Presented at Historical Materialism, London, November 2013. Full paper.

This paper begins from a question: why study pop culture? Or, rather, why study popular culture as someone committed to revolutionary politics or Marxism more specifically? And here I don’t mean studying popular culture in order to engage in politics in a way which would subordinate the study of pop culture as means to political ends. We see this kind of reductive pop culture critique fairly frequently, in which the condemnation of some cultural artefact as ideologically mystifying, or the praise of it as expressing a radical point of view, are taken as occasions for organizing, rallying around, or against, that work. There’s nothing wrong with this, I suppose (although when, as is often the case, the mobilization involved is purely virtual, this kind of activity can combine a self- congratulatory self-understanding as bravely political with little if any political effect). However, this political deployment of popular culture makes for bad criticism because it is (sometimes, and this is admirable, avowedly) uninterested in the particular features of the work under discussion: the interest is in how the work can be deployed as a slogan, not how it functions as a cultural work. What this misses is the aesthetic dimension: how the formal features of the work strike the sensorium of the audience, and what various and ramified effects they produce in doing so Another way of phrasing my question, then, might be: what can a Marxist political project gain from paying attention to the aesthetics of popular culture? And, relatedly, what kind of aesthetic analysis will be valuable from a Marxist perspective?