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Mass Culture & The Popular Classes (John Tappen)

 This week's readings examine notions of culture and attempt to understand culture as not stagnant but embedded in social relations and power. I have a few notes on Hall's piece "Deconstructing the Popular" and end with several questions about stakes and terminology related to the analysis of culture. 


In his essay "Deconstructing the Popular," Hall settles on a definition for understanding the "popular" as that which "looks, in any particular period, at those forms and activities which have their roots in the social and material conditions of particular classes; which have been embodied in popular traditions and practices." For Hall, this definition retains what is valuable in the descriptive definition of popular culture (forms/activities — what Williams terms "a whole way of life") while crucially emphasizing its essential quality: the relations which "the popular" is embedded — that "popular culture" is always in tension with the dominant culture. In short, popular culture can only be identified by its antagonistic relation to what it is not. Delineating what text or practice is a part of the "popular culture" according to intrinsic qualities or ahistorical criteria proves a worthless exercise, as "every fixed inventory will betray us." Rather, the relation between aesthetics and historical position is contingent on the "state of play" in cultural relations — determined by the class struggle in which oppositional forces contest for hegemony over the terrain of culture, i.e., precisely who and what practices constitute "the people." I think it is a credit to Hall that at this moment, the notion that cultural practices or texts have no one-to-one correspondence with class position has become a common-sense notion. 


Hall notes that the term "popular" indicates "this somewhat displaced relationship of culture to classes." In the Marxian vein in which Hall is working, though we might speak colloquially about the existence of a "working-class culture," such a culture does not exist as such; instead, just as a class "for itself" must be built through struggle, the same applies to its culture. All of this seems correct to me (rarely, Hall's work is not incredibly persuasive). However, the ephemerality of "the popular" and its very specific definition in this essay leads me to the following questions: 


  • Adorno/Horkheimer and Hall seem in agreement that subversive cultural forms are easily and frequently subsumed by culture industry/power-bloc (A&H goes so far as to say the culture industry preemptively incorporates these "transgressions" — fictive — into its totalizing style – or lack of style). What is the promise of undertaking this kind of analysis of popular culture, and what are the potential pitfalls of a speculative hegemony of the "people" understood at the level of popular culture? 


  • The term "popular culture" seems to have displaced "mass culture" favored by Horkheimer and Adorno. However, these two terms seem to be getting at two distinct phenomena. In my read of Hall, the first attends more to forms/practices in an antagonistic relation to a dominant culture. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the latter emphasizes the changes that art undergoes within a society fully integrated into capitalism, i.e., commodity production. Is there value in drawing an analytic distinction between "popular culture" and "mass culture" and not using them interchangeably? If the answer is yes, how do we reconcile/integrate/appreciate the affordances of each and recognize their interplay in our analysis? 


-John Tappen

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