ABSTRACT
In the struggle over educational ideology and the ideology of education-the famous ‘storm’ over the university (Searle) that has intensified within the last decade-one presupposition emerges as common to all positions across the spectrum of debate, from radical right to radical left: popular culture presents an urgent, fundamental and undeniable challenge to pedagogical theory and practice. Of course, how this challenge is understood by various partisans of the debate over the canon and curricular reform is at the very center of the controversies provoked by these issues of reform. The effects of popular culture are generally viewed apocalyptically by both the left and the right, signifying the end of educational practice as we know it. We can only hope so. However, the right wants to ‘reclaim the legacy’ (Bennett), quite literally reinstituting an educational system based on nineteenth-century models that ignore changed conditions of circulation of information and knowledge in the technologically sophisticated twentieth-century public arena, and in effect banish popular cultural forms from the classroom. The left is struggling to develop analytical models that take into account changed social, cultural and material conditions, but ironically they often fail to extend their analysis to the very system within which they are developing those models, thus frequently reproducing the very relations of cultural and social power that they seek to investigate, rarely questioning their own positions within an educational system that produces, organizes and legitimates certain means or methods of the transmission of knowledge and power. I want to argue here that the models that the left is developing are much more productive than those of the right, but in order to keep from ultimately reproducing the same mistakes of the right (albeit from a dif ferent perspective), they need to incorporate a self-critical dimension that allows the intellectual-the teacher-to understand that the readings they produce make up one part of a whole arena of evaluative activity, a part that is not necessarily privileged once we begin to question the traditional relations of information, knowledge and power as they circulate within the classroom. The last part of this essay applies and critiques a particular model for the study of popular culture, Ien Ang’s influential audience response study of Dallas viewers. Through a reading of a contemporary ‘quality television’1 program, thirtysomething, I hope to suggest how other evaluative mechanisms that are operative outside the academy are put in to play, complicating the relations of ‘reading’, interpretation, response and knowledge that intellectuals activate within the classroom to justify the study of popular culture.
