Page 187 - Decoding Culture

180 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

makes incorporation such a constant necessity . Instead of concen­
trating 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. (ibid: 20-21)

The conceptual oppositions on which he is trading are clear
enough here. On the one side: forces of dominance; processes of
incorporation; insidious practices of the dominant ideology. On the
other side: tactics for coping; vitality and creativity; everyday resis­
tance and evasion. Dominance, incorporation and ideology are real
enough in Fiske's account, then, but they are not central. Capitalist
society is the locus of cultural contradictions and individual nego­
tiations, and it is these processes that form the focus of Fiske's
interest. The balance tips toward individuals, cultural tactics and
micro-politics, and away from the macro-politics of hegemony
theory.
In thus examining individual creativity and tactical resistance he
draws primarily upon de Certeau (1984). The heart of the matter
for Fiske lies in people's capacity to make their popular culture
out of the materials that the system provides. But unlike views that
concentrate on the ways in which the system thus limits people's
activities and conceptions, Fiske prefers to accentuate the positive
potential of this 'production in consumption'. 'All the culture indus­
tries can do,' he observes, 'is produce a repertoire of texts or
cultural resources' (Fiske, 1989b: 24) , as if that were trivial in com­
parison with the creative use to which such resources will then be
put. His portrait is one of semiotic guerrilla warfare - a concept
traceable back at least as far as Eco in an essay first published in
1967 (Eco, 1987) - in which people 'use guerrilla tactics against the
strategies of the powerful, making poaching raids upon their texts
or structures, and play constant tricks upon the system' (Fiske
1989b: 32) . By 'reading' texts rather than merely 'deciphering'

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