Page 186 - Decoding Culture

THE RISE OF THE READER 179

T e levision Culture, however, and for all his willingness to invoke
V o losinov as did the CCCS before him, his emphasis differs from
that found in their account of hegemony and resistance. Drawing a
key distinction between cultural and financial economies, he insists
that the cultural economy has a degree of autonomy and 'that the
power of audiences-as-producers in the cultural economy is con­
siderable' (Fiske, 1987: 313) . This is semiotic power, 'the power to
f
construct meanings, pleasures, and social identities that dife r from
those proposed by the structures of domination' (ibid: 317). All
this, of course, is not entirely at odds with the CCCS tradition, but
as he begins to think through the implications of intertextuality, the
difficulties encountered with the categories of 'text' and 'audience',
the commodity character of television, and the whole postmodern
turn (Fiske, 1989a, 1991) he begins increasingly to depart from
orthodoxy.
These shifts lead to his 'attempt to outline a theory of popular
culture in capitalist societies' (Fiske, 1989b: ix). Note the 'in capi­
talist societies'. If his position is indeed 'uncritical cultural
populism' it is not one in which the capitalist social formation has
entirely disappeared from the scene, even if it is not theorized as
having quite the same ideological power as in earlier cultural stud­
ies theories. Historically, he suggests, popular culture had either
been studied as an expression of collective social harmony or as an
imposition of mass culture disempowering those caught within it.
It is in a 'third direction' that Fiske's project is to move, and the pas­
sage in which he defines its distinctiveness is worth quoting in
full.

It, too, sees popular culture as a site of struggle, but, while accept­
ing the power of the f o rces of dominance, it fo cuses rather upon the
popular tactics by which these f o rces are coped with, are evaded or
resisted. Instead of tracing exclusively the processes of incorpora­
tion, it investigates rather that popular vitality and creativity that

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