Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
‘Nobody is in any way a better person morally or in any other way for liking Beethoven
more than Adam Faith. . . . Of course the person who likes both is in a very happy position
since he is able to enjoy much more in his life than a lot of other people’ (ibid.:
27). Although Hall and Whannel (1964) recognize ‘the honest intention’ in Arnold’s
remarks, they question what they call ‘the random use of Adam Faith as an example’
because, as they claim, ‘as a singer of popular songs he is by any serious standards far
down the list’. Moreover, as they explain, ‘By serious standards we mean those that
might be legitimately applied to popular music – the standards set, for example, by
Frank Sinatra or Ray Charles’ (28). What Hall and Whannel are doing here is rejecting
the arguments of both Leavisism, and the (mostly American) mass culture critique,
which claims that all high culture is good and that all popular culture is bad, for an
argument which says, on the one hand, that most high culture is good, and on the
other, contrary to Leavisism and the mass culture critique, that some popular culture is
also good – it is ultimately a question of popular discrimination.
Part of the aim of The Popular Arts, then, is to replace the ‘misleading generalizations’
of earlier attacks on popular culture by helping to facilitate popular discrimination
within and across the range of popular culture itself. Instead of worrying about the
‘effects’ of popular culture, ‘we should be seeking to train a more demanding audience’
(35). A more demanding audience, according to Hall and Whannel, is one that prefers
jazz to pop, Miles Davis to Liberace, Frank Sinatra to Adam Faith, Polish films to mainstream
Hollywood, L’Année Dernière à Marienbad to South Pacific; and knows intuitively
and instinctively that high culture (‘Shakespeare, Dickens and Lawrence’) is usually
always best. They take from Clement Greenberg (who took it from Theodor Adorno)
the idea that mass culture is always ‘pre-digested’ (our responses are predetermined
rather than the result of a genuine interaction with the text or practice), and use the
idea as a means to discriminate, not just between good and bad popular culture, but
to suggest that it can also be applied to examples of high culture: ‘The important point
about such a definition [culture as “pre-digested”] is that it cuts across the commonplace
distinctions. It applies to films but not all, to some TV but not all. It covers segments
of the traditional as well as the popular culture’ (36).
Their approach leads them to reject two common teaching strategies often encountered
when popular culture is introduced into the classroom. First, there is the defensive
strategy that introduces popular culture in order to condemn it as second-rate
culture. Second, the ‘opportunist’ strategy that embraces the popular tastes of students
in the hope of eventually leading them to better things. ‘In neither case’, they contend,
‘is there a genuine response, nor any basis for real judgements’ (37). Neither would
lead to what they insist is necessary: ‘a training in discrimination’ (ibid.). This is not
(to repeat a point made earlier) the classic discrimination of Leavisism, defending the
‘good’ high culture against the encroachments of the ‘bad’ popular culture, but discrimination
within popular culture: the necessity to discriminate within and not just
against popular culture; sifting the good popular culture from the bad popular culture.
However, although they do not believe in introducing the texts and practices of popular
culture into education ‘as steppingstones in a hierarchy of taste’ leading ultimately
to real culture, 9 they do still insist (as do Hoggart and Williams) that there is a