If, for example, it may be theoretically correct that tactical resistance finally serves to strengthen the system then Fiske's entire theoretical perspective of the progressive nature of popular culture is built on quicksand. The position that suggests that avant-garde textuality is the only course of resistance is neither challenged nor refuted by designating it elitist. Calling a spade a spade will not make spades disappear. What Collins believes to be profoundly disturbing, an elitist will find profoundly healthy. In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind , Allen Bloom upholds that there are absolute qualitative distinctions of cultural genres.
Culture is something that was .
In marked contrast with theoretical perspectives that do not attempt to challenge the dichotomy but uphold the unproblematic existence of high and popular culture. And yet each position fails in finding an inevitable theoretical objection to the presupposed otherness of popular culture. It seems impossible to study popular culture without a point of view that implies an otherness of some kind. At which point we have to consider the possibility that this otherness is intrinsically inscribed in popular culture and literature, which boils down to asking if we can find a specific, distinct, popular aesthetics that differs essentially from a non-popular aesthetics. The answer to that question must be no.