Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture Quotes

“Having a good time’ may be made to seem so important as to override almost all other claims; yet when it has been allowed to do so, having a good time becomes largely a matter of routine. The strongest argument against modern mass enter- tainments is not that they debase taste – debasement can be alive and active – but that they over excite it, eventually dull it, and finally kill it. . . . They kill it at the nerve, and yet so bemuse and persuade their audience that the audience is almost entirely unable to look up and say, ‘But in fact this cake is made of sawdust’.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“Whereas in the past a worker lived in his or her work, he or she now works in order to live outside his or her work.”
― John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction

“[P]eople are not reducible to the commodities they consume.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“[I]t invites us to think by not thinking for us; this is not to be dismissed as an absence of thought (or ‘moral tone’ for that matter), but as an absence full of potential presence, which the reader is invited to actively produce.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“There are . . . no masses; there are only ways of seeing [other] people as masses.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“[It] was approached from a distance and gingerly, held at arm’s length by outsiders who clearly lacked any sense of fondness for or participation in the forms they were studying.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“Cultural choice and consumption become both the sign of class belonging and the mark of class difference.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“[David Manning White] maintains that critics romanticize the past in order to castigate the present.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“For Barthes, this would be a classic example of the operations of ideology, the attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular; an attempt to pass off that which is cultural (i.e. humanly made) as something which is natural (i.e. just existing).”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

“The way in which ideology conceals the reality of subordination from those who are powerless: the subordinate classes do not see themselves as oppressed or exploited.”
― John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture