Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 4 Marxisms
That judgment may make us feel right, decent and self-satisfied about our denunciations
of the agents of mass manipulation and deception – the capitalist cultural
industries: but I don’t know that it is a view which can survive for long as an
adequate account of cultural relationships; and even less as a socialist perspective
on the culture and nature of the working class. Ultimately, the notion of the people
as a purely passive, outline force is a deeply unsocialist perspective (512).
Post-Marxist cultural studies is informed by the proposition that people make popular
culture from the repertoire of commodities supplied by the culture industries. Making
popular culture (‘production in use’) can be empowering to subordinate and resistant
to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that popular culture is
always empowering and resistant. To deny the passivity of consumption is not to deny
that sometimes consumption is passive; to deny that consumers are cultural dupes is
not to deny that the culture industries seek to manipulate. But it is to deny that popular
culture is little more than a degraded landscape of commercial and ideological
manipulation, imposed from above in order to make profit and secure social control.
Post-Marxist cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and
attention to the details of the production, distribution and consumption of the commodities
from which people may or may not make culture. These are not matters that
can be decided once and for all (outside the contingencies of history and politics) with
an elitist glance and a condescending sneer. Nor can they be read off from the moment
of production (locating meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, the probability of incorporation,
the possibility of resistance, in, variously, the intention, the means of production
or the production itself): these are only aspects of the contexts for ‘production
in use’; and it is, ultimately, in ‘production in use’ that questions of meaning, pleasure,
ideological effect, incorporation or resistance, can be (contingently) decided.
Further reading
Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, Harlow:
Pearson Education, 2009. This is the companion volume to this book. It contains
examples of most of the work discussed here. This book and the companion Reader
are supported by an interactive website (www.pearsoned.co.uk/storey). The website
has links to other useful sites and electronic resources.
Barrett, Michele, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991. An interesting introduction to ‘post-Marxism’.
Bennett, Tony, Formalism and Marxism, London: Methuen, 1979. Contains helpful
chapters on Althusser and Macherey.
Bennett, Tony, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social
Process, London: Batsford, 1981. Section 4 consists of extracts from Gramsci and