No popular culture history is valid that ignores dominant cultural machinery

Evidence

We have now begun to speak, not just about discontinuities and qualitative change, but about a very severe fracture, a deep rupture—especially in popular culture in the postwar period. Here it is not only a matter of a change in cultural relations between the classes, but of the changed relationship between the people and the concentration and expansion of the new cultural apparatuses themselves. But could one seriously now set out to write the history of popular culture without taking into account the monopolization of the cultural industries, on the back of a profound technological revolution (it goes without saying that no “profound technological revolution” is ever in any sense “purely” technical)? To write a history of the culture of the popular classes exclusively from inside those classes, without understanding the ways in which they are constantly held in relation with the institutions of dominant cultural production, is not to live in the twentieth century. The point is clear about the twentieth century. I believe it holds good for the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries as well. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1001

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno/Horkheimer culture industry analysis from The Frankfurt School, where commercial culture is read as domination; Hall here departs from pure manipulation theory.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: why histories of ‘the people’ written purely from below (folk revivalism, workerist nostalgia) quietly erase the technological and industrial machinery that has always shaped class culture.