AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE IN POLITICS

American Popular Culture in Politics

American Popular Culture in Politics

Introduction

The field of popular culture is much traversed by classifications and categorizations. It has become a site where politics and aesthetics mingle freely. The old distinctions of high and popular, elite and mass cultures are destabilized by the recognition that the arts are a form of political mobilization. From this perspective, distinctions in tastes are no longer just preferences intimately linked to biographical circumstances but also practices that reflect social and political viewpoints.

Discussion

Montesquieu, in Diderot's ([1774] 1984) Encyclopédie, argued that the fine arts were distinguishable because they produced sensations of pleasure. With this definition, he asserted a marriage between aesthetics and the emotions (Gans, 2008). Immanuel Kant has elaborated this point in Kritik der Urteilskraft by suggesting that beauty and the arts corresponded to definitions of truth and goodness. Subsequent debates on the nature of the sublime resonate through studies of culture, but importantly, these are relatively recent issues linked with other developments in the sciences, commerce, and technology. After all, it was not until the eighteenth century that high culture became an acceptable category, separate and distinguishable from more banal popular forms (Fiske, 2007).

The new generation of students in the early 1960s overturned the theories about industrialized popular culture and the mass society. The depiction of society as a vast mass of alienated and atomized individuals, who were undifferentiated from one another and unable to overcome a nameless loneliness, was about to be swept away. Reisman's (1964) depiction of modern America in The Lonely Crowd was replaced with the communities of Woodstock. Feminism, gay liberation, identity politics, and race debates shattered the sense of homogeneity that permeated the economic expansionism of the suburban 1950s and set in motion the mannerisms of thinking that would arrive at French ...