Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
It is Willis’s attitude to the capitalist market that most offends political economy,
especially his claim that the capitalist drive for profit produces the very conditions for
the production of new forms of common culture.
No other agency has recognised this realm [common culture] or supplied it with
usable symbolic materials. And commercial entrepreneurship of the cultural field
has discovered something real. For whatever self-serving reasons it was accomplished,
we believe that this is an historical recognition. It counts and is irreversible.
Commercial cultural forms have helped to produce an historical present
from which we cannot now escape and in which there are many more materials –
no matter what we think of them – available for necessary symbolic work than ever
there were in the past. Out of these come forms not dreamt of in the commercial
imagination and certainly not in the official one – forms which make up common
culture (1990: 19).
Capitalism is not a monolithic system. Like any ‘structure’ it is contradictory in that
it both constrains and enables ‘agency’. For example, whilst one capitalist bemoans the
activities of the latest youth subculture, another embraces it with economic enthusiasm,
and is prepared to supply it with all the commodities it is able to desire. It is these,
and similar, contradictions in the capitalist market system which have produced the
possibility of a common culture.
Commerce and consumerism have helped to release a profane explosion of everyday
symbolic life and activity. The genie of common culture is out of the bottle –
let out by commercial carelessness. Not stuffing it back in, but seeing what wishes
may be granted, should be the stuff of our imagination (27).
This entails what Willis knows will be anathema for many, not least the advocates of
political economy, the suggestion of ‘the possibility of cultural emancipation working,
at least in part, through ordinary, hitherto uncongenial economic mechanisms’ (131).
Although it may not be entirely clear what is intended by ‘cultural emancipation’,
beyond, that is, the claim that it entails a break with the hegemonic exclusions of
‘official culture’. What is clear, however, and remains anathema to political economy,
is that he sees the market, in part, because of its contradictions – ‘supplying materials
for its own critique’ (139) – and despite its intentions and its distortions, as facilitating
the symbolic creativity of the realm of common culture.
People find on the market incentives and possibilities not simply for their own
confinement but also for their own development and growth. Though turned
inside out, alienated and working through exploitation at every turn, these incentives
and possibilities promise more than any visible alternative. . . . Nor will it
suffice any longer in the face of grounded aesthetics to say that modern ‘consumer
identities’ simply repeat ‘inscribed positions’ within market provided texts and
artefacts. Of course the market does not provide cultural empowerment in