You can see the conference program and session organization here.
Albrecht, Michael Mario: "The 'Tea Party Movement' as Media Event"
In Media Matters, John Fiske begins by posing the question: “Can we separate media events from nonmedia events, or are all events today, or at least the ones that matter, media events” (1)? Fiske published his book just before the notion of a media event became increasingly complicated with the rise of the Internet and the ability of traditional media to interact with the Internet. In this paper, I bring Fiske’s notion of a “media event” to bear on the contemporary phenomenon known as the “Tea Party Movement.” Further, I look for the ways in which Fiske’s theoretical framework is useful for conceiving political media events in the contemporary media landscape, as well as examining the ways in which Fiske’s theory might be expanded or revised in light of the drastic changes to media that have occurred since Media Matters was published.
I maintain that the Tea Party Movement is useful to interrogate as a media event because it elides components of a media event with traditional components of a social movement, and demonstrates the “real” consequences of media events. Fiske works to destabilize any easy division between the reality behind a media event and the event itself. For him, “no piece of reality contains its own essential existence; equally it cannot dictate the discourse into which it will be put” (5). The fluid ways in which traditional distinctions between the reality and the coverage of reality manifest in the media event surrounding the Tea Party Movement provides an intriguing case study for Fiske’s theoretical framework.
Fiske’s framework is further useful for examining the Tea Party Movement because of the complicated ways in which race and class are manifested within the movement’s discourses. Fiske demonstrates the ways in which voices that were traditionally marginalized come to be seen as part of the mainstream. Fiske was perhaps overly optimistic when he identified Rush Limbaugh as being a part of residual culture and representing “yesterday’s man” (12). Frighteningly, Limbaugh has moved to become part of mainstream culture, and is one of the media figures most idolized by members of the tea party movement. In fact, the movement has taken up discourses and tactics that were traditionally employed by oppressed minorities; in an ironic turn, the traditional mainstream has come to see itself as a marginalized group whose voice is only now emerging as mainstream. In this paper, I ask whether the notions of emergent, mainstream, and residual culture, which Fiske borrows from Raymond Williams, still make sense in conceptualizing culture in the contemporary media landscape.
While Media Matters has been taken up less often by contemporary studies of culture than Fiske’s other books, I want to follow the trains of thought that Fiske outlines in this study and map the terrain of contemporary media culture in relation to those theoretical assumptions laid out by Fiske.
I maintain that the Tea Party Movement is useful to interrogate as a media event because it elides components of a media event with traditional components of a social movement, and demonstrates the “real” consequences of media events. Fiske works to destabilize any easy division between the reality behind a media event and the event itself. For him, “no piece of reality contains its own essential existence; equally it cannot dictate the discourse into which it will be put” (5). The fluid ways in which traditional distinctions between the reality and the coverage of reality manifest in the media event surrounding the Tea Party Movement provides an intriguing case study for Fiske’s theoretical framework.
Fiske’s framework is further useful for examining the Tea Party Movement because of the complicated ways in which race and class are manifested within the movement’s discourses. Fiske demonstrates the ways in which voices that were traditionally marginalized come to be seen as part of the mainstream. Fiske was perhaps overly optimistic when he identified Rush Limbaugh as being a part of residual culture and representing “yesterday’s man” (12). Frighteningly, Limbaugh has moved to become part of mainstream culture, and is one of the media figures most idolized by members of the tea party movement. In fact, the movement has taken up discourses and tactics that were traditionally employed by oppressed minorities; in an ironic turn, the traditional mainstream has come to see itself as a marginalized group whose voice is only now emerging as mainstream. In this paper, I ask whether the notions of emergent, mainstream, and residual culture, which Fiske borrows from Raymond Williams, still make sense in conceptualizing culture in the contemporary media landscape.
While Media Matters has been taken up less often by contemporary studies of culture than Fiske’s other books, I want to follow the trains of thought that Fiske outlines in this study and map the terrain of contemporary media culture in relation to those theoretical assumptions laid out by Fiske.
Aslinger, Ben: "Proper Pleasures?: Cultural Studies and the Game Studies Project"
The emergence of new media platforms invites scholars to analyze John Fiske’s legacy to cultural studies
and how his analyses of representation, cultural power, and audience engagement might be brought to
bear on handheld devices, gaming consoles, and games themselves. While video games problematize
some of the central assumptions of media theories rooted in film and television, this paper addresses
how the central concerns of Media Matters, Television Culture, and Understanding Popular Culture
might be applied to game scholarship. I examine how Fiske’s ideas have been incorporated into game
studies textbooks before turning my attention to two case studies ‐ the racism debate surrounding the
survival horror game Resident Evil 5 and the lackluster commercial performance of the music game DJ
Hero ‐ to examine how Fiske’s discussions of representation and audience pleasure provide new
perspectives on gaming cultures and enable scholars to find a voice distinctive from journalists and
mainstream critics.
I examine textbooks including Franz Mäyrä’s Introduction to Game Studies and Katie Salen and Eric
Zimmerman’s Rules of Play to see how authors reference cultural studies perspectives in works designed
to introduce students to both the critical analysis and production of games. Although the disputes
between narratologists (with a primary focus on story) and ludologists (with a primary focus on rules,
processes, algorithms, and play) have died down, the question remains as to what intervention a
cultural studies perspective might make on scholars whose sympathies still tilt unproductively toward
either the ludic or the narrative.
Analyzing the racism debate surrounding Resident Evil 5 (a survival horror game that places the gamer in
Africa as a white male avatar who must kill infected zombies, many of whom are black Africans), I argue
that the debate was primarily about the proper objects of games criticism. What are the “proper”
objects of game studies, and how might Fiske’s cultural studies models trouble the notion of a proper
object of analysis? Given the transnationality of games scholarship and production, finding answers to
this question has everything to do with separating out a line between games journalism, popular
criticism, and academic work, not only in the U.S., Japan, and UK, but in other situated contexts of
design and play.
Examining the divergence between lackluster sales and critical praise for DJ Hero, I finally address the
uneasy relationship between musical genres, listening pleasures, and playing pleasures. Broader
conceptions of the gamer (or the erasure of the gamer as a distinct category altogether) provoke new
battles, fights, and ruptures in gaming cultures over player identifications and modes of participation.
Cultural perspectives on audiences drawn from Fiske can therefore help us better understand how
games are consumed, repurposed, and made relevant to the process of living.
and how his analyses of representation, cultural power, and audience engagement might be brought to
bear on handheld devices, gaming consoles, and games themselves. While video games problematize
some of the central assumptions of media theories rooted in film and television, this paper addresses
how the central concerns of Media Matters, Television Culture, and Understanding Popular Culture
might be applied to game scholarship. I examine how Fiske’s ideas have been incorporated into game
studies textbooks before turning my attention to two case studies ‐ the racism debate surrounding the
survival horror game Resident Evil 5 and the lackluster commercial performance of the music game DJ
Hero ‐ to examine how Fiske’s discussions of representation and audience pleasure provide new
perspectives on gaming cultures and enable scholars to find a voice distinctive from journalists and
mainstream critics.
I examine textbooks including Franz Mäyrä’s Introduction to Game Studies and Katie Salen and Eric
Zimmerman’s Rules of Play to see how authors reference cultural studies perspectives in works designed
to introduce students to both the critical analysis and production of games. Although the disputes
between narratologists (with a primary focus on story) and ludologists (with a primary focus on rules,
processes, algorithms, and play) have died down, the question remains as to what intervention a
cultural studies perspective might make on scholars whose sympathies still tilt unproductively toward
either the ludic or the narrative.
Analyzing the racism debate surrounding Resident Evil 5 (a survival horror game that places the gamer in
Africa as a white male avatar who must kill infected zombies, many of whom are black Africans), I argue
that the debate was primarily about the proper objects of games criticism. What are the “proper”
objects of game studies, and how might Fiske’s cultural studies models trouble the notion of a proper
object of analysis? Given the transnationality of games scholarship and production, finding answers to
this question has everything to do with separating out a line between games journalism, popular
criticism, and academic work, not only in the U.S., Japan, and UK, but in other situated contexts of
design and play.
Examining the divergence between lackluster sales and critical praise for DJ Hero, I finally address the
uneasy relationship between musical genres, listening pleasures, and playing pleasures. Broader
conceptions of the gamer (or the erasure of the gamer as a distinct category altogether) provoke new
battles, fights, and ruptures in gaming cultures over player identifications and modes of participation.
Cultural perspectives on audiences drawn from Fiske can therefore help us better understand how
games are consumed, repurposed, and made relevant to the process of living.
Barker, Colleen E.Y.: "Fiske: Theoretical Bridge Between Cultural Studies and Sociology"
John Fiske is integral to understanding how ordinary people and media converge in order to create what constitutes popular culture. In the age of the Internet, this convergence is happening at speeds that are incomprehensibly fast creating the effect of not knowing if culture finds meaning created by the people or if media creates meaning for people.
The convergence of fans online over the images they consume and the meanings they create in reference to those images, readily opens itself up investigation by cultural studies. Yet Sociology, the study of people interacting with one another and within social institutions, overlooks cultural studies exploration of this topic. Cultural Studies references sociological theory but Sociology neglects reciprocity.
I propose that Sociology can use Fiske's work in order to understand the postmodern interaction that occurs online between people, specifically through the study of the interaction of fans within fanfiction websites dedicated to the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer. Through my investigation, I want to examine how networks of fans participate in the reinvention of culture informing Sociological scholars that people on the ground level are not just receptacles of media but actively participate in its creation and recreation.
I suggest that Sociology look at the interaction of fandom and mass media through the Internet. I posit that John Fiske's theoretical framework be the vehicle that guides sociological studies of this phenomena. I will also reference Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacra and simulation, Roland Barthes' ideas on readerly and writerly text, and Henry Jerkins' convergence culture to create a theoretical map answering Erving Goffman's dilemma of havoc: the moment where meaning becomes so fragmented that a complete upheaval of sociability occurs. I am proposing that Fiske's cultural theories paired with the aforementioned theories, allot the self more control of meaning where Goffman leaves meaning of the self as fragmented and beyond repair when havoc occurs. Havoc can be related to Fiske's notion of the breakdown but Fiske allows for breakdowns to be reconstructed through the micro interactions of the self with culture. Sociology needs to look beyond its own master theorists in order to find and make meaning of the self in a postmodern world where meaning occurs expeditiously through encounters in mediated technologies like the Internet.
The convergence of fans online over the images they consume and the meanings they create in reference to those images, readily opens itself up investigation by cultural studies. Yet Sociology, the study of people interacting with one another and within social institutions, overlooks cultural studies exploration of this topic. Cultural Studies references sociological theory but Sociology neglects reciprocity.
I propose that Sociology can use Fiske's work in order to understand the postmodern interaction that occurs online between people, specifically through the study of the interaction of fans within fanfiction websites dedicated to the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer. Through my investigation, I want to examine how networks of fans participate in the reinvention of culture informing Sociological scholars that people on the ground level are not just receptacles of media but actively participate in its creation and recreation.
I suggest that Sociology look at the interaction of fandom and mass media through the Internet. I posit that John Fiske's theoretical framework be the vehicle that guides sociological studies of this phenomena. I will also reference Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacra and simulation, Roland Barthes' ideas on readerly and writerly text, and Henry Jerkins' convergence culture to create a theoretical map answering Erving Goffman's dilemma of havoc: the moment where meaning becomes so fragmented that a complete upheaval of sociability occurs. I am proposing that Fiske's cultural theories paired with the aforementioned theories, allot the self more control of meaning where Goffman leaves meaning of the self as fragmented and beyond repair when havoc occurs. Havoc can be related to Fiske's notion of the breakdown but Fiske allows for breakdowns to be reconstructed through the micro interactions of the self with culture. Sociology needs to look beyond its own master theorists in order to find and make meaning of the self in a postmodern world where meaning occurs expeditiously through encounters in mediated technologies like the Internet.
Bury, Rhiannon: "More Moments of Television: The Producerly Text in the Age of Convergence"
There is no text, there is no audience, there are only the processes of viewing,– that variety of cultural activities that take place in front of the screen.
--John Fiske, 1989.
Twenty one years ago, there was no ambiguity about the screen being referenced. In an era of multiple modes of viewing and reviewing, and multiple sites of reception, any scholarly work on television published in the 1980s may seem too outdated to be useful. Moreover, John Fiske’s work has received a fair amount of criticism over the years on other grounds. Doug Kellner (1995), for example, has criticized it for being devoid of politics and naively celebratory of all things popular. He refers to Fiske’s “fetishism” of resistance, accusing him of failing to distinguish between types of forms of resistance and oppositional readings.
While Fiske’s conceptualizations of cultural economy, popular cultural capital, and semiotic democracy are problematic, it is important not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Based on my research on online media fandom over the past ten years, I argue that technological developments and the broader phenomenon of media convergence have not caused processes of viewing to be altered substantially. Fiske’s fundamental logic that television is a “producerly text,” as expounded in the 1987 monograph, Television Culture, and in a subsequent 1989 article, “Moments of Television: Neither the Text Nor the Audience,” is just as relevant as it was when it was first published. Indeed, rather than disrupt primary/secondary intertextual relations or diminish “the oral culture which surrounds and defines television,” both the first and second generations of information and communications technologies expand and extend them.
I will first discuss a few central characteristics that Fiske ascribes to the producerly television text, including transience, segmentation and seriality. With the advent of home recording technologies, beginning with the VCR and now including PVRs, as wells as downloading, streaming and On Demand technologies, these concepts do need some reworking—viewers in general and fans in particular are no longer locked in to network schedules and programming fragmented by advertising.
In addition, multiple modes of viewing and multiple screens have unquestionably extended and expanded the oral culture surrounding television. The migration to cyberspace began a number of years ago with the Usenet and listservs. As I have argued elsewhere, fans have proved to be early adopters of social media, including discussion boards, livejournal, facebook etc. Moreover, easy access to previous seasons of popular series on DVD or on the internet creates multiple entry points into fandom. Finally, social networking technologies and Youtube have unquestionably increased the production and distribution of fan-produced secondary texts (fan fiction, vids, etc). To support these claims, I will present data from both past and current research projects.
--John Fiske, 1989.
Twenty one years ago, there was no ambiguity about the screen being referenced. In an era of multiple modes of viewing and reviewing, and multiple sites of reception, any scholarly work on television published in the 1980s may seem too outdated to be useful. Moreover, John Fiske’s work has received a fair amount of criticism over the years on other grounds. Doug Kellner (1995), for example, has criticized it for being devoid of politics and naively celebratory of all things popular. He refers to Fiske’s “fetishism” of resistance, accusing him of failing to distinguish between types of forms of resistance and oppositional readings.
While Fiske’s conceptualizations of cultural economy, popular cultural capital, and semiotic democracy are problematic, it is important not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Based on my research on online media fandom over the past ten years, I argue that technological developments and the broader phenomenon of media convergence have not caused processes of viewing to be altered substantially. Fiske’s fundamental logic that television is a “producerly text,” as expounded in the 1987 monograph, Television Culture, and in a subsequent 1989 article, “Moments of Television: Neither the Text Nor the Audience,” is just as relevant as it was when it was first published. Indeed, rather than disrupt primary/secondary intertextual relations or diminish “the oral culture which surrounds and defines television,” both the first and second generations of information and communications technologies expand and extend them.
I will first discuss a few central characteristics that Fiske ascribes to the producerly television text, including transience, segmentation and seriality. With the advent of home recording technologies, beginning with the VCR and now including PVRs, as wells as downloading, streaming and On Demand technologies, these concepts do need some reworking—viewers in general and fans in particular are no longer locked in to network schedules and programming fragmented by advertising.
In addition, multiple modes of viewing and multiple screens have unquestionably extended and expanded the oral culture surrounding television. The migration to cyberspace began a number of years ago with the Usenet and listservs. As I have argued elsewhere, fans have proved to be early adopters of social media, including discussion boards, livejournal, facebook etc. Moreover, easy access to previous seasons of popular series on DVD or on the internet creates multiple entry points into fandom. Finally, social networking technologies and Youtube have unquestionably increased the production and distribution of fan-produced secondary texts (fan fiction, vids, etc). To support these claims, I will present data from both past and current research projects.
Chang, Youngchi: "Global Intertextuality: An Analysis of the Intertextuality of Sex and the City in East Asia"
As a distinguished scholar, John Fiske has taught and studied various aspects of popular culture and media. Understanding television (and other media) as a cultural agent, Fiske famously argues that the meaning of media texts does not come from the structures of text itself but result from the social experience of the reader. In so doing, Fiske calls for our attention to intertextuality. By examining how a text is recognized in other texts, Fiske believes, we could explore how meanings are provoked and circulated in a given society. Intertextuality has been an important and influential concept in media and cultural studies. Not only has it been theoretically significant, but intertextuality has also provided a concrete methodological framework for those studies that look at television as a cultural text. Despite the great influence of his theory, however, many studies only look at how a western TV program is circulated in a western society. This is, I believe, a limited usage of Fiske’s scholarship on television studies in the sense that television programs now internationally flow. As growing numbers of scholars have delved into the question of the cultural signification of global media productions, it is our task to ask how meanings of a certain television text are produced in other societies by utilizing Fiske’s notion of intertextuality.
I examine this by looking at how the US TV series Sex and the City is intertextually circulated in Asia. As Fiske specifies, intertextuality has two dimensions – the horizontal (between primary texts) and the vertical (between a primary text and other texts of a different type that refer to it). This paper consists of these two dimensions of the intertextuality of Sex and the City in the region. It seeks to what meanings the American media text produce in this cultural region, and explores the implications of the meanings produced. Observing how frequently Sex and the City is retextualized in Asian societies across diverse media programs, this paper argues: The characters in Sex and the City are often configured to symbolize sexual freedom and feminine independence and their relationship is interpreted as female solidity. The reference of Sex and the City in the institutionally produced texts or in the texts that audiences produced (or, tertiary texts in Fiske’s term) in Asia indicates the global dimension of intertextuality.
Eventually, based on this examination, I propose the following three things. First, Fiske’s notion of intertextuality is helpful to find meanings of a certain media text not only in the domestic sphere but also in the international context. Second, this study suggests that studying a text’s intertextual relations in transnational flows is valuable in the aspect that it could provide us with possibly different meanings of a certain media text. Television’s polysemy should be examined in broader geo-cultural contexts as we now live in a global era. Last, this case study reinforces Fiske’s view on audiences as social subjects.
I examine this by looking at how the US TV series Sex and the City is intertextually circulated in Asia. As Fiske specifies, intertextuality has two dimensions – the horizontal (between primary texts) and the vertical (between a primary text and other texts of a different type that refer to it). This paper consists of these two dimensions of the intertextuality of Sex and the City in the region. It seeks to what meanings the American media text produce in this cultural region, and explores the implications of the meanings produced. Observing how frequently Sex and the City is retextualized in Asian societies across diverse media programs, this paper argues: The characters in Sex and the City are often configured to symbolize sexual freedom and feminine independence and their relationship is interpreted as female solidity. The reference of Sex and the City in the institutionally produced texts or in the texts that audiences produced (or, tertiary texts in Fiske’s term) in Asia indicates the global dimension of intertextuality.
Eventually, based on this examination, I propose the following three things. First, Fiske’s notion of intertextuality is helpful to find meanings of a certain media text not only in the domestic sphere but also in the international context. Second, this study suggests that studying a text’s intertextual relations in transnational flows is valuable in the aspect that it could provide us with possibly different meanings of a certain media text. Television’s polysemy should be examined in broader geo-cultural contexts as we now live in a global era. Last, this case study reinforces Fiske’s view on audiences as social subjects.
Chasar, Mike: "The Arbiters of Paste: Poetry Scrapbooking and Participatory Culture"
John Fiske defined “popular culture” as that culture which “is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life.” One of the central challenges that scholars face is in assessing popular culture in this formulation is amassing evidence of that interface—measuring and recording the types of activities consumers actually do, as well as the various ways that audiences transform the largely homogenized materials of mass culture in the course of everyday life. In this paper, I want to present a largely unknown archive of poetry scrapbooks which offers a material record of this process: evidence of how readers in the first half of the twentieth century artistically and critically repurposed mass-produced poems in large albums of verse that not only served as their age’s version of the mix tape, but that helped establish some of the dynamics of participatory culture that mark popular activity today.
Of particular concern to me is the relationship between ideology and resistance in the activity of poetry scrapbooking. On the one hand, in compiling their personal poetry anthologies, people were encouraged to imagine the activity as an accumulation of literary property that led to middlebrow cultural legitimacy; in fact, the textual act of keeping an album was regularly couched in terms of maintaining and keeping a house—both practices that fostered and relied on the centrality of the bourgeois self. At the same time, given the license to repurpose mass-produced poems, readers constructed albums that empowered critical thinking and challenged social conventions in any number of ways. This is especially the case with albums assembled by women readers, who found in their anthologies a freedom and privacy—a room of their own, as it were—in which to experiment with and explore the new subject positions of modernity.
Of particular concern to me is the relationship between ideology and resistance in the activity of poetry scrapbooking. On the one hand, in compiling their personal poetry anthologies, people were encouraged to imagine the activity as an accumulation of literary property that led to middlebrow cultural legitimacy; in fact, the textual act of keeping an album was regularly couched in terms of maintaining and keeping a house—both practices that fostered and relied on the centrality of the bourgeois self. At the same time, given the license to repurpose mass-produced poems, readers constructed albums that empowered critical thinking and challenged social conventions in any number of ways. This is especially the case with albums assembled by women readers, who found in their anthologies a freedom and privacy—a room of their own, as it were—in which to experiment with and explore the new subject positions of modernity.
Cupples, Julie and Kevin Glynn: "Fiske’s Development Geography: The Mediation of Africa in Contemporary TV Drama"
Since the 1960s, the first world has been saturated with stereotypical images of Africa. These include the pathetic image of the starving African child with swollen belly and ribs showing, or sundry displaced people wandering around or fleeing with possessions to represent an African refugee crisis. In such representations, African refugees are frequently depicted as “wallpaper,” unable to speak for themselves, a backdrop to the expert voice of the aid worker or reporter (Wright 2004).
While such representations have been heavily criticized by African and Africanist scholars, they nevertheless continue to circulate formulaically in mainstream TV news and charity campaigns. Meanwhile, many recent complex humanitarian emergencies in African countries, such as those in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, have failed to garner the attention of mainstream first world TV news and its audiences at all, or do so only when these crises become objects of celebrity activism. John Fiske (1993: 150) discusses how such “othering” representations both assert the superiority of the developed world and depict the “third world” as an appropriate arena for the exertion of “first world” power and control.
This paper examines the extent to which such power-bearing representations may be complicated, contested and destabilized in contemporary TV drama that takes recent African crises as its subject matter. Popular TV dramas, including ER, West Wing and Boston Legal, have all screened episodes dealing with the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur and Rwanda. As Fiske (1987: 109) notes, intertextual meanings cross generic boundaries with ease (so that “othering” meanings of Africa circulated through news and current affairs programming may for instance be activated and indirectly reinforced in TV drama), though genre nevertheless exerts powerful organizational force within intertextual relations. Contemporary TV drama, considered as a generic form whose narrative attractions include character-identification and complex negotiations between competing discourses and emotional perspectives, arguably overcomes certain textual constraints and limitations associated with most TV news. For example, forms of generic hybridity at work in contemporary TV drama that explores recognizable geopolitical relations and events often generate high levels of textual complexity, openness and polysemic possibility, and facilitate genre-shifting by audiences (Fiske 1987; Jenkins 1992).
In this paper, we examine what happens when Africa is brought into the regimes of narrative complexity often associated with television drama in the new millennium, and the possibilities these textual forms offer audiences. We argue that these shows provide a diverse and alternative set of perspectives, both reworking and disrupting formulaic framings of the continent. In addition, we consider what Jonathan Gray (2010) has termed media paratexts, including George Clooney’s mediated activism on Darfur and online fan commentaries. Fan commentaries demonstrate the complexity of the cultural politics of representation in contemporary TV drama. While fans sometimes reassert generic boundaries that seek to exclude “politics” from “entertainment,” they also apply what they learn as consumers of entertainment to more overtly political realms (Jenkins 2006).
While such representations have been heavily criticized by African and Africanist scholars, they nevertheless continue to circulate formulaically in mainstream TV news and charity campaigns. Meanwhile, many recent complex humanitarian emergencies in African countries, such as those in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, have failed to garner the attention of mainstream first world TV news and its audiences at all, or do so only when these crises become objects of celebrity activism. John Fiske (1993: 150) discusses how such “othering” representations both assert the superiority of the developed world and depict the “third world” as an appropriate arena for the exertion of “first world” power and control.
This paper examines the extent to which such power-bearing representations may be complicated, contested and destabilized in contemporary TV drama that takes recent African crises as its subject matter. Popular TV dramas, including ER, West Wing and Boston Legal, have all screened episodes dealing with the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur and Rwanda. As Fiske (1987: 109) notes, intertextual meanings cross generic boundaries with ease (so that “othering” meanings of Africa circulated through news and current affairs programming may for instance be activated and indirectly reinforced in TV drama), though genre nevertheless exerts powerful organizational force within intertextual relations. Contemporary TV drama, considered as a generic form whose narrative attractions include character-identification and complex negotiations between competing discourses and emotional perspectives, arguably overcomes certain textual constraints and limitations associated with most TV news. For example, forms of generic hybridity at work in contemporary TV drama that explores recognizable geopolitical relations and events often generate high levels of textual complexity, openness and polysemic possibility, and facilitate genre-shifting by audiences (Fiske 1987; Jenkins 1992).
In this paper, we examine what happens when Africa is brought into the regimes of narrative complexity often associated with television drama in the new millennium, and the possibilities these textual forms offer audiences. We argue that these shows provide a diverse and alternative set of perspectives, both reworking and disrupting formulaic framings of the continent. In addition, we consider what Jonathan Gray (2010) has termed media paratexts, including George Clooney’s mediated activism on Darfur and online fan commentaries. Fan commentaries demonstrate the complexity of the cultural politics of representation in contemporary TV drama. While fans sometimes reassert generic boundaries that seek to exclude “politics” from “entertainment,” they also apply what they learn as consumers of entertainment to more overtly political realms (Jenkins 2006).
De Kosnik, Abigail: "Fiske, Feminism, Folk Culture, Fandom: From a Defense of Television Viewing to an Aesthetics of the Digital Literary"
John Fiske's seminal work Television Culture (1987) is largely a defense of television fandom. Avid TV viewers, Fiske argues throughout TC, are not passive receivers of mass cultural production (as Theodor Adorno claimed); instead, fans actively make meanings from the shows they watch, meanings which are often resistant to, or aberrant from, the intended or "preferred" (to use Stuart Hall's term) meanings of the shows' producers.
Fiske defends the discourses of TV fans by borrowing theories and concepts from feminism and folk studies. He analyzes the polysemic nature of fan interpretations using psychoanalytic theories of "the feminine as decentered," the multiplicity of feminine social roles, and what Elaine Showalter calls "the wild zone" of women's culture, where women's textual readings escape patriarchy's ideological control. Fiske also analyzes fan discourse as akin to women's gossip, which he valorizes as oral culture, often serving as "a language of the oppressed" and as "social cement."
Similarly, Fiske compares fans' meaning-making work to folk culture, which is not only oral but unstandardized, outside of established social institutions, and characterized by informal transmission, making no differentiations between transmitters and receivers of culture.
This paper continues Fiske's project of legitimizing three types of culture often labeled as "low" -- fan culture, women's culture, and folk culture. I apply Fiske's methods of analyzing fan speech to two contemporary genres of fan writing: fan fiction and fan commentary. I argue that fan fiction and fan commentary, which are now published to mass audiences on the Web, can be regarded as digital literature. Although many cultural critics dismiss both fan fiction and fan commentary as ephemeral or trivial, I claim that these genres have yielded many more masterworks of electronic literature than the hypertext lit genre that was much heralded in academic circles in the 1990s. Fan fiction (on sites such as LiveJournal, Fanfiction.net, and Dreamwidth) is the vanguard of experimental Internet fiction; fan commentary (on sites such as Television Without Pity, as well as numerous show-specific websites) leads the way in innovating new forms of online non-fiction.
I propose a set of aesthetic categories for fan writing, expanding on Fiske's uses of feminist and folk culture theories, which can serve as a basis for assessing and appreciating fan fiction and fan commentary as literary achievements. These aesthetic categories include: the extent to which fan texts dialogue with source texts, and realize the latent potential for multiplicity of meanings in the source texts; the "weaving" together of producers' preferred meanings with fan-generated resistant and aberrant meanings in fans' writing; the similarities between fans' literary output, women's gossip, and folklore.
Fiske employed concepts found in feminist and folk studies to establish that fans who thought and spoke about television texts were not passive and unintelligent, but active and complex cultural interpreters. He succeeded in elevating fan speech to the rank of socially valuable discourse. Building on his work, I argue that exemplars of fan writing are worthy of the status of literary art.
Fiske defends the discourses of TV fans by borrowing theories and concepts from feminism and folk studies. He analyzes the polysemic nature of fan interpretations using psychoanalytic theories of "the feminine as decentered," the multiplicity of feminine social roles, and what Elaine Showalter calls "the wild zone" of women's culture, where women's textual readings escape patriarchy's ideological control. Fiske also analyzes fan discourse as akin to women's gossip, which he valorizes as oral culture, often serving as "a language of the oppressed" and as "social cement."
Similarly, Fiske compares fans' meaning-making work to folk culture, which is not only oral but unstandardized, outside of established social institutions, and characterized by informal transmission, making no differentiations between transmitters and receivers of culture.
This paper continues Fiske's project of legitimizing three types of culture often labeled as "low" -- fan culture, women's culture, and folk culture. I apply Fiske's methods of analyzing fan speech to two contemporary genres of fan writing: fan fiction and fan commentary. I argue that fan fiction and fan commentary, which are now published to mass audiences on the Web, can be regarded as digital literature. Although many cultural critics dismiss both fan fiction and fan commentary as ephemeral or trivial, I claim that these genres have yielded many more masterworks of electronic literature than the hypertext lit genre that was much heralded in academic circles in the 1990s. Fan fiction (on sites such as LiveJournal, Fanfiction.net, and Dreamwidth) is the vanguard of experimental Internet fiction; fan commentary (on sites such as Television Without Pity, as well as numerous show-specific websites) leads the way in innovating new forms of online non-fiction.
I propose a set of aesthetic categories for fan writing, expanding on Fiske's uses of feminist and folk culture theories, which can serve as a basis for assessing and appreciating fan fiction and fan commentary as literary achievements. These aesthetic categories include: the extent to which fan texts dialogue with source texts, and realize the latent potential for multiplicity of meanings in the source texts; the "weaving" together of producers' preferred meanings with fan-generated resistant and aberrant meanings in fans' writing; the similarities between fans' literary output, women's gossip, and folklore.
Fiske employed concepts found in feminist and folk studies to establish that fans who thought and spoke about television texts were not passive and unintelligent, but active and complex cultural interpreters. He succeeded in elevating fan speech to the rank of socially valuable discourse. Building on his work, I argue that exemplars of fan writing are worthy of the status of literary art.
Duncan, Sean C.: "Struggling For Meaning in World of Warcraft Fan Communities"
Since one of John Fiske's enduring legacies has been to explain how audiences wrestle with multiple
meanings of media texts, contemporary scholars are now tasked with understanding how audiences also
bring life experiences to their engagement with media. The rise of online gaming culture provides a
compelling case showing how interactive media in particular is negotiated within interpretative
communities, and how they can often bring sophisticated technical literacies to bear in everyday fan
practices.
In particular, I investigate the interaction between fans/players of the massively‐multiplayer online
game World of Warcraft (WoW), and its lead designer, Dr. Greg Street (better known online as
"Ghostcrawler"). In the realm of online games, WoW has been a dominant market force, with over 11
million current monthly subscribers worldwide and broader cultural impact (from appearances in South
Park to advertisements for Toyota). With respect to the game itself, WoW's official online forums have
emerged as an important virtual locale "around" the game for players to interact with one another,
debate gameplay strategies, and, recently, interact with Ghostcrawler regarding proposals for re‐design
of the game.
In this paper, I present a Discourse analysis (Gee, 2006) of a single but extremely significant WoW forum
post from April 2009. In it, Ghostcrawler (and Activision Blizzard, WoW's corporate owner) frames the
forum as a site for feedback to gauge the impact of designers' choices. At the same time, for “Nawaf”
and many other players, the forums were alternatively framed as venues for the community to self‐
organize and develop their own understandings of the game, making meaning using tools and practices
common within the sciences and open‐source programming communities. This conflict highlights tense
relationships between a game's interactive structures, its channels for fans interaction outside the
game, as well as the ways that fan community activities (including accommodation and resistance to the
designers' goals) can afford and constrain meaning‐making activities.
Drawing from Squire's concept of games as designed experiences, or "experiences resulting from the
intersection of design constraints and players' intentions" (2006: 26), we see in the interaction between
a game's structural elements and the community practices amongst its "audience" of players a need to
better understand the heterogeneity of meanings for WoW within both the game and its gaming
communities. If, as Fiske states, "culture is a struggle for meanings" (1988: 20) then the Discourse
analysis presented here illustrates that this "struggle" is made manifest in some cases through a conflict
between game designers and dedicated player communities, each with their own goals and methods for
developing meaning from the game. I argue that in order to better understand the polysemy of
contemporary interactive media like games, we need to further explore the negotiation of community
practices around media between fans and these games' designers.
meanings of media texts, contemporary scholars are now tasked with understanding how audiences also
bring life experiences to their engagement with media. The rise of online gaming culture provides a
compelling case showing how interactive media in particular is negotiated within interpretative
communities, and how they can often bring sophisticated technical literacies to bear in everyday fan
practices.
In particular, I investigate the interaction between fans/players of the massively‐multiplayer online
game World of Warcraft (WoW), and its lead designer, Dr. Greg Street (better known online as
"Ghostcrawler"). In the realm of online games, WoW has been a dominant market force, with over 11
million current monthly subscribers worldwide and broader cultural impact (from appearances in South
Park to advertisements for Toyota). With respect to the game itself, WoW's official online forums have
emerged as an important virtual locale "around" the game for players to interact with one another,
debate gameplay strategies, and, recently, interact with Ghostcrawler regarding proposals for re‐design
of the game.
In this paper, I present a Discourse analysis (Gee, 2006) of a single but extremely significant WoW forum
post from April 2009. In it, Ghostcrawler (and Activision Blizzard, WoW's corporate owner) frames the
forum as a site for feedback to gauge the impact of designers' choices. At the same time, for “Nawaf”
and many other players, the forums were alternatively framed as venues for the community to self‐
organize and develop their own understandings of the game, making meaning using tools and practices
common within the sciences and open‐source programming communities. This conflict highlights tense
relationships between a game's interactive structures, its channels for fans interaction outside the
game, as well as the ways that fan community activities (including accommodation and resistance to the
designers' goals) can afford and constrain meaning‐making activities.
Drawing from Squire's concept of games as designed experiences, or "experiences resulting from the
intersection of design constraints and players' intentions" (2006: 26), we see in the interaction between
a game's structural elements and the community practices amongst its "audience" of players a need to
better understand the heterogeneity of meanings for WoW within both the game and its gaming
communities. If, as Fiske states, "culture is a struggle for meanings" (1988: 20) then the Discourse
analysis presented here illustrates that this "struggle" is made manifest in some cases through a conflict
between game designers and dedicated player communities, each with their own goals and methods for
developing meaning from the game. I argue that in order to better understand the polysemy of
contemporary interactive media like games, we need to further explore the negotiation of community
practices around media between fans and these games' designers.
Ellcessor, Liz: "Gamers, Geeks, Gender & The Guild: Felicia Day and Changing Meanings of Gaming Culture"
The prevailing stereotype of gamers, particularly those who play massively multiplayer online games
(MMOs), is of socially awkward, unathletic, young white men. This is very close to the cultural meanings
of “geek,” in which whiteness, loudly proclaimed heterosexuality, and affinity for technology (Kendall)
combine to produce an alternative masculinity. The “geek” label has been discussed as a barrier to
women’s participation in computing and the sciences, as many women do not feel they can embody the
“geek” identity without sacrificing other elements of their personalities (Bryner). The gamer stereotype,
and the culture that gave rise to it, may act as a similar barrier. Furthermore, MMOs are male‐
dominated spaces, in which women are alienated, or receive extra attention and favors– and
harassment – due to the perceived rarity of women in the gaming space (Taylor). In reality, studies
estimate that women make up forty percent of MMO players – a not insignificant portion of the gaming
market, community and culture.
In keeping with John Fiske’s theories of subordinated audiences that usurp and alter the cultural
meanings of a text or artifact, I will explore resistance to gendering in MMOs by considering the star
persona and cultural productions of actor and gamer/fan Felicia Day. A relative unknown in Hollywood,
Day is best known for working in the world of online serial video. Continuing her relationship with
producer Joss Whedon (established through Buffy), Day starred in the Emmy‐winning online series
Doctor Horrible’s Sing‐Along Blog. Simultaneously, she wrote, produced and starred in her own Streamy‐
winning series The Guild. This series, now in its third season, follows a guild – a group of MMO players –
through the travails of organizing to play the game, conflicts with other guilds, and the messiness that
erupts when the players interact in “real life.” Day is a player and fan of MMOs, but in appropriating the
game for use in The Guild, she alters the cultural meanings associated with MMOs, particularly as they
relate to gender. Day values her female fans, and has become an identificatory figure for many of them.
Her interpretation of gamer culture in The Guild creates several different inhabitable spaces for
feminine gender expression.
Through analysis of the text of The Guild, its promotional materials, Day’s interviews with mainstream
and niche media, and Day’s extensive personal online activity, I attempt to trace the process by which
her creative work and star persona hail women gamers and valorize their experiences within this
culture. Simultaneously, I look to broader reception of The Guild on online message boards and gaming
sites in order to discern whether this professional, yet fan‐made, media artifact shows signs of altering
the dominant meanings of geeks, gamer culture and gender.
(MMOs), is of socially awkward, unathletic, young white men. This is very close to the cultural meanings
of “geek,” in which whiteness, loudly proclaimed heterosexuality, and affinity for technology (Kendall)
combine to produce an alternative masculinity. The “geek” label has been discussed as a barrier to
women’s participation in computing and the sciences, as many women do not feel they can embody the
“geek” identity without sacrificing other elements of their personalities (Bryner). The gamer stereotype,
and the culture that gave rise to it, may act as a similar barrier. Furthermore, MMOs are male‐
dominated spaces, in which women are alienated, or receive extra attention and favors– and
harassment – due to the perceived rarity of women in the gaming space (Taylor). In reality, studies
estimate that women make up forty percent of MMO players – a not insignificant portion of the gaming
market, community and culture.
In keeping with John Fiske’s theories of subordinated audiences that usurp and alter the cultural
meanings of a text or artifact, I will explore resistance to gendering in MMOs by considering the star
persona and cultural productions of actor and gamer/fan Felicia Day. A relative unknown in Hollywood,
Day is best known for working in the world of online serial video. Continuing her relationship with
producer Joss Whedon (established through Buffy), Day starred in the Emmy‐winning online series
Doctor Horrible’s Sing‐Along Blog. Simultaneously, she wrote, produced and starred in her own Streamy‐
winning series The Guild. This series, now in its third season, follows a guild – a group of MMO players –
through the travails of organizing to play the game, conflicts with other guilds, and the messiness that
erupts when the players interact in “real life.” Day is a player and fan of MMOs, but in appropriating the
game for use in The Guild, she alters the cultural meanings associated with MMOs, particularly as they
relate to gender. Day values her female fans, and has become an identificatory figure for many of them.
Her interpretation of gamer culture in The Guild creates several different inhabitable spaces for
feminine gender expression.
Through analysis of the text of The Guild, its promotional materials, Day’s interviews with mainstream
and niche media, and Day’s extensive personal online activity, I attempt to trace the process by which
her creative work and star persona hail women gamers and valorize their experiences within this
culture. Simultaneously, I look to broader reception of The Guild on online message boards and gaming
sites in order to discern whether this professional, yet fan‐made, media artifact shows signs of altering
the dominant meanings of geeks, gamer culture and gender.
Ford, Sam: "Rethinking the Anthology: Inviting New Voices into the Academy"
John Fiske's contributions to media studies have been substantial not only from the theoretical ground he covered but also from the ways in which it has encouraged the academy to take new approaches for the serious consideration of commercial media content and the audiences that not only receive but actively rework and speak through those "official" media texts. While Fiske's work could only have alluded to the "digital revolution" that was to come, the larger themes behind his writing have become all the more prevalent in a digital age, particularly in understanding how material produced by mass media become active material for a variety of audience purposes.
In the past few years, I've been involved with a variety of intellectual projects that owe their roots in one way or another to Fiske's work. For instance, online initiatives like Transformative Works and like were not only started from organizations with roots in fan activism but likewise encourages scholarship that looks at fan activity around media texts. The Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT works directly with media industries to understand how media companies need to rethink their approach to intellectual property, promotion, and distribution now that manifestations of how active audiences are surround us.
Particularly, I am interested in how Fiske's notions of the context in which cultural material is produced and consumed may reshape how we think about scholarship about mass media and particularly how we rethink institutional staples of the academy such as the anthology.
At the moment, I am working on two essay collections that build, in one way or another, on Fiske's work. Spreadable Media, which I am co-writing with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, has its roots in Fiske's work, arguing that scholars and the media industries alike must come to understand how audiences use commercial media texts as fodder for their own conversations, owing much to Fiske's use of the "producerly," for instance (as project contributor Xiaochang Li has written). Also, The Survival of the Soap Opera is an academic collection I'm co-editing with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington. The book draws substantially from Fiske's considerations of masculine and feminine television, especially at a moment when the soap opera genre is losing influence even as many elements popularized by the soap are manifested in primetime television genres that were traditionally considered "masculine."
In both cases, we are interested in rethinking the model of the anthology itself. In the case of Spreadable Media, we are drawing on scholars and practitioners across a range of disciplines, pulling them into our overall argument for short case studies, illustrations, and arguments, rather than simply citing their work elsewhere. This idea of actively engaging those we cite seems in itself to owe something to Fiske's contributions. Similarly, for The Survival of the Soap Opera, we invited soap opera writers, online bloggers/critics, fan historians, fan site moderators, and a variety of other audiences outside "the academy" to contribute to our discussion about the current state and the future of the genre. At the time of this conference, I’d like to reflect how such projects that invite new voices into the dialogue of media studies can build on the foundation that Fiske and others created for media studies. At a time when new spaces such as the Internet and the proliferation of visible active audience practices poses new questions for the academy, we must invite new and relevant voices into the discussion to broaden and deepen our knowledge about how media texts are contextualized in our culture.
In the past few years, I've been involved with a variety of intellectual projects that owe their roots in one way or another to Fiske's work. For instance, online initiatives like Transformative Works and like were not only started from organizations with roots in fan activism but likewise encourages scholarship that looks at fan activity around media texts. The Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT works directly with media industries to understand how media companies need to rethink their approach to intellectual property, promotion, and distribution now that manifestations of how active audiences are surround us.
Particularly, I am interested in how Fiske's notions of the context in which cultural material is produced and consumed may reshape how we think about scholarship about mass media and particularly how we rethink institutional staples of the academy such as the anthology.
At the moment, I am working on two essay collections that build, in one way or another, on Fiske's work. Spreadable Media, which I am co-writing with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, has its roots in Fiske's work, arguing that scholars and the media industries alike must come to understand how audiences use commercial media texts as fodder for their own conversations, owing much to Fiske's use of the "producerly," for instance (as project contributor Xiaochang Li has written). Also, The Survival of the Soap Opera is an academic collection I'm co-editing with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington. The book draws substantially from Fiske's considerations of masculine and feminine television, especially at a moment when the soap opera genre is losing influence even as many elements popularized by the soap are manifested in primetime television genres that were traditionally considered "masculine."
In both cases, we are interested in rethinking the model of the anthology itself. In the case of Spreadable Media, we are drawing on scholars and practitioners across a range of disciplines, pulling them into our overall argument for short case studies, illustrations, and arguments, rather than simply citing their work elsewhere. This idea of actively engaging those we cite seems in itself to owe something to Fiske's contributions. Similarly, for The Survival of the Soap Opera, we invited soap opera writers, online bloggers/critics, fan historians, fan site moderators, and a variety of other audiences outside "the academy" to contribute to our discussion about the current state and the future of the genre. At the time of this conference, I’d like to reflect how such projects that invite new voices into the dialogue of media studies can build on the foundation that Fiske and others created for media studies. At a time when new spaces such as the Internet and the proliferation of visible active audience practices poses new questions for the academy, we must invite new and relevant voices into the discussion to broaden and deepen our knowledge about how media texts are contextualized in our culture.
Fuller, Jennifer: "The Two Drops Rule: The Refusal to See 'Black' Bodies as Hybrid"
This paper draws from a comment Tiger Woods’ father made: the younger Woods was widely described as “African-American,” despite popular knowledge that his father was black and his mother was Asian. Amid the controversy following fellow golfer Fuzzy Zoeller’s racist jokes about Woods’ blackness, Woods announced that he considered himself “Cablinasian,” a term that summed up his Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian lineage. Woods got a lot of press and mocking for his new term, I argue for the same reason that Zoeller’s jokes were about blackness: it is so “clear” that Woods is black. His body is coded as “black” in such a way that despite knowing this racial mixture and his non-identification with black, he continued to be identified as such. This continues, despite his father’s claim that “the boy has about two drops of black blood in him.”
Woods’ father’s statement invokes the “one drop rule,” a term to describe U.S. policies that during slavery and segregation, designated people as “black” if they had even one black ancestor. Indeed, some commentators pointed out that according to his father, Woods had twice as much black blood as he needed to be considered black.
I am appropriating the term “two drops” in order to describe the calculus of racial (im)purity that dominates our society today. Popular discourses about “mixed race” bodies have been celebratory for some time. This can be seen in well-worn claims that mixed race people “are the future” and that mixed-race people are inherently attractive. Bodies that are deemed “racially ambiguous,” especially those that could be part white, have a certain value within modeling agencies and film/TV casting, because they can signal “ethnicity” and appeal to whites at the same time.
This paper argues that scholarship on discourses about bodies deemed “mixed race,” including the popular argument that Latino/as are inherently racially hybrid, does not grapple often enough with the ugly, exclusionary side of these discourses. This includes the long history of colorism all over the colonized world that ranked “whiter” people of color more beautiful, intelligent and worthy than the rest. For example, we know that African Americans are racially mixed, but as with Tiger Woods’s one drop too many, this knowledge doesn’t move us to consider “unquestionably black,” that is, bodies that are “too dark/black” as “hybrid.”
Bodies that are coded as “white” are still safely positioned as not just the best bodies, but as representative of human dies. Bodies coded “unquestionably” “Asian” or “black” do not have this privilege. This hierarchical trio eerily, but not surprisingly, echoes the “three great stocks of man”: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. This anthropological discourse held sway through the sixties, and while there is much to say about “pure” whiteness or absolute Asianness within marketplaces and academic milieu privileging hybridity, my paper focuses on the fixity of bodies coded as “black.” In this paper, I explore how bodies that are not deemed “hybrid” make it possible for there to be this slip and play for “racially ambiguous” bodies.
Woods’ father’s statement invokes the “one drop rule,” a term to describe U.S. policies that during slavery and segregation, designated people as “black” if they had even one black ancestor. Indeed, some commentators pointed out that according to his father, Woods had twice as much black blood as he needed to be considered black.
I am appropriating the term “two drops” in order to describe the calculus of racial (im)purity that dominates our society today. Popular discourses about “mixed race” bodies have been celebratory for some time. This can be seen in well-worn claims that mixed race people “are the future” and that mixed-race people are inherently attractive. Bodies that are deemed “racially ambiguous,” especially those that could be part white, have a certain value within modeling agencies and film/TV casting, because they can signal “ethnicity” and appeal to whites at the same time.
This paper argues that scholarship on discourses about bodies deemed “mixed race,” including the popular argument that Latino/as are inherently racially hybrid, does not grapple often enough with the ugly, exclusionary side of these discourses. This includes the long history of colorism all over the colonized world that ranked “whiter” people of color more beautiful, intelligent and worthy than the rest. For example, we know that African Americans are racially mixed, but as with Tiger Woods’s one drop too many, this knowledge doesn’t move us to consider “unquestionably black,” that is, bodies that are “too dark/black” as “hybrid.”
Bodies that are coded as “white” are still safely positioned as not just the best bodies, but as representative of human dies. Bodies coded “unquestionably” “Asian” or “black” do not have this privilege. This hierarchical trio eerily, but not surprisingly, echoes the “three great stocks of man”: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. This anthropological discourse held sway through the sixties, and while there is much to say about “pure” whiteness or absolute Asianness within marketplaces and academic milieu privileging hybridity, my paper focuses on the fixity of bodies coded as “black.” In this paper, I explore how bodies that are not deemed “hybrid” make it possible for there to be this slip and play for “racially ambiguous” bodies.
Girard, Melissa: "Poetry for Pleasure: Hallmark, Inc. and the Business of Emotion at Mid-Century"
In the 1960s, Hallmark, Inc., purveyor of greeting cards, entered the book publishing industry. Their diverse offerings went far beyond mere gift books; throughout the decade, they issued a variety of highly readable anthologies focusing on Japanese haiku, African American poetry, popular love poems, limericks, and children’s verse, as well as canonical figures such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot. Hallmark’s capacious vision stood in stark contrast to their New Critical contemporaries, who, at mid-century, were overwhelmingly preoccupied with narrowing the poetic canon. At a moment when the literary academy had abandoned popular poetry and popular readers almost entirely, Hallmark preserved and fiercely defended what they termed a “democratic” poetics. “The way to read a poem is with an open mind, not an open dictionary,” the editors insist in the 1960 anthology Poetry for Pleasure.
My paper takes Hallmark’s poetics seriously as a democratic alternative to the elitism of the mid-century American academy. I am attentive not only to Hallmark’s poetry anthologies but also to their innovative marketing and advertising campaigns, which placed these attractively packaged and affordable books in supermarkets and drugstores. In so doing, I argue that Hallmark played a vitally important, populist role throughout the 1960s, advocating on behalf of poetry and actively attempting to broaden its readership. At the same time, my paper also explores the complex ramifications of Hallmark’s corporate sponsorship of poetry. While Hallmark undoubtedly empowered the average reader, they also sought to strengthen their brand and, concomitantly, to profit from Americans’ increasing poetic literacy. This “emotion marketing,” as Hallmark terms it, belies their “democratic” agenda. My paper recovers this largely forgotten historical struggle between the academy and corporate America for the hearts and minds of poetry readers.
My paper takes Hallmark’s poetics seriously as a democratic alternative to the elitism of the mid-century American academy. I am attentive not only to Hallmark’s poetry anthologies but also to their innovative marketing and advertising campaigns, which placed these attractively packaged and affordable books in supermarkets and drugstores. In so doing, I argue that Hallmark played a vitally important, populist role throughout the 1960s, advocating on behalf of poetry and actively attempting to broaden its readership. At the same time, my paper also explores the complex ramifications of Hallmark’s corporate sponsorship of poetry. While Hallmark undoubtedly empowered the average reader, they also sought to strengthen their brand and, concomitantly, to profit from Americans’ increasing poetic literacy. This “emotion marketing,” as Hallmark terms it, belies their “democratic” agenda. My paper recovers this largely forgotten historical struggle between the academy and corporate America for the hearts and minds of poetry readers.
Glynn, Kevin: "9/11, Media Spectacle and Image Insurgency in a Global Visual Culture"
The 9/11 attacks constituted a media spectacle engineered for maximal and instantaneous visibility that delivered a two-billion gigawatt jolt to the global image circulatory system and enlisted “in full force” the “multiple discursive modalities” (Parks, 2005: 176) of the world’s convergent media cultures. They generated, as Jean Baudrillard (2002) would argue, the “‘mother’ of all events” by tapping a phantasmatic terrain that had been endlessly explored in “countless disaster movies,” and whose resonance registers a widespread urge “to reject any system . . . as it approaches perfection or omnipotence,” an all-embracing “allergy to any definitive order” or power (pp. 4-7). In Media Matters, John Fiske (1996) explores the characteristics of media events and their relationships to the complex currents of meaning that comprise contemporary media cultures. Updating Raymond Williams, Fiske argues that a media culture can thus be likened to a river of discourses that includes dominant, residual and emergent streams that jostle, contest and unsettle one another. A calm surface may at times mask and belie the churning forces and complexities below, though unexpected turbulence may suddenly bring to the surface deep, powerful and well established currents that had previously been all but invisible.
Spectacular media events become focal sites of discursive activity, maximal turbulence, and competing bids and counterbids for meaning as they resonate powerfully with a culture’s deepest fears, desires and anxieties; the most powerful media events may therefore lead to significant shifts in a culture’s overall structure of feeling. In the contemporary US, struggles over the necessarily unstable and indeterminate meanings of spectacular media events and their radiant subsidiary events unfold in a social climate with strong proclivities and tendencies toward what Fiske (1998: 69) calls “democratic totalitarianism,” whose core attributes include rampant technologized surveillance, “intensified policing,” and “appeals to moral totalism.” Fiske characterizes this social environment as “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.”
This paper builds upon Fiske’s work through an examination of mediated struggles over meaning around the 9/11 attacks and the attendant seismic shocks that have characterized the political culture of the US over the past decade. Such struggles involve at their core the mobilization of tools available in a culture of media convergence (Jenkins, 2006) to facilitate the articulation of images to one set of discursive practices or another as a means of advancing particular sociopolitical interests and identities, claiming political space and visibility, and expressing desires, anxieties, fears, and refusals. Thus, vidders and other popular cultural consumer-producers such as the “9/11 Truth” movement have generated image insurgencies, counterspectacles, and alternative popular knowledges by appropriating technologies of visualization and mediatization. The affective energies generated and expressed through these insurgent practices of articulation contributed diversely and collectively to the formation of transformative popular imaginaries whose most salient expression was the transmediated Obama movement.
Spectacular media events become focal sites of discursive activity, maximal turbulence, and competing bids and counterbids for meaning as they resonate powerfully with a culture’s deepest fears, desires and anxieties; the most powerful media events may therefore lead to significant shifts in a culture’s overall structure of feeling. In the contemporary US, struggles over the necessarily unstable and indeterminate meanings of spectacular media events and their radiant subsidiary events unfold in a social climate with strong proclivities and tendencies toward what Fiske (1998: 69) calls “democratic totalitarianism,” whose core attributes include rampant technologized surveillance, “intensified policing,” and “appeals to moral totalism.” Fiske characterizes this social environment as “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.”
This paper builds upon Fiske’s work through an examination of mediated struggles over meaning around the 9/11 attacks and the attendant seismic shocks that have characterized the political culture of the US over the past decade. Such struggles involve at their core the mobilization of tools available in a culture of media convergence (Jenkins, 2006) to facilitate the articulation of images to one set of discursive practices or another as a means of advancing particular sociopolitical interests and identities, claiming political space and visibility, and expressing desires, anxieties, fears, and refusals. Thus, vidders and other popular cultural consumer-producers such as the “9/11 Truth” movement have generated image insurgencies, counterspectacles, and alternative popular knowledges by appropriating technologies of visualization and mediatization. The affective energies generated and expressed through these insurgent practices of articulation contributed diversely and collectively to the formation of transformative popular imaginaries whose most salient expression was the transmediated Obama movement.
Gray, Jonathan: "What About Hate? Expanding Notions of the Active Audience"
A key part of John Fiske’s legacy is as a champion of pleasure or jouissance, that key quality that was seen to domesticate and tame mass culture, allowing audiences to shape it into popular culture. In his interest in audience “activity,” Fiske turned his and media and cultural studies’ attention to audiences enjoying wrestling or quiz shows, appreciating Madonna or tabloids, and “making do” with and repurposing malls, jeans, and beaches. In doing so, he and others of his generation opened up considerable space for fan studies and even for discerning academics to admit the occasional fandom without needing to write confessionals and renunciations thereafter, and he called upon us to do more than simply wag a disapproving, well-manicured finger at popular tastes.
But if Fiske championed jouissance and plaisir, what about déplaisir? What about displeasure and hate? A quick tour through the Internet confirms that while many people enjoy and take pleasure in the media, we can often find as many whose activity comes at the level of disavowal, distaste, displeasure, and dissatisfaction. Thus, for instance, if a film or television show is an open text that beckons for us to research how its audiences make sense of it, those audiences will likely include many who actively dislike the text too, who create significant meaning in doing so, and who may even experience pleasure in such anti-fandom. Some websites walk a thin line between love and hate of a text, while others indulge criticism, whether playful or very serious. If Bourdieu taught us anything, it is to be suspicious of such judgments of taste, but anti-fandom cannot be dismissed as class snobbery alone. A whole world of meaning exists in dislike, and vast swathes of audiences are anti-fans, at least at some points in time, and of certain texts. And thus it is just as important for us to ask what this other form of audience activity means.
This paper will work from the assumption that Fiske’s intervention in media, audience, and textual studies was vital and profound, but it will then try to account for those who dislike texts, genres, or entire media. The past twenty years of fan studies have told us a great deal about audience pleasure and its relationships to textuality, the culture industries, and everyday life, but I will also argue that it is time for media and cultural studies to add a critical understanding of hate, dislike, distaste, and anti-fandom. The paper will be conceptual in basis, but will also draw upon examples from past audience research projects.
But if Fiske championed jouissance and plaisir, what about déplaisir? What about displeasure and hate? A quick tour through the Internet confirms that while many people enjoy and take pleasure in the media, we can often find as many whose activity comes at the level of disavowal, distaste, displeasure, and dissatisfaction. Thus, for instance, if a film or television show is an open text that beckons for us to research how its audiences make sense of it, those audiences will likely include many who actively dislike the text too, who create significant meaning in doing so, and who may even experience pleasure in such anti-fandom. Some websites walk a thin line between love and hate of a text, while others indulge criticism, whether playful or very serious. If Bourdieu taught us anything, it is to be suspicious of such judgments of taste, but anti-fandom cannot be dismissed as class snobbery alone. A whole world of meaning exists in dislike, and vast swathes of audiences are anti-fans, at least at some points in time, and of certain texts. And thus it is just as important for us to ask what this other form of audience activity means.
This paper will work from the assumption that Fiske’s intervention in media, audience, and textual studies was vital and profound, but it will then try to account for those who dislike texts, genres, or entire media. The past twenty years of fan studies have told us a great deal about audience pleasure and its relationships to textuality, the culture industries, and everyday life, but I will also argue that it is time for media and cultural studies to add a critical understanding of hate, dislike, distaste, and anti-fandom. The paper will be conceptual in basis, but will also draw upon examples from past audience research projects.
Hancock, Black Hawk: "Learning How to Fiske"
How and where to begin to discuss and assess the continuing relevance and influence of John Fiske’s legacy for Cultural Studies in order to help us understand our own contemporary conditions a decade after his retirement from academic life? Do we analyze the work? The man? The myth? The legend? Finally, what does it mean when a name becomes a verb in critical intellectual circles? That is the question implicit in the title of this paper. What I learned most from John was not from his scholarship, important as that is, rather the greatest gift he provided me with was his teaching.
This paper explores four trajectories about cultural theory that must be taken as paramount to continuing and building upon what John Fiske taught us: First: To be Transliterate and master the techniques of Translation. One of the many things that set John apart, not only from those on Vilas’s 5th floor, but especially from those who roamed the 8th floor of the Death Star atop Bascom Hill, was the ability to read across arbitrary disciplinary boundaries, all the while attentive to their specific analytic terms, yet be able translate them backwards and forwards in order to make them applicable, accessible, and understood for all those invested. Second: The Bricoleur approach to theory; that one must be fully conversant with theory, that the best theories are taken where ever you can get them, that there is no one theory that will explain all social conditions, and that theories are less like windows that offer a transparent view onto the world, and more like prisms that illuminate some issues better than others depending on what one is interrogating, and finally, that theories must always be open to being connected, combined, deconstructed and reconstructed as necessitated. Third: bodies, pleasures, resistance, evasion, texts, the people, the popular, and the everyday are not just revisionist, romanticized, or over-politicized buzz words or rhetorical flourishes, they are analytical frames that create points of purchase into doing historically grounded, contextually bound, ethnographic work within a world where cultural is always an arena of struggle; a world where culture is contradictory, always both a means and tool of domination and stratification, and a resource for collaboration and emancipation always embedded in and relation to larger social structures. Fourth, and finally and most important of all: Theory must always retain the ability “to be surprised.” There is no totalizing theory; theory must always be underdetermined and open to being questioned. Otherwise academics suffer the objectivistic and subjectivistic epistemological pitfalls one can be seduced or lulled into that must always be avoided.
By exploring each of these theoretical trajectories, how John deployed them, and how they have been incorporated in my own pedagogy, this paper contributes to John Fiske’s ongoing significance and legacy, and to us, as his eternal students, a musing on the art he gave us, the elusive art we must all continue to study and master, the art of learning “How to Fiske.”
This paper explores four trajectories about cultural theory that must be taken as paramount to continuing and building upon what John Fiske taught us: First: To be Transliterate and master the techniques of Translation. One of the many things that set John apart, not only from those on Vilas’s 5th floor, but especially from those who roamed the 8th floor of the Death Star atop Bascom Hill, was the ability to read across arbitrary disciplinary boundaries, all the while attentive to their specific analytic terms, yet be able translate them backwards and forwards in order to make them applicable, accessible, and understood for all those invested. Second: The Bricoleur approach to theory; that one must be fully conversant with theory, that the best theories are taken where ever you can get them, that there is no one theory that will explain all social conditions, and that theories are less like windows that offer a transparent view onto the world, and more like prisms that illuminate some issues better than others depending on what one is interrogating, and finally, that theories must always be open to being connected, combined, deconstructed and reconstructed as necessitated. Third: bodies, pleasures, resistance, evasion, texts, the people, the popular, and the everyday are not just revisionist, romanticized, or over-politicized buzz words or rhetorical flourishes, they are analytical frames that create points of purchase into doing historically grounded, contextually bound, ethnographic work within a world where cultural is always an arena of struggle; a world where culture is contradictory, always both a means and tool of domination and stratification, and a resource for collaboration and emancipation always embedded in and relation to larger social structures. Fourth, and finally and most important of all: Theory must always retain the ability “to be surprised.” There is no totalizing theory; theory must always be underdetermined and open to being questioned. Otherwise academics suffer the objectivistic and subjectivistic epistemological pitfalls one can be seduced or lulled into that must always be avoided.
By exploring each of these theoretical trajectories, how John deployed them, and how they have been incorporated in my own pedagogy, this paper contributes to John Fiske’s ongoing significance and legacy, and to us, as his eternal students, a musing on the art he gave us, the elusive art we must all continue to study and master, the art of learning “How to Fiske.”
Hayward, Mark: "Publishing Cultural Studies: Rethinking Academic Journals"
My paper develops two themes in tandem: one historical, the other conceptual. An active member of the editorial collective for the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, John Fiske was central in its move to the United States in 1987 and its transformation into Cultural Studies. While a considerable amount has been written about the institutionalization of cultural studies in the university in different national contexts, less attention has been paid to the traditions and practices of publication associated with its emergence. When it is discussed, this move is read as marking the professionalization (which often also is described as the ‘Americanization’) of cultural studies. The collectively-run AJCS becomes the peer-reviewed CS; the fiery birth of cultural studies in the 1970s gives way to academic orthodoxy. Even though it overlooks the international character of the journal, it is a story that echoes many others in the histories of cultural studies.
In 2009, Social Text celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its founding. Cultural Studies/AJCS will reach the same age in 2013. These journal come to middle age in the midst of a period of radical changes in academic publishing: a dramatic concentration of ownership of publishing houses, tightening intellectual property regimes, and the globalization of pressures to publish under increasingly precarious labor conditions. In my paper I return to this earlier moment of transformations in the modes of publication for cultural studies as a launching point for thinking about the present moment.
As scholars working in cultural studies (along with colleagues in many other disciplines) seek new models for producing and sharing knowledge, it is worth revisiting how one aspect of the current institutional landscape of cultural studies came into being. While some of the issues faced in the late-1980s are the same (particularly problems around the financing and distribution for publication), many things have changed over the past three decades as new technologies have developed and the political economy of the academy has been transformed by two decades of neo-liberal policy. This is a project already underway in many places as academic publishing embraces the open access movement.
In the second part of my paper, I move from the historical to the conceptual and ask how might we revisit and rework the scholarly journal today. I argue that it is not enough to merely keep the form, while changing the medium (online) and contributor’s contracts (open access). New kinds of knowledge production are emerging, forms that must be acknowledged in the academy. In this light, it is worth examining the history of experimentations within ACJC/CS (Kites, Spinners, Radar Love) that attempted to break with the form of the standard academic journal, their successes and their limitations. In thinking about these transformations in the textuality of scholarly production, I turn to the work of John Fiske and his analysis of the ‘producerly’ nature of the televisual text. I argue that the models of textual openness and engagement outlined by Fiske in his work on television offer promising models and tools for conceptualizing scholarly publishing in the contemporary moment.
In 2009, Social Text celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its founding. Cultural Studies/AJCS will reach the same age in 2013. These journal come to middle age in the midst of a period of radical changes in academic publishing: a dramatic concentration of ownership of publishing houses, tightening intellectual property regimes, and the globalization of pressures to publish under increasingly precarious labor conditions. In my paper I return to this earlier moment of transformations in the modes of publication for cultural studies as a launching point for thinking about the present moment.
As scholars working in cultural studies (along with colleagues in many other disciplines) seek new models for producing and sharing knowledge, it is worth revisiting how one aspect of the current institutional landscape of cultural studies came into being. While some of the issues faced in the late-1980s are the same (particularly problems around the financing and distribution for publication), many things have changed over the past three decades as new technologies have developed and the political economy of the academy has been transformed by two decades of neo-liberal policy. This is a project already underway in many places as academic publishing embraces the open access movement.
In the second part of my paper, I move from the historical to the conceptual and ask how might we revisit and rework the scholarly journal today. I argue that it is not enough to merely keep the form, while changing the medium (online) and contributor’s contracts (open access). New kinds of knowledge production are emerging, forms that must be acknowledged in the academy. In this light, it is worth examining the history of experimentations within ACJC/CS (Kites, Spinners, Radar Love) that attempted to break with the form of the standard academic journal, their successes and their limitations. In thinking about these transformations in the textuality of scholarly production, I turn to the work of John Fiske and his analysis of the ‘producerly’ nature of the televisual text. I argue that the models of textual openness and engagement outlined by Fiske in his work on television offer promising models and tools for conceptualizing scholarly publishing in the contemporary moment.
Hillis, Ken: "Google and The Political Economy of Metaphysics"
Google’s ultimate vision is to archive the universe, from Google Earth to Google Mars and beyond. Google Book aims to build “a comprehensive index of all the books in the world.” Such plans recall Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel (1941), in which the universe is conceived as a vast library holding all knowledge. Without the ability to effectively search, in Borges’ account, the library’s contents remain useless. Despair, induced by the absence of an organizational key, propels librarians to imagine two metaphysical technologies—the Crimson Hexagon and the Man of the Book. These technologies—Borges terms them “superstitions”—are magical logs or indices of all the other books. The librarian who finds them will be “analogous to a god.” Google has taken on the role of that god. In adopting “Don’t Be Evil” as their mantra, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page implicitly understand that building the ultimate global index that is accessible from any place with an internet connection usurps not only powers once accorded the divine, but also state powers and those of civil society institutions.
I critique Google’s project to produce a universal index as crucial to the ways the corporation gains power through inviting searchers everywhere to become, in hegemonic fashion, the authors of their knowledge quests. If information cannot be accessed it may as well not exist, and finding a text through search implicitly positions the searcher as the text’s creator. Because a successful search allows an individual to extract pleasurable use value from the process of exchange that forms the core of search, Google does “share” power with searchers but it retains the lion’s share. Any decentering of power this offers is compensated for when searchers buy into the logic of search and self-fashion themselves in accordance with its principles. In searching others one comes to understand why one should allow oneself to be searched.
Doubtful critique informs my assessment. Yet critique must go beyond doubt alone, and I also identify emergent forms of identification born of search practices that have the potential to support alternatives to neoliberal models of do-it-yourself self-governance. For example, while search practices do help produce auto-correcting selves, they also render these individuals assearchers. Because of searching’s strong associations with practices such as the pursuit of concealed desires, thorough examination, and ascertaining the presence or absence of some person or thing, internet search, as a mode of identification, has the potential to augment subjects’ interest in initiating action for change in ways similar to Gramsci’s organic intellectual and his or her complex relationship to community organization. The purview of knowledge once held tightly by priests and librarians becomes available to a larger proportion of the population with means of access.
I critique Google’s project to produce a universal index as crucial to the ways the corporation gains power through inviting searchers everywhere to become, in hegemonic fashion, the authors of their knowledge quests. If information cannot be accessed it may as well not exist, and finding a text through search implicitly positions the searcher as the text’s creator. Because a successful search allows an individual to extract pleasurable use value from the process of exchange that forms the core of search, Google does “share” power with searchers but it retains the lion’s share. Any decentering of power this offers is compensated for when searchers buy into the logic of search and self-fashion themselves in accordance with its principles. In searching others one comes to understand why one should allow oneself to be searched.
Doubtful critique informs my assessment. Yet critique must go beyond doubt alone, and I also identify emergent forms of identification born of search practices that have the potential to support alternatives to neoliberal models of do-it-yourself self-governance. For example, while search practices do help produce auto-correcting selves, they also render these individuals assearchers. Because of searching’s strong associations with practices such as the pursuit of concealed desires, thorough examination, and ascertaining the presence or absence of some person or thing, internet search, as a mode of identification, has the potential to augment subjects’ interest in initiating action for change in ways similar to Gramsci’s organic intellectual and his or her complex relationship to community organization. The purview of knowledge once held tightly by priests and librarians becomes available to a larger proportion of the population with means of access.
Hoerschelmann, Olaf: "The Quizzical Pleasure of Millionaire: Popularity and Hierarchies of Knowledge"
In this paper, I investigate contemporary quiz shows and Who Wants to be a Millionaire in particular as a site for the production of knowledge. This paper will adapt Fiske’s work on the politics of knowledge in quiz shows from Television Culture (1987) and other articles (Fiske 1990) and argues that the knowledge presented on Millionaire is both informed by social norms and hierarchies and is capable of shaping hierarchies of knowledge, education and taste itself (cf. Bourdieu, 1984, 1990).
While the program emphasizes the intellectual capabilities of its successful contestants, an analysis of the structure and content of questions on Millionaire reveals that the program employs a mixture of trivia and serious knowledge. Fiske (1987, p. 269) observes that knowledge in the game show genre is often categorized through a basic split between factual knowledge and human knowledge. He divides the genre further into 'academic' and everyday knowledge as subcategories of factual knowledge, and knowledge of people in general and of specific individuals as subcategory of human knowledge. I argue that one of the strategies that creates the popular appeal of Millionaire is the collapse of some of the categories that Fiske described in the context of 1980s game shows. Additionally, the use of lifelines and the use of a multiple-choice format makes the knowledge promoted on Millionaire accessible to a larger group of viewers. Millionaire tends to reward surface knowledge of a variety of familiar subjects. The types of knowledge endorsed on Millionaire imply that the program also tends to assume a middle-aged, married, white, Anglo consumer as the ideal contestant.
Following the writings of Giroux and others in the area of critical pedagogy, I conclude that Millionaire not only positions such knowledge as central to US culture, but it also produces a strong image of the normative subject that possesses such knowledge. In other words, Who Wants to be a Millionaire produces a powerful discourse of what counts as normal knowledge and normal education and of the people who are assumed to possess these attributes, while excluding knowledge at the margins of US social and educational hierarchies.
While the program emphasizes the intellectual capabilities of its successful contestants, an analysis of the structure and content of questions on Millionaire reveals that the program employs a mixture of trivia and serious knowledge. Fiske (1987, p. 269) observes that knowledge in the game show genre is often categorized through a basic split between factual knowledge and human knowledge. He divides the genre further into 'academic' and everyday knowledge as subcategories of factual knowledge, and knowledge of people in general and of specific individuals as subcategory of human knowledge. I argue that one of the strategies that creates the popular appeal of Millionaire is the collapse of some of the categories that Fiske described in the context of 1980s game shows. Additionally, the use of lifelines and the use of a multiple-choice format makes the knowledge promoted on Millionaire accessible to a larger group of viewers. Millionaire tends to reward surface knowledge of a variety of familiar subjects. The types of knowledge endorsed on Millionaire imply that the program also tends to assume a middle-aged, married, white, Anglo consumer as the ideal contestant.
Following the writings of Giroux and others in the area of critical pedagogy, I conclude that Millionaire not only positions such knowledge as central to US culture, but it also produces a strong image of the normative subject that possesses such knowledge. In other words, Who Wants to be a Millionaire produces a powerful discourse of what counts as normal knowledge and normal education and of the people who are assumed to possess these attributes, while excluding knowledge at the margins of US social and educational hierarchies.
Johnson, Derek: "New Battlegrounds: Modding Cultural Studies"
In Television Culture (1988), Fiske argues that socio‐economic power guarantees no monopoly on the
power to create meaning. Marginalized consumers reject social roles expected of them and seize power
for themselves by disavowing the dominant meanings preferred by institutionally entitled producers.
This paper argues, however, that video game culture diverges from previous forms of popular culture by
reworking relationships between the pleasures of consumption, production, and power on the margins.
As Terranova (2001), Banks (2003) and Postigo (2007) explain, digital producers depend upon active
audiences as a source of free labor. The power of players to re‐inflect texts generates terabytes of new
maps, levels, and other user‐generated content to sustain games’ commodity value. Power over the
text is no longer appropriated by consumers, as Fiske writes, but deigned to them by producers profiting
from it. Moreover, the semiotic nature of that power to reinterpret takes a back seat to an iterative
power to reproduce. Game culture thereby co‐opts traditional models of audience power,
fundamentally challenging the politics of pleasure and the notion of culture as struggle over meaning.
Yet if game culture confounds cultural studies precepts shaped by Fiske, a careful analysis of players’
creative practices reveals that those models have persistent value if reoriented to alternative fields of
cultural struggle. To examine the crucial intersection of player productivity, power, and institutional co‐
optation, this paper explores the cultural politics of game modifications (or “mods”) and their
reorientation of traditional struggles over meaning around struggles over productive agency. Though
modding takes many forms—including skins made to give games new visual meanings, levels and maps
made to give new context to gameplay, and even complex total conversions that entirely rebuild game
to better suit players’ interests—each of these preferred consumer practices become a new site of
cultural tension. By examining the digital architectures of modded games including Starcraft, Little Big
Planet, and X‐Men Legends, analyzing interviews that reveal institutional strategies, and exploring
websites that reveal modders’ creative practices, this paper argues that game culture shifts popular
struggle to the realm of productive agency. Despite the designed openness of such games to
reiteration, popular productivity remains carefully policed and limited by game designers in ways that
modders repeatedly reject. In this sense, Fiske’s models remain constructive ways to conceptualize
game culture in that dominant institutions’ very attempts to fix open textuality generate tensions that
produce popular opposition. Though semiotic struggles are significantly sidelined by institutional
embrace of active audiences, traditional cultural studies continue to enhance theories of game culture
when trained on the new ways audiences and producers vie to open and close texts.
power to create meaning. Marginalized consumers reject social roles expected of them and seize power
for themselves by disavowing the dominant meanings preferred by institutionally entitled producers.
This paper argues, however, that video game culture diverges from previous forms of popular culture by
reworking relationships between the pleasures of consumption, production, and power on the margins.
As Terranova (2001), Banks (2003) and Postigo (2007) explain, digital producers depend upon active
audiences as a source of free labor. The power of players to re‐inflect texts generates terabytes of new
maps, levels, and other user‐generated content to sustain games’ commodity value. Power over the
text is no longer appropriated by consumers, as Fiske writes, but deigned to them by producers profiting
from it. Moreover, the semiotic nature of that power to reinterpret takes a back seat to an iterative
power to reproduce. Game culture thereby co‐opts traditional models of audience power,
fundamentally challenging the politics of pleasure and the notion of culture as struggle over meaning.
Yet if game culture confounds cultural studies precepts shaped by Fiske, a careful analysis of players’
creative practices reveals that those models have persistent value if reoriented to alternative fields of
cultural struggle. To examine the crucial intersection of player productivity, power, and institutional co‐
optation, this paper explores the cultural politics of game modifications (or “mods”) and their
reorientation of traditional struggles over meaning around struggles over productive agency. Though
modding takes many forms—including skins made to give games new visual meanings, levels and maps
made to give new context to gameplay, and even complex total conversions that entirely rebuild game
to better suit players’ interests—each of these preferred consumer practices become a new site of
cultural tension. By examining the digital architectures of modded games including Starcraft, Little Big
Planet, and X‐Men Legends, analyzing interviews that reveal institutional strategies, and exploring
websites that reveal modders’ creative practices, this paper argues that game culture shifts popular
struggle to the realm of productive agency. Despite the designed openness of such games to
reiteration, popular productivity remains carefully policed and limited by game designers in ways that
modders repeatedly reject. In this sense, Fiske’s models remain constructive ways to conceptualize
game culture in that dominant institutions’ very attempts to fix open textuality generate tensions that
produce popular opposition. Though semiotic struggles are significantly sidelined by institutional
embrace of active audiences, traditional cultural studies continue to enhance theories of game culture
when trained on the new ways audiences and producers vie to open and close texts.
Keyser, Catherine: "Light Verse, Magazines, and Celebrity: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker"
In 1928, Time magazine observed that “for ten years, smart young women have been trying to rival with their versification Edna St. Vincent Millay.” This comment connects reader and poet, public and celebrity, as both use poetry as an emblem of public self-fashioning. John Fiske addressed the contemporary female celebrity and her sexualized body in his essay on Madonna in Reading Popular Culture (1989). The contradictions he recognized in Madonna, a celebrity whose persona conveys both objecthood and agency, resemble the ambiguities that cultural historians trace in the flapper. Emulating Fiske’s attention to traces of domination and resistance in the presentation and reception of celebrities, I analyze poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker as emblems of modern womanhood within mass-market magazines.
With women moving into cities and entering the professions at unprecedented rates, Millay’s light verse about sexuality and mobility became enormously popular in the 1920s. Dorothy Parker cited Millay’s influence on her own career, claiming that she had been “following in the exquisite footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” This language of “exquisite”-ness also suggests the vexed link between body image, fashion choices, and professional autonomy in the magazine fantasy of the urbane modern woman. I examine two magazines, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, that provided readers with a vision of modernity and class mobility. Both magazines featured rhetoric prizing smartness, graphics promising luxury, and light verse presenting sexuality and femininity.
I argue that the magazine’s pages demonstrate the iconic roles that Millay and Parker played in the cultural imagination. I use the advertisements and cartoons that variously picture and address the poets’ readers to analyze the kinship proposed between young single women working in the city and modern female poets writing about it. Both Millay and Parker were prominent writers of light verse, a genre found in newspapers and magazines and characterized by formal conventionality, simple diction, and (often) rollicking rhymes. This genre emblematized the energy and insouciance of youth culture, as well as the rebellion and flirtation of the flapper. The simplicity of the genre and its covert aggression—the punch-line or twist at the end of the poem—invited the common reader’s participation and indeed self-invention.
With women moving into cities and entering the professions at unprecedented rates, Millay’s light verse about sexuality and mobility became enormously popular in the 1920s. Dorothy Parker cited Millay’s influence on her own career, claiming that she had been “following in the exquisite footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” This language of “exquisite”-ness also suggests the vexed link between body image, fashion choices, and professional autonomy in the magazine fantasy of the urbane modern woman. I examine two magazines, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, that provided readers with a vision of modernity and class mobility. Both magazines featured rhetoric prizing smartness, graphics promising luxury, and light verse presenting sexuality and femininity.
I argue that the magazine’s pages demonstrate the iconic roles that Millay and Parker played in the cultural imagination. I use the advertisements and cartoons that variously picture and address the poets’ readers to analyze the kinship proposed between young single women working in the city and modern female poets writing about it. Both Millay and Parker were prominent writers of light verse, a genre found in newspapers and magazines and characterized by formal conventionality, simple diction, and (often) rollicking rhymes. This genre emblematized the energy and insouciance of youth culture, as well as the rebellion and flirtation of the flapper. The simplicity of the genre and its covert aggression—the punch-line or twist at the end of the poem—invited the common reader’s participation and indeed self-invention.
Kirk, Andrew J.: "Fiske Online (And I’ll Take Fries with That)"
As a testament to Ronald McDonald, a young woman in the Philippines known as “Miss McDonald” dressed up as the beloved clown for Halloween in 2004, and that idea blossomed into a photography project that she posted to the World Wide Web. To say the least, she is one of the McDonald Corporation’s biggest fans—a state of being characterized by a diverse set of practices where “identification, both with the object of fandom (e.g., a celebrity) and the community of fans, is central” (Soukup, 2006, p. 322). Various performances mark this terrain, with the objects of fandom and the results of these practices commonly referred to as “popular culture.” However, in doing so, consumers oftentimes “actively produce [their own] cultural meanings through creative appropriations and recontextualizations of mass cultural commodities” (Coombe & Herman, 2001, p. 926). This results in oppositional interpretations of popular culture texts, yet concurrently highlights the “the agency and inventiveness of subordinated cultures” (Rogers, 2006, p. 484) that submit to the pleasures of fandom.
In this regard, Fiske (1989) suggests that consumers will “make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system” (p. 15), thus establishing their own subversive meanings for those products, i.e., excorporation. However, in order to manage such reappropriations, thereby maintaining some semblance of control over their consumers, corporations try to reintegrate those ideas whenever possible. This re-integration is referred to as incorporation, and it allows producers to absorb “the signs of resistance…[back] into the dominant system and thus attempts to rob [subordinated groups] of any oppositional meanings” (p. 18).
While audiences the world over actively construct meanings for the texts they consume based on their own experiences and frames of knowledge (Hirschman & Thompson, 1997, p. 45), their rejection and reappropriation of old meanings and their public dissemination of new meanings problematize Fiske’s original ideas about incorporation and excorporation. As illustrated through the case of Miss McDonald, the advent and availability of Internet technologies across the globe enables a truly international body of fans to become new meaning makers rather than meaning re-makers, with the latter serving as the common conclusion in traditional audience analyses. Ultimately, fans are able to sidestep the original producers thanks to the Internet, bestowing them with power to communicate directly with other consumers who can then re-appropriate and re-disseminate texts like Miss McDonald’s as they see fit.
In this paper, I use the work of Miss McDonald to problematize Fiske’s dated yet foundational model of popular culture to illustrate the meaning-making that can occur when cultures collide. I begin by providing an overview of globalization and fandom, including the ways that Internet technologies have helped shape contemporary fan practices, as well as review Fiske’s original model of popular culture production and consumption. Assisted by Miss McDonald and her online images, I ultimately argue that dramatic increases in Internet usage and availability, coupled with the onslaught of globalization, necessitate that we revisit and revise Fiske’s model to reflect our current global reality.
In this regard, Fiske (1989) suggests that consumers will “make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system” (p. 15), thus establishing their own subversive meanings for those products, i.e., excorporation. However, in order to manage such reappropriations, thereby maintaining some semblance of control over their consumers, corporations try to reintegrate those ideas whenever possible. This re-integration is referred to as incorporation, and it allows producers to absorb “the signs of resistance…[back] into the dominant system and thus attempts to rob [subordinated groups] of any oppositional meanings” (p. 18).
While audiences the world over actively construct meanings for the texts they consume based on their own experiences and frames of knowledge (Hirschman & Thompson, 1997, p. 45), their rejection and reappropriation of old meanings and their public dissemination of new meanings problematize Fiske’s original ideas about incorporation and excorporation. As illustrated through the case of Miss McDonald, the advent and availability of Internet technologies across the globe enables a truly international body of fans to become new meaning makers rather than meaning re-makers, with the latter serving as the common conclusion in traditional audience analyses. Ultimately, fans are able to sidestep the original producers thanks to the Internet, bestowing them with power to communicate directly with other consumers who can then re-appropriate and re-disseminate texts like Miss McDonald’s as they see fit.
In this paper, I use the work of Miss McDonald to problematize Fiske’s dated yet foundational model of popular culture to illustrate the meaning-making that can occur when cultures collide. I begin by providing an overview of globalization and fandom, including the ways that Internet technologies have helped shape contemporary fan practices, as well as review Fiske’s original model of popular culture production and consumption. Assisted by Miss McDonald and her online images, I ultimately argue that dramatic increases in Internet usage and availability, coupled with the onslaught of globalization, necessitate that we revisit and revise Fiske’s model to reflect our current global reality.
Kirkpatrick, Bill: "Play, Power, and Policy: Putting John Fiske Back into Media Policy Studies"
The title of this paper is misleading: since the field of media policy studies never fully embraced John Fiske's contributions, putting him "back into" policy might be a misnomer. Instead, theorists in the 1990s such as Tony Bennett lamented the failure of cultural studies to engage media and cultural policy (as if that were not what scholars like Fiske had been doing all along). In the meantime, political economists on both the left and right, for their part, claimed Media Policy Studies for themselves. In a tired and silly but nonetheless influential move, such scholars frequently sought to shore up the legitimacy of their policy relevance by adopting a caricature of Fiske as their favorite straw man.
We could have hoped that the move toward Critical Cultural Policy Studies (CCPS) would finally acknowledge the power of Fiske's ideas for understanding the workings of media policy, but so far this hasn't happened: While CCPS has usefully recovered and applied Foucault's idea of governmentality to media policy over the past decade, Fiske's reworking of Foucault has been largely silenced. In the key anthology of this area,1 Fiske is mentioned only once --and that was one author's pro forma exercise in kicking a little more straw around.
Fiske's absence from media policy studies has had two key consequences. First, by failing to engage with "the popular" in media policy, we encourage a too narrow emphasis on the state and "official" policy, which risks neglecting the odd forms that media policy takes in the United States and the multiple locations of its formulation and enforcement. Second, media policy studies has not yet had its ethnographic moment, which limits our understanding of how policy is created and lived at different cultural sites and by differently empowered actors, especially in terms of resistance. For example, "official" media policy is formulated with an imagination of resistance to that policy in mind, meaning that we can't understand "top-down" policymaking without appreciating the role of "bottom-up" resistance. At the same time, "unofficial" policymakers can be found everywhere: the parents' dictum "No TV before you've done your homework" is media policy too.
In this paper, then, I will revisit the writings of John Fiske in order to highlight the continued relevance of his work to media policy studies. In particular, Power Plays, Power Works contains a rich, nuanced, and useful understanding of the workings of power that can and should be more vigorously applied to policy studies, including fully elaborated theories of imperializing and localizing power and the relations between them.2 By reconsidering the importance of Fiske's legacy for policy studies, I hope to contribute to the ongoing search for ways to think about the structure and workings of our media systems.
We could have hoped that the move toward Critical Cultural Policy Studies (CCPS) would finally acknowledge the power of Fiske's ideas for understanding the workings of media policy, but so far this hasn't happened: While CCPS has usefully recovered and applied Foucault's idea of governmentality to media policy over the past decade, Fiske's reworking of Foucault has been largely silenced. In the key anthology of this area,1 Fiske is mentioned only once --and that was one author's pro forma exercise in kicking a little more straw around.
Fiske's absence from media policy studies has had two key consequences. First, by failing to engage with "the popular" in media policy, we encourage a too narrow emphasis on the state and "official" policy, which risks neglecting the odd forms that media policy takes in the United States and the multiple locations of its formulation and enforcement. Second, media policy studies has not yet had its ethnographic moment, which limits our understanding of how policy is created and lived at different cultural sites and by differently empowered actors, especially in terms of resistance. For example, "official" media policy is formulated with an imagination of resistance to that policy in mind, meaning that we can't understand "top-down" policymaking without appreciating the role of "bottom-up" resistance. At the same time, "unofficial" policymakers can be found everywhere: the parents' dictum "No TV before you've done your homework" is media policy too.
In this paper, then, I will revisit the writings of John Fiske in order to highlight the continued relevance of his work to media policy studies. In particular, Power Plays, Power Works contains a rich, nuanced, and useful understanding of the workings of power that can and should be more vigorously applied to policy studies, including fully elaborated theories of imperializing and localizing power and the relations between them.2 By reconsidering the importance of Fiske's legacy for policy studies, I hope to contribute to the ongoing search for ways to think about the structure and workings of our media systems.
Marcus, Daniel: "John Fiske's Late Work on Media and Politics: What Works and Matters in 2010"
While best-known for his work on television and semiotics, and his active audience theorizations in subsequent books, John Fiske devoted the last years of his scholarly career to parsing the meanings and relationships between media, culture, and the explicitly political sphere, within a primarily American context. In Power Plays Power Works and Media Matters, Fiske combined the insights of Foucault, Gramsci, and de Certeau in readings of Presidential imagery, black nationalist politics, situation comedy interventions into political and social debate, and the advance of government surveillance, among many other topics. In doing so, he continued and revised the project of British Cultural Studies of the 1970s and 1980s, when Stuart Hall and others examined and explained the triumphs of Thatcherism. One of the primary introducers of BCS methods and concerns into the American academy, Fiske had been seen by many as moving away from BCS’s interest in electoral politics when he was writing his active audience works, only to craft one of the few sustained responses within Cultural Studies to the US political sphere in the post-Reagan era.
This paper traces the strengths and weaknesses of Fiske’s approach in retrospect. His work on the mix of politics and celebrity, the use of television entertainment forms to respond to public events, and the complexities of race and gender as symbols that traverse the political and the cultural seem as equally relevant today as fifteen years ago, if not more so. His concern over encroaching surveillance gained stronger resonance in post-9/11 America, while his work on black nationalism faces a radically new context with the election of Barack Obama. The paper will also address the omissions from Fiske’s approach, to discuss more strongly institutional readings of media and politics and the relevance of political economy.
In examining the usefulness of Fiske’s work today, I will use Obama’s election as a case study. What can Fiske tell us about the varied images and meanings of Barack Obama, as candidate, political symbol, and media celebrity? I will particularly look at how Obama was featured in conservative discourse in 2008, from both televisual and non-televisual sources. Portrayed variously as a liberal, Chicago machine politician, socialist, black nationalist, Muslim, intellectual, and novice, Obama became both a condensation symbol for conservative anxieties and a rhetorical target to be stripped of legitimacy as a potential President. While the FOX News Channel led the way, conservative pundits and activists throughout the media sphere contributed to efforts to brand Obama as dangerous, risky, or foreign. Ultimately, these attacks were unsuccessful in preventing Obama’s election, but set the terrain for renewed conservative attacks over the last year, which have produced a virtual frenzy of signification. In addressing Fiske’s legacy in media, cultural, and political analysis, I hope to contribute to the recent renewed interest in political media in the post-network, Internet era, and delineate the ways in which the post-structuralist approach of British Cultural Studies continues to yield insights in a new era, while grappling with its changes.
This paper traces the strengths and weaknesses of Fiske’s approach in retrospect. His work on the mix of politics and celebrity, the use of television entertainment forms to respond to public events, and the complexities of race and gender as symbols that traverse the political and the cultural seem as equally relevant today as fifteen years ago, if not more so. His concern over encroaching surveillance gained stronger resonance in post-9/11 America, while his work on black nationalism faces a radically new context with the election of Barack Obama. The paper will also address the omissions from Fiske’s approach, to discuss more strongly institutional readings of media and politics and the relevance of political economy.
In examining the usefulness of Fiske’s work today, I will use Obama’s election as a case study. What can Fiske tell us about the varied images and meanings of Barack Obama, as candidate, political symbol, and media celebrity? I will particularly look at how Obama was featured in conservative discourse in 2008, from both televisual and non-televisual sources. Portrayed variously as a liberal, Chicago machine politician, socialist, black nationalist, Muslim, intellectual, and novice, Obama became both a condensation symbol for conservative anxieties and a rhetorical target to be stripped of legitimacy as a potential President. While the FOX News Channel led the way, conservative pundits and activists throughout the media sphere contributed to efforts to brand Obama as dangerous, risky, or foreign. Ultimately, these attacks were unsuccessful in preventing Obama’s election, but set the terrain for renewed conservative attacks over the last year, which have produced a virtual frenzy of signification. In addressing Fiske’s legacy in media, cultural, and political analysis, I hope to contribute to the recent renewed interest in political media in the post-network, Internet era, and delineate the ways in which the post-structuralist approach of British Cultural Studies continues to yield insights in a new era, while grappling with its changes.
McNutt, Myles: "Critical Conduits: Television Criticism as Hybrid Fan/Intellectual Engagement with Television Studies and the Work of John Fiske"
This paper will investigate how online television criticism has formed a unique space for fan/intellectual engagement that reflects the unique challenges of reading television which John Fiske examined throughout his career. While critics continue to play the role of the reviewer, offering readers their opinion so as to inform their viewing habits, many have taken on a far more important role as a facilitator of online discussions which reinforce the importance of Fiske’s observations and communicates them to audiences beyond the academic community.
While the internet formalized reader response to television, making it both instantaneous and accessible, the collective voice of the people is often primarily viewed as an emotional discourse, with fans on message boards arguing over relationships or expressing their love for a particular character. Of course, the Internet provides intellectuals the same opportunities, offering space to post their more detailed academic considerations of television. However, while scholars may visit fan communities on occasion (more often to study them than to engage with them), and fans may occasionally stumble upon scholarly writing about their favorite series, the direct interaction between these two groups is generally limited.
Recently, however, trends within television criticism have established a space where these two groups converge on a near-nightly basis. Built on a foundation of television studies, critics have taken to deconstructing individual episodes in lengthy informal essays, analyzing the episodes both in terms of their position within a show’s narrative and in terms of their thematic, theoretical, and technical content. A show like Mad Men is not only analyzed in terms of considering Don Draper’s future (which would form the content of an episode “recap”), but also in terms of how the writer and the director chose to portray Draper’s story, and how the episode mediates the show’s 1960s setting and its unique cross-section of entrenched ideals and emergent social forces.
By going beyond plot and delving into the complexities of both television production and theoretical discussions, critics like Alan Sepinwall and the collective at The A.V. Club have created an environment where fans are incorporating these detailed analyses into a post-episode ritual. Their reviews inspire the same complex comment threads you might find on a message board, but when placed in the context of a detailed deconstruction of the episode these discussions offer a unique blend of witty repartee and carefully considered theoretical discussions about the show involved.
The result is an online community which not only taps into Fiske’s foundational work in television studies to consider the medium on a weekly basis, but which also extends those principles to audiences who may have never considered television in that light before. By investigating reviews from individual critics, the comments they inspire, and the fan community responses to these more critical investigations of their favorite series, I will demonstrate the degree to which Fiske’s legacy has merged with the internet’s unique potential in order to introduce television studies to a whole new demographic, one review at a time.
While the internet formalized reader response to television, making it both instantaneous and accessible, the collective voice of the people is often primarily viewed as an emotional discourse, with fans on message boards arguing over relationships or expressing their love for a particular character. Of course, the Internet provides intellectuals the same opportunities, offering space to post their more detailed academic considerations of television. However, while scholars may visit fan communities on occasion (more often to study them than to engage with them), and fans may occasionally stumble upon scholarly writing about their favorite series, the direct interaction between these two groups is generally limited.
Recently, however, trends within television criticism have established a space where these two groups converge on a near-nightly basis. Built on a foundation of television studies, critics have taken to deconstructing individual episodes in lengthy informal essays, analyzing the episodes both in terms of their position within a show’s narrative and in terms of their thematic, theoretical, and technical content. A show like Mad Men is not only analyzed in terms of considering Don Draper’s future (which would form the content of an episode “recap”), but also in terms of how the writer and the director chose to portray Draper’s story, and how the episode mediates the show’s 1960s setting and its unique cross-section of entrenched ideals and emergent social forces.
By going beyond plot and delving into the complexities of both television production and theoretical discussions, critics like Alan Sepinwall and the collective at The A.V. Club have created an environment where fans are incorporating these detailed analyses into a post-episode ritual. Their reviews inspire the same complex comment threads you might find on a message board, but when placed in the context of a detailed deconstruction of the episode these discussions offer a unique blend of witty repartee and carefully considered theoretical discussions about the show involved.
The result is an online community which not only taps into Fiske’s foundational work in television studies to consider the medium on a weekly basis, but which also extends those principles to audiences who may have never considered television in that light before. By investigating reviews from individual critics, the comments they inspire, and the fan community responses to these more critical investigations of their favorite series, I will demonstrate the degree to which Fiske’s legacy has merged with the internet’s unique potential in order to introduce television studies to a whole new demographic, one review at a time.
Mittell, Jason: "Updating Television Culture for the Digital Era: From Hart to Hart to YouTube"
John Fiske's work forged American media studies in the 1980s and early-1990s, defining the nascent field in a way that you could not help but build upon, or argue against, his work. Twenty years later, Fiske's reputation and influence seems distant and dated to many scholars, with his work less centrally referenced in contemporary media studies. In this presentation, I take a close look at Fiske's most influential book, Television Culture, and reconsider its arguments and ideas in light of 21st century media. I argue that what appears most dated in Fiske's work are not his theoretical foundations or analytical insights, but the objects of analysis themselves – Fiske wrote in the present tense, encouraging his readers to engage with the most mundane and common aspects of popular culture. Not surprisingly, many of the aspects of everyday life that he used as his tutor texts were not to become the canonized, most remembered objects of 1980s television history, such as Hill Street Blues or Cheers, but the ephemeral everyday popular texts that would otherwise be forgotten: Hart to Hart, Sale of the Century, The A-Team, and Rock 'n' Wrestling. These choices raise key disciplinary issues, as television scholars must engage with contemporary programming, even at the risk of losing salience for future generations of readers.
To update such case studies, I turn to some of Fiske's core ideas and consider how they might help illuminate contemporary examples of American television, and how major shifts within the television industry, textual forms, technologies, and viewer practices might encourage us to rethink some Fiske's conclusions. I consider how his distinction between readerly and producerly texts might apply to some examples of contemporary narrative complexity that encourage what I have called “forensic fandom,” such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Using Veronica Mars as a case study, I look at Fiske's distinctions between masculine and feminine modes of address, considering how contemporary genre mixing builds on the traditional categories laid out in Television Culture. Finally, I examine websites like YouTube and fan wikis as sites of tertiary textuality, considering how Fiske's theories of fan productivity still speak to participatory culture in the digital era. Throughout, I contend that Fiske's foundational analysis is not only still valid when applied to contemporary objects, but essential to understanding the cultural practices and possibilities found in television today.
To update such case studies, I turn to some of Fiske's core ideas and consider how they might help illuminate contemporary examples of American television, and how major shifts within the television industry, textual forms, technologies, and viewer practices might encourage us to rethink some Fiske's conclusions. I consider how his distinction between readerly and producerly texts might apply to some examples of contemporary narrative complexity that encourage what I have called “forensic fandom,” such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Using Veronica Mars as a case study, I look at Fiske's distinctions between masculine and feminine modes of address, considering how contemporary genre mixing builds on the traditional categories laid out in Television Culture. Finally, I examine websites like YouTube and fan wikis as sites of tertiary textuality, considering how Fiske's theories of fan productivity still speak to participatory culture in the digital era. Throughout, I contend that Fiske's foundational analysis is not only still valid when applied to contemporary objects, but essential to understanding the cultural practices and possibilities found in television today.
Müller, Eggo: "Fiske's Politics of Recognition: Reading the Popular Revisited"
In Europe, John Fiske’s (1989) theory of popular culture and his readings of popular texts have been received and are still discussed as a prototypical approach to popular culture opposed to the Frankfurt School’s ‘elitist’ critique of the Culture Industry. Though the differences between Fiske’s account on popular culture and the Frankfurt School’s perspective on the Culture Industry are evident, Fiske has never explicitly positioned himself in opposition to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique, but has explained his own theoretical project in terms of a critical adaptation and continuation of (neo-) Marxist media and cultural theory (Müller 1993).
This paper reconstructs Fiske’s contribution to the theory and analysis of popular culture in terms of a ‘politics of recognition.’ Referring to Axel Honneth’s social-philosophical reflections on the Struggle for Recognition (1995), the paper argues that Fiske’s theory of popular culture (as outlined in Understanding Popular Culture and Reading the Popular, both 1989) can be understood as a contribution to a discourse theorizing popular culture as a ‘medium’ of recognition. It suggests that Fiske’s writings can be integrated into the Frankfurt School’s third generation’s attempt to come to terms with Adorno/Horkheimer’s shortcomings regarding the social-philosophically foundation of their critique of the Culture Industry. At the same time, Fiske’s theory can ‘cover’ this third generation’s blind spot in discussing the role of media and popular culture in the people’s struggle for recognition. The paper relocates Fiske’s approach within Honneth’s social-philosophical grounded critique of the deficit of recognition for many marginalized social groups and raises the question whether corporate media and popular culture might provide ideologically distorted forms of recognition (Honneth 2007). The paper will focus on Fiske’s (1989) analysis of Quiz and Game Shows to discuss this question in detail. In doing so, the paper reconstructs nuances in Fiske’s analysis of popular culture that are widely overseen in the general reception of Fiskes writings. It will thus unlock Fiske’s theory of popular culture for a reception within the contemporary social-philosophical discourse on the struggle for recognition.
This paper reconstructs Fiske’s contribution to the theory and analysis of popular culture in terms of a ‘politics of recognition.’ Referring to Axel Honneth’s social-philosophical reflections on the Struggle for Recognition (1995), the paper argues that Fiske’s theory of popular culture (as outlined in Understanding Popular Culture and Reading the Popular, both 1989) can be understood as a contribution to a discourse theorizing popular culture as a ‘medium’ of recognition. It suggests that Fiske’s writings can be integrated into the Frankfurt School’s third generation’s attempt to come to terms with Adorno/Horkheimer’s shortcomings regarding the social-philosophically foundation of their critique of the Culture Industry. At the same time, Fiske’s theory can ‘cover’ this third generation’s blind spot in discussing the role of media and popular culture in the people’s struggle for recognition. The paper relocates Fiske’s approach within Honneth’s social-philosophical grounded critique of the deficit of recognition for many marginalized social groups and raises the question whether corporate media and popular culture might provide ideologically distorted forms of recognition (Honneth 2007). The paper will focus on Fiske’s (1989) analysis of Quiz and Game Shows to discuss this question in detail. In doing so, the paper reconstructs nuances in Fiske’s analysis of popular culture that are widely overseen in the general reception of Fiskes writings. It will thus unlock Fiske’s theory of popular culture for a reception within the contemporary social-philosophical discourse on the struggle for recognition.
Newton, Darrell M.: "They Want Their Country Back, But I Want My Leader Black: Obama and the Illusion of Post-Blackness"
Within this presentation, I will be discussing the emergence of post-blackness as a form of cultural capital within Obama’s America. Just as in the 1960s, in which perceptions of Blackness amplified pride, empowered community groups and social movements, there is a current notion that the popular election of the nation’s first African American president signals the possible end of black political and cultural efficacy, and the triumph of pluralism.
“Post-black” cultural critics have hailed Obama's election as a new definition of Blackness, one in which the iconography of this notion can be re-shaped beyond the “limits of ghetto,” and the “dogmatic code of the ‘hood and [of] street militancy” (Touré). Further, there is a belief that while a struggle for racial equality has lessened to a polite disagreement, Blackness currently reflects those locked into a lower income class struggle, a struggle led by grass roots organizers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton; icons framed as passé within this new, multicultural nation.
As Fiske reminds us, class differences and race are inseparable. As the Black “underclass” earns less than whites and other ethnic groups, their very name identifies them asunder, rather than part of, the white social order. The recoding of racial difference into “comparative maturity,” notes that this Black underclass holds less economic and social maturity than the racial majority, reinscribing whiteness as superior, and mature.
While this racial Darwinism constructs whiteness as the evolutionary goal to which others may develop, present economic uncertainties have disrupted white middle class Americana. As the previous administration remains mostly unnamed within this fracas, “static confiners of whiteness” are now sliding uncontrollably into the economic abyss; bringing them closer to the underclass than ever before as Main Street views Wall Street bailouts, hears discourses of bloated government and witnesses a Black man in expensive suits continue to hail the coming changes in America.
It is painfully obvious in town hall meetings, as effigies of the President, clad in B-boy athletic wear, knit caps, and faux-gold chains are burned, the issues of race, and class disruption are clearly in flux. This is particularly evident in news stories, blogs You Tube postings, and elsewhere. Those who could not avoid the presence of Obama and his convergent saturation of media presence now shift racist attitudes into classist concerns, as demands increase to get their country back.
I argue that those elements within pop culture that define Blackness through the lens of binarism and economic class, do not seemingly acknowledge the continued naming of Obama as Black, iconic and problematic. The struggle to define Blackness as diverse, multiclassist and fluid is all-encompassing and, for better or worse, still alive. These ideological choices may then merge with resistant readings of continued Black ideological presence, intrinsic desire and the aesthetic.
“Post-black” cultural critics have hailed Obama's election as a new definition of Blackness, one in which the iconography of this notion can be re-shaped beyond the “limits of ghetto,” and the “dogmatic code of the ‘hood and [of] street militancy” (Touré). Further, there is a belief that while a struggle for racial equality has lessened to a polite disagreement, Blackness currently reflects those locked into a lower income class struggle, a struggle led by grass roots organizers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton; icons framed as passé within this new, multicultural nation.
As Fiske reminds us, class differences and race are inseparable. As the Black “underclass” earns less than whites and other ethnic groups, their very name identifies them asunder, rather than part of, the white social order. The recoding of racial difference into “comparative maturity,” notes that this Black underclass holds less economic and social maturity than the racial majority, reinscribing whiteness as superior, and mature.
While this racial Darwinism constructs whiteness as the evolutionary goal to which others may develop, present economic uncertainties have disrupted white middle class Americana. As the previous administration remains mostly unnamed within this fracas, “static confiners of whiteness” are now sliding uncontrollably into the economic abyss; bringing them closer to the underclass than ever before as Main Street views Wall Street bailouts, hears discourses of bloated government and witnesses a Black man in expensive suits continue to hail the coming changes in America.
It is painfully obvious in town hall meetings, as effigies of the President, clad in B-boy athletic wear, knit caps, and faux-gold chains are burned, the issues of race, and class disruption are clearly in flux. This is particularly evident in news stories, blogs You Tube postings, and elsewhere. Those who could not avoid the presence of Obama and his convergent saturation of media presence now shift racist attitudes into classist concerns, as demands increase to get their country back.
I argue that those elements within pop culture that define Blackness through the lens of binarism and economic class, do not seemingly acknowledge the continued naming of Obama as Black, iconic and problematic. The struggle to define Blackness as diverse, multiclassist and fluid is all-encompassing and, for better or worse, still alive. These ideological choices may then merge with resistant readings of continued Black ideological presence, intrinsic desire and the aesthetic.
Parks, Lisa: "Spotting the Satellite Dish: Populist Approaches to Infrastructure"
This essay posits the satellite dish as a populist portal into the world of satellite technologies and infrastructures. Building on the work of Fiske, in particular his interest in uses of low-tech apparatus (i.e. pirate radio, amateur video) to contest dominant power formations, I discuss the manufacturing, use and positioning of satellite dishes in various cities (such as Berlin, Los Angeles, Istanbul and Doha) in relation to issues of class, taste, ethnicity, diasporas, displacements and national cultures. As Charlotte Brundson has shown, when satellite dishes were first installed in London and Tokyo during the late 1980s controversies over various issues ranging from property rights to architectural aesthetics surfaced, making the dish integral to the production of new “landscapes of taste.”
Using semiotic approaches that resonate with those of Fiske and Brunsdon, I describe how the satellite dish functions not only as a sign of cultural taste and class, but also of ethnic identity, (trans)national belonging, and global media integration. Drawing on an archive of satellite dish photographs that I have developed over the past ten years, I also suggest that the satellite dish functions as a key consumer-citizen interface with a highly dispersed and complex satellite infrastructure. Much more than an eyesore on a building’s rooftop or facade, the satellite dish can be used to intimate the presence of a broader satellite system that is imperceptible in its entirety. It can also infer the vertical fields (the uplinking and downlinking) of global culture, and help direct us to imagine the routes and densities of world signal traffic. The satellite dish is a vital part of satellite infrastructure that is both popularly accessible and physically tangible, and as such serves as a useful platform for thinking through the technology’s relation to the politics of culture and territory.
Using semiotic approaches that resonate with those of Fiske and Brunsdon, I describe how the satellite dish functions not only as a sign of cultural taste and class, but also of ethnic identity, (trans)national belonging, and global media integration. Drawing on an archive of satellite dish photographs that I have developed over the past ten years, I also suggest that the satellite dish functions as a key consumer-citizen interface with a highly dispersed and complex satellite infrastructure. Much more than an eyesore on a building’s rooftop or facade, the satellite dish can be used to intimate the presence of a broader satellite system that is imperceptible in its entirety. It can also infer the vertical fields (the uplinking and downlinking) of global culture, and help direct us to imagine the routes and densities of world signal traffic. The satellite dish is a vital part of satellite infrastructure that is both popularly accessible and physically tangible, and as such serves as a useful platform for thinking through the technology’s relation to the politics of culture and territory.
Peirce, L. Meghan: "Botswana’s Edutainment Soap, Makgabaneng: A Fiske Genre Analysis"
Makgabaneng is an entertainment-education radio serial drama in Botswana. The name means “Rocky Road”, as its motto is that “Life is a journey on a rocky path. The hope is, which every fall, there is a Rise.” It first aired August 20, 2001, in an effort to address critical HIV/AIDS awareness messages among 10-49 year-old citizens in Botswana (The Republic of Botswana Popular Report, 2005). It is one of the few HIV/AIDs organizations that produce messages based on behavioral change theory.
In 2000, behavioral scientists developed the M.A.R.C.H strategy to help change risky health behaviors associated with HIV/AIDS. M.A.R.C.H. stands for Modeling And Reinforcement to Combat HIV/AIDS. The modeling aspect of the strategy suggests that audiences learn how to handle various situations through character modeling. This is consistent with Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, which states, “learning can occur through observing media role-models and this vicarious learning can, under certain conditions, be more effective then direct experiential learning” (Singhal et al, 2002).
Makgabaneng has addressed these elements through their positive, negative, and transitional character development strategy. Each produced storyline includes a positive role model who consistently makes responsible health decisions and a negative character that consistently engages in risky and irresponsible behavior. Most importantly, transitional characters are included who may start making risky decisions, but evolve over the series into an empowered, knowledgeable, and positive character. These dynamic transitional characters most likely serve as the most identifiable role models for audience members, as they are neither consistently positive nor consistently negative.
Fiske’s research explains how popular media is a representation that aids in maintaining dominant ideologies through culture rituals by examining the three foci of text: the formal qualities of programs and their flow; the intertextual relations within the itself, with other media and with conversation; and the study of the socially situated readers and the process of reading. Social change is able to occur in this environment through constant tension between those with social power and subordinate groups trying to gain power, an imperative understanding in edutainment research.
Much of Fiske’s work focuses on the soap opera genre. “All soaps are highly sexual, and many women use terms more conventionally applied to male pornography to describe their reaction to them. The soap opera press frequently emphasize sexuality, most commonly in discussion of love scenes or in descriptions and photographs of the male hunks” (Fiske, 1987, 186). However, many edutainment soaps are trying to decrease the amount of relationships and sexual tension between characters in their efforts to educate audiences.
This study aims to examine the radio-soap Makgabaneng through a textual analysis to understand how relationships are presented in accordance with Fiske’s description of the ‘soap genre’. This study explores the boundaries of the soap drama, especially when minimal sexuality is presented in the storyline. Moreover, it hopes to gain a better understanding of the social change balance between entertainment and education.
In 2000, behavioral scientists developed the M.A.R.C.H strategy to help change risky health behaviors associated with HIV/AIDS. M.A.R.C.H. stands for Modeling And Reinforcement to Combat HIV/AIDS. The modeling aspect of the strategy suggests that audiences learn how to handle various situations through character modeling. This is consistent with Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, which states, “learning can occur through observing media role-models and this vicarious learning can, under certain conditions, be more effective then direct experiential learning” (Singhal et al, 2002).
Makgabaneng has addressed these elements through their positive, negative, and transitional character development strategy. Each produced storyline includes a positive role model who consistently makes responsible health decisions and a negative character that consistently engages in risky and irresponsible behavior. Most importantly, transitional characters are included who may start making risky decisions, but evolve over the series into an empowered, knowledgeable, and positive character. These dynamic transitional characters most likely serve as the most identifiable role models for audience members, as they are neither consistently positive nor consistently negative.
Fiske’s research explains how popular media is a representation that aids in maintaining dominant ideologies through culture rituals by examining the three foci of text: the formal qualities of programs and their flow; the intertextual relations within the itself, with other media and with conversation; and the study of the socially situated readers and the process of reading. Social change is able to occur in this environment through constant tension between those with social power and subordinate groups trying to gain power, an imperative understanding in edutainment research.
Much of Fiske’s work focuses on the soap opera genre. “All soaps are highly sexual, and many women use terms more conventionally applied to male pornography to describe their reaction to them. The soap opera press frequently emphasize sexuality, most commonly in discussion of love scenes or in descriptions and photographs of the male hunks” (Fiske, 1987, 186). However, many edutainment soaps are trying to decrease the amount of relationships and sexual tension between characters in their efforts to educate audiences.
This study aims to examine the radio-soap Makgabaneng through a textual analysis to understand how relationships are presented in accordance with Fiske’s description of the ‘soap genre’. This study explores the boundaries of the soap drama, especially when minimal sexuality is presented in the storyline. Moreover, it hopes to gain a better understanding of the social change balance between entertainment and education.
Shepperd, Josh: "‘Flows and Counterflows’: Fiske on the ‘Discourse Event’ and Counterhegemonic Media Analysis"
This presentation conducts a close theoretical reading of Fiske’s contributions to ‘hegemonic theory’, which he characterizes in Power Plays, Power Works as a methodological attempt to ‘gramscianize Foucault while foucaultdinizing Gramsci’. While much work conducted in the Fiskean tradition rightfully examines the workings of ‘power’ along mediated representations and performances of race, gender, and class, especially among audience engagement with popular culture, this paper argues that Fiske intends not only to identify points of contradiction and agency in media production and consumption, but constitute the groundwork for counterhegemonic media analysis through his postulation of the discourse event.
Both Gramsci and Foucault attempt to conceptualize how power functions dynamically in consciousness. For Gramsci, change must be engendered through painstaking analysis of how various discourses simultaneously appropriate and resist hegemony. No power bloc or emergent group can ever exhaust the totality of available social meanings, therefore remaining contradictory and in a state of becoming. But Gramsci further contributes the paradox that hegemony is tied to structural objectives yet remains independent of the human will. As a phenomenon both enmeshed in cultural practices and independent of specific groups, hegemony can be utilized as a tool to gauge and measure the effects of power upon human consciousness. Similarly, Fiske reads Foucault’s theory of ‘power’ as an apparatus that ‘operates through technologies and mechanisms rather than class’; power materializes the auspice of normalization upon law, word, text, and tradition by ‘qualifying, classifying, punishing, and distributing’ individuals and groups among a ‘manifest field’ of external and internal relations. For Foucault, resistance takes place along the periphery of the ‘manifest field’ through transgressive behavior.
Fiske argues that Gramsci’s theory of hegemony serves as a means to access ‘identifiable social interests’, whereas Foucault offers an nuanced explication of agents and relations as they become ‘detached from social interests’. But neither thinker, according to Fiske, fully takes into account how dimensions of knowledge are ‘activated’ through the ‘terrain’ of mediated activity. Media produce ‘instrumental’ senses of the ‘real’ in daily life; yet when the greater ensemble of social relations coalesce around a specific discourse event (also called the media event), tensions synthesize between the desire to control and social constraint, a dynamic Fiske calls ‘flows and counterflows’. Therefore the discourse event, for Fiske, is an opportune juncture that represents the continuity between: 1) a history of domination, subordination and resistance that culture calls upon to make sense of deferent yet ostensible ‘structures’ of social relations, including ‘the repertoire of words, images and practices’, and 2) the media site as ‘maximum visibility and maximum turbulence’ of the manner in which various practices, positionalities, and perspectives play out. If discourse events are opportune for surveying various hegemonic interests as they are performed and coded, as well as reading the way that various groups employ or resist established relations, consequently, Fiske’s counterhegemonic analysis could presumably aid alliances of ‘tactical mobility’ in surveying a topography of discursive positionings, further clarifying how Gramsci’s nonviolent ‘war of position’ may elicit dialectical changes within consciousness and the public sphere.
Both Gramsci and Foucault attempt to conceptualize how power functions dynamically in consciousness. For Gramsci, change must be engendered through painstaking analysis of how various discourses simultaneously appropriate and resist hegemony. No power bloc or emergent group can ever exhaust the totality of available social meanings, therefore remaining contradictory and in a state of becoming. But Gramsci further contributes the paradox that hegemony is tied to structural objectives yet remains independent of the human will. As a phenomenon both enmeshed in cultural practices and independent of specific groups, hegemony can be utilized as a tool to gauge and measure the effects of power upon human consciousness. Similarly, Fiske reads Foucault’s theory of ‘power’ as an apparatus that ‘operates through technologies and mechanisms rather than class’; power materializes the auspice of normalization upon law, word, text, and tradition by ‘qualifying, classifying, punishing, and distributing’ individuals and groups among a ‘manifest field’ of external and internal relations. For Foucault, resistance takes place along the periphery of the ‘manifest field’ through transgressive behavior.
Fiske argues that Gramsci’s theory of hegemony serves as a means to access ‘identifiable social interests’, whereas Foucault offers an nuanced explication of agents and relations as they become ‘detached from social interests’. But neither thinker, according to Fiske, fully takes into account how dimensions of knowledge are ‘activated’ through the ‘terrain’ of mediated activity. Media produce ‘instrumental’ senses of the ‘real’ in daily life; yet when the greater ensemble of social relations coalesce around a specific discourse event (also called the media event), tensions synthesize between the desire to control and social constraint, a dynamic Fiske calls ‘flows and counterflows’. Therefore the discourse event, for Fiske, is an opportune juncture that represents the continuity between: 1) a history of domination, subordination and resistance that culture calls upon to make sense of deferent yet ostensible ‘structures’ of social relations, including ‘the repertoire of words, images and practices’, and 2) the media site as ‘maximum visibility and maximum turbulence’ of the manner in which various practices, positionalities, and perspectives play out. If discourse events are opportune for surveying various hegemonic interests as they are performed and coded, as well as reading the way that various groups employ or resist established relations, consequently, Fiske’s counterhegemonic analysis could presumably aid alliances of ‘tactical mobility’ in surveying a topography of discursive positionings, further clarifying how Gramsci’s nonviolent ‘war of position’ may elicit dialectical changes within consciousness and the public sphere.
Smith, Christopher Holmes: "Popular Discrimination in the Obama Era: The Case of BET"
"This paper argues that Black Entertainment Television (BET) serves as a productive locus through which to gauge the “post-racial” argument’s resonance in contemporary black cultural production and black pop’s political engagement with the broader question of American business’ need for a reinvigorated moral code. On the one hand, over the past decade and a half, BET has been a central catalyst for the commercial circulation of the “bling” aesthetic of hyper-consumption through which hip-hop creative practitioners have garnered increasing mainstream cultural clout. BET’s identity as an iconographic brand also generated the consistent return-on-investment track record that eventually made the network an attractive take-over target for the Viacom Corporation in 2000, a symbolic and material cachet that it has successfully parlayed in its subsequent decade of operation. While the network’s success as a purveyor of the most ribald forms of conspicuous consumption made its founder and CEO, Robert L. Johnson, and his hand-picked successor, Debra Lee, considerable fortunes—positioning them accordingly as exemplars of the millennial age’s new black corporate, political, and cultural elite—it has also rendered the network’s senior executive leadership as figures of pronounced discursive contestation within the black pop imagination. The ensuing analysis suggests that this intra-racial debate over BET’s cultural relevance has not ebbed in the wake of Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency—in defiance of the post-racial discourse’s hegemonic truth-claim—and has only expanded in scope in accordance with the elaborate media eco-system of Web 2.0.
Sorby, Angela: "Poetry vs. Paris Hilton: Who’s On Top?"
In 2007, Paris Hilton read a poem on Larry King Live that she had supposedly written in prison. The poem, which turned out to be plagiarized from a fan letter, prompted a media scandal that raises implicit questions about how poetry works, or fails to work, as a popular cultural medium. In Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske argues that, to be popular, a text or commodity must be relevant: it must be functionally available to consumers who make it a meaningful part of their daily lives. In this essay, I will twist Fiske’s thesis to argue that poetry is a functional medium because people are not comfortable using it in their daily lives.
Through an analysis of the Paris Hilton poetry scandal, and of subsequent poems written to (and against) Hilton, I will suggest that precisely because poetry is not “relevant” to most consumers, it arouses strong reactions (disciplinary scorn, passionate defense) when it appears in mass cultural contexts. Poetry, in this case, prompts a breakdown in the ideological unity of an icon such as Paris Hilton, whose popular subjectivity relies on hyper-legibility and relevance.
Through an analysis of the Paris Hilton poetry scandal, and of subsequent poems written to (and against) Hilton, I will suggest that precisely because poetry is not “relevant” to most consumers, it arouses strong reactions (disciplinary scorn, passionate defense) when it appears in mass cultural contexts. Poetry, in this case, prompts a breakdown in the ideological unity of an icon such as Paris Hilton, whose popular subjectivity relies on hyper-legibility and relevance.
Tetzlaff, David: "Let’s Get Fisked Up!: Toward a Manifesto for Teaching Media Studies"
I want to focus less of John Fiske’s ideas about culture per se, and more on his manner of presenting them. Perhaps the two are ultimately inseparable, but I want to draw more specific attention on the form of Fiskean discourse, and argue that this is a key element of “the continuing relevance of Fiske’s work.” I also argue that this is a part of Fiske’s legacy that has had too little influence in academia, and deserves not just our attention, and emulation, but continued exploration farther along the same lines.
The completed manifesto itself will be brief and punchy, as a good manifesto should be, so I intend to take some time to explain a few things it’s principles, and how I derived them from my exposure to John Fiske as a writer, teacher, and patron of restaurants and taverns. Practice is theory made manifest, though the theory often remains unspoken. I shall speak the pedagogical theory I learned from John Fiske’s practice.
I do not intend to detail any anecdotes of Fiskean behavior, though I shall draw significance from the fact that such anecdotes exist, and tend to have a certain character. We learn about culture by telling stories, and if the stories are fun we learn better. If our intent is to undermine the authoritarian impulses that underlie much of what passes for fun in the hegemonic strata of mass produced popular entertainments, we shall also make more headway if not only endorse an element of the mischievous, but model it. Put the proof in the pudding.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I will be focusing specifically on a short, now-largely-forgotten essay Fiske published in an obscure journal back in 1986, and my experiences in using this essay in my own teaching over the years. “MTV: Post-Structural, Post Modern” appeared in the special MTV issue of The Journal of Communication Inquiry devoted to Warner’s 24-hour music video cable channel. The not-too-hidden agenda of this issue was to stage a theoretical engagement between postmodernism on one hand, and Cultural Studies/Critical Theory on the other. Fiske graciously acceded to Kuan Hsing Chen’s request to contribute to the project, and the result is, in one sense — the ‘content’ sense — a kind of outlier in the Fiske oeuvre: Fiske in Baudrillard’s clothes, or vice versa. But in another sense — the ‘attitude’ sense — I argue that the essay is hyper-Fiske – all the elements of John’s approach to presenting ideas about the popular turned up to 11.
Even as the currency and apparent ‘relevance’ of the cultural product it engages has continued to fade over the years, I have found the piece to be consistently productive in the classroom. Why? Well, because it’s about things that matter, it’s clear, it’s fun, it has a point of view, it’s outrageous, and it always gets a good discussion/argument going. As practitioners of Cultural Studies, or whatever else we’re calling it this week, I submit that this is our job. “Let’s Get Fisked Up!” will both expound on that concept, and, of course, seek to embody it at the same time.
The completed manifesto itself will be brief and punchy, as a good manifesto should be, so I intend to take some time to explain a few things it’s principles, and how I derived them from my exposure to John Fiske as a writer, teacher, and patron of restaurants and taverns. Practice is theory made manifest, though the theory often remains unspoken. I shall speak the pedagogical theory I learned from John Fiske’s practice.
I do not intend to detail any anecdotes of Fiskean behavior, though I shall draw significance from the fact that such anecdotes exist, and tend to have a certain character. We learn about culture by telling stories, and if the stories are fun we learn better. If our intent is to undermine the authoritarian impulses that underlie much of what passes for fun in the hegemonic strata of mass produced popular entertainments, we shall also make more headway if not only endorse an element of the mischievous, but model it. Put the proof in the pudding.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I will be focusing specifically on a short, now-largely-forgotten essay Fiske published in an obscure journal back in 1986, and my experiences in using this essay in my own teaching over the years. “MTV: Post-Structural, Post Modern” appeared in the special MTV issue of The Journal of Communication Inquiry devoted to Warner’s 24-hour music video cable channel. The not-too-hidden agenda of this issue was to stage a theoretical engagement between postmodernism on one hand, and Cultural Studies/Critical Theory on the other. Fiske graciously acceded to Kuan Hsing Chen’s request to contribute to the project, and the result is, in one sense — the ‘content’ sense — a kind of outlier in the Fiske oeuvre: Fiske in Baudrillard’s clothes, or vice versa. But in another sense — the ‘attitude’ sense — I argue that the essay is hyper-Fiske – all the elements of John’s approach to presenting ideas about the popular turned up to 11.
Even as the currency and apparent ‘relevance’ of the cultural product it engages has continued to fade over the years, I have found the piece to be consistently productive in the classroom. Why? Well, because it’s about things that matter, it’s clear, it’s fun, it has a point of view, it’s outrageous, and it always gets a good discussion/argument going. As practitioners of Cultural Studies, or whatever else we’re calling it this week, I submit that this is our job. “Let’s Get Fisked Up!” will both expound on that concept, and, of course, seek to embody it at the same time.
Wilson, Pam: "Teaching Fiske: The Next Generation"
A proposed introductory paper for a roundtable discussion
This paper is intended to serve as a discussion starter to explore ways that John Fiske’s ideas and theories have been marginalized, reduced or omitted by many of the leading writers and compilers of cultural studies textbooks and anthologies and to propose ways that Fiske’s ideas and approaches may be reclaimed, rehabilitated and freshly incorporated as essential elements of the undergraduate media theory or cultural studies curriculum.
Fiske’s work was caught up in the “cultural studies wars” of the 90s and became caricatured or dismissed by many writers who today influence the pedagogy of media and culture. Fiske’s complex ideas have generally become selectively interpreted and condensed caricatured nuggets belying his broader contribution to the field. An examination of the range of available textbooks and anthologies used in undergraduate cultural studies and media theory courses reveals some significant omissions of John Fiske’s contributions as well as a frequently dismissive tone and approach used when discussing Fiske’s ideas (if they are discussed at all).
For example, Chris Barker’s Cultural Studies (3rd Ed, Sage Press), though it lists Fiske as a “Key Thinker,” reveals an overly simplistic and reductionist approach to Fiske, not to mention a tiresome repetitiveness of the same old clichés. At four separate points in his book, and in his only references to Fiske’s work, Fiske’s ideas are reductively summarized as Fiske seeing “popular culture as a site of semiotic warfare and of popular tactics deployed to evade or resist the meanings produced and inscribed in commodities by producers” with popular culture “a site of ‘semiotic warfare’” (pp. 344 and 61; also see pp. 51 and 457, in which he repeats this almost verbatim). Thus, Fiske’s entire career of theoretical contributions has become condensed into “popular resistance” and ‘semiotic warfare.” Similarly, Fiske’s work is either conspicuously absent or likewise caricatured in John Storey’s and Tony Thwaites’ introductory textbooks.
With the exception of an excerpt from Television Culture in John Storey’s reader and a very brief excerpt entitled “Interpellation” in Michael Ryan’s 1350-page anthology, Fiske’s writing has not been adequately excerpted and included in the leading Cultural Studies readers such as Durham and Kellner or Simon During.
Most of these writers, in fact, seem to ignore Fiske’s work beyond 1989. Fiske’s significant later works (Power Plays, Power Works and Media Matters, from the 1990s) in which he interweaves and integrates the theoretical contributions of de Certeau, Gramsci and Bourdieu into a post-Marxist model and the theoretical models that they present of imperializing versus localizing power; of struggles over power, cultural control and representation; and of understanding the role of media in larger cultural struggles, have been almost wholly overlooked in these textbooks and readers. These are arguably some of his most important contributions to the field, and yet they are absent from much of the discourse within the field.
How can this be remedied? Fiske’s work is clearly woefully underrepresented in textbooks and anthologies/readers, and a third option (the assignment of the theoretical writings in their original context for the student to read) is hindered by the dated nature of many of his examples. Unfortunately, the style of his writing in which he interwove his theories into case studies and analyses of contemporaneous issues has served to diminish their teachability a quarter of a century later. The larger ideas need to be distilled from the case studies and made accessible so that their relevance to the 21st century might be made clearer.
How might Fiske’s significant theoretical contributions be gathered and interwoven into the body of pedagogical material available not only to those of us who are familiar with his brilliant insights first hand, but most importantly to that large number of university-level instructors who have not been adequately exposed to Fiske’s ideas and concepts? How, indeed, can we plant a seed at this conference that will grow Fiske’s writing and his theoretical ideas into a body of accessible, integrated and circulating teachable publications?
This paper is intended to serve as a discussion starter to explore ways that John Fiske’s ideas and theories have been marginalized, reduced or omitted by many of the leading writers and compilers of cultural studies textbooks and anthologies and to propose ways that Fiske’s ideas and approaches may be reclaimed, rehabilitated and freshly incorporated as essential elements of the undergraduate media theory or cultural studies curriculum.
Fiske’s work was caught up in the “cultural studies wars” of the 90s and became caricatured or dismissed by many writers who today influence the pedagogy of media and culture. Fiske’s complex ideas have generally become selectively interpreted and condensed caricatured nuggets belying his broader contribution to the field. An examination of the range of available textbooks and anthologies used in undergraduate cultural studies and media theory courses reveals some significant omissions of John Fiske’s contributions as well as a frequently dismissive tone and approach used when discussing Fiske’s ideas (if they are discussed at all).
For example, Chris Barker’s Cultural Studies (3rd Ed, Sage Press), though it lists Fiske as a “Key Thinker,” reveals an overly simplistic and reductionist approach to Fiske, not to mention a tiresome repetitiveness of the same old clichés. At four separate points in his book, and in his only references to Fiske’s work, Fiske’s ideas are reductively summarized as Fiske seeing “popular culture as a site of semiotic warfare and of popular tactics deployed to evade or resist the meanings produced and inscribed in commodities by producers” with popular culture “a site of ‘semiotic warfare’” (pp. 344 and 61; also see pp. 51 and 457, in which he repeats this almost verbatim). Thus, Fiske’s entire career of theoretical contributions has become condensed into “popular resistance” and ‘semiotic warfare.” Similarly, Fiske’s work is either conspicuously absent or likewise caricatured in John Storey’s and Tony Thwaites’ introductory textbooks.
With the exception of an excerpt from Television Culture in John Storey’s reader and a very brief excerpt entitled “Interpellation” in Michael Ryan’s 1350-page anthology, Fiske’s writing has not been adequately excerpted and included in the leading Cultural Studies readers such as Durham and Kellner or Simon During.
Most of these writers, in fact, seem to ignore Fiske’s work beyond 1989. Fiske’s significant later works (Power Plays, Power Works and Media Matters, from the 1990s) in which he interweaves and integrates the theoretical contributions of de Certeau, Gramsci and Bourdieu into a post-Marxist model and the theoretical models that they present of imperializing versus localizing power; of struggles over power, cultural control and representation; and of understanding the role of media in larger cultural struggles, have been almost wholly overlooked in these textbooks and readers. These are arguably some of his most important contributions to the field, and yet they are absent from much of the discourse within the field.
How can this be remedied? Fiske’s work is clearly woefully underrepresented in textbooks and anthologies/readers, and a third option (the assignment of the theoretical writings in their original context for the student to read) is hindered by the dated nature of many of his examples. Unfortunately, the style of his writing in which he interwove his theories into case studies and analyses of contemporaneous issues has served to diminish their teachability a quarter of a century later. The larger ideas need to be distilled from the case studies and made accessible so that their relevance to the 21st century might be made clearer.
How might Fiske’s significant theoretical contributions be gathered and interwoven into the body of pedagogical material available not only to those of us who are familiar with his brilliant insights first hand, but most importantly to that large number of university-level instructors who have not been adequately exposed to Fiske’s ideas and concepts? How, indeed, can we plant a seed at this conference that will grow Fiske’s writing and his theoretical ideas into a body of accessible, integrated and circulating teachable publications?
Xu, Yingchun: "Culture Struggle Between 'Black' and 'White,' 'Them' and 'Us': A Study for China’s 'Unlicensed Cab'”
Recently, a 19-year-old suspicious Chinese “unlicensed cab” or “black cab” driver cut off a finger to prove his innocence, which disclosed “entrapment enforcement” by Shanghai government who used bounty hunters to manufacture false evidence. Chinese popular ironically named this enforcement as “fishing”. From 1979 till 2009, the number of Chinese unlicensed cabs has been over that of legal cabs. This essay studied the process of the image construction for “unlicensed cab” in 30 years by China’s mainstream media. Unlicensed cabs have been constituted as illegally, destructively, and dangerously “black” as well as “marginal” image, which should be resolutely cracked down and eliminated while the image of “unlicensed cab” drivers are immoral profit-makers, evil offenders and “otherness”. A resistant decoding among the audience was proved. It represents a culture struggle towards “black” versus “white”, “us” versus “them”. This culture resistance liberates the oppressed knowledge so that the audiences produce meanings and pleasures by influencing the mainstream media’s encoding or even by their own encoding text. Ultimately, the production and circulation of meanings and pleasures not only deconstruct the traditional image of “unlicensed cab” but also effect on discursive practice and change the society. In this case, finally, 16-year entrapment had to be terminated by Chinese government.
Approaches of content and discourse analysis were adopted, 70 relative articles on the most authoritative newspaper—People’s Daily in 30 years were studied, contextualizing of macro and micro-environments in China. Meanwhile, the characteristics of “unlicensed cab driver”, “governmental enforcement officials” and “taxi driver” were cognized by 20 audiences and another 10 got interviewed.
The two economies that Fiske (1989, p24) advocated of financial and cultural are highly valuable in contemporary Chinese communication practice. Cultural economy is the phase of the production and consumption of meanings and pleasures. Differential decoding is connected with resistant power. In China, culture struggle always involves politics.
China’s traditional media is monopolized by government and it is mainly for propaganda of the Communist Party. Before web 2.0, although there was differential decoding for the audience, cultural struggles rarely happened or were often oppressed because of no any access to negotiate with traditional media and authorities. With the advent of the internet web 2.0, culture struggles have displayed in everyday life. People are able to express their diverse opinions on the platform of internet, which makes it possible to develop dialogues with authorities including traditional media. In this way, the production and circulation of meanings and pleasures by the masses is of special significance. Moreover, culture struggle provoked by differential decoding will not be completely put down by government like the radical populist. More and more often, to some extent, the government has treated this kind of meanings and pleasures as public opinions worthwhile being paid attention to therefore it can finally make improvements and change the social system. More and more cases as “unlicensed cab” have showed that this kind of culture struggles have won places for disadvantaged minorities.