Power Plays Power Works

John Fiske, Black Hawk Hancock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317498551
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Now, more than 20 years since its initial release, John Fiske's classic text Power Plays Power Works remains both timely and insightful as a theoretically driven examination of the terrain where the politics of culture and the culture of politics collide.

Drawing on a diverse set of cultural sites - from alternative talk radio forums, museums, celebrity fandom, to social problems such as homelessness - Fiske traverses the topography of the American cultural landscape to highlight the ways that ordinary people creatively construct their social identities and relationships through the use of the resources available to them, while constrained by social conditions not of their own choosing. This important analysis provides a set of critical methodological and analytical tools to grapple with the complexities and struggles of contemporary social life.

A new introductory essay by former Fiske student Black Hawk Hancock entitled 'Learning How to Fiske: Theorizing Power, Knowledge, and Bodies in the 21st Century' elucidates Fiske's methods for today's students, providing them with the ultimate guide to thinking and analyzing like John Fiske; the art of 'Learning How to Fiske'.

Part One Power and Cultural Theory

1 Power Plays

DOI: 10.4324/9781315713625-2

An Introductory Instance

It is about 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday, 7 November 1989. As nearly a decade of Reaganomic policies draws to an end, a homeless man in a small Midwestern city slips Die Hard into his shelter’s VCR. Some fifteen or twenty other homeless men are in the same lounge, all of them white. Some are playing cards, some are reading, some talking, but most are just sitting. Tobacco smoke hangs in the air, and the supervisor sits at his desk just beyond the lounge’s always-open door. From here he can observe the men’s behavior in this lounge and in the non-smoking one next door.

The beginning of the movie flicks onto the screen, but the men pay little attention; most have seen it before, for it is one of the few violent, masculine movies among the “family” ones that are available to them at the local library. The couple of dollars charged at video rental stores is too much for these men, so they use the free collection at the public library and thus submit their cultural pleasures to a menu drawn up according to someone else’s notion of culture-in-the-public-interest as opposed to the commercial interests that inform the selection at the rental stores. Socially similar eyes watch over both the men’s behavior in the lounges and the movies on offer at the public library.

The movie, which has yet to grab their attention, is about a New York cop who goes to Los Angeles at Christmas to visit his estranged wife and daughter. She left him in order to build a career for herself and she is now a senior executive in the Nakatomi Corporation. The executives’ Christmas party, on the 32nd floor of their corporate headquarters, is invaded by a gang who hold the executives hostage for the $640 million in the vaults of the skyscraper. The narrative follows the lone hero as he gradually kills off the villains one by one while the LA police vainly try to storm the building from the outside. The final victory restores not only public law and order but also the law and order of a patriarchal marriage as the hero wins back his wife.

The casual glances by which the men have monitored the screen suddenly turn to rapt attention as the villains invade the executives’ party. The scene climaxes with the killing of Tagaki, the CEO. He is shot coldly and deliberately after refusing to yield the computer key to the vaults. The camera closes up on his impassive Asian-American face, which shows hardly a hint of fear as he says, “I cannot give you the code, you’ll just have to kill me.” “OK,” responds the villain, and he pulls the trigger. At the moment of death the screen explodes in red and the homeless men erupt in loud and enthusiastic cheers.

But their cheers are based as much on what has preceded the moment as on the moment itself. The scene that climaxes in the CEO’s death begins as his senior executives are rounded up by the gang. The sounds of muted corporate panic filling the room are abruptly silenced by the authoritative, teutonic voice of the leader: “Due to the Nakatomi Corporation’s legacy of greed around the globe they’re about to be taught a lesson of the real use of power. And you will witness it.” He then passes among them, reading Tagaki’s vita as he searches for him. Tagaki, the homeless men learn, emigrated from Japan in 1939, was interned during World War II, became a scholarship student at the University of California, earned a law degree from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard and then became President of Nakatomi Trading and Chairman of Nakatomi Investment Group. The details of educational success leading to corporate power and wealth are an excessive display of what the homeless men lack, but which our ideology has taught them is their right to desire, if not possess.

A later scene is also greeted with cheers and whistles. The villains have gained control of the skyscraper and watch from above as the police bring up an armored vehicle equipped with a battering ram. It is, incidentally, the one used in “real life” by the LAPD to smash into suspected crack houses. The villains fire a rocket which disables the vehicle and prepare to fire another, tactically unnecessary, one. From his hidden vantage point the hero “silently” begs them not to. But they do, and the camera lingers on the total destruction of the vehicle and the cops inside it. The homeless men’s cheers drown the sounds of destruction and panic.

This is the high point of the villains’ success; from here on, the hero gradually gains the upper hand, and the men’s interest in the movie gradually wanes. They switch off the tape halfway through the hero’s final battle with the remaining villains, and replace it with one of Robocop. They have no interest in watching the restoration of law and order.

The men’s pleasures were not centered exclusively on the success of the villains, however, for they also enjoyed the hero’s victories against the villains, particularly in the earlier parts of the movie. The movie shows a variety of forms of social power in conflict with challenges from apparently weaker opponents. In each power conflict, typically represented through spectacular violence, the homeless men sided with the weaker party and took pleasure in any tactical victories won, however temporarily. The power of the Nakatomi Corporation to accumulate enormous wealth and control the lives of people all around the world was made manifest in its huge skyscraper: in addition to the $640 million in its vaults, its topmost floors were luxuriously furnished with antiques and high art interspersed with detailed models of its global capital projects. The gang of villains, well organized and equipped though they were, were clearly weaker than the corporation, so the homeless men took great pleasure in their spectacular destruction of the symbols of corporate wealth and power. Similarly, they also sided against the villains and with the hero, for he was alone and equipped only with a handgun, his physical prowess, and his ingenuity. In the early stages of the movie at least, the men allied themselves with the hero against the villains but maintained their allegiance to the villains against the corporation and the police force. The more ground the hero won and the more closely he became aligned with the police force, the less interest they showed in either him or the movie.

And they had no interest at all in watching the hero’s final victory, for that carried within it the victories of the police, of the corporation and thus of the social order which, in their view, has decisively rejected them.¹

Power and The People

Despite its vaunted victory in the Cold War, the US in the 1990s is a deeply unsettled society. The street people in almost every city are but one symptom of this instability: the cheers of these particular homeless men are a tiny, localized instance of it. But the minuteness of the moment does not mean that it is insignificant; indeed, as I hope to show, when we understand all that is going on behind these cheers, their significance is immense.

This book begins with an account of those cheers because I see them as a specific instance of a much broader paradox: at the very moment when its leadership has pushed the US into a position of pre-eminence in a “one superpower world” the people have lost faith in that leadership and in the system that empowers them. Poll after poll shows a widespread disillusionment with Washington, its politicians and its policies. One of the consequences of this disenchantment with “Washington” is a widespread sense that some of the most important political arenas lie outside the party political system_ so the streets of LA and Crown Heights, the doors of abortion clinics, the courts and the school curricula have joined, if not displaced, the voting booth as key sites of political action. Equally significant is the low involvement in any form of political activity, whether by ballot or by activism_ this is not necessarily a sign of apathy, but may rather indicate that many of the struggles of everyday life take place in arenas that traditional politics have been slow to recognize. This oft-bemoaned “political apathy” does not mean that the US is an apathetic society—far from it. There is a surging vitality, energy and creativity that makes US society so exciting, restless and unstable: the fact that those who possess this energy often direct it to areas of their lives outside the domain of traditional politics is a problem for political analysts, but not necessarily for the people.

If some of the arenas of political struggles are changing, so too are the frameworks used to comprehend the issues within them. In particular, the frame of “left wing/right wing” appears to have lost its explanatory usefulness for many people. This loss is in step with the attempt of both Republicans and Democrats to occupy the center: the centrism of the two parties is the public equivalent of the diminishing significance of the difference between left and right in the public consciousness. The difference may not have disappeared, but it has become only one of a number of frames, often not the most salient, by which social differences and therefore politics are made to make sense. A recent study by Russell Neuman and colleagues of how people “framed” current political issues found that the “left–right frame” was one of the least frequently used.² Two frames were clearly more common than any others: one produced the key social difference as that between “the haves” and “the have-nots,” and the other divided social issues into “those where I can exert some influence” and “those where I cannot.” Both these frames can be seen at work in comprehending “Washington” as a place of privilege and self-seeking that differs from the US that “ordinary people” inhabit: Washington is framed as the domain of “the haves” (whether they are Republican or Democrat matters less than their difference from “the have-nots”), and what goes on there is understood as lying beyond the influence of, and therefore of no relevance to, the rest of the population.

“The haves” and “the have-nots” are not objective social categories like the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat” or “Blacks” and “whites.”³ They are mobile categories, formed to fit the conditions of their use and their user: in some social relations a middle-class white woman, for example, may be one of “the haves,” while in others she may be a “have-not.” “The haves” is a category which can only be made and used from below—it is a construction of “the have-nots” and as such is tactical rather than objective.

So, too, “issues where I can make a difference” (and where, therefore, my limited energies are best directed) is also a tactical or strategic category, constructed by the user in its conditions of use: no particular issue can, on its own terms only, be objectively included in, or excluded from, it.

This tactical mobility of ways of making social sense, together with a multiplicity of axes of social difference (of which class, gender, race, and age may be the most frequently prominent) constitute the world of highly elaborated late capitalism as poststructural rather than structural. A structural world is one that can be understood by relatively stable categories in a fixed relationship to each other: such a world can be analyzed to reveal the “deep structure” that invisibly organizes those categories and reproduces itself in all domains of social experience. Understanding this deep structure is, then, the key to understanding the social reality it produces. Arguably the three “definers” of twentieth-century thought—Saussure, Marx and Freud—were all structuralists, in that they offered explanations of language, capitalist society and the psyche in terms of deep structures that organized all the infinite variety of experiences that each can offer. “Left wing/right wing” is a product of a deeply structured binary opposition that has been used to organize most of the political thinking and action of this century. At the global level, this opposition surfaces in that between capitalism and communism, which in international relations produced the “Cold War” between the USA and its allies, and the USSR and its allies. Nationally it emerged in the “two-party system” of the right and the left, of conservatism, capital and the higher classes ranged against socialism, labor and the working classes. In the workplace, management and the bosses were set off from labor, those paid salaries calculated annually distinguished from those paid wages calculated hourly. These clear divisions in the way one earned one’s money translated, in the realm of consciousness, into a sense of class identity—an awareness of where and with whom one stood in the social order whose prime determinate was economic. Under these conditions, it made sense to theorize class as the main structuring principle of consciousness, social relations and international relations. Social class was the key to both the analysis and solution of social problems because class relations were where this deep structure surfaced in its economic, material, and thus most immediately experienced form.

It can be argued that early capitalism in both Europe and the US was a more structurally determined social system than that of contemporary capitalism, and that it was thus appropriate that structural theories should have been developed to explain it. But though the structural organizers of capitalism (particularly class difference) are still with us, their determinations have become more indirect and their structural relations more contradictory and more fluid. Contemporary capitalist societies are too highly elaborated to be understood by a structural model, and, as a result, class can no longer occupy a position of theoretical centrality but must take its place alongside other axes around which social identities and social systems are organized. It is still important, but has been joined by race/ethnicity and gender as perhaps the core axes of social difference. But even this core is not certain, for other axes, such as age, marital status, religion, region, locality are all important and, in any instance, any of them may join the core, or dislodge one of the core axes from its centrality.

But while class may have lost its privileged position in social theory the problems addressed by traditional class analysis have not. Economic inequality, the center of class theory, has grown greater not less, but it is now distributed along any or all of these social axes. Children are actually the poorest social category in the US (and in the world), but Black and Latino children are poorer than white children, and children in a single-parent family poorer than those living with two. Presumably (and I have seen no statistics to support this hypothesis), Black and Latino single-parented children are poorer than whites. African Americans and Latinos in general are disproportionately poor, but their poor are poorer than white poor. Single-parented families of whatever race are poorer than dual-parented ones, and those parented by a woman are poorer than those by a man. After divorce a woman’s standard of living goes down and she heads towards, and often into, poverty while that of her ex-husband rises. The sick are poorer than the healthy, and the handicapped poorer than the whole. Many of the poor (though far from the majority) are, by other standards, middle class—some of the homeless recently owned homes and businesses, many were once married to men who still do. Poverty, then, is distributed by age, race, gender, class, and marital status (at least) and while some of these axes of distribution may be in general more salient than others, in any particular case they may come together in any relative proportion. The ingredients are those of poverty in general, but the way they are mixed and cooked can vary widely and produce widely different results.

The homeless people we observed watching Die Hard are white and male, and these axes of race and gender configure their economic deprivation in particular ways. The way in which they are members of “the have-nots” are particular to them, and not necessarily typical of the homeless in general. Because they are white and male (normally categories of privilege) their homelessness will differ from that of some others in terms of gender and race, but be similar in terms of economics. But however multiaxial is the distribution of poverty, class still counts, but it counts differently from when it was the salient social axis.

Even in its most overt forms, class difference is always articulated with other axes. We cannot understand the large category of “the working poor” simply by referring to the fact that it takes more than one and a half full-time jobs at the minimum wage to lift a family of four up to the poverty line. The working poor are, of course, a product of class politics working overtly in setting the minimum wage at $4.35 and less visibly in ensuring constant structural unemployment. But these class relations interact with race relations, not only because minimum wage jobs are disproportionately held by non-whites, but also because the meagreness of the wage is often “justified” by reference to “third” world sweatshops, which are “our” competitors: the “third” world is thus understood as the racially distinguished working class of the “first.”⁴ When relations between the “first” and “second” worlds were preeminent, class was central, but in those between the “first” and the “third” economic relations necessarily intertwine race with class. So, too, the classist policies by which homelessness is organized and controlled from above have a racial and gendered dimension that will be discussed later in this chapter.

This book, then, is about culture and politics, mainly about the politics of culture, but also, necessarily, about the culture of politics. In it I hope to contribute to a poststructural political analysis which, unlike some poststructuralism, is both socially critical and directed to understanding specific struggles that have clear structural oppositions within their poststructural conditions. This form of poststructuralism can, I believe, do for the late twentieth century what critical structural analysis did for its third quartile. The theoretical core around which the arguments and analyses of this book are organized derives from three main sources: a Foucauldian theory of power and bodies in argument with structural Marxist ones of ideology, consciousness and class; a Gramscian account of struggles (inflected by the work of Vološinov, Hall, and Williams) between the power-bloc and the people; and a Bakhtinian sense of the vitality of the people and the constriction of the power-bloc.⁵

At the book’s heart lie the numerous modes of opposition between the power-bloc and the people. Stuart Hall makes the point well:

The people versus the power-bloc: this, rather than class-against-class, is the central line of contradiction around which the terrain of culture is polarized. Popular culture, especially, is organized around the contradiction: the popular forces versus the power-bloc.⁶

One form of this contradiction is that between “the haves” and “the have-nots,” sometimes seen as that between “Washington” and “the rest of the US” (or “the rest of us”), or, in its most ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Learning How to Fiske: Theorizing Power, Knowledge, and Bodies in the 21st Century
• PART ONE Power and Cultural Theory
• PART TWO Controlling Bodies
• PART THREE Representing and Knowing
• PART FOUR White Power, Black Power
• Appendix: The John Fiske Reading List
• Index