CHAPTER 1 Understanding Popular Culture POPULAR CUL TURE This book consists of a number of analyses of popular culture in practice. In their various ways they all, I hope, shed some light on the meanings and pleasures we generate and circulate as we live our everyday lives. Culture is the constant process of producing meanings of and from our social experience, and such meanings necessarily produce a social identity for the people involved. Making sense of anything involves making sense of the person who is the agent in the process; sense making dissolves differences between subject and object and constructs each in relation to the other. Within the production and circulation of these meanings lies pleasure. Culture making (and culture is always in process, never achieved) is a social process: all meanings of self, of social relations, all the discourses and texts that play such important cultural roles can circulate only in relationship to the social system, in our case that of white, patriarchal capitalism. Any social system needs a cultural system of meanings that serves either to hold it in place or destabilize it, to make it more or less amenable to change. Culture (and its meanings and pleasures) is a constant succession of social practices; it is therefore inherently political/'ltJs^entraUy_myolved in the distribution and possiblej-edistribution of various forms of social power. 1 ^Jpulaxxuifaii^ yariousformations of subordinated or disempowered people out of the resources/ both discursive 2 Reading the Popular Understanding Popular Culture 3 and material,. that are p_rr>vided Jby the social system fh.il disempowers them. Ft is therefore contradictory and i onlliclual to its core. The resources—-television, records, clothes, video games, Janguage^— carry; the interests of the economically and ideologically dominant; they have lines of force within them that are hegemonic and that work in favor of the status quo. But hegemonic power is necessary, or even possible, only because of resistance, so these resources must also carry contradictory lines of force that are taken up and activated differently by people situated differently within the social system. If the cultural commodities or texts do not contain resources out of which the people can make their own meanings of their social relations and identities, they will be rejected and will fail in the marketplace. They will not be made popular. Popular culture is madeby subordinatedpe.oples in their own interests but' of resources that also, contradictorily, serve the economic interests of _the dominant. Poj^ilar culture isjrnade from withinancl below^not imposed from without or above as mass cultural theorists would have it. There is always an element of popular culture that lies outside social control, that eseapesor opposes hegemonic forces. Popularculture is always a culture of conflict, it always involves the struggle to make social meanings that are in the interests of the subordinate and that are not those preferred by the dominant ideology. The victories, however fleeting or limited, in this struggle produce popular pleasure, for popular pleasure is always social and political. PcApjjJax culture is. maple.. in_ relationship to structures of dominance. This relationship can taket wo main-forms—that of resistance or evasion. The girl fans of Madonna (Chapter 5a) are resisting"IlVe patriarchal meanings of female sexuality and constructing their own oppositional ones; the boys in video arcades (Chapter 4) are similarly making their own resistant meanings of human-machine relations and power structures. But surfers (Chapter 3) are evading social discipline, evading ideological control and positioning. Evasion and resistance are interrelated, and neither is possible without the other: both involve the interplay of pleasure and meaning, but evasion is more pleasurable than meaningful, whereas resistance produces meanings before pleasures. Making popular culture out of television news, for instance, is possible and pleasurable only if the subordinate can make their meanings out of it, otherwise the news would be part of dominant, hegemonic culture only. So the news of a snow storm (Chapter 7) or of Israeli troops quelling an uprising by Arab youths (Chapter 8) can be made popular only if it offers meanings that are relevant to the everyday lives of subordinate people, and these meanings will be pleasurable only if they are made out of the news, not by the news. These productive pleasures of making one's own sense are different in emphasis from the evasive, offensive pleasures of the body experienced by surfers or video game players. Popular culture is always in process; its meanings can never; be identified in a text, for texts are activated, or made/ meaningful, only in social relations and in intertextualj relations. This activation of the meaning potential of a text can\ occur only in the social and cultural relationships into which it \ enters. The social relationships of texts occur at their moment j of reading as they are inserted into the everyday lives of the readers. Shopping malls a re quite different texts for women and for unemployed youths, because their social relationships differ in each case (see Chapter 2): for women, malls are legitimate, unthreatening public places, that are opposed to both the street and the home; for unemployed youths, they are a place to trick "the system," to consume the images, warmth, and places of consumerism, without buying any of its commodities. The meanings of shopping malls are made and circulated in social practices. But they are also made intertextually: bumper stickers announcing, "A woman's place is in the mall," coffee mugs decorated with the words "mall rats," or T-shirts that proclaim the pathology of the "shop-a-holic" can be used defiantly, skeptically, critically, and variously, according to their many uses—a father giving a T-shirt to his teenage daughter would setup a series of meanings that would differ significantly from those generated by it as a gift from one of her friends. The culture of shopping malls, as of Madonna, as of the beach, cannot be read off the primary texts themselves, but only in their social uses and in their relationships with other texts. The postcards we send are as much a part of the meaning of the 4 Reading the Popular beach as our use of it to expose ourselves to the sun and sight of others; Madonna's posters are as much a part of her meanings and pleasures as her songs and videos. The fan decorating her bedroom with Madonna icons, the wanna-bes (Madonna look-alikes) striding down the sidewalk, are agents in "Madonna culture," their texts (the bedroom, their bodies) as signifying as any of Madonna herself. The meanings of popular culture exist only in their circulation, not in their texts; the texts, which are crucial in this process, need to be understood not for and by themselves but in their interrelationships with other texts and with social life, for that is how their circulation is ensured. POPULAR PRODUCTIVITY AND DISCRIMINA TION T_he_art oJL^opular culture is "the art of makijT^do/'The people's subordinatiGrTmeansTfTat they cannot produce the resources of popular culture, but they do make their culture from those resources. Commodities make an economic profit for their producers and distributors, but their cultural function is not adequately explained by their economic function, however dependent it maybe on it. The cultural industries are often thought of as those that produce our films, music, television, publications, and so on, but all industries are cultural industries to a greater or lesser extent; a pair of jeans (see Understanding Popular Culture, Chapter 1) or a piece of furniture is as much a cultural text as a pop record. All commodities are consumed as much for their meanings, identities, and pleasures as they are for their material function. Qur culturei^ji_ecmimodky culture, ar^djiislruitless tojargue against it on the basis that culture and profit are mutually exclusive tcrms-^thaT^^ be cultural^for others. Behind such arguments lie two romantic fantasies that originate at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum—at one end that of the penniless artist, dedicated only to the purity and aesthetic transcendence of his (for the vision is a patriarchal one) art, and at the other that of a folk art Understanding Popular Culture 5 in which all members of the tribe participate equally in producing and circulating theirculture, free of any commercial taint. Neither of these fantasies has much historical basis, and neither of them is any help at all in understanding the popular culture of capitalist societies. Th^gultural dimensions of industries are where their dominance is^at its shakiest: they know that people have to eat, to wear clothes, to be~abTe Jo transport thc^mjjelyes, but they are much less sure in deter-mining what or why they want to eat, wear, or travel in. The cultur^il~industrics, by which I mean _aH industries, have to produce a repertoire of products from which the people choose. And choose they do; '^^gj^g^g^^s of the failure rate for new products—whether primarily cultural, such as movTes~or records^or more material commoditie,s—a rc-Tfs"liiglx_as 90 percent despite extensive advertising (and the prime fu_ncHpn_pf our enormous publicity industry is to try to ensure the cultural circulation of economic commodities—that js,,. to. exploit the cultural dimension of commodities for the economic profit of their producers). But, despite all the pressures, it is the people who finally choose which commodities they will use in their culture. These j^ressures a re not mc r cly economic. Tho beach. _for \ instaiTce, isTj^ta commodity to be bought and sold, and neither 1 arejhe public rest areas of shopping malls ofthe view of Sears / Tower from the freeway. But the absence of economic power does not mean the absence of social or hegemonic p^wer. As I show i^ control the meanings, pleasure^ are ^1 w^/Rj^hj^v and popular culture has to accommodate them in a constant interplay ojFpower and resistance, discipline and indiscipline, order and1 disorder. _ Much of this struggle is a struggle for meanings, andpopular texts can ensure their popularity only by making themselves inviting terrains for thisjstj^uggleT^ choose any commodity that serves only the economic and ideological jriterests, of the dominant. So popmra^'fexl^are structured in the tension between forces of closure (ojidomln^L" nQ~nland openness (or popularity). Tn Understanding Popular j Cu/fare^ Chapter ip'l thfflrj^mp nf thp ToVc>g^J^p"i^nnpgfi; / in this book Thy to trace them at work. So/popular culture is full 6 Reading the Popular Understanding Popular Culture 7 of puns whose meanings multiply and escape the norms of the social order and overflow their discipline; its excess offers oppbrtuhTties for parody, subversion, orirvyersion; it is obvious and superficial, refusing_ to produce J^^^eep, complexly crafted texts_that narrow down their audiences and social meanings; it is taste lejitTa^d^vuT^ control and class interest mascjueracting as a naturally finer sensibility; it is sh ot through with contradictions, for contradichcm^^^Tre the productivity of the reader to make his orTier sense out of them.) It often centers oh the body and its sensations rather than on the mind and its sense, for the bodily pleasures offer carni-valesque, evasive, liberating practices—they constitute the popular terrain where hegemony is weakest, a terrain that may possibly lie beyond its reach. Popular texts are inadequate in themselves—they are never self-sufficient" struchires_Jof mean (as .gome will argue highbrow teats to be), they are_pr^^oJ^rs_ji£_meanings and pleasure, they are completed only when taken_up by people and inserted 'Into tfieir e^^ryHay culture. The people make popular culture at the interface between everyday life and the consumption of the products of the cujtural_indusiries- The aim of this productivity is, therefore, to produce meanings thal/arerelevjm^ Relevance is central to populaj^o^h^ betweentext and life, between the aesthetic and the everyday that is so central to a process- and practice-based culture (such as the popuIa^ra~fherTthari a |^^~^ojlP^rfojTnance-based one (such as the bourgeois, highbrow one) (see Understanding Popular Culture, Chapter 6). "Relevance can be produced only by (he people, for only theycai-iknow which texts enable them to make the meanings that will function in their everyday lives. Relevance also means tHaTmucK popular culture is ephemeral —as the social conditions of the people cKan^e,^o_do the texts and tastes from which relevances can be produced, Relevance is the intersection between the textual and the social^ Tt is therefore a siteof struggle^ £or. reley^.nces_ are dispersed, and as divergent as the social situations of the people: the popular text^ therefore, has to work against its differences toFfhd a commonality between_diverge.nt social groups m order to maximize its consumption and profitability. There .is also a„struggle over relevance itself, particularly in the function of news inj^pujar culture. Though there are many similarities between entertainment and information, and hard-arid-fast distinctions between them are as useless as they are poj^a^mo^T^ d i f fe re n tl y in each There are few who now believe that it is in the national interest to control the entertainment of the people so as to improve their iasj^e_(which means, in practice, to do away with popular tastes and reduce them all to bourgeois ones), but there are much more solidly grounded arguments that there is information the people need to have if democracv is to flourish. A politically ignorant or apathetic electorate will be unable to produce high-caliber politicians. So television news, for example, is caught in the tension between the need to convey information deemed to be in the public interest and the need to be popular. It attempts to meet these contradictory needs by being socially responsible in content, but popular in formjartd presentation, and thus runs the risk o^bemgfud^ irrelevant from one side, and superficial and rushed from the other - It is ca light be tw at the national (or global) level and at the local level of everyday life, and can be judged to be successful only when it manages „tp merge the two into one. In Chapters 7 and 8,1 trace the interplay of power, knowledge, pleasure, and^jr^ujarity in thejiews as social responsibility and discipline meet popular productivity and relevance. POLITICS Populax.eultu.rejs the culture of the subordinate who resent their suborjjination; it is not concerned with finding consensual meanings or with producm^sqdah;itua.I^^ dinference, as_ the liberal piuralists would have it. Equally, however, it is not the culture of subordination that massifies or commodities people into_the _y^timized dupes of capitalism, as mass cultural theorists propose. Different though these two arguments are, they both find in popular culture only those 8 Reading the Papular forces that work in favor of the statu s quo—the liberal plu ralists may define this in terms of a consensus, and the mass culturalists in terms of the power of the dominant classes, but neither argument allows popular culture to work as an agent of destabilization or as a redistributor of the balance of social power toward the disempowered. They are therefore inadequate. Popular culture is structured within what Stuart Hall (1981) calls the opposition between the J>o^_rJbJoc_and_the people. The power-bloc consists of a relatively unified, relatively.stable alliance of social forces—economic, legal, moral, aesthetic; the people, on the other hand, is a s de Certeau_(1984) am^§£0^(1986) characterize it: But the relationship is always one of conflict or confrontation; th.-b.y.enio-i:. l.-n.-.ot li..rn..)>eu.-;:\ aiv dwav • met by the resistances of heterogen city. These resista nces take various forms tha tdiffer in their social visibility, in their -ociai position:*!..',, an.I in lh.it activity. It could be arguedT^^ bodily pleasures of'evas^on^the^ dogged refusal of the dominant ideology and its discipline, and the ability toconstruct a^et of experiences beyondTSreacfi. Surfers and video game players "lose" their "socially constructed identities and Jherefore the structure of domii^tron-subordinatidh m their moments of jriiii^nwivKcnthe intensity of bocEIy cbncentratidn-geastire becomes"rjjfg£s7Tuc "(see Chapters 3 and 4). Other .evasive, offensive pleasures are those of the carnivalesque,of exaggerated, liberating fun (see Chapter 6 and Understanding Popular Culture^' Outers 3 and 4) that inverts social norms and momentarily disrupts their power. Understanding Popular Culture 9 There are arguments that such evasive or carnivalesque pleasures are merely safety valves that finally serve to maintain the current structure of power by providing licensed, con-tained,^ontrolled n,eari3>of expressing regenfmPjit. There are similar arguments against the p6nticaTefTecfivTr>' of semiotic or interior resistances that occur within a realm of fantasy that is constructed outside and against the forces of ideological subjection (seeChapter5b). Theseargumentshold thatbecause such resistance occurs within the realm of the individual rather than that of the social it is defused, made safe, and thus contained comfortably within the system. But what these arguments fail to take into account is the politics of everyday life that occur on the micro rather than macro level; they fail equally to account for the differences and potential connections between interior, semiotic resistances and sociopolitical ones, between meanings and behaviors, between progressiveness and radicalism, between evasive and offensive tactics. These are the issues and relationships that are central to the politics of popular culture, and theories that fail to address them can never offer us adequate insights. Theories of ideology or hegemony stress the power of the dominant to construct the subjectivitiescjniie'su^^ the commo n sense of society i n their own fh'f eresfs ."Therfp"ower is the power to have their meanings of self arid of social relations accepted prcQngentedTto by BKe peopleTSftKe most basic leVel, evading this power or inverting it is an act of defiance, for any expression of meanings that establish conflictual social differences maintains and legitimates those meanings and those differences. The threat to the power of the dominant is evidenced by their constant attempts to control, delegitimate, and disparage the pleasures of the people. But despite centuries of legal, moral, and aesthetic repression (see Understanding Popular Culture, Chapter 4), the everyday culture of the people, often transmitted orally, has maintained these evasive, resistant popular forces without which more active resistances would have no base and no motivation. Evasion is the foundation of resistance; a voiding capture, either ideological or physical, is the first duty of the guerrilla. The basic power nf th» .foininant in ^pitalism may be economic, but tjWs economic power is both underpinnedjmd *mIf i A ititi Hii„A !lii Jlfcl,,iiyjtti ifti, i iii I Hut i!lM\ , ill im Ml UlAMM> [Jilt Ufc.JL.tfel.«4M .... _____4_ 10 Reading the Popular exceeded, by. semiotic power, that._iSj.Jhe power to make meanings. So semiotic resistance that not only refuses the dominant meanings but constructs oppositional ones that serve the interests of the subordinate is as vital a base for the redistribution of power as is evasion. The ability to think differently, to construct one's own mea nings of self and of social relations, is the necessary ground without which no political action can hope tojmcceeck The minority wboare active at the marrn Jgypfof p"1