hall’s deconstruction of the popular
In his 1981 essay, Notes on Deconstructing the Popular, Stuart Hall (1932) presents a number of tools one may use in the examination of popular culture. Perhaps most significantly is Hall’s emphasis on popular culture as a malleable process rather than a fixed state. In Hall’s view, popular culture is not confused with mass culture, the culture of dominant groups within society, or the culture of the working class. Popular culture exists on a continuum at the intersection of resistance to and containment by the dominant groups. The evolution of popular culture is a melee fought through the incorporation and commoditization of resistance ideology and signs into the dominant culture and the expropriation, modification, repurposing, recycling, and re-presentation of ideas and symbols out of the dominant culture.
Because the study of popular culture requires simultaneous application of etic and emic approaches, periodization is a vital concept in Hall’s analysis. Simply stated, an etic approach to the study of popular culture requires the acquisition of fact and truth through observation, while the emic approach requires an insider’s participation and understanding. One must both observe the flow of popular culture in relation to the culture of the dominant groups as well as in relation to society at large, and participate within the specific context of the resistance. The use of periodization provides a control perspective to both one’s participation and observation. Hall specifies the period of 1880-1920 as a key segment of our history to serve as the control. The selection of this period is prescient.
1880-1920 was the pivotal time of transfer from an agrarian to an industrialized society. Innovations in technology increased the pace of life, necessitated broader education, restratified and blurred social classes, and created a new middle class with both leisure time and disposable income. One notes the same pattern of change as the world in which we live transitions from an industrialized base to an information base. The power bloc requires a working class both sufficiently educated to manipulate data and adequately mollified so as to facilitate the limitation of resistance to the ideals of the dominant groups. Drawing correlations between the present and a previous period allows one to ground observation and experience together.
In Stephen Crane’s (1871-1900) novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), the protagonist, Maggie, exemplifies the interplay on the battlefield between incorporation and resistance. Foremost, Maggie, who works as a seamstress in a factory, observes the “well-dressed women” and, rather than acknowledge a rift in classes, desires matter-of-factly to possess the same refinements. In the previous era of agrarian society, such thoughts would most likely not occur. Maggie, however, has been educated to use industrialized technology and time tables at a cost to the power bloc of Maggie using her refined mental capacity for purposes outside of factory work.
Curiously, Maggie seems preoccupied with the appearance of people rather than who the people really are. She is not concerned with the process of becoming something more. Rather, she is focused on the outward appearance and wanting more. She seems to be the model of consumer capitalism. In addition to seeing clothing and social acceptance as simple commodities, Maggie sees herself, and her youth particularly, “the bloom on her cheeks,” as a commodity to be invested, traded, and sold. This self commoditization mirrors the power bloc’s drive to market everything possible to the working class.