We Murder to Dissect. Someone Said That Once.

I might be the worst academic scholar of popular culture ever. I’ve never seen an episode of Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones. No thank you, but I usually try to avoid the Journal of Popular Culture Studies. I cringe when I see the latest University offering of a course in Buffy Studies or Sopranos Studies or whatever pop culture artifact someone has decided that some sustained dissection of is going to help teach students something (though I do love me some Buffy).

Oh sure, that deep textual analysis of pop culture can be fun to read and fun to write. I’m not against people doing it; hey, whatever floats your boat. However, here's a brief summary of the problems with academia's death grasp on textual analysis.

What Does Textual Dissection Give Us?

Such textual analysis (finding the “hidden” meanings, predicting the text’s effect on culture in an attempt to bet on the analyzer’s preferred theoretical pony, trying to sound supersmart) tells us very little about that text’s actual lived experience amongst the people who consume it, eschew it, or have passing knowledge of it. Most of the time this analysis is offered as either the way the analyzer thinks people should be experiencing something or as the assumed horrors that the text is maybe sorta possibly bringing to culture.

The Actually "Popular" is Rarely Looked at (except to mock)

The pieces of pop culture actually brought into the classroom, or turned into courses, are usually far from being actually popular (in the strictest definition of that word implying a large audience—a problematic definition in and of itself). Usually, we (who are we?) bring in cult favorites, indie phenomena, or narratively complex/difficult work. Nothing wrong with those kinds of texts (I love many of them) but I’m not sure they tell us anything about the popular. Show me a course on Everybody Loves Raymond or a course on Taylor Swift—and not courses that exist just to mock those texts (and the people who enjoy them). Then I’ll believe you’re interested in popularity.

Pop Culture is a Networked Experience

Breaking pop culture up into film studies, TV studies, music studies, etc.—or further breaking down to specific artifacts (the aforementioned courses) makes no sense to me. Nobody experiences any of those things in a vacuum. Pulling them out of the context of popular culture as a broader network or assemblage of experience isn't very interesting to me.

It's Already Being Done in the Hands of Very Capable People

Everyday people from bloggers, tweeters, to what-evers are already adept masters of pop culture textual analysis. And why shouldn't they be? There are plenty of amazingly smart people out there who know more about their personal experience with a text than we could ever predict for them. There is certainly no dearth of such writing all over the web. Shouldn’t we in the academy be doing something different? We don’t do textual analysis any better (the umpteenth Foucault reference does not add anything to the conversation at this point). We’re not better (I’m not going to buy into that elitism) but we are in a different position so let’s do something with that. Let's not use the theory that we spent too much money on to put a title in front of our names just to flog a dead horse.