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Quote :Reading the Popular
If the cultural commodities or texts do not contain resources out of which the people can make their own meanings of their social relations and identities, they will be rejected and will fail in the marketplace. They will not be made popular. Popular culture is made by subordinated peoples in their own interests out of resources that also, contradictorily, serve the economic interests of the dominant. Popular culture is made from within and below, not imposed from without or above as mass cultural theorists would have it. There is always an element of popular culture that lies outside social control, that escapes or opposes hegemonic forces. Popular culture is always a culture of conflict, it always involves the struggle to make social meanings that are in the interests of the subordinate and that are not those preferred by the dominant ideology. The victories, however fleeting or limited, in this struggle produce popular pleasure, for popular pleasure is always social and political.
Who knew pleasure could mean so many things? Popular culture is, for Fiske, ambivalent: on the one hand, there's no point romanticizing it, since mass-produced goods and texts are produced along strict lines so the top dogs can bring home the bacon and the little man stays entertained. On the other hand, the public doesn't want to feel that it's being force-fed something, and that individuals don't have any say.
Cultural theorists have therefore developed more nuanced accounts of how pop culture works. When he argues that culture is always political, Fiske is saying that it relates to the distribution and redistribution of social power. So, pop culture isn't just about entertainment and escapism: the watcher's escape into TV-zone-out-land means big bucks for the show producer. Still, for culture to live up to its name, people have to feel that it's something that they can relate to and engage with in one way or another.
Ultimately, Fiske doesn't see culture as some sort of monolithic force that's either good or bad, but as something pretty paradoxical: it's a type of output that disempowered people can engage with, even though it's provided by the very system that disempowers the folks at home.