Page 188 - Decoding Culture

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THE RISE F THE READER 181
them - a distinction he borrows from de Certeau - popular cultural
readers work against the system's language, a form of resistance
promoting 'parole over langue, practice over structure' (ibid: 108) .
Popular culture is thus the site of a struggle to use the system's
cultural resources against the system itself, at least in the sense of
opening up space for everyday resistance. Indeed, cultural
resources only become popular culture because, for Fiske, the
latter is by definition formed in a process of reacting against what
he calls the 'forces of domination'.
Quite how these forces work is left largely unanalysed, pre­
sumably on the grounds that cultural studies has already paid more
than enough attention to such issues. Yet periodically Fiske does
retreat from the more extravagant rhetoric of cultural resistance.
For example, in the course of discussing what he calls the 'pro­
ducerly text' (a somewhat improbable conjunction of the
accessibility of Barthes' 'readerly' text with the openness of his
'writerly' one) he concedes that a 'double focus' is required in
analysing popular culture. The 'deep structures' of such texts show
us domination in action, 'how insistently and insidiously the ideo­
logical forces of domination are at work in all the products of
patriarchal consumer capitalism' (ibid: 105) . But the pessimism
that this insight engenders, where the only hope lies in radical
revolution, must be counterbalanced by a more optimistic and
'complementary focus' on active cultural resistance. Traditional
forms of analysis and criticism neglect this face of popular culture,
he suggests, though one wonders where he might place CCCS
work of the kind reported in Resistance through Rituals or all the
appreciative criticism of popular genres scattered through the his­
tory of film studies. No doubt they remained too concerned to see
popular forms as finally recuperated by the dominant ideology.
There is, then, a frustrating tendency in Fiske's account to reach
for the rhetoric of semiotic resistance whenever more structural

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