Why We Talk the Talk We Talk

Granted, the term ‘unpopular culture’ adds some spice to the soup of terms we ¹ usually stir when we talk the talk we are used to (supposed to?) talk in the study of popular culture. ‘Unpopular culture’, to be precise, sounds somewhat more ‘exotic’, even subversive, compared to the more established repertoire of concepts that usually come in dichotomies—‘mass culture’, ‘low culture’, ‘the mainstream’, as opposed to ‘elite culture’, ‘high culture’, ‘avant-garde’, to mention perhaps the most prominent examples. But what’s in it, one might well ask, despite its challenging prefix ‘un-’, which, indeed, somewhat surprisingly, irritates our set of taken-for-granted terms and concepts? My contribution takes this question as a starting point to explore if, and, if yes, in how far thinking and talking about ‘unpopular’ culture might be a fruitful exercise, not so much with regard to the examination of specific popular cultural practices and forms of expression, but rather with an eye on the ways we talk a talk in which the above-mentioned terms, including the ‘unpopular’, are used as categories of self-positioning, rather than as analytical categories.