Notes on Popular Culture

Abstract

For those of us who weathered the historical experience of populism, expressions such as “popular culture” and “culture of the people” provoke a certain distrust and a vague sense of uneasiness. We must bear in mind, however, that these reactions are born from the memory of the political context in which those expressions were abundantly employed. In all of its manifestations, paternalistic or forceful, populism is a politics of manipulating the masses who are attributed with a passivity, immaturity, disorganization and consequently, with a mixture of innocence and violence, justifying the need to educate and control them so that they may appear “correctly” on the stage of history. The populist is obliged to recognize the reality of a crude culture deemed “popular” while also valuing it both positively (as the basis of political and social practices) and negatively (as the bearer of those attributes that were imposed upon the masses). This ambiguity produces the image of an ideal popular culture (either in the sense of an idea to be realized or in the sense of a model to be followed) whose implementation will depend upon the existence of an enlightened vanguard committed to the project of enlightening the people. This vanguardist and unconsciously authoritarian form of enlightenment carries with it an instrumental idea of culture and the people,1 whose most refined expression appears in the 1962 manifesto of the Center of Popular Culture.2