ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the formulation briefly in relation to different concepts of ideology. It explains the formulation in more detail and demonstrates how it might be used to understand the 'determinations' that influence the production and consumption of popular culture. Marxism is a difficult and contentious body of work. The Marxist approach to culture insists that texts and practices must be analysed in relation to their historical conditions of production. As William Morris observed, capitalism 'has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures'. While Matthew Arnold and Leavisism had worried that popular culture represented a threat to cultural and social authority, the Frankfurt School argue that it actually produces the opposite effect: it maintains cultural and social authority.
