Materiality and Popular Culture

The Popular Life of Things

Anna Malinowska, Karolina Lebek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317219125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai's famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.

Part I
Theorizing the Popular and the Material

1 Culture

The ‘Popular’ and the ‘Material’

John Storey

This chapter seeks to problematize the two key concepts of the book, the ‘popular’ and the ‘material.’ Both concepts have helped produce two general categories, popular culture and material culture. In the course of my analysis I will try to show some of the complexities and contradictions that can arise if we treat either of these categories as self-evident. I will argue that it is impossible to really understand the texts and practices of what we call ‘popular culture’ without a critical engagement with the different concepts of popular culture. In order to do this, I will outline five ways in which popular culture has been theorized and show how each theorization carries with it a different understanding of what we are doing when we engage in the study of popular culture. In the second part of the chapter I will approach the concept of the material in a slightly different way. Rather than present a critical discussion of the definitional difficulties we might encounter with competing concepts, I will tighten the critical focus to the materiality of popular culture. This will inevitably involve a discussion of what cultural studies means by culture and how this connects to its understanding of the material.

Popular Culture

An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that it is simply culture that is well liked by many people. We could examine sales of books, CDs, and DVDs. 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 programs or genres of cinema. The difficulty with the coming together of culture and popular in this way is that we are required to agree on a figure over which something becomes ‘popular culture’ and below which it is just ‘culture.’ Unless we can agree on such a figure, we might find that ‘well liked’ by many people might include so much as to be virtually useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture. 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. Another way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is what is left over after we have decided what is culture. Popular culture, in this definition, is a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that are unable to meet the required standards to qualify as culture. In other words, it is a definition of popular culture as inferior or failed culture. Those who deploy this definition generally insist that the division between popular and ‘real’ culture is absolutely clear. Moreover, not only is this division clear, it is transhistorical—fixed for all time. This latter point is usually insisted on, especially if the division is dependent on supposed essential textual qualities. But even a little knowledge of cultural history should make us skeptical of such claims. In the UK and U.S., for example, the work of William Shakespeare is now seen as the very epitome of ‘real’ culture, yet as late as the nineteenth century, before the plays became poetry on the page rather than scripts to be performed on the stage, they were very much a part of popular theatre (Levine 1988). Similarly, since its invention in the late sixteenth century, opera has been both popular and exclusive culture (Storey 2010). Many who challenge the supposed certainties of popular culture as a residual category often do so from a position heavily influenced by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 2009). Contrary to most definitions, this position argues that there is no ‘essential’ difference between culture and popular culture; rather, the difference has to be produced and reproduced—‘culture’ and ‘popular culture’ are social constructions and social categories. The content of these categories continually changes but it is the categories that matter, not their content. The difference between the two marks and maintains a social difference between two types of consumer: elite and nonelite. Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions of this kind are often used to support class distinctions. Taste is a deeply ideological category: it functions as a marker of ‘class’ (using the term in a double sense to mean both a social economic category and the suggestion of a particular level of quality). The function of the division between culture and popular culture (based on this argument) is to make, mark, and maintain social difference—what Bourdieu calls “social distinction.” As he explains, the division is, ultimately “predisposed […] to fulfil[l] a social function of legitimating social difference” (2009, 503). In other words, the division is always part of an attempt to mark differences between people. Therefore, if something becomes too popular it ceases to have what Bourdieu calls its “cultural capital”; lacking ‘cultural capital’ it loses its ability to produce ‘social distinction.’ When this happens, elite groups will reject it, as consuming it no longer marks them out as different (i.e., the perception of themselves as superior). Therefore, the general point of this perspective is that, ‘culture’ and ‘popular culture’ are empty categories; the content of these categories can and does change, but the distinction between them must be maintained, must be policed in the interests of social exclusivity. The first really sustained and detailed intellectual linking of popular and culture was developed in Europe in the late eighteenth century as a result of a growing interest in the culture of the so-called ‘folk’ (Storey 2003, 2016). In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth century, different groups of intellectuals, working under the different banners of nationalism, Romanticism, folklore, and, finally, folksong, ‘invented’ the first ‘intellectual’ concept of popular culture. For these groups, popular culture is culture that originates from ‘the people’ (i.e., the ‘folk’). This produces a definition of popular culture as something that spontaneously emerges from ‘below’—something communal and self-made. According to this definition, the term ‘popular culture’ should be used only to indicate an ‘authentic’ culture of the people. One problem with this approach is the question of who qualifies for inclusion in the category ‘the people.’ The intellectuals involved in the ‘discovery’ of the folk distinguished between two versions of the people—the ‘rural folk’ and the ‘urban masses’—and only the ‘folk’ were producers of popular culture. Another problem with this definition is that it evades any significant discussion of the commercial nature of many of the resources from which popular culture as folk culture is produced. For example, many of the folksongs collected were later discovered to be versions of once popular ‘commercial’ songs.

The ‘discovery of the folk’ not only produced a concept of popular culture as folk culture, but it also helped to establish the intellectual tradition of seeing the urban working class as masses consuming mass culture. This is because the ‘discovery’ of the rural folk was accompanied, and no doubt driven, by the ‘discovery’ of the urban masses. If the folk represented a disappearing ‘positive’ popular, the new urban masses represented an emerging ‘negative’ popular. As Cecil Sharp, one of the leading figures in the English ‘folksong’ movement, made clear in 1907,

[f]lood the streets […] with folk-tunes, and those, who now vulgarise themselves and others by singing coarse music-hall songs, will soon drop them in favour of the equally attractive but far better tunes of the folk. This will make the streets a pleasanter place for those who have sensitive ears, and will do incalculable good in civilising the masses. (quoted in Storey 2003, 12)

Sharp is clearly working with two versions of the people (rural folk and urban masses) and two versions of popular culture (folk and mass). This way of thinking, premised on the idea that the rural folk were being replaced by the urban masses, gradually produces a concept of popular culture as commercial culture, mass-produced for mass consumption, with an audience of nondiscriminating consumers. The culture itself is seen as formulaic and 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. But as John Fiske (1989) points out, “between 80 and 90 per cent of new products fail despite extensive advertising […] many films fail to recover even their promotional costs at the box office” (31). Simon Frith (1983, 147) also points out that about 80 percent of singles and albums lose money. Such statistics should clearly call into question the notion of consumption as an automatic and passive activity and, in so doing, undermine one of the key claims of this definition.

Finally, analysis informed by Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (1971, 2009) tends to see popular culture as a terrain of ideological struggle between dominant and subordinate classes. Popular culture in this usage is not the imposed culture of the mass culture theorists, nor is it an emerging from below, spontaneously oppositional culture of ‘the people.’ It is a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two: a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups—in other words, a terrain of the production and reproduction of hegemony. The texts and practices of popular culture move within what Gramsci calls a “compromise equilibrium” (2009, 76)—a balance that is mostly weighted in the interests of the powerful. For example, the music of the counterculture helped mobilize people against America’s war in Vietnam, but the profits from the music could be used to support the war. This contradiction is captured in Keith Richards’s discovery of the actions of his record label:

We found out, and it wasn’t for years that we did, that all the bread we made for Decca was going into making black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers to bomb fucking North Vietnam. They took the bread we made for them and put it into the radar section of their business. When we found that out, it blew our minds. That was it. Goddamn, you find out you’ve help kill God knows how many thousands of people without even knowing it. (quoted in Storey 2010, 28–29)

The music worked like ‘folk culture’ in that it articulated an oppositional, communal politics, but it also worked like ‘mass culture’ in that it made profits for a capitalist culture industry that could use the money to undermine the very politics promoted by the music.

So far, I have discussed popular culture as a concept, but what each of these different formulations has in common is that they all depend on materiality. In other words, however we define popular culture, we are defining a social practice that entangles meaning and materiality. Thinking this idea critically will be the focus of the next section.

Materiality

Popular culture always takes material form. Even a few random examples should make this point: mobile phones, clothes, greetings cards, toys, bicycles, CDs (discs and players), DVDs (discs and players), cars, game consoles, televisions, radios, sporting equipment, computers, computer tablets (including the iPad), magazines, books, cinemas, football grounds, nightclubs, and pubs. Youth subcultures are an obvious example of the visibility of materiality in popular culture. How we know a youth subculture is always through the materiality of what it consumes. There is always a drug of choice, a particular dress code, social spaces that are occupied, a particular music providing an aural landscape. It is the combination of these different forms of materiality that makes a youth subculture visible to the wider society. But this is not just the case with youth subcultures; most people’s lives are filled with material objects. We interact with material objects in many ways: we produce and consume them, we exchange them, we talk about them and admire them, and we use them to say things about ourselves. I type these words on my computer and you read them in the book you hold in your hands. These different forms of materiality have enabled our communication. If I know you, I might send you an e-mail from my laptop and you might respond with a text message from your mobile phone. We may then travel by bus, train, or taxi to a pub and have a few bottles of beer or share a bottle or two of wine. In these different ways our encounter is enabled and constrained by the materiality that surrounds us.

Sometimes the material capacities of an object are such that they transform what we do. The car is an obvious example. It has helped bring about a fundamental change in the popular culture of shopping—not only how we shop, but also who shops. It has reshaped both the social practice of shopping and the built materiality of the shopping areas of towns and cities. Without the widespread use of the car, it is very difficult to imagine the success of the out-of-town shopping center, which always has as much space for cars as there is for shops and shoppers. Another obvious example is the mobile phone, which has changed many aspects of everyday life. For example, it is now impossible to walk down the street of any town or city and not see people using mobile phones to talk, text, take photographs, or listen to music. Text messaging has also significantly changed the development of romantic relationships (see Storey 2014). The mobile phone’s camera has ‘democratized’ the self-portrait—making possible the so-called ‘selfie.’

Material objects surround us and we interact with them and use them to interact with others. They accompany us through the shifting narratives of our lives, becoming the material of our emotions and our thoughts. But they always do this from within a particular regime of realized signification (Williams 1980, Storey 2014). Popular culture is never just the materiality of things; it is always a simultaneous entanglement of meaning, materiality and social practice. This admixture can take various forms: a text message written on an iPhone, musical sounds produced by the human body, graffiti painted on a wall, a toy loved by a child. When Roland Barthes writes about other similar examples, he says that what they have in common is that they are signs (1995, 157). “When I walk through the streets—or through life—and encounter these objects, I apply to all of them, if need without realizing it, one and the same activity, which is that of a certain reading” (157). In other words, the material objects Barthes encounters are also signs to be read. They have materiality, but they also have meanings. Cultural studies shares with Barthes the insistence that “[a]ll objects which belong to a society have a meaning” (182); that is, they have been transformed by the fact that “humanity gives meaning to things” (179). In this way, then, the material objects that surround us do not issue their own meanings; they have to be made to mean, and how they are made to signify informs how we think about them, value them, and use them.

Although material objects are always more than signs, more than symbolic representations of social relations, what they are for us is inconceivable outside a particular culture that entangles meaning, materiality, and social practice. They are never things in themselves, but always objects that are articulated in relation to a particular regime of realized signification, enabling and constraining particular types of social practice. A mobile phone, a dress, a football, a wooden table, a CD, an ad in a magazine—what they all have in common is materiality and meaning produced by social practice. It is this combination that makes them examples of culture. Culture is not therefore something we ‘have’; rather, it is something we ‘do’—the social production and reproduction of meanings realized in materiality and social practice. Meanings are not in the materiality of things, but rather in how things are constructed as meaningful in social practices of representation. The world and its contents have to be made to signify; this is not a denial of the reality of material things but it is an insistence that such things are mute until made to signify in social practices of representation. This claim is sometimes misunderstood (often deliberately and mischievously) as a denial of the materiality of things. But to be absolutely clear, the material properties of an object are not culturally constructed; what is constructed is its inscription and location in culture. Materiality is mute and outside culture until it is made to signify by human action. However, saying materiality is mute is not the same as saying it does not exist, nor is it the same as saying that it does not enable and constrain how it might be made to signify. In other words, culture is a social practice that entangles meaning with materiality.

It is sometimes claimed that cultural studies reduces material objects to a simple matter of meanings. The opposite is in fact true: the material object is not reduced; it is expanded to include what it means in human culture. Cultural studies has always been interested in the use of things, and this interest has always involved a consideration of their materiality. For example, if I pass a business card to someone in China, the polite way to do it is with two hands. If I pass it with one hand, I may cause offence. This is clearly a matter of culture. However, the culture is not simply in the social act, in the materiality of the card, or in the meaning of the card and act—it is in the entanglement of meaning, materiality, and social practice. Moreover, the passing and/or receiving of a business card in China is not simply a symbolic performance in which meaning is represented; rather, it is a performative event in which meaning is enacted and realized.

Material objects have to be realized as meaningful by social practice. It is this p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Popular Life of Things
• PART I Theorizing the Popular and the Material
• PART II From Material Media to Digital Materiality
• PART III The Agency of Things and the Negotiation of Meaning
• PART IV Popular Narratives and Material Culture
• PART V Material Culture and the Creative Self
• Contributors
• Index