What Pop Culture School of Thought Are You? (Through the Lens of the Oscars)

Ever wondered what your theoretical approach to popular culture is but not wanted to read 1000s of pages of history? Never fear! See which cluster of Oscar related statements relate to you and the answer will be yours.

• Why would anyone watch this crap?
• I’ve got better things to do and I’m going to announce that to people on social media so they recognize my moral superiority.
• These movies suck. Nothing good ever gets nominated for an Oscar.
• Hey, look at all the millionaires congratulating themselves in a four hour commercial!

You're A Member of the Frankfurt School!

You think popular culture is  bland, dumbed down, and full of stupid. You also think there are non-subjective, clearly defined standards of what makes something quality and worth spending time on. People who enjoy pop culture may as well be zombies, and you’d wipe the drool from their mouths if you weren’t so busy with your far superior hip and cool pursuits. Pop culture is just a giant tool of the capitalist overlords and you’re not going to play along . . . unless it’s something you like. That’s totally different.

Go read some Adorno and Horkheimer

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• Really? That movie won? Funny how different people can get different things from different movies.
• That was the first black man to win for directing a Best Picture. That was only the seventh black woman to win an Oscar at all. That’s sad.
• Wow, that was a real sausage fest in the “Heroes” montage. Hollywood really doesn’t consider women to be heroes at all.
• I’m watching the Oscars but only to study it so I can “know the enemy,” if you will.

You're A Member of the Birmingham School!

Congratulations, you realize that people are capable of finding their own meanings and uses for pop culture and don’t just follow trends like lemmings going off a cliff. You think people have brains and can use them to interpret pop culture texts in a myriad of ways. Despite this, you recognize that there are culturally dominant and often dangerous messages that rise to the top. You’re a champion for equality and hate oppression. Unfortunately, you might be part of the reason the great Lawrence Grossberg once said Cultural Studies has gotten so “fucking boring.” You look for oppression exactly where anyone would expect to find it and are likely too reliant on the notion that simply noticing/writing about it will make positive social change. The idea that people might enjoy pop culture despite its often problematic aspects? Let’s not go there, please.

Go read some Stuart Hall.

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• “Let it Go” is such an interesting song. It’s fascinating how it can be embraced by so many different types of people. I want to know why.
• I’m going to write some Benedict Cumberbatch/Jennifer Lawrence slash fic right now.
• Yeah, this is kinda silly but I love how it brings people together—either in Oscar parties or to play “who can be the snarkiest” on Twitter.
• I can’t wait to see all the John Travolta memes tomorrow which deservedly will mock him mercilessly.

You're With Fandom Studies & Participatory Culture!

You are a champion of aesthetic pluralism. You recognize that taste is incredibly subjective and statements about quality are always based in socially constructed values. Therefore, you see little need to go analyze pop culture texts with the razor sharp precision usually reserved for literature (you recognize pop culture technically can be studied this way but it seems about as pointless as John Travolta trying to read a teleprompter). You realize that people are not passive sheep and actually actively participate with pop culture in a million different, interesting ways. In short, you’re much more interested in what people do with pop culture versus what it may or may not be. Too bad you mainly focus on cool, indie, cult texts and often ignore texts that are massively popular in the sense of millions of people consuming them. Maybe you have more in common with the Frankfurts than you’re comfortable admitting.

Go read some Henry Jenkins.

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• What is it about the Oscars that gets people so intensely worked up—either with love, hate, or meh?
• Bette Midler just sang “Wind Beneath My Wings” as part of the In Memorium. A bit on the nose, but it’s interesting how that song draws its meanings from so many different personal/social contexts.
• I feel compelled to watch this show but I doubt that the reasoning is consciously accessible to me, so I’m just going to roll with it and not be a jerk about it.
• If I don’t know what happened on the show, I’ll miss out on so many references and miss an opportunity to participate in a social moment.

You're With Affect and Psychoanalytic Studies!

Like the fandom studies people, you see little reason in looking at the actual content of pop culture texts and are much more interested in the social function of those texts, people, and ideas. You recognize that pleasure, hate, and dis-taste are super complicated states of being that resonate with different intensity across the complex contexts where people experience pop culture in their lives. You’re also not convinced that looking at what people do with pop culture (or even asking them why they like something) is fruitful because the subconscious aspects of taste are likely the most telling aspects of popularity as a concept. Your interests lie in how people are connected to (or disconnected from) other people based on how they encounter, talk about, and form fluid identities around pop culture. Too bad all this talk of intensities and subconsciousness leads to a methodology of assumptions and hypotheses that the publishing world isn’t always thrilled about (trust me, I know).

Go read some Lawrence Grossberg.

Discovering the Field and Parting Ways

Although I have been an avid fan of popular culture all my life, it took a while to realize popular culture could intersect with my work in academia. The change came when I was a Masters student in American Literature— a place where the fact that I’d rather be watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer over slogging through Nathanial Hawthorne was not the kind of comment you openly made in front of colleagues. I had always felt like a literature major merely by default. I loved to read, was apparently good at textual analysis, and to my knowledge, there weren’t many other paths to travel that rewarded those two factors. Then, as part of a teaching assistantship, I encountered James Berlin’s article, “Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom,” and discovered that popular culture had not only a place in academia but was also a field of study where rigorous textual analysis was being applied to the kind of texts I truly loved. I soon discovered there where whole journals devoted to the topic and a rich history of critical thought on popular culture (most of it lacking, in hindsight). To use a literary reference, I experienced a tremendous sea change, and was soon a doctoral student in the area of rhetoric, composition, and cultural studies.

In hindsight, Berlin was an odd introduction to integrating pop culture into academic studies and composition classrooms. After all, Berlin’s work, by his own admission, was much in line with the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (a school I would now heavily criticize). Though the aforementioned essay discusses how Berlin brought popular culture into the classroom, his social-epistemic rhetoric ultimately had little to do with discussing actual popularity or how his students integrated popular cultural texts into their worlds. In fact, the focus was on how their worlds could hardly be called their own considering the problematic place these texts held in the larger power contexts of society. Following in the theoretical footsteps of Aronowitz, Giroux, and Shor, social-epistemic rhetoric strived to fill a savior function. Students (in theory) were taught the semiotic codes of their hegemonic culture with the hopes that they would come to resist these codes and become more aware, humane, and democratic citizens. Sure, a television show might have made it into Berlin’s classroom; however, the focus was on how students had a cultural pre-disposition to interpret the show through the lens imposed upon them by the ideological villain-of-the-week: capitalism, hegemony, jingoism, etc. With all the emphasis on postmodernism and poststructuralism in Berlin’s late work, the entire project was oddly centered on a misplaced, elitist, and overly-rational faith in Enlightenment at its core: give students the power of reason and they will realize their “true” selves are under attack from a malicious culture industry.
  
Nevertheless, Berlin, gave me permission to bring popular culture into my first forays of teaching composition. Most of my colleagues had little interest in following me down this path. They couldn’t wait to finally have a captive audience of students to preach to about the brilliance of their own favorite novel. I was mostly accused of pandering and just trying to make the class “fun” for my students (though why fun would be a bad thing is something I’ve yet to figure out). The irony is: my students were not having fun. In fact, they were resistant, suspicious, and outraged at every turn. If we analyzed commercials or print ads, they rolled their eyes as if to say: they’re manipulative; we get it. One of two results came from asking them to write essays about one of their favorite television shows and how its semiotic codes were implicit in social ills. One, I would receive a truly appalling essay that went through the perfunctory moves of so-called “critical thinking” but offered no sense that the student truly believed a word of what they had written. Or two, I would receive a brilliantly composed essay where the student clearly knew how to play the grade game. The conclusions of these essays were the most telling. They always had either an implicit or explicit: so yeah, but I still love the thing you forced me to critique.

And they should.  It took me a few years to realize that this is a woefully unproductive way to study pop culture or bring it into the classroom. Turning students against the things they love is an odd pedagogical goal. It also (willfully?) ignores the complexity of concepts like taste, pleasure, and entertainment itself.  I started to care less what pop culture texts "meant," "should mean," or what effects the texts maybe, kinda, probably, likely were having on culture. I jettisoned the notion that I was some hero that needed to "save" my students. I don't want to a.) assume they need to be saved or b.) imply pop culture is something evil that one needs saving from. In many ways, I'm still trying to figure out where I'm at now. Most of the time, I don't even like saying I do "Pop Culture Studies" due to the negative connotation baggage. It's probably more accurate to say I do Taste Studies. Not as catchy. Probably sounds even more potentially frivolous than pop culture studies often gets accused of. And Taste Studies, if I can make that a thing, is a potentially harder beast to describe as it combines network theory, systems theory, psychoanalysis, neuroscience and any other tool that helps explain people's encounters with and reactions to popularity.

Good thing I have a blog, I guess. 

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.