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

Catherine Driscoll catherine.driscoll at arts.usyd.edu.au
Sat Jan 11 00:48:19 PST 2003


Quoting Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>:


> 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.

Why is insisting it is not any of the above, without having to give specific reasons, any more valid? But I take your point. I am perfectly willing to defend my interest in the significance of, well, anything I find significant. But that was not what was at stake in this discussion. It was a general term "popular culture" and, frankly, I thought I was giving reasons for its significance. Heaven knows I am not the person to defend _Empire_ which has been, I think, the only specific object mentioned. Oh yeah, _The Simpsons_ and Doritos. But I didn't bring them up. Do I need to defend the significance of things I quote from other people's posts as well, Yoshie, or is that sufficiently significant to the conversation I am presently having?


> 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).

There are several meanings for the word popular, and have been for a very long time. Are Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall sufficiently Marxist for me to be able to refer you to them for discussion of the relations between definitions of "popular"? I don't necessarily agree with everything they say on the matter, however, so perhaps you think it's necessary for me to define "popular", and presumably "culture", and perhaps "Marxism" or even "significance" as well before I use these words in a conversation where I presumed I could presume a degree of common points of reference (at least until I'd come across my own or someone else's confusion concerning the meaning of these terms).


> 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.

And, how is this significant, relevant, etc and so on and so forth?

Catherine

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