ABSTRACT
In this article I want to address questions that have concerned me for some time; specifically, what pleasures are involved in the consumption of sport, and what role do heroes, as figures for identification, play. First, however, it is necessary to explain briefly the sense in which I am using the concept of popular culture. I am operating with a definition of popular culture derived largely from the work of the Open University course team who devised a popular culture course in the early 1980s. Broadly speaking, they argued that popular culture should be understood neither as the authentic culture of the people, nor as commercialised mass-produced artefacts, but rather as the result of processes of struggle and contestation between cultural practices generated from below and imposed from above (Bennett 1981). While many cultural products have emerged from the practices of ordinary people to become popular, this production cannot take place separate from the process of mass production and distribution. In the era of mechanical production, mass culture and globalisation, language and meaning are themselves not neutral. It is no longer possible to conceptualise a folk tradition that can carry on un-influenced by, and in ignorance of, the world of Madonna, Michael Jackson, or Maradona. However, the alternative mass culture model of a domain of mass-produced cultural products imposed on a passive unthinking indiscriminate audience is not tenable either. Popular culture has to address its audience – it has to relate to their real lived experience, their lives, in some meaningful way, precisely in order to become popular. This need means that popular cultural production can never be totally controlled by producers – its success always also depends on striking the public nerve – articulating the right elements at the right moment in time for the right audience. In short, popular culture needs to be understood as a site of struggle, and as a field of complex and contradictory meanings (Bennett 1981).
