56
PARTISAN REVIEW
ward and unashamed demotic and statistical approach, entirely
stripped of value judgments and keeping its attention fixed on "facts."
"No serious student of Popular Culture, " he writes, "can lose time,
money or energy by tuning in on 'Rhoda,' paying to see
Jaws,
or
skimming through Harold Robbins' latest opus. Because for such
students these activities are ... 'research,' and whether they entail
pleasure or pain is immaterial."
"The only evaluation which counts," he goes on, "is the strictly
quantitative one: how large a proportion of the work's potential
audience responded to it positively. Did it receive a respectable Nielsen
rating? Did
Variety
rate it a box office success? Did it appear on the
bestseller list? .. . [for] the only real authority concerning the 'beauty
or excellence' of a work of Popular Culture is the people . .. in
Popular Culture the rule is 'one person-one vote.' However regrettable
this may appear to professional students, it is a fact of the discipline."
This is honest enough, and while I don 't presume that Rollin
speaks for all his colleagues-he is evidently in this essay wielding a
whip lo bring some of them into line-he does express what I take
t~
be
the dominant or normative position. One might expect that quantifi–
cation would be an essential element in such studies, and quantifica–
tion is of course something of an anathema to criticism of the usual
historical kind. Those of us who have practiced that craft, or art, or
rhetoric, naturally find repellent the notion that numbers can play any
central role in our considerations. When David Madden, who is dearly
one of the dissidents Rollin is addressing bUl who is also infected by the
idea of quantity, writes that "the use of statistics is more suitable for
popular art than for high art" we can only shake our heads at the word
U
rnare ."
As I say, we should not be surprised at this grounding of popular
culture studies in slatistics; since they are inspired by a democratic
morale, and since democracy entails, al leasl theoretically, the forging
of values by consensus, art or culture has no exemption from this rule.
What art and culture become under this sort of scrutiny is obviously
something very different from what we have known, but that is just the
poinl: the subjects of popular culture studies or criticism are chosen
because of their difference from what was considered worthy of study
before, the ineligible being given status and significance such as were
previously denied to them.
There is a problem here apart from the obvious one of the relation
between quanlities and personal values (which, I might remark, have a
way of sneaking back into the work of many of these writers) and that is
