"Popular" in English & Spanish Re: Deleuze & Guattari...

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Jan 10 06:56:35 PST 2003


At 12:55 AM +1100 1/11/03, Catherine Driscoll wrote:
> > The thing about popular culture, as opposed to everyday relations of
>> production, is that pop culture is always open to reading and re-reading,
>> but there are only so many ways you can interpret a striker being beaten by
>> a cop.
>
>OK, let's say that's true, though I've noticed more than a little
>rereading of such incidents, why does that make popular culture less
>interesting, significant, relevant, and so on and so forth.

If anyone has anything interesting to say about _Empire_ or "popular culture" or anything else, go ahead and say it, rather than simply insisting that it can be interesting, significant, relevant, or whatever.

It's doubtful whether we still have "popular culture" here -- culture of, by, and for peasants, artisans, workers, etc. -- today, as opposed to pop cultural sensations that are not really of, by, and for popular social forces but are in fact just pop flashes in the marketing pan.

In American English, the word "popular" has come to become in effect synonymous with "best-selling," "fancied by a large number of people": e.g. "She was popular in high school" (to whatever class she or the high school in which she was popular belonged).

In Spanish, the word "popular" still means "of, by, and for peasants, artisans, workers, etc.": e.g., "Asamblea Popular Revolucionaria de Venezuela" (Cf. <http://www.aporrea.org/>), "a Rebelión Popular Argentina de Diciembre de 2001," etc. -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>



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