STATE OF CRITICISM
53
any astuteness-but rather one of assertion; such argument invariably
states a position, a stance.
There is a small and perhaps growing body of writing by people
who take popular culture seriously (as I do myself, I might say, though
not always for the same reasons), writing which while by no means free
of political or sociological bias and special pleading does at least
recognizably constitute something like criticism in the broad sense of
the word. I'm talking now about the writing of some of those people,
nearly all academics, who have taken up "low" culture as a subject,
instituting courses in it,
to
the disgruntlement and even dismay of their
traditionalist colleagues, setting about simultaneously
to
legitimate
these studies and ward off the attacks of the elitists, and filling the
pages of their chief forum
(Journal of Popular Culture)
with their
essays, reviews and manifestoes.
I might remark at this point that I've chosen
to
concentrate in this
talk on the
Journal of Popular Culture
because I think it representative
and not because I think it official. Most of the writers for the
Journal of
Popular Culture,
as far as I can see, don ' t call themselves critics, it
being apparently almost a point of pride as well as a piece of strategy
not to; "specialists" in or "analysts" of popular culture is the designa–
tion I have most often seen them apply to themselves. Well, whatever
they call themselves, some of them are producing a type of what I
would call "precriticism" (though others might see it as "post"), the
most serious and thoughtful among them being engaged precisely in
trying to work out a basis, hitherto, as they acknowledge, lacking in
these studies, for what any kind of criticism has to have, namely an
aesthetic, or, if that word has lost its usefulness, a set of principles of
investigation, a philosophy of form, a structure of values, without
which any discussion of art works-though not of course discussions of
the theory of art works-is either mere description, by which I mean
recapitulation, or the expression of incalculable, hermetic "taste. "
The enterprise is an extremely interesting one and is an endeavor
to
which those of us who represent the various traditional "higher"
branches of aesthetics, in other words the ones that have been pro–
pounded through trial and error and hard thinking and openness of
response, ought to be sympathetic and not scornful. The work is
carried out against great difficulties, the obduracy of the subject itself
being the most fundamental. I shall return to that, but here I want to
point out how these would-be aestheticians or analysts of entertain–
ment are also beset in a way that traditionalists seldom are, by the
unwillingness of many of their confreres to grant that such a task is
