Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer

Chapter 4: Popular Appropriation: The Readers and Their Books

4. Popular Appropriations: The Readers and Their Books Popular culture is a category of the learned. Why should I begin with such an abrupt proposition? Simply to remind us that the debates surrounding even the definition of popular culture engage a concept that attempts to define, characterize and name practices never designated by their actors as part of "popular culture."An intellectual category aiming to encompass and describe artifacts and behaviors situated outside learned culture, the concept of popular culture, in its multiple and contradictory meanings, has expressed the relationships maintained by western intellectuals (among them "scholars") with those whose cultural otherness is even more difficult to understand than that encountered in "exotic" lands. Risking extreme simplification,one can reduce the innumerable definitions of popular culture to two great descriptive and interpretive models. The first, aiming to abolishallforms of cultural ethnocentrism, conceivesof popular culture as a coherent and autonomous symbolic system that functions according to alogic absolutely foreign to those of literate culture. The second, concerned with emphasizingthe relations of domination that organize the social world, perceives popular culture in its dependencies and deficiencies with respect to the dominant culture. On one side, then, popular culture constitutes a world apart, closed on itself, independent. On the other, popular culture is completely defined by its distance from a cultural legitimacy of which it is deprived. With strategies of research, styles of description, and theoretical propositions completely opposed, these two models have penetrated all the disciplines engaged in researchinto popular culture: history, anthropology, and sociology. Jean-Claude Passeron has recently shown the methodological dangersof both of these models: Just as the sociological blindness of cultural relativism applied to popular cultures encouragespapulisme, according to which popular practices arecarried out completely in the monadic happiness of symbolic autosufficiency, so the 84 Chapter 4 theory of cultural legitimacy risks . . . leading to Ugitimisme. which, in the extreme form of misembilisme, does nothing more than discount in sorrow differences as deficiencies, otherness as a lesser form of existence.1 The opposition holds true term for term: the celebration of a majestic popular culture opposes adescription "by default"; the recognition of equal dignity in all the symbolic universes opposes a reminder of the implacable hierarchies of the social world. One might follow Passeron when he remarks that as these definitions of popular culture arelogically and methodologically contradictory, they do not serve as adequate principles of classification for scholarship: "the oscillation between these two ways of describingpopular culture can be found in the same work, in the same author" and their boundary "runs sinuously in all descriptions of popular culture that combine these alternative interpretive strategies."2 As a historian, I might add that the contrast between these two perspectives —that which accents the symbolic autonomy of popular culture and that which insists on its dependence with respect to the dominant culture —is the foundation of all chronological models that oppose a golden age of popular culture, original and independent, to a time of censure and constraints that disqualified and dismantled it. We must be careful not to accept without reservation the now-consecrated time scheme that considers the first half of the seventeenth century in Western Europe to have been aperiod of major rupture that pitted a golden age of vibrant, free, and profuse popular culture against an age of church and state discipline that repressed and subjugated that culture. According to this view, after 1600 or 1650 the combined efforts of the repressive churches of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations to "acculturate" the population, and those of the absolutist states to centralize and unify the nation, are seen as stifling or inhibiting the inventive exuberance of an ancient culture. By imposing new discipline, by inculcating a new submissiveness , by teaching new models of comportment, church and state allegedly destroyed the roots and ancient equilibrium of atraditional wayof viewing and experiencing the world. "Popular culture, as much rural as urban, experienced an almost complete eclipse in the era of the Sun King. Its internal coherence disappeared definitively. It could no longer be a system of survival, a philosophy of existence," writes Robert Muchembled in his description of the "repression of popular culture" in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.3 In a more subtle way, Peter Burke describes the two movements that Popular Appropriation: The Readers and Their Books 85 have altered traditional popular culture: on one hand, a systematic attempt by some of the...