WHAT IS POPULAR CULTURE?
(Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
An Introduction (7th edition)
John Storey
by Routledge, 2015, pp. 5-12)
The history of cultural theory’s engagement with popular culture is,
therefore, a history of the different ways in which the two terms have been
connected by theoretical labour within particular historical and social
contexts.
1. An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to
say that popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well
liked by many people. And, undoubtedly, such a quantitative index would
meet the approval of many people.
2. A second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture
that is left over after we have decided what is high culture.
3. A third way of defining popular culture is as ‘mass culture’. The first point
that those who refer to popular culture as mass culture want to establish is
that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass-produced
for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating
consumers.
4. A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture that
originates from ‘the people’. It takes issue with any approach that suggests
that it is something imposed on ‘the people’ from above. According to this
definition, the term should be used only to indicate an ‘authentic’ culture of
‘the people’. This is popular culture as folk culture: a culture of the people for
the people.
[5] A fifth definition of popular culture, then, is one that draws on the
political analysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly on his
development of the concept of hegemony. Gramsci (2009) uses the term
‘hegemony’ to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society,
through a process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, seek to win the
consent of subordinate groups in society.
6. A sixth definition of popular culture is one informed by recent thinking
around the debate on postmodernism. The main point to insist on here is the
claim that postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the
distinction between high and popular culture.
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