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PARTISAN REVIEW
can - if it does nOl already-participate in the critical discourse of high
culture. And, if the first instance, the more easily it does so, the more
difficult will become the judgments and discriminations that
Mr.
Gilman would defend.
In
the measure that criticism becomes largely an
academic exercise, popular culture can serve as well as high culture as
the object of its attention. But this initial assimilation of popular to
high culture via the critical language will not suffice.
It
can only
neutralize the very objects and processes criticism is supposed to
elucidate.
In
our day, popular culture h as become incontrovertibly assimi –
lated to mass cu ltu re with all the attendant implications of mass
reproduction and commercialization. This process has facilitated elitist
disdain. Recognition of the process, moreover, precludes mindless
romanticization of popular culture, the production of which entails
profound distortions of the mainsprings of popular life and conscious–
ness even when it becomes a feature of that life and consciousness. But
the appropriation and re-presentation of human life, complete with its
unconscious dynamics, also becomes part of the experience of society as
a whole, including those who believe themselves committed to a high
culture altogether innocent of such contamination.
In
fact, throughout
Western cu ltural history, themes and strands of popular culture have
worked themselves into the most celebrated monuments of high
culture-one has only to evoke Rabelais, Shakespeare, Dickens. The
folk tales , fairy stories, and so forth, widely taken to encode collective
unconscious fears and wishes in shared, structured fantasies, have
served to color the chi ldhoods of the most original geniuses with the
tones of popular life. The comic books and films that today take their
place may have less appeal to cultured adults, but they represent a
functional equivalent.
If
we indeed judge them so lacking in taste or in
moral fabric as
to
be dangerous to the reproduction of our values –
which means of our ethical and political culture-then we shou ld turn
our attention to the criticism of the social relations that produce them
rather than pretending that we can escape into a high culture immune
to the society which produces it.
Keith Botsford
Popular culture embraces all the things that people want,
rather than feel they ought to have. As such, it comprises all the things
