Black Hawk Hancock

"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.”