From entertainment to citizenship: Politics and popular culture

1

Introduction

The links between popular culture and politics are often referred to – sometimes dismissively, sometimes seriously. They are dismissed when it is thought that popular culture diminishes politics. When politicians appear, for example, on reality television shows – whether Big Brother or Strictly Come Dancing – the assumption is that what they are doing is a desperate attempt to appear ‘relevant’ or to revive a flagging career. Such stunts serve only, it is suggested, to lower the public’s respect for an already tainted profession. But there are occasions, by contrast, when the link between politics and popular culture is taken with the utmost seriousness. During the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, much was made of the role played by music and musicians in inspiring the rebellion in Tunisia or the crowds that gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo. In a similar way, seriousness is frequently accorded to the efforts of film stars such as George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, or rock stars like Bono and Bruce Springsteen, to address injustice in the world. However, whether the connection between popular culture and politics is casually mocked or earnestly regarded, it is less commonly studied in detail. This book is dedicated to doing just this.

From entertainment to citizenship looks at how ‘politics’, itself an ambiguous and multifaceted term, features in the content of popular culture – from soap operas to pop songs to video games. But it also reveals how the forms of popular culture are themselves understood and used as forms of political engagement. It is one thing for academic analysts to point to the ‘messages’ encoded in a cultural text; it is quite another to say that these revealed meanings are shared by audiences and fans. And it is the latter to which this book is dedicated. It is an attempt to reveal the routine, daily transactions between popular culture and politics.

The research project that underpins this book sprang from a desire to understand whether popular entertainment actually informed and animated people’s relationship to the political world. Rather than to assume that popular culture was necessarily political (or apolitical), we wanted to ask whether – in the routine pleasures of popular culture – there were moments when lessons were learnt about how the world works and how power operates, when affinities were formed with groups of distant others, and when passions were stirred about injustice or unfairness. We wanted to see if, as many had suggested but few had demonstrated, popular culture did contribute to our lives as citizens. Was it possible that popular culture, commercially produced entertainment, played as important a role in the political realm as it is assumed that news programmes do? And more than this: we were curious about whether forms of popular culture differed in what they allow for (or thwart) in terms of political engagement? Our book is, we believe, the first to ask whether types of popular culture differ in their ability to engage with politics. Much of what has been written in this area has looked at entertainment television; we wanted to go beyond this, to examine music and video games as well.

In comparing the capacity of different forms of popular culture to link to politics, we concentrate on a distinct group of people: first-time voters, young people aged 17–18 years old. Our focus on young people is inspired by two thoughts. The first is that they are often portrayed as the most politically disenchanted of all generations. The widely voiced concern about the ‘crisis of democracy’ tends to focus, in particular, upon the young. In the UK, a commission was set up in 2007 precisely to address this anxiety (Tonge and Mycock 2010). The second thought is that the young tend to be the most dedicated and enthusiastic consumers of popular culture, and indeed the two phenomena – the political and the cultural – are often linked. Time spent on entertainment detracts from time spent as an active citizen (Putnam 2000).

Like others (Norris 2000; Dalton 2008), we found this general picture to be some way from the truth. Nonetheless, the common perception is widespread, and the true picture complicated, and thus there is a powerful case for closer scrutiny of how and when popular culture and politics interact in the lives of our future citizens.

From popular culture to politics

As we have noted, we are not the first to venture down this path. Two decades or so ago, it might have been true to say that, among many social scientists, there was only a passing interest in the political significance of popular culture. More recently, this situation has changed considerably. Initially, as popular culture has been taken more seriously, two sharply demarcated sides have emerged. On the one hand, there are those who see popular culture as distorting, or detrimental to, political engagement. Writers like Douglas Kellner (1995) portrayed popular culture – most notably, Hollywood films – as serving the dominant interests in the way they ‘transcoded’ US foreign policy anxieties into blockbusters like First Blood or Top Gun. Other writers, most notably Robert Putnam (2000), although also concerned with the ‘messages’ encoded in entertainment, focused in particular upon the disengaging effects of popular culture. These negative accounts of the impact of mass entertainment provoked counter claims in which popular culture was seen as serving democracy and political engagement (Jones 2005; van Zoonen 2005).

Increasingly, though, this stand-off between two opposing sides has been replaced, not by a happy consensus, but rather by a more nuanced approach, in which the question is about the multiple, often contradictory ways in which politics and popular culture intersect (see, for example, Couldry et al. 2010). Our book is very much in this tradition. We see popular culture neither as an unalloyed political good or evil. More importantly, we do not see the answer to the question of how popular culture and politics relate as lying solely in the content of the culture itself, but rather also in the interpretation and use of it by audiences and fans. For this reason, the research reported here concentrates on the way in which young people talk about the popular culture they enjoy (and dislike). It is this talk that forms the core of our enquiry; it is here, we argue, that links are forged with the political realm and political thoughts and values are articulated.

Our research breaks new ground, as we have mentioned, in its comparison of different forms of popular culture and in its detailed examination of how young people’s cultural tastes and practices reveal a political dimension. Where others have concentrated on a single form of culture, whether television or music, we consider both of these and video games. Comparison of this kind helps to highlight what it is about or within popular culture that allows it to become linked to politics. And concentrating on talk allows us to listen intently to what young people say about their cultural lives, rather than to read those lives from the cultural texts.

What we hope to show is that popular culture does indeed allow young people to think about, and reflect upon, politics as it is conventionally understood – as the business of governments and parties. It also enables them to feel connected to others, to form communities of interest, which have claims upon the political realm, and to feel animated about those claims. But in showing this, we also demonstrate how different forms of culture make these things possible in different ways and to different extents. Our research reveals that the links between politics and popular culture are not permanent and persistent features of the relationship between the two. They are dependent on many intervening variables, not least the aesthetic judgements of our respondents. Nonetheless, our core claim is that the pleasures of popular culture are closely allied with the ways in which citizenship is lived.

In making this case for the link between popular culture and politics (and especially citizenship), one of the issues that has most occupied us, and those with whom we have discussed our research, is what we mean by ‘politics’. How can casual conversations about soap operas and reality television, or about pop songs and video games, have any bearing on politics? This is a question to which we return throughout the book. Suffice it to say here that while we treat ‘politics’ as that realm occupied by governments, parties and bureaucracies, in which the right to allocate resources is fought over, we also see politics as the pursuit of collective interests and as the struggle between competing ideologies. As Kum-Kum Bhavnani (1991: 52) wrote in an earlier study of young people and politics:

Economic and social relations both help comprise the domain of politics. This argument provides a definition of politics: politics can be defined as being the means by which human beings regulate, attempt to regulate and challenge with a view to changing unequal power relations.

For us too, politics is oriented towards the public operation of power in respect of collective or communal interests and identities. And in this respect we follow Colin Hay (2007), who defines politics as that which takes place when people, faced with a choice, deliberate with others about their decision. To define politics like this has two important implications. The first is that it is not everywhere – in other words, we reject the suggestion that ‘everything is political’ on the grounds that this risks emptying it of all meaning. Equally, politics is not confined to the formally designated arenas – the ones that once occupied textbooks of political science (parliament, the parties, the civil service, the cabinet, pressure groups). Politics can exist outside these realms – in the operation of the media, most obviously – where public power is at stake.

This approach to politics is designed to establish a common ground between traditional political science and cultural studies. It is designed to avoid the excessive inclusiveness of the latter and equivalent exclusiveness of the former. It is about creating the conditions for a dialogue across disciplines, and to allow each to learn from the other. More than this, our definition is designed to allow for the thought that politics is absent from conversations about popular culture, and that people may be, in Couldry and his colleagues’ word (2010), ‘unconnected’ to the public realm and to its politics.

What follows, therefore, is an account of how our research – funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and conducted in 2008–2009 – enabled us to look in more detail and depth into the role of popular culture in politics, and to ask when and whether it contributed to the formation of democratic citizenship. There are three dimensions to this contribution. The first is the extent to which popular culture is seen as providing knowledge of the world with which politics is traditionally occupied. Put simply: what is learnt about political reality from popular culture? The second dimension has to do with popular culture’s capacity to make people aware of communities of interest to which they might belong. If the first dimension refers to the cognitive, this refers to the affinitive. The final dimension has to do with how knowledge and affinities are animated by a sense of justice or otherwise. This refers to the affective feelings that people have about the reality they imagine and the affinities they share. These three dimensions form the organising principles of the chapters that follow.

The structure of the book

The first two chapters place our project in its wider context. Chapter 2 traces the links that have been established over time between politics and popular culture, concentrating especially upon the debates provoked by the Frankfurt School from the 1940s onwards. The chapter incorporates a discussion of how, in the playing out of arguments about the politics of popular culture, the key terms ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ are themselves being reconfigured. Chapter 3 focuses on an equally important aspect of the context into which our research fits. This is the way in which citizenship has been linked to media and culture. Traditional accounts of citizenship have typically seen it to derive from the allocation of formally designated political rights. But following T. H. Marshall (1950) and others, the conception of citizenship has become broader, as has our understanding of the processes that shape it. This chapter documents the development of our understanding of how media and culture relate to citizenship, and hence sets the background to our research.

Chapter 4 describes the details of our research practice, explaining the methods we used and relating them to other work in this field. It reports too on a small survey that we conducted with our young participants, which is revealing of their tastes, habits and political attitudes. The remaining chapters document in detail the different aspects of young people’s relationship to popular culture and its relevance to their sense of citizenship. We begin in Chapter 5 with a discussion of the ways in which the popular culture that they enjoy represents the wider world and seeks to engage them in it (or distance them from it). We then explore, in Chapter 6, the extent to which young people use popular culture to make sense of the ‘real world’ and the operation of power within it. Do they see soap operas as ‘realistic’, or do they understand the judges on The X Factor or The Apprentice as having expertise and knowledge about how the world really works? Chapter 7 pursues this latter question further by asking whether, when the stars of popular culture behave as ‘celebrity politicians’, they are taken seriously by young audiences. Our findings suggest that young people accord some celebrities the right to lead or ‘represent’ them, but that this right is granted cautiously and conservatively. The chapter reveals how, in observing celebrity politicians, our respondents construct their own understanding of what is required of a politician.

The representative claim that emerges in celebrity politics is itself dependent on some notion of a collective identity, of a set of interests to be represented. Chapter 8 describes how our participants use forms of popular culture to construct a sense of collective identity. Key to our argument throughout is that popular culture is not merely a means of ‘mirroring’ reality or ‘expressing’ identity, but rather of constructing them. Just as important, we suggest, is the role that popular culture has in animating these constructions. Our last substantive chapter draws attention to the way in which popular culture is used in articulating emotional reactions to types of political behaviour. It also explores the relationship between pleasure – most notably, laughter – and politics. Both emotions and pleasure are neglected in much social science research, despite their importance to the routines of everyday life. And for us, they constitute vitally important elements to the relationship we explore between popular culture and politics. Our main research was conducted in 2008–09, before the emergence of the Occupy Movement in 2010 and the UK riots in 2011. We do not pretend that we anticipated these events in the conversations we had with young people, but the various forms of social and political disruption of the last few years are indicative of how passion and popular culture become emmeshed with the ‘real world’ of politics.

Over the course of our research, we heard – in the group discussions and individual interviews that we conducted with young citizens – popular culture emerge as an important site for the articulation and exploration of politics. We also saw how the passions aroused by popular culture were channelled into political sentiments. The political attitudes and feelings that popular culture provoked may have been confused and contradictory (as they are, we suspect, for us all), but what we witnessed was how the ‘serious’ world of politics and the ‘trivial’ one of entertainment feed off each other in the lives of young people. The relationship is a complex one, but crucially important if we are to understand the multiple ways in which citizenship is formed, and the particular contribution made by music, video games and entertainment television.

2

Politics and popular culture

How has popular culture become linked to politics? How is it that a form of life often associated with fun and escapism, and often labelled as ‘mere entertainment’, can be connected with the serious (sometimes deadly serious) world of politics? These questions lie at the heart of this book. Understanding how the two realms of politics and popular culture come to be linked is key to appreciating the issues that are raised by our argument that popular culture can be an important element in political engagement.

There are many competing conceptions of popular culture – from folk to mass forms. Our concern is with the latter. When we talk of ‘popular culture’ we mean mass-produced or mass-consumed forms of entertainment – such as video games, popular music, Hollywood movies, talent shows, soap operas and situation comedies. Although we are aware that news media of various types might reasonably be deemed a form of ‘popular culture’, our concern is not with them. Equally, we are not concerned with forms of folk culture, which, while ‘popular’ in an important sense (as part of the routines of ordinary life), are not part of a process of large-scale production and consumption. We are interested in forms of culture and entertainment that do not appear, at least at first glance, to have any direct bearing on the ‘real world’ of politics; those forms of culture that seem more intent upon providing a distraction or an escape from everyday reality, that are part of leisure rather than work (at least for its consumers).

This chapter traces the histories and the theories that frame the link between politics and popular culture, and which give rise to the research questions that we address here. In the following pages, we also reveal how, in forging the connection between apparently very different realms of human life, we encounter competing notions of the key terms. What is meant by both ‘politics’ and ‘popular culture’ is a product of various legacies and perspectives, not all of which can be reconciled into a single vision. Sometimes politics emerges as the traditional business of the exercise of public power by parties and governments, by legislators and executives (and their administrations). Sometimes politics refers to all relations between people, in which power – both public and private – is being contested. Equally, popular culture sometimes appears as the product of the imagination and creativity of audiences and artists. Sometimes it is the more or less cynical product of the marketing and commercial skills of the media and culture industries. These very different conceptions are, as we say, a product of the rival traditions of thought and practice that are applied to the relationship between the two.

These various approaches provide the background to this book. They help to explain how, for some writers, it becomes reasonable to ask whether entertainment might lead to citizenship, just as they help to account for the doubts raised by others, for whom citizenship is simply a matter of the rights granted by the constitution and determined by the law. For the latter, the entertainment industry is of no relevance.

We ourselves adopt the former position, one associated with the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences (Butler 1997; Nash 2000, 2001; Goodin and Tilly 2008). To focus on culture is to question accounts of human behaviour that either see it as determined by