Understanding Popular Culture: Part Two

For my second week of reading Understanding Popular Culture, I found myself inundated with theory after theory in the final two–thirds of John Fiske’s text. Since the first three chapters of this work were more contemporary in tone at the time of Fiske’s writing, I was surprised by the historical mood of Chapter 4: “Offensive Bodies and Carnival Pleasures.” While charting the evolution of sports and recreation in England – and the public reaction to them – Fiske adopts a tone akin to Foucault in The History of Torture, as he provides both a historical overview of his subject matter and an application of theory. Utilizing the work of historians Robert Malcolmson, Gareth Stedman-Jones, and Hugh Cunningham, Fiske argues how British sports such as football and cricket were able to be appropriated by the English middle-class and made respectable (65).

When it comes to wrestling, thankfully – and this is where Fiske’s discussion becomes timely for me – strategies of class-control are ineffectual. Fiske writes, “Wrestling…is quite a different matter – here the middle-class ethos has failed to control the professional sport to the extent that it becomes doubtful if the bourgeois word sport is even remotely appropriate. In wrestling, probably more than in any other ‘sport,’ the disorderly popular pleasures are given free and public expression” (65). As the author then discusses the resisting “grotesque” bodies of wrestlers, with an application of Bakhtin thrown in to aid his argument, he states, “The grotesque is properly part of the vernacular of the oppressed” (72). This comment, which articulates why wrestling fans loves their disproportionately-musculatured heroes, instead of traditional square-jawed paragons of masculinity, led me, in a linear-way, to wonder why fans of the fictitious living dead choose to dress up like their decaying heroes and take zombie strolls. On the one hand, this carnivalesque public expression of zombie fandom is undeniably egalitarian – as the issues of sex, race, or bodily appearance becomes transformed and obviated by makeup showing varying degrees of physical decrepitude. Thus, the grotesque simulation of death becomes the resisting and destabilizing force against traditional notions of bodily health and beauty. The majority of these zombie strollers, on the other hand, are predominately middle-class, judging from the locations – towns and malls – where they stage the spectacle of their “walks.” Nonetheless, in an age of economic uncertainty, such expressions of resistance mimic anxieties concerning a post-apocalyptic scenario where all social institutions – perhaps all normal definitions of existence itself – have evolved into a distorted, deathly mockery of middle-class life.

In Chapter 6, “Popular Texts,” Fiske likewise lends me a finer understanding of how television opens itself up to the rigor of critical interpretation once reserved for a novel: “The reader of a novel is often told in great detail of the interior feelings and motivations of a character: The viewer of television has to infer all of these from a raised eyebrow, a downturn of the corner of a mouth, or the inflection of the voice as it speaks the cliché. By ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling,’ by sketching rather than drawing completely, popular texts open themselves up to a variety of social relevances” (98). Last week, I mentioned that I am currently working on a paper articulating Steven Moffat’s development of the character of River Song and fan reaction to her evolving characterization. Moffat is adept at conveying the depth of emotional feeling taking place between the Doctor and River, but the fans still feel a sense of ownership toward the characters, particularly River, as they closely watch and, hence, rewrite, or appropriate Moffat’s text when it lets them down and goes in a direction beyond their set of expectations. With Fiske’s above comment in mind, then, I can better approach fan interpretations of River in zines and user-generated tribute videos on YouTube.

In the future, for my theoretical dissertation, which I hinted at in my last blog, I potentially wish to explore anime fandom. Like my comments concerning zombie strollers, this is relatively new critical territory for me, but, if I simply posited myself as a Doctor Who or Star Wars theorist, how ultimately effective would I be as a scholar and teacher? Going outside my traditional objects of studies – and embracing more feminized fandoms such as anime – will thereby help me to achieve a wider, gendered overview of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror fandoms. Since anime is an animated form – or cartoon – it can visually transcend the limitations of reality. This thought leads me back to Fiske, who, in Chapter 6’s “Popular Discrimination,” discusses Bob Hodges and David Tripp’s studies on modalities, in that television news is a “high” (or more real) modality for children whereas “cartoons… are of low modalilty [as] they work on the conditional mood, and say, ‘The world would be like this if…’”  (123). When I thus behold the elegant and romanticized cartoon visuals of the anime series Chobits, the beautiful and action-oriented imagery of InuYasha, and the eclectic, kinesthetically shifting anime styles for FLCL, I understand why Japanese and American children, teens, and adult fans of these narratives love escaping to worlds where the infinite possibilities of if are constantly in play. 

Fiske’s concluding chapter, “Politics,” works well in telling me that the term mass culture is a misnomer as “such a process, if it existed…would be anticultural and unpopular; it would be the antithesis of culture understood as the production and circulation of meanings and pleasures, and of the popular as an intransigent, oppositional, and scandalous set of forces” (141). This tension between the forces of production and the consumers who purchase or reject brands and goods should indeed be celebrated. Oppositional binaries, as Fiske reminds us in his conclusion to Understanding Popular Culture, are also the chaotic sort of energy that should channel scholarship: “New knowledge is not an evolutionary improvement on what precedes it; rather, new knowledges enter adversarial relationships with older, more established ones, challenging their position in the power play of understandings, and in such confrontations new insights can be provoked” (153). With Fiske’s inspiration truth now in hand, I can more confidently forge ahead in my evolution as a fan cultures scholar!

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…

 

 

Time Incorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives: Vol. 3: Writings on the New Series: Part Two

In “Allons-y, Part 6 of Time Incorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives: Vol. 3: Writings on the New Series (Mad Norwegian Press 2011), writer Lloyd Rose celebrates John Simm’s Master in “Re-Mastered.” From reading online message boards, I often see fans slagging off Simm’s interpretation of the Master, which I have always held to be diabolically brilliant. Rose’s positive reading of Simm’s interpretation of the Master thus reinforces my defense and adoration for his performance. He also points out the act of creative synergy taking place between writer Russell T Davies and Simm: “Forget whatever’s going on between the Master and the Doctor. This is the real story, the romance between writer and actor, a fusion of shared exploration and delight” (180). As I said in my second blog on Convergence Culture, academic criticism for an object of study does not always have to be critical. In the case of fan criticism toward an object of affection, this truth doubly holds its weight. And for me, who wishes to hone his skill as a fan cultures scholar, this rule is triply true, as I need to remember to fairly assess fans even if I do not agree with their critical views or obsessive love for their sacred idols and stories.

For Part 7: “The 21^st Century is When It All Happens,” which centers on the two Doctor Who spinoff series, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, I have mixed feelings. It is not that the articles presented in this section of the book are not interesting; I just wish they could have been organized into a separate volume of Time Unincorporated dealing with ancillary series as the collection to this point contained a certain sense of momentum in commenting on the mother show. Nonetheless, I was quite impressed by Helen Kang’s contribution to this volume, “Death, Corpses and Un-Death in Torchwood.”  Taking Owen Harper’s death and subsequent “living dead” resurrection as a sentient, walking corpse in the second series of Torchwood as her cue, Kang intriguingly weaves in Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic, particularly his ideas concerning pathological anatomy, where a corpse tells the story of the deceased individual’s life (206). 

What I like about Kang’s approach is that she’s writing for Torchwood fans, but also for the academic crowd, a strategy which my co-author Marc Schuster and I similarly employed for our ruminations on Doctor Who in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: The Discerning Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who (McFarland 2007). Now that I am older, a little wiser, and heading toward my comprehensive exams and dissertation in the next few years for a Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism, I am reminded that this attitude is still a valid one, as it achieves a twofold success in appealing to the erudite fan and serious scholar alike. Thus, regardless of whether or not I’m talking about feminist Doctor Who fans, aging comic-book readers, people who join in group zombie strolls, tween science-fiction readers, devoted Star Wars lovers, or cross-cultural anime fandom, I can still incorporate the theories of such thinkers as Marx, Haraway, Bourdieu, and any other so-called “heavy” intellectual when I am writing with a multilayered audience in mind.

In understanding how fans express their appreciation – or the converse – for producer / head writers Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, one should look at how these two men approach writing Doctor Who. Scott Clarke tackles this subject in “A Tale of Two Writers” in Part 8 of this volume, “Wibbly-Wobbly…”  With one line, Clarke’s adroitly articulates Davies and Moffat’s divergent mythology-arc structuring of their Doctor Who seasons: “To be completely stark: a Davies arc is a portent of doom in the background of escalating character crisis; a Moffat arc is like an elaborate mousetrap that the characters have to react to and find their way out of” (233). In interviews, both writers often discuss growing up with Doctor Who and practicing a lifelong love of the series, in front of the television as a fan and behind the writer’s desk as a professional. Their respective mythology-arc strategies form a synthesis of their Doctor Who viewing experiences and their understanding about modern television, which has resulted in successful new televised adventures for a certain two-hearted alien and his antiquated time machine. 

Part 9, “Bowties are Cool,” repeats what Part 1 of this volume accomplished: It presents fan-love for the incumbent Time Lord, in this case, Matt Smith, who plays the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor. Graeme Burke’s contribution to this section, “Dear Matt Smith,” is one specific standout since it proffers a fan’s perspective on the act of assuming the venerated role of the Doctor to Mr. Smith, who, at the time of Burke’s article, would not debut on BBC screens as the Eleventh Doctor for over a year.  Burke wisely warns Smith that Doctor Who fans will dissect every aspect of the show’s production, which involves casting, characters, storylines, and even the briefest of interviews. He adds to Smith, “With that passion – and the principle holds true for fans of football, baseball, and theatre – fans can develop an incredible sense of enthusiasm, that we are personally owed something by you” (273). Although Burke proceeds to tell Smith to just apply his best acting to the role of the Doctor, the darker vision of his words remains with me.  This shadowy and sometimes disturbing underbelly of Doctor Who – and practically any other type of fandom – is not the most appealing variety of subject matter, but it is one I must address in the future as I explore different modules of fan communities. I guess what I am saying is that, in returning to the subject of obsessive fans, I am going to have to take both a clinical and empathetic intellectual stance in delving into their oftentimes complicated, troubled, and contradictory mindsets…