Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The economic field 229
anything like a full sense. There are choices, but not choices over choices – the
power to set the cultural agenda. Nevertheless the market offers a contradictory
empowerment which has not been offered elsewhere. It may not be the best way
to cultural emancipation for the majority, but it may open up the way to a better way
(160; my italics).
Like capitalism, the culture industries, which supply the commodities from which
people make culture, are themselves not monolithic and non-contradictory. From the
very first of the culture industries, nineteenth-century stage melodrama, to perhaps one
of the most powerful in the twentieth century, pop music, cultural commodities have
been ‘articulated’ in ways which ‘may open the way to a better future’. For example,
Figure 10.1 is a poster for a benefit organized at the Queen’s Theatre (a commercial
site established to sell commodified entertainment) in Manchester. The poster shows
how the theatre had given itself over (or had been taken over) for a benefit performance
in support of bookbinders striking in London. 58 Another significant example
is the fact that Nelson Mandela’s first major public appearance, following his release in
1990, was to attend a concert to thank a pop music audience (consumers of the commodified
practice that is pop music) because they ‘chose to care’. 59 Both examples challenge
the idea that capitalism and the capitalist culture industries are monolithic and
non-contradictory.
Willis also makes the point that it is crude and simplistic to assume that the effects
of consumption must mirror the intentions of production. As Terry Lovell (2009)
points out, drawing on the work of Marx (1976c), the capitalist commodity has a
double existence, as both use value and exchange value. Use value refers to ‘the ability
of the commodity to satisfy some human want’ (539). Such wants, says Marx, ‘may
spring from the stomach or from the fancy’ (ibid.). The exchange value of a commodity
is the amount of money realized when the commodity is sold in the market. Crucial
to Willis’s argument is the fact, as pointed out by Lovell, that ‘the use value of a commodity
cannot be known in advance of investigation of actual use of the commodity’
(540). Moreover, as Lovell indicates, the commodities from which popular culture is
made
have different use values for the individuals who use and purchase them than they
have for the capitalists who produce and sell them, and in turn, for capitalism as
a whole. We may assume that people do not purchase these cultural artefacts
in order to expose themselves to bourgeois ideology . . . but to satisfy a variety of
different wants which can only be guessed at in the absence of analysis and investigation.
There is no guarantee that the use-value of the cultural object for its purchaser
will even be compatible with its utility to capitalism as bourgeois ideology
(542).
Almost everything we buy helps reproduce the capitalist system economically.
But everything we buy does not necessarily help secure us as ‘subjects’ of capitalist
ideology. If, for example, I go to an anti-capitalist demonstration, my travel, food,