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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, International Edition ventures beyond the history of pop culture to give readers the vocabulary and tools to address and analyze the contemporary cultural landscape that surrounds them.
- Moves beyond the history of pop culture to give students the vocabulary and tools to analyze popular culture
- suitable for the study of popular culture across a range of disciplines, from literary theory and cultural studies to philosophy and sociology
- Covers a broad range of important topics including the underlying socioeconomic structures that affect media, the politics of pop culture, the role of consumers, subcultures and countercultures, and the construction of social reality
- Examines the ways in which individuals and societies act as consumers and agents of popular culture
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Seitenzahl: 969
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface: A User’s Guide to
Popular Culture: A
User’s Guide
Acknowledgments
1 Introducing Popular Culture
Approaching Popular Culture
Defining Popular Culture
Popular Culture Invades the Classroom
The Americanization of Popular Culture
The Decolonization of Culture
Culture and Economics—The Postindustrial Revolution
Why This? Why Now? Why Me? A Couple of Final Arguments for the Importance of Studying Popular Culture
Coffee as Popular Culture
And It All Boils Down To…What
Is
in a Cup of Coffee?
Suggestions for Further Reading
2 The History of Popular Culture
Taking It from the Streets
Making the Streets Safe for Commerce
Popular Recreation before 1830
Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution
Popular Recreation and Resistance
The Production of Commercial Mass Culture—the Birth of the Culture Industry
Continuities and Changes
Suggestions for Further Reading
3 Representation and the Construction of Social Reality
Truth2Power
Constructing a Crisis—the Discourse of Violent Youth
Signification—the Production of Social Sense
Representing the Youth Crisis
Truth2Power: The Politics of Representation
Contexts of Representation
Representation in Contemporary Culture
Suggestions for Further Reading
4 The Production of Popular Culture
The Business of Culture
“Money Changes Everything”: The Pitfalls of Thinking about Production
The Culture Industry Thesis
Shifting Modes of Cultural Production
Cultural Production Today
Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing
5 The Consuming Life
Back to “Normal”
A Brief History of Consumer Culture
Consumption as Distinction
Consumption, Desire, and Pleasure
The Politics of Consumption
Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing
6 Identity and the Body
Identity—a Necessary Fiction?
The History of Identity—Some Different Theories
Hegemonic Masculinity, Postfeminism, and the Third‐Wave
LGBTQ+
Different Bodies, Different Selves?
Altered States
Suggestions for Further Reading
7 Identity, Community, Collectivity
Who Do You Want Me to Be?
“The People Who Are Ours”
Modern Identities: Nation, Empire, and Race
Nation and Empire
Postcolonial Identities
Postnational Identities: Melted, Frozen, Reconstituted
Community or Collectivity?
Suggestions for Further Reading
8 Subcultures and Countercultures
The Mainstream and Other Streams
Subcultures and Countercultures: What Is the Difference?
Popular Representations of Subcultures and Countercultures
The Politics of Subcultures
Suggestions for Further Reading
9 Space, Place, and Globalization
(Dis)Locations of Popular Culture
Private versus Public Space
Inside Out
The Big Picture: Globalization?
Is Globalization Real?
Globalization and Popular Culture
Globalization: What’s Next?
Suggestions for Further Reading
10 Popular Culture in the Twenty‐First Century
In with the New?
Many Popular Cultures?
New Technology and Its Discontents
Lost Generation?
What Is Next?
Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing
Glossary
Works Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 02
Table 2.1 Early definitions of “amateur.”
Chapter 04
Table 4.1 The studio system (1920s to 1960s).
Table 4.2 Production modes and film styles.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 01
Figure 1.1 Many museums now embrace elements of popular culture.
The Art of Video Games
, an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, included a physical installation as well as an online, interactive component.
Figure 1.2 “Culture” includes not only artistic and commercial creative practices and texts, but also aspects of everyday life, such as the rituals that surround food.
Figure 1.3 What is in a cup of coffee? More than a “liquid brown drug,” coffee derives its meaning within interconnected networks of representation, consumption and production.
Figure 1.4 When researchers in the United States experimented with giving drugs to spiders, they found that caffeine had a more severe effect than marijuana, resulting in much more sparse, haphazard webs.
Figure 1.5 The image of Tim Hortons as an emblem of Canada persists in media coverage of the coffee’s arrival on a military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in July 2006, in response to intense lobbying by the troops.
Chapter 02
Figure 2.1 Recalling traditional “grassroots” forms of recreation, a game like street hockey exists in a complicated relationship with contemporary commercial sport.
Figure 2.2 Fight between John Jackson and Daniel Mendoza, 1795. Sports such as prizefighting flourished in part because of—rather than in spite of—middle‐class moralists’ attempts to ban them.
Figure 2.3 The music hall represented a transitional moment in the evolution of “homemade” popular culture into mass culture.
Figure 2.4 A hardy and determined band of players resisted the general trend toward the organization and institutionalization of football.
Figure 2.5 The celebrity status and colossal salaries accorded to professional athletes, such as soccer player Lionel Messi, are among the most visible signs of the commercialization of soccer.
Figure 2.6 The incorporation of football into schools as part of an ideology of masculine character development was an important step in its institutionalization.
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 A 2002 study that linked piercings with high‐risk behavior sparked a raft of headlines like this one, warning “Pierced Girls Are Bad Girls: Study.” The caption of the accompanying photo stated “A U.S. researcher says parents, teachers and doctors should view an adolescent’s desire to obtain a body piercing as a warning sign, prompting a closer inspection of the teenager’s friends and pastimes.”
Figure 3.2 This photo appeared in the Canadian newspaper the
National Post
, with the headline “Harris Vows to Rid Streets of Pushy Beggars, Squeegees.” The caption below the 1999 photo provided further information: “The Tories would amend the Highway Traffic Act to keep ‘Martin’ from his post at the corner of Spadina Avenue and Queen Street West.”
Figure 3.3 Encoding/decoding.
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 “I like his earlier work better, particularly the ones I said I didn’t like at the time.”
Figure 4.2 The 2008 “tease and reveal” ad campaign by Ontario Colleges drew attention to common attitudes toward community colleges as a second choice to university programs. The ad was covered a few weeks later with a sticker saying “Luckily, Obay Isn’t Real…Explore all the options at ontariocolleges.ca.” What makes this ad especially effective is that it plays on common assumptions about the function of advertising, especially as it relates to teens and young adults. The subtext is that parents would need a drug such as Obay just to get teens to listen to them instead of to ads like this one!
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 The concept of activist shopping enjoys popular support; its capacity to effect democratic change remains limited, though, by the economic framework of consumerism.
Figure 5.2 Growing from a small shop founded in 1838, Le Bon Marché in Paris is often considered the oldest department store in the world. This 1928 ad is for a sale on handbags, dresses, and umbrellas.
Figure 5.3 Quaker Oats is an early example of a brand name that has become synonymous with its product.
Figure 5.4 In the movie
American Beauty
, the now iconic image of plastic bags dancing in the wind became a symbol of beauty for the character Ricky, highlighting the unpredictable intersections of commodity culture and creativity.
Figure 5.5 The scale of contemporary production has expanded along with the global increase in the demand for consumer objects and experiences.
Chapter 06
Figure 6.1 Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon worked to maintain the effect of constant surveillance whether the central watchtower was occupied or not.
Figure 6.2 Gender codes are highly visible in electoral politics. During the 2008 US Democratic primary, candidate Barack Obama was mocked for bowling “like a girl,” while his rival, Hillary Clinton, downed whiskey shots in a bar and visited the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. As Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Donald Trump in 2016 further confirmed, looking like “one of the boys” is a requisite for political success in North America.
Figure 6.3 When the Toronto District School Board mandated curriculum elements challenging homophobia and heterosexism, the conservative Institute for Canadian Values launched a campaign at stopcorruptingchildren.com. When it ran an ad in the
National Post
, portraying a wide‐eyed child with the words “Please! Don’t confuse me. I’m a girl. Don’t teach me to question if I’m a boy, transsexual, transgendered, intersexed, or two‐spirited,” trans activist Chase Joynt, in collaboration with media artist Alexis Mitchell, parodied it with a poster captioned “Please! Don’t insult me. I’m Chase. Teach me to question everything!”
Figure 6.4 Traditional images of conception owe less to scientific accuracy than to metaphorical representations of gender stereotypes.
Figure 6.5 Once associated with subcultures, tattoos today have significance as a form of creative self‐expression that works in tension with their legibility within conventional codes of gender, sex, class, and so on.
Figure 6.6 Products like Google Glass, billed as a “ubiquitous computer,” blur the line between human and technology.
Chapter 07
Figure 7.1 Shows like
Little Mosque on the Prairie
highlight obstacles to achieving equality in hopes of eliminating them.
Figure 7.2 In 2015, a stenciled image of a hijab‐wearing woman accompanied by the text “I am Canadian” began appearing on the walls of buildings in Hamilton, Ontario. This image offers a pointed challenge to the Conservative government’s proposal to ban Muslim woman from wearing the niqab (a head scarf that covers their faces) at citizenship ceremonies.
Figure 7.3 Nineteenth‐century British ideologies of race and nation are reflected in advertising of the time. While messages like this one would never appear today, advertisements continue to be a potent site for the reproduction of mythologies of collective identity.
Figure 7.4 The line between national pride and racism is often blurry. Following a number of incidents of aggression on and off the field in previous tournaments, during Euro 2012 the Union of European Football Associations joined with players in a highly publicized anti‐racism campaign.
Figure 7.5 With their in‐your‐face violation of cultural taboos surrounding race and sexuality, Benetton ads have been read as both socially progressive and crassly exploitative of the minority groups represented in them.
Figure 7.6 Social networking sites offer some of the same forms of support and connection provided by traditional communities along with new possibilities of flexibility. Whether they strengthen or threaten those more material connections is a different question.
Chapter 08
Figure 8.1 Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s
My Winnipeg
is a formally inventive and adventurous mockumentary about his hometown, Winnipeg.
Figure 8.2 Members of Occupy Edmonton were prevented by police from entering campus on the National Day of Student Action (February 1, 2012) to protest higher education funding cuts, high tuition fees, and record levels of student debt. After a public outcry, protesters were permitted on campus the following day.
Figure 8.3 Brad Pitt gets tough on consumer culture in
Fight Club
.
Figure 8.4 “The police post themselves at the School of Fine Arts/The fine arts students poster the street!” This anonymous poster from the May 1968 protests in Paris cleverly connects art, revolution and access to education—and to the streets.
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1 The Manchester band The Get Out Clause shot a video using only surveillance cameras—an inventive way of putting devices that control and monitor to different uses.
Figure 9.2 In 2008, public protests greeted the City of Toronto's announcement of plans to close public pools to save money.
Figure 9.3 More rejuvenating than a coffee break: as part of a move to unleash all the productive capacities—body and soul—of their labor force, a few companies, such as this YouTube office in London, England, have designed spaces for their employees to chill out in.
Figure 9.4a A classic image of nature: Moraine Lake in Banff National Park, Canada.
Figure 9.4b An equally classic image of “culture”: cityscapes such as this image of the Palace of Westminster (UK Houses of Parliament) taken from the dome of Methodist Central Hall, London.
Figure 9.5 McDonald’s restaurants are now at “home” around the world, including in such countries as Egypt.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 An Egyptian anti‐government demonstrator takes part in a candlelight vigil at Cairo’s Tahrir Square on February 9, 2011 on the 16th day of consecutive protests calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
Figure 10.2 A world map in which the size of countries is modified to reflect comparative internet usage shows a stark divide between the Global North and South.
Figure 10.3 “An explosion [in 2011] at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu, China, killed four people and injured 18. It built iPads.”
New York Times
.
Figure 10.4 The actual distribution of wealth in the United States plotted against the estimated and ideal distribution across all respondents. Because of their small percentage of total wealth, neither the “4th 20%” value (0.2%) nor the “bottom 20%” value (0.1%) are visible in the “Actual” distribution.
Figure 10.5 This Audi ad promotes private solutions to public programs, in line with the neoliberal ideology guiding government decision making across the world.
Figure 10.6 An estimated 200 000 people attended a march in Montreal on March 22, 2012 to highlight student indebtedness and to protest the Quebec government’s decision to increase tuition fees by $1625 over five years—one of the largest demonstrations in the province’s history.
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Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, International Edition is a lively and engaging introduction to popular culture. It provides the tools and knowledge for an analysis of the contemporary cultural landscape across a range of disciplines, from literary theory and cultural studies to philosophy and sociology.
The text covers a broad range of key topics, such as the underlying socioeconomic structures that affect media and our consciousness, the politics of pop culture, the role of consumers, subcultures and countercultures, and the construction of social reality. It examines the ways in which individuals and societies act as consumers and agents of popular culture. It is also filled with a variety of helpful learning features including case studies, real‐life examples, suggested activities, boxed features on specific topics, and a glossary of terms. Popular Culture helps readers navigate the complexities of twenty‐first century popular culture, arming them with the awareness and ability to critically evaluate everyday life and practices.
IMRE SZEMAN is Canada Research Chair of Cultural Studies and Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is also Adjunct Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, Canada. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the US Cultural Studies Association. He is the author or editor of more than 16 books, including Cultural Theory: An Anthology (Wiley Blackwell, 2010) and After Globalization (Wiley Blackwell, 2011).
SUSIE O’BRIEN is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Her research and teaching focus on postcolonial and environmental cultural studies. She has published on postcolonial literature, the slow and local food movements, scenario planning, and the temporality of globalization. She is co‐editor of Time, Globalization and Human Experience (forthcoming 2017).
Popular Culture
A User's Guide, International Edition
Imre Szeman
Susie O’Brien
This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Edition HistoryAdapted from Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, Third Edition, by Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman, published by Nelson Education Ltd. Copyright © 2014 by Nelson Education Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Imre Szeman and Susie O’Brien to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Szeman, Imre, 1968– author. | O’Brien, Susie, author.Title: Popular culture : a user’s guide / Imre Szeman, University of Waterloo, Canada, Susie O’Brien, McMaster University, Canada.Description: International edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017. | “Adapted from Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, Third Edition [published in 2014 by Nelson Education].” | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017011125 (print) | LCCN 2017026179 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119140368 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119140375 (epub) | ISBN 9781119140337 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119140344 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Popular culture.Classification: LCC HM621 (ebook) | LCC HM621 .S995 2017 (print) | DDC 306–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011125
Cover Image: Courtesy of Jessica SabogalCover Design: Wiley
Preface: A User’s Guide to Popular Culture: AUser’s Guide
The goal of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide is to provide readers with an introduction to the critical study of popular culture. Our aim is to give readers the analytical tools to understand the everyday texts and practices that surround them, as well as their own roles as consumers of and participants in popular culture.
Why does anyone need a guidebook to popular culture? Don’t we all already know not only what is meant by popular culture, but also how to consume and use it? Guidebooks are supposed to make mysterious lands with unusual customs more familiar, or help us learn how to navigate complex tasks (like building a deck or planting a good‐looking garden) with greater ease. Popular culture, on the other hand, is, well, popular. When it comes to watching films, listening to pop music, shopping, or sucking down cups of coffee, we believe that we know exactly what we are doing and why we are doing it. Like our native tongue, popular culture is something we know how to “speak” without resorting to lessons, audiotapes, courses, or guidebooks. So what can a user’s guide tell us about popular culture that we don’t already know?
In many respects, it is precisely the intimacy and familiarity with which we engage in contemporary popular culture that require critical reflection, exploration, and analysis. After all, knowing how to speak a language because we are immersed in it does not mean that we are necessarily able to read or write it, or that we understand its syntax and structure. Reading and writing take an enormous amount of effort to get right. And once we have learned how to read, we are faced with other questions, such as how written language on a page can convey information about real and imagined worlds.
As with language, so, too, with popular culture. Because we are immersed in it, popular culture is both uniquely accessible and frustratingly opaque; it is hard to get a critical purchase on something we inhabit so completely and, most of the time, more or less unconsciously. To help us understand the “syntax” and “grammar” of popular culture—the unacknowledged but crucial structures that give popular culture its shape, meaning, and significance—this book attempts to help readers see this familiar terrain more acutely and with greater insight. Our familiarity with popular culture tends to hide some of its most important features and its relationship to broader social, political, and economic currents. Popular Culture: A User’s Guide will help readers see parts of the contemporary cultural landscape that they may have been looking at all along without really perceiving them.
This book aims to take readers beyond the “commonsense” approach to popular culture, an approach that is defined by an odd mix of cynical knowingness and complacency. We are working from the premise that readers today possess an unprecedented level of media literacy. We are all aware, for example, that certain forms of media, such as advertising, operate according to particular agendas that may or may not reflect our own interests, and we also believe that we are smart enough to resist. This book seeks to create a level of awareness that goes beyond cynical complacency, not only to make readers aware of the underlying socioeconomic structures that determine the shape of media and, by extension, consciousness, but also to make them recognize the myriad ways in which popular culture manages to maneuver around these structures. We want to give students the tools to understand their role not just as consumers, but also as agents of popular culture.
We also want to showcase the full range of activities and practices that can be considered part of contemporary popular cultural experience. Unlike “high culture,” which is generally understood to refer to a discrete body of books or artworks that are unified by their adherence to specific aesthetic and cultural codes, the field of popular culture is diverse and uneven, comprising texts and practices ranging from commercial media to subcultural styles to the activities of everyday life (eating, shopping, drinking coffee, recreational activities, etc.).
Many books about popular culture are actually surveys or overviews of academic or theoretical approaches to the study of popular culture. In other words, what such books offer is a roughly historical account of a specific academic discipline (what is now often called cultural studies) and the individuals and theories that have been important to the development of that discipline. While we certainly discuss and make use of many of the most important theories of popular culture, we have chosen to emphasize practical strategies for understanding and interpreting the popular. Working from case studies and examples, this book aims to provide readers with a critical vocabulary and methods of analysis that will allow them to perform independent readings of cultural texts extending far beyond the sampling we offer here.
The specific analyses we provide in each chapter exemplify ways of using and adapting critical and theoretical materials to address the issues and problems at hand. The text is organized mainly around broad themes rather than specific genres or forms of popular culture (television, music, film, etc.), and is bookended by chapters that focus on the prehistory of contemporary popular culture (Chapter 1) and on the complexities that the current historical context introduces for the study of popular culture (Chapters 9 and 10).
A number of other features make this book a distinctive contribution to the study of popular culture. There is, first, an emphasis throughout on the politics of popular culture—that is, on the way in which popular culture is always connected to practices and discourses related to the exercise of and struggle over power and recognition in contemporary society. Second, there is an unapologetically Canadian flavor to this book. One reason for this is practical: both authors grew up, and currently work in, Canada. Though we have both lived and worked elsewhere, and much of our research is focused on places outside of Canada, the premise of this book that popular culture is ordinary and familiar compels us to approach the topic through our own everyday experiences. For that reason, many, though by no means all, of the case studies and examples we draw on are Canadian. Or Canadianish: the fact of the matter is that popular culture in Canada has historically always included radio and television, and films and books from around the world—alongside and in conjunction with homegrown programming and cultural production, but often at the expense of our own cultural producers. This situation of being on the periphery, culturally speaking, is not unique. Many, if not most, people share the experience of being both outside the pop culture mainstream and also deeply engaged with it; this is likely true even for people who live in the English‐speaking cultural centers of the United States and the United Kingdom, though it may be harder to articulate without the convenient signpost of a geographical border. While the border that marks our Canadianness slips in and out of view, we hope this book highlights the fact that, in the study of popular culture, what you see and do not see often depends on where you are looking from.
Finally, to help our readers work through Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, we have incorporated a number of pedagogical features. Important terms and concepts are listed in a glossary at the end of the book and highlighted in bold on their first appearance in the text to allow readers to cross‐reference with ease. Each chapter contains one or more suggested activities and questions that are intended to get readers to think further about particular subjects and to apply them to their own experiences. In course use, these Suggested Activities may form the basis of oral or written assignments. Close‐Ups in each chapter clarify key concepts, theories, or movements, and may also form the basis for further study and investigation. Each chapter ends with a list of suggestions for further reading or viewing. These titles include other introductory texts that may deal with the same material in a different way or with a different emphasis, as well as original works by scholars and theorists referred to in the chapter.
Like the writers of any guidebook, we hope that readers use our maps and recommendations of places to visit and things to think about as a jumping‐off point for the elaboration of their own maps of the landscape of popular culture. The authors would be the first to admit that not only are there plenty of things they have not seen, there are places they do not yet even know exist.
Susie O’BrienHamilton, Ontario
Imre SzemanWaterloo, OntarioFebruary 2017
Acknowledgments
Susie: To EN/CSCT 1B3 and 1CS3 TAs for coming up with amazingly inventive ways to bring the subject matter of this book to life, and to my students, for their engagement, enthusiasm, and suggestions for how to improve this book, my teaching, and my wardrobe. Special thanks to Jesse Arseneault, Amber Dean, Nick Holm, Mary O’Connor, Simon Orpana, Scott Stoneman, Helene Strauss, and Carolyn Veldstra for insight and inspiration and some great guest lectures, and to Bridget Mountford, for invaluable editorial suggestions as well as reminders about why and how pop culture matters.
Imre: To my colleagues at the University of Waterloo and elsewhere who continue to make it interesting to spend time sorting through the (sometimes alarming) complexities of our contemporary moment: Brent “Brett” Bellamy, Sarah Blacker, Nicholas Brown, Jeff Diamanti, Dan Harvey, Eva‐Lynn Jagoe, Sean O’Brien, Michael O’Driscoll, Andrew Pendakis, Stuart Poyntz, Mark Simpson, Will Straw, Justin Sully, Jennifer Wenzel, Sheena Wilson, and Heather Zwicker.
1Introducing Popular Culture
Approaching Popular Culture
“Let’s go get a coffee.”
Every day, throughout much of the world, this phrase is uttered thousands of times, by different people—students, teachers, construction workers, lawyers, mothers, retail clerks, unemployed people, old people, young people—and in different social contexts, such as work, breaks from work, dating, interviews, therapy sessions, or hanging out. Going for a coffee is a major part of popular culture, not only in the sense that it is such a common practice, but also in that it means so much more than the literal act of tossing back a hot caffeinated beverage: in fact, “going for coffee” need not involve drinking coffee at all. So what does it mean? And what is it about coffee drinking that makes it part of popular culture while other equally common practices—like, say, yawning or mowing the lawn—are not? Or are they part of popular culture, too?
These are the kinds of questions this book sets out to answer—not by offering a comprehensive account of what fits in the category of popular culture and what does not, but by helping us to think about the question of why popular culture is such a critical part of contemporary life. For this reason, it might be misleading to call this book a “user’s guide” to popular culture. A standard user’s guide to, say, the smartphone that you may have just received for Christmas (which happens all the time in television commercials, less often in real life) tells you everything there is to know about the specific object that you have in your hands, what its functions are, and what it can and cannot do. Popular culture is not like that. For one thing, popular culture is a far more difficult “thing” to pin down than a smartphone or an IKEA desk; it is constantly changing shape, shifting locations, assuming new identities and new tasks and functions. The goal of a user’s guide to popular culture is to provide culture’s users—that is, all of us—with a way to think about popular culture that is flexible and supple enough to allow us also to think about its changes and redefinitions, and to figure out what is at stake in the definition of popular culture. How can we learn to read and participate in—to use—what is popular in a way that strengthens our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in? This book approaches these questions through the analysis of texts (objects that we can interpret, just like a book) and practices (things that we do): seeing movies, listening to songs, watching television shows, playing sports, going shopping—and drinking coffee.
The purpose of this introduction is to lay out a working definition of popular culture, to outline a few key concepts that will reappear in later discussion, and to give you a diagram of the way this book is put together—a “guide to the guide”—that should help make the task of piecing the bits of popular culture together a productive one. We also offer a rough guide to the field of cultural studies (see Close‐Up 1.2) for readers who want to delve further into the question of how popular culture has come to be seen as something significant and tricky enough to require a user’s guide. Just be forewarned: by the end of the book, you will still be left with extra parts and you will likely end up with a concept of popular culture that looks different from that of your neighbors. But trust us: this is a good thing…
Defining Popular Culture
Like most things that form a big part of our daily lives, popular culture is familiar and obvious at first glance, but very complicated as soon as you start to think about it in any detail. Before we outline the concept of popular culture that informs this book, we suggest you take a couple of minutes to try to come up with your own working definition. When we’ve conducted this exercise in introductory university classes, a typical range of ideas tend to come up: popular culture consists of those things—products, texts, practices, and so on—that are enjoyed by lots and lots of people; popular culture is commercial culture (as opposed to, say, “high” culture, which people today still tend to associate with the things they imagine that rich people who own yachts like to do, like listen to opera or go to the symphony); popular culture consists of the traditional practices and beliefs or way of life of a specific group; and, finally, the most wide‐ranging definition of all, popular culture is simply the practices of everyday life.
What is interesting about these definitions is not just their range but their differences—differences that are shaped to a large degree by the way we understand the terms “popular” and “culture.” It is worth taking the time to think about these different ideas, but not so we can dismiss some of them to identify a correct definition. Like most other important social concepts—concepts such as democracy, progress, justice, civilization, and so on that produce the shape of the societies we live in—it does not really make sense to hope for a correct definition that would likely solve the puzzle of all of these different meanings by establishing the essential one supposedly lurking in their midst. Rather, we want to suggest that popular culture is informed by all of these perspectives, not just in the sense that each is partially true, but also in the sense that the tension between them is fundamental to understanding the meaning of popular culture today. So before we erect a definition of popular culture that we can all feel comfortable inhabiting, we need to think about this tension. This may initially seem to be a frustratingly circuitous and unhelpful route to finding out the “facts.” However, such meanderings are a critical part of the study of culture, in which the question of meaning is never evident but always up for negotiation and disagreement.
What Is Culture?
When we ask our students to track the word “culture” as it is used in the media and other sources, two things tend to emerge: (i) culture (along with variations such as multiculturalism) gets mentioned a lot, implying that it is a significant concept in our society, and one that we likely can’t do without; and (ii) it appears in many different, often contradictory, contexts, suggesting that exactly how it signifies is hard to pin down. When we talk about culture in the sense of building opera houses, the word obviously means something different than when we talk about Western culture or youth culture, national culture or business culture. Culture in the first sense—the one that fits with opera houses, ballet, and Shakespeare, which for convenience we’ll call capital‐C Culture—focuses on what we usually think of as high‐end creative production: artistic pursuits that are enjoyed by an elite minority as opposed to more accessible leisure activities, such as sports. These kinds of cultural productions are those that have over time (they are often associated with the past) assumed an especially privileged place in the collection of ideas and artifacts that comprise a cultural tradition.
A second definition encompasses a much broader understanding of culture as a whole way of life of a society or a distinct subsection of society: along with art, it encompasses everyday rituals such as meals, work, religious observances, sports, sex, family, and friendship. Implicitly opposed to “nature,” which we associate with biology (the things we share with the living nonhuman world), “culture” in this context refers to the practices that define us, collectively and in distinct groups, as human. This definition of culture, or something close to it, informs the disciplines of the social sciences—particularly anthropology, which until recently tended to focus on the cultures of preindustrial societies. When we go on vacation to experience other cultures, it is this sense of culture that we are making reference to: a glimpse into a different way of life organized according to its own principles and around its own unique practices.
The Mass Media
Interestingly, neither the familiar humanities definition of culture nor the one employed by traditional anthropologists adequately encompasses the experience of living in a postmodern capitalist society—the experience of most of us who teach and study those subjects—which is a way of life increasingly dominated by the mass media. Not only do the mass media tend to fall outside the definitions of culture centered around elite artistic production or the practices of ordinary everyday life; they also are frequently cited as the thing that threatens to destroy culture in both these senses: while one set of critics laments the dumbing‐down of Shakespeare to satisfy the tastes of a mass audience in Hollywood productions such as William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, O (based on Othello), or 10 Things I Hate About You (based on The Taming of the Shrew), another warns of the corruption of “authentic” grassroots cultures by the global entertainment industry, which has made it more difficult to find cultures that are all that different from our own in our travels. While they come from different places, what these criticisms have in common is an element of nostalgia, a feeling that something has been lost, that a once pure realm of culture has become contaminated by commerce. It is the desire to understand this world‐contaminated‐by‐commerce that motivates the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, into which this book fits (and whose development as an academic field is discussed in more detail later in this chapter).
Objects of Study
To avoid the limitations of earlier definitions of culture, cultural studies defines its object of study in very broad terms. One definition, offered in Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, describes culture as “the social production and reproduction of sense, meaning and consciousness. The sphere of meaning, which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations (politics)” (O’Sullivan et al. 68). This is a useful definition insofar as it manages to encompass a wide variety of “meaning‐producing” practices and technologies, including both traditional definitions of culture—fine art and everyday practices—and mass media. Of course, while the incorporation of these diverse meanings into one functional frame might give us a quick snapshot of what it is that cultural studies actually studies—the kinds of things that it looks at and why it is that it looks at them—it is difficult to ignore that the different conceptions of culture that are named in this definition are historically not only different but also contradictory.
Rather than seeking to smooth over these contradictions, cultural studies is interested in actively teasing them out and laying them bare. It is committed to an understanding of culture that does not just expand on earlier definitions to include practices, objects, and people that tended, for different reasons, to get left out (such as television game shows, science fiction novels, or skateboarding), but also thinks about why and how such inclusions and exclusions occur in the first place. This means that cultural studies thinks deeply about the connections between culture and the spheres of politics and economics, and seeks to understand how that realm of activity concerned with “meanings, pleasures, and identities” shapes (and is shaped by) relations of power. Among the key questions that are raised by the contradictions between the different definitions of culture cited above are: How is culture produced (made by a society) and reproduced (passed on by a society into the future)? Who makes culture? For whom is it made? This brings us to the other half of the concept of popular culture (Fiske 1).
What/Who Defines the Popular?
Having wrestled with the complicated problem of what constitutes culture, the meaning of “popular” seems much more straightforward, at least initially. Derived from the Latin word popularis, which means “of, or belonging to the people,” “popular” is often used in a contemporary context to describe something that is liked by a lot of people. For example, when an authoritative source cites NCIS as the most popular show on television, based on ratings in 20 nations (“TV Guide”), we can assume, reasonably, that a lot of us like slick crime dramas shot in glamorous settings. But when we start to look a little further into how the word “popular” is used today, it becomes obvious that it has to do with more than numbers—that the words “popular” and “the people” don’t refer to absolutely everyone, but to a particular group to whom a certain quality or value is attached.
A couple of examples will serve to illustrate this. First, a number of major art museums have recently come under fire for abandoning their mandate to promote serious art in favor of “popular” blockbuster shows guaranteed to fill up the galleries (and the museum shop). Recent examples of this phenomenon include the Art of Star Wars exhibition that toured galleries in Japan, Singapore, Scotland, and England between 2002 and 2004, and Diana, A Celebration, a tribute to the late Princess Diana that drew crowds at museums in Toronto, Fort Lauderdale, and Dayton, Ohio, from 2006 to 2014.
Art and museum critics are not all happy about the trend of blurring high and popular culture. As George Neubert, former director of the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, puts it:
A lot of museums are now torn between two extreme opposite philosophies….One feels it has to compete with pop culture and mass culture to be relevant and for the big E, education, with lots of well‐intentioned outreach and participatory programs. It does for a short moment bring up the numbers, but I wonder how meaningful those are in the long term. (Wolgamott)
A counterargument can be easily mounted in favor of the museums’ decision to show more “popular” work: as a public space, the museum should respond to the preference of people in general rather than to the tastes of an overly educated minority to whom museums have typically catered. Since these latter tastes are often seen to be disproportionately supported by state subsidy of the arts, this argument also often concerns the appropriate allocation of tax dollars and the need for the arts sector to be more market driven. While a cultural institution can readily apply to governments for support of a show on Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches, it is harder to justify showing off concept drawings of the dark Sith, Darth Maul, even if this is what the public might “really” want to see. In this case, the “popular” is evoked both as a democratic principle and as a judgment about who can make sense of “real” art. By including more “popular” shows, the museums invite more people inside them—but not, of course, to see the kinds of art objects they were initially designed to exhibit (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Many museums now embrace elements of popular culture. The Art of Video Games, an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, included a physical installation as well as an online, interactive component.
Source: The Art of Video Games exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 16, 2012–September 30, 2012
Another example of the slipperiness of the concept of the popular concerns the use of the related word “people” in the context of political protest. International political meetings, from the G20 to Rio + 20, frequently encounter opposition in the form of “people’s summits” organized by activist groups. In this example, the word “people” connotes something like democratic or grassroots or ordinary, in contrast to the powerful minority of state leaders and corporate CEOs. While government leaders denounce the organizers of such meetings as “special interest groups” (versus “democratically elected” leaders), activists counter these claims by highlighting governments’ subordination of social justice to corporate agendas and the resulting failure to represent the interests of the people. The term “people” here becomes the symbolic linchpin of a battle to gain the moral high ground over the substantive issues under debate. As with the art museum, the word “people” and its derivative “popular” are used here to convey something roughly opposite to “elite,” though the value of those terms means something entirely different in each context.
So we can add a couple of new elements to our understanding of the word “popular.” First, it tends to carry with it connotations of value that are implicitly contrasted with the value of what it is not, though those values are seen differently depending on who is talking and in what context. Second, as is particularly evident in the latter example of people’s summits, the question of who or what constitutes the popular is tangled up with questions of power.
With this in mind, let’s return to the apparently simple usage of “popular” with which we began this section and think about it in a little more detail. Who are the people who define the “popularity” of NCIS? Are they the unenlightened masses who lack the ability to discriminate between schlock and substance? Are they discerning viewers exercising their consumer choice? Or are they engaged in an act of political activism, employing the cultural resources of NCIS to construct an agenda for crime prevention or progressive social change? The slightly ludicrous quality of the last possibility raises a quite serious question about how we understand the popular: What kind of agency—that is, possibility for self‐motivated activity or action—is involved on the part of “the people” in determining or defining something to be “popular”? This question has particular significance when we start to talk about popular culture.
What Is Popular Culture?
Common uses of the term “popular culture” reflect in interesting ways our understandings of the two separate words we discussed above. The most familiar use of the term “popular culture” identifies it with the entertainment produced through and by commercial media (television, film, the music industry, etc.) that have the economic and technological capacity to reach large, demographically diverse, and geographically dispersed audiences. Popularity is measured, in this case, by patterns of consumption: it refers to the things we buy (or watch, or listen to, etc.). A somewhat different use of “popular culture” defines it in terms not of consumption but production: popular culture is what “the people” make, or do, for themselves. This definition fits fairly closely with the anthropological definition of culture as “the practices of everyday life.”
Both of these definitions differ quite clearly from the elite capital‐C Culture defended by cranky art patrons. Apart from this, however, their connotations are quite different and even oppositional: “do‐it‐yourself” popular culture is explicitly different from the culture that is produced by large corporate entities whose interest in the everyday practices of their consumers is shaped by their need to figure out how best to sell them things. Indeed, the kind of culture produced by the commercial media is often seen as threatening the culture of everyday life by diverting people’s desire for fulfillment—a desire that can ultimately be satisfied only by productive activity—into habits of passive consumption.
Folk Culture and Mass Culture
To distinguish clearly between these two different forms of cultural production, critics will sometimes use the terms “folk culture” and “mass culture.” Folk culture refers to those cultural products and practices that have developed over time within a particular community or socially identifiable group and that are communicated from generation to generation and among people who tend to be known to one another. It tends to be seen as the direct expression of the life experiences shared by its creators and their audience (Nachbar and Lause 15; Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney 37). Mass culture, on the other hand, is produced for an unknown, disparate audience. While the transmission of folk culture is generally technologically simple (e.g., face‐to‐face, oral communication), mass culture depends on electronic (or mechanical) media to convey its message to the largest possible audience in order to secure maximum profit, which is its ultimate goal. These terms can serve to make useful distinctions between kinds of cultural production, highlighting the differences between, say, an Aboriginal dot painting and an MTV rap video. On even a superficial examination, however, the differences start to look a little fuzzy. Aboriginal paintings have been reproduced in forms ranging from mugs to T‐shirts to high fashion. These uses are frequently condemned as appropriation or cultural theft—a justifiable charge in the many cases where Aboriginal artists are compensated poorly, or not at all, for the use of their work. But in the increasing instances where Aborigines direct and control the marketing of traditional art, complaints may have more to do with romantic, non‐Aboriginal conceptions of primitive authenticity than they do with concerns about cultural ownership or legitimacy. Rap music, for its part, is now a multibillion‐dollar industry, but one that emerged relatively recently from the African American street culture of the South Bronx. In each of these cases, it is difficult to identify the precise moment when folk culture metamorphosed into mass culture. The attempt to maintain a strict division is not just tricky in a practical sense, but also, arguably, somewhat suspect ideologically, an issue explored in more detail in Chapter 5.
The desire to preserve a folk culture safe from the corrupting influence of commerce is often inflected by a nostalgic desire to return to a (mythical) moment of history in which cultural and social identities were secure and cultural boundaries were clear. When this desire is extended to a socially and economically disadvantaged group, as in the two examples above, the situation becomes even more complicated. While it might be argued that the preservation of folk culture is a matter of community survival, the unhappiness of white collectors at the move toward mass‐produced art may be motivated by concerns that have little to do with Indigenous peoples’ autonomy and more with how the value of their own art pieces will be affected. A less crudely materialist motivation for consumer nostalgia in this case might be a well‐intentioned, if racist, aesthetic investment in the image of the “noble savage.” This imaginary figure conjures up a purer, more natural world outside Western commercial culture while occupying a comfortable place within it.
However seemingly progressive the cause that is being (or has been) promoted in the name of “the people,” “folk culture” remains a term whose peculiarly heavy ideological baggage should set off alarm bells every time we hear or read it; the same alarm bells that should go off when we hear politicians invoke the mythical category of “ordinary working folks.” Just who are these “ordinary” people? This is not to say that we need to abandon completely the idea of folk culture and all its troublesome derivations. Like mass culture, it retains some value as a descriptive term to designate particular kinds of cultural production, especially when referring to a time before our present capitalist moment—a moment when authenticity and commercial value are increasingly impossible to disentangle, when there is a sense in which, as one critic puts it, “all culture is mass culture” (Denning 258, emphasis added). We explore this idea a little further in Chapter 5.
Suggested Activity 1.1
Does commercialism destroy the authenticity of a cultural product or practice? Or does the authenticity of an object or practice increase its commercial value and potential? What does it mean if it is possible for us to answer both of these questions affirmatively? How does the divide between authenticity and commercial value work in the case of a practice like ecotourism and an object like the first release of an indie band on its own label?
The Culture of Everyday Life
To signal this ambiguity, and to avoid producing a definition of popular culture that falls too clearly on the side of celebrating the folk or denigrating the masses, we might define popular culture as something like “the communicative practices of everyday life” (where “communicative practices” comprises all those activities concerned with the production of meaning: talking, writing, social rituals such as eating, shopping, dancing, music, visual culture, sports, fashion, etc.) that are shared among many members of a society, including and especially those who are not particularly socially, economically, or politically powerful (see Figure 1.2). This somewhat clumsy definition accomplishes three things: (i) it signals the inclusion of mass media alongside, and even within, the practices of everyday life, without determining in advance what relationship it has to those practices; (ii) it emphasizes the meaningful nature of popular culture—meaningful in the sense that it is important, as well as in the sense that it is concerned with the production of sense and social value; and (iii) it highlights the issue of power that always and overtly dogs the production of culture in general and popular culture in particular.
Figure 1.2 “Culture” includes not only artistic and commercial creative practices and texts, but also aspects of everyday life, such as the rituals that surround food.
Source: © Corbis/SuperStock
The Politics of Popular Culture
Why is power such a central issue for understanding popular culture? As we have already tried to suggest, culture is bound up closely with other aspects of human existence. As “the sphere of meaning which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations (politics)” (O’Sullivan et al. 68), culture is concerned not just with individual tastes and desires, but also with the fundamental organization of society—with the distribution of material and symbolic power. Culture both reflects and influences social organization and the distribution of power. In the early twenty‐first century, in most parts of the world, the dominant economic system is capitalism (for more on capitalism, see Close‐Up 1.1). This means that the key characteristics of capitalism, including both its wealth‐generating capacity and the patterns of inequitable distribution on which that capacity depends, help determine the shape of culture. This is particularly true for popular culture.
Close‐Up 1.1 Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and geared toward the generation of profit. It is the dominant economic system in the world today. It is not the only economic system that has ever been in place, nor is it likely to be the last way in which human beings organize their economies, despite some claims to the contrary.
Loosely definable as a system of private enterprise whose primary aim is the production of profit, capitalism has been developing since at least the fifteenth century and underwrites many of the economic and cultural institutions that we take for granted today, such as private property, individual freedom, and the imperative of economic growth. Our tendency today to see these features of capitalism as not only positive but also natural—the products of human nature rather than consciously worked‐out ideas—makes it harder to see its less desirable aspects, such as social fragmentation, the unequal distribution of wealth, and the conversion of everything (including life itself) into something that can be bought or sold.
These brutal elements of capitalism were particularly evident during the heyday of European colonialism
