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.

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989)
By David Hall

Synopsis: Examines the roles and uses of religion in the everyday lives of colonial New Englanders by focusing on six main ideas: "the role of the 'folk,' the geography of religion, the relationship between the church and state, the appeal of 'radical' religion, the appeal of 'magic,' and the sway of the literary" (5). Shows that religion permeated everyday life, even for those who were not hard-core about religion. An excellent example of this is the way the Bible was used as a tool of literacy, and that the Bible and other religious books represented "a myth of freedom from the tyranny of priests" (52). Also, they looked for signs of the supernatural everywhere, the will of God as everywhere, and thus all about defeating an evil world. Argues that "Culture and religion...must be understood as partly independent of the social system in which hey occur" (245). This seems to be why so much old-time religion survived - it could elude the changes taking place in the other realms. Basically, religion was a shared rather than a divided/elite culture, power-wise (245).

Interesting Specifics:

"Literacy and religion were inseparable" (38). Books as key link between Protestant traditions and the market economy (70).

Popular literature and religion grew intertwined; tales of damnation and doom were big sellers (137).

Colonists saw "their meetinghouses and cemeteries as civil space, not sacred. The very ground was drained of ritual significance" (167).

Interacts With:

Very mild use of "resistance" in that reading books (esp. the Bible) was seen as a slight act of resistance as one could have the word directly and do what they wanted with them rather than rely on a priest or minister. In this way perhaps interacts with:
de Certeau, Beneath the American Renaissance [in its argument for the omnipresence of religion, that religion affected the popular literature of the time - even though Hall's book is dealing with an earlier period, the Renaissance book makes a similar point.]

The Practice of Everyday Life

The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
By Michel de Certeau

Synopsis: Utilizing a pop culture approach, de Certeau examines the ways in which "submissive groups subvert the meaning of those things imposed on them by using those things for their own, different means" (xiii). Argues that we must examine the gap between producers' intent and the actual consumer's use. He utilizes a range of fields including sociology, history, anthropology, and literature, though his theory is grounded in linguistics and focuses on speech acts and rhetoric. Book includes sections on ordinary culture, theory of practice, spatial practice, language, and believing. Is concerned with small creative acts of "weak" people rather than with overt oppositional movements; that is, how do consumers "resist" or make meaning through small acts/gestures. For example, he views walking as a creative act because you can carve your own path; reading too because it's about movement. Seems also to be annoyed by the privileging of speech/the visible/sight [interacts with Lefebvre in this way].

Interesting Specifics:

Most people today are on the margins, that is, they are not producers of culture. [This clearly is a pre-internet statement to make, because it totally leaves out the flexibility of production now, the value of the internet and digital media overall a la Convergence Culture's argument].

"Strategies" are more connected to a place/seat of power, whereas "tactics" are more about time - i.e. doing what you can in that given moment; a strategy is for those is power, a tactic is an act of the weak (37).

Strategies use spatial practices to articulate power.

"Walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language" (97).

"Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it 'speaks'" (99).

"To walk is to lack a place" (103).

Reading has no place; reader as traveler.

The fact that we no longer read out loud, shows that text no longer imposes its voice and rhythm on the body of the reader; text has become disembodied (175-76).

"The simulacrum is what the relationship of the visible to the real becomes when the assumption crumbles that an invisible immensity of Being (or of beings) lies hidden behind appearances" (187). We decide what is real based on its relationship to other things..

"The 'real' is what, in a given place, reference to another place makes people believe in" (188).

Interacts With:

Says his book interacts with Foucault in that both are interested in power and the way it is subverted.
In his focus on small everyday acts, does this connect to the Situationists at all?
Supposedly he was one of the forerunners of "power of the consumer" resistance idea, idea that small acts can be subversive and powerful. Apparently marked a turning point away from focus on the producer and to the consumer. Seen as radical.
Most every book on Janet's list that deals with resistance and re-appropriation/flexibility of meaning. Basically any book that talks about the ability of the consumer to create their own meaning from what they're given. Focus is on the consumer, not the producer.
Fiske (Understanding Popular Culture), Lefebvre, Bourdieu
Supposedly also refutes Bourdieu's idea that people are passive prisoners of the habitus and that cultural practices are used only to gain power. De Certeau says small cultural practices are ways of circumventing power. [So, his view believes more in agency that Bourdieu's does.]