Kevin Glynn, Pamela Wilson and Jonathan Gray: “Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular”

“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, n othing would have been possible.” We’d like to return the favor that is implied implied in Fiske’s statement, statement, and encourage others to do so. In his sentence, Fiske gestures 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 identities and subjectivities, are inescapably traversed and animated by the dialogical. It is in the spirit of these very Fiskean ways of thinking a nd operating that we offer this introduction to his two companion companion texts on popular culture. Two of us were students students of Fiske, another one of us works in the Media and Cultural Studies Program at the University of

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2 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, 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 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 ea ch text, we are nevertheless firmly convinced that Fiske’s two popular culture books remain vital resources for enga ging in a history that is still being forged and actively struggled for. _______________________________________ no ting one of the most under-appreciated Jonathan Gray: Let me get the ball rolling by noting 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 book s 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.













3 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 un derstand 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 h ow 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 h ow he has woven together toge ther 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













4 the consumer information, but the concrete specific uses they are put to, the individual individua l 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 b y 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 systems of the official culture. In other words, for a long time there have ha ve been cultural critics and analysts who are willing to grant the value of popular texts that display officially sanctioned aesthetic attributes such as n arrative 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 mov e from “work” to “text” allow Fiske to do













5 reversing” the elitist and disparaging evaluation of excessiveness and obviousness as “bad” textual attributes (UPC , p. 114). In this way, Fiske 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 au thors 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 manne r 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!). "Commod ities and Culture" in Understanding Pam Wilson: In the chapter called "Commodities 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 The y 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













6 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 b eyond 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















7 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, an d this has not always been adequately adequa tely appreciated. A major concern of his was with the political problems stemming from the established presumption on the left that the macro-level forces o f 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 might make a difference. And yet for Fiske,













8 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. UPC. Fiske recognizes here that pleasures are multiple and often often contradictory, and he focuses on popular pleasures, pleasures, which he distinguishes from hegemonicallyoriented ones. The former, he believes, are bottom-up 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 take the form of evasion, offensiveness, offensiveness, or productivity. Fiske uses case studies 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 ha d in many ways become far too insularized a nd 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 dev elopment 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 a t arm’s length. And he













9 “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. work. Today, in the age of The 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 a lso 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 no ted 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













10 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 po pular culture had at times been a valuable resource in my













11 Pam Wilson: Like Jonathan, I had left academia because of disillusionment with the

inadequacy of the then-dominant paradigms pa radigms (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 pop ular culture and television -- and the culture cu lture 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. h im. 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















12 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, b old, 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 eexcess. xcess. Similarly, active audience disavowal seems too often to carry the













13 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 de termined by said critics) existed, and if it replaced our current media, audiences au diences would consume it and welcome it just as they consume













14 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 to be used, not least, in the classroom. 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 classroom and the research seminar. seminar. I think he was deeply committed committed to the whole Birmingham-style, Stuart Hall-inspired project of creating inclusive and democratic educational spaces that might be conducive to the emergence emergence of organic intellectuals. I think that













15 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 a utobiography 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 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,” Life,” and I enrolled. At the very first first session, John wrapped things up by presenting his chapter “Video Pleasures” from Reading the Popular (which was in press at













16 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.















17 body, and the body of gender.” In Fiske’s hands, the 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 o f disciplinary













18 poses. As he writes in RP, “knowledge is never neutral . . . and the circulation of knowledge is part of the social distribution distribution of power. . . . The power of knowledge has to struggle struggle . . . to reduce reality to the knowable, which entails producing it as a discursive construct whose arbitrariness and inadequacy are disguised disguised as far as possible” possible” (pp. 149-50). Fiske is writing writing here about journalistic media, but these observations apply equ ally 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, authoritative, expert-sanctioned













19 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













20 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 take n 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 nu mber of careers and immortalized otherwise mundane a nd private moments such as those captured in “David After Dentist,” a home video of a child in the













21 "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 an d excorporation can















22 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













23 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. important caveats, Jonathan. I think there are points that Kevin Glynn: Those are important













24 Pam Wilson: With regard to Fiske’s concept of localizing power, Kevin, it is interesting

to note that a decentralization decen tralization 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













25 to control and engineer outcomes—including ou tcomes—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 from an increasingly broad variety of sources, and much













26 “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



























Kevin Glynn, Pamela Wilson and Jonathan Gray: “Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular”

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