John Fiske |
Understanding popular cultureBoston: Unwin Hyman. 1989. |
| New York: Teachers College Press. 1996. |
There can be no popular dominant culture, for popular culture is formed always in reaction to, and never as part of, the forces of domination. This does not mean that members of dominant social groups cannot participate in popular culture--they can and do. But to do so they must reform their allegiances away from those that give them their social power. The businessman entertaining his colleagues in a private box at a football game is not participating in popular culture; the same man, however, devoid of his business suit and sporting the favors of his local team as he cheers them on from the bleachers, can be. To participate in the popular, however, he must be able to call up other social allegiances, possibly those formed as a youth in the neighborhood. His tastes and his cultures are social, not individual; as a social agent he can exert some control over the allegiances he forms, but not over the social order that frames them.
Similarly, popular readings of mass cultural texts are not the only ones. Dallas may be read popularly as a criticism of capitalism or of patriarchy (and we know that sometimes it is), but this does not mean that all of its readers find popular meanings and pleasures in viewing it all of the time. It is perfectly feasible theoretically and probable practically that some viewers decode it dominantly and find pleasure in aligning themselves with the capitalist, consumerist, sexist, racist values that are as clearly there in the program as they are in the society that produces and circulates it. The fact that ethnographic studies of Dallas viewers have not discovered such perfectly positioned subjects may be the result of the ideological framings of the investigations themselves, for they have concentrated (though not exclusively) on nonmainstream audiences. Ang's (1985) viewers were, of course, self-selected fans, and thus their readings may be typical of the dedicated audiences, but they were Dutch, and not American, and so they read Dallas under social conditions that were quite different from those of its production. But if there are readings that fail to activate its contradictions-that is, readings that consent to its hegemonic strategy-these are not part of popular culture: they are complicit with the interests of the power-bloc against which the formations of the people are variously situated (Hall 1981).
In understanding the interplay of forces in this constant struggle between the power-bloc and the people, it is important to avoid essentializing meanings and taking them out of their culturally and historically specific moments of production.
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The role of the critic-analyst, then, is not to reveal the true or hidden meanings of the text, or even to trace the readings that people make of it; rather, it is to trace the play of power in the social formation, a power game within which all texts are implicated and within which popular culture is always on the side of the subordinate.
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Popular readings are always contradictory; they must encompass both that which is to be resisted and the immediate resistances to it. This is why popular culture is such an elusive concept: it cannot be firmly located in its texts or in its readers.
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The same person can, at different moments, be hegemonically complicit or resistant, as he or she reforms his or her social allegiances. Resistance fighters are law-abiding citizens much of the time; their acts of resistance are selectively sporadic, determined by a mix of the requirements of their situation and the opportunities afforded them by the strategies of the dominant. Popular culture is to be found in its practices, not in its texts or their readers, though such practices are often most active in the moments of text-reader interaction.
"The popular," then, is determined by the forces of domination to the extent that it is always formed in reaction to them; but the dominant cannot control totally the meanings that the people may construct, the social allegiances they may form. The people are not the helpless subjects of an irresistible ideological system, but neither are they freewilled, biologically determined individuals; they are a shifting set of social allegiances formed by social agents within a social terrain that is theirs only by virtue of their constant refusal to cede it to the imperialism of the powerful. Any space won by the weak is hard won and hard kept, but it is won and it is kept.
Popular culture is produced under conditions of subordination.
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But class is not the only axis of domination-subordination, and within classes there are many different formations of the people. While recognizing the close interconnections between class and culture, we must not map them too deterministically one onto the other. The proletarian and the popular are overlapping but not coterminous concepts.