Notes

Fiske: audience power
John Fiske is best known for a pair of books, Understanding Popular Culture and Reading
the Popular. At the time of their simultaneous publication in 1989, Fiske was a
fiftysomething professor, and a self-confessed fan of pop culture, who had taught in Britain,
Australia and the USA. The time-pressed modern consumer may like to note that an article by
Fiske called 'Moments of Television' (1989c) offers a decent introduction to the views which
he discusses in much more depth in the books.
Fiske's work represents a view diametrically opposed to Adorno's. Near the start
of Understanding Popular Culture, he tells Adorno fans bluntly:
Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is
produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the
on-going process of producing their popular culture.
(1989a: 24)
In other words, the power of the audience to interpret media texts, and determine their
popularity, far outweighs the ability of media institutions to send a particular message or
ideology to audiences within their texts. This position did not, of course, appear out of the
blue. Stuart Hall's 'encoding/ decoding' model (1973) had already suggested, in more modest
terms, that a media message could be 'decoded' by the audience in different and unpredictable
ways – a point which, you might think, was pretty obvious anyway. Fiske, however, offers a
radically exaggerated version of this view, which – no doubt as a reaction to the pessimism of
Adorno and his followers – often appears to be a gleeful celebration of the audience's power
of interpretation and choice.
We should note that although Fiske was opposed to the cynical stance of left-wing critics like
Adorno, Fiske's arguments are not (nor are they intended to be) a 'right-wing' response.
Instead, Fiske comes across as an upbeat 'leftie' and a 'man of the people' who wants to show
that 'the people' are not foolish dupes. He says, indeed, that we can't even talk about 'the
people' or 'the audience' because a singular mass of consumers does not exist: there is only a
range of different individuals with their own changing tastes and a 'shifting set of social
allegiances' which may or may not relate to their social background, and which are complex
and contradictory (Fiske, 1989a.). Fiske does not deny that we live in a capitalist and
patriarchal society, but suggests that it is silly to think of popular culture as a manufactured
thing imposed by capitalists upon the unsuspecting masses. 'Culture is a living, active
process: it can be developed only from within, it cannot be imposed from without or above'
(ibid.: 23). Therefore the pop charts are not a set of recordings that people have been
somehow duped into liking and purchasing, in a uniform way; instead they reflect what is
genuinely popular. Fiske supports this by pointing out that record companies and movie
studios put out many products which fail: flops outnumber the hits, showing that the public
choose which items they actually want and like. Furthermore, people relate to their current
favourite single or film, as they relate to all media texts, in a complex, shifting way, based in
their own identity, which is unique to themselves. And rather than the people accepting a
stream of similar products, as Adorno would suggest, Fiske says that there is a 'drive for
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innovation and change [which] comes from the audience activity in the cultural economy'
(1989c: 62).
Our media choices are limited, to an extent. Fiske says that 'My argument in favour of
difference and a relatively empowered, relatively loosely subjected, subject must not blind us
to the determining framework of power relations within which all of this takes place' (1989c:
58). Nevertheless, Fiske says there is an 'overspill' of meanings (ibid.: 70), so that most texts
contain the 'preferred' meaning – the one intended by its producers – but also offer
possibilities for consumers to create their own alternative or resistant readings. Indeed, Fiske
says that people are not merely consumers of texts – the audience rejects this role 'and
becomes a producer, a producer of meanings and pleasures' (1989c: 59). Following the
French theorist Michel de Certeau (1984), Fiske talks about the 'guerrilla tactics' by which
everyday media users snatch aspects of the mass-produced media but then (re-)interpret them
to suit their own preferred readings. The text is the source from which the viewer activates
meanings to make sense of their material existence (1989c: 58).
Let us take, for example, the case of Madonna, who was discussed by Fiske over a decade
ago, and remains very popular today. By the end of 2001, Madonna had sold around 140
million albums worldwide. For Adorno, this would well illustrate his thesis that the culture
industry can mass-produce one product (or a set of similar products) and successfully flog it
to an audience of passive consumers – millions of them – who do not seek out their own
preferred entertainments, but settle for the work of a manufactured icon whose image is
successfully promoted and marketed around the world. For Fiske, it is quite the reverse.
Madonna has sold so many million albums because of her ability to connect with an
audience, to be meaningful to individuals. Each album sold may be just another 'unit' to
record company executives, but at an individual level, it is a unique item which its purchaser
invests with a unique set of meanings. Fiske says that Madonna is
an exemplary popular text because she is so full of contradictions – she contains the patriarchal meanings of
feminine sexuality, and the resisting ones that her sexuality is hers to use as she wishes in ways that do not
require masculine approval … Far from being an adequate text in herself, she is a provoker of meanings whose
cultural effects can be studied only in her multiple and often contradictory circulations.
(1989a: 124)
By saying that Madonna is not an 'adequate' text, Fiske is not commenting on Madonna per
se, but is reminding us of his argument that the meaning of any text is not complete until
interpreted by an individual within the context of their lives.
Madonna's image, then, becomes 'a site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal
control and feminine resistance, of capitalism and the subordinate, of the adult and the young'
(1989b: 97). In short, Madonna is 'a cultural resource of everyday life' who can be used by
each individual fan in a different way to add some meanings or pleasures to their existence.
This can be carried through to their whole way of being in the world, too. 'Madonna offers her
fans access to semiotic and social power; at the basic level this works through fantasy, which,
in turn, may empower the fan's sense of self and thus affect [their] behaviour in social
situations' (ibid.: 113).
This process is not meant to be unique to Madonna and her audience, of course – Fiske would
say that this is just an illustration of a mode of media consumption which happens all the
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time. Similarly, for example, the TV Living study found that people used TV science fiction
shows as a way of thinking through their sense of 'otherness' – even though they were not,
themselves, eccentric Time Lords like Doctor Who or alienated androids like Data inStar
Trek: The Next Generation – and thereby arrived at a comfortable sense of their own identity
(Gauntlett and Hill, 1999). The media is thus an 'enabler' of ideas and meanings, promoting
diversity and difference, which might lead to social change (Fiske, 1989c: 73). The obvious
criticism of Fiske's work is that it is far too optimistic about the challenging impact of
mainstream texts – or, to be precise, the challenging consequences of people's own unique
readings of mainstream texts. But it's certainly a thought-provoking response to Adorno's
extreme pessimism. At this stage in the book I'll leave it for you to decide who you think is
closer to the truth. Now we'll move on to consider the empirical, rather than theoretical,
studies of the media's impact.