User:Ssstephen/Reading/Notes on Deconstructing the Popular

In this pad me and Bobi did radical annotation: writing our own version of this essay before reading it, by filling in the gaps between the first and last sentence of alternating paragraphs.

The notion of the people as a purely passive, outline force is a deeply unsocialist perspective.

Maybe even the term "the people" is a bit difficult here, even "the masses" is better because it is plural. "The people" is just one thing, sure it's a nice dream to be united but it's not that nice to hide the multiplicity and differences.

the field of culture as a sort of constant battlefield

A battlefield is I think a destructive place where victories are won through defeating and destroying the opposition. Is this what Stu is saying culture is? If you go somewhere expecting a battle it can make it difficult to have a civilised, productive conversation. And if you want to have a revolution maybe skip the battlefield and have a riot in the middle of the city.

provided commercial popular culture

I think it's surprising that this phrase still makes sense 42 years after Stu originally wrote this. Despite lifestyle brands, customisable coca cola bottles, the internet, tv on demand, the dominant culture still overpowers other cultural production, people still watch hollywood films and wear canada goose jackets just like they have done for hundreds of years. I'm not sure if new media which claim to be more personalised have made a major difference in how hegemonised culture is.

Virtually anything which "the people" have ever done can fall into this list [of the popular culture: the cultures, mores, customs and folkways of "the people"]

I see no issue here except with the word popular. Culture is what people do, that makes sense to me. In the sense of a bacterial culture: a growing or a cultivation, it is just what happens when entities live and die together. Popular though, doesnt fit into this definition.

Its main focus of attention is the relations between culture and questions of hegemony

We guessed this third definition pretty well in our radical annotation.

What matters is not the intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural relations: to put it bluntly and in an over simplified form - what counts is the class struggle in and over culture.

This seems to be specifically avoiding or understating the role history has to play in cultural relations (and classes are a part of culture if you ask me). When has tradition ever been valued "for its own sake", tradition is always used as a tool in specific cultural actions and items to create and reinforce identity, assert or challenge dominance, and express existing and desired cultural (class) relations.

The capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular force - that is the nature of political and cultural struggle.

Yes for sure buuuuuut a very common way to unite people is to give them a common enemy. Redrawing the lines doesn't get rid of the lines. This whole essay makes me think of the (collateral) damage that is bound to happen in a struggle, a battlefield, and wonder if there is another way. Maybe using big categories like "the people" and "the power-bloc" is having consequences for smaller entities in the culture like for example human beings.