Pam Wilson

"Teaching Fiske: The Next Generation"

A proposed introductory paper for a roundtable discussion 

This paper is intended to serve as a discussion starter to explore ways that John Fiske’s ideas and theories have been marginalized, reduced or omitted by many of the leading writers and compilers of cultural studies textbooks and anthologies and to propose ways that Fiske’s ideas and approaches may be reclaimed, rehabilitated and freshly incorporated as essential elements of the undergraduate media theory or cultural studies curriculum.

Fiske’s work was caught up in the “cultural studies wars” of the 90s and became caricatured or dismissed by many writers who today influence the pedagogy of media and culture. Fiske’s complex ideas have generally become selectively interpreted and condensed caricatured nuggets belying his broader contribution to the field.  An examination of the range of available textbooks and anthologies used in undergraduate cultural studies and media theory courses reveals some significant omissions of John Fiske’s contributions as well as a frequently dismissive tone and approach used when discussing Fiske’s ideas (if they are discussed at all).

For example, Chris Barker’s Cultural Studies (3rd Ed, Sage Press), though it lists Fiske as a “Key Thinker,” reveals an overly simplistic and reductionist approach to Fiske, not to mention a tiresome repetitiveness of the same old clichés. At four separate points in his book, and in his only references to Fiske’s work, Fiske’s ideas are reductively summarized as Fiske seeing “popular culture as a site of semiotic warfare and of popular tactics deployed to evade or resist the meanings produced and inscribed in commodities by producers” with popular culture “a site of ‘semiotic warfare’” (pp. 344 and 61; also see pp. 51 and 457, in which he repeats this almost verbatim).  Thus, Fiske’s entire career of theoretical contributions has become condensed into “popular resistance” and ‘semiotic warfare.”  Similarly, Fiske’s work is either conspicuously absent or likewise caricatured in John Storey’s and Tony Thwaites’ introductory textbooks.

With the exception of an excerpt from Television Culture in John Storey’s reader and a very brief excerpt entitled “Interpellation” in Michael Ryan’s 1350-page anthology, Fiske’s writing has not been adequately excerpted and included in the leading Cultural Studies readers such as Durham and Kellner or Simon During.

Most of these writers, in fact, seem to ignore Fiske’s work beyond 1989.  Fiske’s significant later works (Power Plays, Power Works and Media Matters, from the 1990s) in which he interweaves and integrates the theoretical contributions of de Certeau, Gramsci and Bourdieu into a post-Marxist model and the theoretical models that they present of imperializing versus localizing power; of struggles over power, cultural control and representation; and of understanding the role of media in larger cultural struggles, have been almost wholly overlooked in these textbooks and readers.  These are arguably some of his most important contributions to the field, and yet they are absent from much of the discourse within the field.

How can this be remedied?  Fiske’s work is clearly woefully underrepresented in textbooks and anthologies/readers, and a third option (the assignment of the theoretical writings in their original context for the student to read) is hindered by the dated nature of many of his examples. Unfortunately, the style of his writing in which he interwove his theories into case studies and analyses of contemporaneous issues has served to diminish their teachability a quarter of a century later.  The larger ideas need to be distilled from the case studies and made accessible so that their relevance to the 21st century might be made clearer. 

How might Fiske’s significant theoretical contributions be gathered and interwoven into the body of pedagogical material available not only to those of us who are familiar with his brilliant insights first hand, but most importantly to that large number of university-level instructors who have not been adequately exposed to Fiske’s ideas and concepts?  How, indeed, can we plant a seed at this conference that will grow Fiske’s writing and his theoretical ideas into a body of accessible, integrated and circulating teachable publications?