Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular Kevin Glynn, Pamela Wilson and Jonathan Gray

An Introduction to the second editions of John Fiskes Understanding Popular Culture (Routledge, 2010) and Reading the Popular (Routledge, 2010)

John Fiske writes, in his original Prefaces to both Understanding Popular Culture and Reading the Popular, My histories and the multiple voices of my colleagues, friends, antagonists, students, teachers, and others constitute the resource bank that I raid in order to speak and write: I take full responsibility for the use I make of them, but without them, nothing would have been possible. Wed like to return the favor that is implied in Fiskes statement, and encourage others to do so. In his sentence, Fiske gestures (if only obliquely) toward at least three valuable and important dimensions of his approach to popular media culture. First, history, whether considered at the level of the individual or that of social structures, should be understood as neither inert nor bearing deterministically on the present; rather, it presents resources and opportunities to forms of creative agency capable of drawing upon them in distinctive and unpredictable ways. Second, cultural resources must be put to use in order to become socially effective; indeed, they cannot be properly understood without some effort on the part of the analyst to grapple with the ways in which they are taken up and variously mobilized by their users. Third, all cultural products, including texts, places, events, identities and subjectivities, are inescapably traversed and animated by the dialogical. It is in the spirit of these very Fiskean ways of thinking and operating that we offer this introduction to his two companion texts on popular culture. Two of us were students of Fiske, another one of us works in the Media and Cultural Studies Program at the University of

2 Wisconsin-Madison where Fiske retired, and the three of us can each identify moments in our own personal histories when Fiskes work presented us with useful resources that have made a difference in our lives. We have each benefited substantially from the dialogues weve undertaken with and through Fiskes popular culture books. It seems fitting, then, to offer, by way of introduction, our own mutual dialogue as an invitation to others to join the conversation with Fiskes understandings and readings of popular culture. Although the study of popular media culture has expanded substantially in the years since UPC and RP were first published, and therefore many new voices have entered the dialogue, we remain convinced that these two books comprise a particularly rich and distinctive treasury of resources whose potential uses are nowhere near exhausted. While, as we discuss below, media and popular culture have in some ways transformed dramatically in the two decades since these texts first appeared, and while we may quibble or disagree with aspects of each text, we are nevertheless firmly convinced that Fiskes two popular culture books remain vital resources for engaging in a history that is still being forged and actively struggled for. _______________________________________ Jonathan Gray: Let me get the ball rolling by noting one of the most under-appreciated elements of the two popular culture books (and of Fiske) -- they introduce Barthes, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and De Certeau to readers with clarity. My undergrads at four universities have regularly struggled with the first three in particular, and yet these books make them all intelligible. Thus, for all the hoopla about active audience theory and semiotic democracy, the popular culture books also do an outstanding job of rendering other theories accessible. I'd also note that these are among the fairly few books in media studies that truly take an understanding of "the text" seriously. We can tend to run footloose and fancy free through our

3 own textual analyses without even stopping to ask how textuality works in the first place, but UPC and RP don't just make offhand comments -- they really try to understand basic principles at work. Thus, even before we discuss the importance of the specific observations that Fiske makes in the books, its worth noting how they prove that theoretically engaged scholarship neednt be distant, remote, or painfully difficult, and that grounded examples and involved theory neednt be strangers. Personally, Im thankful that figures such as Fiske and Stuart Hall helped lay this groundwork for how media studies could and should work. Pam Wilson: Fiske does such a good job in these two books introducing and explaining in clear, accessible language concepts that are either quite dry in theory textbooks or quite complex when reading the primary texts. And beyond that, I think what is totally underappreciated about Fiske is not just that he explains or applies other peoples' theories well (which he does) but that his particular blend and interpretation of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Althusser, Williams, de Certeau, Barthes, Hall, Foucault, Bakhtin is a distinctive mix and approach that places him both within the British Cultural Studies camp but also sets him apart in significant ways. Having just read Fiske's Introduction to Communication Studies (1982) and noted his rootedness in Saussurian semiotics, and having myself received my early graduate training in the interdisciplinary field (linguistics/anthropology/sociology) of the 1970s-80s called the Ethnography of Speaking, it is also interesting to me how he has woven together Saussure's langue/parole model and de Certeau's model of tactical practice to understand the cultural processes involved in acts of consumption, which are reinterpreted to reveal forms of creative production. Fiske articulates this especially clearly when he says, "The object of analysis, then, and the basis of a theory of everyday life is not the products, the system that distributes them, or

4 the consumer information, but the concrete specific uses they are put to, the individual acts of consumption-production, the creativities produced from commodities" (UPC, 37). This emphasis on "concrete and specific uses" combined with the understanding that these usages will shift with various social formations, leads to a very context-based theory of practice in which nothing can be generalized; it's not about the generative rules (the grammar, the intended or prescribed usages) but rather about the way meaning is made in a given situation with the resources at hand. In the chapter of UPC entitled "Popular Texts," Fiske continues along these lines by building onto the Barthesian model of producerly texts (which he introduced in Television Culture) by analyzing popular and vernacular uses of language (focusing especially on punning and double entendres), and the prevalence of tropes of excess in popular culture. In these ways, he challenges the frequent accusation that popular culture is textually impoverished. Kevin Glynn: I think the chapter on popular textuality youre referring to, Pam, is an important and characteristically Fiskean one. One of its most interesting attributes is that it makes a more radical move than a lot of earlier cultural criticism that appreciated popular texts for their successes in living up to the criteria and value systems of the official culture. In other words, for a long time there have been cultural critics and analysts who are willing to grant the value of popular texts that display officially sanctioned aesthetic attributes such as narrative complexity, or the presence of psychologically well-rounded, realistic characters, for instance. But Fiskes appropriation of the Bakhtinian critique of cultural officialdom, his reading of Bourdieus analysis of the popular refusal of dominant aesthetic forms, stances and posturing, and his reworking of Barthes articulation of the move from work to text allow Fiske to do something that is arguably more radical in its own way, which is to accept the commonplace view of popular texts as excessive and obvious, while at the same time rejecting or even

5 reversing the elitist and disparaging evaluation of excessiveness and obviousness as bad textual attributes (UPC, p. 114). In this way, Fiske builds on his theoretical sources to mount a critique of the apparatuses of elite critical judgment (including those at work in the production of university curricula), and a sophisticated defense of popular taste that helped to establish the basis for a lot of subsequent work on everyday, popular texts (even if the authors of some of those subsequent works didnt always display a great appreciation for Fiskes interventions; in fact, I recall a few academic texts on television and popular culture that seemed to go out of their way to distance themselves from Fiske, often in a manner that seemed quite gratuitous, while then proceeding to elaborate arguments and analyses that were entirely consonant with Fiskes theoretical and political orientations there was something very revealing in this!). Pam Wilson: In the chapter called "Commodities and Culture" in Understanding Popular Culture, Fiske lays out the foundational principles that he will go on to explore more fully in Power Plays, Power Works and Media Matters -- notably, his interest in the social formations and processes by which "shifting sets of social allegiances" operate. In a 1991 interview with Eggo Mueller, Fiske said, I find ... useful Stuart Hall's formulation of the difference between the powerbloc and the people, where neither the power-bloc nor the people are objective social classes, but are agencies of social interest that are quite fluid. They constitute a theoretical concept. They don't exist as social categories, but as opposing social interests that different social categories will align themselves with or against for different purposes at different stages of history, for different spheres of their own existence. A working class man can align himself with the interests of the power-bloc in his gender politics and align himself with the interests of the

6 people in his class politics, so that it's fluid and shifting sets of allegiances that structure the contestation rather than social categories, whether those social categories are ones of class, of race, of gender, of age, or what have you. [http://www.let.uu.nl/~Eggo.Mueller/personal/onderzoek/interview-fiske.htm] Throughout my years studying with Fiske in the early 90s, he was clearly trying to create a model for understanding social formations that went beyond the traditional Marxist notions of class struggle and which could also encompass the cultural politics of race, gender, age, and so on. I think he felt that Bourdieu's concepts articulated in Distinction came the closest to expressing what he was trying to get at, but they were so specific to French society that Fiske wanted to create a model that could be applied in many different contexts. He particularly wanted to be able to understand and explain American social formations, finding the concept of class alone to be deeply inadequate. He was interested in the fluidity of social formations, which seemed to be less fixed in the American context than in Europe, and in the increasing ability of individuals to actively align themselves with multiple ones: to join and unjoin, to simultaneously "belong" to multiple social formations and to be variably invested in any one of them at any given time. As he clearly explains: "The various formations of the people move as active agents, not subjugated subjects, across social categories, and are capable of adopting apparently contradictory positions .... These popular allegiances are elusive, difficult to generalize and difficult to study, because they are made from within, they are made by the people in specific contexts at specific times. They are context- and time-based, not structurally produced: they are a matter of practice, not of structure" (UPC, 24-25).

7 Kevin Glynn: Youre right, Pam, to point to the politics of all this: this dimension is absolutely crucial for any kind adequate understanding of Fiskes work. In fact, it is telling that the final chapter toward which Understanding the Popular builds is focused on politics. Fiskes project was always a deeply political one, and this has not always been adequately appreciated. A major concern of his was with the political problems stemming from the established presumption on the left that the macro-level forces of social domination are merely and necessarily reproduced at the level of the micro-politics of everyday life. But it was never enough for Fiske just to show that these micro-politics operate according to an alternative set of transverse logics and disruptive energies; he was always concerned with trying to identify some of the points at which the micro-politics of indiscipline, subversion, oppositional difference, evasion what have you might be articulated into a set of forces capable of intervening at the level of the macro-politics of whole social formations. In this regard, his work, including the two popular culture books, was always very much a part of the British Cultural Studies tradition, even though he was often enough characterized as having veered off on some celebratory tangent and seen as a strange sort of postmodern, Americanized bastard offspring of the CCCS project. A common enough idea, I think, was that Fiskes interest in pleasure had led him to turn away from the politics that matter, the politics that might make a difference. And yet for Fiske, popular culture offered powerful lessons that might themselves reinvigorate a progressive politics that was often too preachy and dour for its own gooda left-wing politics that has allowed the right to promise the party while declining to envision a socialist alternative that delivers much in the way of fun (UPC, p. 162). That is, popular culture itself might contain some of the key insights into how progressive politics could more effectively make a difference.

8 Pam Wilson: One of the places where he explores these challenging questions around the role of pleasure in both our individual everyday lives and the culture at large is the chapter on Productive Pleasures in UPC. Fiske recognizes here that pleasures are multiple and often contradictory, and he focuses on popular pleasures, which he distinguishes from hegemonicallyoriented ones. The former, he believes, are bottom-up and "must exist in some relationship of opposition to power (social, moral, textual, aesthetic, and so on) that attempts to discipline and control them" (p. 50), while the latter are those pleasures associated with the exercise of dominating power. Popular pleasures, then, may take the form of evasion, offensiveness, or productivity. Fiske uses case studies to show how viewers and fans of TV programs and films engage in the pleasurable production of micro-political meanings. Kevin Glynn: Fiskes account of popular pleasure was a deliberate intervention, or even a provocation, regarding many of the orthodoxies of a politicized cultural theory and of a political left more broadly, both of which had in many ways become far too insularized and thus protected from the risks associated with becoming more effective. And this helps to explain the virulence of the reaction against his work in some circles, I think. Fiske risked the development of a genuinely engaged, effective progressive cultural politicsengaged and effective in the sense of entering into a dialogue with the popular, rather than holding it at arms length. And he paid a certain price for taking such risks, in the form of his critics virulence. His more sympathetic critics understood the deeply political dimensions of Fiskes work, even though they may have worried that he risked, for instance, encouraging an overemphasis on the micro-politics of everyday life and on the liberatory and subversive dimensions of popular pleasure. And these certainly are legitimate concerns to raise, because there are limitations and risks associated with an emphasis on the political potential of popular pleasurealthough the

9 Politics chapter of UPC illustrates well how Fiske always approached these issues with an exceptional level of nuance and thoughtful consideration. But his anti-fansthe fierce, sometimes even ugly criticsnever really even got it at all; they never really grasped the deeply political underpinnings or dimensions of Fiskes work. Today, in the age of The Daily Show and the Colbert Nation, however, more people seem to be taking an interest in the politics of popular pleasure, oppositional laughter and subversive fun. Among those who were often most appreciative of Fiskes work on popular culture were many feminists and many students. Fiskes work always listened to and engaged with feminist thinking and approaches, so its not surprising that there was a mutual dialogue between them. Students were drawn to Fiskes work on popular culture not only, I think, because it made complex theory more accessible to them, but also because of the inclusive way in which it invited them into an academic engagement with popular culture that was deeply democratic (and, having been a student of Fiskes, I would say that among the things his students noted about John was not only his general good humor, but also his democratic personality). Many students liked Fiskes work, I think, because it helped them better understand how they might both hold progressive commitments and enjoy many of the ordinary, popular cultural pleasures that they actually enjoyed. Other, more orthodox left/progressive theories of the popular were far less accommodating and politically inclusive in this respect. Jonathan Gray: Agreed, Kevin -- if you'll allow my self-indulgence, a tiny bit of autobiography follows. I was an English Lit student who got bothered by being able to talk about texts, but not about politics or culture (unless it was Culture a la Matthew Arnold) ... which meant I couldn't talk about textuality as it actually worked. So I went into Postcolonial Lit, which allowed me to discuss politics and culture, but the texts under analysis were excellent books that

10 few had read, and I yearned to analyze more popular things that reached a large audience. I left academia, but a friend of mine kept saying she thought I'd like media studies. I grabbed Neil Postmans Amusing Ourselves to Death and 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 attention deficit disorder that supposedly afflicted my generational cohort, even though I'd known many of that cohort who enjoyed reading 1000 page novels. So I went back to my friend unimpressed, asking what this was. She told me I needed to follow her reading list, not go off alone, and she handed me Understanding Popular Culture. I read Understanding Popular Culture with great relish, and then Reading the Popular, and they were truly transformative. I don't agree with all that Fiske says in them, but finally someone understood how to be critical, concerned about politics and culture, willing and eager to use theory, and yet with a keen eye for the ways in which specific texts worked. I'm from a generation that grew up watching lots of TV, playing games modeled on TV and film, etc., and I couldn't in all honesty distance myself from that unless I wanted to disavow my childhood as one long social and political nightmare. I could and certainly wanted to express concern about many of its messages, and yet I sensed that popular culture had at times been a valuable resource in my development, not simply the brain-frying apparatus that both Amusing Ourselves to Death and some of my Lit training had suggested it was. Postman couldn't explain that. Fiske could, and he was willing and able to look beyond bourgeois cultures repression of popular culture to ask about the politics and culture of everyday life. So he had me, and I shipped off to study media and cultural studies.

11 Pam Wilson: Like Jonathan, I had left academia because of disillusionment with the inadequacy of the then-dominant paradigms (this was in anthropology in the early 80s, prior to Clifford and Marcus and Fischer and the post-structuralist turn in that discipline). It took reading Fiske's Television Culture to reignite my intellect and provide me with a model for how to engage critically with and understand popular culture and television -- and the culture beyond the media -- in a paradigm that incorporated both politics and pleasure. And this passion led me to seek out Fiske and apply to the doctoral program at UW to work with him. The questions you pose, Jonathan, are the very ones that fueled my often grueling but ultimately rewarding years as a doctoral student -- and that keep me teaching today. Jonathan Gray: I still balk when I hear the over-easy condemnations of Fiske and active audience work. Criticism is of course welcome, but as you noted earlier, Kevin, theres often a virulence to it that I find unsavory. First, it's usually from people who haven't truly read Understanding Popular Culture -- they hear the term "semiotic democracy" and think the worst. Many are, or fashion themselves as, well-meaning Marxists, who think they're fighting for the masses, yet sadly some can't get beyond the barely concealed, whole-hearted adoption of a theory of false consciousness that has them thinking very little of those masses, and that paradoxically sees the masses as in need of an elitist holding hand. They don't get the complex nature of the relationship between power, hegemony, and personal agency, and hence they overlook the fact that a society or culture is formed by more than just its institutions. Consequently, studies of the micro and of everyday consumption are posited as distracting for scholars, without realizing that the macro forces that they want to study must work through and around the actors and agents within them. Admittedly, society would be easier to understand if it

12 was just institutions, no people, but its not that simple, and thus we need models of culture that consider people as more than just automatons and institutional subjects. There's also something so disturbingly self-serving and self-congratulatory about the virulent criticism of Fiskes position too: go to school, put your head in a bunch of books, and then, to convince yourself that you're not bourgeois and out of touch, or even if you're not, to perform that you're not, disavow those nasty active audience scholars and their "celebratory" attitude towards the culture industries. (And, while you're at it, turn them into (a) a straw man caricature of rabid belief in audience power, and (b) imagine that they hold sway in academia, and that you're in the bold, rebel minority). I think of Joli Jensen's piece in the Lisa Lewis collection, The Adoring Audience, about fans being the easy stand-in and scapegoat when regular consumers want to feel better about their interaction with modernity, and so they create fandom as a space for looney excess. Similarly, active audience disavowal seems too often to carry the air of a campaign to make the disavower feel better about his or her (though often his) own scholarship perhaps being perceived as out of the loop and not sufficiently contributing to the revolution. As such, what Fiske did that means a lot to me is that he found a way to get complicity on the table. We may have misgivings with the media, and, heck, we should have misgivings. Many. But we're doing so while in the system, and we can't step outside to some Archimedean vantage point. Instead of disavowal, or of simply lashing one's back repeatedly, what seems required is an engagement with how we move forward even while complicit. The dreams of slaying the system and starting anew are cute, but till then, how do we move forward? How can we care about politics, and how can we make leftism work, while perhaps also enjoying a trip to the mall occasionally, or while being an avid fan of Lost, or while thinking pop music is

13 awesome? Maybe it's just because I've been prepping a class on Derrida for tomorrow, but it seems that we either deconstruct ourselves and work in the rubble, or we make ourselves great big targets to be deconstructed by others. Fiske wisely frames this issue in terms of relevance when he writes in UPC, for instance, that The need for relevance means that popular culture may be progressive or offensive, but can never be radically free from the power structure of the society within which it is popular (p. 134). This is a vital reminder, since as much as we might envision a radical break from the system as it is, Fiske suggests that radical breaks would suffer from being unfamiliar and unrooted, meaning theyd struggle to find a welcome, or even a comprehending, audience. Theres a highly problematic assumption that many critics of popular culture tend to make that if media that was better, smarter, and more edifying (as determined by said critics) existed, and if it replaced our current media, audiences would consume it and welcome it just as they consume and welcome popular culture today. Its like the TV Turnoff Week folk who hope that by turning off the television, young children will instead get out a chemistry set, read the works of Charles Dickens, and then form a recycling club. Maybe. But maybe theyll go tease a kid down the road, eat their way through a bag of candy, and then burn ants with a magnifying glass. Similarly, if we overhauled our media system, theres no promise that audiences would accept the alternative. Which means we must always be attentive to whats relevant, and to what speaks to an audience. Of course, I dont mean to make the opposite error of assuming that audiences would automatically reject anything better and revert always to the lowest common denominator. But to appear relevant, something will need to work with and in the world the audience has in front of it. The avant gardes aura of elitism, difference, and unfamiliarity will always limit its potential, and hence Fiske argues, there is more evidence of the progressive effectivity of

14 popular art on the micro level than there is of radical art on the macro level (p. 191). So when the products of a cultural industry are all around us, and a large part of the world that we know, how can we use those products, and what might that use do to transform them? Kevin Glynn: The classroom is one of the important places to develop strategies for moving forward and to forge new points of relevance between the concerns of academics and the interests of those whose lives may bring them into direct contact with universities for only four years or so at most. John was an exceptionally gifted teacher, and his books were written to be used, not least, in the classroom. In good cultural studies fashion, he was always engaged with efforts to bring a democratic cultural politics to bear within educational institutions, at the level of the curriculum, the classroom and the research seminar. I think he was deeply committed to the whole Birmingham-style, Stuart Hall-inspired project of creating inclusive and democratic educational spaces that might be conducive to the emergence of organic intellectuals. I think that both his scholarship and his pedagogy were deeply motivated by concerns to reach a different set of students and readers than the humanities and social sciences had traditionally sought to reach. Today we may take it for granted that things like music videos, gaming, and the cultures of shopping malls -- sites of leisure, tourism and everyday life -- are legitimate and interesting objects of analysis, so it might be easy to forget that this was not by any means always so. And often when such things were studied, it wasnt in ways that were both critically and theoretically informed and concerned to understand the meaning-making practices and perspectives of their audiences/users/consumers. But this critically and theoretically informed analysis that is concerned to understand the perspectives and pleasures of consumers certainly is characteristic of Reading the Popular and Understanding Popular Culture.

15 The chapter on video games in RP is a good example of this. If I may indulge in recounting a bit of my own autobiography for a moment, I can start to put my finger on how John won me over to media and cultural studies. I originally began my postgraduate studies in the discipline of political science, and was interested in culture, politics and theory. But I quickly became dissatisfied with a discipline that was, as Lawrence Grossberg has recently noted, remarkably resistant to the cultural turn that has brought sweeping changes to the humanities and social sciences as a whole over the past few decades. In my experience, this resistance was often mounted in the name of the discipline (and of disciplinarity more broadly) and a desire to protect grad students from faddish theoretical and methodological approaches. Then, almost by accident, I discovered a postgraduate seminar John was offering across campus called Media and the Culture of Everyday Life, and I enrolled. At the very first session, John wrapped things up by presenting his chapter Video Pleasures from Reading the Popular (which was in press at the time). I was drawn in by this immersive experience of the rich potential for theoretically informed and empirically detailed analyses of popular media culture from a politicized perspective. Rather than beginning from the presumption that video arcades and games are harmful to players, who are then in turn seen as harmful to democracy, Fiske began by interrogating this widely circulated, common sense (at the time) thinking, then attempted to understand how these sites of popular culture activate certain key social contradictions in a way that opens possibilities for players to corporeally evade and invert forms of control that are at work within capitalist institutions of labor and learning. By the end of the semester I had submitted my application to enroll as a Ph.D. student in media and cultural studies. Pam Wilson: Yes, Kevin, and you and I were studying with Fiske at Wisconsin together, with quite an impressive cohort of fellow grad students, in those years in which our little

16 program, anchored by Fiske, Lynn Spigel and Julie DAcci, seemed like a subversive offshoot of the more staid Communication Arts Department. While others in the wider department were analyzing formal qualities of film style or researching media effects, our generation of telecommies was delving into the undervalued realm of popular culture and television (considered a low art by the cinephiles). In fact, it was even quite an internal political struggle to get the Society for Cinema Studies to broaden its name to acknowledge and incorporate television and new media a decade or so ago. Known today as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the organizations website boasts that it is devoted to the scholarly study of film, television, video and new media. But I dare suggest that this broadening of acceptance of popular culture, and especially television, as legitimate objects of study alongside cinema in this organization would likely not have happened were it not for the influence of John Fiske on a generation of junior scholars who pushed hard for their inclusion. Returning to your point about the centrality of the body and the corporeal: yes, for Fiske, the disciplining and the pleasures of the body are key to understanding popular culture. In addition to his discussion of gamers and arcades, he draws on a bunch of historical studies of other popular recreations and sports, ranging from blood sports (like cockfighting) to football. Fiske examines the history of such proletarian bodily pleasures and of the aristocracys responses to them, as the latter worked hard to discipline the former, render them respectable, and thus exert the same control over the conditions of leisure as it did over those of work (p. 76). Fiske writes that the body and its pleasures have been, and continue to be, the site of a struggle between power and evasion, discipline and liberation; though the body may appear to be where we are most individual, it is also the material form of the body politic, the class body, the racial

17 body, and the body of gender. In Fiskes hands, the body becomes a site of cultural and political struggle, since it is where politics can best disguise itself as human nature. Kevin Glynn: I think its interesting that all of us were drawn to Fiske and to media and cultural studies as students from outside, from other fields of study with which we were dissatisfied in certain ways. Perhaps this says something about the interdisciplinary (and sometimes anti-disciplinary) force and reach of both cultural studies in general and Fiske in particular, which have each very effectively reached across and disrupted a range of disciplinary boundaries and formations by responding to gaps, closures and limitations that arguably arise from disciplinarity itself. Cultural studies has perhaps been more responsible than anything else for the interesting reconfigurations of disciplinarity that have reshaped a lot of academic thinking and practice in recent decades (not least because cultural studies has most consistently thematized, theorized and problematized the issue of disciplinarity, and has thus driven its reassessment over a number of years). As a teacher, Fiske encouraged students not to be constrained by either theoretical or disciplinary (in both interlinked senses of the term!) orthodoxies. His body of published work, too, encourages this, not least by ranging freely across theoretical and empirical domains: Marxism and poststructuralism, for example (at a time when many disciplines saw them as antithetical or contradictory orientations), TV genres, tourist destinations, everyday cultural sites, products and practices, politics, and so on. His popular culture books encourage us to understand how such diverse sites of cultural production and circulation can be understood and profitably analyzed in relation to one another. I think theres an interesting connection between Fiskes emphasis in the popular culture books on everyday culture as a site for the negotiation, reworking, suspension and (sometimes) refusal of social disciplinarity, and the challenge to academic disciplines and disciplinarity that his work also

18 poses. As he writes in RP, knowledge is never neutral . . . and the circulation of knowledge is part of the social distribution of power. . . . The power of knowledge has to struggle . . . to reduce reality to the knowable, which entails producing it as a discursive construct whose arbitrariness and inadequacy are disguised as far as possible (pp. 149-50). Fiske is writing here about journalistic media, but these observations apply equally well to other sites for the social production of expertise and authority, such as university disciplines and the work of academics within them. Fiske thought that instead of merely dispensing authoritative, expert-sanctioned knowledge from on-high, TV news should provoke disruptions of the boundary between the world reported on and that of viewers everyday lives; it should discard its role of privileged information-giver, with its clear distinction between the one who knows (the author) and those who do not (the audience), for that gives it the place and the tone of the author-god and discourages popular productivity. Rather, it should aim to involve its viewers in making sense of the world around them, it should encourage them to be participants in the process [RP, p. 193]. These ideas reveal something important about not only Fiskes approach to popular media, but also about his approach to pedagogy and students. Pam Wilson: It still excites me each time I read Fiske's work; even though the examples are progressively more dated, his ideas are so lively and fresh that they encourage me to find new examples and to search for ways to use Fiske's deep theoretical insights to understand contemporary cultural politics and the texts and processes created today -- which are far more complex than those of the world in which Fiske was writing, but whose complexity his work prefigured.

19 In the more than two decades since the publication of Understanding Popular Culture and Reading the Popular, the rise of media venues that allow ordinary people to voice and visualize their perspectives has had a tremendous effect on the mediascape. Citizen journalism, blogs, social media, You-Tube, wikisall have led to a blurring of the boundary between the producer and audience of traditional television and related media. The elimination, or minimizing, of the need for and authority of experts as gatekeepers has resulted in a new kind of energized media empowerment of the very people who were considered to be the passivized victims of the culture industries by the Frankfurt School and the proponents of mass society theory. Today, with the explosion of options for user-generated content, what were formerly audience members have in many cases become the producers/agents of media. Can we really even bifurcate the traditional concepts of producer and audience anymore? The two concepts have become far too intertwined. Like Fiske's conceptualization of the shifting and fluid constructs of the power bloc and "the people," those of producer and audience that were formerly more fixed in a model of industrial, professional media production have now been loosened and seem to float more freely; the role of producer has been liberated from the industrial model and is now open for anyone to occupy. Ordinary people have become media producers and use available technologies to express themselves verbally and visually and to interject their products into the mediasphere via the internet, where they may (or may not) find both local and global audiences. The YouTube phenomenon, which began in 2005 and allows anyone with the technical capabilities to upload user-generated videos onto the web, has been astounding. Broadcast Yourself is its tagline, and many of its most-viewed videos are vlogs that feature little-known people who become

20 overnight worldwide celebrities simply by sitting in their bedrooms and talking to a webcam. YouTube (owned by Google since 2006) has also generated an expanding public sphere for sharing films made by aspiring directors, montages created by vidders, clips taken from viewers favorite films and TV shows, and ordinary home movies. The phenomenal spread of popular but often quirky videos has even introduced a new term into the cultural lexicon: viral videos. Such virality has already launched a number of careers and immortalized otherwise mundane and private moments such as those captured in David After Dentist, a home video of a child in the back seat of a family car which was viewed more than 37 million times in 2009, or the "JK Wedding Entrance Dance," which garnered more than 33 million viewers that same year. It appears that we are undergoing a major paradigm-shift away from the era of expertise that developed in the 1950s, when Americans were taught that they could only trust professional producers and journalists, toward an era in which anyone can assert and demonstrate their own expertise. The model of the audience as passive consumers of professionally produced media has been at least partially displaced by that of an audience/producer that desires to see into the lives of other ordinary people and honors the perspectives of articulate nonprofessionals. In many important ways, Fiskes popular culture books, with their emphasis on audience activity and popular creativity, anticipate and help to explain these kinds of developments, which are increasingly familiar today. Jonathan Gray: Granted, Pam. However, unless such a move is heretical here, I'd also like to get on the table a continuing concern I have with Understanding Popular Culture and Reading the Popular: namely that the division between "mass culture" (that of the industry) and "popular culture" (that of the consumers) is wedded too closely to a moral binary. David Morley offers a nice quote about this in Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies, where he notes a

21 "curiously Christian" assumption that "the sins of the industry (or the message) are somehow seen to be redeemed in the 'after-life' of reception" (1992: 30). First off, this model and metaphor usually pose active audiences as heavenly, and indeed all of Fiske's examples are of people making progressive use of mass culture; surely, though, if marginalized groups can read dominant texts against themselves, a dominant power bloc can also read resistive or progressive texts actively, or deeply regressive groups can read texts actively in ways that are more hellish, less heavenly. Fiske's model of incorporation and excorporation can certainly allow for some of this, but I'd have loved for him to offer a few more solid examples (beyond jeans) of how crafty a dominant power bloc can be in repurposing a text, and in trying to shut down active readings. I think here of Robert Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus' article on the Fight Club DVD (in Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 2002) -- while the movie seemingly opened a wide door to homoerotic readings, the DVD commentaries work hard to shut that door. The incorporation/excorporation model is really helpful, but at times it becomes easy to read it as a two-step process, rather than as a continuing cycle and battle. And I also find myself wondering about less pretty active audiences -- racists watching a non-racist film and finding racist pleasures in it, for instance. Or, for an actual example, we could turn to Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis's Enlightened Racism, where they find white audiences reading The Cosby Show as a sign that the civil rights era is over and everything has turned out just fine for AfricanAmericans. Surely that's not what Cosbys writers intended, so this is an active audience reading, but it's one that works against a text's hopes for progessivism; instead of the audience "saving" the text, they may be damning it. And that last example there leads me to another concern -- namely, that in the interests of trying to understand popular culture as distinct from mass culture, Fiske can at times posit the

22 latter as automatically problematic and in need of the redemption that an active audience will bring. Surely, though, we might occasionally want to argue for some items of mass culture as progressive, and hence we might even want some audiences to be wholly "passive." Granted, it's not as simple a matter as any text being "good" or "bad." But I think of some international viewers of The Simpsons who I interviewed, and who liked it in large part because they saw the show as making fun of America, or at least refusing to peddle the timeworn, tiresome America the Awesome party line of many other items of Hollywood. These audiences werent being active, though: they were being quite passive -- The Simpsons does make fun of America, at least at one level, and it does challenge some of the excesses of America and American chauvinism, encouraging its audience to read back over and rewrite messages about America from other texts. An active audience here would be one that read American chauvinism into the text, and that refused to see the parody and satire. Or how about The Daily Show? Personally, nine times out of ten, Im quite happy for audiences to be passive when watching that. So here are a couple examples of texts that may already be relatively progressive, and hence whose passive audiences are those we might prefer. I don't offer these points as broadside attacks by any means. Fiske doesn't disallow them with his theory. But they are points I like to bring into discussion of Understanding Popular Culture and Reading the Popular when teaching them, since those notions of the active audience and of the push and pull between popular and mass culture require some deromanticization, I think. If I began this discussion by noting how accessible Fiske is, ironically thats a potentially dangerous quality of his work of which I find myself needing to be keenly aware when teaching him, since his writing has such a power and force to it, and even now it often has such a revelatory quality to it for students whose teachers and parents have been more Postmanesque in

23 their regard for popular culture, that it can be easy for readers to sign up for the ride without stopping to read into, through, and around Fiske at times too. Kevin Glynn: Those are important caveats, Jonathan. I think there are points that emerge in Fiskes work of this period that do gesture toward some of the complexities and contradictions to which you are wishing hed pay greater attention. For example, in the Reading the Beach chapter of RP, Fiske suggests that through their partial embrace of certain hegemonic sensemaking categories and practices, particularly those that relate directly through masculinism to gendered relations/identities and discourses of sporting prowess and competitiveness, members of surfie subcultures participate in the domestication of what is at other moments a radical challenge they pose toward capitalist and bourgeois subjectivities, ideologies and signifying systems. But the tendentious emphasis on the active audience as progressive guerrilla warrior locked in an unequal combat with the largely malign, colonizing forces of the media industry is there nonetheless. I have often attributed this to the historical moment of Fiskes intervention, as a somewhat calculated strategy aimed at redressing the wellestablished imbalance between predominant modes of critical media theory that prevailed in the US of the mid- to late-1980s and which tended to equate power only with its dominating aspect, to the detriment of what Fiske would later conceptualize, in Power Plays, as the comparatively weak, localizing powers of the relatively socially subordinated. My own view is that as his work moved from its middle period, perhaps best defined by Television Culture, UPC and RP, toward its later phase, including Power Plays and Media Matters, this emphasis shifted somewhat toward a more balanced, nuanced and muted sense of populism. I certainly dont see these as radical breaks in Fiskes work, however, but as drifts of thought or progressive developments in his thinking.

24 Pam Wilson: With regard to Fiskes concept of localizing power, Kevin, it is interesting to note that a decentralization of media control and authority (yet one that still allows the media corporations to maintain ultimate editorial discretion) has led over the past decade or two to the creation of new genres of television, radio and other media. There has been a burgeoning of talk radio, reality TV, and citizen journalism (including on mainstream stations and sites such as CNNs iReport, launched in 2006, which invites viewers to contribute their own amateur videos and reports on breaking news stories) as professionally-produced media have increasingly incorporated ordinary peoples lives and perspectives into hybrid new media forms. Other dimensions of this shift that allows ordinary people to be agents of our pleasure-generating narratives while relaxing the appearance of top-down control include the growing pervasiveness of fan culture and the intensified degree to which fan/audience involvement directly affects the production of movies, TV franchises, video games and peripheral products. As well, there are new platforms such as World of Warcraft, which, although created and maintained by professional media developers, nevertheless facilitate the collective and interactive production of narrative pleasure and meaning by multiplayer video gamers. Moreover, the internet functions increasingly as a venue for a new kind of collective production of knowledge by self-selected organic intellectuals, who contribute to and monitor wikis and related sites such as Geni.com (a collaborative genealogical database in which Ive been involved). So, how might Fiske help us to make sense of this New World Order when it comes to media? He made us aware of the importance of ordinary people and their engagements with media technologiesthat no matter what the intentions of the professional producers, the recipients would determine the uses of media products and the social meanings made of those products. The current shifts are arguably diminishing the power of professional media producers

25 to control and engineer outcomesincluding even the narrative outcomes of reality-TV shows and diminishing the corporate monopoly on the shape and range of information that consumers receive. Such information now comes from an increasingly broad variety of sources, and much of it is produced by nonprofessionals, though it nevertheless it competes with and often receives equal measures of respect and attention as that which is professionally generated. Consequently, media users these days often feel that what they are reading, watching and hearing is somehow less filtered, less mediated, by gatekeepers. Fiskes theoretical approach is spot-on relevant to an understanding of the struggle for, and the delicate balancing of, power between media corporations and consumers/users, the people and the power bloc, imperializing versus localizing powers. I believe Fiske would have a good deal to say about the degree to which these apparent shifts in authority are part of a hegemonic process that allows ordinary people to perceive that they have power and control while hiding corporate gatekeeping behind a veil. After all, YouTube, Facebook and iReport are not anarchic media spaces; they are controlled by corporate rules and regulations that most users never read. Even our blogs and seemingly private, personal emails are under the control of internet service providers, who are often called upon to release such content in legal cases. I think Fiske would be quite interested in pursuing the contradictions in new media between the appeal of unregulated self-expression and the more stealthy and covert degree of surveillance and corporate control that goes widely unperceived by users. Kevin Glynn: In what is to my knowledge the final major essay that he published in our field, Fiske wrote (in 1998) about what he called an expanding regime of democratic totalitarianism, whose core attributes include rampant technologized surveillance, intensified policing, and appeals to moral totalism. Fiske characterizes this social environment as

26 democratic totalitarianism because its capacity to exert control depends upon the extent to which its key techniques of power can be operationalized underneath the structures of democracy (p. 69). In much the same way as the work of his middle period seems to have conceptually anticipated so many of the developments in our popular media environment that youve pointed to, Pam, so too does Fiskes concept of democratic totalitarianism speak volumes about many things that have become familiar both within and beyond the US in the decade since the intensively racialized Florida election debacle of 2000 and the destruction of the World Trade Center -- the colossally defining media event of the new millennium -- in 2001. In his final essay, Fiske points to the expanding possibilities for democratic totalitarianism in a hypermediated scanscape of surveillance, where citizens spaces of privacy and control over the terms of their own visibility are increasingly (but in racially unequal ways) eroded (p. 69). But Fiske also gestures toward emergent opportunities for countersurveillance, which is crucial because of its power to contest the management of visibility by dominant social forces and institutions (p. 78). In my own current research, Ive been exploring the ongoing reconfiguration of relationships between popular knowledges, digital technologies, visibility in a hypermediated culture, and the remarkable political struggles of the new millennium. Hence, Fiskes work has not been far from my mind lately, particularly his theorization of the increasingly complex and pervasive forms of contestation over knowledge and visibility that are driven by the activities of a heterogeneous set of social formations operating in a context of shifting and expanding media apparatuses for discursive production and circulation. Fiskes work on both popular culture and democratic totalitarianism therefore helps me understand how groups such as the 9/11 Truth Movement make use of new media sites, technologies and processes to engage in vital struggles

27 over the management of visibility, knowledge and space in the new millennium. In these ways and more, I agree that Fiskes work is as important now as it has ever been. _______________________________________ Kevin Glynn is Coordinator of the Cultural Studies Programme at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where he teaches media studies, cultural studies, and American Studies. He has published widely in media and cultural studies journals and is author of Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television (Duke University Press). His recent publications have examined Indigenous peoples media, digital media and convergence culture, popular and political cultures of the Americas, and media and postcolonialism. His ongoing research projects involve the Mori Television Service and other Indigenous media operations and practices, and the relationships between media convergence and cultural citizenship. His next book explores media convergence, spectacle, and political cultures of the US in the new millennium. Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008), and Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and co-editor of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007). His current work continues to analyze paratexts and transmedia, satire and parody, and text-audience interactions.

28 Pamela Wilson is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Communication Program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia, where she enjoys introducing students to a cultural studies perspective in a wide range of courses. Her research and writing have focused on the historical and cultural politics of media and other representational forms of cultural expression: from television journalism and popular programming to online genealogical communities to Native American and global indigenous media. She is the co-editor (with Michelle Stewart) of Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics and Practices (Duke University Press, 2008) and has published many journal articles. Wilson is currently researching the cultural politics of self-representation through tourism in Native American communities.