«NOTES ON DECONSTRUCTING THE POPULAR» Stuart Hall 1981

What does deconstructing mean? What does the title suggest?

Deconstruct means to dismantle, to dissect The title implies that the notion popular will be critically examined and the commonplace ideas regarding the meaning of the word popular will be challenged.

Hall gives a historical account of the development of British popular culture with reference to the social tensions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in order to show how these tensions shaped popular culture.

Key concepts in Hall’s essay are: acceptance, resistance, containment, dominant, subordinate, power, transformation, cultural domination, cultural implantation, struggle, hegemony, masses

In his essay, he refers to the changing attitude of the working class, which was once rebellious and confrontational. During the 1930s (the economic depression), a «militant, radical, mature culture of the working class» was non-existent.

Hall examines different meanings of the concept popular, some of which he disagrees with: Manipulative aspect of commercial popular culture Based on this meaning of popular, working class people are depicted as «passive consumers» («cultural dopes») who take everything that is offered. This view suggests that there is no original working class culture. Popular culture is shaped by the dominant class (e.g. impositions of new cultural definitions and representations through TV shows – Coronation Street – in the process of reconstructing the «realities of working class life») Mass manipulation Cultural implantation

To Hall culture is a battlefield, a way of struggle between the dominant and the subordinate. Popular culture keeps shifting between pure autonomy and capitulation.

2. Hall refers to the anthropological definition of popular – that is, «the mores, customs and folkways of the people.» He finds this definition limiting because individuals do not have the same hobbies and/or interests.

3. He defines popular culture in a continuing tension to the dominant culture. According to him, cultures are not conceived as separate ways of life but as ways of struggle. Popular culture is an ongoing process. Cultural forms, signs and practices may change in time as a result of the new meanings inscribed on them (e.g. swastika).

Cultural signs indicate different ways of life. (e. g Cultural signs indicate different ways of life. (e.g. While it was the cucumber sandwich popular for the upper class in Victorian England, it was the jellied eel, or steak and kidney pie for the working class.)

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1959) theorised that humans make a separation between a word and what that word means. All words in a language, body language, signs and symbols are signifiers. Signifier: the expression, the material embodiment Signified: the meaning, the concept conveyed by the signifier SIGN

In line with Gramsci, Hall agrees with Marx that the class which seizes material power also seizes ideological power or the power of ideas. To overcome this hegemony, it would be necessary to develop a counter- hegemony formed by working class to promote the creation of development of a new culture.

According to Hall, popular culture is a struggle for a culture of the powerful – each social class desires to have power to determine the contents of popular culture and it is against the culture of the powerful – the subordinate culture’s resistance against cultural implantation.