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recognize that our revolutionary work is to transform white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy in the multiple arenas of our lives where it is manifest,
whether in gangsta rap, the black church, or in the Clinton administra–
tion. "
Agonies such as these are a product of cultural studies' certainty that
the popular culture is popular. But how do we know that it is? The mere
fact that people buy something does not mean that they like it or even
use it. The sociology of the popular is terra incognita; since the days of
Paul Lazarsfeld, sociologists have been trying to understand the phe–
nomenon of the mass audience, with little success. But cultural studies
enthusiasts, unrestrained by a sociologist's need for data, spin imaginative
interpretations of what
Hustler
magazine or AIDS iconography mean to
those who read or see them. If we only knew. The fact is that there is as
little basis for concluding that popular culture is a source of resistance to
the dominant order as there is for believing that it is a prop of the domi–
nant order. Cultural studies happens when literature professors wander
into the territory of sociologists without a map.
For this very reason, cultural studies also takes the popularity of
popular culture far more seriously than the purveyors of popular culture
do. Those who write soap operas and market punk rock are guided by
little else than their relentless quest for something that will turn a profit.
Postmodernists in their own fashion, they operate by no core principles
and subscribe to no theories of human nature or the proper organization
of society. They would be the first to recognize that there is no message
in their message, other than half-hearted efforts at product differentiation.
They can never be sure that their contributions to popular culture will
ever make it past the wastebasket and into the video stores. When their
products are successful, they usually have little idea why. If they were in–
terested, and they generally are not, they could consult advocates of
cultural studies, who are busy trying to supply a meaning and rationale for
their work which they themselves do not possess.
Cultural studies thus operates as a vanguard party for the media elite.
In Australia, where cultural studies flourishes, its enthusiasts, no longer
able to find work in the university, are, according to Meaghan Morris,
"virtually forced to work in the media or in the bureaucracy or increas–
ingly in the private sector . . ." No such corresponding shift in
occupational affiliations has happened in the United States, but the day
may well come. "A media-conscious left, a left that knows how social
signs can be appropriated and reappropriated, may be capable of deliber–
ately wrestling cultural meanings away from the New Right on its own
ground," writes Berube. Why wait? Cultural studies can begin right now
to present itself in media-like fashion: its books, sound-byte scholarship,
