Abstract:
Within Arena, popular culture has been considered as both a manifestation of the problem of radical ‘autonomy’ and as the scene through which we might glimpse the outbreak of an alternative future – a ‘transitional practice’ of sorts.1 Looking back over Arena’s engagement with popular culture, I am struck initially by the now quaint sound of the phrase ‘popular culture’. The proliferation of information technologies over the fifty years of Arena’s existence has reduced the significance of one of the factors by which culture was distinguished as popular or elite: accessibility. Now the terrain of the popular extends across the cultural field, its forms of consumption and production shaping the cultural ‘content’ once held in place by aesthetic and social distinction. Recently the novelist Will Self noted this shift as it affects the ‘literary novel’: from ‘the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone’ in the twentieth century to marginal form in the twenty-first. He went on to describe the cultural present, dominated by digitized connectivity, as.
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