Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
It is important to distinguish between the power of the culture industries and the
power of their influence. Too often the two are conflated, but they are not necessarily
the same. The trouble with the political economy approach is that too often it is
assumed that they are the same. Warner Bros is undoubtedly part of a powerful multinational
company, dealing in capitalist commodities. But once this is established, what
next? Does it follow, for example, that all Warner Bros’ products are the bearers of capitalist
ideology? Despite what REM, for example, may say or think to the contrary, are
they really mere purveyors of capitalist ideology? Those who buy their records, pay to
see them live, are they really in effect buying capitalist ideology; being duped by a capitalist
multinational; being reproduced as capitalist subjects, ready to spend more and
more money and consume more and more ideology? The problem with this approach
is that it fails to acknowledge fully that capitalism produces commodities on the basis
of their exchange value, whereas people tend to consume the commodities of capitalism
on the basis of their use value. There are two economies running in parallel
courses: the economy of use, and the economy of exchange – we do not understand
one by interrogating only the other. We cannot understand consumption by collapsing
it into production, nor will we understand production by reading it off consumption.
Of course the difficulty is not in keeping them apart, but in bringing them into a relationship
that can be meaningfully analysed. However, if when studying popular
culture our interest is the repertoire of products available for consumption, then
production is our primary concern, whereas, if we are interested in discovering the particular
pleasures of a specific text or practice, our primary focus should be on consumption.
In both instances, our approach would be determined by the questions we
seek to answer. Although it is certainly true that in an ideal research situation – given
adequate time and funding – cultural analysis would remain incomplete until production
and consumption had been dialectically linked, in the real world of study this is
not always going to be the case. In the light of this, political economy’s insistence that
it offers the only really valid approach to the study of popular culture is not only
untrue, but, if widely believed, could result in either a reductive distortion, or a complete
stifling, of cultural studies research.
Post-Marxist cultural studies: hegemony revisited
The critique of cultural studies offered by political economy is important not for what
it says but because it draws attention to a question, which, needless to say, it does not
itself answer. The question is how to keep in analytical view the ‘conditions of existence’
of the texts and practices of everyday life. The problem with the mode of analysis
advocated by political economy is that it only addresses the beginning of the
process of making culture. What they describe is better understood, to borrow Stuart
Hall’s (1996c) phrase, as ‘determination by the economic in the first instance’ (45).
There are economic conditions, and fear of economic reductionism cannot just will