Thomas Carmichael and Alison Lee

The University of Western Ontario

Consider for a moment Richard Dyer's often reprinted essay on Hollywood musicals. In his deft negotiations of the traditional descriptions of "escapist" entertainment and the consumption of the spectacle, Dyer briefly confronts an analytic dilemma that pervades the criticism of popular culture generally. He remarks, in a seemingly unexceptionable passage, that "while entertainment is responding to needs that are real, at the same time it is also defining and delimiting what constitutes the legitimate needs of people in this society" (Dyer in During, 278). In its immediate context, Dyer's statement of this dilemma is simply an effort to legitimate the study of Hollywood musicals, historically regarded with suspicion by progressive popular culture critics, by aligning musicals with a broader utopian impulse that might link them with the ostensible motives for much higher culture. This methodological move deserves attention because it is entirely characteristic not only of Dyer but of popular culture studies generally; however, at the outset, we would like simply to address more specifically the ways in which Dyer's argument centres on the conflation of desire and the political.

Dyer's discussion is haunted by an argument that is most often associated in its earlier modernist form with the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, for whom:

Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City" presents us with a gram-mar of pedestrian enunciations whose ultimate aim is to project a path of liberation; however, this grammar is governed by the logic of the Lacanian mirror stage, so that walking recalls, in de Certeau's words, "the 'joyful activity' of the child who, standing before a mirror, sees itself as one... but another... an image with which the child identifies itself" (109). This is also famously an image of the beginning of the endless metonymic displacements of desire governed by the symbolic, and so, strangely, then, de Certeau's liberating walk leads us along inescapable avenues of desire which, if we accept his analogy, are already set out, well trodden, well paved, and polished by law and custom. This might not trouble us particularly, except that de Certeau's effort to describe resistant patterns of consumption leads just as inevitably to a system of constraint and enclosure, and this dilemma persists in other guises. For example, in one of his many expansive moments in Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske proclaims:

We need to consider desire more closely here, particularly in its connection to the social. As Slavoj iek has pointed out, deviations, disruptions, and deformations of the social have their counterpart in the psychoanalytic symptom, in which deviations and disruptions are the true signs of mental functioning (128). In terms of cultural analysis, this might suggest that the pleasures of the popular are significant not because they can be mapped or organized, but rather because their very contingent nature reveals the larger scene in which they take place to be equally partial and contingent. We might then regard the pleasures of popular consumption not as part of a process of making popular artifacts meaningful by making their meanings somehow personal (whatever that last term signifies). We could rather regard them as a process of investing and cathecting (to borrow an older vocabulary), by very differently situated subjects, not with an end of some final fulfilment in mind, but mindful of its necessary absence as the inescapable scene of pleasure. As Freud famously tells us, "in the world of reality, which I am trying to depict here, a complication of motives, an accumulation and conjunction of mental activities - in a word, overdetermination - is the rule" ("Dora," 95).

In this context, we might want to reconsider such a notion as Bourdieu's "cultural capital." Even though Bourdieu astutely reminds us that "There is no way out of the game of culture," and that all objectifications of its processes are necessarily partial, the model of a general economy of culture posited here and in most forms of popular culture analysis envisions a repertoire of pleasures that can be fully tracked as the flip side of the oppressive system of production and reproduction. But this tracking, as Lawrence Grossberg has recently suggested, takes place in "overdetermined historical realities," and the pleasures produced in response to those realities are themselves both overdetermined and radically contingent (115). In terms of the analysis of popular culture, then, this model perhaps suggests that to retrieve popular practices and pleasures to the economy of professionalized institutional criticism is to engage unwittingly in the reproduction of the cultural system that popular pleasures so quickly escape or at least render indifferent.

If this were merely a question of reconsidering the institutional enterprise of cultural studies in order to attune it to the inescapable excess of popular pleasures, then the dilemma that we pose here might well be resolved by some more finely balanced and sympathetic form of the literary/critical talking cure. But the dilemma we pose is finally, and perhaps more directly, also a pedagogical one, and in this guise it calls for more radical departures. Let us begin our reconsideration by presenting the dilemma in another form. In David Lodge's academic novel Changing Places, a group of academics play a game called "Humiliation," "in which each person had to think of a well-known book he hadn't read, and scored a point for every person present who had read it" (83). The point is that "you have to humiliate yourself to win, you see. Or to stop others from winning" (83). The more canonical the text, the greater the humiliation, and one imagines that Hamlet or one of its sibling plays would win hands down. There is a connection between this little episode and teaching popular culture in a university setting, and the point is made, unconsciously perhaps, at the beginning of David Bianculli's book Teleliteracy. This book begins with a ten-page quiz designed to test the reader's high cultural and popular cultural knowledges and, to a large degree, to pit the two against each other. On one side of the page is the 'classics' portion, "asking questions about famous works of art and literature; on the other side is the 'teleliteracy' portion, asking parallel questions about famous works of... television. On one side Milton; on the other, Milton Berle" (7). In the "Classic Quotes" section, the reader is asked to "Match each quotation to its proper source" (12), and is given such choices as "A mighty fortress is our God," and "Who loves ya, baby?" (13). In another section readers are asked to provide the next line to "lyric poetry" such as: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree" (8), and "Hey, hey we're the Monkeys/ And people say we monkey around" (9).

As its subtitle suggests, this is a book that seeks to [Take] Television Seriously. And yet what Bianculli does in much of the rest of the book, while trying to make the case that television is a major cultural site, is to perpetuate the kind of high/low culture binary suggested by its opening pages. As a good deal of theoretical writing has suggested, the boundaries between "high" and "low" culture are always shifting: one day the Beatles are spokesmen for an oppositional popular youth culture, the next they are curriculum highlights in a course taught by Christopher Ricks. But what Bianculli's book suggests is that popular culture should be kept firmly in its place. This is, after all, what creates the humor in his quiz because a quick perusal will reveal the shocking truth: the teleliteracy of a professor of English literature might well be higher than his or her classics literacy. Still, the question is: what does this really say? Bianculli's assumption that familiarity is knowledge and that one kind of knowledge is exclusive of any other is echoed by students who assume popular culture is a "bird" course, and by professors who try desperately to make popular culture into something else in order to give it critical respectability. But it is not familiarity we lack; rather, what is missing is a language that would enable cultural critics to talk about pop culture without relying on a critical economy derived from high culture.

In practical terms, courses in popular culture make great corporate sense for the university even if including it in the curriculum is tinged ever so slightly with cynicism. Such courses bring in students by the truckload who are, indeed, better prepared in the primary texts than many of their lecturers. But it presents pedagogical problems, one of the most pernicious of which is how to define and talk about pleasure. As we have pointed out, the pleasure of popular culture is overdetermined, and teaching popular culture includes looking at the complexity of the overdetermination, looking at networks of meanings rather than focusing on specific objects. Ideally, one would hope, teaching popular culture in a university would come from a recognition that it is in popcult's "hybridized space... where the conflicts over the related issues of memory, identity, and representation are being most intensely fought over as part of a broader attempt by dominant groups to secure cultural hegemony" (Giroux 27). To make ourselves "relevant" to ourselves and our constituency it seems important to examine both the "terrain of struggle" and the cultural authority vying for it (ibid.). But to do so would require an enormous critical self-consciousness, because the university may well be the cultural authority it aims to interrogate; if we disregard the "enemy," we risk ignoring that the "enemy" is us.

As we have suggested, one of the pedagogical problems we might encounter is just how to examine the seemingly infinite and dangerously expansive pleasure that makes popular culture popular. But as everyone knows, pleasure is more than a little suspect in literature departments. In fact, teaching popular culture in a university, often has the aim of warning students away from finding pleasure in it. We study popular culture, we tell our students, to see the popular object as in itself it really is, or to leap the tall tales of advertisers in a single bound; in short, to be better consumers, but also to be better critics and better people. On one side, the popular culture course engages in a kind of therapy or a kind of faith healing: you pass if you renounce Entertainment Tonight, which you will do because you will recognize the better part of Culture to come. On the other side, it simply reproduces the logic of the market, in which rationalized consumption is the only legitimate knowledge.

High culture to late Victorian and Modernist critics was an intellectual barrier against the precursors of what we now understand as mass media. It was a way of preserving the "best" in Matthew Arnold's words, and the critic was the arbiter of just what the best should be. What irony there is in this. After all, had Matthew Arnold been able to shuffle into his slippers and settle down to a solid evening of Star Trek, he would have found there in a familiar and comforting dose of liberal humanism at the end of a hard day. But even more ironic perhaps is the situation of contemporary cultural critics who find themselves appropriating popular texts to an institutionalized critical culture that is in the end not dissimilar from everything that they have tried to position themselves against.

As has been suggested, popular culture often becomes simply a vehicle for doing something else. In his chapter, "Television as a Serious Subject," Bianculli quotes teachers from all levels of education who agree that a study of television, "its nuances and deceptions, its worth, and its frequent unworthiness" is a way to "develop students' critical skills": "Students assigned to watch and analyze The Cosby Show, thirtysomething and other series can easily transfer those skills and interests to To Kill a Mockingbird and Our Town" (285). Outdated as this argument may seem, it does point to a persistent dilemma. Somehow we have lost the ability, or maybe we never had it, to deal with pleasure in an academic environment, and perhaps this accounts for the way in which we appropriate popular culture to high culture and assume that people who appreciate popular culture cannot resist the manipulation that does indeed form a good part of it. Popular culture is clearly excessive and not just in terms of its sensationalism or its vulgarity. As we have pointed out, the pleasure involved in popular culture is overdetermined - it consistently escapes the kind of analysis that would control or limit it. This excess, according to Fiske, is what allows consumers to escape the ideological manipulation of any specific text. He suggests that the "excessive sign performs the work of the dominant ideology, but then exceeds and overspills it, leaving excess meaning that escapes ideological control and is free to be used to resist or evade it" (114). Fiske's enthusiasm is itself overdetermined, and arguments about whether popular culture resists or reproduces dominant ideology are endless. As close as he comes to the heart of the issue, Fiske is still driven back to an older vocabulary that seems often at odds with what he is trying to express.

None of this is an attempt to argue against cultural studies as a progressive institutional enterprise or against the study of popular culture. Rather, it is to suggest that our institutional vocabularies, our present literary cultural academic forms of the talking cure, are not yet up to the task of confronting that which is, after every explanation, the seemingly infinite source of popular pleasure.

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Bianculli, David. Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984

Dyer, Richard. "Entertainment and Utopia." The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993: 271-83

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