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PARTISAN REVIEW
which ultimately means politics. The problem of numbers-call it
mass, call it democratization-may evoke fear, denigration, romantici–
zation, or glorification. But the criticism of popular culture has yet to
generate very many serious and identificatory voices. In other words,
the critical establishment has yet to engage popular culture as an
articulation of itself and its concerns. The socially and culturally
engaged critic cannot afford to reject popular culture as alien, for that
culture is systematically tied to the nature and possibilities of high
culture itself.
The new poetics permits discussing popular culture in terms of its
structures and signs and, thereby, permits comparison between high
and popular culture in the same terms. It further permits an attention
to
what I should call cultural density-intertextuality, if you prefer–
the elements of overlay and repetition in contemporary culture. But
any interpretation or explanation must eschew the danger of treating
the text, or cultural product, as manifestation or confirmation of some
theory of human behavior or symbolization. Popular culture can
provide just as good fodder for such concerns as high culture-and has.
To the extent that the language of criticism becomes increasingly
self-referential-an invitation to virtuosity-all critical language risks
flattening the objects of its discout'se. To the extent that high and
popular culture can interchangeably function as the raw material for
one or another critical exposition, the differences between them recede
before the critical exercise itself. And here I must return to Mr.
Gilman's preoccupation with distinguishing between high and popu–
lar culture.
I have tried to suggest that the broad understanding of culture
would include all symbolic and ritual human activities. This reading
of culture really comprises all attempts to give meaning to human life.
If
such a reading is accepted, then surely it becomes invidious, not to
say politically dangerous, to rank levels of culture. Such rankings
reduce culture to one or another hierarchical ordering that invariably
indentify high culture with the rich, well born, or well promoted-the
elite in contradistinction to the mass. In this context, assessing popular
culture turns in part on assessments of spontaneity and manipulation:
does popular culture express the authentic sensibility of the populace
or does it embody an attempt to shape-i.e. distort-popular con–
sciousness? Or, more to the point, as in the case of Afro-American
religion, does it represent a complex blending of the two? There are
also difficult questions of medium, form, and content which I cannot
pretend to address today-how do we evaluate television? Nor am I
