John Fiske: Understanding Popular Culture

1
John Fiske Understanding Popular Culture

• Culture is the constant process of producing
  meanings of and from our social experience.
• These meanings produce a social identity.
• Culture making is a constant process, and it is a
  distinctly social process.
• All meanings that are produced in our particular
  culture are in context of a particular social
  system.
• This social system is stratified it is
  dominated by certain groups who have relatively
  more power whites, males, wealthy capitalists.
• The dominant ideologies of our society emanate
  from these categories more than others. These
  dominant ideologies affect the preferred or
  dominant-culture readings of media texts.

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Ideology

• However, there are alternative or oppositional
  ideologies, too.
• Oppositional ideologies are more likely to
  emanate from social categories that are ranked
  near the bottom of our social stratification
  system racial minorities, women, the poor, etc.
• Alternative or oppositional readings of media
  texts are more likely to emanate from these
  groups the subordinated.

3
Popular Culture

• Because culture relates to the social system and
  to its power structure, culture is inherently
  political.
• It is centrally involved in the distribution (or
  possible redistribution) of social power.
• Popular Culture is made by various social
  categories who are subordinated or disempowered
  in some way by the social system.
• It emanates from people who lack some of the
  privileges that social power provides.

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Mass Society, Stratification and Dominant Ideology

• The larger or mainstream culture of a society
  will tend to reflect the meanings and interests
  of those categories that have the most power in
  society.
• Those groups in power have various resources of
  society at their disposal to assure that their
  ideologies, values, and myths are visible
  throughout the mainstream culture.
• Our mass society reflects the interests of the
  superordinates the dominant categories within
  the social stratification system particularly
  whites, males, and the rich.

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Mass Culture vs. Popular Culture

• In the mass culture, the mainstream way of life
  involves everyday Betty Crocker or cookie
  cutter lifestyles that presume certain preferred
  readings of media texts.
• The Betty Crocker norms of everyday life are
  sufficient for most people, particularly those
  who do not feel disempowered by the social
  system.
• Popular culture, however, is made by people who
  lack some of these societal resources. It is made
  by subordinates within the stratification system
  who do feel somewhat disempowered.
• The Betty Crocker lifestyle the cookie-cutter
  lifestyle - doesnt work for them.

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Popular Culture is Contradictory

• Because Betty Crocker is rejected to some extent,
  subordinates seek to make their own culture.
• To do this, they must appropriate the existing
  resources provided by the very social system the
  disempowers them.
• Popular Culture is therefore contradictory,
  because it uses the resources provided by the
  dominant social system but it uses them in ways
  that are not intended by the dominant social
  system.
• In other words, these people are purchasing Betty
  Crocker brownies, but they are choosing to not
  follow the directions provided by Betty Crocker
  on how to cook these brownies. They are making
  something that fits their own subculture.

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The Dominant System Provides lots of Resources

• The dominant social system provides lots of
  resources in our culture cars, clothes, TVs,
  games, language, shopping malls, music, sports,
  etc.
• These resources carry the interests of the
  dominant social categories. They subtly reinforce
  the hegemony of their interests.
• For example, the English language subtly
  reinforces patriarchy. It has so many words
  against women, and so few against men.
• However, if appropriated into the popular
  culture, these resources may by modified to carry
  contradictory messages.
• Feminists, for example, may use the term whore
  against men and thus liberate the word from its
  patriarchal connotations.

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Excorporation and Incorporation

• Excorporation this is a popular culture term for
  when an item of the dominant culture is modified
  to fit the interests of subordinate groups in
  the social system. This liberates an alternative
  meaning of that item.
• Incorporation this is when members of society
  accept the preferred meaning of an item the
  Betty Crocker or mainstream definition that
  carries the interests of the dominant groups.
• To follow the Betty Crocker cooking instructions
  to the letter is to incorporate those
  instructions. But if they are modified by
  subordinate groups to fit their own interests
  they are excorporated.

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Excorporation

• To be adopted, the cultural commodities of the
  dominant culture must appeal in some way to the
  interests of ordinary folks they must seem
  appealing to the subordinated.
• For a product to become popular, ordinary
  people have to be able to fit it into their own
  lives. In the act of fitting it, people modify
  it.
• This modification process is called
  excorporation.
• Because people modify the resources made
  available to them, there is always an element of
  popular culture that lies beyond the control of
  the elite.

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Popular Culture

• Popular culture is always a culture of conflict.
  It involves a struggle to make social meanings
  that fit the world of the subordinated using
  the resources provided by the very groups who do
  the subordinating.
• Essentially, popular culture is when the dominant
  culture is reconstructed and made popular by
  various non-elites.
• The same resources, like television, can serve
  both the elite and the subordinated.

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Popular Culture

• Popular culture is that culture made by the
  subordinated out of resources provided by the
  mass society in which these resources are
  excorporated to fit the interests of the
  subordinate.
• The meanings of popular culture can never be
  identified from the cultural resources alone. The
  meanings arise when these resources are taken and
  inserted into the everyday lives of non-elites,
  who excorporate new meanings from them.
• There is an abundance of polysemy, because the
  same item of culture may mean something different
  to different people, and it may be used
  differently too.

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Resistant Popular Culture

• Popular culture is made in relationship to the
  structures of dominance. This relationship can
  take two forms Resistance and/or Evasion.
• Resistance involves making resistant meanings.
• For example, when teenage girls adopt a
  definition of Madonna as a liberator from
  patriarchy (she asserts sexual independence),
  they have adopted a resistant meaning.
• The emphasis in resistance is on creating
  alternative readings to the preferred reading of
  a media text or an item of culture (such as
  Madonna).
• Creating alternative readings produces a form of
  pleasure called productive pleasure. New meanings
  are produced in a creative way.

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Resistant Meanings

• Making resistant meanings, or making alternative
  readings of media texts, is the first step toward
  developing an oppositional ideology to the status
  quo.
• This is significant to Marxists because Marxists
  argue that one must develop a class consciousness
  of collective resistance to achieve a revolution
  and remake the social system.
• John Fiske is not a Marxist, however. He argues
  that resistant meanings are not necessarily
  revolutionary rejections of the status quo.
  They are simply alternative meanings. But they do
  fertilize the groundwork for social change and
  may lead to class consciousness.

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Evasive Popular Culture

• The other form of popular culture is Evasion.
  Evasion involves evading or avoiding the
  hegemonic influence of the dominant social
  system.
• The evader ducks out. Fiskes example is the
  subculture of surfers who develop their own
  lifestyle (with nicknames) apart from mainstream
  expectations to get a job and settle down.
  People who evade seek to remain independent from
  the dominant culture not to change it. They are
  typically apolitical pleasure seekers.
• The pleasures they seek are independent from
  society and societal expectations. Evaders tend
  to emphasize the pleasures of the body. Sex,
  drugs and rocknroll, when done to the extreme,
  produce evasive pleasures.

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Resistance and Evasion

• Whereas resistant popular culture is mostly about
  producing alternative meanings (even though these
  meanings bring some pleasure), evasive popular
  culture is mostly about producing alternative
  pleasures.
• In evasive popular culture, the message is often
  to party or get high and one must do this
  away from authority figures.

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Summary

• Resistant popular culture is associated with
  productive pleasures creating new meanings.
• Evasive popular culture is associated with
  evasive pleasures pleasures of the body that
  are outside the limits of dignified mainstream
  society like sex, drugs, and rocknroll that are
  done to the extreme. To surfers, bikers, and
  hippies, its about the rush.
• It is also about avoiding the hegemonic
  discipline of mass society with its
  bureaucratic rules and regulations the rat
  race.

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Hegemonic Pleasure

• Popular culture emphasizes two forms of popular
  pleasures productive pleasures and evasive
  pleasures.
• There is a third form of pleasure, and it is
  associated with the dominant culture. Hegemonic
  pleasure is the pleasure of conforming to the
  rules.
• It is the pleasure of discipline in which we
  reveal that we are capable of playing by
  societys rules and thus pleasing authority
  figures like our parents, teachers, bosses, etc.
• While popular pleasures involve resisting or
  evading the rules, hegemonic pleasures are the
  pleasures of conformity to the rules. Every child
  who has been toilet trained knows this pleasure.

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The Shopping Mall different meanings, different
pleasures

• The meaning of the shopping mall resides in the
  interrelationship between the resource and the
  user.
• The dominant culture meaning of the Mall is that
  it is a cathedral of consumption. One is expected
  to be a proper consumer. The good shopper shops
  properly - on credit and achieves a hegemonic
  pleasure.
• However, in our stratified society, poor people
  cannot easily achieve this pleasure. Indeed, poor
  people are not welcome in shopping malls. Yet
  despite the security guards there are poor people
  at the mall. And there are suspicious teenagers
  there too who are not shopping properly. What are
  they doing there?

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The Shopping Mall

• Marginal people may use the mall for alternative
  purposes than shopping. They may be there to
  merely window shop, or to meet friends, or just
  to use the space. These users are not consumers.
  They may simply be using the mall to duck out
  from school (evasive popular culture) and/or to
  reject its preferred meaning in favor of an
  alternative meaning, thus engaging in resistant
  popular culture.
• There are even shoppers at the mall who are not
  Betty Crocker shoppers. The teenage Goth shopper
  is purchasing tons of black makeup to make a
  statement of (popular culture) resistance against
  the dominant culture. It is easy to find
  hegemonic, productive and evasive pleasures at
  the mall.

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Popular Culture is fluid and diverse

• Popular culture is the culture of the subordinate
  who resent their subordination at some level.
• They may avoid the system, they may trick the
  system, they may redefine the system, or they may
  openly reject the system.
• Those who evade or resist the system are not one
  unified homogenous group. Popular culture is
  loose, fluid, and diverse. They same people who
  tricked the system one day may behave
  properly the next day. Popular culture has a
  guerilla resistance nature to it.

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Fight the power!

• To John Fiske, while many people are passive
  dupes (conformists) of industrial capitalism and
  its dominant ideologies, many people are not.
  They are active choosers of which products to
  buy, which TV shows to watch, and which
  information to believe in.
• In our mass society, there is a constant
  interplay of power and resistance to power.
• Much of this struggle is a struggle for meanings.
  What is the dominant culture meaning of a poor
  black person in the ghetto? Do these blacks
  accept this definition, or do they fight back
  with alternative definitions?

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Popular Culture is everywhere, and it is often
vulgar

• Popular culture is full of resistances puns,
  vulgarities that assault elites, jokes, parodies
  anything that doesnt conform to the
  disciplined social order that the social system
  encourages.
• The use of vulgarity in hip hop culture is often
  to send a message of resistance against
  mainstream white-dominated society. This is an
  in-your-face resistance that says we dont
  play by your rules.
• Indeed, youth culture itself is filled with
  vulgarities in the face of repressive adult
  norms. It is even possible for adults to enjoy
  these vulgarities. They may read an
  anti-aristocracy statement in youth culture
  vulgarities that they too identify with.

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Mass culture and popular culture

• Hal Himmelstein is worried that popular culture
  is a culture of subordination in which people
  have been massified into dupes of capitalism and
  its dominant myths.
• Himmelstein is concerned about the effects of
  mass culture and does not differentiate it from
  what Fiske calls popular culture. Himmelstein
  is a mass culture theorist.
• Fiske differentiates between mass culture and
  popular culture.
• Mass culture is produced by elites and their
  corporations and serves the interests of elites.
  It is the assembly line culture of the
  mainstream, such as found on Top-40 radio.

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How dupified are the masses?

• Popular culture is produced by subordinates out
  of resistance to or evasion of mass culture.
• Fiske argues that mass culture theorists
  underestimate the extent to which popular culture
  works as an agent of resistance against the
  dominant groups in society.
• Fiske does not see people as passive and opiated,
  although he concedes that some are. He sees
  active interpreters who evaluate using different
  criteria than those provided simply by dominant
  ideologies.

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Resistance is not futile

• Fiske sees everyday acts of deviance in the mall,
  at school, on the job, at the theater, in sports
  arenas, etc.
• They may not take the form of an organized social
  movement, but they are resistant.
• These everyday acts of defiance provide fertile
  soil for more organized and visible challenges to
  the status quo to emerge.
• To Fiske, evasion is the foundation of
  resistance, and resistance is the foundation of a
  social movement that can dramatically change
  society.
• He likens this to a kind of guerilla warfare in
  which anyone at any time can engage in deviant
  behavior and sent a message of resistance or
  evasion.

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Popular Culture is Empowering

• The beginning of political empowerment is the
  ability to think differently. This is the source
  of resistance.
• This resistance results from the desire to exert
  control over the meanings of their own lives.
  People who are subordinated face the problem of
  more powerful groups defining them. If they allow
  this, they lose their self esteem and can become
  passive.
• Resistance is empowering. When one takes control
  over their own defining process they gain self
  esteem, and this confidence leads to more visible
  actions of resistance.
• A guerilla resistance may appear minor, such as
  getting a risqué tattoo that is disapproved of by
  society, but it seeds empowerment.

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Comparison of the Economic Model (Himmelstein)
with the Cultural Model (Fiske) Emphasis
Eco. Model Cult. Model
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The Jeaning of the World

• Jeans were developed in America and have become
  so popular throughout the world that they have
  become a world symbol of American culture and
  values.
• When jeans are adopted in the popular culture of
  other countries, these cultures excorporate new
  meanings for the jeans.
• Yet they also bear traces of their
  Americanness.
• The export of jeans contributes to the
  Americanization of the world, but these cultures
  do not become American. They pick and choose
  aspects of Americanism that they identify with.

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Containment

• Fiske argues that popular culture is everywhere
  and that excorporation is very common.
• When subordinated groups use resources in a new
  way, and this underground style becomes popular
  at the grass roots level, the corporate producers
  of the resources must resort to the process of
  containment.
• Manufacturers quickly exploit the popularity of
  the underground style by reproducing it in the
  factory and marketing it as hip or the next
  big thing.

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Containment

• Fiske gives the example of torn jeans. The
  original torn jeans were done by ordinary hippies
  who simply wore out their clothes rather than
  replace them with new store-bought jeans.
  Hippies dont believe in consumerism, and the
  torn jeans came to symbolize this counterculture.
• But the very popularity of torn jeans made them
  attractive to corporations, who began to offer
  factory-beached, factory-torn jeans as the next
  big thing. The process of adopting the signs of
  resistance into the dominant system is an attempt
  to rob them of their oppositional meanings to
  co-opt them.

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Containment

• To the economic model - the model emphasizing
  incorporation - these signs of opposition are
  turned to the advantage of the manufacturers, so
  that the wearing of torn jeans becomes a way of
  extending consumerism rather than a way of
  opposing consumerism.
• Fiske argues the problem with this model is it
  fails to recognize that there is a huge
  difference between a person who wears their own
  torn jeans (as a statement of resistance to the
  corporate machine) and one who wears factory-torn
  jeans (as a statement of conformity to what the
  corporate machine dictates as hip).

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Containment is never fully successful

• Containment, says Fiske, is never fully
  successful because resistors simply move on to
  create new styles of resistance.
• Corporations are constantly trying to catch up
  with these underground styles.
• They pay close attention to these resistors and
  evaders emanating from the streets, from high
  schools and colleges, from the ghettos, from
  tattoo parlors, music clubs, and other dives, and
  from youth culture in general.
• Popular culture fashion and music is always ahead
  of the mass culture versions of their products.

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Popular culture and mass culture

• There are basically two cultures operating
  simultaneously in our society popular culture
  and mass culture - and they are connected through
  this process of containment.
• At the grass roots level, ordinary subordinates
  seek to create their own identities and make new
  fashion, music, language, sports, and other
  styles to reflect these efforts.
• At the mass culture level, corporations market
  copy-cat versions of these styles which are
  slightly modified to be safe for the status quo.
• Corporate rock music is not the same as
  underground rock music - it has been factory
  bleached to be safe for mass marketing.

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Adaptation, not adoption

• To Fiske, popular culture is made by the people
  not produced by a culture industry.
• It is in the self-interest of large corporations
  to massify, to promote dominant ideologies and
  myths, and to offer standardized assembly-line
  products. But these behaviors and messages do not
  go unopposed.
• The opposing forces transform or excorporate mass
  made products into new cultural resources. In
  doing so, the opposing forces pluralize the
  meanings of that particular commodity.
• The culture of everyday life is found in the
  process of adaptation (not adoption) to the
  imposed systems brought forth by the powerful.

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Tactical Consumption

• One form of adaptation is tactical consumption.
• In our society, everyone is a consumer, so
  everyone feeds the machine of corporate
  capitalism.
• Yet the act of consumption can be detached from
  the strategies of capitalism. A consumer might
  use a commodity to make a different statement
  than the one intended by the products
  manufacturer. When this is done, it is called
  tactical consumption.
• An example was given earlier of a goth subculture
  consumer who buys and wears outrageous makeup on
  purpose in order to send a message of resistance.
  This is a tactical consumption.

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Popular Culture is Inclusive

• This is not to say that a member of a dominant
  group cannot participate in popular culture. They
  can and do. But to do so, they must reform their
  allegiance away from those that give them their
  social power.
• It is also possible that a wealthy white male
  might identify with the plight of the Jews, or be
  a feminist, or be aligned in some way against
  some aspect of the power structure.
• Our social statuses are complex, and our
  loyalties are complex.
• Any product offered by the mass culture may be
  used or interpreted in a popular culture manner,
  and almost anyone can do this.

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Empowerment

• The key motivating force behind popular culture
  is the desire and pleasure of producing ones own
  meanings and pleasures, while avoiding or
  resisting the social discipline imposed by the
  dominant forces in society.

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Evasive Pleasure

• Evasive pleasure usually focuses on the pleasures
  of the body. It is extra-social.
• Ecstasy, bliss, the orgasm these are all
  pleasures which are associated with the loss of
  self.
• The self is socially constructed and therefore
  socially regulated. The loss of self is therefore
  a form of evading the socially-constructed self
  it is a form of evading societal control.
• In the pleasures of the body, we are all equal,
  and this insight poses a threat to any
  hierarchical social system.

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Evasive Pleasure

• In the moment of orgasm, or any bliss, the
  temporary loss of ones social identity produces
  a momentary unique identity apart from society.
• This temporary bliss may be induced by drugs,
  orgasm, loud music, surfing, skydiving, rhythmic
  dancing, chanting, praying, or even singing in
  the shower. It is a distinct body high and it
  has nothing to do with society and its rules and
  everything to do with our nervous system.
• At this moment, one may sense a temporary
  oneness with others or even a spiritual awakening
  that is related to this new extra-social
  identity.

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Evasive Pleasure

• Regardless of how it is achieved, these evasive
  pleasures attract the forces of social discipline
  because they threaten the status quo.
• These experiences are totally subjective and
  beyond the manipulative power of dominant groups
  to control.
• This is one of the reasons why there have been so
  many attempts to control and discipline the
  expression and experience of sexuality.
• Womens sexual pleasure, and even masturbation
  itself, has been restricted by the forces of
  social power. In the Victorian 19th century, it
  wasnt civilized for a woman to achieve orgasm.

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Evasive pleasure

• To be civilized is to be disciplined by the
  rules of society. And a Christian or Victorian
  society allows only certain forms of pleasure.
• Therefore to experience these bodily pleasures is
  to refuse to be socially controlled, at least
  momentarily.
• This temporary experience is empowering because
  it reminds us that there are aspects of ourselves
  that lie beyond the laws of society.
• Fiske argues that evasive pleasures produce the
  energy and empowerment that underlie the
  production of resistant meanings. They are a
  foundation.

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Productive pleasure

• Whereas evasive pleasures center on the body,
  productive pleasures center on the mind.
• Creating resistant interpretations, such as by
  using an alternative interpretation of a
  mainstream TV show, produces a productive
  pleasure.
• Embarrassing elites is a common popular pleasure.
  Much of our tabloid culture offers plenty of
  opportunity for productive pleasures.
• Empowerment comes from producing your own
  meanings from the available cultural resources
  and making them relevant to the everyday world.

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Strategies of Discipline

• The industrialization of the 19th century
  produced extreme social class divisions, and the
  worlds of the rich and the working class were
  extremely different, as were their
  consciousnesses.
• These differences constituted a threat to the
  ability of the wealthy to control the social
  order for their own interests.
• Consequently, the disciplinary energy of the
  wealthy was directed toward trying to control or
  contain the leisure activities of the lower
  classes.
• The significance of leisure for the working class
  is that it is an activity that lies beyond the
  workplace and is therefore not directly
  controlled by the company manager.

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Strategies of Discipline

• Consequently, the dominant classes developed
  strategies to control the leisure of the working
  class to control or try to manipulate their
  conditions of pleasure.
• There were two main strategies
• 1. Repressive legislation to actually stop the
  behavior. Cockfighting, for example, could be
  outlawed.
• 2. Containment of their vulgarities into
  socially acceptable formats. Wrestling and boxing
  could be subject to rules and officials in order
  to civilize them and bring them under the
  control of the dominant classes.

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Strategies of Discipline

• In the popular culture of this era, the popular
  recreations were either blood sports like
  cockfighting or carnivalesque festivals such as
  annual fairs and sports events.
• Historically, where popular behavior exceeds
  social control, it tends to be defined as immoral
  and as a threat to civilized society (in other
  words, elites).
• This is true to some extent, because all popular
  culture is inherently subversive to the status
  quo.
• The pleasures and excesses of the body, such as
  drunkenness, sexuality, drug use, idleness,
  rowdiness these were all seen as threats to the
  social order. They were undisciplined behavior.

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Strategies of Discipline

• While drunkenness and sexual promiscuity were
  frowned upon if they occurred in the world of the
  aristocracy, there were not seen as threatening.
  This same drunkenness in the working class,
  however, was perceived as threatening by elites.
• So an old peasant ritual characterized by public
  drunkenness and rowdy behavior the holiday we
  now call Christmas - might be appropriated or
  contained and turned into an official holiday.
  In its 19th century version, this holiday was to
  be earned by the industrial worker for being
  obedient to the boss. Pass the spiked eggnog
  please.
• Actually despite efforts at containment, many of
  us still get drunk and rowdy over Christmas.

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Strategies of Discipline

• Wrestling was also a popular working class sport
  that was subject to containment. Wrestling was
  appropriated into a ring, with an official who
  would assure that civilized rules would apply.
• The dominant class sought to turn wrestling into
  a controlled recreation. Their goal was to turn
  a vulgar activity into a respectable
  activity.
• Despite the attempt by the dominant classes to
  control (or contain) the lower classes, these
  efforts have had limited success. People still
  get drunk and rowdy, and wrestling is still
  pretty vulgar.

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Wrestling as popular culture material

• Indeed modern wrestling makes a parody of rules
  and officials, signaling working class contempt
  against elites. Wrestling is filled with
  intentional bad taste and degradation, just as
  hip hop is - and for similar reasons.
• Today, modern wrestling is similar to the
  medieval carnival. It is intentionally
  uncivilized a place where rules are made to be
  broken. In wrestling, the referee is not
  powerful, and even the wrestlers body borders on
  the grotesque.
• A sign of popular leisure is when the people
  themselves participate in the activity, and in
  wrestling the fight always spills out into the
  stands.

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Wrestling as popular culture material

• Wrestling, therefore, is a parody of the world of
  the upper class, where they laugh at the wimpy
  aristocrat.
• This is why wrestling still appeals mostly to the
  working class. It is they who are subject to the
  rules of elites.
• Therefore, this audience enjoys a sport of
  excess, where the cheaters and ugly characters
  win and where the guy who plays by the rules
  loses.
• We expect insults and vulgarities in wrestling
  because they symbolize a refusal to be tamed by
  the elite forces of discipline.

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Conclusion

• To Fiske, popular culture is progressive in the
  sense that it challenges the status quo and its
  pecking orders.
• It is micro-based rather than macro-based, and it
  reflects everyday statements that reveal a desire
  for self-determination and self-expression in the
  face of social hierarchies.
• While it is not a direct ideology of revolution,
  it provides the soil for social change and for
  revolutionary ideologies to emerge.
• To Fiske it is wrong to assume that because
  people are not in a state of class consciousness,
  then they must be in a state of false
  consciousness.

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Conclusion

• Similarly, Fiske argues that there is nothing
  inherently wrong with finding pleasure out of the
  same system that colonizes us.
• Indeed, this very pleasure might be a subversive
  popular pleasure.
• The fundamental issue is control over our own
  lives in a mass society dominated by the
  interests of corporate capitalism.
• The current absence of powerful movements for
  humanistic social change does not mean that the
  masses are opiated the way mass culture theorists
  argue. The very existence and pervasiveness of
  popular culture shows that many people are
  actively pushing back.

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End