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John Fiske Quotes

Total quotes: 5
“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
“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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