Page 234 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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218 Chapter 10 The politics of the popular

‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ (316) in a conflict fought out between the forces of incor-
poration and the forces of resistance: between an imposed set of meanings, pleasures
and social identities, and the meanings, pleasures and social identities produced in acts
of semiotic resistance, where ‘the hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by
the resistances of heterogeneity’ (Fiske, 1989a: 8). In Fiske’s semiotic war scenario, the
two economies favour opposing sides of the struggle: the financial economy is more
supportive of the forces of incorporation and homogenization; the cultural economy
is more accommodating to the forces of resistance and difference. Semiotic resistance,
he argues, has the effect of undermining capitalism’s attempt at ideological homo-
geneity: dominant meanings are challenged by subordinate meanings; thus, the dom-
inant class’s intellectual and moral leadership is challenged. Fiske states his position
without apology and with absolute clarity:

It . . . sees popular culture as a site of struggle, but, while accepting the power of
the forces of dominance, it focuses rather upon the popular tactics by which these
forces are coped with, are evaded or are resisted. Instead of tracing exclusively the
processes of incorporation, it investigates rather that popular vitality and creativity
that makes incorporation such a constant necessity. Instead of concentrating on
the omnipresent, insidious practices of the dominant ideology, it attempts to
understand the everyday resistances and evasions that make that ideology work so
hard and insistently to maintain itself and its values. This approach sees popular
culture as potentially, and often actually, progressive (though not radical), and it
is essentially optimistic, for it finds in the vigour and vitality of the people evidence
both of the possibility of social change and of the motivation to drive it (20–1).

Fiske also locates popular culture in what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘the cultural
field’ (113–20), in which takes place a cultural struggle between dominant or official
culture and popular culture abstracted from economic and technological determina-
tions, but ultimately overdetermined by them. According to Bourdieu, as Nicholas
Garnham and Raymond Williams (1980) explain,

all societies are characterised by a struggle between groups and/or classes and class
fractions to maximise their interests in order to ensure their reproduction. The
social formation is seen as a hierarchically organised series of fields within which
human agents are engaged in specific struggles to maximise their control over the
social resources specific to that field, the intellectual field, the educational field, the
economic field etc. ...The fields are hierarchically organised in a structure over-
determined by the field of class struggle over the production and distribution of
material resources and each subordinate field reproduces within its own structural
logic, the logic of the field of class struggle (215).

The historical creation of a unique space – the cultural field – in which Culture with
a capital C could develop above and beyond the social has for Bourdieu the purpose,
or at least the consequence, of reinforcing and legitimizing class power as cultural and