Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
Despite my criticisms, I believe McGuigan makes an important argument of some
significance to students of popular culture. As he names John Fiske and Paul Willis as
perhaps the most ‘guilty’ of uncritical cultural populists, I shall outline some of the key
features of their recent work to explain what is at issue in what is so far a rather onesided
debate. In order to facilitate this, I will introduce two new concepts that have their
provenance in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the ‘cultural field’ and the ‘economic field’.
The cultural field
John Fiske is generally seen as the epitome of the uncritical drift into cultural populism.
According to McGuigan, ‘Fiske’s position is . . . indicative of the critical decline of
British cultural studies’ (85). Fiske is said to continually sacrifice economic and technological
determinations to make space for interpretation – a purely hermeneutic version
of cultural studies. For example, he is accused of reducing the study of television
‘to a kind of subjective idealism’ (72), in which the popular reading is king or queen,
always ‘progressive’ – untroubled by questions of sexism or racism, and always
ungrounded in economic and political relations. In short, Fiske is accused of an uncritical
and unqualified celebration of popular culture; he is the classic example of what
happened to cultural studies following the supposed collapse of hegemony theory and
the consequent emergence of what McGuigan refers to as the ‘new revisionism’,
the reduction of cultural studies to competing hermeneutic models of consumption.
New revisionism, with its supposed themes of pleasure, empowerment, resistance and
popular discrimination, is said to represent a moment of ‘retreat from more critical
positions’ (75). In political terms, it is at best an uncritical echo of liberal claims about
the ‘sovereignty of the consumer’, and at worse it is uncritically complicit with prevailing
‘free market’ ideology.
Fiske would not accept ‘new revisionism’ as an accurate description of his position
on popular culture. He would also reject absolutely two assumptions implicit in the
attack on his work. First, he would dismiss totally the view that ‘the capitalist culture
industries produce only an apparent variety of products whose variety is finally illusory
for they all promote the same capitalist ideology’ (Fiske, 1987: 309). Second, he is
emphatic in his refusal of any argument which depends for its substance on the claim
‘that “the people” are “cultural dupes”. . . a passive, helpless mass incapable of discrimination
and thus at the economic, cultural, and political mercy of the barons of the
industry’ (ibid.). Against these assumptions, Fiske argues that the commodities from
which popular culture is made circulate in two simultaneous economies, the financial
and the cultural.
The workings of the financial economy cannot account adequately for all cultural
factors, but it still needs to be taken into account in any investigation. ...But the
cultural commodity cannot be adequately described in financial terms only: the