Mcdull is more than a toy but represents something intimate entangled within the relationship between my boyfriend ah Lai(亞賴) and I. Mcdull and my boyfriend share a very noticeable characteristic that both of their right eyelids are blackened, slightly swelled, like a bruise. At the first sight of Mcdull in a stationery shop, I was shocked by their similarity. My intuition told me ah Lai is Mcdull.

The identification works in the same way that Louis Althusser uses vocal hailing to illustrate the concept of interpellation, which can be conceived of a process of identification which constitutes the subject of the hailed within discourses or ideologies(Weedon 2004:5-9). What distinguishes my own experience of identifying Mcdull with ah Lai is the visual image that is hailing instead of a voice. However, in despite of their having the same blackened right eyelids, I am interested to know what makes such identification possible which Althusser’s theory has no answer to provide. One of the intellectual resources I have come across in workshops on cultural economy might offer me a hint about how to make sense of my Mcdull experience. Adorno, a figure for Frankfurt School, represents a brand of theories which understand popular culture, as Mcdull it is, heavily carries ideology with the sole purpose to mask me away from the social reality. John Storey defines ideology as ‘the way in which certain cultural texts and practices present distorted images of reality’ (cited in Miles 2001:19). However, the question as to what social reality is Mcdull, if we take it as a cultural text, to distort immediately provokes and lingers in my mind. Or re-framed in Marxist term, what types of false consciousness Mcdull is carrying and passing on me? Is hugging Mcdull every time I wake up or kissing Mcdull before I go to bed a symptom of the working false consciousness? If we deny that there is no space for individual agency, what other alternative ways of understanding myself and my experience with Mcdull available and plausible?

This project is inspired by Nick Couldry’s Inside Culture whose primary objective is to challenge the neglect of individual cultural experience in the field of Cultural Studies research. Well before approaching the intimate relationship that our life has with Mcdull, or what and how Mcdull signifies and gets entangled with our cultural experience, theoretical foundations on which my analysis, or in Couldry’s phrase the exercise of ‘thinking culture through the self’(2000:144), should be laid down first. What Couldry convincingly argues throughout the book is that if Cultural Studies is to advocate and achieve participatory democracy in which every person’s voices and experience, irrespective of how they are marginalized or suppressed in the dominant culture, should be treated valuable and get heard, there is no alternative for Cultural Studies but to go beyond the way individuals have long been conceptualized. The complexity of individual cultural experience should no longer be neglected but seriously taken into consideration at full.

Couldry traces the approaches that have dominated Cultural Studies research in respect of the relationship between the individual and the wider cultural environment in which the individual is formed. Inherited from the perspective on culture that Raymond Williams developed in the 1950s, one of the hegemonic thinking sees the individual as a unique, coherent entity. The place of individual experience is merely reduced to serve as evidence that validates the theoretical resources or framework the researchers choose well before individual experience is actually taken into account. Such an approach that Williams adopts has something to do with the issue of the time at stake. Williams, as Couldry argues, makes a deliberate choice to incline towards working-class, however, unfortunately, such a well-informed choice has an undesirable consequence of preventing him from acknowledging other identities and experiences cutting across the working-class, which is in effect much more heterogeneous than Williams might/should have thought (2000:50). This conceptualization subsumes individual experience to wider culture but runs the risk of failing to recognize individual agency - the ability to resist.

For Couldry, the diversity of individual experience is a pre-condition for really understanding what culture is and therefore, he tries to formulate an alternative perspective in which individual experience is no longer naively reduced to merely reflect the ‘external’ structure but seek for a new perspective being sensitive and delicate enough to capture the complexity of the relationship between individuals and the wider culture. It is admitted and well taken as a fact that every single cultural resource available pre-exists the formation of the self and identity. Media are the cultural resources that the individual in a commercialized society can never escape. Individuals are constantly bombarded by advertisements and other media messages anywhere they/we go. If we are to admit that media are one of the building bricks we use to construct personal sense of the self, be it consciously or unconsciously, Mcdull in my life might seem to be a vivid case that ah Lai and I are simply ‘nothing but the effects of certain historically shifting practices and “technologies”’’(Couldry 2000:117).

Put aside the questions of agency for a moment, the earlier interrogation of what purpose the practices and ‘technologies’ serve have not been resolved. One possible answer is that the identification I have built with Mcdull is the logic of late capitalism as suggested by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984). Jameson argues that capitalism has become so exhaustive and all-encompassing that it has reached nearly every social and cultural area and it keeps exploring new area to conquer. Following Jameson’s insight, my identification is part of the logic of late capitalism and serves as a tool to recruit fresh and new consumers (Miles 2001:84-86). Ah Lai and I are, unfortunately, the newly recruited converts.

I personally find both Althusser’s and Jameson’s theorization of subjectivity formation and the individual in capitalist society fascinating but at the same time dissatisfied with the way individual experience is handled, if they really did. The first difficult question that Althusser has to address is the very common experience and observation that not everyone doing window shopping would be hailed by the hailing Mcdull’s image which is no doubt intentionally placed in a highly ‘noticeable’ position to catch the attention of passerby. What perplexes me is under what conditions interpellation works. And, above all, to what extent do I play an active role in shaping the conditions necessary for interpellation.

I would argue that it is the emotional investment that I actively contribute to our intimate relationship sets out the pre-condition, otherwise the identification could not have happened. In this sense, it is the intimate relationship built between ah Lai and I that determines or predisposes me to Mcdull with which I am willing to be associated emotionally. This understanding leaves much more room for personal agency in a sense that we are not under total manipulation of popular culture which is sometimes said to be exhaustively dominating our personal preferences and tastes.

Concurring with Couldry, I am not too naïve to think of myself as completely free agents. As the book’s title suggests, we are all ‘inside culture’. There is no vantage point from which we can observe, judge or even resist ‘objectively’. The very language we employ to reflect on the way culture has been shaping us is itself a cultural construct (2000:50). Nonetheless, using a language that pre-exits us does not necessarily mean it entirely determines and structures one’s reflection. Couldry cautions us against sliding two perspectives. One perspective sees using shared cultural resources as determining conditions that structure the very specific content of our reflection while the other one perceives those shared cultural resources as constitutive or limiting conditions, which has nothing to do with the reflection content but set limits as to the types of experience people are exposed. Weedon echoes with Couldry that there are a range of identities and experience available but people’s access to them is restricted by their gender, age, class and sexuality (2004:7). Following Couldry’s and Weedon’s arguments, what limiting conditions or social position that renders me a particular way to experience Mcdull and facilitates the process of identification?

Resistance is a theme that runs through many Cultural Studies research and critique. Couldry even argues that to fully do justice to the complexity of individual cultural experience, resistance is a theme the Cultural Studies practitioners have to pay full attention and document where they appear. I would understand Couldry’s emphasis on resistance as a means not to reduce personal experience into mere reflection or patterns of the wider social and cultural context. Resistance reminds us of the gap between the individual and the environment in which her/his subjectivity is formed. The gap between I and Mcdull lies in the fact that I am not a big fan of Mcdull. This means I have not read all its cartoons, comics and magazines. Neither did I buy every single commodity with a Mcdull brand name. The relationship between us is not pre-determined, or at least totally, by the ideology Mcdull carries (if it really does). Rather, Mcdull as a figure is re-appropriated by ah Lai and I to signify a sense of intimacy. We treat Mcdull as our son. We talk to it every morning and it does talk to us too (though it is in ah Lai’s or my voice). Mcdull serves as a posthouse, a transit in our communication. I could role-play as Mcdull and talk to ah Lai and vice versa.

How can I make sense of such a role-playing and its implications for communications and relationship? Bakhtin’s theorization of communication might give us some hints. Role-playing is a type of speech act. The utterances produced in speech are social by definition because the hearer and the listener can only make sense of the utterances if they share the same language system. As for the formation of subjectivity, Bakhtin argues that it involves ‘hearing’ and ‘assimilating’ of words and discourses uttered by others in various contexts. Role-playing Mcdull and the communications we have contribute to the formation of subjectivity. The language we use to refer to our ‘parental’ relationship has something to do with our desire to form a family. Once framed as paternal relationship, ah Lai and I are actually imagining ourselves to play a role that is denied in the dominant heterosexist society. In this sense, the experience with Mcdull is political in nature. Couldry contends that people have to construct their own subjectivity by whatever resources available to them. It is more crucial to those whose cultural experience is marginalized and thrown ‘outside’ culture. It is the tension instead of identification that constitutes our subjectivities and underlies the very use of Mcdull between us.

I was once tempted to directly apply the central concept of ‘lack’ in Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis to explain my political and emotional investment in Mcdull and the linguistically constructed ‘paternal’ relationship. However, direct application of Lacan’s psychoanalysis is what Couldry criticizes Cultural Studies research for not taking individual experience seriously. The mistake is to treat individual experience as ‘merely the place for working out wider structural patterns’ (2000:47).

However, if I decide not to draw on the answer-providing psychoanalysis to understand my desire to form a family through Mcdull, then, I have to return to how I read Mcdull in the first place. The way I read Mcdull might have bearing on why I ‘chose’ Mcdull to form a ‘father-son’ relationship. Analyzing Mcdull surely begs the question of what texts are. Chris Barker defines a text as ‘anything that generates meaning through signifying practices’ (2000:393). This definition is much more inclusive than the one which confines texts to classical canon and textual analysis to elucidation of the true meanings embedded within words. However, Couldry criticizes this understanding for ignoring the practical dimension because not every single piece of textual material is regarded as a text. Or put it another way, textual materials do not necessarily function as a text. It is the readers who deliberately ‘interpret [a textual material] as a discrete, unified whole’ (2000:70-71) before it assumes the status of ‘a text’. Couldry’s working definition places readers in a central position. Having inspired by Couldry’s insight, Barker’s definition of text could be re-written as anything that generates meaning through signifying practices in the reader’s own perspective.

The meanings signified by a text become meaningful only if they are able to be articulated with individual experience. Growing up in a single family, though this family background has never been widely celebrated in Mcdull’s films and comics, poor academic performance and being ugly are characteristics with which I am identified with. The characteristics themselves pose a challenge to dominant popular culture in which the main character is often described as perfect as it can be. The sense of rebellion, as I interpret, is similar to what drives me in the local Tongzhi movement. They seem to echo each other though in an entirely different form. The general impression I gained through watching two Mcdull’s films is that they are more than cartoons but critically interrogate one’s existence and the wider social and cultural sphere. It is through the seeming stupidity of Mcdull that certain issues such as Hong Kong education and urban planning are critically and ironically accessed. The sense of rebellion and criticism is then embodied in Mcdull and I use Mcdull to form a gay-couple ‘family’ whose very existence has yet to be socially and legally recognized.

From the above discussion, I have gone through what choices I made when I bought Mcdull and how it serves as a metaphor of rebellion that links my commitment in social movement. What I have attempted in the paper is to illustrate that the relationship between popular culture through the case of Mcdull and its participation in the formation of my individual experience is never one-way direction. I do project my own values, expectations and preference onto Mcdull that it is not originally designed to take. Although the appropriation of Mcdull might not be counted as resistance (this is not my intention here either), my experience with Mcdull at least shows that the complexity an individual has when it comes into contact with popular culture cannot be downplayed or neglected. As Couldry succinctly says ‘ignoring the scale of individual cultural experience means missing crucial insights into what culture is’ (2000:45).

Reference:
1. Chris Weedon (2004) Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging. New York: Open University Press.
2. Min Eung Jun (1992) ‘Contributions of Habermas and Bakhtin to the Assimilation of Modernity and Postmodernity within Cultural Studies’, Department of Communications, Rhode Island College.
3. Nick Couldry (2000) Inside Culture: re-imagining the method of cultural studies. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
4. Steven Miles (2001) Social theory in the real world. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

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