Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
Thus, the fan is always in constant conflict, not only with the various structures of
power, but also with the vast audience of media consumers. But such an elitist view
of fandom does little to illuminate the complex relations that exist between forms
of popular culture and their audiences. While we may all agree that there is a difference
between the fan and the consumer, we are unlikely to understand the
difference if we simply celebrate the former category and dismiss the latter one
(ibid.).
In a similar way, subcultural analysis has always tended to celebrate the extraordinary
against the ordinary – a binary opposition between resistant ‘style’ and conformist
‘fashion’. Subcultures represent youth in resistance, actively refusing to conform to the
passive commercial tastes of the majority of youth. Once resistance has given way to
incorporation, analysis stops, waiting for the next ‘great refusal’. Gary Clarke (1990)
draws attention to the London-centredness of much British subcultural theory, with
its suggestion that the appearance of a given youth subculture in the provinces is a
telling sign of its incorporation. It is not surprising, then, that he also detects a certain
level of cultural elitism structuring much of the classic cultural studies work on youth
subcultures.
I would argue generally that the subcultural literature’s focus on the stylistic
deviance of a few contains (albeit implicitly) a similar treatment of the rest of the
working class as unproblematically incorporated. This is evident, for example, in
the distaste felt for youth deemed as outside subcultural activity – even though most
‘straight’ working-class youths enjoy the same music, styles, and activities as the
subcultures – and in the disdain for such cults as glam, disco, and the Ted revival,
which lack ‘authenticity’. Indeed, there seems to be an underlying contempt for
‘mass culture’ (which stimulates the interest in those who deviate from it) that
stems from the work of the Marxism of the Frankfurt School and, within the
English tradition, to the fear of mass culture expressed in The Uses of Literacy (90).
If subcultural consumption is to remain an area of concern in cultural studies,
Clarke suggests that future analysis ‘should take the breakthrough of a style as its starting
point’ (92), rather than seeing this as the defining moment of incorporation. Better
still, cultural studies should focus on ‘the activities of all youths to locate continuities
and discontinuities in culture and social relations and to discover the meaning these
activities have for the youths themselves’ (95).
The economic field
McGuigan (1992) claims, as I observed earlier, that ‘the separation of contemporary
cultural studies from the political economy of culture has been one of the most