Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Popular Culture: Asking the Right Questions

88 Popular Culture Asking t he Right Quest ions Jol i Jensen The questions we ask determine the answers we get. That simple truth is one of the many things I learned from Jim Carey during my years at the Institute of Communications Research (1977–84), when I took every course offered on popular culture. Those courses introduced me to C. Wright Mills, Dwight Macdonald, Lewis Mumford, Hannah Arendt, and Edward Shils. These writers, as well as other participants in the mass culture debates, puzzled over some version of the question that mattered most to me: how are the mass media shaping American life? For those social critics, and for Carey, questions about media effects pointed toward answers about the quality of mass mediated culture. Mills and Macdonald were worried about a new kind of social order, mass society, and a new kind of cultural category, mass culture. Nonetheless, because these critics assumed that culture comes in levels (high, middle, and low) or in categories (fine arts, folk arts, popular arts), their answer to the question of “media effects ” was usually to bemoan the ways mass culture corrupts mass taste. From questions of media effects came claims about a oncelively public becoming narcotized, distracted, and atomized. In the 1950s mass culture debate, questions about popular culture ended Popul a r Cul t ur e 89 up with answers about the populace, answers that challenged the very possibility of modern democratic life. A cultural studies approach to popular culture proposes that the mass culture debaters were worried about the right things—media, culture, and democracy —even if they painted themselves into an unproductive corner by assuming that public tastes were being ruined. In his essay “Mass Communication and Cultural Studies” Carey noted the recent tendency to dismiss the mass culture debate on popular culture as at best “an aberrational prelude” to subsequent critical and more serious theoretical work: “I resist that fashion because I have become more convinced that the protagonists in the mass culture debate were on the hunt of the real goods. If anything the pertinence of the arguments they set forth has grown over the years (of happiness and despair we still have no measure) for they collectively grasped, however much they differed, how modern societies were put together and the major trajectories of their development ” (Carey 1989, 38–39). Carey argued that the understanding of American life found in C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite (1959) and work on mass society by William Kornhauser (1959) had not been superseded by writers working the terrain of critical theory, postmodernism, or even “effects” research: “Indeed, as our understanding of culture has grown, our understanding of social structure has dimmed” (Carey 1989, 39). One major question that animated Carey was “How can we create and sustain modern American democratic life?” His many essays on journalism and technology addressed this concern more directly and thoroughly than did his few essays on popular culture. Overall, popular culture was not a focus of his work, even if he had a lively personal interest in versions of it. Nonetheless, when Carey asked questions about popular culture, it was always to urge us toward a better understanding of the relationships among particular cultural forms (news and entertainment), the social order, and democratic possibility. Carey helps us ask the right questions—and thus get better answers—about popular culture, so here I describe how and why the mass culture debaters were onto what Carey regarded as “the real goods” and why current considerations of popular culture too often ask and answer the wrong questions. Our methods for studying popular culture have done far too little to address how we experience popular culture and what those experiences imply for our common life, that is, to address questions that Carey (1989, 67)described as both simple and profound: “What is the significance of living in the world of meanings conveyed by popular art? What is the relationship between the meanings found in popular art and in forms such 90 Joli Jensen as science, religion, and ordinary speech? How, in modern times, is experience cast up, interpreted, and congealed into knowledge and understanding?” Terms and Trajectories The study of popular culture still struggles with terminological confusion. In itself this is interesting. Why is it so hard to figure out what to call the various kinds of cultural forms that modern life offers? Why do we still disagree...