Chapter Five: Newspapers and Magazines
From: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, by John Storey
Summary by: Diane Neu
General Overview
Storey outlines various approaches to understanding cultural studies within three separate contexts of newspapers and magazines: “The Popular Press,” “Magazines for Women and Girls,’ and “Reading Visual Culture.”
The Popular Press
Storey begins his explanation of the role that the popular press plays in cultural studies by quoting from Jostein Gripsrud that while we do not need to come to the defense of the press “in any simplistic populist or ‘anti-elitist’ manner,” we should strive to understand it and the way it functions (87). He then moves into discussing four different cultural studies approaches to the popular press:
Peter Dahlgreen: For Dahlgreen, storytelling is the “ ‘key link’ ” “between tabloid journalism and popular culture” (87). Storytelling is “one of the two basic modes of knowing and making sense of the world, the other being the analytic mode” (87). While the analytic mode is made up of facts, logic, and navigational information, the storytelling mode makes sense of the world through narrative accounts. Though journalism may aim for the analytic mode with straightforward facts, it is “the storytelling mode which is most often brought into play” (87). Dahlgreen sees a “ ‘storytelling continuum’ ” existing “ ‘between serious and tabloid news, between fact and fiction’ ” (87).
Colin Sparks: Sparks contends that the “key difference” between “quality” journalism and the popular press is the use, by the popular press, of “an explanatory network” (88). While the “quality” press may prefer to present a strict timeline of events and facts and leave inference up to the reader, the popular press decides to bridge that gap for the reader. The reader does not need to create human-interest stories to go along with the news – the popular press will create it for them.
John Fiske: Fiske maintains that while the popular press is “ ‘not radical,’ ” it is often “ ‘potentially, and often actually, progressive’ ” (89). Fiske explains that the popular press “ ‘may be progressive in that they can encourage the production of meanings that work to change or destabilize the social order, but they can never be radical in the sense that they can never oppose head on or overthrow that order” (89). While the official press serves as the mouthpiece “of the prevailing structures of power,” the popular press “is full of utopian fantasies of another way of understanding the world which challenges the normalizing “reality” of the power-bloc” (89-90). The popular press functions as a way for “the people” to enter into conversation with the official news through a process where this official news is “ ‘re-informed’ ” in order to “ ‘be made relevant to everyday life’ ” (91).
Ian Connell: Connell focuses in on the ways in which the popular press devotes its pages to detailing the lives of the rich and famous. Connell argues that readers are simultaneously “ ‘engaged by the stories,’ ” imagining themselves as one of the mega-wealthy while also
“ ‘mount[ing] a populist challenge on privilege’ ” (92). At the heart of these stories of the wealthy is an articulation of “a moral economy in which the world is divided between those with power and privilege and those without power and privilege” (93).
Magazines for Women and Girls
Storey skips the lead-in quote here, and begins right away by discussing one of the three approaches to looking at magazines created for women and girls:
Angela McRobbie: McRobbie begins by dissecting the role of magazines in the lives of women and girls through the 1970s magazine Jackie. She posits that magazines like Jackie strive “ ‘to win and shape the consent of the readers to a particular set of values’ ” (94). These magazines do so by appealing to its readers through four “ ‘subcodes’ ” which serve to define these areas of the reader’s life (94):
1. The code of romance: Girls must fight each other over men. Girls cannot trust other girls. Heterosexual romance is the only path to happiness (94).
2. The code of personal/domestic life: The values from the other codes must be instilled into the everyday workings of a girls personal life as well. The magazine uses its “problem page” to send “explicit messages to girls about what is right and expected of them (95).
3. The code of fashion and beauty: Wearing make-up and dressing nicely should be “ ‘of paramount importance’ ” to a girl (95).
4. The code of pop music: Pop stars (male, I presume) are a suitable release for young, female emotions. You can look and listen – but do not touch (95).
McRobbie “welcomes the fading popularity of Jackie, and other magazines like it” while welcoming magazines like Just Seventeen and Mizz as examples of magazines for girls that have been “influenced by the success and circulation of feminist ideas” (95).
Janice Winship: Winship contends that we cannot “ ‘simply dismiss women’s magazines’ ” because to do so would be “ ‘to dismiss the lives of millions of women who read and enjoyed them each week’ ” (96). Winship desires to explain why women enjoy these magazines so much, and she does this by explaining the ways in which these magazines directly appeal to their demographic (96-7). These appeals, according to Winship, are organized around different “ ‘fictions.’ ” These fictions are essentially the stories the magazines creates through its articles and advertising, in order to draw the reader “into a world of consumption “ where they will be sold on the idea of “pleasurable femininity” (97).
Joke Hermes: Hermes’s approach is similar to Winship’s in that she finds fault with those that simply criticize the women who read the magazines written for them. She rebels against the idea of feminists who think that the readers of such magazines must be saved and enlightened away from their choice of reading material (99). Instead, she advocates for an “ ‘appreciation that readers are producers of meaning rather than the cultural dupes of the media institutions’ ” (99). Hermes is more interested in the meaning that readers construct from the text for themselves as opposed to the message that the text may or may not be trying to impose on them. After conducting interviews with readers of women’s magazines, Hermes identifies the four main meanings that readers constructed, which she refers to as “repertoires.” They are:
1. “ ‘easily put down’ ”
2. “ ‘relaxation’ ”
3. “ ‘practical knowledge’ ”
4. “ ‘emotional learning and connected knowing’ ” (101)
Reading Visual Culture
In this section, Storey only focuses on Roland Barthes’s approach to reading visual culture, as Storey sees the “foundational work” of Barthes to be some of “the most influential work on popular visual culture within cultural studies” (103).
Roland Barthes: Each visual image is involved in a process of “ ‘signification’ ” (103). In this process, there is both a “primary signification (denotation)” and a secondary signification (connotation)” (105). Barthes uses the example of a cover of Paris Match magazine. On the cover is a “black soldier saluting the French flag.” This is the primary signification – the surface level picture. However, the secondary signifier is that of “Paris Match’s attempt to produce a positive image of French imperialism” (105). However, there are several things to consider before coming to a conclusion about an image’s secondary signifier. The context of the photo is extremely important to making meaning of the secondary signifier. If the same photo had been placed “on the cover of a socialist magazine, its connotative meaning(s) would have been very different” (105). In such a context, the reader would have likely looked for humor and irony. As photos “rarely appear without the accompaniment of a linguistic text of one kind or another,” each photo is carefully placed within a context and can be removed from one context and then reused in another context through the use of new text, layout, etc. Barthes calls this process anchorage (107-8). Ultimately, what makes the reader able to jump from the level of primary signification to that of secondary signification is “the store of social knowledge (a cultural repertoire) upon which the reader is able to draw when he or she read the image. Without access to this shared code (conscious or unconscious), the operations of connotations would not be possible” (108).
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
Abstract of Chapter 5: Newspapers and Magazines
by Mike Peterson
Description of Article
In this chapter, John Storey outlines four approaches to understanding the “popular press,” two approaches for analyzing “magazines for women and girls,” and one approach to “reading visual culture.”
THE POPULAR PRESS
Peter Dahlgren: The connection between tabloid journalism and popular culture is storytelling. While journalism is committed to the analytic mode, it often still uses the mode of storytelling, and the difference between “serious” and “tabloid” news, therefore, isn’t really that different (75).
Colin Sparks: The difference between serious and tabloid (what he calls quality and popular) press, is the marked reliance of popular press on the “personal” as an explanatory framework (76). This reliance, he argues, makes it nearly impossible for the popular press to engage in “popular productivity,” but will, instead, usually fall in the realm of the “reactionary popular,” which can only “speak of their concerns, joys and discontents within the limits set for it by the existing structures of society” (76).
John Fiske: “Popular culture is potentially, and often actually, progressive (though not radical)” (77). Fiske lumps the types of press into three categories: popular, official, and alternative (though nothing more is said in this chapter about the alternative press). The official press represents the interests of the power-bloc in a “top-down flow of information” and ensures the “maintenance of the prevailing structures of society” (77). The popular press, on the other hand, takes a tone of “skeptical laughter” and sees through the power-bloc. One such way this happens is through the popular press’s utopian fantasies, which challenge the “normalising ‘reality’ of the power-bloc” (78). The official press, Fiske argues, would have its readers “deciphering” its texts—subjecting themselves to its “truths,” whereas the popular press would have its readers “reading” its texts—actively participating in the production of the text’s relevance.
Ian Connell: The popular press is somewhat ineffective for social change because it merely produces resentment for those in the stories (celebrities, politicians, etc.) but not resistance to them (80). In other words, in the clash of the “haves” and “have-nots,” the popular press merely causes the “have-nots” to want to be a member of the “haves,” rather than questioning why there are “haves” and “have-nots” to begin with. The popular press has three players: the characters (the haves), the narrator (who writes about the haves but isn’t necessarily one himself), and the powerless readers (presumably the have-nots) (81).
MAGAZINES FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS
Angela McRobbie: There has been a satisfying shift in how feminity is portrayed for teenage girls between Jackie of the seventies and Just Seventeen and Mizz of today. All of Jackie’s articles, ads, and columns center around one or more of four strategies: the code of romance, the code of personal/domestic life, the code of fashion and beauty, and the code of pop music—all of which function “to map and, ultimately, to limit the feminine sphere” (83). The newer magazines talk about love and sex and boys, but not in the “conventionally coded meta-narrative of romance which…could only create a neurotically dependent female” (84).
Janice Winship: Feminists shouldn’t simply dismiss women’s magazines. Instead, they should “critically consider its limitations and potential for change” (84). All women’s magazines, she argues, follow the same formula regardless of politics: they operate as survival manuals through a combination of entertainment and useful advice (85). Each magazine works to draw the reader into a world of consumption, but this isn’t necessarily bad. Advertisements, for example, can be aesthetically and emotionally pleasing, letting readers “vicariously indulge…in the fictions they create” without necessarily duping or fooling the reader (85). The problem with the magazines is that they are survival manuals for the “mythical individual woman” which encourages woman to “do alone what they can only do together” in fighting “powerful social and cultural structures and constraints” (85, 87).
READING VISUAL CULTURES
Roland Barthes: In the process of signification, the secondary signification, or connotation, is where myth is created. A myth, according to Barthes, is an “ideology understood as a body of ideas and practices which defend and actively promote the values and interests of the dominant groups in society” (88). Barthes uses the example of the image in Paris Match: a picture of a black man in a French uniform saluting the French flag. At the level of connotation, there are considerations that go into reading the visual: the context of the publication is paramount in this example. As we understand the role of semiology in the construction of connotative readings, we can go beyond being innocent consumers of myth (90). Images rarely appear without text, and Barthes argues that “the image does not illustrate the text; it is the text which amplifies the connotative potential of the image” (91). The text helps readers pin down the denotative meaning as well as limit the connotative interpretations. It is important to remember that how an image/text is read depends on the “location of the text, the historical moment and the formation of the reader” (92).
by Mike Peterson
Description of Article
In this chapter, John Storey outlines four approaches to understanding the “popular press,” two approaches for analyzing “magazines for women and girls,” and one approach to “reading visual culture.”
THE POPULAR PRESS
Peter Dahlgren: The connection between tabloid journalism and popular culture is storytelling. While journalism is committed to the analytic mode, it often still uses the mode of storytelling, and the difference between “serious” and “tabloid” news, therefore, isn’t really that different (75).
Colin Sparks: The difference between serious and tabloid (what he calls quality and popular) press, is the marked reliance of popular press on the “personal” as an explanatory framework (76). This reliance, he argues, makes it nearly impossible for the popular press to engage in “popular productivity,” but will, instead, usually fall in the realm of the “reactionary popular,” which can only “speak of their concerns, joys and discontents within the limits set for it by the existing structures of society” (76).
John Fiske: “Popular culture is potentially, and often actually, progressive (though not radical)” (77). Fiske lumps the types of press into three categories: popular, official, and alternative (though nothing more is said in this chapter about the alternative press). The official press represents the interests of the power-bloc in a “top-down flow of information” and ensures the “maintenance of the prevailing structures of society” (77). The popular press, on the other hand, takes a tone of “skeptical laughter” and sees through the power-bloc. One such way this happens is through the popular press’s utopian fantasies, which challenge the “normalising ‘reality’ of the power-bloc” (78). The official press, Fiske argues, would have its readers “deciphering” its texts—subjecting themselves to its “truths,” whereas the popular press would have its readers “reading” its texts—actively participating in the production of the text’s relevance.
Ian Connell: The popular press is somewhat ineffective for social change because it merely produces resentment for those in the stories (celebrities, politicians, etc.) but not resistance to them (80). In other words, in the clash of the “haves” and “have-nots,” the popular press merely causes the “have-nots” to want to be a member of the “haves,” rather than questioning why there are “haves” and “have-nots” to begin with. The popular press has three players: the characters (the haves), the narrator (who writes about the haves but isn’t necessarily one himself), and the powerless readers (presumably the have-nots) (81).
MAGAZINES FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS
Angela McRobbie: There has been a satisfying shift in how feminity is portrayed for teenage girls between Jackie of the seventies and Just Seventeen and Mizz of today. All of Jackie’s articles, ads, and columns center around one or more of four strategies: the code of romance, the code of personal/domestic life, the code of fashion and beauty, and the code of pop music—all of which function “to map and, ultimately, to limit the feminine sphere” (83). The newer magazines talk about love and sex and boys, but not in the “conventionally coded meta-narrative of romance which…could only create a neurotically dependent female” (84).
Janice Winship: Feminists shouldn’t simply dismiss women’s magazines. Instead, they should “critically consider its limitations and potential for change” (84). All women’s magazines, she argues, follow the same formula regardless of politics: they operate as survival manuals through a combination of entertainment and useful advice (85). Each magazine works to draw the reader into a world of consumption, but this isn’t necessarily bad. Advertisements, for example, can be aesthetically and emotionally pleasing, letting readers “vicariously indulge…in the fictions they create” without necessarily duping or fooling the reader (85). The problem with the magazines is that they are survival manuals for the “mythical individual woman” which encourages woman to “do alone what they can only do together” in fighting “powerful social and cultural structures and constraints” (85, 87).
READING VISUAL CULTURES
Roland Barthes: In the process of signification, the secondary signification, or connotation, is where myth is created. A myth, according to Barthes, is an “ideology understood as a body of ideas and practices which defend and actively promote the values and interests of the dominant groups in society” (88). Barthes uses the example of the image in Paris Match: a picture of a black man in a French uniform saluting the French flag. At the level of connotation, there are considerations that go into reading the visual: the context of the publication is paramount in this example. As we understand the role of semiology in the construction of connotative readings, we can go beyond being innocent consumers of myth (90). Images rarely appear without text, and Barthes argues that “the image does not illustrate the text; it is the text which amplifies the connotative potential of the image” (91). The text helps readers pin down the denotative meaning as well as limit the connotative interpretations. It is important to remember that how an image/text is read depends on the “location of the text, the historical moment and the formation of the reader” (92).
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Ch. 7 Consumption in Everyday Life
Before I get started I just want to point out that in my 'Storey book' (the new version), the title has the word 'EVERYDAY' spelled as one word and in the page headings that follow in the chapter the, 'EVERYDAY' is split into, 'EVERY' and 'DAY'. As much as my entry could be about this Derridean moment, I'll reserve it for another discussion maybe.
Consumption in Everyday Life : Abstract
by Matt Dewey
The chapter on consumption stems from the the overall conception of a culture as having a material base and is located in a sense of consumables and the processes of consumption as texts. Given that Storey positions all things cultural as texts allows him to then discuss consumption of texts on the level of a tension between objective (political) and subjective (theoretical) interpretations. He states that cultural studies is concerned with consumption for two reasons: a) the plurality of meanings of a text as it is negotiated over time and use (theoretical); b) that these texts are made and remade by consumers in the practices of the ‘everyday’ (political).
In response to what Storey calls the, ‘pessimistic elitism’, of more critical and structuralist cultural studies, culture in his mind should view texts and their consumption as “production in use” (pg. 133), that there is no set place for the actual meaning of a text to be found but that it should be studied as a process and in its processes of continual meaning formation. Storey goes on to discuss the duality in consumption through studies on youth subcultures, fan cultures and shopping.
Subcultural Consumption
Through an analysis of studies of youth subcultures in working class areas of London (Cohen) Storey, states that youth in subcultures are searching for a unity in affluence promised by their parents working class ethic, and an acceptance from the very consumer based society that rejects them. Therefore, in practice, subcultures like, punks and mods, are an example of , “...consumption at its most discriminating. Through a process of ‘bricolage’, subcultures appropriate for their own purposes and meanings the commodities commercially provided... commodities are rearticulated to produce oppositional meanings “ (pg. 135). By a process of essentially reinventing the meaning of texts, subcultures resist the generalization and assimilation that constitutes mass consumption. It is this negotiation, between positions in society(class) and the rewriting of cultural products that embodies the importance of Storey’s two reasons to the study of consumption.
Fan Culture
Storey goes on the analyze fan culture. While subculture youths rewrite texts to embody their conceptual displacement outside of popular culture, fan culture practices embrace particular texts in order to create additional, supplemental, or intensified versions of those texts. Fan cultures surrounding a TV show would engage in consumption, creation, and recreation of different aspects of text, be it characters, themes, genres, in order to develop specialized and hypostatized understandings of the original or related text. The significance of Fan culture is the process of production and appropriation that lead to readings/ consumptions(141) that are entirely separate text. Fans, not unlike subcultural youths, create communities of people who share a common interest in recreating alternative understandings and uses of the ‘popular’ or generally accepted meaning of products.
Shopping
Storey suggests that in looking at shopping from a cultural studies perspective we would find that it is not simply an activity that culminates in the purchasing of a product. Though phenomena such as the department store once served the submissive tastes of the bourgeois, today the act of shopping can serve a number of different social functions such as exercise, interaction with others, employment, and immediate and temporary shelter for the weather stricken or homeless.
To conclude the article description, Storey in general seems to want us to not automatically assume that we are all mindlessly consuming products because of some unseen productive evil. Though we should not forget that there are motive behind advertising and 2-for-one sales, consumption is more nuanced and creative in culture than merely supportive for economic systems. It is a way to share interests and create new ones.
Analysis
“... the problem of capitalism is not production, but consumption”
- Sut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World (1998)
Although I appreciate Storey’s insistence on the theoretical and political implications in the study of consumption I can’t help but wonder if Storey's two reasons are actual the same, or so incorporated and constitutive of each other that their separation is merely academic. I do, I admit, have problems with seeing how plurality of meanings of texts are separate from the process of creation and recreation of those meanings. It could be as well that my misunderstanding doesn’t even matter or that the two reasons were never placed in dialectical opposition. Storey does though seem to disconnect conceptually another issue of consumption by implying that in order to determine the extent of social control, “requires vigilance and attention to details of the active relations between production and consumption”(133). I thought at first I was making too big a deal out of it but as I read on, it seems particularly important for Storey that the idea of consumption lie evenly outside the process of production (structural) as it does inside in order for his two reasons to be separately considered. I’m not so sure that his analysis frees consumption from structure as much as he aims to.
Though of course the processes of producing a product are mechanically different from the act of buying the product in a store, they are bound intrinsically and inseperably, specifically the United States, to the narrative of capitalism. The relationship between production and consumption is not arbitrary but explicit. The idea that subcultural youth negotiate class issues through recreating the meaning of the products they consume suggest a non- negotiation, or an essential acceptance and adherence, to the logic and promise of consumption. Whether one is ‘discriminately consuming’ or consuming through depression the orientation to material is still complete. This leads me to ask as I was reading the chapter at what point in the discussion of texts and their negotiation is there not a reinforcement or apology for the structure that guides it? Where then, does the power that causes class struggle or forms the hegemony of a mass culture suddenly become innocuous?
If consumption was arbitrary, if for most people it was a leisure activity of whim, as it seems to be for the ‘fan culture’, we could insist that it be studied from a purely humanistic interactive perspective. But this sort of consuming is privileged; Walmart does so well not because it is a cultural mecca of fashion, but because its demographic is the poor and middle class which make up a majority of the population. Consumption is specifically class oriented and class is specifically structural.
The underline idea Storey is discussing in the negotiation of consumption is the negotiation of identity or the formation of it. The idea of identity in consumer goods is a specific articulation of advertising but has its historical roots in the separation of classes. Those who can afford to be discriminating have the ability to pick and choose, have access to this market or that, wear purple instead of green; access and accumulation to such goods defined the bourgeois ethic. To return to the discussion of youth subcultures, punk lost its identity or negotiation with popular culture when specific stores or agents began to cater to their ‘style’ (the idea of 'Style' being an ‘acceptance of’ or ‘hierarchy’ according Stuart Ewen in All Consuming Images, 1988). It is in this idea of identity that consumption is acutely structural as well.
I understand that this places me specifically in the structuralist camp. It could also be my educational background in the study of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas (The Frankfurt School), that has made me acute to accusation of elitism that they have often received. I believe Storey short cuts the importance of the Frankfurt School's influence in the shaping of his own analysis and in the Birmingham experience in general. For instance, his discussion of appropriation he takes from Hebdige (born in 1951), is the same discussion Adorno and Horkheimer had in the, Dialectic of Enlightenment , printed in 1944. Of course this discussion could be traced through Marx and beyond. Adorno (from Marx) reinforces the analysis that it is capitalism that breeds class struggle and that through the logic of the market, or in the problem of consumption, laws, policies, suburbs and educations are created and used to negotiate meaning.
Of course this is not an effort to decide who said what first, but to show for instance that the analysis that comes from the Frankfurt School comes specifically out of resistance to Nazi fascism. If there is an aura of elitism in discussions of the power of culture and structure, those accusation must be in an involved historical perspective. It may seem just as hierarchical to place cultural welfare in the hands of ‘discriminating consumers’.
We may now have to acknowledge, given the extent and speed of global capital, the interminable existence of a consumptive based society. As out-sourcing continues, we will soon no longer produce anything in this country we consume. This separation is not negotiated (in public) but structural. I myself consume many things that would be considered privileged in another context (such as Darfur). I consume free range and recyclables because I can afford to (at the beginning of the month) and can choose to blur the distinctions between negotiated meanings of consumables as art or identity. But this is an affordance of structure and not negotiation.
But this discussion is not to say that Storey is not aware of his privilege either. His effort I believe is to find the particular moments in culture where we are, conceptually at least, free to self actuate. If we are always and continually victims of structure our actualization is always in service of the state or multinational corporation. His discussion of how fan cultures “rereading” (146) of texts frees their attention from ‘what will happen’ to ‘ how things happen’ is particularly convincing for what it may bring to the pedagogy of media literacy, even for the possibilities of media production.
Consumption in Everyday Life : Abstract
by Matt Dewey
The chapter on consumption stems from the the overall conception of a culture as having a material base and is located in a sense of consumables and the processes of consumption as texts. Given that Storey positions all things cultural as texts allows him to then discuss consumption of texts on the level of a tension between objective (political) and subjective (theoretical) interpretations. He states that cultural studies is concerned with consumption for two reasons: a) the plurality of meanings of a text as it is negotiated over time and use (theoretical); b) that these texts are made and remade by consumers in the practices of the ‘everyday’ (political).
In response to what Storey calls the, ‘pessimistic elitism’, of more critical and structuralist cultural studies, culture in his mind should view texts and their consumption as “production in use” (pg. 133), that there is no set place for the actual meaning of a text to be found but that it should be studied as a process and in its processes of continual meaning formation. Storey goes on to discuss the duality in consumption through studies on youth subcultures, fan cultures and shopping.
Subcultural Consumption
Through an analysis of studies of youth subcultures in working class areas of London (Cohen) Storey, states that youth in subcultures are searching for a unity in affluence promised by their parents working class ethic, and an acceptance from the very consumer based society that rejects them. Therefore, in practice, subcultures like, punks and mods, are an example of , “...consumption at its most discriminating. Through a process of ‘bricolage’, subcultures appropriate for their own purposes and meanings the commodities commercially provided... commodities are rearticulated to produce oppositional meanings “ (pg. 135). By a process of essentially reinventing the meaning of texts, subcultures resist the generalization and assimilation that constitutes mass consumption. It is this negotiation, between positions in society(class) and the rewriting of cultural products that embodies the importance of Storey’s two reasons to the study of consumption.
Fan Culture
Storey goes on the analyze fan culture. While subculture youths rewrite texts to embody their conceptual displacement outside of popular culture, fan culture practices embrace particular texts in order to create additional, supplemental, or intensified versions of those texts. Fan cultures surrounding a TV show would engage in consumption, creation, and recreation of different aspects of text, be it characters, themes, genres, in order to develop specialized and hypostatized understandings of the original or related text. The significance of Fan culture is the process of production and appropriation that lead to readings/ consumptions(141) that are entirely separate text. Fans, not unlike subcultural youths, create communities of people who share a common interest in recreating alternative understandings and uses of the ‘popular’ or generally accepted meaning of products.
Shopping
Storey suggests that in looking at shopping from a cultural studies perspective we would find that it is not simply an activity that culminates in the purchasing of a product. Though phenomena such as the department store once served the submissive tastes of the bourgeois, today the act of shopping can serve a number of different social functions such as exercise, interaction with others, employment, and immediate and temporary shelter for the weather stricken or homeless.
To conclude the article description, Storey in general seems to want us to not automatically assume that we are all mindlessly consuming products because of some unseen productive evil. Though we should not forget that there are motive behind advertising and 2-for-one sales, consumption is more nuanced and creative in culture than merely supportive for economic systems. It is a way to share interests and create new ones.
Analysis
“... the problem of capitalism is not production, but consumption”
- Sut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World (1998)
Although I appreciate Storey’s insistence on the theoretical and political implications in the study of consumption I can’t help but wonder if Storey's two reasons are actual the same, or so incorporated and constitutive of each other that their separation is merely academic. I do, I admit, have problems with seeing how plurality of meanings of texts are separate from the process of creation and recreation of those meanings. It could be as well that my misunderstanding doesn’t even matter or that the two reasons were never placed in dialectical opposition. Storey does though seem to disconnect conceptually another issue of consumption by implying that in order to determine the extent of social control, “requires vigilance and attention to details of the active relations between production and consumption”(133). I thought at first I was making too big a deal out of it but as I read on, it seems particularly important for Storey that the idea of consumption lie evenly outside the process of production (structural) as it does inside in order for his two reasons to be separately considered. I’m not so sure that his analysis frees consumption from structure as much as he aims to.
Though of course the processes of producing a product are mechanically different from the act of buying the product in a store, they are bound intrinsically and inseperably, specifically the United States, to the narrative of capitalism. The relationship between production and consumption is not arbitrary but explicit. The idea that subcultural youth negotiate class issues through recreating the meaning of the products they consume suggest a non- negotiation, or an essential acceptance and adherence, to the logic and promise of consumption. Whether one is ‘discriminately consuming’ or consuming through depression the orientation to material is still complete. This leads me to ask as I was reading the chapter at what point in the discussion of texts and their negotiation is there not a reinforcement or apology for the structure that guides it? Where then, does the power that causes class struggle or forms the hegemony of a mass culture suddenly become innocuous?
If consumption was arbitrary, if for most people it was a leisure activity of whim, as it seems to be for the ‘fan culture’, we could insist that it be studied from a purely humanistic interactive perspective. But this sort of consuming is privileged; Walmart does so well not because it is a cultural mecca of fashion, but because its demographic is the poor and middle class which make up a majority of the population. Consumption is specifically class oriented and class is specifically structural.
The underline idea Storey is discussing in the negotiation of consumption is the negotiation of identity or the formation of it. The idea of identity in consumer goods is a specific articulation of advertising but has its historical roots in the separation of classes. Those who can afford to be discriminating have the ability to pick and choose, have access to this market or that, wear purple instead of green; access and accumulation to such goods defined the bourgeois ethic. To return to the discussion of youth subcultures, punk lost its identity or negotiation with popular culture when specific stores or agents began to cater to their ‘style’ (the idea of 'Style' being an ‘acceptance of’ or ‘hierarchy’ according Stuart Ewen in All Consuming Images, 1988). It is in this idea of identity that consumption is acutely structural as well.
I understand that this places me specifically in the structuralist camp. It could also be my educational background in the study of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas (The Frankfurt School), that has made me acute to accusation of elitism that they have often received. I believe Storey short cuts the importance of the Frankfurt School's influence in the shaping of his own analysis and in the Birmingham experience in general. For instance, his discussion of appropriation he takes from Hebdige (born in 1951), is the same discussion Adorno and Horkheimer had in the, Dialectic of Enlightenment , printed in 1944. Of course this discussion could be traced through Marx and beyond. Adorno (from Marx) reinforces the analysis that it is capitalism that breeds class struggle and that through the logic of the market, or in the problem of consumption, laws, policies, suburbs and educations are created and used to negotiate meaning.
Of course this is not an effort to decide who said what first, but to show for instance that the analysis that comes from the Frankfurt School comes specifically out of resistance to Nazi fascism. If there is an aura of elitism in discussions of the power of culture and structure, those accusation must be in an involved historical perspective. It may seem just as hierarchical to place cultural welfare in the hands of ‘discriminating consumers’.
We may now have to acknowledge, given the extent and speed of global capital, the interminable existence of a consumptive based society. As out-sourcing continues, we will soon no longer produce anything in this country we consume. This separation is not negotiated (in public) but structural. I myself consume many things that would be considered privileged in another context (such as Darfur). I consume free range and recyclables because I can afford to (at the beginning of the month) and can choose to blur the distinctions between negotiated meanings of consumables as art or identity. But this is an affordance of structure and not negotiation.
But this discussion is not to say that Storey is not aware of his privilege either. His effort I believe is to find the particular moments in culture where we are, conceptually at least, free to self actuate. If we are always and continually victims of structure our actualization is always in service of the state or multinational corporation. His discussion of how fan cultures “rereading” (146) of texts frees their attention from ‘what will happen’ to ‘ how things happen’ is particularly convincing for what it may bring to the pedagogy of media literacy, even for the possibilities of media production.
Chapter Two: Summary
Chapter Two: Television
From: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, by John Storey
By: Bridgett Vanderwalker
Summary:
Storey states that “Television is the popular cultural form of the twenty-first century” (9). Storey divides the chapter into four specific theories of how television functions in cultural studies and their various aspects.
Encoding And Decoding Television Discourse
Storey starts with Hall’s ideas presented in his work ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.’ First media produces a raw event on television which wants to carry across a dominant viewpoint. The media producers have a certain motive in their work but once it leaves their hands it will be absorbed based on the audiences’ preconceived notions that may be different than was intended. The second process is once the product is produced it can then be process and may produce public discourse. The third process involves decoding the message if it meaningful it will open the “market for more consumption if not consumption will end and so will any discussion. Storey stresses that meanings and messages cannot be transmitted but produced and those messages are based in a certain context and time. Misunderstandings are always possible with the intention of the program because it may be too difficult or too strange to the domestic context of outside the dominant code”(12). When an audience is in concord with the program they are operating within dominate and professional code. A second option for audiences is the ‘negotiated code or position.’ “It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local conditions’, to its own corporate positions”(13). The third position Hall indentifies is that of “the oppositional code.” This is where the viewer recognizes the preferred message but chooses an alternative meaning. Hall stages how individuals interpret television programs within a social position.
1. The production of a meaningful message in the TV discourse is always problematic ‘work’. Translation: Any message can be interpret in several ways
2. The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form.
3. Messages encoded one way can always be read in a different way.(14)
Hall makes a good point when he says decoding of messages are not exclusive to what social position one holds. He says it is class plus “particular discourse positions produce specific readings”.(15) Hall goes on to say that not all messages hold the same level and this based on the context one finds themselves.
Television Talk
Morely another theorist says “the domestic context of TV viewing,[ ] is constitutive of its meaning”(18). Morely takes a much more individualistic viewpoint in that it is individuals who interrupt television programs. He makes an excellent point in pointing out that watching television is a social act which promotes social relationships and unites people where otherwise certain social groups would not normally associate with each other. Hobson makes a point to point out that people watch different programs for different reasons. The viewers bring many different ideas and feelings to a program and thus they are able to make their own interpretations. Hobson says: “New contexts will bring about the enactment of new significances; a narrative [in this case a soap opera] seemingly discarded seems suddenly to have a new relevance and a new utility”(21). “Hobson insists that viewers ‘work with the text and add their own experiences and opinions to the stories in the programme’”(22). Hobson also comments on that one storyline may have different meanings it is how the individual interprets it that the text comes alive. Hobson says that a text has a material structure which has a variety of interpretations. Viewers view programs from social and discursive and thus a there are limits to the text. In conclusion a program is a stepping stone for discussion of wider social groups that see generalizations that apply to humanity as a whole.
Television And ‘The Ideology Of Mass Culture’
The Dutch theorist, Ien Ang, states that “realism is an illusion created by the extent to which a text can successfully conceal its constructiveness”(26). Essentially, viewing a program is decoding and constructing meaning by intermingling ourselves in the narrative itself so even the most unrealistic texts can have meaning if the viewer is engaged in the text. As long as a show has cultural or individualistic relevance in the human sphere it can be seen as discussion of human issues. Ang say that while some may like or dislike a show it is based on if they are engaging with the text and whether they see the show as a product of mass media. Ang makes a valid point when she says: “fantasy and fiction does not function in place of, but besides, other dimensions of life (social practice, moral or political consciousness)”(31).
The Two Economies Of Television
John Fishe says that “the power of the audience-as-producers in the cultural economy is considerable”(32). Fishe believes cultural commodities such as television and films revolve around two economies financial and cultural. Financial revolves around exchange value while cultural is concerned with meanings, pleasures, and social identities. If TV producers can’t predict what audiences want they will fail to sell their product. In this viewpoint popular culture is seen as ‘a site of struggle’ where both economic and aesthetic concerns are competing for balance.
Questions
1. What American studies have been done recently on the two economies of television where it seems particularly relevant to see the financial side and viewer side and how functions in American society.
From: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, by John Storey
By: Bridgett Vanderwalker
Summary:
Storey states that “Television is the popular cultural form of the twenty-first century” (9). Storey divides the chapter into four specific theories of how television functions in cultural studies and their various aspects.
Encoding And Decoding Television Discourse
Storey starts with Hall’s ideas presented in his work ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.’ First media produces a raw event on television which wants to carry across a dominant viewpoint. The media producers have a certain motive in their work but once it leaves their hands it will be absorbed based on the audiences’ preconceived notions that may be different than was intended. The second process is once the product is produced it can then be process and may produce public discourse. The third process involves decoding the message if it meaningful it will open the “market for more consumption if not consumption will end and so will any discussion. Storey stresses that meanings and messages cannot be transmitted but produced and those messages are based in a certain context and time. Misunderstandings are always possible with the intention of the program because it may be too difficult or too strange to the domestic context of outside the dominant code”(12). When an audience is in concord with the program they are operating within dominate and professional code. A second option for audiences is the ‘negotiated code or position.’ “It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local conditions’, to its own corporate positions”(13). The third position Hall indentifies is that of “the oppositional code.” This is where the viewer recognizes the preferred message but chooses an alternative meaning. Hall stages how individuals interpret television programs within a social position.
1. The production of a meaningful message in the TV discourse is always problematic ‘work’. Translation: Any message can be interpret in several ways
2. The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form.
3. Messages encoded one way can always be read in a different way.(14)
Hall makes a good point when he says decoding of messages are not exclusive to what social position one holds. He says it is class plus “particular discourse positions produce specific readings”.(15) Hall goes on to say that not all messages hold the same level and this based on the context one finds themselves.
Television Talk
Morely another theorist says “the domestic context of TV viewing,[ ] is constitutive of its meaning”(18). Morely takes a much more individualistic viewpoint in that it is individuals who interrupt television programs. He makes an excellent point in pointing out that watching television is a social act which promotes social relationships and unites people where otherwise certain social groups would not normally associate with each other. Hobson makes a point to point out that people watch different programs for different reasons. The viewers bring many different ideas and feelings to a program and thus they are able to make their own interpretations. Hobson says: “New contexts will bring about the enactment of new significances; a narrative [in this case a soap opera] seemingly discarded seems suddenly to have a new relevance and a new utility”(21). “Hobson insists that viewers ‘work with the text and add their own experiences and opinions to the stories in the programme’”(22). Hobson also comments on that one storyline may have different meanings it is how the individual interprets it that the text comes alive. Hobson says that a text has a material structure which has a variety of interpretations. Viewers view programs from social and discursive and thus a there are limits to the text. In conclusion a program is a stepping stone for discussion of wider social groups that see generalizations that apply to humanity as a whole.
Television And ‘The Ideology Of Mass Culture’
The Dutch theorist, Ien Ang, states that “realism is an illusion created by the extent to which a text can successfully conceal its constructiveness”(26). Essentially, viewing a program is decoding and constructing meaning by intermingling ourselves in the narrative itself so even the most unrealistic texts can have meaning if the viewer is engaged in the text. As long as a show has cultural or individualistic relevance in the human sphere it can be seen as discussion of human issues. Ang say that while some may like or dislike a show it is based on if they are engaging with the text and whether they see the show as a product of mass media. Ang makes a valid point when she says: “fantasy and fiction does not function in place of, but besides, other dimensions of life (social practice, moral or political consciousness)”(31).
The Two Economies Of Television
John Fishe says that “the power of the audience-as-producers in the cultural economy is considerable”(32). Fishe believes cultural commodities such as television and films revolve around two economies financial and cultural. Financial revolves around exchange value while cultural is concerned with meanings, pleasures, and social identities. If TV producers can’t predict what audiences want they will fail to sell their product. In this viewpoint popular culture is seen as ‘a site of struggle’ where both economic and aesthetic concerns are competing for balance.
Questions
1. What American studies have been done recently on the two economies of television where it seems particularly relevant to see the financial side and viewer side and how functions in American society.
Chapter Four: Film
From: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, John Storey
Chapter Four: Film
By: Tyson Livingston
Summary:
For the chapter on film, Storey indicates that his aim is to “discuss key moments in the discussion of film and cultural studies” rather than discuss the most recent developments in this area of the field. He divides the chapter into the following sections: Structuralism and Film, Visual Pleasure in Film, and Cultural Studies and Film.
Structuralism and Film
Storey notes two major works in film cultural studies that occurred in 1975: Sixguns and Society, by Will Wright, and ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, by Laura Mulvey. This first section examines Sixguns and Society, which was classically structuralist in its treatment.
Storey begins by discussing the ideas of Ferdiand de Saussure from which much of structuralist theory is derived. He discussed language as a “system of contrasts and opposites... [that] constructs our access to reality” (74). He indicated that language was divided into two parts which produced a third. These are the signifier, which is the inscription of a word, the signified, which is the mental image initiated by that word, and these two come together to produce the sign. Because of the ways these parts interact, “the way in which we ultimately conceptualize the world is ultimately dependent on the language that we speak and, by analogy, the culture that we inhabit” (74). His ideas also include his concept of Language and Parole, where language refers to the structures and rules, and Parole refers to individual utterance. Storey finishes his discussion of Saussure by indicating that, following structuralism, it is the job of the culturist to show how rules and conventions determine the meaning of a given text. He then refers to Levi-Strauss and his example of myth, and how it works like language.
After discussing Levi-Strauss’s example of myth, he then turns directly to Sixguns and Society and indicates how Wright analyzed the Hollywood Western as American myth. By using binary relations and other structuralist techniques, Wright explored how the interaction of the hero, society, and the villain conceptualized American social beliefs and the myth of the American Dream. He also demonstrated how the evolution of the Western through three different periods reflected the change in those social beliefs and the changing perceptions of how to obtain the American Dream based on those beliefs.
Visual Pleasure in Film
In the second section, Storey discusses Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Mulvey seemed to focus on “the male gaze” in cinema, which posited that in film women are viewed as objects of male desire, and also represent the threat of castration.
The first part of this idea seems pretty straightforward, that the woman functions as an object of erotic desire, both for the hero and for the male spectator in the audience. I admit, however, that I am still a little fuzzy on the ins and outs of the second part. Mulvey indicates that when viewing the female form the absence of a penis implies the threat of castration, and that this ‘look’ can only be countered through one of two methods. The first is by investigating the original moment of trauma and then eventually devaluing, punishing, or saving the guilty object. The second is to fetishize the woman so that she becomes a thing of beauty in and of herself, a pure erotic spectacle (78-79). I admit that I am still a little fuzzy on how we get from point A to point B to point C on this part.
Mulvey ultimately argued that this pleasure in the cinema had to be eliminated to free women from ‘the male gaze’. Her work was quite influential, so much so that others have explored and further defined and refined her ideas. For example, examining if the male gaze is always present or just dominate over a ‘female gaze.’ The question has also been raised that her theory doesn’t take into account the possibility of the audience being more than a passive spectator, when in fact the audience would negotiate with the film based on its own experiences and discourse.
Cultural Studies and Film
The last section focuses primarily on the research of Christine Gledhill and Jackie Stacey. Gledhill recognized the act of negotiation between the spectator and the film. She indicated that “meaning is neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation, and experience” (80). She further indicated that this negotiation could be studied on three different levels: audience, texts, and institutions.
Stacey elaborates on this approach based on her research from the end of the 1980s where she surveyed women in their 60s who were avid movie-goers in the 40s and 50s. This way she was able to study the actual consumption of the film. Three areas were addressed in her study. The first, escapism was one of the primary reasons her subjects went to the cinema. She determined that this escapism manifested not only from the film itself, but from the environment of the theater, and the community of movie-goers. It also provided a means of escape not only to the utopian vision of the Hollywood screen, but from the hardships of wartime Britain.
The second, identification, indicated that women shared a fluidity of identity with the women onscreen and were able to identify with the actors because of some shared quality or trait, such as hair color. This sharing of identity would often extend beyond he film experience, leaving the spectators with a fantasy of a more powerful and confident self that could ultimately act as a form of resistance.
The third area, consumption, was defined by Stacey as “a site of negotiated meanings, resistance, and of appropriation as well as of subject and exploitation” (84). She gave the example that the fashions of hollywood stars went against the more restricted ideas of british femininity. Therefore the consumption of these films by women were a resistance to extend and negotiate those standards.
Chapter Four: Film
By: Tyson Livingston
Summary:
For the chapter on film, Storey indicates that his aim is to “discuss key moments in the discussion of film and cultural studies” rather than discuss the most recent developments in this area of the field. He divides the chapter into the following sections: Structuralism and Film, Visual Pleasure in Film, and Cultural Studies and Film.
Structuralism and Film
Storey notes two major works in film cultural studies that occurred in 1975: Sixguns and Society, by Will Wright, and ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, by Laura Mulvey. This first section examines Sixguns and Society, which was classically structuralist in its treatment.
Storey begins by discussing the ideas of Ferdiand de Saussure from which much of structuralist theory is derived. He discussed language as a “system of contrasts and opposites... [that] constructs our access to reality” (74). He indicated that language was divided into two parts which produced a third. These are the signifier, which is the inscription of a word, the signified, which is the mental image initiated by that word, and these two come together to produce the sign. Because of the ways these parts interact, “the way in which we ultimately conceptualize the world is ultimately dependent on the language that we speak and, by analogy, the culture that we inhabit” (74). His ideas also include his concept of Language and Parole, where language refers to the structures and rules, and Parole refers to individual utterance. Storey finishes his discussion of Saussure by indicating that, following structuralism, it is the job of the culturist to show how rules and conventions determine the meaning of a given text. He then refers to Levi-Strauss and his example of myth, and how it works like language.
After discussing Levi-Strauss’s example of myth, he then turns directly to Sixguns and Society and indicates how Wright analyzed the Hollywood Western as American myth. By using binary relations and other structuralist techniques, Wright explored how the interaction of the hero, society, and the villain conceptualized American social beliefs and the myth of the American Dream. He also demonstrated how the evolution of the Western through three different periods reflected the change in those social beliefs and the changing perceptions of how to obtain the American Dream based on those beliefs.
Visual Pleasure in Film
In the second section, Storey discusses Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Mulvey seemed to focus on “the male gaze” in cinema, which posited that in film women are viewed as objects of male desire, and also represent the threat of castration.
The first part of this idea seems pretty straightforward, that the woman functions as an object of erotic desire, both for the hero and for the male spectator in the audience. I admit, however, that I am still a little fuzzy on the ins and outs of the second part. Mulvey indicates that when viewing the female form the absence of a penis implies the threat of castration, and that this ‘look’ can only be countered through one of two methods. The first is by investigating the original moment of trauma and then eventually devaluing, punishing, or saving the guilty object. The second is to fetishize the woman so that she becomes a thing of beauty in and of herself, a pure erotic spectacle (78-79). I admit that I am still a little fuzzy on how we get from point A to point B to point C on this part.
Mulvey ultimately argued that this pleasure in the cinema had to be eliminated to free women from ‘the male gaze’. Her work was quite influential, so much so that others have explored and further defined and refined her ideas. For example, examining if the male gaze is always present or just dominate over a ‘female gaze.’ The question has also been raised that her theory doesn’t take into account the possibility of the audience being more than a passive spectator, when in fact the audience would negotiate with the film based on its own experiences and discourse.
Cultural Studies and Film
The last section focuses primarily on the research of Christine Gledhill and Jackie Stacey. Gledhill recognized the act of negotiation between the spectator and the film. She indicated that “meaning is neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation, and experience” (80). She further indicated that this negotiation could be studied on three different levels: audience, texts, and institutions.
Stacey elaborates on this approach based on her research from the end of the 1980s where she surveyed women in their 60s who were avid movie-goers in the 40s and 50s. This way she was able to study the actual consumption of the film. Three areas were addressed in her study. The first, escapism was one of the primary reasons her subjects went to the cinema. She determined that this escapism manifested not only from the film itself, but from the environment of the theater, and the community of movie-goers. It also provided a means of escape not only to the utopian vision of the Hollywood screen, but from the hardships of wartime Britain.
The second, identification, indicated that women shared a fluidity of identity with the women onscreen and were able to identify with the actors because of some shared quality or trait, such as hair color. This sharing of identity would often extend beyond he film experience, leaving the spectators with a fantasy of a more powerful and confident self that could ultimately act as a form of resistance.
The third area, consumption, was defined by Stacey as “a site of negotiated meanings, resistance, and of appropriation as well as of subject and exploitation” (84). She gave the example that the fashions of hollywood stars went against the more restricted ideas of british femininity. Therefore the consumption of these films by women were a resistance to extend and negotiate those standards.
Chapter Two - Television, John Storey
Summary: John Storey’s Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, “Chapter 2, Television.”
By Jennifer Lowry
Storey begins this chapter by stating: “Television is the popular culture form of the twenty-first century” (9). He breaks the chapter up into four parts: “Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse,” “Television Talk,” “Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’,” and “The Two Economies of Television”.
Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse
In the first section he describes Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.” Hall argues that there are three moments that televisual discourse must pass through in order to make meaning (9). The first moment is the point at which the media professionals portray a “’raw’ social event” (10). At this point the media professionals have the power because they are in control of “how the ‘raw’ social event will be encoded in discourse” (10). The second moment occurs after the “’raw’ social event” is in the “form of televisual discourse” and the “formal rules of language and discourse are ‘in dominance’” (11). Essentially, the event has been produced in a discourse (encoded), presented in television and now is in the hands of the viewer to interpret its meaning (decoded). This is where the third moment occurs, in the process of the audience decoding the message (‘raw’ social event). “If the event is to become ‘meaningful’ to the audience, it must decode and make sense of the discourse” (11) but the information that is decoded is not always what was encoded. This is where the concepts of dominant or preferred code take place. If the audience is not privy to the dominant code, the decoding of the message will not take on the meaning intended.
Television Talk
David Morley in ‘The Nationwide Audience” tested Hall’s model “to see how individual interpretations of televisual texts relate to ‘social position’” (14). Morley broke decoding into three categories: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. He determined that social position determines access to different discourses and therefore, social class position is not the only determinant of decoding. Experience also influences interpretation of text; Morley argues that television viewing is a domestic activity, which inevitably plays a role in the interpretation process.
Since television viewing is a social act, television leads to social conversation as evidenced by Dorothy Hobson’s research in Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. Hobson argues that television interpretation is also influenced by culture and experience, the message changes depending on the viewer’s culture or prior experiences. Television and real life can merge through interpretation, “viewers are able to use events within television narratives to explore issues in their own lives; issues that might otherwise remain too painful to speak about openly in public” (23). Television allows people to distance themselves from the problem by speaking about it in the form of a fictional character or story (25). Hobson argues that women especially use television as a means for social interaction.
Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’
Dutch Cultural critic Ien Ang came to similar conclusions in her research about the prime time soap opera Dallas. She found that viewers went through a “selective process, reading across the text from denotation to connotation, weaving our sense of self in and out of the narrative” (26). While the viewers may not have everything in common with the characters of a television show, they are able to recognize “fundamental things in common: relationships and broken relationships, happiness and sadness, illness and health” (26). Based upon the information gathered in her research, the viewers are separated into four “reading positions” which Ang calls “the ideology of mass culture” (28).
Mass culture:
Popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers (28).
The first group is those who dislike the programme: since the programme is mass culture, the group dislikes it. The second group is those who like the show and still “subscribe to the ideology of mass culture (28). But in order to do so, these viewers read the show through irony. The third group is the fans who “find it necessary to locate their pleasure in relation to the ideology of mass culture; they ‘internalise’ the ideology; they ‘negotiate’ with the ideology; they use ’surface irony’ to defend their pleasure against the withering dismissal of the ideology” (29-30). The final group is “informed by the ideology of populism. The core of this ideology is the belief that one person’s taste is of equal value to another person’s taste” (30), meaning that it is open to individualism and that judgments should not be made against others.
The Two Economies of Television
The final section of this chapter discusses John Fiske’s idea that “cultural commodities – including television – from which popular culture is made circulate in simultaneous economies: the financial and cultural” (32).
Financial economy: “concerned with exchange value”
Cultural economy: “primarily focused on use – ‘meanings, pleasures, and social identities’” (32).
Fiske uses the example of the show Hill Street Blues that was sold to NBC and sponsored by Mercedes Benz.
In the cultural economy, the series changed form a cultural commodity (to be sold to NBC) to a site for the production of meanings and pleasures for its audience. In the same way, the audience changed from commodity (to be sold to Mercedes Benz) to a producer of meanings and pleasures (32).
In this context the audience has power since the production of meaning and pleasure is more difficult to come by than the production of wealth. The producers of television are not always able to predict what will sell (32) giving the consumer the power. Different cultures will also view the same program in different ways, often using it to its own purpose. Fiske uses “the example of the Russian Jews watching Dallas in Israel and reading it as ‘capitalism’s self criticism’” (33).
According to Fiske, “resistance to the power of the powerful by those without power in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic and social” (33).
Semiotic resistance: concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities
Social resistance: concerned with transformations of the socio-economic system (33).
Popular culture is a “site of struggle” operating mostly in semiotic power (33). “Semiotic resistance – in which the dominant meanings are challenged by subordinate meanings – has the effect of undermining capitalism’s attempt at ideological homogeneity” (33).
Question:
Who really has the power in the reading of television? While the audience obviously holds the power in interpretation, the producers are the ones who determine what is on television in the first place. Is what we interpret really our choice?
By Jennifer Lowry
Storey begins this chapter by stating: “Television is the popular culture form of the twenty-first century” (9). He breaks the chapter up into four parts: “Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse,” “Television Talk,” “Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’,” and “The Two Economies of Television”.
Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse
In the first section he describes Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.” Hall argues that there are three moments that televisual discourse must pass through in order to make meaning (9). The first moment is the point at which the media professionals portray a “’raw’ social event” (10). At this point the media professionals have the power because they are in control of “how the ‘raw’ social event will be encoded in discourse” (10). The second moment occurs after the “’raw’ social event” is in the “form of televisual discourse” and the “formal rules of language and discourse are ‘in dominance’” (11). Essentially, the event has been produced in a discourse (encoded), presented in television and now is in the hands of the viewer to interpret its meaning (decoded). This is where the third moment occurs, in the process of the audience decoding the message (‘raw’ social event). “If the event is to become ‘meaningful’ to the audience, it must decode and make sense of the discourse” (11) but the information that is decoded is not always what was encoded. This is where the concepts of dominant or preferred code take place. If the audience is not privy to the dominant code, the decoding of the message will not take on the meaning intended.
Television Talk
David Morley in ‘The Nationwide Audience” tested Hall’s model “to see how individual interpretations of televisual texts relate to ‘social position’” (14). Morley broke decoding into three categories: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. He determined that social position determines access to different discourses and therefore, social class position is not the only determinant of decoding. Experience also influences interpretation of text; Morley argues that television viewing is a domestic activity, which inevitably plays a role in the interpretation process.
Since television viewing is a social act, television leads to social conversation as evidenced by Dorothy Hobson’s research in Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. Hobson argues that television interpretation is also influenced by culture and experience, the message changes depending on the viewer’s culture or prior experiences. Television and real life can merge through interpretation, “viewers are able to use events within television narratives to explore issues in their own lives; issues that might otherwise remain too painful to speak about openly in public” (23). Television allows people to distance themselves from the problem by speaking about it in the form of a fictional character or story (25). Hobson argues that women especially use television as a means for social interaction.
Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’
Dutch Cultural critic Ien Ang came to similar conclusions in her research about the prime time soap opera Dallas. She found that viewers went through a “selective process, reading across the text from denotation to connotation, weaving our sense of self in and out of the narrative” (26). While the viewers may not have everything in common with the characters of a television show, they are able to recognize “fundamental things in common: relationships and broken relationships, happiness and sadness, illness and health” (26). Based upon the information gathered in her research, the viewers are separated into four “reading positions” which Ang calls “the ideology of mass culture” (28).
Mass culture:
Popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers (28).
The first group is those who dislike the programme: since the programme is mass culture, the group dislikes it. The second group is those who like the show and still “subscribe to the ideology of mass culture (28). But in order to do so, these viewers read the show through irony. The third group is the fans who “find it necessary to locate their pleasure in relation to the ideology of mass culture; they ‘internalise’ the ideology; they ‘negotiate’ with the ideology; they use ’surface irony’ to defend their pleasure against the withering dismissal of the ideology” (29-30). The final group is “informed by the ideology of populism. The core of this ideology is the belief that one person’s taste is of equal value to another person’s taste” (30), meaning that it is open to individualism and that judgments should not be made against others.
The Two Economies of Television
The final section of this chapter discusses John Fiske’s idea that “cultural commodities – including television – from which popular culture is made circulate in simultaneous economies: the financial and cultural” (32).
Financial economy: “concerned with exchange value”
Cultural economy: “primarily focused on use – ‘meanings, pleasures, and social identities’” (32).
Fiske uses the example of the show Hill Street Blues that was sold to NBC and sponsored by Mercedes Benz.
In the cultural economy, the series changed form a cultural commodity (to be sold to NBC) to a site for the production of meanings and pleasures for its audience. In the same way, the audience changed from commodity (to be sold to Mercedes Benz) to a producer of meanings and pleasures (32).
In this context the audience has power since the production of meaning and pleasure is more difficult to come by than the production of wealth. The producers of television are not always able to predict what will sell (32) giving the consumer the power. Different cultures will also view the same program in different ways, often using it to its own purpose. Fiske uses “the example of the Russian Jews watching Dallas in Israel and reading it as ‘capitalism’s self criticism’” (33).
According to Fiske, “resistance to the power of the powerful by those without power in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic and social” (33).
Semiotic resistance: concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities
Social resistance: concerned with transformations of the socio-economic system (33).
Popular culture is a “site of struggle” operating mostly in semiotic power (33). “Semiotic resistance – in which the dominant meanings are challenged by subordinate meanings – has the effect of undermining capitalism’s attempt at ideological homogeneity” (33).
Question:
Who really has the power in the reading of television? While the audience obviously holds the power in interpretation, the producers are the ones who determine what is on television in the first place. Is what we interpret really our choice?
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Storey, CH 2
Bill Schnupp
Abstract: John Storey’s Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture
Summary: Chapter 2: Television
I. The Cycle of Televisual Discourse
The widespread popularity of television as a cultural form led to Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” a piece in which the author posits a three-part model of televisual communication:
1. Media professionals convert a “raw” social event into televisual discourse
2. Once the event has taken the form of televisual discourse, formal rules of language and discourse are in play.
3. The audience must decode not the actual event, but the media’s translation. The act of decoding—of making meaning from the translation—is itself a social act, open to encoding in another distinct discourse, This begets a cycle in which production moves to consumption, and back to production, a self-perpetuating cycle that feeds upon itself.
Main ideas: “The circuit starts in the social and ends, to begin again, in the social.”
-“Meanings and messages are not simply transmitted, they are always produced” (11).
II. Decoding and Misunderstandings
Hall assumes two difficulties in the decoding process: first, “misunderstandings of a literal kind. . .[in which] the viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition. . .but more often, broadcasters are concerned. . .that viewers are not operating within the dominant of preferred code” (12). Hall’s primary concern is with this second type of misunderstanding, an occurrence directly linked with the engagement of formal language and discourse structures that form the second stage in his model of televisual discourse.
Hall outlines three primary decoding positions:
1. Dominant-hegemonic position, in which the viewer interprets the message
within the confines of the power structure and professional code out forth by the
broadcaster.
2. Negotiated code or position, likely the most common, in which viewers
recognize the authority and legitimacy of the broadcast discourse, but blend often
oppositional elements that have more direct bearing on their personal life.
3.Oppositional code, adopted by viewers who recognize the validity of the
discursive mode, but nonetheless chooses to operated from an opposing frame of
reference.
Hall’s hypothetical decoding positions sparked David Morley’s Nationwide Audience project, an undertaking concerned with how social class influenced decoding, and explored such ideas as:
1. “how and why certain production practices and structures tend to produce certain
messages, which embody their meanings in certain recurring forms”
2. “The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form. It
always contains more than one potential reading”
3. “Messages encoded in one way can always be read in a different way” (14).
In his project, Morley’s population was a collection of twenty-nine different groups, socially stratified to include students, apprentices, schoolboys, shop stewards, middle-class bank managers, and public officials. Each was asked to watch two episodes of the BBC’s Nationwide news program. Morley analyzed each group’s reading, confirming many of Hall’s prior ideas. Morley’s ultimate findings, however, indicated that “decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
Main ideas: “When we are interpellated by a text, this is always in a context of other
interpellations”(16).
-“The text reader encounter does not occur in a moment isolated from other discourses, but always in a field of many discourses, some in harmony with the text, some of which are in contradiction with it”(16).
-“decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
III. Television and Family
Morley’s Nationwide endeavor led to his Family Television project, an undertaking limited by a lack of time and money, but nonetheless concerned with television practices within the home. Practice—though perhaps not an obvious choice of terms—is accurate regardless, as Morley concern here was “how television is interpreted (literary/semiological approaches) and how television is used (sociological approaches)” (18). Issues of audience decoding and choice as they relate to family leisure were paramount here. In this context, television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
Morley’s ideas led to Dorothy Hobson’s Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. In her study, Hobson viewed the program Crossroads, and conducted open-ended follow-up interviews with, participants (predominantly women). Though light on theory, Hobson’s ethnographic study nonetheless provided some interesting observations.
1. The circumstances of viewing are highly varied: Some viewers sit and watch the program,
while many conduct daily domestic activities.
2. The interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far
beyond the initial moment of consumption.
3. The program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could
actively transition from “program discourse” to personal, domestic, and professional
discourse.
4. Viewers rely on their own experience to judge events on television programs.
5. Soap operas allow viewers a means of interpreting and coping with their problems, shared
both by actual people, as well as characters on the program. Thus, Hobson posits that
innumerable interpretations of a program exist.
6. Discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events
otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
7. Interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of
viewers.
On the fifth point, Storey disagrees, arguing that that are definite material and contextual limitations on the possible number of interpretations of a specific program. On the final point, however, Mary Ellen Brown echoes Hobson’s point, and furthers it with the contention that viewers undertake a “carnivalesque sense of play in the crossing opf boundaries between fiction and reality. Furthermore, Brown maintains that women’s talk about soap operas is best understood as a fundamental part of the long tradition of women’s oral culture” (24).
Tamar Liebs and Elihu Katz further this strand of argument, and put forth that
soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
Main ideas: “television talk provides cultural studies with an important bridge between the social and the textual” (25).
-television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
-soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
-the interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far beyond the initial moment of consumption.
-the program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could actively transition from “program discourse” to personal and professional discourse.
-discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
-interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of viewers.
IV. Television and Mass Culture
Dutch cultural critic Ien Ang took up the soap opera idea in a study in which she placed an add in a popular magazine soliciting viewer opinion about the television series Dallas. Forty-two responses, both from critics and supporters of the program led Ang to the conclusion that the program was popular for its “emotional realism,” and that the degree to which viewers found Dallas good or bad was based on their perception of its realism (good) or lack of authenticity (bad). Interestingly, Ang found that elements of Dallas that were unreal and regarded as such at the denotative level were not considered unrealistic at the connotative level.
Much of the program’s popularity was based on the ease with which viewers could transition between the fiction of the program and the everyday lives. It gives rise to the “melodramatic imagination.” Essentially, Ang found that Dallas “is not a compensation for the presumed drabness of everyday life, nor a flight from it, but a dimension of it” (27).
From these findings, Ang posits “the ideology of mass culture,” the idea that “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28). This theory enabled Ang to lump viewers into four categories: those who strongly dislike the program because it is an example of mass culture; those who give the program an ironical viewing, in which the program is mocked for its melodrama and transformed into a comedic program—the pleasure of viewing results from the fact that the program is, in fact, bad and worthy of mockery; fans, who internalize the ideology of mass culture and appreciate the program for what it is; and the populist, who views with the contention that it is pointless to pass aesthetic judgment on the tastes of others. The first three positions signify an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
Ang concludes that the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
Main ideas: “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28).
-there is an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
- the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
V. Fiske’s Two Economies
Chapter two concludes with John Fiske’s argument that television inhabits two economies: financial, concerned with exchange values; and cultural, centered around “meanings, pleasures, and social identities” (32). Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous. Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33)
Fiske recognizes popular culture as a site of struggle between dominant forces, and diverts attention to how theses forces are coped with, resisted, or evaded.
Main ideas: Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous.
- Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33).
Key Terms:
Ideology of Mass Culture
Cultural Economy
Discourse
Encoding
Decoding:
Dominant-hegemonic
Negotiated
Oppositional
People:
John Storey
Stuart Hall
David Morley
Dorothy Hobson
Mary Ellen Brown
Tamar Liebs
Elihu Katz
Ien Ang
John Fiske
Questions:
1. What do you make of Storey’s objection to Hobson’s notion of infinite readings? (23)
2. Do you agree with Hobson’s idea that television programs can lead to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere? Why or why not?
Abstract: John Storey’s Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture
Summary: Chapter 2: Television
I. The Cycle of Televisual Discourse
The widespread popularity of television as a cultural form led to Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” a piece in which the author posits a three-part model of televisual communication:
1. Media professionals convert a “raw” social event into televisual discourse
2. Once the event has taken the form of televisual discourse, formal rules of language and discourse are in play.
3. The audience must decode not the actual event, but the media’s translation. The act of decoding—of making meaning from the translation—is itself a social act, open to encoding in another distinct discourse, This begets a cycle in which production moves to consumption, and back to production, a self-perpetuating cycle that feeds upon itself.
Main ideas: “The circuit starts in the social and ends, to begin again, in the social.”
-“Meanings and messages are not simply transmitted, they are always produced” (11).
II. Decoding and Misunderstandings
Hall assumes two difficulties in the decoding process: first, “misunderstandings of a literal kind. . .[in which] the viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition. . .but more often, broadcasters are concerned. . .that viewers are not operating within the dominant of preferred code” (12). Hall’s primary concern is with this second type of misunderstanding, an occurrence directly linked with the engagement of formal language and discourse structures that form the second stage in his model of televisual discourse.
Hall outlines three primary decoding positions:
1. Dominant-hegemonic position, in which the viewer interprets the message
within the confines of the power structure and professional code out forth by the
broadcaster.
2. Negotiated code or position, likely the most common, in which viewers
recognize the authority and legitimacy of the broadcast discourse, but blend often
oppositional elements that have more direct bearing on their personal life.
3.Oppositional code, adopted by viewers who recognize the validity of the
discursive mode, but nonetheless chooses to operated from an opposing frame of
reference.
Hall’s hypothetical decoding positions sparked David Morley’s Nationwide Audience project, an undertaking concerned with how social class influenced decoding, and explored such ideas as:
1. “how and why certain production practices and structures tend to produce certain
messages, which embody their meanings in certain recurring forms”
2. “The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form. It
always contains more than one potential reading”
3. “Messages encoded in one way can always be read in a different way” (14).
In his project, Morley’s population was a collection of twenty-nine different groups, socially stratified to include students, apprentices, schoolboys, shop stewards, middle-class bank managers, and public officials. Each was asked to watch two episodes of the BBC’s Nationwide news program. Morley analyzed each group’s reading, confirming many of Hall’s prior ideas. Morley’s ultimate findings, however, indicated that “decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
Main ideas: “When we are interpellated by a text, this is always in a context of other
interpellations”(16).
-“The text reader encounter does not occur in a moment isolated from other discourses, but always in a field of many discourses, some in harmony with the text, some of which are in contradiction with it”(16).
-“decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
III. Television and Family
Morley’s Nationwide endeavor led to his Family Television project, an undertaking limited by a lack of time and money, but nonetheless concerned with television practices within the home. Practice—though perhaps not an obvious choice of terms—is accurate regardless, as Morley concern here was “how television is interpreted (literary/semiological approaches) and how television is used (sociological approaches)” (18). Issues of audience decoding and choice as they relate to family leisure were paramount here. In this context, television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
Morley’s ideas led to Dorothy Hobson’s Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. In her study, Hobson viewed the program Crossroads, and conducted open-ended follow-up interviews with, participants (predominantly women). Though light on theory, Hobson’s ethnographic study nonetheless provided some interesting observations.
1. The circumstances of viewing are highly varied: Some viewers sit and watch the program,
while many conduct daily domestic activities.
2. The interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far
beyond the initial moment of consumption.
3. The program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could
actively transition from “program discourse” to personal, domestic, and professional
discourse.
4. Viewers rely on their own experience to judge events on television programs.
5. Soap operas allow viewers a means of interpreting and coping with their problems, shared
both by actual people, as well as characters on the program. Thus, Hobson posits that
innumerable interpretations of a program exist.
6. Discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events
otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
7. Interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of
viewers.
On the fifth point, Storey disagrees, arguing that that are definite material and contextual limitations on the possible number of interpretations of a specific program. On the final point, however, Mary Ellen Brown echoes Hobson’s point, and furthers it with the contention that viewers undertake a “carnivalesque sense of play in the crossing opf boundaries between fiction and reality. Furthermore, Brown maintains that women’s talk about soap operas is best understood as a fundamental part of the long tradition of women’s oral culture” (24).
Tamar Liebs and Elihu Katz further this strand of argument, and put forth that
soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
Main ideas: “television talk provides cultural studies with an important bridge between the social and the textual” (25).
-television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
-soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
-the interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far beyond the initial moment of consumption.
-the program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could actively transition from “program discourse” to personal and professional discourse.
-discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
-interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of viewers.
IV. Television and Mass Culture
Dutch cultural critic Ien Ang took up the soap opera idea in a study in which she placed an add in a popular magazine soliciting viewer opinion about the television series Dallas. Forty-two responses, both from critics and supporters of the program led Ang to the conclusion that the program was popular for its “emotional realism,” and that the degree to which viewers found Dallas good or bad was based on their perception of its realism (good) or lack of authenticity (bad). Interestingly, Ang found that elements of Dallas that were unreal and regarded as such at the denotative level were not considered unrealistic at the connotative level.
Much of the program’s popularity was based on the ease with which viewers could transition between the fiction of the program and the everyday lives. It gives rise to the “melodramatic imagination.” Essentially, Ang found that Dallas “is not a compensation for the presumed drabness of everyday life, nor a flight from it, but a dimension of it” (27).
From these findings, Ang posits “the ideology of mass culture,” the idea that “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28). This theory enabled Ang to lump viewers into four categories: those who strongly dislike the program because it is an example of mass culture; those who give the program an ironical viewing, in which the program is mocked for its melodrama and transformed into a comedic program—the pleasure of viewing results from the fact that the program is, in fact, bad and worthy of mockery; fans, who internalize the ideology of mass culture and appreciate the program for what it is; and the populist, who views with the contention that it is pointless to pass aesthetic judgment on the tastes of others. The first three positions signify an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
Ang concludes that the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
Main ideas: “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28).
-there is an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
- the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
V. Fiske’s Two Economies
Chapter two concludes with John Fiske’s argument that television inhabits two economies: financial, concerned with exchange values; and cultural, centered around “meanings, pleasures, and social identities” (32). Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous. Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33)
Fiske recognizes popular culture as a site of struggle between dominant forces, and diverts attention to how theses forces are coped with, resisted, or evaded.
Main ideas: Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous.
- Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33).
Key Terms:
Ideology of Mass Culture
Cultural Economy
Discourse
Encoding
Decoding:
Dominant-hegemonic
Negotiated
Oppositional
People:
John Storey
Stuart Hall
David Morley
Dorothy Hobson
Mary Ellen Brown
Tamar Liebs
Elihu Katz
Ien Ang
John Fiske
Questions:
1. What do you make of Storey’s objection to Hobson’s notion of infinite readings? (23)
2. Do you agree with Hobson’s idea that television programs can lead to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere? Why or why not?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
