Understanding Popular Culture

Understanding Popular Culture (2006 [1986])
By John Fiske

Synopsis: This book is an attempt to outline a theory of popular culture in capitalist societies (ix). Main argument is that popular culture is the culture of the subordinated and the disempowered, "and thus always bears within it the signs of power relations, traces of the forces of domination and subordination that are central to our social system"...(5). Popular culture is fluid and changing and full of contradiction, and change can only come from below. Popular culture is an active process that must be relevant to the immediate social situation of the people. In this way, "consumers" make their own oppositional meaning from within the space that they are given, which results in an ever present struggle for control over meaning. Uses jeans as a semiotically-rich example, as tearing can be an act of resistance. Popular culture is a type of pleasure which is sometimes subjugated by the ruling classes, as pleasure can be seen as a sort of "out of control-ness." There are two types of pleasure: jouissance (the pleasure of avoiding social order), and plaisir (the pleasure of relating to it) [I guess this comes from Barthes?]. Fiske argues that popular culture is not subject to "aesthetics" (in the elitist sense of the word), because popular culture is important for what it does and not for what it is. Popular culture can thus be used to create moments of progressivism which can help people combat the dominant culture.

Interesting Specifics:op

** Great one! Focus on for exam! **

Pop culture is full of contradiction.

In the U.S., news moves from East to West (due to time zones), and weather moves from West to East. East = Culture, West = Nature (10).

"A commodity is ideology made material" (14).

"Popular culture is not consumption; it is culture - the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system: culture, however industrialized, can never be adequately described in terms of the buying and selling of commodities" (23).

A popular culture text must "contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them" (25).

"Popular culture is the art of making due with what the system provides" (25). [This is very de Certeau]

In capitalist societies, there is no "authentic fold culture" against which to measure the "inauthentic" mass culture (27).

"Every act of consumption is an at of cultural production, for consumption is always the production of meaning" (35).

"Popular pleasures arise from the social allegiances formed by the subordinated people, they are bottom-up and thus must exist in some relationship of opposition to power (social, moral, textual, aesthetic, and so on) that attempts to discipline and control them" (49).

Loss of self = evasion of ideology [I think this connects to the idea of utopia - that within popular culture there is space to lose ones' self, and this is essentially what utopia thrives on].

"The struggle for control over the meanings and pleasures of the body... is crucial because the body is where the social is most convincingly represented as the individual and where politics can best disguise itself as human nature" (70).

The obsession with the individual body is an obsession with capitalism and labor, and what labor produces (96). [Which would be the opposite of the collective Rabelais-ian body].

"Aesthetics is naked cultural hegemony, and popular discrimination properly rejects it" (130). Aesthetics is also "an attempt by the bourgeoisie to exert the equivalent control over the cultural economy that is does over the financial" (130).

In saying popular culture is not mass culture: "Mass culture is a term used by those who believe that the cultural commodities produced and distributed by the industries can be imposed upon the people in a way that irons out social differences and produces a unified culture for a passive, alienated mass audience" (177).

"...I do wish to question the claims that radical art is politically more effective than the progressive uses of popular art" (191).

"...I believe the popular forces to be a positive influence in our society and that failing to take proper account of their progressive elements is academically and politically disabling" (194).

Interacts With:

Stuart Hall (with his belief in the firm existence of a "popular culture" category that appeals to the "downtrodden")
Anything that talks about the fluidity of popular culture.
Bakhtin (discussion of carnival and the "proper" uses of the body, especially as the body becomes "individualized" via capitalism and body as labor unit, versus the Rabelais world of the holistic/collective body)
de Certeau (as relates to idea that people make due with what they are given by the dominant culture; can then eek out own meaning within those goods/texts/practices]
Barthes
Bourdieu (as relates to idea that working class culture is more participatory, and bourgeois is more about distance)
I think this book was a bit of a break-through, idea that consumers of pop culture are not just mindless dupes, and can in fact create their own meaning and forms of resitence from what they're given.