Daniel Marcus

"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.