Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

214
Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
hermeneutic mode at the expense of the perspective of political economy. But what
is worse, he maintains, is that cultural studies has increasingly narrowed its focus to
questions of interpretation without situating such questions within a context of material
relations of power. To reverse this trend, he advocates a dialogue between cultural
studies and the political economy of culture. He fears that for cultural studies to remain
separate is for it to remain politically ineffective as a mode of explanation, and thus for
it to remain complicit with the prevailing exploitative and oppressive structures of
powers.
In my view, the separation of contemporary cultural studies from the political
economy of culture has been one of the most disabling features of the field of
study. The core problematic was virtually premised on a terror of economic reductionism.
In consequence, the economic aspects of media institutions and the
broader economic dynamics of consumer culture were rarely investigated, simply
bracketed off, thereby severely undermining the explanatory and, in effect, critical
capacities of cultural studies (40–1).
Nicholas Garnham (2009) makes a similar point: ‘the project of cultural studies can
only be successfully pursued if the bridge with political economy is rebuilt’ (619). Work
on consumption in cultural studies has, or so the argument goes, vastly overestimated
the power of consumers, by failing to keep in view the ‘determining’ role production
plays in limiting the possibilities of consumption.
Cultural studies is thus accused of failing to situate consumption within the ‘determining’
conditions of production. Although the introduction of neo-Gramscian hegemony
theory into cultural studies had promised to do this, according to McGuigan
(1992), ‘it has never done so adequately due to the original schism with the political
economy of culture’ (76). Can we return to hegemony theory revitalized by political
economy? It seems that the answer is no: hegemony theory inevitably leads to an
uncritical populism, fixated with consumption at the expense of production. Our only
hope is to embrace the political economy of culture perspective.
McGuigan also claims that cultural populism’s exclusive focus on consumption and
a corresponding uncritical celebration of popular reading practices has produced a ‘crisis
of qualitative judgment’ (79). What he means by this is that there are no longer
absolutist criteria of judgement. What is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ is now open to dispute.
He blames postmodern uncertainty fostered by cultural populism, claiming that
‘the reinsertion of aesthetic and ethical judgment into the debate is a vital rejoinder to
the uncritical drift of cultural populism and its failure to dispute laissez-faire conceptions
of consumer sovereignty and quality’ (159). Clearly unhappy with the intellectual
uncertainties of postmodernism, he desires a return to the full authority of the
modernist intellectual: always ready to make clear and comprehensive that which the
ordinary mind is unable to grasp. He seeks a return to the Arnoldian certainties – culture
is the best that has been thought and said (and the modernist intellectual will tell
us what this is). He seems to advocate an intellectual discourse in which the university
lecturer is the guardian of the eternal flame of Culture, initiating the uninitiated into