I’m learning about a lot of things that have come to be of special interest to me in my American Popular Culture course, and that’s what I feel like writing about now. Everything I will write about on this topic is either directly from the course, from Tony Myers’s book, Slavoj Žižek, or from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I found a very useful summary of the latter here. This isn’t anything I’m writing formally, it’s just mostly for my own entertainment, so I don’t really feel the need to go into any extensive bibliography beyond that. I’m not going to get into it much today, I’ll just give a short preface and get more into the heart of it tomorrow.

Before any discussion is started, it is important to understand what I mean when I speak of “popular culture,” as the term often brings to mind a certain field of meaning that may vary substantially from what I’m discussing. Popular culture can be thought of as a sort of giant group mind in which we’re all little neurons. Our culture is literally working something out through popular culture, and this manifests itself in a number of interesting ways. What we as a culture are really worried about becomes very apparent. Popular culture is immediately responsive to these things; that is, if we’re worried about something as a culture, it will immediately be exhibited one way or another in what we hold in pop culture. It’s worth studying because it contains everything about us: our politics, our economy, our psychological orientation, how we’re changing. It reacts to and mirrors our socioeconomic and political processes and our conflicts, and it does so fairly directly and immediately.

Certainly, in order to explain this view of pop culture, one must also explore the meaning of paradigms, the transfer from the modern to the postmodern, the importance of the 1950s in all of this, and quite a few other concepts so that the discussion is put into something of a proper context. I'm also going to add a preliminary discussion of Lacan's Real, Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Big Other. I say "preliminary" because at this point, I only understand them on a very elementary level, though I find them incredibly interesting and relevant to the exploration of pop culture.

Stay tuned!