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John Fiske Quotes

Total quotes: 9
“Popular discrimination is concerned with functionality rather than quality, for it is concerned with the potential uses of the text in everyday life.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism, Popularity, Populism, Virality
“Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Culture Industry, Popular Culture, Relevance, Social Tools
“Relevance is discovered or produced by the reader; it is the moment and process of production in the cultural economy that takes the text beyond its role as commodity in the financial. Popular discrimination, then, does not operate between or within texts in terms of their quality, but rather in the identification and selection of points of pertinence between the text and everyday life.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Defining Quality, Relevance, Relevant, Thought Catalog
“The aesthetics of the bourgeoisie demand that their art should be valued to the degree of its appeal to human and aesthetic universals rather than to the specifics of the here and now: even though some art may be 'realistic' and refer explicitly to the details of the everyday, the middle-class 'appreciation' must be able to look through these to the 'universals' underlying them. Relevance to one's immediate social context is not a middle-class criterion for the evaluation and enjoyment of art.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Aesthetics, Media Class, Univeral vs. Particular
“The left's concern for the interests and wellbeing of the powerless and the weak, and its belief that such powerlessness and weakness are the results of the social system, and not of the inadequacies of the people within it, leads it to propose a political program of social action. The right has been eager to equate any such program with an increase in the power of the power-bloc and thus a reduction of people's ability to exercise control over their own lives. The right has been able to turn this popular desire for control to its own interests by articulating it with its own ideology of individualism. It has therefore been able to construct and have circulated a right-wing set of meanings of the opposition between the people and the power-bloc, a set of meanings that are relevant to popular culture because they align the people with individualism and freedom and the power-bloc with state control. By its use of a populist rhetoric the right has, in the domain of party politics at least, been able to define the left as anti-popular and itself as concerned with the interests of the people, and at the same time has been able to disguise the paradoxical nature of the definition.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Individualism, Political Rhetoric Tricks, Powerlessness, Social Systems, Leftism, Liberalism, Ideology, Politics
“It is the social system that makes violence popular, not the 'baseness' of the citizens: the roots of violence are to be found in society, not in individual morality. So it is predictable that the movement to eradicate violence from our screens would be led by middle-class moralists. By 'blaming' social violence on television they avoid having to consider the uncomfortable idea that it might be their own position of social privilege that actually provokes most violent and criminal activity among the disadvantaged. Television and the apparent gullibility of its 'mass' audience become convenient scapegoats upon which to displace the social responsibility of their own class position.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Class, Mass Audiences, Media, Media Wars, Scapegoat, Television, Violence
“There is little historical evidence to suggest that any form of radical art has produced a discernible political or social effectivity. In saying this, I have no wish to marginalize radical or avant-garde art any more than it has already marginalized itself, but I do wish to question the claims that radical art is politically more effective than the progressive uses of popular art. Barthes points to the political limitations of the avant-garde when he argues that it challenges the bourgeoisie only in the spheres of aesthetics and ethics, but in no way disturbs its economic or political power. Any effectivity it may have is confined to marginal shifts within the bourgeoisie itself.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Poetry Does Nothing, Radical Art, Social Change
“The intensity of concentration required to play the games results in the loss of social identity and the ideology it bears; it is an evasion of the forces of subordination. The player's body interacts with the signifiers on the screen in a pure eroticism of the text, and the muscular spasm followed by partial collapse of the body that marks the end of the game, the loss of the final life, is as orgasmic a pleasure as any symbolic experience can offer.”
— John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
Tagged: Powerful Art, Video Games
“Popular discrimination is thus quite different from the aesthetic discrimination valued so highly by the bourgeoisie and institutionalized so effectively in the critical industry. “Quality” —a word beloved of the bourgeoisie because it universalizes the class specificity of its own art forms and cultural tastes—is irrelevant here. Aesthetic judgments are antipopular—they deny the multiplicity of readings and the multiplicity of functions that the same text can perform as it is moved through different allegiances within the social order. Aesthetics centers its values in the textual structure and thus ignores these social pertinences through which text and everyday life are interconnected. Aesthetics denies the transience of popular art, it refuses to recognize that the social order changes and thus that art that is relevant today will be irrelevant tomorrow. It refuses to recognize the shifting nature of the allegiances that constitute “the popular,” that what the people are today they will not be tomorrow and thus what is popular today will not be popular tomorrow.”
— John Fiske, understanding popular culture
Tagged: Thought Catalog History
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