Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Understanding Popular Culture: Part One




In approaching reading John Fiske’s seminal cultural studies text, Understanding Popular Culture (Second Edition, Routledge 2010), I regard it, like editor Lisa A. Lewis’s The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (Routledge 1992), as a historical document (as all theory becomes in representing the avant-garde ideas of their respective eras). At the same time, I ask myself how Fiske’s theories resonate with our current culture. After all, the true touchstone of testing the timelessness, the universal truth, of a theorist’s mettle, can be achieved by applying his or her ideas beyond the era of their historical context. Fortunately, Fiske’s ideas, for me, have withstood the passage of time…
 
Fiske, like his equally brilliant protégé, Henry Jenkins, indeed wishes to enlighten students and general readers about the market and societal forces shaping our spending habits and identity formation. Taken to a greater level, if we do not have the so-called “elitist” intellectuals looking out for the every-person, who will step into the gap to help us to better grasp, and, in turn, manipulate and appropriate the corporations, political action committees, and media conglomerates trying to control our lives?
 
Jenkins leads off this this text with “Why Fiske Still Matters,” which offers his overview of his mentor’s contribution to cultural studies. Railing against Fiske’s various critics, Jenkins writes, “If Fiske’s formulations have been described as over-simplistic, then what do we make of his critics’s own simplification of his work?” (xviii). This line particularly impresses me since Jenkins is correct in emphasizing how critics are often ironically guilty of generalizing the theories of a scholar whom they wish to pigeonhole as a simple, or loose, thinker in order to make themselves look smarter. With his next line, Jenkins continues to speak the truth: “In a sense, it is always easier for academics to be pessimistic and much harder to create work which maintains the hope of cultural and political transformation” (xviii). It’s true that Fiske will begin his arguments with basic concepts (e.g., American cultural and economic positions on jeans in Understanding Popular Culture’s first chapter, “The Jeaning of America”), but his discussions gradually build in intensity within his succeeding chapters as he comments on grander societal issues, while incorporating such theorists as Stuart Hall, Umberto Eco, and Michel De Certeau. Seeing Fiske, who begat Jenkins, refer to and incorporate these pantheon of his fellow theorists motivates me into mentally charting the theoretical framework of my future dissertation.

I’m a visual thinker, so I conceptualize my forthcoming dissertation in the form of modules whose ideas are formed by an acetate-layering of thought. On one layer, I will structure my basic arguments concerning my subject matter and specific examples as the theoretical engines moving my claims into deeper areas of thought. For the next layer, I can lay in contemporary media theorists as Jenkins, Matt Hills, and Scott McCloud. Then, I can add a layer for Claude Lévi-Straus, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin, and another for Karl Marx, Joseph Campbell, and possibly Plato. In other words, the history of critical theory, which informs current “cutting edge” readings of  media manifestations of narrative in the form of cinema, television, web vids, and comic books, must be with me in a multilayered way at all times during my critical discussions, which must also anticipate, echo, and complement one another’s arguments.

"Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular,” the second introductory chapter to Understanding Popular Culture, presents a roundtable conversation taking place amongst Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray, and Pamela Wilson. During the course of these three scholars praising the legacy of retiree Fiske’s theories, I was particularly intrigued by Gray’s comments on Neil Postman’s text, Amusing Ourselves to Death: “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 deficit disorder that supposedly afflicted my generation cohort, even though I’d known many that cohort who enjoyed 1000 page novels” (xlv).  Of course, Fiske’s writings pushed Gray into a finer theoretical conception of how media texts and their viewers interact. As for me, I now hold a different view on Amusing Ourselves to Death, as I can agree with Postman in that some people have a brief, Sesame-Street attention span (and perhaps they would have regardless of watching children’s television) while others can  watch rapidly-edited newscasts and read complex works of literature. Gray’s reconceptualizing of Postman likewise reminds me not to religiously accept any theorist’s views in my doctoral studies, but to perform a perceptional shift upon their concepts whenever necessary. Getting back to Jenkins’s comment on pessimistic intellectuals, I must simultaneously temper my impish impulse to offer a negative reading of scholarly theories in order to make myself look more intelligent.

One of the theories threaded throughout the first three chapters of Understanding Popular Culture is that consumers are not mindless, that corporations must read the constantly shifting barometer of their tastes and desires in order to produce goods and entertainment that will engage their time and spending habits. This arrangement is not exactly reciprocal since the people (i.e., consumers), as Fiske establishes, do not self-sufficiently produce their own goods as would a folk culture (22). Nonetheless, the relationship between producer and consumer does enact a type of cultural dialogue. Fiske also argues that the “politics of popular culture is micropolitics,” the pleasures of which produce “meanings that are relevant and functional” (46).  In Fiske’s words, “The meanings I make from a text are pleasurable when I feel that they are my meanings and that they relate to my everyday life in a practical, direct way” (46).

Taken to another level, that of the lens of fandoms, Fiske’s explanation of micropolitics can be applied to my understanding of why, for instance, Star Wars fans who grew up with the original theory hail it as “classic” while vilifying creator George Lucas for producing the prequel trilogy, which did not meaningfully relate to the majority of their adult selves’ lives. I can also relate micropolitics to a paper that I am currently composing on writer production (via Steven Moffatt) and fan reaction to River Song, a popular recurring character featured on the current iteration of Doctor Who. When Moffat is successfully writing River to the fans’ satisfaction, meaning she is sufficiently mysterious and empowered in her first few stories with the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, the fans are pleased. However, in her subsequent appearances, as her chronologically rearranged origin is revealed and her agency as a strong heroine is diminished, fans criticize her characterization. Conceivably, with Fiske’s theory of micropolitics in mind, fans, particularly females, experience a sense of diminishing returns in reference to the pleasure of deriving meaning or identity identification with a formerly strong female character who is in the process of being (to borrow a comic-book term) depowered

 

 

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