“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.