Hop on Pop, The Politics and Pleasures
of Popular Culture
by Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane
Shattuc, editors
Duke University Press, Durham, 2002
748 pp., illus. b/w, paper, $34.95
ISBN: 0-8223-2737-6.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
Hop on Pop, the editors carefully and patiently
explain, is a play on words. I wonder who would have thought otherwise?
Hop on Pop, the editors even more carefully and patiently explain,
is the printed place to be for those who want to travel along the
new way of doing 'cultural studies'. In their introductory 'Manifesto',
they claim that this new route is characterised by its immediacy,
multivalence, accessibility, particularity, contextualism, and situationalism.
Which basically means that the practitioners of this style avoid any
confrontation with whatever canon, tradition or theory of the past
while they are writing about their own obsessions, delusions and hobbyhorses
and still want to be recognised as academics and theoreticians.
The book is organised in seven parts, under the topics of 'Self',
'Maker', 'Performance', 'Taste', 'Change', 'Home', and 'Emotion',
but the editors carefully and patiently assure the reader that this
has no real meaning and that each article or essay could go under
a different topic. So why bother?
Most of the essays are structured along the same lines: experience
or anecdote, theory, rejection or critique of theory, experience or
anecdote. Bar the anecdotes and the experiences, and what you are
left with is a collection of overviews of theories of culture in general
and popular culture in particular. Covering about every canonised
author, starting from Marx, Gramsci, and Weber, past Raymond Williams,
Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Cherteau, and Michel Foucault to arrive
at Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Fredric Jameson, there is a
lot of understanding and misunderstanding, digesting and indigestion
in this book. (Unbelievably so, and telling for the quality of the
work, there is not a single reference to Guy Debord but some ten references
to Oprah Winfrey). Mostly, no real insights are added, no theoretical
frameworks constructed or expanded, no generalisation endeavoured.
The only 'real' subject is the particular, the individual, the local.
That is as well, but why call this a new way of doing science unless
you call it applied culturology, therapeutic sociology or plainly
talkshow philosophy?
A lot of the essays, however, are very enjoyable. I liked the pieces
on ethnicity in Star Trek (Peter Chvany), Opera, television and the
black diva (Dianne Brooks) and 'Narrativizing Cyber-Travel: cd-rom
Travel Games and the Art of Historical Recovery' (Ellen Strain) most.
Probably because I am, myself, a Trekkie, an opera-lover and a player
of Myst and the like. And this judgment is, true to the way cultural
studies ought to be done according to the editors, as good as any
other, since it is immediate, multivalent, contextual, accessible,
particular and situated.
By the way, dear editors, 'Hop on Pop' is not an alliteration but
an assonance. Take this from an academic who still thinks scholarship
counts for something.