Thoughts on the Study of Popular Culture?

John Storey's text, Inventing Popular Culture, is an introduction to the study of popular culture. What are some of the fundamental methodologies, vocabularies, and goals of the study of popular culture? In what ways might we use this language to help us understand Disney culture?

During: Quotes and Key Terms

Important quotes from chapter 1, "The Discipline":

Culture is not a thing or even a system: it's a set of transactions, processes, mutations, practices, technologies, institutions, out of which things and events (such as movies, poems or world wrestling bouts) are produced, to be experienced, lived out and given meaning and value to in different ways within the unsystematic network of differences and mutations from which they emerged to start with.... For cultural studies today, cultural objects are simultaneously 'texts' (that is, they have meaning) and events and experiences, produced out of, and thrown back into, a social force field constituted unevenly by power flows, status hierarchies and opportunities for many kinds of transportation, identification and pleasure. they are also social institutions, some based in the state, others in the market or in so-called civil society. (6)

The first characteristic feature of cultural studies is that it is...an engaged study of culture.... The second ideal feature of cultural studies...is that it ought to be self-reflective. (9-10)

Entertainment is said to be the USA's biggest export now. (14)

In enterprise culture, cultural industries are routinely regarded as economic contributors, as employers, as attractors of tourism and business.... Culture is regarded as a means through which governments can manage different communal values and traditions in society.... (16-17)

Key terms to define and keep in mind:

• Entrepreneurialism and enterprise culture
• Cultural materialism (Williams)
• Hegemony (Gramsci)
• Ideology (Althusser)
• Representation
• Everyday life (de Certeau)
• Base/superstructure theory of culture (Marxism)
• Postmarxism
• The subject; subject-positions; identity

During, "Media and the Public Sphere"

During, Simon. “Media and the Public Sphere.” Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005. 109-142.

How does During understand "technoculture"? How does technoculture suggest "the emergence of a new domain between the public and the private" (141)? How do you think the Internet functions as a media/medium through which we can study popular culture? In what ways is the Internet a "globalising technology" (88)? The Internet is a medium notorious for its economic dimensions. How do you see the Internet's economic dimensions impacting Disney as a consumable commodity?

During, "Space"

During, Simon. “Space.” Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005. 81-106.

• Consider During's overview of globalization in the chapter on "Space." Is Disney a global culture?
  
• During comments that, in one sense, "globalisation needs to be regarded as the outcome of a history of Western expansionism" (83). How do you understand Disney's relationship to globalisation in this sense?
  
• "Technological factors in the process of globalisation include the development of new communications technologies, especially the Internet..." (85).
  
• Consider During's comments on the more negative sense of "vernacular globalism" (87) as a "dislocat[ing]" force tending to the "Americanisation of the world." How do you understand Disney's relationship to these facets of globalisation? To the spectre of "global uniformity" under capitalism?
  
• Consider the way During speaks of "nation" in this chapter. In what ways might we think of Disney as a nation? Disney culture as a national culture? Disney subjects as patriotic? What about the way Disney represents other cultures?
• As above, Anderson's concept of "imagined communties"-- religion, like nation, an "ideological formation based on the organised imagination" (99).Balibar on nationalism (100)? Disney and tourism, the "tourist gaze" (101)?