Abstract
This article starts from the observation that popular culture resides in a contradictory space. On the one hand it seems to be thriving, in that the range of media objects that were previously studied under the rubric of popular culture has certainly expanded. Yet, cultural studies scholars rarely study these media objects <em>as</em> popular culture. Instead, concerns about immaterial labor, about the manipulation of voting behavior and public opinion, about filter bubbles and societal polarization, and about populist authoritarianism, determine the dominant frames with which the contemporary media environment is approached. This article aims to trace how this change has come to pass over the last 50 years. It argues that changes in the media environment are important, but also that cultural studies as an institutionalizing interdisciplinary project has changed. It identifies “the moment of popular culture” as a relatively short-lived but epoch-defining moment in cultural studies. This moment was subsequently displaced by a set of related yet different theoretical problematics that gradually moved the study of popular culture away from the popular. These displacements are: the hollowing out of the notion of the popular, as signaled early on by Meaghan Morris’ article “The Banality of Cultural Studies” in 1988; the institutionalization of cultural studies; the rise of the governmentality approach and a growing engagement with affect theory.
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the issue “From Sony’s Walkman to RuPaul’s Drag Race: A Landscape of Contemporary Popular Culture” edited by Tonny Krijnen (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands), Frederik Dhaenens (Ghent University, Belgium) and Niall Brennan (Fairfield University, USA)
Even though we approached the question from different angles, we found ourselves in agreement that it seemed popular cul‐ ture is no longer studied as popular culture
By this we meant that studies of the popular no longer invoke the notion of popular culture, even when they use the term
Summary
“People griping about nonwhite actors in Bridgerton but not fussing about the Duke wearing riding boots to a ball?! Riding boots!” (Fredericks, 2020). The merging of popular texts and politics that is characteristic of cultural studies work, is prefigured in Hall and Whannell’s collection The Popular Arts (1964) and Fiske and Hartley’s Reading Television (1978) Both books depend significantly on semiotics, where later work merged semiotics and Marxism with an ethno‐ graphic approach. Work on popular culture in cultural studies, in its enthusiasm to defend the relevance and importance of this new domain of critical work, developed a penchant to cast different kinds of everyday, often media‐related practices as transgressive and resisting dominant culture. These claims may not always have been entirely convinc‐ ing. Neither did his critics give John Fiske any credit for the wave of scholarly enthusiasm and inspiration that his work undeniably generated, or the complexity of his reasoning
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