John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture

Introduction

The book ‘Understanding Popular Culture’ by John Fiske highlights the conflicting responses popular culture can stir up. It takes a new approach in studying cultural artifacts. It discusses what popular culture is and what do popular ‘texts’ reveal about class, race and gender dynamics in a society. Furthermore, it differentiates mass culture- the cultural products put out by an industrialized, capitalist society between popular culture- the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and message. Finally, this book presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that is, literally, of the people.

Fiske draws on examples from both sides of the Atlantic, in particular, the USA and the UK in making his concepts easier to understand. He analyzes popular "texts" to reveal both their explicit, implicit (and often opposite) meanings and uses, and the social and political dynamics they reflect. He also examines the multitude of meanings lying beneath the cultural artifacts that surround us in shopping malls, popular music and television.

‘Understanding Popular Culture’ highlights the conflicting responses that cultural phenomenon such as Madonna and the Chicago Sears Tower evoke. It locates popular culture as the point at which people take the goods offered them by industrial capitalism and turn them to their own creative and even subversive uses. Finally, it refutes the theory that a mass audience mindlessly consumes every product it is offered.

Criticisms

John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture deals with the popular use of the texts provided by a total culture industry. Because the popular culture is the culture of oppressed, the freedom of the oppressed here is a freedom of reading, interpreting and producing popular meanings out of the material provided by the dominant forces. (Cvek, 2003)

The problem of this approach affects the political immediacy of the theory as well as its perspectives since an absolute focus on the use of popular texts denies the possibility of people to take up other subject position than of the consumer. People simply cannot produce anything else than readings and meanings since they cannot match on the popular production of culture. In other words, popular culture is basically a culture of consumers, not producers. (Cvek, 2003)

This contributes to a separation of the spheres of politics and entertainment as a part of culture industry. In the contemporary situation where the dominant force is a corporate industrial-entertainment such approach can not account for the actuality of and aesthetization of politics. This aesthetization occurs predominantly by way of popular culture. (Cvek, 2003)

In his examination of Television Culture, John Fiske (1987) extends the tradition by holding that people are readers, reactors, and re-interpreters who bring their individual social residual factors to the television screen. Television has taken the role of dependent variable and the examination of a single television show as a delineation of viewers’ concerns. (Curry, 2001)

He acknowledges that the television audience consists of socially produced viewers who work the remote control within the web of their own social interests. More specifically, he suggests that viewers scan for programs that provide them the textual space to mediate between who they are, what they see, and the way they interpret program content. (Curry, 2001)

Thus, Fiske is correct in requesting audience research, which examines more than television’s influence, because to recognize the impact of viewer interactive reception in the social processing of meaning is to recognize the force and the reality of the social viewer. (Curry, 2001)

On the other hand, he has been criticized for overestimating the individual as a free and acting agent. Critics of reception studies have pointed out that even if people interpret the programmes they watch, they do so within the framework of possible interpretations. Further, it has been argued that he neglects the importance of structural and institutional factors, and thereby gives the individuals a far too independent and active role when the individual makes use of cultural products. In Fiske’s analysis, Mosco (1996) argues that differences between class, gender, race and other social categories that construct meanings and identities, are leveled out to the degree that they faces the danger of trivializing social differences. (The Political Economy of Popular Entertainment, 1998)

Point of View

I agree with John Fiske that popular culture is not consumption but a culture-the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system. I also agree that popular culture is not produced by the culture industry but made by the people themselves. All the culture industries can do is to produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture.

Nevertheless, the products of these industries become only a tool by means of which the people engage in the cultural task of determining meaning of their lives. Thus, pop culture has become a cultural phenomenon.

Popular culture also reflects and affects the values and outlooks that people construct for them. Pop cultural commodities may well be produced and distributed by industries that are motivated to a large degree by their own economic interests.

There could be also no popular dominant culture. It is determined by the forces of domination to the extent that it is always formed in reaction to them. But the dominant cannot control totally the meanings that the people may construct and the social allegiances they may form. The people are not the helpless subjects of an irresistible ideological system. They are free willed and biologically determined individuals. Members of the dominant social groups could also participate in popular culture. They must just reform their allegiances away from those that give them their social power.