Revaluation Of The Cultural Creativity Of The Public

Since the naissance of John Fiske's popular culture theory, there has beenmuch controversy in the fields of cultural studies, with some responding withappraisal and understanding while others questioning, criticizing and eventotally denying. However, no matter Fiske is praised or blamed, it's out ofquestion that he is an most important person in the fields of contemporarycultural studies, in particular, the popular culture. Fiske's importance, or valueand significance of his cultural philosophy, is particularly reflected in twoaspects; firstly Fiske is an important representative in the changing process ofcontemporary cultural studies and, secondly, Fiske's theory of popular cultureis an important source of thought to be used for reference by researchers ofcontemporary Chinese popular culture.While reading Fiske's works, one may mostly be impressed by the uniqueway in which he understood and defined the people and the popular culture.As Fiske believed, "the people" was not a stable sociological category; it couldnot be identified and subjected to empirical study, for it did not exist in objectivereality. The people, the popular, the popular forces, were a shifting set ofallegiances that cross all social categories; various individuals belong todifferent popular formations at different times, often moving between themquite fluidly. This point of view is obviously different from that of Ortega andthinkers of Frankfurt School. Firstly, Fiske held a different stand by using "thepeople" or "the popular" rather than "the masses", which was preferred byOrtega and thinkers of Frankfurt School. Secondly, Fiske took an anti-elitismstand towards "the people". Even more, Fiske was also against the atom andhegemony theory with regard to "the people".Just as Fiske used "the people" or "the popular", he used " popular culture"rather than "mass culture", "working-class culture" or "folk culture", whichhighlighted his researching methods for and value orientation towards thepopular culture, and showed his difference from other thinkers. As Fiskeunderstood and defined, the popular culture was an actual practice of thepeople to conduct creative activities with the available resources; the art of thepeople was the art of "making do"; the culture of everyday life lied in thecreative, discriminating use of the resources that capitalism provided. Thereare two prominent features of such definition. First is that Fiske based his definition of popular culture on the interaction of the dual-power relationshipbetween the dominant power and evading and resisting power. The popularculture was not produced by the culture industry to force upon the masses; itwas, on the contrary, created bythe people on the interface of the products ofthe culture industry and the everyday life. For the second point, Fiske wasdifferent from those theorists who defined the mass culture from theperspective of cultural products, by defining the popular culture from theperspective of the cultural creativity of the people, who was regarded as thesubject of practice. The meanings and pleasures embodied by the popularculture were not the intrinsic attributes of the text; however, they were createdduring the practice that the people used the text.To the disappointment of Fiske, too many theorists used to pay muchattention to the concentrated production which was the symbol of financialeconomy and culture industry, while ignoring another means of action, theso-called "consumption", "a totally different form of production", an indomitableand quite behavior of the people. Starting from such a field of vision, theresearch was likely to come to a conclusion that the people was in a passiveposition and under control, and the popular culture was used by the powerholders to hypnotize or instill their points of views into the subordinated groups.In a sharp contrast, Fiske believed that the cultural products could becirculated within two parallel, semiautonomous economies, i.e., the financialeconomy which circulated wealth in two subsystems, and the cultural economywhich circulated meanings and pleasures. Fiske advocated a double focus,being concerned with not only the power used to dominate the others and theresistance against the power, but also the financial economy circulating thewealth and the cultural economy circulating meanings and pleasures. Such aunique vision helped Fiske with insights into the subjectivity and creativity ofthe people in the culture, which had been ignored by many other theorists.Fiske recognized that text was the resources of making do during thecreation of popular culture, though he never believed that all the texts could be.If a text could be used by the people, it must be producerly. The presence ofthese characteristics did not guarantee that a text would be used, but theirabsence made its use likely and flexible. According to Fiske, a popular textshould be producerly. The category of the producerly was needed to describethe popular writerly text, a text whose writerly reading was not necessarilydifficult, that did not challenge the reader to make sense out of it, did not faze the reader with its sense of shocking difference both from other texts and fromthe everyday. It did not impose laws of its own construction that readers had todecipher in order to read it on terms of its, rather than their choosing. Theproducerly text features a combination of the characteristics of openness ofRoland Barthes' readerly text and accessibility of the writerly text. Fiskeanalyzed the characteristics of the producerly text of the people from theperspective of the language, excess and the obvious, contradictions andcomplexity, and the textual poverty and intertextuality and gave it a positiveaffirmation.Whether the cultural industrial products are accepted or given up by thepeople, it is, first of all, decided by whether there is relevance with the daily lifeexperience of the people. If the cultural resources cannot provideaninterception with the daily life experience, they would hardly be popular and beselected by the people. Being different from the criterion of aesthetics,relevance is the central criterion of the popular discrimination. In other words,relevance is not the intrinsic characteristic of the text; it is discovered orproduced by the reader. The popular discrimination then does not operatebetween or within texts in terms of their quality, but rather in the text andeveryday life. This means that any one text can offer, potentially at least, asmuch relevance as there are different social allegiances of its readers.Relevance is not created by the culture industry or the college critics; only thepeople know which text correlate with their everyday life and can bring themmeanings, pleasures and self-identity. The people can usually recognize andpick out the relevance between the text and their everyday life, and show theirdiscriminating capacity and creativity by ways of selected and disjointedreading, infatuation for the popular culture, and flexibility of mode of culturalconsumption.An important reason for Fiske's concern with the political potential of thepopular culture is that politics of popular culture has often been misunderstood.The paradox of certain left-wing theory is that it, on one hand, tries to be thespokesman of the people and, on the other hand, tends to demean the peoplefor whom it speaks, and denies the progressiveness of the popular culture.What Fiske tried to do is to redefine the popular forces and regard it asundeveloped social resources so as to push forward the social changes. Fiskefurther illuminated it by summarizing two models of social change, i.e. radicalmodel and popular model. The radical model usually occurs at relatively infrequent crisis points, resulting in a major redistribution of power in society,which is often described as revolution, armed or otherwise; the popular change,however, is an ongoing process, aimed at maintaining or increasing thebottom-up power of the people within the system and maintaining their esteemand identity. Therefore, politics of the popular culture is progressive and cannotbe radical; it is micropolitics rather than macropolitics. Though the popularmodel of the social change is not aimed directly at overthrowing the rulingpower, there would not be radical social change without it. The micropoliticsthat maintains resistances in the minutiae of everyday life maintains a fertilesoil for the seeds of macropolitics without which they will inevitably fail toflourish.It is no doubt that there are certain limits of Fiske's theory of popular culture,such as romanticizing some popular actions and being the spokesman as atthe college. However, Fiske's contributions to the research on the popularcultural theory can never be doubted. The most prominent point is that henoticed not only the controlling over the people by the authority power fromupward, but also the resistance and overthrowing of the authority power by thesubordinate from downward, as well as the cultural discriminating capacity,subjectivity and creativity of the people, and the progressive potential of thepopular cultural politics. It would probably beneficial to the wider and deepenedunderstanding of the contemporary Chinese popular cultural phenomena if thecultural industry theory of the Frankfurt School represented by Adorno and thepopular culture theory of the Cultural Studies represented by Fiske could bearticulated.