David Tetzlaff

"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.