Inventing Popular Culture, part 1

Storey states in the Preface that "the book will explore the ways in which the idea of popular culture is often a way of categorizing and dismissing the cultural practices of 'ordinary' people" (xii). This examination will help to explain why the artistic creations of Disney are often dismissed. A closer look at the various frameworks of popular culture furthermore assists in explaining the various facets of the Disney corporation.

Frameworks:
1. Folk Culture - "popular culture as a quasi-mythical rural 'folk culture'" (1)
Based on the notion that the culture of the "rural people" needed to be preserved, middle class intellectuals began to collect and gather songs, stories and artwork to ensure that it would remain a part of the country's history. As Storey organizes it, there were two historical period -- the first period focused on the collection and study of ballad and folk tales and the second period focused on the collection and study of the folk song. The usefulness of looking at folk culture as popular culture aids in the promotion of the "very embodiment of the nature and character of a nation." (2) Cecil Sharp makes a similar point when arguing for "introduction of folk songs into elementary schools" which would "stimulate the growth of the feeling of patriotism" (12-13). Yet the most useful notion in seeing folk culture as popular culture in relationship to Disney is the linking of the past to the present. As Storey mentions in the beginning of the chapter, the "real" folk culture is not preserved but the "myth" of the folk culture. Disney is quite successful in using this tool in its theme parks. By presenting a ideal of say Hollywood as we all believed that it existed in the 1930s and 1940s, it sells the fantasy of what the magic of Hollywood today could be.

2. Mass Culture - a dividing line between culture and mass culture was created by Matthew Arnold,Culture and Anarchy, in which he said that culture is "the best that has been thought and said in the world"
This concept of Arnold lends itself very nicely to the separation between high culture and low culture. Additionally, "popular culture as mass culture is the 'anarchy' embodied in the disruptive nature of working-class lived culture" (20). Other intellectuals pick up this concept and put their own spin on it, but remaining close to the original idea. For example, the English literary intellectuals, the Leavisities, "believed that 'culture has always been in minority keeping'" (21). Examples of his this belief was played out was the removal of Shakespeare and opera from the masses into the hands of the minority tastemakers. The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, had another take on the ideas of Arnold and the Leavisties. He believed that "the hyperdemocratic rule of the masses...will pain the world a single shade of gray: 'The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select'" (25). So rather than creating social anarchy as Arnold suggested, Ortega suggests that everything will be the same and therefore meaningless. While it seems that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would be saying the same thing that "the cultural commodities produced by the cultural industry...are marked by homogeneity...all mass culture is identical," they are not. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that "it actually maintains social authority." (28). It dulls the senses of the masses in a way that they do not understand that they are missing anything.