Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The cultural field 217
circulation that is crucial to its popularity occurs in the parallel economy – the
cultural (311).
Whereas the financial economy is primarily concerned with exchange value, the cultural
is primarily focused on use – ‘meanings, pleasures, and social identities’ (ibid.).
There is of course dialogical interaction between these separate, but related, economies.
Fiske gives the example of the American television programme Hill Street Blues. The
programme was made by MTM and sold to NBC. NBC then ‘sold’ the potential audience
to Mercedes Benz, the sponsors of the programme. This all takes place in the
financial economy. In the cultural economy, the television series changes from commodity
(to be sold to NBC) to a site for the production of meanings and pleasures for
its audience. And in the same way, the audience changes from a potential commodity
(to be sold to Mercedes Benz) to a producer (of meanings and pleasures). He argues
that ‘the power of audiences-as-producers in the cultural economy is considerable’
(313). The power of the audience, he contends,
derives from the fact that meanings do not circulate in the cultural economy in the
same way that wealth does in the financial. They are harder to possess (and thus to
exclude others from possessing), they are harder to control because the production
of meaning and pleasure is not the same as the production of the cultural commodity,
or of other goods, for in the cultural economy the role of consumer does
not exist as the end point of a linear economic transaction. Meanings and pleasures
circulate within it without any real distinction between producers and consumers
(ibid.).
The power of the consumer derives from the failure of producers to predict what will
sell. ‘Twelve out of thirteen records fail to make a profit, TV series are axed by the
dozen, expensive films sink rapidly into red figures (Raise the Titanic is an ironic example
– it nearly sank the Lew Grade empire)’ (ibid.). In an attempt to compensate for
failures, the culture industries produce ‘repertoires’ of goods in the hope of attracting
an audience; whereas the culture industries seek to incorporate audiences as commodity
consumers, the audience often excorporates the text to its own purposes. Fiske cites
the example of the way Australian Aboriginal viewers appropriated Rambo as a figure
of resistance, relevant to their own political and cultural struggles. He also cites the
example of Russian Jews watching Dallas in Israel and reading it as ‘capitalism’s selfcriticism’
(320).
Fiske argues that resistance to the power of the powerful by those without power in
Western societies takes two forms, semiotic and social. The first is mainly concerned
with meanings, pleasures and social identities; the second is dedicated to transformations
of the socio-economic system. He contends that ‘the two are closely related,
although relatively autonomous’ (316). Popular culture operates mostly, ‘but not
exclusively’, in the domain of semiotic power. It is involved in ‘the struggle between
homogenisation and difference, or between consensus and conflict’ (ibid.). In this
sense, popular culture is a semiotic battlefield in which audiences constantly engage in