Pleasure, Power And Meaning

Distinguishing the two economies in popular culture: financial economy and culture economy, John Fiske shifted the focus from text structure of popular culture to meaning creation. With the three key words, pleasure, power and meaning and assuming a position beyond Elitism and Pessimism, he gave a thorough analysis to popular culture by looking into individual cases of popular culture and the representational level of texts. His theory was known for the prominence of initiativity and resistance of the popular. He took popular culture as the art of making do and popular culture texts as popular-productive texts, emphasizing the pleasure and meaning obtained from popular culture consumption. In addition, he attached much importance to the relevancy of culture, trying hard to dig up the factor, power, in popular culture movement. Looking into the source of John Fiske's theory together with a diachronic-synchronic review, it is suggested that the main contribution of John Fiske's theory rests on his re-identifying of the status of popular culture, his shifting from popular culture texts to the interpretation of popular culture practice, his highlighting the value of the consumption of social symbols, his expounding the pleasure function of popular culture and his stressing the conflict of powers in culture practice. The weak points of his theory lie in his uncritical position, his tampering with academic sources, his arbitrariness in interpreting popular culture and his nihilism, dualism originated from the post-modernism. The inspirations that Fiske's theory can bring to China's current culture study range from how to assume a proper culture perspective, how to accommodate western theoretic sources to a Chinese context, how to keep a balance between the thriving of culture study and its boundlessness, how to solve the conflict between intellectual position and elitist position, to how to combine critical macro study and empirical micro study.