The Notion of ‘The People’

The use notion of ‘the people’ in the discourse of the social sciences is indeed one that has eluded consensus. Distinctions between ‘the serious’ and ‘the popular’ in, say, aesthetics and cultural studies, have for a long time informed connotations of a lowbrow, naïve or shallow quality for the products of popular creativity. The ‘serious/popular’ dichotomy sustained a series of other distinctions: ‘the people’ were distinguished from the elites, and, by extension, their more ‘refined’ tastes and cultural production, their more serious predispositions. As Derrida suggests, meaning is often defined in terms of binary oppositions, where ‘one of the two terms governs the other’; integrated in such binary schemata, concepts are categorised and hierarchised (Derrida 1992:41). Thus, to return to the fields of cultural studies and aesthetics where ‘the people’ became the subject of contestation and debate, the notion of ‘the popular’ became one of the central preoccupations for members of the Frankfurt School, mainly in the context of what was then referred to as ‘mass culture’, or the culture industry. In the work of Horkheimer and Adorno (1944), ‘the popular’ was often approached as a field comprising practices, ideologies and cultural products that debased the masses, or even flattered their ‘shallowness’. Dismayed at the state of mass culture, and equating it with popular culture, they produced a very pessimistic account of how ordinary people became passive consumers of culture industry products.