Gramsci and Popular Culture

Bennett's application of Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony' in analyzing popular culture seems to me particularly interesting in the light of the complexity embodied by cultural forms today. The bipolar approach that tends to assimilate popular culture into either "structuralist" or "culturalist" paradigms are reductive and oversimplifies the complexity of popular culture's relations with economics, power, politics etc. Bennett regards Gramsci's writing as providing the "only way out of this impasse." In Gramsci's writing, "popular culture is viewed neither as the site of people's cultural deformation nor as that of their cultural affirmation or, in any simple Thompsonian sense, of their own self-making; rather, it is it is viewed as a force field of relations shaped, precisely, by these contradictory pressures and tendencies" (p.219). Bennett finds this turn to Gramsci as useful in refuting the assumption that cultural forms can be assigned an "essential class belongingness and contesting a simply 'bourgeois versus working class conception of the organization of the cultural and ideological relationships" (p.221).

While a relationship of complicity and resistance characterizes some popular cultural forms' relation to hegemonic ideologies and practices, some cultural forms which are oppositional can be gradually incorporated into the mainstream. These complexities and contradictions are also embodied in cultural forms what we consider today as 'high' culture. Shakespearean plays, commonly regarded as signifiers of high culture, seemingly affirm dominant ideologies and the interests of the ruling class. However, as Jean E. Howard pointed out, the material conditions of producing these plays during the Elizabethan times placed these plays in a fraught relationship with hegemonic views. For, theatre was considered as a threat to the social order in that it promoted laziness and profligate behavior, while actors were seen as enacting a double transgression in dressing up as nobility - a rank that they did not belong to - and cross-dressing as women. These concerns about the theatre were expressed in virulent attacks against it in the Elizabethan anti-theatrical tracts.

Today's popular cultural forms, as Bennett points out, incorporate these complexities and ambiguities. Popular cultural forms such as Super bowl present problems of neat categorization. While Super-bowl is a popular cultural form which one might call oppositional in the light of the physical prowess and 'violence' promoted in the game, its extent of commercialization and incorporation within capitalist structures is unmistakable. The problem is whether this complicity or capitulation to 'cultural industry,' the ambiguity, and complexity necessarily efface the radical potential that popular cultural forms can embody or is it just what we read into these cultural forms that matter? Also, while one can argue that these cultural forms may transform consciousness, the question remains to which extent can these incite us to action.