Popular culture cannot be studied apart from dominant cultural production.

Evidence

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. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1001

Categorization

• XREF: Directly contradicts textbook ‘history from below’ approaches — an echo of the autonomy-vs-encapsulation tension in the earlier essay on popular moralism.