Re-thinking of popular culture studies as interdisciplinary subject

 School to mass culture of the 
twentieth century made attempts to analyze contemporary culture using this 
critical perspective more difficult for Marxists. 
RE-THINKING OF POPULAR CULTURE... 
32 
 New Criticism is identified as the most original Anglo-American 
contribution to literary theory. It arose in the 1930s as a specifically 
antihistoricist, anticontextual reading of texts. New Criticism asserted that 
knowing the author's intensions or, indeed, anything at all about the author and 
the world in which he or she wrote was irrelevant to deciphering the meaning of 
texts. The message was in the text itself, and the good reader could discover it 
without reference to external clues. 
 New Criticism seemed to have little to offer students of popular culture. 
After all, its practitioners were concerned with developing techniques for 
distinguishing good from bad literature, in which all the components of the text 
contributed to "the reconciliation of opposites that constitutes its poetic function" 
(Robey, 85) and did not generally deign to touch mass culture because it was by 
definition less closely tied to a distinctive authorial style. But still, their approach 
to reading had its counterpart in film studies, in the guise of 'auteur theory'. 
Critics working within this tradition tried to explain individual films by reference 
to the corpus of the director. 
 Serious study forms of popular culture as popular culture, using 
techniques of literary criticism, had to wait for the semiotics of Roland Barthes. 
Barthes was among the early structuralists to use Saussurian linguistics as a 
means of cultural analysis. He went one step beyond most structuralists. He did 
not simply use linguistic techniques for analyzing patterns of literary writing; he 
proposed to use them for studying non-literary works like film, photography, 
clothing, and other popular forms like food and boxing. 
 For literary theorists trying to understand artworks of any sort means that 
authors are to be set aside as objects of study, and new objects are to be given 
center stage. Popular cultural forms are impersonally developed and "often 
regarded as and 'ideological machine'" (Bennett, 348). They must be accounted 
for with an analysis of the systems by which languages are mobilized. With the 
exception of the British School of Marxists, who have been particularly interested 
in working-class resistance to structural systems of control, little room is left in 
structuralist theories for concerted action, expressive or political. This is one of 
the problems of structuralism that helped spur the development of 
poststructuralist theories. 
 If no one is the author, perhaps everyone is the author. The central tenet 
of poststructuralist analyses is that texts are multivocal. Texts are seen as having 
variety of potential meanings, none of which is the real meaning to be derived by 
some superior reader. The Frankfurt School, Marxism, New Criticism, and 
structuralist theories all have taken it for granted that the purpose of criticism is to 
discover 'the' meaning of the text. In contrast, poststructuralists have generally 
been more interested in the variability of readings as "a momentary 'fix' between 
two moving layers" (Selden 71) than in the perfect ability of the reading process. 
All texts, the poststructuralists effectively reach, are 'intertexual'; and just as they 
subtly or openly, intentionally or unconsciously, allude to or incorporate other 
texts, so they make themselves inevitably open to multiple readings. 
 From this viewpoint, the critic loses his or her special expertise. The act 
of criticism is an act of reading. This means that popular reading of popular 
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33 
culture are just as interesting a subject matter for poststructualist analysis as 
readings by critics within elite culture. Jacques Derrida argues, for instance, that 
the world of writing has its own life, and its textuality is part of how it 
communicates. It is spatial and visual, not simply aural. So language use on paper 
has its own meanings, problems, and possibilities and becomes "a new 
metaphysical ground of being" (Docker, 130). This enables analysts like Derrida 
and his followers to seek out the conceptual contradictions in writing, 
contradictions so severe that written work is its own criticism, or, as one school of 
poststructuralism says, writing 'deconstructs' itself into an "undercidable scasster 
of opposed significations" ('Poststructuralism', 261). 
 With the revival of Freudian thinking in France based on the work of 
Jacques Lacan, critics have asked more about how human needs are addressed 
through culture. Like Lacan, a number of poststructuralists like Foucault and 
Barthes have also asked questions about the psychological factors that pervade 
the process of reading. 
 Sex and power have been particularly important categories in feminist 
theories, in which culture can be made and used. And they look for an 
"authentically female culture" (Bennett 348). Similarly, feminists have also 
contended that language is by its nature political as well sensual and establishes 
systems of power in its every use. 
 Foucault raises many of these issues on the author. His analysis suggests 
that we have so long kept standard ideas about authorship in large part because 
without them the cultural critic could no longer identify great work by its great 
author. That would be dangerous because it would upset the system of power, 
which is "gained through discourse" (Selden, 102), in language, known as 
discourse theory, including the stratified relationship of elite to popular culture. 
Popular culture is often 'authorless,' unless like film, it is elevated by the 
identification of its 'real' author (the director). It is precisely because Foucault's 
analysis of literary authorship unravels so revealingly the politics of cultural 
stratification that it is so important to students of popular culture. 
 Foucault calls into question what it means to be an author, but critics like 
Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish pointedly raise the issue of what it means to be a 
reader. Reader response theory developed before poststructuralism and without 
the concern for the multivocal quality of texts themselves. But the 
poststructuralist movement of deconstruction is a theory of reading that subverts 
the structuralist view and proposes a creative reading of any text as a play of 
differences that generate innumerable, mutually contradictory, but totally 
'undecidable' meanings. 
 Poststructuralism in linguistic has parallels with the movement known as 
postmodernism in literature and arts. Posmodernism, for Storey, is a term current 
inside and outside the academic study of popular culture (146). Thus, popular 
culture has a direct relation with this movement because both have the common 
interest in their approaches. 
 The development of postmodern theory emerges from United States and 
Britain in the early 1960s, through its theorization in the work of Jean-Francois 
RE-THINKING OF POPULAR CULTURE... 
34 
Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism involves not only 
the counter traditional experiments of modernism but also diverse attempts to 
break away from modernist forms which has to overthrow the elitism of 
modernist 'high art' by returning to the models of 'mass culture' in film, television, 
newspaper cartoons, and popular music. In this connection, Peter Brooker in his 
introduction to Modernism/Postmodernism writes: "Postmodernism splices high 
with low culture, it raids and parodies past art, it questions all absolutes, it 
swamps reality in a culture of recycled images, it has to do with deconstruction 
and consumerism, television, the end of communism... the rise of the information 
society" (qtd. in Hutcheon). 
 Thus, one prominent tendency is to subvert the hierarchical distinctions 
between 'high art or literature' and the traditionally 'lower' forms that appeal to a 
much larger body of consumers, or to devote no more attention to elite canonical 
literature than to popular fiction and romances, magazine writing, journalism, and 
advertising, together with other arts that have mass appeal such as comics, film, 
television, video, and all forms of popular music. Prominent is the undertaking to 
transfer to the center of cultural study such hitherto 'marginal' or 'excluded' subjects as 
the literary, artistic, and intellectual productions of women, the working class, ethnic 
groups, and colonial, postcolonial, and Third-World cultures; for instance, Storey 
says, "the study of popular shows that 'studying' popular culture can be a very serious 
business indeed-serious political business" (171). 
 The implications of this position are probably most evident in the studies of 
canonization and canonicity that are now popular in literary studies. In one elegant 
example, Jane Tompkins has written of the social, economic, and political 
underpinnings of the rise of Nathanial Hawthorne's writings to 'masterpiece' status. 
She challenges the common place notion of a 'classic' as a text that retains its value 
even though times change. She argues that a 'classic' is in constant change: 
Rather than being the repository of eternal truths, they embody the changing 
interests and beliefs of those people whose place in the cultural hierarchy 
empowers them to decide which works deserve the name of classic and which 
do not. For the idea of 'the classic' itself is no more universal or interest-free 
than the situation of those whose business it is to interpret literary works for the 
general public. (qtd. in Mukerji & Schudson, 53) 
 Thus, the interpretation leaves the students of popular culture wondering if the 
elite culture/popular culture distinction and all the elaborate barricades and buildings and 
temples erected to sustain it, has finally been revealed as a house of cards. 
 In general, literary scholars, art and music historians, and cultural critics 
were the most committed of all academics to elitist concepts of culture. Indeed, 
defining taste and value was in many ways their reason for existence. Thus, they 
seemed to be most uninterested of all to study popular culture. And this may help 
explain why the changes in literary theory have been the most far-reaching of any 
considered here. The traditional tools of literary scholarship seemed shockingly at 
odds with the antielitist tone of so much contemporary art and writing, the very 
subject of scholarship seemed to be rejecting its institutionalized study. The 
revolution in theories of interpretation could not help addressing new questions 
about the purpose of cultural criticism itself. 
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35 
CONCLUSION 
 The disciplinary origins of the new research in popular culture result from 
the broad reassessments of the nature of culture within these fields. Many scholars 
have had to suspend beliefs in fundamental normative prescriptions of Western 
culture, a difficult move in its requirements of careful theoretical reasoning but a 
rewarding one in opening up for study of a vast range of human activities. 
 As definitions of what objects are important for cultural analysis have 
changed, popular culture has found legitimacy for the very reasons it was previously 
derided. This has made it central to any understanding of Western societies and 
though as John Docker, in his book Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Culture 
History, says, "In the postmodern world, we might say, it is never easy to distinguish 
between the mainstream and the oppositional, the conforming and the unconventional, 
the majority and minority view- between centres and margins that are ever shifting 
and uncertain" (163). 
 The irony of the situation is that popular culture, so often described by 
academics as insignificant, and alien to the Great Tradition of Western culture, has 
arrived in the present intellectual environment as a fascinating and revolutionary 
object for academic thought. That is why, although the rethinking of popular culture 
may be embedded in analysis of jokes, romance novels, and the treatment of pets, it is 
not just about these subjects. It is also a commentary on broad intellectual changes 
initiated by scholars who, in struggling to see Western culture without being totally 
blinded by its assumptions, began to think about and reject the taboos that had kept 
thinkers away from everyday culture. They have bravely redefined the role and value 
of popular amusements and, in doing so transformed their thinking. 
 In summing up the above discussion, it can be said that it has drawn 
attention to some of the basic points in the debate about the relationship between 
postmodernism and popular culture. The main point is that postmodern culture no 
longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture. For some this is to 
celebrate as an end to an elitism constructed on arbitrary distinctions of culture; for 
others, it is a reason to despair as the final victory of commerce over culture. 
Ironically, the debate on the role of popular culture in the study of literature is one of 
the intellectual terrains from where the interdisciplinary area of study begins. 
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