“Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular”
Kevin Glynn, Pamela Wilson and Jonathan Gray
An Introduction to the second editions of John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture (Routledge, 2010) and Reading the Popular (Routledge, 2010)
John Fiske writes, in his original Prefaces to both Understanding Popular Culture and
Reading the Popular, “My histories and the multiple voices of my colleagues, friends,
antagonists, students, teachers, and others constitute the resource bank that I raid in order to
speak and write: I take full responsibility for the use I make of them, but without them, nothing
would have been possible.” We’d like to return the favor that is implied in Fiske’s statement,
and encourage others to do so. In his sentence, Fiske gestures (if only obliquely) toward at least
three valuable and important dimensions of his approach to popular media culture. First, history,
whether considered at the level of the individual or that of social structures, should be understood
as neither inert nor bearing deterministically on the present; rather, it presents resources and
opportunities to forms of creative agency capable of drawing upon them in distinctive and
unpredictable ways. Second, cultural resources must be put to use in order to become socially
effective; indeed, they cannot be properly understood without some effort on the part of the
analyst to grapple with the ways in which they are taken up and variously mobilized by their
users. Third, all cultural products, including texts, places, events, identities and subjectivities,
are inescapably traversed and animated by the dialogical.
It is in the spirit of these very Fiskean ways of thinking and operating that we offer this
introduction to his two companion texts on popular culture. Two of us were students of Fiske,
another one of us works in the Media and Cultural Studies Program at the University of
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Wisconsin-Madison where Fiske retired, and the three of us can each identify moments in our
own personal histories when Fiske’s work presented us with useful resources that have made a
difference in our lives. We have each benefited substantially from the dialogues we’ve
undertaken with and through Fiske’s popular culture books. It seems fitting, then, to offer, by
way of introduction, our own mutual dialogue as an invitation to others to join the conversation
with Fiske’s understandings and readings of popular culture. Although the study of popular
media culture has expanded substantially in the years since UPC and RP were first published,
and therefore many new voices have entered the dialogue, we remain convinced that these two
books comprise a particularly rich and distinctive treasury of resources whose potential uses are
nowhere near exhausted. While, as we discuss below, media and popular culture have in some
ways transformed dramatically in the two decades since these texts first appeared, and while we
may quibble or disagree with aspects of each text, we are nevertheless firmly convinced that
Fiske’s two popular culture books remain vital resources for engaging in a history that is still
being forged and actively struggled for.
_______________________________________
Jonathan Gray: Let me get the ball rolling by noting one of the most under-appreciated
elements of the two popular culture books (and of Fiske) -- they introduce Barthes, Bakhtin,
Bourdieu, and De Certeau to readers with clarity. My undergrads at four universities have
regularly struggled with the first three in particular, and yet these books make them all
intelligible. Thus, for all the hoopla about active audience theory and semiotic democracy, the
popular culture books also do an outstanding job of rendering other theories accessible.
I'd also note that these are among the fairly few books in media studies that truly take an
understanding of "the text" seriously. We can tend to run footloose and fancy free through our
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own textual analyses without even stopping to ask how textuality works in the first place, but
UPC and RP don't just make offhand comments -- they really try to understand basic principles
at work. Thus, even before we discuss the importance of the specific observations that Fiske
makes in the books, it’s worth noting how they prove that theoretically engaged scholarship
needn’t be distant, remote, or painfully difficult, and that grounded examples and involved
theory needn’t be strangers. Personally, I’m thankful that figures such as Fiske and Stuart Hall
helped lay this groundwork for how media studies could and should work.
Pam Wilson: Fiske does such a good job in these two books introducing and explaining
in clear, accessible language concepts that are either quite dry in theory textbooks or quite
complex when reading the primary texts. And beyond that, I think what is totally
underappreciated about Fiske is not just that he explains or applies other peoples' theories well
(which he does) but that his particular blend and interpretation of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Althusser,
Williams, de Certeau, Barthes, Hall, Foucault, Bakhtin is a distinctive mix and approach that
places him both within the British Cultural Studies camp but also sets him apart in significant
ways.
Having just read Fiske's Introduction to Communication Studies (1982) and noted his
rootedness in Saussurian semiotics, and having myself received my early graduate training in the
interdisciplinary field (linguistics/anthropology/sociology) of the 1970s-80s called the
Ethnography of Speaking, it is also interesting to me how he has woven together Saussure's
langue/parole model and de Certeau's model of tactical practice to understand the cultural
processes involved in acts of consumption, which are reinterpreted to reveal forms of creative
production. Fiske articulates this especially clearly when he says, "The object of analysis, then,
and the basis of a theory of everyday life is not the products, the system that distributes them, or
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the consumer information, but the concrete specific uses they are put to, the individual acts of
consumption-production, the creativities produced from commodities" (UPC, 37). This emphasis
on "concrete and specific uses" combined with the understanding that these usages will shift with
various social formations, leads to a very context-based theory of practice in which nothing can
be generalized; it's not about the generative rules (the grammar, the intended or prescribed
usages) but rather about the way meaning is made in a given situation with the resources at hand.
In the chapter of UPC entitled "Popular Texts," Fiske continues along these lines by
building onto the Barthesian model of producerly texts (which he introduced in Television
Culture) by analyzing popular and vernacular uses of language (focusing especially on punning
and double entendres), and the prevalence of tropes of excess in popular culture. In these ways,
he challenges the frequent accusation that popular culture is textually impoverished.
Kevin Glynn: I think the chapter on popular textuality you’re referring to, Pam, is an
important and characteristically Fiskean one. One of its most interesting attributes is that it
makes a more radical move than a lot of earlier cultural criticism that appreciated popular texts
for their successes in living up to the criteria and value systems of the official culture. In other
words, for a long time there have been cultural critics and analysts who are willing to grant the
value of popular texts that display officially sanctioned aesthetic attributes such as narrative
complexity, or the presence of psychologically well-rounded, realistic characters, for instance.
But Fiske’s appropriation of the Bakhtinian critique of cultural officialdom, his reading of
Bourdieu’s analysis of the popular refusal of dominant aesthetic forms, stances and posturing,
and his reworking of Barthes’ articulation of the move from “work” to “text” allow Fiske to do
something that is arguably more radical in its own way, which is to accept the commonplace
view of popular texts as “excessive and obvious,” while at the same time “rejecting or even
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reversing” the elitist and disparaging evaluation of excessiveness and obviousness as “bad”
textual attributes (UPC, p. 114). In this way, Fiske builds on his theoretical sources to mount a
critique of the apparatuses of elite critical judgment (including those at work in the production of
university curricula), and a sophisticated defense of popular taste that helped to establish the
basis for a lot of subsequent work on everyday, popular texts (even if the authors of some of
those subsequent works didn’t always display a great appreciation for Fiske’s interventions; in
fact, I recall a few academic texts on television and popular culture that seemed to go out of their
way to distance themselves from Fiske, often in a manner that seemed quite gratuitous, while
then proceeding to elaborate arguments and analyses that were entirely consonant with Fiske’s
theoretical and political orientations – there was something very revealing in this!).
Pam Wilson: In the chapter called "Commodities and Culture" in Understanding
Popular Culture, Fiske lays out the foundational principles that he will go on to explore more
fully in Power Plays, Power Works and Media Matters -- notably, his interest in the social
formations and processes by which "shifting sets of social allegiances" operate. In a 1991
interview with Eggo Mueller, Fiske said,
“I find ... useful Stuart Hall's formulation of the difference between the ‘power-
bloc’ and ‘the people’, where neither the ‘power-bloc’ nor ‘the people’ are
objective social classes, but are agencies of social interest that are quite fluid.
They constitute a theoretical concept. They don't exist as social categories, but as
opposing social interests that different social categories will align themselves with
or against for different purposes at different stages of history, for different spheres
of their own existence. A working class man can align himself with the interests
of the power-bloc in his gender politics and align himself with the interests of the
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people in his class politics, so that it's fluid and shifting sets of allegiances that
structure the contestation rather than social categories, whether those social
categories are ones of class, of race, of gender, of age, or what have you.”
[http://www.let.uu.nl/~Eggo.Mueller/personal/onderzoek/interview-fiske.htm]
Throughout my years studying with Fiske in the early 90s, he was clearly trying to create
a model for understanding social formations that went beyond the traditional Marxist notions of
class struggle and which could also encompass the cultural politics of race, gender, age, and so
on. I think he felt that Bourdieu's concepts articulated in Distinction came the closest to
expressing what he was trying to get at, but they were so specific to French society that Fiske
wanted to create a model that could be applied in many different contexts. He particularly
wanted to be able to understand and explain American social formations, finding the concept of
class alone to be deeply inadequate. He was interested in the fluidity of social formations, which
seemed to be less fixed in the American context than in Europe, and in the increasing ability of
individuals to actively align themselves with multiple ones: to join and unjoin, to simultaneously
"belong" to multiple social formations and to be variably invested in any one of them at any
given time. As he clearly explains:
"The various formations of the people move as active agents, not subjugated
subjects, across social categories, and are capable of adopting apparently
contradictory positions .... These popular allegiances are elusive, difficult to
generalize and difficult to study, because they are made from within, they are
made by the people in specific contexts at specific times. They are context- and
time-based, not structurally produced: they are a matter of practice, not of
structure" (UPC, 24-25).
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Kevin Glynn: You’re right, Pam, to point to the politics of all this: this dimension is
absolutely crucial for any kind adequate understanding of Fiske’s work. In fact, it is telling that
the final chapter toward which Understanding the Popular builds is focused on politics. Fiske’s
project was always a deeply political one, and this has not always been adequately appreciated.
A major concern of his was with the political problems stemming from the established
presumption on the left that the macro-level forces of social domination are merely and
necessarily reproduced at the level of the micro-politics of everyday life. But it was never
enough for Fiske just to show that these micro-politics operate according to an alternative set of
transverse logics and disruptive energies; he was always concerned with trying to identify some
of the points at which the micro-politics of indiscipline, subversion, oppositional difference,
evasion – what have you – might be articulated into a set of forces capable of intervening at the
level of the macro-politics of whole social formations. In this regard, his work, including the
two popular culture books, was always very much a part of the British Cultural Studies tradition,
even though he was often enough characterized as having veered off on some celebratory tangent
and seen as a strange sort of postmodern, Americanized bastard offspring of the CCCS project.
A common enough idea, I think, was that Fiske’s interest in pleasure had led him to turn
away from the politics that matter, the politics that might make a difference. And yet for Fiske,
popular culture offered powerful lessons that might themselves reinvigorate a progressive
politics that was often too preachy and dour for its own good—a left-wing politics that has
“allowed the right to promise the party” while declining to envision a socialist alternative that
delivers much in the way of fun (UPC, p. 162). That is, popular culture itself might contain some
of the key insights into how progressive politics could more effectively make a difference.
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Pam Wilson: One of the places where he explores these challenging questions around the
role of pleasure in both our individual everyday lives and the culture at large is the chapter on
“Productive Pleasures” in UPC. Fiske recognizes here that pleasures are multiple and often
contradictory, and he focuses on popular pleasures, which he distinguishes from hegemonically-
oriented ones. The former, he believes, are bottom-up and "must exist in some relationship of
opposition to power (social, moral, textual, aesthetic, and so on) that attempts to discipline and
control them" (p. 50), while the latter are those pleasures associated with the exercise of
dominating power. Popular pleasures, then, may take the form of evasion, offensiveness, or
productivity. Fiske uses case studies to show how viewers and fans of TV programs and films
engage in the pleasurable production of micro-political meanings.
Kevin Glynn: Fiske’s account of popular pleasure was a deliberate intervention, or even
a provocation, regarding many of the orthodoxies of a politicized cultural theory and of a
political left more broadly, both of which had in many ways become far too insularized and thus
protected from the risks associated with becoming more effective. And this helps to explain the
virulence of the reaction against his work in some circles, I think. Fiske risked the development
of a genuinely engaged, effective progressive cultural politics—engaged and effective in the
sense of entering into a dialogue with the popular, rather than holding it at arm’s length. And he
paid a certain price for taking such risks, in the form of his critics’ virulence.
His more sympathetic critics understood the deeply political dimensions of Fiske’s work,
even though they may have worried that he risked, for instance, encouraging an overemphasis on
the micro-politics of everyday life and on the liberatory and subversive dimensions of popular
pleasure. And these certainly are legitimate concerns to raise, because there are limitations and
risks associated with an emphasis on the political potential of popular pleasure—although the
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“Politics” chapter of UPC illustrates well how Fiske always approached these issues with an
exceptional level of nuance and thoughtful consideration. But his anti-fans—the fierce,
sometimes even ugly critics—never really even got it at all; they never really grasped the deeply
political underpinnings or dimensions of Fiske’s work. Today, in the age of The Daily Show and
the Colbert Nation, however, more people seem to be taking an interest in the politics of popular
pleasure, oppositional laughter and subversive fun.
Among those who were often most appreciative of Fiske’s work on popular culture were
many feminists and many students. Fiske’s work always listened to and engaged with feminist
thinking and approaches, so it’s not surprising that there was a mutual dialogue between them.
Students were drawn to Fiske’s work on popular culture not only, I think, because it made
complex theory more accessible to them, but also because of the inclusive way in which it
invited them into an academic engagement with popular culture that was deeply democratic (and,
having been a student of Fiske’s, I would say that among the things his students noted about John
was not only his general good humor, but also his democratic personality). Many students liked
Fiske’s work, I think, because it helped them better understand how they might both hold
progressive commitments and enjoy many of the ordinary, popular cultural pleasures that they
actually enjoyed. Other, more orthodox left/progressive theories of the popular were far less
accommodating and politically inclusive in this respect.
Jonathan Gray: Agreed, Kevin -- if you'll allow my self-indulgence, a tiny bit of
autobiography follows. I was an English Lit student who got bothered by being able to talk about
texts, but not about politics or culture (unless it was Culture a la Matthew Arnold) ... which
meant I couldn't talk about textuality as it actually worked. So I went into Postcolonial Lit, which
allowed me to discuss politics and culture, but the texts under analysis were excellent books that
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few had read, and I yearned to analyze more popular things that reached a large audience. I left
academia, but a friend of mine kept saying she thought I'd like media studies. I grabbed Neil
Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and I was kind of drawn in till I got to the chapter about
Sesame Street. Postman's suppositions about children of Sesame Street weren't just unempirical -
- they were bizarre in their assumption of a pervasive attention deficit disorder that supposedly
afflicted my generational cohort, even though I'd known many of that cohort who enjoyed
reading 1000 page novels. So I went back to my friend unimpressed, asking what this was. She
told me I needed to follow her reading list, not go off alone, and she handed me Understanding
Popular Culture.
I read Understanding Popular Culture with great relish, and then Reading the Popular,
and they were truly transformative. I don't agree with all that Fiske says in them, but finally
someone understood how to be critical, concerned about politics and culture, willing and eager to
use theory, and yet with a keen eye for the ways in which specific texts worked. I'm from a
generation that grew up watching lots of TV, playing games modeled on TV and film, etc., and I
couldn't in all honesty distance myself from that unless I wanted to disavow my childhood as one
long social and political nightmare. I could and certainly wanted to express concern about many
of its messages, and yet I sensed that popular culture had at times been a valuable resource in my
development, not simply the brain-frying apparatus that both Amusing Ourselves to Death and
some of my Lit training had suggested it was. Postman couldn't explain that. Fiske could, and he
was willing and able to look beyond bourgeois culture’s repression of popular culture to ask
about the politics and culture of everyday life. So he had me, and I shipped off to study media
and cultural studies.
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Pam Wilson: Like Jonathan, I had left academia because of disillusionment with the
inadequacy of the then-dominant paradigms (this was in anthropology in the early 80s, prior to
Clifford and Marcus and Fischer and the post-structuralist turn in that discipline). It took reading
Fiske's Television Culture to reignite my intellect and provide me with a model for how to
engage critically with and understand popular culture and television -- and the culture beyond the
media -- in a paradigm that incorporated both politics and pleasure. And this passion led me to
seek out Fiske and apply to the doctoral program at UW to work with him. The questions you
pose, Jonathan, are the very ones that fueled my often grueling but ultimately rewarding years as
a doctoral student -- and that keep me teaching today.
Jonathan Gray: I still balk when I hear the over-easy condemnations of Fiske and active
audience work. Criticism is of course welcome, but as you noted earlier, Kevin, there’s often a
virulence to it that I find unsavory. First, it's usually from people who haven't truly read
Understanding Popular Culture -- they hear the term "semiotic democracy" and think the worst.
Many are, or fashion themselves as, well-meaning Marxists, who think they're fighting for the
masses, yet sadly some can't get beyond the barely concealed, whole-hearted adoption of a
theory of false consciousness that has them thinking very little of those masses, and that
paradoxically sees the masses as in need of an elitist holding hand. They don't get the complex
nature of the relationship between power, hegemony, and personal agency, and hence they
overlook the fact that a society or culture is formed by more than just its institutions.
Consequently, studies of the micro and of everyday consumption are posited as distracting for
scholars, without realizing that the macro forces that they want to study must work through and
around the actors and agents within them. Admittedly, society would be easier to understand if it
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was just institutions, no people, but it’s not that simple, and thus we need models of culture that
consider people as more than just automatons and institutional subjects.
There's also something so disturbingly self-serving and self-congratulatory about the
virulent criticism of Fiske’s position too: go to school, put your head in a bunch of books, and
then, to convince yourself that you're not bourgeois and out of touch, or even if you're not, to
perform that you're not, disavow those nasty active audience scholars and their "celebratory"
attitude towards the culture industries. (And, while you're at it, turn them into (a) a straw man
caricature of rabid belief in audience power, and (b) imagine that they hold sway in academia,
and that you're in the bold, rebel minority). I think of Joli Jensen's piece in the Lisa Lewis
collection, The Adoring Audience, about fans being the easy stand-in and scapegoat when regular
consumers want to feel better about their interaction with modernity, and so they create fandom
as a space for looney excess. Similarly, active audience disavowal seems too often to carry the
air of a campaign to make the disavower feel better about his or her (though often his) own
scholarship perhaps being perceived as out of the loop and not sufficiently contributing to the
revolution.
As such, what Fiske did that means a lot to me is that he found a way to get complicity on
the table. We may have misgivings with the media, and, heck, we should have misgivings.
Many. But we're doing so while in the system, and we can't step outside to some Archimedean
vantage point. Instead of disavowal, or of simply lashing one's back repeatedly, what seems
required is an engagement with how we move forward even while complicit. The dreams of
slaying the system and starting anew are cute, but till then, how do we move forward? How can
we care about politics, and how can we make leftism work, while perhaps also enjoying a trip to
the mall occasionally, or while being an avid fan of Lost, or while thinking pop music is
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awesome? Maybe it's just because I've been prepping a class on Derrida for tomorrow, but it
seems that we either deconstruct ourselves and work in the rubble, or we make ourselves great
big targets to be deconstructed by others.
Fiske wisely frames this issue in terms of “relevance” when he writes in UPC, for
instance, that “The need for relevance means that popular culture may be progressive or
offensive, but can never be radically free from the power structure of the society within which it
is popular” (p. 134). This is a vital reminder, since as much as we might envision a radical break
from the system as it is, Fiske suggests that radical breaks would suffer from being unfamiliar
and unrooted, meaning they’d struggle to find a welcome, or even a comprehending, audience.
There’s a highly problematic assumption that many critics of popular culture tend to make that if
media that was “better,” smarter, and more edifying (as determined by said critics) existed, and if
it replaced our current media, audiences would consume it and welcome it just as they consume
and welcome popular culture today. It’s like the TV Turnoff Week folk who hope that by turning
off the television, young children will instead get out a chemistry set, read the works of Charles
Dickens, and then form a recycling club. Maybe. But maybe they’ll go tease a kid down the road,
eat their way through a bag of candy, and then burn ants with a magnifying glass. Similarly, if
we overhauled our media system, there’s no promise that audiences would accept the alternative.
Which means we must always be attentive to what’s “relevant,” and to what speaks to an
audience. Of course, I don’t mean to make the opposite error of assuming that audiences would
automatically reject anything better and revert always to the “lowest common denominator.” But
to appear relevant, something will need to work with and in the world the audience has in front
of it. The avant garde’s aura of elitism, difference, and unfamiliarity will always limit its
potential, and hence Fiske argues, “there is more evidence of the progressive effectivity of
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popular art on the micro level than there is of radical art on the macro level” (p. 191). So when
the products of a cultural industry are all around us, and a large part of the world that we know,
how can we use those products, and what might that use do to transform them?
Kevin Glynn: The classroom is one of the important places to develop strategies for
moving forward and to forge new points of relevance between the concerns of academics and the
interests of those whose lives may bring them into direct contact with universities for only four
years or so at most. John was an exceptionally gifted teacher, and his books were written to be
used, not least, in the classroom. In good cultural studies fashion, he was always engaged with
efforts to bring a democratic cultural politics to bear within educational institutions, at the level
of the curriculum, the classroom and the research seminar. I think he was deeply committed to
the whole Birmingham-style, Stuart Hall-inspired project of creating inclusive and democratic
educational spaces that might be conducive to the emergence of organic intellectuals. I think that
both his scholarship and his pedagogy were deeply motivated by concerns to reach a different set
of students and readers than the humanities and social sciences had traditionally sought to reach.
Today we may take it for granted that things like music videos, gaming, and the cultures
of shopping malls -- sites of leisure, tourism and everyday life -- are legitimate and interesting
objects of analysis, so it might be easy to forget that this was not by any means always so. And
often when such things were studied, it wasn’t in ways that were both critically and theoretically
informed and concerned to understand the meaning-making practices and perspectives of their
audiences/users/consumers. But this critically and theoretically informed analysis that is
concerned to understand the perspectives and pleasures of consumers certainly is characteristic
of Reading the Popular and Understanding Popular Culture.
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The chapter on video games in RP is a good example of this. If I may indulge in
recounting a bit of my own autobiography for a moment, I can start to put my finger on how
John won me over to media and cultural studies. I originally began my postgraduate studies in
the discipline of political science, and was interested in culture, politics and theory. But I quickly
became dissatisfied with a discipline that was, as Lawrence Grossberg has recently noted,
remarkably resistant to the “cultural turn” that has brought sweeping changes to the humanities
and social sciences as a whole over the past few decades. In my experience, this resistance was
often mounted in the name of “the discipline” (and of disciplinarity more broadly) and a desire to
“protect” grad students from “faddish” theoretical and methodological approaches. Then, almost
by accident, I discovered a postgraduate seminar John was offering across campus called “Media
and the Culture of Everyday Life,” and I enrolled. At the very first session, John wrapped things
up by presenting his chapter “Video Pleasures” from Reading the Popular (which was in press at
the time). I was drawn in by this immersive experience of the rich potential for theoretically
informed and empirically detailed analyses of popular media culture from a politicized
perspective. Rather than beginning from the presumption that video arcades and games are
“harmful” to players, who are then in turn seen as harmful to democracy, Fiske began by
interrogating this widely circulated, “common sense” (at the time) thinking, then attempted to
understand how these sites of popular culture activate certain key social contradictions in a way
that opens possibilities for players to corporeally evade and invert forms of control that are at
work within capitalist institutions of labor and learning. By the end of the semester I had
submitted my application to enroll as a Ph.D. student in media and cultural studies.
Pam Wilson: Yes, Kevin, and you and I were studying with Fiske at Wisconsin together,
with quite an impressive cohort of fellow grad students, in those years in which our little
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program, anchored by Fiske, Lynn Spigel and Julie D’Acci, seemed like a subversive offshoot of
the more staid Communication Arts Department. While others in the wider department were
analyzing formal qualities of film style or researching media effects, our generation of
“telecommies” was delving into the undervalued realm of popular culture and television
(considered a low art by the cinephiles). In fact, it was even quite an internal political struggle to
get the Society for Cinema Studies to broaden its name to acknowledge and incorporate
television and new media a decade or so ago. Known today as the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies, the organization’s website boasts that it is “devoted to the scholarly study of film,
television, video and new media.” But I dare suggest that this broadening of acceptance of
popular culture, and especially television, as “legitimate” objects of study alongside cinema in
this organization would likely not have happened were it not for the influence of John Fiske on a
generation of junior scholars who pushed hard for their inclusion.
Returning to your point about the centrality of the body and “the corporeal”: yes, for
Fiske, the disciplining and the pleasures of the body are key to understanding popular culture. In
addition to his discussion of gamers and arcades, he draws on a bunch of historical studies of
other popular recreations and sports, ranging from “blood sports” (like cockfighting) to football.
Fiske examines the history of such proletarian bodily pleasures and of the aristocracy’s responses
to them, as the latter worked hard to discipline the former, render them “respectable,” and thus
“exert the same control over the conditions of leisure as it did over those of work” (p. 76). Fiske
writes that “the body and its pleasures have been, and continue to be, the site of a struggle
between power and evasion, discipline and liberation; though the body may appear to be where
we are most individual, it is also the material form of the body politic, the class body, the racial
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body, and the body of gender.” In Fiske’s hands, the body becomes a site of cultural and
political struggle, since it is “where politics can best disguise itself as human nature.”
Kevin Glynn: I think it’s interesting that all of us were drawn to Fiske and to media and
cultural studies as students from “outside,” from other fields of study with which we were
dissatisfied in certain ways. Perhaps this says something about the interdisciplinary (and
sometimes anti-disciplinary) force and reach of both cultural studies in general and Fiske in
particular, which have each very effectively reached across and disrupted a range of disciplinary
boundaries and formations by responding to gaps, closures and limitations that arguably arise
from disciplinarity itself. Cultural studies has perhaps been more responsible than anything else
for the interesting reconfigurations of disciplinarity that have reshaped a lot of academic thinking
and practice in recent decades (not least because cultural studies has most consistently
thematized, theorized and problematized the issue of disciplinarity, and has thus driven its
reassessment over a number of years). As a teacher, Fiske encouraged students not to be
constrained by either theoretical or “disciplinary” (in both interlinked senses of the term!)
orthodoxies. His body of published work, too, encourages this, not least by ranging freely across
theoretical and empirical domains: Marxism and poststructuralism, for example (at a time when
many disciplines saw them as “antithetical” or contradictory orientations), TV genres, tourist
destinations, everyday cultural sites, products and practices, politics, and so on. His popular
culture books encourage us to understand how such diverse sites of cultural production and
circulation can be understood and profitably analyzed in relation to one another. I think there’s
an interesting connection between Fiske’s emphasis in the popular culture books on everyday
culture as a site for the negotiation, reworking, suspension and (sometimes) refusal of social
disciplinarity, and the challenge to academic disciplines and disciplinarity that his work also
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poses. As he writes in RP, “knowledge is never neutral . . . and the circulation of knowledge is
part of the social distribution of power. . . . The power of knowledge has to struggle . . . to
reduce reality to the knowable, which entails producing it as a discursive construct whose
arbitrariness and inadequacy are disguised as far as possible” (pp. 149-50). Fiske is writing here
about journalistic media, but these observations apply equally well to other sites for the social
production of expertise and authority, such as university disciplines and the work of academics
within them. Fiske thought that instead of merely dispensing authoritative, expert-sanctioned
knowledge from on-high, TV news should provoke disruptions of the boundary between the
world reported on and that of viewers’ everyday lives; it should
discard its role of privileged information-giver, with its clear distinction between
the one who knows (the author) and those who do not (the audience), for that
gives it the place and the tone of the author-god and discourages popular
productivity. Rather, it should aim to involve its viewers in making sense of the
world around them, it should encourage them to be participants in the process
[RP, p. 193].
These ideas reveal something important about not only Fiske’s approach to popular media, but
also about his approach to pedagogy and students.
Pam Wilson: It still excites me each time I read Fiske's work; even though the examples
are progressively more dated, his ideas are so lively and fresh that they encourage me to find new
examples and to search for ways to use Fiske's deep theoretical insights to understand
contemporary cultural politics and the texts and processes created today -- which are far more
complex than those of the world in which Fiske was writing, but whose complexity his work
prefigured.
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In the more than two decades since the publication of Understanding Popular Culture
and Reading the Popular, the rise of media venues that allow “ordinary people” to voice and
visualize their perspectives has had a tremendous effect on the mediascape. Citizen journalism,
blogs, social media, You-Tube, wikis—all have led to a blurring of the boundary between the
producer and audience of traditional television and related media. The elimination, or
minimizing, of the need for and authority of experts as “gatekeepers” has resulted in a new kind
of energized media empowerment of the very people who were considered to be the passivized
victims of the culture industries by the Frankfurt School and the proponents of mass society
theory.
Today, with the explosion of options for user-generated content, what were formerly
“audience members” have in many cases become the producers/agents of media. Can we really
even bifurcate the traditional concepts of producer and audience anymore? The two concepts
have become far too intertwined. Like Fiske's conceptualization of the shifting and fluid
constructs of the power bloc and "the people," those of producer and audience that were formerly
more fixed in a model of industrial, professional media production have now been loosened and
seem to float more freely; the role of producer has been liberated from the industrial model and
is now open for anyone to occupy.
“Ordinary people” have become media producers and use available technologies to
express themselves verbally and visually and to interject their products into the mediasphere via
the internet, where they may (or may not) find both local and global audiences. The YouTube
phenomenon, which began in 2005 and allows anyone with the technical capabilities to upload
user-generated videos onto the web, has been astounding. “Broadcast Yourself” is its tagline, and
many of its most-viewed videos are “vlogs” that feature little-known people who become
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overnight worldwide celebrities simply by sitting in their bedrooms and talking to a webcam.
YouTube (owned by Google since 2006) has also generated an expanding public sphere for
sharing films made by aspiring directors, montages created by vidders, clips taken from viewers’
favorite films and TV shows, and ordinary home movies. The phenomenal spread of popular but
often quirky videos has even introduced a new term into the cultural lexicon: “viral videos.”
Such virality has already launched a number of careers and immortalized otherwise mundane and
private moments such as those captured in “David After Dentist,” a home video of a child in the
back seat of a family car which was viewed more than 37 million times in 2009, or the "JK
Wedding Entrance Dance," which garnered more than 33 million viewers that same year.
It appears that we are undergoing a major paradigm-shift away from the era of expertise
that developed in the 1950s, when Americans were taught that they could only trust professional
producers and journalists, toward an era in which anyone can assert and demonstrate their own
expertise. The model of the audience as passive consumers of professionally produced media has
been at least partially displaced by that of an audience/producer that desires to see into the lives
of other “ordinary people” and honors the perspectives of articulate nonprofessionals. In many
important ways, Fiske’s popular culture books, with their emphasis on audience activity and
popular creativity, anticipate and help to explain these kinds of developments, which are
increasingly familiar today.
Jonathan Gray: Granted, Pam. However, unless such a move is heretical here, I'd also
like to get on the table a continuing concern I have with Understanding Popular Culture and
Reading the Popular: namely that the division between "mass culture" (that of the industry) and
"popular culture" (that of the consumers) is wedded too closely to a moral binary. David Morley
offers a nice quote about this in Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies, where he notes a
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"curiously Christian" assumption that "the sins of the industry (or the message) are somehow
seen to be redeemed in the 'after-life' of reception" (1992: 30).
First off, this model and metaphor usually pose active audiences as heavenly, and indeed
all of Fiske's examples are of people making progressive use of mass culture; surely, though, if
marginalized groups can read dominant texts against themselves, a dominant power bloc can also
read resistive or progressive texts actively, or deeply regressive groups can read texts actively in
ways that are more hellish, less heavenly. Fiske's model of incorporation and excorporation can
certainly allow for some of this, but I'd have loved for him to offer a few more solid examples
(beyond jeans) of how crafty a dominant power bloc can be in repurposing a text, and in trying to
shut down active readings. I think here of Robert Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus' article on
the Fight Club DVD (in Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 2002) -- while the movie
seemingly opened a wide door to homoerotic readings, the DVD commentaries work hard to shut
that door. The incorporation/excorporation model is really helpful, but at times it becomes easy
to read it as a two-step process, rather than as a continuing cycle and battle. And I also find
myself wondering about less pretty active audiences -- racists watching a non-racist film and
finding racist pleasures in it, for instance. Or, for an actual example, we could turn to Sut Jhally
and Justin Lewis's Enlightened Racism, where they find white audiences reading The Cosby
Show as a sign that the civil rights era is over and everything has turned out just fine for African-
Americans. Surely that's not what Cosby’s writers intended, so this is an active audience reading,
but it's one that works against a text's hopes for progessivism; instead of the audience "saving"
the text, they may be damning it.
And that last example there leads me to another concern -- namely, that in the interests of
trying to understand popular culture as distinct from mass culture, Fiske can at times posit the
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latter as automatically problematic and in need of the redemption that an active audience will
bring. Surely, though, we might occasionally want to argue for some items of mass culture as
progressive, and hence we might even want some audiences to be wholly "passive." Granted, it's
not as simple a matter as any text being "good" or "bad." But I think of some international
viewers of The Simpsons who I interviewed, and who liked it in large part because they saw the
show as making fun of America, or at least refusing to peddle the timeworn, tiresome “America
the Awesome” party line of many other items of Hollywood. These audiences weren’t being
“active,” though: they were being quite passive -- The Simpsons does make fun of America, at
least at one level, and it does challenge some of the excesses of America and American
chauvinism, encouraging its audience to read back over and rewrite messages about America
from other texts. An active audience here would be one that read American chauvinism into the
text, and that refused to see the parody and satire. Or how about The Daily Show? Personally,
nine times out of ten, I’m quite happy for audiences to be passive when watching that. So here
are a couple examples of texts that may already be relatively progressive, and hence whose
passive audiences are those we might prefer.
I don't offer these points as broadside attacks by any means. Fiske doesn't disallow them
with his theory. But they are points I like to bring into discussion of Understanding Popular
Culture and Reading the Popular when teaching them, since those notions of the active audience
and of the push and pull between popular and mass culture require some deromanticization, I
think. If I began this discussion by noting how accessible Fiske is, ironically that’s a potentially
dangerous quality of his work of which I find myself needing to be keenly aware when teaching
him, since his writing has such a power and force to it, and even now it often has such a
revelatory quality to it for students whose teachers and parents have been more Postmanesque in
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their regard for popular culture, that it can be easy for readers to sign up for the ride without
stopping to read into, through, and around Fiske at times too.
Kevin Glynn: Those are important caveats, Jonathan. I think there are points that
emerge in Fiske’s work of this period that do gesture toward some of the complexities and
contradictions to which you are wishing he’d pay greater attention. For example, in the
“Reading the Beach” chapter of RP, Fiske suggests that through their partial embrace of certain
hegemonic sensemaking categories and practices, particularly those that relate directly through
masculinism to gendered relations/identities and discourses of sporting prowess and
competitiveness, members of surfie subcultures participate in the domestication of what is at
other moments a radical challenge they pose toward capitalist and bourgeois subjectivities,
ideologies and signifying systems. But the tendentious emphasis on the active audience as
progressive guerrilla warrior locked in an unequal combat with the largely malign, colonizing
forces of the media industry is there nonetheless. I have often attributed this to the historical
moment of Fiske’s intervention, as a somewhat calculated strategy aimed at redressing the well-
established imbalance between predominant modes of critical media theory that prevailed in the
US of the mid- to late-1980s and which tended to equate “power” only with its dominating
aspect, to the detriment of what Fiske would later conceptualize, in Power Plays, as the
comparatively “weak,” “localizing” powers of the relatively socially subordinated. My own
view is that as his work moved from its “middle period,” perhaps best defined by Television
Culture, UPC and RP, toward its later phase, including Power Plays and Media Matters, this
emphasis shifted somewhat toward a more balanced, nuanced and muted sense of populism. I
certainly don’t see these as “radical breaks” in Fiske’s work, however, but as drifts of thought or
progressive developments in his thinking.
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Pam Wilson: With regard to Fiske’s concept of localizing power, Kevin, it is interesting
to note that a decentralization of media control and authority (yet one that still allows the media
corporations to maintain ultimate editorial discretion) has led over the past decade or two to the
creation of new genres of television, radio and other media. There has been a burgeoning of talk
radio, “reality TV,” and citizen journalism (including on mainstream stations and sites such as
CNN’s iReport, launched in 2006, which invites viewers to contribute their own amateur videos
and reports on breaking news stories) as professionally-produced media have increasingly
incorporated “ordinary people’s” lives and perspectives into hybrid new media forms. Other
dimensions of this shift that allows ordinary people to be agents of our pleasure-generating
narratives while relaxing the appearance of top-down control include the growing pervasiveness
of fan culture and the intensified degree to which fan/audience involvement directly affects the
production of movies, TV franchises, video games and peripheral products. As well, there are
new platforms such as World of Warcraft, which, although created and maintained by
professional media developers, nevertheless facilitate the collective and interactive production of
narrative pleasure and meaning by multiplayer video gamers. Moreover, the internet functions
increasingly as a venue for a new kind of collective production of knowledge by self-selected
“organic intellectuals,” who contribute to and monitor wikis and related sites such as Geni.com
(a collaborative genealogical database in which I’ve been involved).
So, how might Fiske help us to make sense of this New World Order when it comes to
media? He made us aware of the importance of ordinary people and their engagements with
media technologies—that no matter what the intentions of the professional producers, the
recipients would determine the uses of media products and the social meanings made of those
products. The current shifts are arguably diminishing the power of professional media producers
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to control and engineer outcomes—including even the narrative outcomes of reality-TV shows—
and diminishing the corporate monopoly on the shape and range of information that consumers
receive. Such information now comes from an increasingly broad variety of sources, and much
of it is produced by nonprofessionals, though it nevertheless it competes with and often receives
equal measures of respect and attention as that which is professionally generated. Consequently,
media users these days often feel that what they are reading, watching and hearing is somehow
less filtered, less “mediated,” by gatekeepers.
Fiske’s theoretical approach is spot-on relevant to an understanding of the struggle for,
and the delicate balancing of, power between media corporations and consumers/users, the
people and the power bloc, imperializing versus localizing powers. I believe Fiske would have a
good deal to say about the degree to which these apparent shifts in authority are part of a
hegemonic process that allows “ordinary people” to perceive that they have power and control
while hiding corporate gatekeeping behind a veil. After all, YouTube, Facebook and iReport are
not anarchic media spaces; they are controlled by corporate rules and regulations that most users
never read. Even our blogs and seemingly private, personal emails are under the control of
internet service providers, who are often called upon to release such content in legal cases. I
think Fiske would be quite interested in pursuing the contradictions in new media between the
appeal of unregulated self-expression and the more stealthy and covert degree of surveillance
and corporate control that goes widely unperceived by users.
Kevin Glynn: In what is to my knowledge the final major essay that he published in our
field, Fiske wrote (in 1998) about what he called an expanding regime of “democratic
totalitarianism,” whose core attributes include rampant technologized surveillance, “intensified
policing,” and “appeals to moral totalism.” Fiske characterizes this social environment as
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“democratic totalitarianism” because its capacity to exert control depends upon the extent to
which its key techniques of power can be operationalized “underneath the structures of
democracy” (p. 69). In much the same way as the work of his middle period seems to have
conceptually anticipated so many of the developments in our popular media environment that
you’ve pointed to, Pam, so too does Fiske’s concept of “democratic totalitarianism” speak
volumes about many things that have become familiar both within and beyond the US in the
decade since the intensively racialized Florida election debacle of 2000 and the destruction of the
World Trade Center -- the colossally defining media event of the new millennium -- in 2001. In
his final essay, Fiske points to the expanding possibilities for democratic totalitarianism in a
hypermediated “scanscape” of surveillance, where citizens’ spaces of privacy and control over
the terms of their own visibility are increasingly (but in racially unequal ways) eroded (p. 69).
But Fiske also gestures toward emergent opportunities for “countersurveillance,” which is crucial
because of its power to contest the “management of visibility” by dominant social forces and
institutions (p. 78).
In my own current research, I’ve been exploring the ongoing reconfiguration of
relationships between popular knowledges, digital technologies, visibility in a hypermediated
culture, and the remarkable political struggles of the new millennium. Hence, Fiske’s work has
not been far from my mind lately, particularly his theorization of the increasingly complex and
pervasive forms of contestation over knowledge and visibility that are driven by the activities of
a heterogeneous set of social formations operating in a context of shifting and expanding media
apparatuses for discursive production and circulation. Fiske’s work on both popular culture and
democratic totalitarianism therefore helps me understand how groups such as the 9/11 Truth
Movement make use of new media sites, technologies and processes to engage in vital struggles
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over the management of visibility, knowledge and space in the new millennium. In these ways
and more, I agree that Fiske’s work is as important now as it has ever been.
_______________________________________
Kevin Glynn is Coordinator of the Cultural Studies Programme at the University of
Canterbury in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where he teaches media studies, cultural studies, and
American Studies. He has published widely in media and cultural studies journals and is author
of Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American
Television (Duke University Press). His recent publications have examined Indigenous peoples’
media, digital media and convergence culture, popular and political cultures of the Americas, and
media and postcolonialism. His ongoing research projects involve the Māori Television Service
and other Indigenous media operations and practices, and the relationships between media
convergence and cultural citizenship. His next book explores media convergence, spectacle, and
political cultures of the US in the new millennium.
Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of
Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media
Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008), and Watching with
The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and co-editor of Satire
TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), Battleground: The Media
(Greenwood, 2008), and Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press,
2007). His current work continues to analyze paratexts and transmedia, satire and parody, and
text-audience interactions.
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Pamela Wilson is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Communication
Program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia, where she enjoys introducing students to
a cultural studies perspective in a wide range of courses. Her research and writing have focused
on the historical and cultural politics of media and other representational forms of cultural
expression: from television journalism and popular programming to online genealogical
communities to Native American and global indigenous media. She is the co-editor (with
Michelle Stewart) of Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics and Practices (Duke
University Press, 2008) and has published many journal articles. Wilson is currently researching
the cultural politics of self-representation through tourism in Native American communities.
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