Popular culture studies  

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Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular culture. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies.

Following the social upheavals of the 1960s, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse mediums as comic books, television and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones (Mukerji & Schudson 1991:1-2).


Traditional theories of popular culture

The theory of mass society



The theory of culture industry

Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view, the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing culture industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination of society by a specific group which stays in power by partially taking care of and partially repressing the claims of other groups, does not work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over; only the state apparatus dominates.

The theory of progressive evolution

A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist ideology and is often called "progressive evolutionism", is overtly optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating opportunities for every individual to participate in a culture which is fully democratized through mass education, expansion of leisure time and cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood points out (1977:22), there is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular culture does not threaten high culture, but is an authentic expression of the needs of the people. A third view on popular culture

Contemporary popular culture studies



Traces of the theory of culture industry


A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its aristocratic counterpart. Both establish the lonely, autonomous, avant-garde intellectual as the only light in a zombie society. Thus the former Marxists arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and antirevolutionary upper-class culture. This brings us to a third argument, already made in the sixties by Umberto Eco (1988). In a state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid, intellectual Übermensch can only retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the contemporary situation is not taken into account, so its internal contradictions are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as purely utopian. The culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to passivity and thereby becomes an objective ally of the system it pretends to criticize.

It is of course mainly the influence exercised by the Frankfurt School which matters here: not all of their texts present the same rigid view. In Das Schema der Massenkultur (1973-86:331), for instance, Adorno discusses a "nucleus of individuality" that the culture industry cannot manipulate, and which forces her to continuously repeat her manipulation.



Contemporary liberal pluralism



If we consider all the views depicted in the present article as instances of both the thesis and the antithesis of an argument, it is a less know scholar, Blanca de Lizaur who manages to finally produce the synthesis. In the sociological line of Mims and Lerner, she sees Literature as a necessary social institution -id est: fulfilling an essential social need: That of explaining, justifying and promoting its society's world-view, values, ideas and beliefs, through depicting them "in action" in lyrics and narratives from which we all learn. Not only this: The expression of the feelings that may be expected to accompany depicted actions and events, also constitutes a fundamental part of its social role, as we naturally expect Literature to constructively account for, inform, modulate and educate our feelings. Hence why Literature is present in every human culture, all along history.

Because of its fundamental role and our need for it, Literature will always find its way to, and adapt to the latest technologies and to the furthest reaching distribution channels available. It is also because of this reason that works that successfully represent their audiences' values, ideas and beliefs, and attain commercial success, will at the same time become the subject of unsurmountable pressures -...losing success once power actors manage to substitute their society's message for their own.

De Lizaur, emerging from the field of Literary Studies, also developed a full literary theory that accounts for popular works' aesthetics, strategies, resources, genres, and meaningful criticism, as opposed to ideologized or prejudiced criticism.

Contemporary apocalyptic thought




This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that is, the fragmentation of the public. 19th-century intellectuals could still tell themselves that they were either writing for their colleagues, or teaching the undifferentiated masses. 20th-century intellectuals face a heterogeneous whole of groups and mediums producing their own discourses according to their own logic and interests. Thus they cannot control the reception of their own messages anymore, and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the growing "illiteracy" of the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly concerned with high culture illiteracy, the inability to appreciate difficult art and literary classics.


Recurring issues in popular culture studies

The interactions between popular and legitimized culture

The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass society. It is hardly surprising then that a lot of studies deal with this topic. There are, for instance, a number of sociological studies on literary institutions which are held responsible for this mix. Among the first were the commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the twenties on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice Radway (1989) in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow". According to Radway, the book clubs were perceived as scandalous because they blurred some basic distinctions of cultural discourse. In a society haunted by the spectre of cultural standardization and leveling towards below, they dared to put "serious" fiction on the same level as detective, adventure stories, biographies and popular nonfiction. Book clubs were scandalous because they created a space where high and low could meet.

Soon, the term "middlebrow" was introduced to qualify this phenomenon, and to dismiss it as threatening the authenticity of both high and popular culture. A bit after the book clubs came the paperbacks, and their influence was even more wide-ranging. More about this can be found in Thomas Bonn's book (1989) on New American Library. It shows through what elaborate strategies the respectable hardcover editors had to go in order to hide the fact that, from the sixties on, paperback publishers had taken over the control on the production of serious literature.

The possibility of a "subversive" popular culture


The question whether popular culture can actually resist dominant ideology, or even contribute to social change, is much more difficult to answer. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as "attacks against the system", neglecting both the exact ways in which the so-called revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of dominant doctrines to recuperate critical messages. Tania Modleski in "The Terror of Pleasure" (1986:159), for instance, presents exploitation horror films as attacks on the basic aspects of bourgeois culture. Thus a loving father cannibalizes his child, and priests turn into servants of the devil. Other scholars (e.g. Clem Robyns, 1991) claim that, by presenting their perversion as supernatural, or at least pathological, horror films precisely contribute to perpetuating those institutions.

Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone hero fighting for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim Collins in Uncommon Cultures (1989:30-31) sees crime fiction opposing a smart private detective and an inefficient police force as a critique of state justice. On the other hand, Thomas Roberts demonstrates in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990:173-174), a study of the historical background of the private detective model, how the detective story came into existence in the middle of the 19th century, at the time the institution of state police was developed. This force consisted mainly of lower-class people, but nevertheless disposed of a certain authority over the upper class. The fears among the upper classes for this uncontrolled force were eased by domesticating the police in stories explicitly devoted to them. Their inability to pass on correct judgment was amply demonstrated, and forced them to bow for the individual intellect of the detective, who always belonged to the threatened upper class.

Finally, Umberto Eco's studies on Superman and James Bond (1988:211-256, 315-362) as myths of a static good-and-evil world view should be mentioned as very early and lucid examples of a combination of semiotic and political analysis.



See also


  • Houston Baker, 1989: "Handling Crisis", paper read at the Symposium Cultural Literacy in the Media Age: The Clash of Values, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, August 1989.
  • Pierre Bourdieu 1971: "Le marché des biens symboliques", in L'année sociologique 22:49-126.
  • Pierre Bourdieu: Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris: Fayard.
  • Jim Collins, 1989: Uncommon Cultures. Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, Mew York/London: Routledge.
  • Charles Grivel, 1973: Production de l'intérêt romanesque, The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
  • Tania Modleski, 1986: "The Terror of Pleasure. The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory", in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment. Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 155-167.
  • Clem Robyns, 1991: "Beyond the first dimension: recent tendencies in popular culture studies", in Joris Vlasselaers (Ed.) The Prince and the Frog, Leuven: ALW.
  • Clem Robyns, 1995: "Defending the National Identity", In Andreas Poltermann (Ed.) Literaturkanon, Medienereignis, Kultureller Text. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.

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