Page 63 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURAL POPULISM

that choose to differentiate themselves from the group. Furthermore,
with the complex, shifting terrain of culture and identity, the potential
terrain of citizenship theory is becoming potentially limitless.
See also: Multiculturalism

Further reading: Hartley (1999); Miller (1998)

CULTURAL POPULISM

The ascription of democratising tendencies to cultural practices and
pursuits, including that of acting as audience or reader of popular
entertainments. The term was made familiar by Jim McGuigan (1992),
who criticised cultural studies, in the person of John Fiske especially,
for finding resistive political potential in the act of pleasurable media
consumption. McGuigan and others disliked the textual turn in
cultural studies, since it had diverted attention from the economic side
of popular culture, and from what they could recognise as bona fide
‘political activism’ in cultural critique.
The idea gained ground, especially in media sociology and political
economy, that taking the pleasure and textuality of popular culture
seriously was misguided or even pernicious, because in the end what
people did with the media they enjoyed was subordinate to the power
of the corporations who distributed those media (see Ferguson and
Golding, 1997). People needed not to consume texts pleasurably if
resistively, but to be warned off altogether, presumably to give them
time to organise protests (this position was adopted by the Glasgow
Media Group, for instance). Analysts who were interested in the text/
reader relationship were berated for populism because they were said
to be following rather than criticising popular tastes. Thus, opponents
of cultural populism thought analysts should take a ‘normative’
position outside of popular culture in order to offer a corrective
diagnosis of its downside (Douglas Kellner, 2001: 144–145). The idea
that ordinary punters might not need such protection was rarely aired.
There was very little debate about cultural populism, largely because
it is an accusatory term, a charge, and therefore used only by its
opponents, rather than a term researchers identified with: you won’t
get a research grant for proposing to study it. In fact cultural populism
was by no means merely ‘bad theory’. It was an early, if not always
coherent, recognition of a fundamental shift away from the high
modern obsession with production, and a timely prod of the analytical
agenda towards consumption. This shift has become ever more

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