HIGH POLITICS AND LOW DATA 179used by people in the construction of meaning about their world and their activities” (Ó Tuathail
and Agnew 1992, 192–93)—and a structure of meaning-in-use—“a language or system of repre-
sentation that has developed socially in order to make and circulate a coherent set of meanings”
(Fiske 1987, 14). Discourses—like that of neoliberal globalization—are sets of rules for ordering
and relating discursive elements (subjects, objects, their characteristics, tropes, narratives, and so
on) in such a way that some meanings rather than others are constituted. Conversely, we have
reached the boundaries of a discourse when representations fail to be meaningful, when they
seem “unintelligible” or “irrational” (Muppidi 1999, 124–25). Discourses, then, are sources of
power because ruling some meanings in and others out is already and fundamentally an exercise
in power. Moreover, some dominant discourses become common sense—what Gramsci called
the “diffuse, unco-ordinated features of a generic mode of thought” (1971, 330, note) that provide
our “categories of practical consciousness” (S. Hall 1986, 30). Constructions like “globaliza-
tion,” that is, become common sense when they “are treated as if they neutrally or transparently
represent the real” (Weldes 1999a, 226). Alternative discourses, in contrast, can provide a resis-
tant form of power that allows dominant representations to be contested. Discourses are capital in
the ubiquitous battle over meaning.
Discourses—whether dominant or not—manifest themselves in assorted representations. “Be-
cause the real is never wholly present to us—how it is real for us is always mediated through some
representational practice” (M. Shapiro 1988, xii), and these representations are necessarily cul-
tural. Although the term “culture” is contested (R. Williams 1983, 160), we can usefully define it
as “the context within which people give meaning to their actions and experiences and make
sense of their lives” (Tomlinson 1991, 7). Culture, in this sense, is less a set of artifacts—novels,
television programs, paintings, comics, for instance (although it is these things as well)—than a
set of practices “concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings—the ‘giving and
taking of meaning’—between members of a society or group” (S. Hall 1997a, 2). Understood in
this way, culture encompasses the multiplicity of discourses or “codes of intelligibility” (S. Hall
1985, 105) through which meanings are constructed and practices produced. This multiplicity, in
turn, implies that meanings can be contested. Culture is thus composed of potentially contested
codes and representations; it designates a field on which battles over meaning are fought. Popular
culture constitutes one substantial element in this field of contestable meanings. As a result, “low
data” are essential to questions of meaning, its constitution, and its reception.
The links between popular culture and world politics, as noted above, are intimate and com-
plex. On the one hand, popular culture helps to create and sustain the conditions for contempo-
rary world politics. “With the exception of some resistant forms,” Michael Shapiro has argued,
“music, theater, TV weather forecasts, and even cereal box scripts tend to endorse prevailing
power structures by helping to reproduce the beliefs and allegiances necessary for their uncon-
tested functioning” (1992, 1). U.S. popular culture in the mid-1980s, for instance, helped to “re-
deem Vietnam and Teheran” with such films as Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985) and the
“techno-twit novels” of Tom Clancy, such as The Hunt for Red October (1984) and Red Storm
Rising (1986) (Lipschutz 2001, 146). To the extent that popular culture reproduces the structure
and content of dominant discourses, it helps to generate approval for, or at least acquiescence to,
familiar policies and prevailing world orders. Popular culture is thus implicated in the “produc-
tion of consent” (S. Hall 1982, 64).
But resistance is not futile. Because dominant readings are not determinate, it is always pos-
sible for popular culture to defy the boundaries of common sense, to contest the taken-for-granted.^9
While cultural practices constrain and oppress people, they simultaneously provide resources to
challenge those constraints. We can, then, examine popular culture for representations that resist