ABSTRACT
Before considering how to move beyond the self-imposed limitations of latter-day cultural populism, already signalled in the concluding section of the last chapter, I should like to summarise the main critical themes of this book. First, an uncritical populist drift in contemporary cultural studies has been identified. The case is stated polemically, accentuating discernible trends in order to highlight consequential dilemmas of culture and politics. That ordinary people use the symbolic resources available to them under present conditions for meaningful activity is both manifest and endlessly elaborated upon by the new revisionism. Thus, emancipatory projects to liberate people from their alleged entrapment, whether they know they are entrapped or not, are called into question by this fundamental insight. Economic exploitation, racism, gender and sexual oppression, to name but a few, exist, but the exploited, estranged and oppressed cope, and, furthermore, if such writers as John Fiske and Paul Willis are to be believed, they cope very well indeed, making valid sense of the world and obtaining grateful pleasure from what they receive. Apparently, there is so much action in the micro-politics of everyday life that the Utopian promises of a better future, which were once so enticing for critics of popular culture, have lost all credibility.
