- This extract focuses upon actually defining what popular cultre means by looking at the many definitions for both words.
- The reading also looks at periodisation and movements, throughout time such as the emergence of the popular press.
Main Points
- Reformation and transformation changes people: therefore it changes culture
- Revolutions and Capitalism along with the emergence of the popular press; influenced popular culture
- There are many definitions of the terms 'popular' and 'culture'. All are correct in their own way, but it is difficult to pinpoint one definition which sums up 'Popular Culture'.
- There are many different categories to 'culture'; it's always moving and always changing
- Culture = struggle: mainly class struggle, resulting in resistance (mabye even anarchy?)
- 'Tradition' is difficult to have in 'culture' as everything is constantly changing and the meanings of signs and words always change.
Methodology
- Not really mentioned - but i might suggest a form of historiograpghy as Hall discusses different eras and cultre then.
Conclusions
- 'Popular Culture' matters as it is where the struggle for and against the powerful takes place. 'It is the arena of consent and resistance'.
- 'Popular Culture' constitutes socialism and secures hegemony.
- Without 'Popular Culture' the mass would be living in a state of 'false consciousness' or does popular culture really create this?
My Opinion
- In some senses i agree with Hall, especially with the fact that 'Popular Culture' is very hard to define. However, i still don't understand whether 'Popular Culture' is a good or a bad thing: people enjoy 'Popular Culture' but is it just really being used to oppress the masses further.
- It is true that we think of things as either being a cultural object or being uncultural; there's a definate blank space inbetween which many things fit into; like Hall's example of the 'Daily Mirror' - it's not working class; but it's not fleet street level, so where does it fit in?
- Personally, i feel that 'popular Culture' and 'Culture' in general is a very complicated chasm, which once opened and the further and further you dig the more complicated it gets!
Useful Quotes
- 'The study of 'Popular Culture' keeps shifting between these two, quite unacceptable, poles: pure 'autonomy' or total 'encapsulation'.'
- 'Actually it recognises that almost all cultural forms will be contradictory in this sense, composed of antagnostic and unstable elements. The meaning of a cultural form and it's place or position in the cultural field is not inscribed inside it's form. Nor is its position fixed once and forever'.
- 'There is a continuous and necessary uneven and unequal struggle, by the dominant culture, constantly to disorganise and reorganise popular culture; to enclose and confine its definitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms. There are points of resistance; there are also moments of supersession. This is the dialectic of cultural struggle.'
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