Stanley Cavell was no doubt the first to account for the transformation of theory and criticism brought about by reflection on popular culture and its "ordinary" objects, such as so-called mainstream cinema. Cavell defined philosophy as the "education of grownups", in parallel with his goal to give popular culture the function of changing us. According to him the value of a culture lies not in "great art" but in its transformative capacity, the same capacity found in the moral perfectionism of Emerson and Thoreau. Within such a perspective, the vocation of popular culture is the philosophical education of a public rather than the institution and valorisation of a socially targeted corpus.