Popular culture, then, is not mass culture, though it is typically made
from it. The relationship between the
commercial interests of mass culture and popular interests is always
antagonistic and unstable. The people
constantly scan the repertoire produced by the cultural industries to find
resources that they can use for their own cultural purposes. The industry similarly constantly scans the
tastes and interests of the people to discover ones that it can commodify and
turn to its own profit. The industry
always tries to incorporate the culture of the people and the people always try
to excorporate the products of the industry—the to and fro between
incorporation and excorporation, or between appropriation and expropriation, is
a constant feature of the relations between mass and popular culture, and the
boundary between the two is always on the move, never fixed in analytical
certainty. While popular culture is
never mass culture, it is always closely bound up with it.
John Fiske,
“Popular Culture,” CTLS 331
What has
confused--and sometimes infuriated--many academics about cultural studies is
its refusal to declare a prevailing methodology and a designated object of
study, two features required of traditional academic disciplines.
Cultural studies strives to analyze the hegemonic practices by which social
groups are bound (institutionally, intellectually, emotionally and
economically) to dominant social forms. And it examines how forces of
resistance creatively intervene in those practices. Since hegemony works
through and on every social site and practice, cultural studies has deemed
anything a potential object of study and has adapted any disciplinary
methodology that might prove useful, ranging from surveys, case studies, and
personal observation to textual explication, institutional analysis, and
political critique. Partly in response to intellectual elitism, partly by
happenstance, and partly as a form of leftist populism, much cultural studies
work has focused on popular, as contrasted to high, culture. But any
activity through which people negotiate their relationship to society and to
the disparate forces and institutions in their lives is fair game for its
attention....If a literary critic believes that any interpretation of a literary
text must consider both the social forces that contribute to the text's
production and the hegemonic work that the text does, then he or she
has taken up the concerns and questions that characterize cultural studies.
(NA1896-97)
