He offers a structuralist response to the question of academic legitimacy.
Every cultural artifact is a potential sujet for critical enquiry and analysis.
But I find in his arguments no answer to the question why we should pay attention to the products of popular culture, other than that we are excused from bothering with it because the fact that they exist is enough to warrant our attention. Hayden White seems to reduce the difference between high and low or popular culture essentially to a difference in the complexity of linguistic expression. Yet in order to speak of degrees of sublimation and subtlety of articulation we have to agree on a particular pivotal standard of expression. The World of less complex degrees of sublimation and subtlety of articulation', would stand the test. His proposal recalls the attempts of the Russian Formalists in their search for literariness as a linguistic code, whereby the literary could be defined as a deviation from the accepted linguistic norm.