On John Fiske’s Notion Of Pleasure

Among Fiske’s popular culture theories, the notion of pleasure is one of themost innovative and important. John Fiske thinks that pleasure is the internal drivingforce of popular culture. It can be divided into two types: productive pleasures,offensive bodies and carnival pleasures. They are in correspondence with the twopleasure running patterns: evasive and productive, through which the masses carryout meaning production and power resistance.The paper gives a deep examination on his popular culture theory as to explorethe notion of pleasure with an aim of finding out assistance to the popular culturestudy in China. John Fiske’s notion of pleasure in his theory has been argued in threeaspects. After a brief introduction of the thesis statement, in the first chapter, we tracethe origin of Fiske’s notion of pleasure. We find that he has completely appliedMichel de Certeau’s viewpoint on the practice and resistance of everyday life. He hasapplied Roland Barthes’ semeiology, text theory and the thought of body aesthetics.He has also applied some theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, JeanBaudrillard, Claude Levi-Strauss. Meanwhile he has deformedly used MichelFoucault’s “power—resistance” theory. In the second chapter, we make a deepexamination on Fiske’s notion of pleasure, together with the specific case analysis,especially the pleasure of shopping, the pleasure of video games and the pleasure ofthe beach, etc. In the third chapter, we point out the significance of Fiske’s notion ofpleasure and the inspirations that Fiske’s theory can bring to China’s current culturestudy. After all these have been discussed, a conclusion will be made.