Inventing Popular Culture From Folklore to Globalization (review)

Inventing Popular Culture is part of Blackwell Publishing's "Manifesto" series, which provides prominent scholars an opportunity to summarize the cutting edge of research in their area of study to a broad audience, as well as take a polemical stand on debates in their field. John Storey has a history of producing monographs that clearly outline major arguments in cultural studies; here he surveys a generation's worth of scholarship on one of the key topics of cultural studies, the history and political significance of popular culture. The book promises to provide readers with the cultural-studies interpretation of the history of middle-class interest in popular culture, and it delivers on this promise.

Specifically, Storey draws on the work of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Antonio Gramsci in order to provide a historical overview of the career of the concept of popular culture, in modernity and beyond. Historically, Storey argues, the story has been deployed in a manner that reinforces pre-existing prejudices of intellectual elites toward "the masses." Inventing Popular Culture details the construction of intellectual chauvinism toward non-intellectuals beginning in the Romantic era, escalating in modernity, and still prompting the condescension of elites in our own time.

Storey also details the creation of a trope governing scholarly discussion of popular culture for a century, where pop culture is valued provided its artifacts or popular audiences are on the verge of disappearing. Repeatedly, Storey explains, the discourse of professional intellectuals constructs a feckless mass as it delineates the ways of the folk, a mass that can't be fully trusted with its own cultural heritage.

At this point, in steps the intellectual, in the form of the middle-class collector, like folksong archivist Cecil Sharp, whose procedures Storey details in chapter one. Sharp the archivist preserves the relics of the people, and thereby earns the right to criticize the taste of his working-class contemporaries, and their predilection for contemporary popular song of the music hall over "Tam Lin."

Inventing Popular Culture moves from a history of late Victorian and modernist proclamations on pop culture into a programmatic discussion of how, since the 1950s, cultural studies has endeavored to reorganize the field of popular culture as an object of study. As Storey explains, the major contribution of cultural studies to the academic study of popular culture was two-fold. Cultural-studies work presumed that cultural difference isn't essential or intrinsic to cultural production, but a construct, inevitably linked to the broader project of reproducing class hierarchy. The other plank of the cultural-studies platform insists that the proper analysis of popular culture demands a balanced account that weighs both the redemptive and repressive character of pop-culture production. The political project of cultural studies made it difficult for cultural-studies scholars to accept the account of the duped consumer of culture-industry product presented by modernist critics like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as a working hypothesis. In fact, insofar as academics know about cultural studies, they probably are familiar with the work scholars such as Dick Hebdige, Janice Radway, and scores of others, produced to confer pop-culture consumers with dignity and political legitimacy.

Storey's final position on popular culture rephrases the conclusions of Antonio Gramsci and his master interpreter Stuart Hall on the need to resist reading popular culture as either capitalist conspiracy or as a practice totally remade by the creative agency of the people. As Storey puts it, "Gramscian cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and attention to the details of the production, distribution, and consumption of the commodities from which people may or may not make culture" (53). Storey concurs, and his take on the politics of pop culture is reasonable, and feels, in its dialectical breadth, like the last word on the topic.

But why should modernist scholars care about cultural studies and the relation to popular culture? Modernist studies has been interested in the notion of the high/low divide in...