TEAC921B: In Media Res

First, a long-winded summary:

John Storey, in his text, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (4th ed, University of Georgia Press: 2006) begins his introduction with a triadic. Cultural theory has a tripod foundation of culture, ideology, and popular culture.

Storey posits (while citing Raymond Williams) that culture can be described as “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development,” “a particular way of life, whether of people, a period or a group,” and “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (Williams 90).

Ideology, Storey asserts, “can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people” but also reminds us that ideology “suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment” (Storey 2). Using a Marxist critique, Storey asks us to remember that ideologies, particularly the dominant variety, can create a “false consciousness,” that works “in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless” (2). Again drawing on Carl Marx’s work, Storey asserts that ideology can also “draw attention to the way in which texts (television, fiction, pop songs, novels, feature films, etc.) always present a particular image of the world (Storey 3). Furthering the complications associated with defining ideology, Storey draws upon the work of Roland Barthes and provides a fourth definition that “operates mainly at the level of connotations, the secondary, often unconscious meanings that texts and practices carry, or can be made to carry” (3).

Though Barthes calls ideology “myth,” it’s clear that even myths contain what Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser would call “material practices.” As Storey attempts to draw multiple cultural theory threads together, it’s clear that to define culture and popular culture, one must cross multiple philosophical and disciplinary borders. And, it seems, the definition of culture is dependent on the definitions of pieces of culture itself.

A definition of popular culture isn’t much easier to grasp as Storey cites Williams again and four possible definitions of popular culture:

1. Well-liked by many people
2. Inferior kinds of work
3. Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
4. Culture actually made by the people for themselves

Storey also includes the suggestion that popular culture is simply a leftover, what remains after a society determines what is “high culture.” With this definition, it’s clear that popular culture is inferior culture (Storey 5). It’s that inferior notion, however, that requires us to consider what Pierre Bourdieu contends that, “the consumption of culture is ‘predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences’ (Storey citing Bourdieu 5). Even so, those differences are dependent upon a certain aesthetic operating in tandem with some sense of morality (Storey 5).

Further complicating his definition, Storey includes notions of “mass culture” as a commercial culture, manufactured for a “mass of non-discriminating consumers” (6). He also unfolds theory surrounding popular culture as American culture – as something that falls under the title of “Americanization” that is suspect largely because the tension between “… traditional values of high culture, or the traditional way of life of a ‘tempered working class’” (Storey 7).

Additional definitions, from the structuralist view that posit popular culture as a “ideological machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the dominant ideology,” to the post-structuralist view of popular culture as of the people and not something imposed upon them (Storey 7) seem to establish room for the idea of that popular culture is actually a negotiation between hegemonic power and its subordinates (Storey citing Antonio Gramsci (8).

Storey goes even further to complicate cultural theory and pop culture definitions by including some discussion as to the nature of the definition of “the people” on which, all previous definitions of both culture and its theories rely. David Morely, Storey asserts, “has modified the model to take into account discourse and subjectivity; seeing reading as always an interaction between the discourses of the text and the discourses of the reader” (9). This is quite similar to the postmodern notion that the boundaries between and high and low culture are no longer recognized by the masses – largely due to commercialism and the multiple ways in which art, even “high art” are used to create corporate imagery and advertising.

As Storey himself confesses, there isn’t one hard and fast definition of popular culture. Storey says he believes this is due to the “absent other” that “always haunts any definition we might use” (11). In short, the definitions themselves require a reflexive engagement with an other – some body, person, ideology, or cultural entity that represents one end of a binary.

And now, a little light engagement with the text:

Considering that popular culture is often considered synonymous with mass culture, it’s easy for me to see how and why Storey brings Marx, Barthes, and Bourdieu to the conversation table. Class distinctions are associated with my personal experiences with both “high culture” and popular culture, but even so, I find myself in the postmodern quandary with the “absent other.” As Henri Lefebvre asserts, “Il y a toujours l’autre” – There is always the other. So though I find binaries useful in determining what something is or is not, I find it much more exciting to “critically third” and bring that other into the equation. Meaning, somewhere between hot and cold there is lukewarm. Though I see the polarized high and mass culture as a useful tool in understanding the power relations between socioeconomic classes, I am equally drawn to classes such as “Indie hipsters” who borrow from both high and low cultures to define their class.

Though I am well aware of the production of culture through mainstream media, I’m also well aware of its consumerist nature. What people buy is reproduced, predicted based on consumer behavior patterns, and then distributed again. Digital technology, specifically the Internet, disturbs this power paradigm by making the public sphere accessible to any individual who has access to it. Though individuals may not have the same sway and pull as mainstream media, it is difficult to deny the power of entities like YouTube and Blogger, and the ways in which they have assisted, if not created, a backlash against the mainstream media.

Of particular interest to me are bloggers and other citizen journalists who have tipped the scales by taking their First Amendment rights to heart. To date, the journalist who has done more time than any other was Josh Wolf who spent 266 days in jail for refusing to turn over his reporter’s notes gathered on the Apple Corporation (). It seems we’re in a postmodern swirl of access and market saturation, in that mainstream media (now aware of the power of blogging) now requires its major faces (Anderson Cooper et. al) to maintain blogs on network pages. So it’s difficult to determine, at first glance, what came first (a chicken and the egg sort of thing), but it does seem to me that the mainstream response to counter-cultural markets is to “normalize” them (and thus, perhaps, disempowering them) by duplicating them.

This speaks to the structuralist and post-structuralist theories and the issue of hegemonic power, or the ways in which ideology is used to maintain power within the status quo (and dissenters be diluted in both voice and power). That being said, I think it also speaks to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “simulacra and simulation” (1994), when the “pure” form of resistance suffers “demuseumification” – “another spiral in artificiality” (11). The mainstream cultural machine replicates the alternative culture response, the resistance, by replicating the form (blog). This is particularly important when one considers that bloggers were often functioning as “watchdogs of the watchdogs of democracy,” correcting errors, misrepresentations, and illuminating the behind-the-scenes relationships between government and the “free press.”

As Al Gore notes in his Nobel Peace Prize-winning book, The Assault on Reason:

A free press is supposed to function as our democracy’s immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” So what happened? Why does our immune system no longer operate as it once did? For one thing, there’s been a dramatic change in the nature of what philosopher Jürgen Habermas has described as “the structure of the public forum.” As I described in the introduction, the public sphere is simply no longer as open to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals as it was when America was founded (26).

The mainstream replication of independent journalism by the recreation of its preferred medium is one example of the ways in which elites maintain power by normalizing or discrediting (it seems either works) the work of the dissenters. Though access to the public sphere is simplified or facilitated by digital technology, it seems the necessary tension – the physics of equilibrium as defined by engineering – that keep democracy stable, are not present in the public sphere (despite our radical efforts). So what can we do? I suspect that we’ll have to do as we, the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, will have to keep representing ourselves, through popular culture or counter culture, until we push those in power to adapt, to overcome.

This issue of hegemonic power reminds me of Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed and Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary. Both writers attempt to use “false consciousness” as a place from which to begin resistance, and both post that power in the postmodern sense is not hegemonic. To Sandoval, postmodern globalization marks an amputation, a severing between art, its aesthetics, and the power associated with them because “…art no longer functions as an instrument of social criticism and change” (24). To Sandoval, the “absent other” is really absent and because there isn’t a “normality” (something she notes that Fredrick Jameson would call a “grim symptom” of postmodernity and not a “liberatory condition”), counter culture cannot use parody as a means of pushing back power. As Sandoval writes:

Advanced capitalist territories today are being linked, writes Jameson, into varying fields of “stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm.” This new territorialization disables all formerly dominant languages or understandings that might have been used to define the present diffusion of social reality; there are no controlling codes capable of mapping this mobile terrain. This means that U.S. citizen-subjects live in an era of postliteracy, Jameson writes, that operates beyond older notions of language, writing, and imagination itself (24).

Sandoval’s solution to this postmodern power plane (a non-linear, and therefore non-hegemonic structure) is to evoke what she calls “differential consciousness” that will use the mobile nature of the public space terrain to its advantage by allowing citizen-subjects to move “’between and among’ ideological positions” (57). To Sandoval, ideology as Storey posits, represents multiple positions and perspectives, and the postmodern citizen-subject can gain agency by moving in and out, among and between, its borders.

Pérez, writing specifically about history and Chicana/o studies, posits this mobility as a political move. As Pérez writes:

History monographs pose particular histiographic questions to advance the accepted official arguments. There is a complicit and implicit understanding about what is privileged in current debates. Studies that reiterate the discussion most successfully set the norm for upcoming works. A historian must remain within the boundaries, the borders, the confines of debate as it has been conceptualized if she/he is to be a legitimate heir to the field. Breaking out of the borders is like choosing to go outside, into the margins, to argue or expose that which no one will risk. Going outside the accredited realm of historiography means daring to be dubbed a-historical. It means traversing new territories and disciplines, mapping fresh terrains such as cultural studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and of course, Chicana/o studies (xi).

What I glean from Storey’s account of cultural theory and pop culture is the very discursive nature of the discipline(s). The history he chooses is elitist, and demonstrates,in part, the issues of histiography Pérez describes. Because theory assumes that anything is “always, already” in action, I’m not quick to separate Sandoval or Pérez from Storey. In this sense, I’m moving from a binary to a critical thirding – evoking the “absent other” not as a frustration or absence that complicates definition, but as an important (and promising) part of the triadic.

The fact that Storey posits his definitions as discursive and in multiplicity, dependent upon what has gone before, and complicated by many factors interacting (instead of tidy categorical renditions), I’m not quick to separate the theories I’ve already studied from these new ones I’m encountering.

Of course, this is going to make my work difficult. Of course, I will probably over-talk and over-think everything (as I always do). But I do think it’s important to consider that Storey isn’t offering a quick definition, and I suspect this is because culture is political and power changes, churns, and shifts. The political and mobile terrain within the postmodern view is tectonic, always shifting, always moving.

I look forward to sorting through the complexities. But then, I’m a nerd.