Page 194 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

POPULAR/POPULAR CULTURE

or bad because they are popular (the ‘more means worse’ or dumbing
down viewof popularity).
The ambiguity is not simply a matter of the personal prejudices of
the critic. It is implicit in the position of those people and products
that can be described as popular. It has two aspects. First, there is
ambiguity about the extent to which popular culture is imposed on
people in general (by media corporations or state agencies), or derived
from their own experiences, tastes, habits, and so on. Second, there is
ambiguity about the extent to which popular culture is merely an
expression of a powerless and subordinate class position, or an
autonomous and potentially liberating source of alternative ways of
seeing and doing that can be opposed to dominant or official culture.
These ambiguities have an important bearing on the study of
popular culture, since they make it very hard to specify an easily agreed
object of study. What ‘counts’ as popular culture depends to some
extent on whether you are interested in what meanings are produced
by or for ‘the people’, and whether you take these meanings as
evidence of ‘what the public wants’ or of ‘what the public gets’.
Further, the study of popular culture requires some attention to
cultures other than popular ones – especially that known as high
culture. However, discussion centred on differences between popular
and high culture has traditionally focused on matters of taste and
artistic merit. For instance, there is an implicit valuation in
distinctions such as those between ‘serious’ and ‘pop’ music, which
are frequently institutionalised in the form of entire radio networks
(Radio 3 and Radio 1 in the UK), or between creative genius (high
culture) and commercial consumption (popular). These distinctions
appear at first to derive from the qualities of the works associated with
each type: Mozart writes ‘better’ music than a chart-topping pop
group, and moreover Mozart’s music is not tied to time, nation or
class – it is seen as an expression of human genius in general. In short,
the accepted (or at least the established) evaluations of different
cultural products are naturalised: accounted for as intrinsic properties
of the product and not as a result of their assignation to different
cultural categories.
What is at stake in the attempt to specify popular culture is the
status of these naturalised evaluations. For they may themselves be
explained as an ideological strategy whereby class relations (supremacy
and subordination) may be ‘lived’ as natural differences. In fact the
study of popular culture cannot get very far without some attempt to
relate the social production and reproduction of meanings to the
economic and political divisions and antagonisms of class.

179