Bill Kirkpatrick

"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.