The Joke(r) Is on Us: The End of Popular Culture Studies

BARRY W. SARCHETT The Joke(r) Is on Us: The End of Popular Culture Studies The inflationary theory market of the eighties gave rise to a proliferation of "theory guides" designed for the undergraduate classroom and teacher, so it was perhaps inevitable that the relatively successful displacement of Literary Studies by Cultural Studies in the early nineties would create a market for introductory guides such as the three that lie on my desk as I write: Graeme Turner's British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Bob Ashley's The Study of Popular Fiction: A Source Book, and John Storey's An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture? Each of these primers quite usefully addresses what is perhaps the crucial issue in contemporary literary study, and, fot the last several years under the aegis of the many "Posts," we've all heard the news: traditional cultural hierarchies have collapsed. What Jan Cohn has called the "weary" distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, elite and popular (25), authentic art and mass culture can no longer be self-evidently maintained undet the pressure of both cultural mutations (postindustrial, postmodern, postcolonial, postCulture culture ) and theoretical interventions (poststructuralism, postmarxism). As Andreas Huyssen wished, critics have quickly caught on to the fact that we ate living after the modernist discourse of the "Great Divide" between high art and mass culture has collapsed (viii-ix).2 What interests me most about these guides, however, is a certain self-defeating contradiction between strategy and theory. Storey claims, for example, that the intention of his book "is to provide an introduction to the academic study ofpopular culture" (xi). However, ifthe category of elite art is menaced culturally and theoretically, then, given Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 3, Autumn 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 72Barry W. Sardtett the diacritical relationship of binaries, the category of the popular is also necessarily menaced. The end ofelite att ("Litetature," in this case) as an ahistotical, essentialized category entails the end ofthe essentially "popular" as well. Ashley in particulat is acutely aware of this problem: noting that "the popular-serious distinction ... is a theoretical minefield " (2), he must therefore allow that "the very notion of a method fot the study of popular fiction may be questioned" and that "the ideal to work towards is one in which analysis is directed at 'fiction' with no need ofqualitative adjective" (5-6). The,question then remains—what could the project of theorizing and institutionalizing "the study of popular culture" possibly mean, if the category of the populai, like the category of Literature, is in fact so difficult to locate?3 Storey declares that "popular culture is in effect an empty conceptual categoty, one which can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways depending on the context ofuse" ( 1 ). Like John Frow, then, I choose to reject the category of the populat, which "is equally ... a refusal of the category of 'high' culture" (81 ).4 This further entails the proposition that, in the context of the academic study of cultural texts, the use of the tetm "popular culture studies" to denote any discrete disciplinary or sub-disciplinary arena can no longer be convincingly sustained in eithet institutional or theoretical terms. Most analyses of postmodernity claim that such global distinctions as high and low cultutes, when "conceived as unified blocs" (Ross 28), are now hopelessly blurred. We are thus left with a dynamic cultural field of multiple, contingent, and fluid differences: microcultutes which are themselves sites of multiple "subject positions"—themselves fragmented , multiple—which may simultaneously inhabit other more or less different microcultures with more or less different agendas/inter- · ests.5 To make matters worse—or better, as I would have it—this morass of multiple relational "positionalities" seems to imply, as Jim Collins has forcefully argued in Uncommon Cultures, that an "official" or "dominant " culture is "increasingly difficult to identify in contemporary societies " (2). Steven Connor puts this another way: much "theoty of contemporary popular culture ... is locked into an oppositional logic of The End of Popuhr Culture Studies73 dominant and marginal which does not allow for the blending of the two categories. For, after all, what is...