Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 10 The politics of the popular
always confronts a text or practice in its material existence as a result of determinate
conditions of production. But in the same way, the text or practice is confronted by a
consumer who in effect produces in use the range of possible meaning(s) – these cannot
just be read off from the materiality of the text or practice, or the means or relations of
its production. 60
The ideology of mass culture
We have to start from here and now, and acknowledge that we (all of us) live in a world
dominated by multinational capitalism, and will do so for the foreseeable future –
‘pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’, as Gramsci said (1971: 175). We
need to see ourselves – all people, not just vanguard intellectuals – as active participants
in culture: selecting, rejecting, making meanings, attributing value, resisting and,
yes, being duped and manipulated. This does not mean that we forget about ‘the politics
of representation’. What we must do (and here I agree with Ang) is see that although
pleasure is political, pleasure and politics can often be different. Liking Desperate
Housewives or The Sopranos does not determine my politics, making me more left-wing
or less left-wing. There is pleasure and there is politics: we can laugh at the distortions,
the evasions, the disavowals, whilst still promoting a politics that says these are distortions,
evasions, disavowals. We must teach each other to know, to politicize for, to
recognize the difference between different versions of reality, and to know that each can
require a different politics. This does not mean the end of a feminist or a socialist cultural
politics, or the end of struggles around the representations of ‘race’, class, gender,
disability or sexuality, but it should mean the final break with the ‘culture and civilization’
problematic, with its debilitating insistence that particular patterns of consumption
determine the moral and political worth of an individual.
In many ways, this book has been about what Ang calls ‘the ideology of mass culture’.
Against this ideology, I have posed the patterns of pleasure in consumption and
the consumption of pleasure, aware that I continually run the risk of advocating an
uncritical cultural populism. Ultimately, I have argued that popular culture is what we
make from the commodities and commodified practices made available by the culture
industries. To paraphrase what I said in the discussion of post-Marxist cultural studies,
making popular culture (‘production in use’) 61 can be empowering to subordinate and
resistant to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that popular
culture is always empowering and resistant. To deny the passivity of consumption is
not to deny that sometimes consumption is passive; to deny that the consumers of
popular culture are cultural dupes is not to deny that the culture industries seek to
manipulate. But it is to deny that popular culture is little more than a degraded landscape
of commercial and ideological manipulation, imposed from above in order to
make profit and secure social control. Post-Marxist cultural studies insists that to decide
these matters requires vigilance and attention to the details of production, textuality