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Popular Media (Routledge 1992), as a historical document (as all theory becomes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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