Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. New York, NY: Rutledge, 1989.
Fiske builds a new concept on top of Barthes' idea of readerly and writerly texts. The former is the jigsaw-puzzle view of literature. There is one meaning to a text. That meaning is bound up in the author's intent. It is the reader's job to simply decipher that meaning. It is called the 'readerly' because it is merely reactive. It's passive reception.
The latter places the responsibility of making meaning on the reader, turning her into a writer of sorts. It is not bound up in authorial/authoritative intent, and therefore it's 'free' of hegemonic ideology. However, according to Fisk, Barthes points out that the readerly text will always be more popular because the writerly text, the avant garde, requires that the reader learn a whole new set of 'givens' in order to get anything out of it. The corolary is that the readerly text will always be popular because it is the 'givens' that popular readers already know.
In between these two, Fiske places what he calls the 'producerly' text (and I will now stop using the word 'text' because I don't want to support the notion that all art, and indeed all perception, can be collapsed into language; I will now simply refer to 'art'). Audiences of producerly art can make meaning outside of the art's authoritative intention, like the avant garde, but also remains accessible to the 'masses' but it communicates using the 'givens' of dominant culture. Producerly art is not just a theoretical construct, a name with some features attached. It is the result of a few factors, and has a methodological underpinning.
Producerly art is intentionally conformist, but escapes mere conformity through excess. "Excessiveness is meaning out of control, meaning that exceeds the norms of ideological control of the requirements of any specific text" (114). Excessiveness is an integral part of the eye-catching, attention-grabbing, bright-colours-and-loud-noises-making media machine. It needs us to watch to generate revenue, so it goes out of its way to be obnoxious, impossible to ignore. In desperately throwing as much stuff as us as is humanly, or technologically, possible, it hits us with extra concepts--words, images, ideas--that we can then use any way we like, in new combinations unimagined by its creators.
Fiske argues that producerly art forces us to use a "double focus" (105) to analyse popular culture. First, "deep structure" analysis, methods like psychoanalysis and semiotics, attempts to "reveal just how insistently and insidiously the ideological forces of domination are at work in all the products of patriarchal consumer capitalism" (105). Second, the "producerly" (105) focus on "how people cope with system, how they read its texts, how they make popular culture out of its resources" (105) helps to reveal the deliberate misreadings of popular art .
We cannot use just the first alone because it usually assumes that the populace is powerless to resist the dominant culture, thus characterising them as, to use Zizeck's word, idiots. It also leaves us without any options for dissent other than total revolution, usually in the form of Marxism. From Jameson, we know that this is an almost untenable situation. If the revolution will happen at its own pace, then there's nothing to be done about it now. We cannot do just the second, either, because to do so would be to totally ignore the actual power and influence of the corporate culture that has slowly come to dominate most of the world. We cannot leap to some kind of post-Marxism that assumes that the populace is so powerful and smart that everything's fair now, as post-feminism is sometimes accused of doing with gender. In fact, the assumption that the consumer is 'really' in charge of the economy is part of the cover story of capitalism. Acknowledging the producerly 'text,' or at least something like it, forces us to see both actions in operation: the attempt at total, ideological domination, and the inevitable resistance to that attempt through creative reinterpretation.
And this leads me to a couple of other 'something like it' examples of concepts parallel to the producerly. In Drones, Clones, and Alpha Babes: Retrofitting Star Trek's Humanism, Post-9/11, Diana Rilke makes a fascinating critical move that mirrors the producerly approach. She extensively details the imperialistic and patriarchal overtones of Star Trek: the United Federation of Planets is a thinly disguised empire, neither Kirk nor Riker can keep it in their pants, etc. The arguments are easy to make and, to be fair, hard to disprove. Despite the wonderfully positive ideas and intentions behind everything Gene Roddenberry touched, it still contains a great deal of hegemonic ideology. To its credit, the show did improve over time, ditching the extremely sexist costumes of the 60s in favour of unisex uniforms, but for every two steps forward, there tended to be one step back, for example the tailor-made, padded bras that all members of the Next Generation cast wore (did you think all those actresses not only had D-cups but the same D-cups?).
However, Rilke then takes an abrupt turn by pointing out that the fans of the show, despite being ridiculed and dismissed as mindless mouth-breathers, already know that. They're perfectly aware of the occasionally insidious nature of the Federation and Kirk's cosmic wang. They also have the ability to, in Rilke's words "deliberately misread" the show. She specifically discusses the pro-feminist readings female fans of Voyager constructed around Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine, either as a pair or separately. Despite the anti-feminist implications that we can certainly tease out of those shows, fans chose to read the characters as positive representations of femininity, taking the good parts and simply ignoring the bad. Which is to say, they took advantage of the excess, the 80 episodes, dozens of writers, and hundreds of cast members, and built their own version of Voyager in their minds. What Rilke has done would seem to be exactly what Fiske recommends.
There is an interesting counter-example, too. In "Holy Homosexuality Batman!" Freya Johnson argues that Warner Brothers' Batman Forever presents strong images of queerness but avoids a homophobic Backlash by "turning the queer subtext hidden beneath the surface of many Batman representations into an overtly queer supratext that goes right over the head of the mainstream viewing audience" (par. 3). The film throws excessively queer imagery at the audience--loving close-ups of Batman's rubber nipples, Jim Carrey in spandex yelling "Spank me!"--such that a large portion of that audience assumes that the movie couldn't possibly mean that, thereby constructing a reading of the movie that, despite the evidence, is 'free' of homosexual implications. This would seem to be the example that proves the rule, though. Johnson argues that the source material contains overt homosexuality, but it has so much of it, such an excess, that the audience can cherry pick the evidence to filter out the unwanted content.
There's a basic irony to Fiske's approach. He reveals that producerly art provides an opportunity to analyse it against its apparent intentions or its unintentional implications. However, that means, as Johson demonstrates, that we can also read against the radical content. Fiske's examples of reading against intent tend to psychoanalyse the popular audience, reasoning that they like some content more than the other because of their dominated position in the social, economic, and political spheres. They like imagery in which the powerless become powerful, and vice-versa, for example. By the exact same reasoning, however, if that popular audience likes hegemonic readings, they can filter out anything rebelious or radical. Once we put that power in the hands of the audience, we then have to contend with what that audience actually does and what it really wants. Producerly art cuts both ways.
Posted by orion at July 14, 2006 6:07 PM