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Corrine's Deconstruction of Hall's Deconstruction of Popular Culture

 I just want to first say that I *loved* the readings for this week. Encoding/decoding has been fundamental to my work as a media studies scholar, and "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'" has been... well once again fundamental to my work as a popular culture scholar :-) Super excited for our conversations tomorrow!

1. I'm interested in one of the final lines of Hall's "What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" Hall states that popular culture is not "the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic...it is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time" (477). This line really struck me, not because I see popular culture as some profound form of truth, but because I had not thought about the "mythic" nature of it before; I could not help but think of Baudrillard's simulacrum here. Is popular culture the terrain that has been constructed out of representation? (I hope the way I worded this made sense. I have the hardest time talking about most of Baudrillard's work in general, but simulacra/simulation has always been particularly difficult for me to wrap my mind around)! 

2. Another question I have is more general from across the readings. How can we negotiate the fact that, as Hall argues, popular culture does not turn us into cultural dopes or manipulate us, with the fact that sometimes, it does? For example, I'm thinking here of how Mars Inc. recently rebranded their M&Ms characters in the name of "inclusion," causing controversy, conveniently around the time it was hit with a large child slavery lawsuit: it is readily apparent by a quick Google search of either issue which was discussed in popular culture more. I really am so committed to the belief that audiences are active and are fundamentally not cultural dopes, but I think there are moments where it is apparent that some forms of obfuscation at best and deception and worst occur; I do wonder what these moments tell us about the terrain of popular culture at large.

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