Defining Popular Culture
Why 'popular culture' resists a single definition, and the competing senses — quantitative, residual, mass, folk, and hegemonic — that scholars attach to the term.
Definition
Defining popular culture is the analytical task of specifying what the term denotes; there is no neutral definition, since each candidate definition embeds assumptions about value, class, commerce, and the relationship between high and low culture.
Scope
This topic examines the contested meaning of 'popular culture' itself. It sets out the standard typology of definitions (popular as well-liked by many people; as the residue left over once high culture is removed; as mass-produced commercial culture; as authentic folk culture from the people; and as a site of hegemonic struggle), and the conceptual problems each one raises. It does not survey the broader theoretical traditions, which are treated at the area level.
Core questions
- Does 'popular' mean simply 'liked by many', and why is a purely quantitative definition inadequate?
- Is popular culture best defined negatively, as whatever is left over after high culture is set aside?
- How does defining popular culture as commercial 'mass culture' differ from defining it as authentic 'folk culture'?
- What does it mean to define the popular as a terrain of hegemonic struggle rather than a fixed body of texts?
Key concepts
- quantitative definition
- residual definition
- mass culture
- folk culture
- hegemony
- high/low distinction
- the popular
Key theories
- Six definitions framework
- Storey distinguishes popular culture as quantitatively well-liked, as inferior residual culture, as mass commercial culture, as folk culture originating with the people, as a Gramscian site of hegemonic struggle, and as a postmodern collapse of the high/low distinction.
- Deconstructing the popular
- Stuart Hall argues that 'the popular' is not a fixed set of objects but a relational and shifting category, constituted by the ongoing dialectic between the culture of dominant and subordinate groups.
- Culture as keyword
- Raymond Williams shows that 'culture' is one of the most complicated words in English, carrying overlapping senses of intellectual works, a process of development, and a whole way of life, which inflect every definition of popular culture.
History
Attempts to define popular culture sharpened in the 1970s and 1980s as cultural studies sought to establish it as a legitimate object of academic study. Williams's Keywords (1976) historicised the vocabulary; Hall (1981) and Bennett (1980) reframed the popular as a relational and political category rather than a stable canon; Storey's textbook subsequently codified the competing definitions for students.
Debates
- Stable object or shifting relation
- Whether popular culture is a definable body of texts and practices, or a constantly renegotiated relation between dominant and subordinate cultures that cannot be fixed.
Key figures
- John Storey
- Raymond Williams
- Stuart Hall
- Tony Bennett
Related topics
Seminal works
- williams1976
- hall1981
- storey2018
Frequently asked questions
- Why can't popular culture just mean 'whatever most people like'?
- A purely quantitative definition is unworkable: many works of high culture are also widely popular, the threshold for 'many' is arbitrary, and the definition tells us nothing about how or why the culture is made and used. It also smuggles in the assumption that popularity equals low quality.
- Is there a single correct definition?
- No. Most scholars accept that each definition is bound up with a particular theory and a particular set of value judgments, so the choice of definition is itself a theoretical and political decision rather than a neutral matter of fact.