The document summarizes Stuart Hall's work "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'" which discusses different definitions of the term "popular culture". Hall argues that popular culture is complex and cannot be defined by any single definition. He offers three definitions: 1) things consumed by large numbers of people, 2) things that reflect people's everyday lives, and 3) things that involve class struggles over cultural meanings. Hall's main point is that popular culture is "multi-accentual" rather than having a fixed meaning, and its interpretation depends on the historical context.

1. NOTES ON DECONSTRUCTING
‘THE POPULAR’
Stuat Hall (1932-2014)
Course: Cultural Studies
October 12, 2014
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2. Stuat Hall : Popular culture
Popular culture in many ways represents the horizon of
Hall’s thought.
Hall first came to popular culture, not through
academic research, but through the New Left.
His sense there, that popular culture played a formative,
rather than secondary or reflective role in social and
political change has remained at the centre of his
thinking ever since.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony underpins all Hall’s
writings on popular culture since the 1980s.
The popular is the point at which power relations are
negotiated and contested rather than predetermined in
advance.
Hall argues that popular culture is a ‘contradictory
space’, a site of continuous negotiation.
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3. Stuat Hall : Popular culture (continued)
Hall is attempting to deconstruct stereotypical connections
between popular culture and the working class.
According to Hall, popular culture does not have a fixed,
intrinsic value or content inscribed into it.
For Hall, popular culture is, as he demonstrates with reference
to the Russian Marxist linguist Valentin Volosˇinov,
‘multi-accentual’ rather than ‘uni-accentual’.
Volosˇinov’s theory allowed Hall to challenge essentialist ideas
of class relating to popular culture, notably, the notion that the
popular is an authentic, pure expression of the working class.
Hall’s interventions on the popular shift in conjunction with
the particular historical moment he is engaging.
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4. NOTES ON DECONSTRUCTIN ‘THE POPULAR’
The first part of Stuart Hall's "Notes on Deconstructing
'The Popular'" is an historical account of the development
of British popular culture in late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
In the main part, Hall is discussing the problematic
meaning of the word "popular" in "popular culture“
Hall is offering three different definitions of "popular" in
relation to culture, and his main point in "Notes on
Deconstructing 'The Popular'" is to try and point to the
complexity of the relation between cultural products and
content associated with "the common people" and the
products and content of the culture industry.
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5. Three different definitions
The first one, which according to Hall is the most common is: things are
said to be popular because large amounts of people consume them. This
is a definition which focuses around commercialism and consumption.
However this definition has problems as it assumes that all audiences are
passive and accept what they are fed by the media.
Ex. 'Daily Mirror' is written for the working class, imitates their style of speech,
however is written by the ruling class.
The second definition, Hall feels is more useful, this explains the popular
as all those things that people do or have done in their lives.
Ex. Coronation Street(a British soap opera) imitates the lives of working class
culture. Although inaccurate, people are still able to connect and identify with it.
Hall's final definition of popular culture is that it involves class struggle,
each part of popular culture has its’ roots in a certain class.
Ex. Hall offers the example of the swastika, that potent emblem of Nazi Germany
which was subsequently re-appropriated(and thereby re-accented) within the
street styles of youth cultures in the 1970s and early 1980s, as a multi-accentual
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6. Few more extracts from
NOTES ON DECONSTRUCTIN ‘THE POPULAR’
Periodisation: Hall addresses out desire to categorize everything.
Multi-accentuality: The idea of multi-accentuality suggests there
are no popular cultural forms or signs that ‘belong’ to a particular
class and whose meaning can be guaranteed forever.
Tradition: Everything changes. There is then, no single
transhistorical ‘theory’ of the popular in Hall’s work.
Binary Oppositions: Hall expands upon some of binaristic ways of
thinking about popular culture. It is what allows him to move
beyond the kind of common-sense binary oppositions (soap opera
vs. opera) with which this chapter began and which have tended
to dominate postwar debate on the subject.
the struggle depends upon the success or failure in giving popular
culture ‘a socialist accent’, not as class vs. class but the power bloc
vs. the people.
By exposing the power relations, the tensions between opposition
and resistance that at any given moment govern the popular,
Hall’s hope is to ‘shift the dispositions of power’ .
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7. John Akomfrah’s film The Stuart Hall Project (2013)
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8. Thank You