Musings on Popular Culture "Criticism"...

As I noted in my blog on the Maude/Mandelker War and Peace a lot of what passes for so called popular culture criticism these days (and no doubt in the past) is irrelevant and ultimately adolescent. A lot of the "criticism" one finds on new digital age media sites like Amazon and Facebook is grounded in emotionalism, the I like it or dislike it school of "criticism", and misses the critical mark because this I like it or dislike if "criticism" ignores the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic realities within which popular culture, whether lowcult, midcult, of poshcult, is made or produced.

A show like the BBC's long running Doctor Who, for instance, was in the 1980s, made with limited finances, made within the boundaries of British political culture, made within the boundaries of core nation science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and education, and made within the context of British and international media practises. The I like it or I don't like it school of narcissistic media criticism ignores all these realities and assumes the ideological posture of a fantasy, namely that all media products are alike in every given place and given time and can be analysed on the basis of the "critics" present, which itself is conceived in contextless hermetic fashion.

The problems with such a narcissistic and adolescent criticism should be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of how society and culture really works. Doctor Who, for instance, had, in the 1980s a limited budget, such a limited budget that the show sometimes almost ran out of monies toward the end of the series, something that obviously affected the mise-en-scene of the show from set design to special effects. Such historical realities are not covered by that mantra of the I like it or I don't like it school of "critics", "boring". "Boring, is not a form of criticism. It is a social and culturally impacted psychological state that tells us more about the reader rather than the product the reader is listening to, reading, or watching. It is an emotional response that takes us into how the uncritical mind works and functions in modern and postmodern societies.

This vacuum packed form of "criticism" may and probably is useful in the formation of aesthetic cliques or gangs, cliques and gangs with a sense of identity and an identity grounded in ethnocentrism, but it is not helpful in understanding, in really understanding, popular culture in its historical social and cultural contexts. And it is only after we understand a piece of popular culture, that we can truly begin to comprehend it and put it into even broader contexts.