Feb 05, Nate Huston rated it liked it. A classic to be sure. If you want to know about the development and operation of political parties in the US, start here. You don't have to agree with Aldrich's theory, but it's well thought out, clearly articulated, and provides a great foundation for further thought. I could have done without the historical interpretation of the initial formation of American parties - the assertions simply aren't that convincing.
Furthermore, I don't think it's necessary for the meat of his work. While the ori A classic to be sure. While the origin story as description is enlightening, the attempt to test his theory using it falls flat. All in all, an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. Dec 23, Wes rated it it was ok Shelves: political-science. Good and concise history of the party system in the United States, and a rational model for its development.
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Download Free PDF. John storey cultural theory and popular culturebookzz-org. Patrice parkes. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Under a range of well-known imprints, including Longman, we craft high quality print and electronic publications which help readers to understand and apply their content, whether studying or at work.
To find out more about the complete range of our publishing, please visit us on the World Wide Web at: www. I have also added new material to most of the chapters the book has grown from a first edition of around 65, words to a fifth edition that is in excess of , words.
I have also added more diagrams and illustrations. The fifth edition is best read in conjunction with its companion volume, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, fourth edition Pearson, Preface to fourth edition In writing the fourth edition I have revised, rewritten and edited throughout.
I have also added new material to most of the chapters the book has grown from a first edi- tion of around 65, words to a fourth edition that is well in excess of , words.
The most obvious addition is the new chapter on psychoanalysis and the sections on post-Marxism Chapter 4 and the global postmodern Chapter 8.
Finally, I have changed the running order of the chapters. The chapters are now chronological in terms of where each begins. However, where each chapter ends may sometimes disrupt chronology.
For example, Marxism begins before post-structuralism, but where the discussion of Marxism ends is more contemporary than where the discussion of post-structuralism ends. There seems to be no obvious solution to this problem. Preface to third edition In writing the third edition I have sought to improve and to expand the material in the first two editions of this book.
To achieve this I have revised and I have rewritten much more extensively than in the second edition. I have also added new material to most of the chapters. Perhaps the most visible change is the addition of illus- trations, and the inclusion of a list of websites useful to the student of cultural theory and popular culture. Preface to second edition In writing the second edition I have sought to improve and to expand the material in the first book.
To achieve this I have revised and I have rewritten. More specifically, I have added new sections on popular culture and the carnivalesque, postmodernism and the pluralism of value. I have also extended five sections, neo-Gramscian cultural studies, popular film, cine-psychoanalysis and cultural studies, feminism as reading, postmodernism in the s, the cultural field.
Preface to first edition As the title of this book indicates, my subject is the relationship between cultural theory and popular culture.
But as the title also indicates, my study is intended as an introduction to the subject. This has entailed the adoption of a particular approach. I have not tried to write a history of the encounter between cultural theory and popular culture. Instead, I have chosen to focus on the theoretical and methodological impli- cations and ramifications of specific moments in the history of the study of popular culture. To avoid misunderstanding and misrepresentation, I have allowed critics and theorists, when and where appropriate, to speak in their own words.
In doing this, I am in agreement with the view expressed by the American liter- ary historian Walter E. Try to define them and you lose their essence, their special colour and tone.
They have to be apprehended in their concrete and living formulation. However, this book is not intended as a substitute for reading first-hand the theorists and critics discussed here.
And, although each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, these are intended to supplement the read- ing of the primary texts discussed in the individual chapters details of which are located in the Notes at the end of the book. Above all, the intention of this book is to provide an introduction to the academic study of popular culture. As I have already indicated, I am under no illusion that this is a fully adequate account, or the only possible way to map the conceptual landscape that is the subject of this study.
Finally, I hope I have written a book that can offer something to both those familiar with the subject and those to whom — as an academic subject at least — it is all very new. I would also like to thank colleagues in the University of Sunderland Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, and friends at other institutions, for ideas and encouragement.
I would also like to thank Andrew Taylor of Pearson Education for giving me the opportunity to write a fifth edition. In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material, and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.
We are grateful to all the reviewers who generously gave their comments on this new edition. Before we consider in detail the different ways in which popular culture has been defined and analysed, I want to outline some of the general features of the debate that the study of popular culture has generated. It is not my intention to pre-empt the specific findings and arguments that will be presented in the following chapters.
Here I simply wish to map out the general conceptual landscape of popular culture. This is, in many ways, a daunting task. As we shall see in the chapters which follow, popular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other conceptual categories: folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working-class cul- ture, etc.
A full definition must always take this into account. Therefore, to study popular culture we must first confront the difficulty posed by the term itself. The main argu- ment that I suspect readers will take from this book is that popular culture is in effect an empty conceptual category, one that can be filled in a wide variety of often conflict- ing ways, depending on the context of use. Williams suggests three broad definitions.
This would be a perfectly understandable formulation. Using this definition, if we speak of the cul- tural development of Western Europe, we would have in mind not just intellectual and aesthetic factors, but the development of, for example, literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals. In other words, culture here means the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning.
Using this definition, we would probably think of examples such as poetry, the novel, ballet, opera, and fine art. The second meaning — culture as a particular way of life — would allow us to speak of such practices as the seaside holiday, the celebration of Christmas, and youth subcultures, as examples of culture.
These are usually referred to as lived cultures or practices. The third meaning — culture as signifying practices — would allow us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and comics, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as texts.
Ideology Before we turn to the different definitions of popular culture, there is another term we have to think about: ideology. Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular cul- ture. Like culture, ideology has many competing meanings. An understanding of this concept is often complicated by the fact that in much cultural analysis the concept is used interchangeably with culture itself, and especially popular culture. The fact that ideology has been used to refer to the same conceptual terrain as culture and popular culture makes it an important term in any understanding of the nature of popular cul- ture.
What follows is a brief discussion of just five of the many ways of understanding ideology. We will consider only those meanings that have a bearing on the study of popular culture.
First, ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people. Here we would be referring to the collection of polit- ical, economic and social ideas that inform the aspirations and activities of the Party. Ideology 3 A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment.
Ideology is used here to indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of real- ity. Such distortions, it is argued, work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless. Using this definition, we might speak of capitalist ideology. What would be intimated by this usage would be the way in which ideology conceals the reality of domination from those in power: the dominant class do not see themselves as exploiters or oppres- sors.
And, perhaps more importantly, the way in which ideology conceals the reality of subordination from those who are powerless: the subordinate classes do not see them- selves as oppressed or exploited.
This definition derives from certain assumptions about the circumstances of the production of texts and practices. This is one of the fundamental assumptions of classical Marxism. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstruc- ture and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general 3. What Marx is suggesting is that the way a society organizes the means of its eco- nomic production will have a determining effect on the type of culture that society pro- duces or makes possible. In Chapter 4, we will consider the modifications made by Marx and Frederick Engels themselves to this formulation, and the way in which subsequent Marxists have further modified what has come to be regarded by many cultural critics as a rather mechanistic account of what we might call the social relations of culture and popular culture.
Abandon this claim, it is argued, and Marxism ceases to be Marxism Bennett, a: We can also use ideology in this general sense to refer to power relations outside those of class.
In Chapter 8 we will examine the ideology of racism. This usage is intended to draw attention to the way in which texts television fiction, pop songs, novels, feature films, etc. This definition depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather than consensual, structured around inequality, exploitation and oppression. Texts are said to take sides, consciously or unconsciously, in this conflict. There is no play and no theatrical performance which does not in some way affect the dispositions and conceptions of the audience.
Another way of saying this would be simply to argue that all texts are ultimately political. That is, they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world is or should be. A fourth definition of ideology is one associated with the early work of the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. What was being suggested is that the socialism of the Labour Party is synonymous with social, economic and political imprisonment.
Moreover, it hoped to locate socialism in a binary relationship in which it connoted unfreedom, whilst conservatism connoted freedom. For Barthes, this would be a classic example of the operations of ideology, the attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular; an attempt to pass off that which is cultural i. This is made clear in such formulations as a female pop singer, a black jour- nalist, a working-class writer, a gay comedian. A fifth definition is one that was very influential in the s and early s.
It is the definition of ideology developed by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. We shall discuss Althusser in more detail in Chapter 4. Here I will simply outline some key points about one of his definitions of ideology.
Principally, what Althusser has in mind is the way in which certain rituals and customs have the effect of binding us to the social order: a social order that is marked by enormous inequalities of wealth, status and power. Using this definition, we could describe the seaside holiday or the celebra- tion of Christmas as examples of ideological practices. This would point to the way in which they offer pleasure and release from the usual demands of the social order, but that, ultimately, they return us to our places in the social order, refreshed and ready to tolerate our exploitation and oppression until the next official break comes along.
In this sense, ideology works to reproduce the social conditions and social relations neces- sary for the economic conditions and economic relations of capitalism to continue. So far we have briefly examined different ways of defining culture and ideology. What should be clear by now is that culture and ideology do cover much the same con- ceptual landscape.
The main difference between them is that ideology brings a polit- ical dimension to the shared terrain. Popular culture There are various ways to define popular culture. This book is of course in part about that very process, about the different ways in which various critical approaches have attempted to fix the meaning of popular culture. Therefore, all I intend to do for the remainder of this chapter is to sketch out six definitions of popular culture that in their different, general ways, inform the study of popular culture.
An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people.
And, undoubtedly, such a quantitative index would meet the approval of many people. We could also examine attendance records at concerts, sporting events, and festivals. We could also scrutinize market research figures on audience preferences for different television programmes.
Such counting would undoubtedly tell us a great deal. The difficulty might prove to be that, paradoxically, it tells us too much. Despite this problem, what is clear is that any definition of popular culture must include a quantitative dimension. The popular of popular culture would seem to demand it. What is also clear, however, is that on its own, a quantitative index is not enough to provide an adequate definition of popular culture.
A second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture that is left over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture, in this definition, is a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture. In other words, it is a definition of popu- lar culture as inferior culture.
For example, we might want to insist on formal complexity. In other words, to be real culture, it has to be difficult. Being difficult thus ensures its exclusive status as high culture. Its very difficulty liter- ally excludes, an exclusion that guarantees the exclusivity of its audience.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions of this kind are often used to support class distinctions. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 9 and This definition of popular culture is often supported by claims that popular cul- ture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result of an individual act of creation. The latter, therefore, deserves only a moral and aesthetic response; the former requires only a fleeting sociological inspection to unlock what little it has to offer.
Whatever the method deployed, those who wish to make the case for the division between high and popular culture generally insist that the division between the two is absolutely clear. Moreover, not only is this division clear, it is trans- historical — fixed for all time. This latter point is usually insisted on, especially if the division is dependent on supposed essential textual qualities. There are many problems with this certainty. For example, William Shakespeare is now seen as the epitome of high culture, yet as late as the nineteenth century his work was very much a part of popular theatre.
Similarly, film noir can be seen to have crossed the border supposedly separating popu- lar and high culture: in other words, what started as popular cinema is now the pre- serve of academics and film clubs. Even the most rigorous defenders of high culture would not want to exclude Pavarotti or Puccini from its select enclave. Such commercial success on any quantitative ana- lysis would make the composer, the performer and the aria, popular culture. Other stu- dents laughed and mocked.
About , people were expected, but because of heavy rain, the number who actually attended was around , Two things about the event are of interest to a student of popular culture. The first is the enormous popularity of the event. His obvious popularity would appear to call into question any clear division between high and popular culture.
It is therefore interesting to note the way in which the event was reported in the media. All the British tabloids carried news of the event on their front pages. The Daily Mirror, for instance, had five pages devoted to the concert. What the tabloid coverage reveals is a clear attempt to define the event for popular culture. When the event was reported on televi- sion news programmes the following lunchtime, the tabloid coverage was included as part of the general meaning of the event.
The old certainties of the cultural landscape suddenly seemed in doubt. Although such comments invoked the spectre of high-culture exclusivity, they seemed strangely at a loss to offer any purchase on the event.
The apparently obvious cultural division between high and popular culture no longer seemed so obvious. An example of this usage would be: it was a popular performance.
Yet, on the other hand, something is said to be bad for the very same reason. Consider the binary oppositions in Table 1. Table 1. This is principally the work of the education sys- tem and its promotion of a selective tradition see Chapter 3. This draws heavily on the previous definition.
The mass culture perspective will be discussed in some detail in Chapter 2; therefore all I want to do here is to suggest the basic terms of this definition. The first point that those who refer to popular culture as mass culture want to establish is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass- produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating con- sumers.
The culture itself is formulaic, manipulative to the political right or left, depending on who is doing the analysis. It is a culture that is consumed with brain- numbed and brain-numbing passivity. Simon Frith also points out that about 80 per cent of singles and albums lose money.
Such stat- istics should clearly call into question the notion of consumption as an automatic and passive activity see Chapters 7 and This usually takes one of two forms: a lost organic community or a lost folk culture. The Frankfurt School, as we shall see in Chapter 4, locate the lost golden age, not in the past, but in the future. The claim that popular culture is American culture has a long history within the theoretical mapping of popular culture.
There are two things we can say with some confidence about the United States and popular culture. Second, although the availability of American culture worldwide is undoubted, how what is available is consumed is at the very least contradictory see Chapter 9. What is true is that in the s one of the key periods of Americanization , for many young people in Britain, American culture represented a force of liberation against the grey certain- ties of British everyday life.
What is also clear is that the fear of Americanization is closely related to a distrust regardless of national origin of emerging forms of popu- lar culture. As with the mass culture perspective generally, there are political left and political right versions of the argument. There is what we might call a benign version of the mass culture perspective. The texts and practices of popular culture are seen as forms of public fantasy.
Popular cul- ture is understood as a collective dream world. In this sense, cultural practices such as Christmas and the seaside holiday, it could be argued, function in much the same way as dreams: they articulate, in a disguised form, collective but repressed wishes and desires.
Structuralism, although not usually placed within the mass culture perspective, and certainly not sharing its moralistic approach, nevertheless sees popular culture as a sort of ideological machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the prevailing struc- tures of power.
There is little space for reader activity or textual contradiction. Chapter 6 will consider these issues in some detail. This is popular culture as folk culture: a culture of the people for the people. No matter how much we might insist on this definition, the fact remains that people do not spontaneously produce culture from raw materials of their own making. Whatever popular culture is, what is certain is that its raw materials are those which are commercially provided. Critical analysis of pop and rock music is particularly replete with this kind of analysis of popular culture.
At a con- ference I once attended, a contribution from the floor suggested that Levi jeans would never be able to use a song from The Jam to sell its products. The fact that they had already used a song by The Clash would not shake this conviction. As this was not going to happen, Levi jeans would never use a song by The Jam to sell its products.
But this had already happened to The Clash, a band with equally sound political credentials. This circular exchange stalled to a stop. The cultural studies use of the concept of hegemony would have, at the very least, fuelled further discussion see Chapter 4.
A fifth definition of popular culture, then, is one that draws on the political ana- lysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly on his development of the concept of hegemony. This will be dis- cussed in some detail in Chapter 4. The process is historical labelled popular culture one moment, and another kind of culture the next , but it is also synchronic moving between resistance and incorporation at any given historical moment. For instance, the seaside holiday began as an aristocratic event and within a hundred years it had become an example of popular culture.
Film noir started as despised popular cinema and within thirty years had become art cinema. In general terms, those looking at popular culture from the perspective of hegemony theory tend to see it as a terrain of ideological struggle between dominant and subordinate classes, dominant and subordinate cultures. As Bennett explains, The field of popular culture is structured by the attempt of the ruling class to win hegemony and by forms of opposition to this endeavour.
Popular culture 11 The compromise equilibrium of hegemony can also be employed to analyse differ- ent types of conflict within and across popular culture. The Conservative Party political broadcast, discussed earlier, reveals this process in action.
What was being attempted was the disarticulation of socialism as a political movement concerned with economic, social and political emancipation, in favour of its articulation as a political movement concerned to impose restraints on individual freedom. Also, as we shall see in Chapter 7, feminism has always recognized the importance of cultural struggle within the contested landscape of popular culture.
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