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.Every text and every reading has a social and therefore politicaldimension, which is to be found partly in the structure of the text itself andpartly in the relation of the reading subject to that text.(Fiske 1987a: 273)The picture here is one of balance, but nevertheless one that depicts ideologicalsystems maintaining their purchase against significant competition.The even-handedness works to produce a consensual model of cultural production thatrecalls Hall s encoding/decoding explanations.Fiske ultimately distances himself from such a position in order to explain whythere is, in practice, no direct or necessary equation between popularity and ideo-logical unity.To do this, Fiske draws on, among others, John Hartley s Encouraging Signs: Television and the Power of Dirt, Speech and ScandalousCategories (1983), in which Hartley discusses television as a  dirty (sociallyunsanctioned) category that thrives on ambiguity and contradictions.Television s special quality, Hartley says, is its ability to  produce more meaningthan can be policed (1983: 76), a quality television producers deal with byattempting to limit their programme s potential for meaning.This, Hartleyargues, inevitably fails, as ambiguity  leaks into and out of the text.An  encour-aging sign of the weakness of the tenure of any hegemonic meaning, this leakageis the result of  semiotic excess , a proliferation of possible readings, an excess of97CENTRAL CATEGORI ESmeaning.Fiske (1986) suggests that this semiotic excess  not ideological unity is intrinsic to popular cultural forms, explaining both their popularity and theapparent unpredictability of reactions to them:I suggest that it is more productive to study television not in order to identifythe means by which it constructs subjects within the dominant ideology(though it undoubtedly and unsurprisingly works to achieve precisely thisend), but rather how its semiotic excess allows readers to construct subjectpositions that are theirs (at least in part), how it allows them to make mean-ings that embody strategies of resistance to the dominant, or negotiatelocally relevant inflections of it.(Fiske 1986: 213)Fiske s enterprise can here be understood as an attempt to explain how popularculture seems, on the one hand, to be at the mercy of the culture industries and,on the other hand, to exercise a stout resistance and even subversiveness at timesin its response to specific texts and their proposed meanings.The attribution ofambiguity to the text explains how texts might determine their preferred readingswhile still containing the potential for subversive or resistant  misreadings.In Television Culture, Fiske (1987b) mobilizes developments in audiencestudies, the dethroning of the text, and his sense of the subversiveness of pleasureto present a view of popular culture audiences that is many miles from the manip-ulated masses of  effects studies.Drawing on de Certeau s theorizing of thecreativity of popular culture, Fiske sees  the popular in rather a Brechtian way as a relatively autonomous, if subordinated, voice competing with the dominantfor representation.The making over of the dominant meanings in popularculture is seen as a successful political strategy that  empowers otherwise subor-dinated groups and individuals.5 The textual analysis this motivates is mostinterested in the production of politically progressive readings.The majority ofTelevision Culture deals with what Fiske calls  activated texts , those producedlargely through appropriation by their audience rather than, say, successful posi-tioning by their producers.These activated texts do not constitute an aberration,at the fringe of television s cultural function, but are among its defining charac-teristics:Television s open-ness, its textual contradictions and instability, enable it tobe readily incorporated into the oral culture of many and diverse groups inmany and diverse ways so that, while it may not in its broadcast mode be aform of folklore, it is at least able to serve folkloric functions for some of itsaudiences [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]