Theories of Popular Culture
The competing intellectual traditions that define popular culture and explain how it works, from nineteenth-century cultural criticism to the Frankfurt School and British cultural studies.
Definition
Theories of popular culture are systematic frameworks that define popular culture as an object of study and explain its production, circulation, meaning, and social effects, typically by relating it to questions of class, ideology, commerce, and power.
Scope
This area surveys the major theoretical frameworks used to conceptualise popular culture: how the term has been defined, the value judgments attached to it, and the rival accounts of who produces popular culture, for whom, and with what effects. It covers the culture-and-civilisation tradition, the Frankfurt School's critique of the culture industry, and the culturalist and structuralist turns associated with the Birmingham Centre. It does not cover the substantive empirical fields (consumption, subcultures, celebrity) treated in sibling areas, focusing instead on the conceptual apparatus they share.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What is meant by 'popular culture', and how do its various definitions (quantitative, residual, mass-commercial, folk, hegemonic) differ?
- Is popular culture imposed on people from above as a commercial product, or actively made by them from below?
- How do high culture and popular culture get distinguished, and whose interests do those distinctions serve?
- What is the relationship between popular culture, ideology, and social power?
Key concepts
- high culture vs popular culture
- mass culture
- culture industry
- ideology
- hegemony
- culture as a whole way of life
- the popular
Key theories
- Culture and civilisation tradition
- From Matthew Arnold through F. R. Leavis, popular or 'mass' culture is treated as a debased threat to standards, against which a minority defends 'the best that has been thought and said'.
- Culture industry thesis
- Adorno and Horkheimer argue that under monopoly capitalism culture becomes a standardised, commodified industry that produces pseudo-individualised goods and pacifies consumers, reinforcing the status quo.
- Culturalism
- Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and E. P. Thompson reframe culture as 'a whole way of life' and as ordinary lived experience, recovering popular and working-class culture as meaningful and agentive.
- Two paradigms of cultural studies
- Stuart Hall maps the field as a tension between a culturalist paradigm centred on lived experience and a structuralist paradigm centred on ideology and signifying systems.
History
The study of popular culture begins as a defence of cultural standards in Victorian Britain, with Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) and later the Leavisite project of the 1930s. In parallel, the Frankfurt School developed a Marxist critique of the 'culture industry' in the 1940s. After the Second World War, British writers Hoggart, Williams and Thompson reconceived culture as ordinary and lived, founding the culturalist tradition that, institutionalised at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from 1964, would absorb structuralism and the work of Gramsci and Althusser to form modern cultural studies.
Debates
- Imposition versus agency
- Whether popular culture is a commercial mass culture imposed on a passive audience (the Frankfurt School view) or an active, meaningful practice produced by people themselves (the culturalist view).
- The high/popular distinction
- Whether the boundary between high and popular culture reflects genuine aesthetic value or merely encodes class distinction and the interests of cultural elites.
Key figures
- Matthew Arnold
- F. R. Leavis
- Theodor Adorno
- Max Horkheimer
- Raymond Williams
- Richard Hoggart
- Stuart Hall
Related topics
Seminal works
- arnold1869
- adornohorkheimer1944
- williams1958
- hall1980
- storey2018
Frequently asked questions
- Is 'popular culture' the same as 'mass culture'?
- Not quite. 'Mass culture' is a particular, usually pejorative definition that frames popular culture as commercially produced, homogenised and consumed passively. 'Popular culture' is the broader term, which other traditions define more neutrally or positively as culture made and used by ordinary people.
- Why is the Frankfurt School so critical of popular culture?
- Writing in exile from Nazi Germany and observing American commercial entertainment, Adorno and Horkheimer saw standardised cultural commodities as a tool that integrated people into capitalism and dulled their capacity for critical, autonomous thought.