Josh Shepperd

"‘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.