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Abstract
This dissertation argues that popular culture plays an integral and creative role in contemporary political life. Few resources exist within political science to justify such a position. In fact, political science – and political theory in particular – have paid surprisingly little attention to popular culture. I contend that this neglect is due in part, and ironically, to the lasting influence of the cultural analyses of Harold Lasswell and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Indeed, despite the apparent dissimilarities between Lasswell's proto-positivism and the Frankfurt School's normative political philosophy, both conceptualized popular culture as a collection of propagandistic symbols that elites use to maintain their social and political authority with a minimum of dissent. For these thinkers, popular culture served as the loudspeaker for more powerful political conditions, and was therefore ultimately determined by those conditions. To provide an alternative this dismissive viewpoint, I turn to the work of John Dewey and Michel Foucault. Drawing upon their treatments of ordinary activities such as art, discipline, education, and sexual conduct, I contend that in articulating socio-political problems felt especially pressing to its consumers – from racism to civic (dis-)engagement, liberal individualism, and gender norms – popular culture shapes the way such problems can be seen, heard, and engaged in everyday life. More than a propagandistic mirror of our existing political environment, I argue that popular culture helps to actually create this environment. Popular culture is, in this sense, a more dynamic political activity than the discipline of political science tends to assume.
