Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

10 The politics of the
popular
I have tried in this book to outline something of the history of the relationship
between cultural theory and popular culture. In the main I have tended to focus on the
theoretical and methodological aspects and implications of the relationship, as this, in
my opinion, is the best way in which to introduce the subject. However, I am aware that
this has been largely at the expense of, on the one hand, the historical conditions
of the production of theory about popular culture, and on the other, the political relations
of its production and reproduction (these are analytical emphases and not separate
and distinct ‘moments’).
Something I hope I have demonstrated, however, is the extent to which popular culture
is a concept of ideological contestation and variability, to be filled and emptied,
articulated and disarticulated, in a range of different and competing ways. Even my
own truncated and selective history of the study of popular culture shows that ‘studying’
popular culture can be a very serious business indeed – a serious political business.
A paradigm crisis in cultural studies?
In Cultural Populism, Jim McGuigan (1992) claims that the study of popular culture
within contemporary cultural studies is in the throes of a paradigm crisis. This is
nowhere more clearly signalled than in the current polities of ‘cultural populism’.
McGuigan defines cultural populism as ‘the intellectual assumption, made by some
students of popular culture, that the symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary
people are more important analytically and politically than Culture with a capital C’
(4). On the basis of this definition, I am a cultural populist, and, moreover, so is
McGuigan. However, the purpose behind McGuigan’s book is not to challenge cultural
populism as such, but what he calls ‘an uncritical populist drift in the study of popular
culture’ (ibid.), with an increasing fixation on strategies of interpretation at the expense
of an adequate grasp of the historical and economic conditions of consumption. He
contends that there has been an uncritical drift away from the ‘once compelling . . .
neo-Gramscian hegemony theory’ (5) 49 towards an uncritical populism. In some ways,
this was inevitable (he claims) given the commitment of cultural studies to a