Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
The French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau (1984, 2009) also interrogates the
term ‘consumer’, to reveal the activity that lies within the act of consumption or what
he prefers to call ‘secondary production’ (2009: 547). Consumption, as he says, ‘is
devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly,
because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through
its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order’ (546). For de
Certeau, the cultural field is a site of continual conflict (silent and almost invisibly)
between the ‘strategy’ of cultural imposition (production) and the ‘tactics’ of cultural
use (consumption or ‘secondary production’). The cultural critic must be alert to
‘the difference or similarity between . . . production . . . and . . . secondary production
hidden in the process of . . . utilisation’ (547). 51 He characterizes the active consumption
of texts as ‘poaching’: ‘readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to
someone else, like nomads poaching their way across the fields they did not write’
(1984: 174).
The idea of reading as poaching is clearly a rejection of any theoretical position that
assumes that the ‘message’ of a text is something which is imposed on a reader. Such
approaches, he argues, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the processes
of consumption. It is a ‘misunderstanding [which] assumes that “assimilating” necessarily,
means “becoming similar to” what one absorbs, and not “making something
similar” to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating or reappropriating it’ (166).
Acts of textual poaching are always in potential conflict with the ‘scriptural economy’
(131–76) of textual producers and those institutional voices (professional critics,
academics, etc.) who, through an insistence on the authority of authorial and/or textual
meaning, work to limit and to confine the production and circulation of ‘unauthorized’
meanings. In this way, de Certeau’s notion of ‘poaching’ is a challenge to
traditional models of reading, in which the purpose of reading is the passive reception
of authorial and/or textual intent: that is, models of reading in which reading is
reduced to a question of being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. He makes an interesting observation
about how the notion of a text containing a hidden meaning may help sustain certain
relationships of power in matters of pedagogy:
This fiction condemns consumers to subjection because they are always going to
be guilty of infidelity or ignorance when confronted by the mute ‘riches’ of the treasury.
. . . The fiction of the ‘treasury’ hidden in the work, a sort of strong-box full
of meaning, is obviously not based on the productivity of the reader, but on the
social institution that overdetermines his relation with the text. Reading is as it
were overprinted by a relationship of forces (between teachers and pupils ...)
whose instrument it becomes (171).
This may in turn produce a teaching practice in which ‘students . . . are scornfully
driven back or cleverly coaxed back to the meaning “accepted” by their teachers’
(172). 52 This is often informed by what we might call ‘textual determinism’: 53 the view
that the value of something is inherent in the thing itself. This position can lead to
a way of working in which certain texts and practices are prejudged to be beneath