Russel B.

Nye
English Department
Michigan State University
East Lansing

NOTES FOR AN INTRODUCTION

TO A DISCUSSION OF POPULAR CULTURE
First, let us define terms. I use the word popular to mean that
which is widely diffused, generally accepted, approved by the majority.
Culture, an especially protean word, I use in the sense of Edward
Tylors definition as that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, custom, and other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society, a definition which, of course, needs to be focused
more precisely, depending on the use of popular materials within
particular academic disciplines. This is not the occasion to trace the
history of popular culture, or of attitudes toward it; this has already
been done with distinction by others.1 I am more concerned at the
moment with considering briefly recent trends in the study of popular culture, as observed by cultural historians, literary critics, historians of ideas, and philosophers of aesthetics. Within the last decade
there has been, if I read the signs right, the beginnings of a significant
shift in our attitudes toward relationships among cultural levels and
cultural values. Artists and audiences seem to be crossing borders
they shouldnt; critics are asking whether the lines that presumably
separate highbrow from lowbrow or elite from popular
(those classic terms never quite clearly established but traditionally
and uncritically accepted) ought to be so sharply defined, or perhaps
ought to be there at all. People who know Beethoven and Bartok

1032

JOURNAL. OF POPULAR CULTURE

listen to the Beatles; Time and Newsweek and Leonard Bernstein

have approved California and Liverpool rock; even the New York
Review ofBooks, mirubile dictu, has published an admiring article on
popular music. Peanuts is written about by theologians and philosophers; there are articles on Marvel Comics and horror movies; John
Lennon and Leonard Cohen are studied the way graduate students
used to study Eliot and Pound. Playboy has a centerfold in the
ancient and honorable Police Gazette tradition, and also publishes
essays by Leslie Fiedler and Harvey Cox. There is a rock-opera and
a folk-mass; painters use soup cans and highway signs and hamburgers.
Clearly, things are not what they used to be.
There are a number of reasons for this wave of interest in, and
the recent re-evaluation of, the aims, audiences, conventions, and
artifacts of popular culture. I should like to identify five which
seem to me immediately operative, although there are probably others
equally important. First, the attention given by social scientists to
mass communications and media study has revealed serious limitations
in the older concept of society as composed of a naive, maneuverable
mass on the one hand, and a self-controlled, cultured elite on the
other. The real relationships between the mass media and their various
publics is proving t o be much more complicated than the simplistic
picture drawn by the critics of the thirties and forties. Social psychologists find that audiences resist manipulation in ways not earlier
suspected; that mass communications do more than merely transmit
information; that if the media do distort reality, people have compensatory built-in resistances, of which critics have never taken full
account. Furthermore, it also seems clear that attempts t o convince
mass audiences that they ought to reject popular culture are ingenuous
and ineffective, and that the critics of popular culture too may have
their own biases and limitations. I do not think we can afford to
overlook the importance of those explorations of popular culture now
being made by the more alert social sciences.
Second, the study of popular culture has been demonstrably
affected by the example of cultural anthropology and its belief that
all parts of a culture are worth study. Cultural relativism, the idea
that no part of a culture has-for purposes of understanding it-innate
superiority over another, has provided those who wish to study
popular culture with a useful, viable methodology, as well as welcome
scholarly and moral support. If it is permissible to study the songs of

NOTES ON POPULAR CULTURE

1033

a Bantu tribe, or the marriage customs of a Polynesian subgroup, it

seems equally permissible to study the songs of teeny-boppers in
California or popular stories from True Confessions, and for the
same reasons.
Third, the insights of Marshall McLuhan-scattered, confusing,
but often brilliant-have attracted the attention of a number of
younger critics who are putting together a new aesthetic which includes, rather than excludes, a wider range of cultural levels than
before. McLuhan has made at least two suggestions which, in their
reverberations, have deeply influenced the study of popular culture.
His assertion that the medium is as important as, or more important
than, the message, changed the focus of cultural criticism by shifting
attention from content to medium, from what was said t o how it
was transmitted. Concern with effect, rather than meaning, he
wrote in Understanding Media, is the basic change of our electric
time; or again, When a medium becomes a depth experience, the
old categories of classical and popular, or of highbrow and lowbrow,
no longer obtain; and again, Anything that is approached in depth
acquires as much interest as the greatest matters.
Deriving from McLuhan, critics such as Susan Sontag, for example, have opted for a new sensibility, challenging all the old
boundaries between scientific and artistic, high and low, mass and
elite. In addition, another seminal idea has been McLuhans concept
of modern communications as a mosaic; that is, he suggests that
information flows in upon the individual in a random mosaic pattern which is unified by the individual, who experiences and orders
it. If life, as McLuhan says, has discontinuous variety and incongruity, then art may reflect and interpret it by building similar
mosiac, experiential structures in imitation of life. The Beatles
Abbey Road album, for example, a collection of separate songs in
various styles and settings, gains full effectiveness only when the
listener perceives the relationship among them all or simply experiences them all as a totality. To use the current popular phrase,
putting it all together is a simplified version of McLuhans idea of
mosaic disconnection and reconnection. A novel like Leonard
Cohens Beautiful Losers asks the reader to do just that-to put together a discontinuous series of events and characters, separated by
time and space, juxtaposed in a pattern that is no longer accidental
as the reader imposes his own design on the experience.

1034

IOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

Fourth, I think we are seeing the results of having lived for two
generations with mass culture. We are not afraid of it any more, and
we know how to find meaning and value in it. The dire predictions
of the thirties and forties about the social disintegration and cultural
decay that would inevitably follow movies, radio, comic strips, television, and jazz have simply not come true. The Canadian National
Film Board calculates (and the figures no doubt hold true for the
United States) that todays average 18-year-old has seen 500 feature
films and 15,000 hours of television, plus heaven knows how many
commercials, advertisements, comics, or hours of disc-jockey music
he has heard on his transistor. Yet he seems to be able to handle it
with considerable sophistication and to respond t o it in a number of
interesting, subtle, and imaginative ways. We have lived for threequarters of a century with mass culture, and we are culturally no
worse off than before; in fact, there is reason to believe we may be
better off.
Fifth, and this is important, popular culture and technology
have made a unique merger, with interesting, powerful, and utterly
new results. The customized car, to cite an example, is an authentic
midcentury expression of the meanings of the automobile age; there
are those who find similar technological and aesthetic validity in a
Brabham taking the Thunder Valley esses at Elkhart Lake, or in the
intricate kinetics of a freeway cloverleaf. The artist has become
technician-sculptors are metallurgists, printmakers chemists, movie
directors and editors highly skilled workmen in the use of cameras,
lenses, lights, cutters, and other tools of the trade. Popular artists
have taken eager advantage of technology, both its materials and
techniques. Acrylic paints, welding torches, television cameras, and
multitrack tape recorders (Apple Records uses as many as sixteen
tracks) are as much cultural tools as commercial ones, and vice versa.
Painters use real telephones and bathtubs; composers artificial noises;
musicians instruments like the Fender bass and the Moog synthesizer.
Popular music in particular has made imaginative use of electronic
technology. The sound engineers part in making music is as creative
as the musicians, using reverberation, equalization, overdubbing and
distortion techniques to create sounds and performances that never
existed; the amplifier alone has virtually transformed the character
of much popular music. By using three amplifiers on a violin, for example, the engineer can select and combine sound frequencies and

NOTES ON POPULAR CULTURE

1035

levels to produce quite new and striking sounds; to cite another example, the wa-wa pedal, developed recently for amplified guitar,
for the first time gives a stringed instrument voice-like qualities. Certainly none of this bears resemblance to what were considered culturally acceptable techniques and subjects in the arts a short generation ago. This mutual absorption of culture and technology on the
popular level is an outstanding characteristic of our contemporary
world.
As a result of these and other factors, real doubts have been
raised about the customary division of culture into brow-levels, and
about ways of judging and investigating materials drawn from popular
culture. 1 am not at all sure that the presumed dichotomy among
cultures is real or natural. Do the culturally elite never search for
entertainment, and the so-called masses never seek insight? Is
culture only a matter of class, income, and education? If you stopped
Gunsmoke next week, would there be larger audiences for Oh Calcutta?
As for the argument that popular culture does not impart genuine
values, how do you measure genuine-ness? who can say that the TV
watcher gets less genuine value-at his level of experience-than
the professor reading James? I have never quite understood why, if
a Ph.D. settles down with a Scotch and soda to read Ross MacDonald
(who was recently favored with front-page Times and Newsweek reviews) its sophistication, whereas a tool-and-die maker from oldsmobile who watches Munnix on TV with a can of beer is automatically a slob. Whose values are the more genuine? These are some of
the questions raised by the current explorations of the nature and
uses of popular culture, and ones that should not only be raised but
answered.
There are many more. What about standards of good and
bad, applied to the popular arts? Should we judge a popular novel
as we would Faulkner? Is Aristotle applicable to paperbacks, Northrop Frye to television? Most of our critical standards are drawn from
studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction and poetrywhat have they to do with twentieth century media? As a result,
what a good many critics are saying about popular culture is little
more than that the aesthetic forms and aims that flourished in the
nineteenth century do not satisfy the twentieth, a conclusion hardly
profound. Furthermore, what do we mean by popular, in the critical
sense? Is definition in terms of consumption, or economics, or sales,

1036

JOURNAL. OF POPULAR CULTURE

valid? Is a good book that millions of people read popular or

not? What are we going t o do with Charles Dickens? Or Charles
Chaplin? Or Hair? I have no answers nor is it necessary here t o make
precise ones. The point is, that by continuing to ask questions the
range of interest in the study of popular culture may be broadened,
deepened, better understood, focused with greater precision.
The study of popular culture is still in the process of finding its
methodology, primarily because it is a joint scholarly venture, involving several disciplines, borrowing and gaining something from
each. I do not account this a weakness. It means, in effect, that in
finding out what we want t o know about the culture of a society at
a given place and time, we can choose the most effective tools,
whether they be sociological, psychological, historical, aesthetic, or
philosophical. Popular culture can be considered as a point at which
the investigative techniques of the social sciences and the humanities
may converge. Where such interests draw together-in examinations
of social behavior, cultural patterns, communications media, social
and cultural values-the study of popular culture provides a common
ground where different disciplines may combine. There is, then, no
single, approved methodology for the study of popular culture, but
several. Since many forms of popular culture depend for effectiveness
on their collective appeal (and some, like contemporary popular music,
are even collectively produced), any approach to the study of them
almost necessarily must be eclectic. We should be able to choose
that method of investigation which allows us to find out what we
want t o know. What works best is the best methodology.
Borrowing from a Wallace Stevens poem, I should like to suggest
six ways of looking at popular culture, depending on what one wishes
to find out and how one wants to define it. One way turns on the
study of the means by which culture is transmitted. I t assumes that
popular culture includes those cultural elements which are not so
complex and sophisticated that they cannot be effectively disseminated among a majority audience. This provides a useful distinction
between popular and elite cultures-i.e., a painting versus a print-by
focusing attention on the distributive process. A second way of
approaching popular culture may be based on an examination of the
differences in the production of popular cultural artifacts, distinguishing between the unique and the mass-produced-in other words,
focusing on the creative act, and on whether or not it can be sustained

NOTES ON POPULAR CULTURE

1037

or is reproducible. John Cawelti has refined this approach by defining at least a broad portion of popular culture as that which is
characterized by artistic formulas which arise in response to certain
cultural needs fo; entertainment and escape. That is, if there exists
a majority cultural need, the popular artist evolves a formula for
meeting it-the Western movie, the Sinatra song style, the McKuen
poem, the True Romance.
Third, it may also be useful t o examine the product of popular
culture on the basis of its function-that is, to ask, What is it used
for? Comics, B movies, listening music, the detective story-is the
point relaxation or cerebration? In recognizing the difference in
function between Conan Doyle and Tolstoy-both masters at their
craft-it is also recognized that one does not judge either by the
others standards. What this functional approach does, and very
usefully, is to acknowledge gradations of aim among serious work
seriously received, unserious work unseriously received, and all stages
between. Basically, this view of cultural grades derives from Santayanas famous distinction between work and play as basic human
activities, between what must be done and what is done by choice.
While this approach is perhaps overly generalized, it is especially useful as a tool for studying popular culture before the appearance of
the mass media-one cannot, I think, study pre-media and post-media
popular culture in the same ways.
A fourth approach is that suggested by Marshall Fishwicks
characterization of popular culture as that part of culture abstracted
from the tota2 body of intellectual and imaginative work which each
generation receives, which is not narrowly elitist or aimed at special
audiences, and which is generally (but not necessarily) disseminated
via the mass media. Popular culture thus includes everything not
elite, everything spoken, printed, pictured, sounded, viewed and
intended for other than the identifiable few. Professor Fishwicks
concept is particularly useful for its inclusiveness, and for its adaptability to sociological, historical, psychological, philosophical or
critical investigation. Abraham Kaplan has suggested a fifth, somewhat related approach, pointing out that the distinguishing mark of
popular culture is the kind of taste it reflects and satisfies, rather
than how widely it is disseminated. Popular culture thus becomes
not dependent for definition on numbers and profits, or for uniqueness or lack of it, but rather is defined on the basis of its own nature

1038

JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

and aims. Sixth, Ray Browne has suggested that differences among
various levels of culture are t o be considered matters of degree rather
than of substance or audience. Culture, he has written, is not t o be
arranged vertically from low to high, but in a kind of horizontal
continuum, resembling a flattened lens or ellipsis, with Elite at one
end, Folk at the other, and between, largest and most visible, Popular
culture. Lines of demarcation are mobile, investigatory methods
variable and pragmatically chosen, the purpose to treat culture in all
its phases, to exclude none and include all. Although I cannot match
Stevens thirteen, these are six ways of approaching the study of
popular culture, all valid for varying purposes, all useful and investigating what is, it seems to me, the most provocatively versatile field
of academic study of our contemporary day.
The value of this pioneering conference, and of others which I
hope will follow, lies in asking questions, testing boundaries, stretching conjectures. What the study of popular culture requires more
than anything else at this point is this loosening of divisions and
broadening of perspectives. The classic definition of culture as the
best that has been done or thought, or as the upper ten-percent
of a societys best accomplishments, has been valuable-and will
always be-as a means of preserving and transmitting the cultural
heritage. But on the other hand, to rule out the rest of the broad
spectrum of human cultural activity as an area for exploration is a
far too restrictive act. Certainly, the culture of the majority of
society ought to be subjected t o this kind of searching, intensive
investigation by historians, literary critics, and humanists in general,
if we are to know our modern, pluralistic, multileveled society.
NOTES
b e e , for example, Leo Loewenthals essay, An Historical Preface to the
Popular Culture Debate, in Norman Jacobs, ed., Culture for the Millions
(Princeton, 1961),28-42.