Page 189 - Decoding Culture

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

considerations sneak to the fore. Clearly he sees himself correcting
an imbalance, and there are indeed conceptual imbalances in need
of correction in cultural studies. Whether Fiske's somewhat
romantic optimism about the potential for resistance in popular
culture is the appropriate theoretical strategy, however, is not so
clear. That optimism, and the celebratory tone that attends it,
surely leads to equally problematic imbalances in the other direc­
tion. Consider, for example, his repeated insistence that popular
culture is 'progressive'. 'Popular culture always has a progressive
potential,' he says (ibid: 177) , by which he means that the materials
of popular culture can be and are utilized to construct resistance in
the micro-politics of everyday life. 'Its progressiveness is con­
cerned with redistributing power within these structures [family,
work, classroom] toward the disempowered; it attempts to enlarge
the space within which bottom-up power has to operate' (ibid: 56) .
Sometimes he seems to write as if this potential was always
realised in the very existence of popular culture, a claim which is
trivially true in that, for Fiske, real popular culture is definitionally
made by consumers in the act of resistance. But (popular) cultural
resources are surely used just as often at the micro-political level in
sustaining existing power relations, and constantly to stress their
progressive use is to lose sight of the complexity of micro-politics
in the cause of an overstated corrective to the 'pessimistic reduc­
tionism' (ibid: 192) of incorporation arguments. Although it is true
that people use culture of all kinds to resist the constraints of
everyday life, that is by no means its only or even its dominant use.
Does this work represent an uncritical populist drift in cultural
studies, as McGuigan (1992: 171-172) suggests, founded on an
'increasingly sentimental' solidarity with ordinary people and over­
attention to micro-processes of meaning construction? In general
terms we have to concede that it probably does, although Fiske's
tendency periodically to qualify and even contradict his stronger

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