Dissertation Summary

In the past twenty years, popular culture studies have gravitated towards one of two broad extremes.  One approach continues in the vein of Marxist-influenced, Gramscian foundations.  These approaches seek to analyze texts for ideological implications and hegemonic dangers that the consumers of said texts are often too blind, uncritical, or manipulated to realize. The other approach takes a more populist view.  These approaches embrace the postmodern shattering of highbrow/lowbrow distinctions and seek to contextualize pop culture by looking at the ways actual people use it. 

Both approaches are flawed and an approach to popular culture is needed that breaks out of this longstanding elitist/populist binary.  The first step in my project returns to the idea of popularity itself.   In actual practice, popularity is not a monolithic status.  Popularity can never be all good, or all bad, and there is never one kind of popularity that sums up one particular text. Audiences and taste publics are now more fractured than ever for such a simple representation of popularity.  What is needed is a close look at how digitality and the web have altered what it means for a cultural text to be popular.  Digitality allows popularity to show up in ways that make previous conceptions of the popular seems incredibly problematic and insufficient for explaining the practices that now actually occur.

My project seeks to redefine popularity as primarily an emergent textual status that is inherently rhetorical in nature.  I see popular culture not as specific texts (or types of texts); but rather, as a complex network(s) defined by the social practices of competing taste publics. By virtue of these social practices that occur through participatory consumption, popularity emerges over time through complex networks of social influence.  Since nobody enjoys a text in a complete social vacuum, popularity becomes evidence that forms of persuasion have occurred. This influence and persuasion is marked by participatory practices that make explicit or implicit reasons for spreading either positive or negative opinions about a particular text.  People will indeed find and create their own meanings and uses for the popular culture in their lives, but this does not change the fact that before they even begin those processes they have been led to (or away from) particular texts based on a multitude of persuasive actions emanating from others.

Viewed another way, there is much work to be done in looking at the ways people position themselves towards a text based upon its perceived popularity.  Popularity as a perceived textual status is a primary factor that produces and allows the variety of rhetorical and embodied responses that contribute to what popular culture is.  The way I feel the way I do about a text is always a complex reflection of how I perceive others feel about it, whom I believe those types of people are, whom I believe the types of people are whom reject such a  text, and where I perceive my own desired identity fitting in this equation.  I am subjected to different persuasive tactics at all steps along this process, and my own ultimate practices and participation add another level of complexity to the networked popularity value of any given textual example.

Looking at popularity as an emergent phenomenon that begins on local levels of cultural participation and practice, allows us to think about popularity removed from the specter of a looming ideological overseer who is pulling all the strings in the name of manipulation or oppression.   This is not to suggest that these practices are performed without influence or uninformed by the practices and opinions of those with more power.  In fact, the properties of any and all networks ensures that this process will be undemocratic and defined by uneven power distribution.  However, previous theories have focused on individuals, groups, and institutions as sovereign agents whom produce texts that abuse the passive others (which leads to the elitist/populist binary of ways to look at the effects of such a system).  Network theory allows us to see these people and texts as interconnected and dependant hubs in a network model.  Galloway and Thacker write, “What matters, then, is less the character of the individual nodes than the topological space within which they operate as nodes.  To be a node is to exist inseparably from a set of possibilities and parameters– to function with a topology of control” (40).  The network model of a digital popular culture space, then, allows credible agency to those whom participate within it without going so far to deny us possibilities for critical questioning of the influence topographical structuring has on the types of participation that take place.

By focusing on the embodied and social practices of consumers in a rule-bound and networked space my project ultimately hopes to move beyond viewing popular culture based on surface effects and presupposed ideological manipulation.  Popular culture defined by the emergent processes of textual circulation and participation opens up spaces to further explore the reoccurring culture studies themes of identity, ideology, power, and persuasion; however, putting popularity itself at the core grounds the exploration in rhetorical theories that do not underestimate the consumer, nor ignore the strictly controlled space in which they live.