Popular cultural change is imposed re-education and transformation, not natural decline

Evidence

Throughout the long transition into agrarian capitalism and then in the formation and development of industrial capitalism, there is a more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the laboring classes and the poor. This fact must be the starting point for any study, both of the basis for, and of the transformations of, popular culture. The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout that history reveal themselves, time and again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions, and ways of life of the popular classes. Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense. And one of the principal sites of resistance to the forms through which this “reformation” of the people was pursued lay in popular tradition. That is why popular culture is linked, for so long, to questions of tradition, of traditional forms of life—and why its “traditionalism” has been so often misinterpreted as a product of a merely conservative impulse, backward looking and anachronistic. Struggle and resistance—but also, of course, appropriation and ex -propriation. Time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. “Cultural change” is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the center of popular life, actively marginalized. Rather than simply “falling into disuse” through the Long March to modernization, things are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place. … Even more important than ban and proscription is that subtle and slippery customer—“reform” (with all the positive and unambiguous overtones it carries today). One way or another, “the people” are frequently the object of “reform”: often, for their own good, of course—“in their best interests.” We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”—yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the laboring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. Popular culture is neither, in a “pure” sense, the popular traditions of resistance to these processes; nor is it the forms which are superimposed on and over them. It is the ground on which the transformations are worked. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘transformation’ as the active reworking of traditions — distinct from mere resistance or imposition — which is Hall’s central analytic category here.
• SEED: Offers a lens for an essay: reading ‘modernization’ discourse as a euphemism for the active destruction of ways of life — applies to current tech/industrial transitions.
• XREF: connects to: Pedagogical reinvention begins by questioning the status quo and re-experiencing the ordinary. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 49