Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> Workers as consumers individually or cliquishly reinterpreting
> meanings of mass-marketed cultural goods and services created by
> workers who specialize in their production are different from slaves,
> artisans, peasants, and workers acting as collective producers of
> their own culture (work songs, folk tales, etc. -- Cf. Sterling
> Brown, "Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work
> Songs,"
This whole thread (or set of threads) is having difficulty (as is always the case) with just what is the word "culture" designating. (I've touched on this in a separate post). I think what Yoshie has put her finger on here is that it is that while (to an extent) one can discuss relations of production without explicitly focusing on culture (in most of the word's senses), discussion of culture (popular or otherwise) is meaningless _except_ in the context of an understanding of the relations of production within and around which the cultural phenomena exist.
For example, the main fact about the Simpsons, or any other TV show, can be known with no more knowledge of it that that it _is_ a TV show (one need not even know that it is animated). How is a TV show, at the most fundamental level, _experienced_? It is experienced as a _choice_ among many choices, and moreover a choice made in utter isolation from all others making the same (or a different) choice, and these choices are interrelated (or their interrelationships are 'visible') only from the perspective of the most abstract consideraion of the total mode of production in which they are made. For example, in the historical context Yoshie describes above, the "decision" of one person not to listen to a given ballad will not impact on the choices of others to listen (or, if it does, that impact will be visible to all). But if (some number) of persons choose not to view the Simpsons that show will be cancelled. (This applies to the whole range of consumer choices. Once non-dairy creamers came on the market, powdered cream disappeared.)
The relations between relations of production and "culture" are internal but _not_ reciprocal. That is, study of _culture_ (popular, Arnoldian, or otherwise) will _not_ (ever) reveal the enmeshment of that culture in capitalist relations of productions, though a study of capitalist relations of production illuminates "cultural" relations _and_ estabishes the context in which the study of culture enhances understanding of the relations of production.
Abrupt stop. It took me three years or more to work out some of this in respect to the episode of Uriel and the Cherub in PL, and I can't work it all out now in this context in one post off the top of my head.
Carrol