Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 60

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The Popular Culture Review

is established only by means of some theoretical prosthetic, in
essence, limiting the study of popular culture to either an
exemplification of the theoretical or a theorization of theory. This
snobbism, ironically, quickly turns against theoretical investigations,
inasmuch as theory can be used as merely an ornament—a necessary
evil if popular culture studies is to define its place in an academy
given over to the theoretical enterprise. In these terms, theory is
very useful from a political standpoint but is itself hardly connected
to what we might think of as the object of popular culture's inquiry.
This is a fundamental resistance with which we can begin to construct
a theory of popular culture: our resistance to the frequent, if not
"popular," uses of theory in the study of popular culture.
I would argue that a resistance to theory might be redirected
in terms of what can be learned from it. We don’t have to ask, "What
can popular culture teach theory?" nor even, "What can theory teach
popular culture?" Instead, we might inquire, "What is it about the
theoretical and the popular which make learning possible?" That is,
"does learning allow us, as a third term in an argument, to constitute
as a necessary condition the lack which the theoretical and the
popular represent for each other?"
I will use the Actaon myth to specify the use of learning as a
"third term," as a means to make apparent what gets silenced if we