J103-Reading Analysis-6/10: Notes on Deconstructing the Popular (Part 2); 17th Oct 2006

I have chosen to split this essay by Stuart Hall because of the wholly different arguments that appear. In the last reading analysis I discussed the ideas up to halfway down page 446.
In the second half Stuart Hall discusses his ideas about the meaning of the words ‘popular’ and ‘culture’. He starts off simply enough by setting out what he believes to be the common understanding for the word ‘popular’. He argues that until this point in the essay he has been using the term as “the direct opposite”. He explains that the common use alludes to the fact that those who subscribe to popular culture are “‘cultural dopes’”. Hall says that this view only serves to make “us [the sociologically initiated]…self-satisfied about our denunciations”. He entirely dismisses this idea as it does not provide “an adequate account of cultural relationships; and…is a deeply unsocialist perspective”. I tend to agree with Hall at this juncture and I think that his reasoning for this view is suitably persuasive enough to get a number of people to feel the same.
The two solutions to this problem that he says make up the “quite unacceptable, poles” of “The study of popular culture” are both recognisable to me and through his explanation, no longer seem to make sense. In essence he says that popular culture is either includes everything or nothing within culture.
As mentioned in the previous analysis, culture is made through “containment and resistance” Hall explains this as a means to describe the forming of popular culture as taking place on a “constant battlefield” that renders the idea of “cultural dopes” useless. He suggests that the idea of purely manipulative cultural forms do exist, that no one really fully accepts them, but that there are “recognisable experiences and attitudes, to which people are responding.” Upon suggesting this he picks holes in his own argument by saying that this too assumes that culture is made up of absolutes, i.e. that cultural forms are “either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic.” He gives the example of “The language of the Daily Mirror”. Explaining that it is neither “‘newspeak’ nor is it the language which its working class readers actually speak.” He says that such cultural forms must contain some recognisable element of the people they are trying to reach otherwise people wouldn’t buy it. The second definition of popular culture is one that is all-inclusive. The problem with this Hall suggests is that society selects useful parts of “history to be transmitted”. This brings the risk of stagnation: “freezing popular culture into some timeless descriptive mould”.
The third definition that Hall settles with (however limited it is) basically takes both these two definitions into account and forms an inevitably more complicated idea. This is my biggest problem with Stuart Hall’s essay: by the end he is still succumbing to simplicity. With every definition comes more complexity, which he doesn’t seem to be satisfied with. The reason why I am frustrated by his conclusions is that he still doesn’t go far enough. Popular Culture is a very complicated ‘thing’ that could never be described in a few paragraphs. The idea that it is made up of everything that people do and the way the classes that create those cultural forms relate to each other is satisfactory for an essay, but don’t really go any way to describing the infinitely complicated “battlefield” of which Hall writes.