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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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John Fiske explains how it is quite possible to see Madonna as the product of patriarchal capitalism. Her early career shows the typically exploitative approach of the capitalist pop music industry, exploitative of both her and her teenage girl fans. Such a reading of the representation of Madonna would be supported by the fact that her videos concentrate on her sexuality and often show her subordinated to men. Thus she can be seen as 'hailing' [her fans] as feminine subjects within patriarchy, and as such [as] an agent of patriarchal hegemony.
This reading assumes, however, that Madonna's fans are 'cultural dopes'. The later Fiske, developing de
Certeau's views of the tactics of resistance used by audiences in constructing counterhegemonic readings for media texts, is not prepared to accept that media audiences are cultural dopes.
What people in capitalist societies have in common is the dominant ideology and the experience of subordination or disempowerment. The economic needs of the cultural industries are thus perfectly in line with the disciplinary and ideological requirements of the existing social order, and all cultural commodities must therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, bear the forces that we can call centralizing, disciplinary, hegemony, massifying, commodifying (the adjectives proliferate almost endlessly).
Opposing these forces, however, are the cultural needs of the people, this shifting matrix of social allegiances that transgress categories of the individual, or class or gender or race or any category that is stable within the social order. These popular forces transform the cultural commodity into a cultural resource, pluralize the meanings and pleasures it offers, evade or resist its disciplinary efforts, fracture its homogeneity and coherence, raid or poach upon its terrain.All popular culture is a process of struggle, of struggle over the meanings of social experience, of one's personhood and its relations to the social order and of the texts and commodities of that order. reading relations reproduce and re-enact social relations, so power, resistance, and evasion are necessarily structured into them.
Fiske (1989) p.28
He therefore sees Madonna as 'a site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal control and feminine resistance, of capitalism and the subordinate, of the adult and the young'.
In his examination of Madonna, using a mixture of semiotic analysis of the texts and ethnographic study of the meanings her fans actually construct for her, Fiske demonstrates how Madonna enables her fans to reject the subject position constructed by the dominant patriarchal ideology.
It's worth pointing out that Kellner (1995), who is concerned to see the development of what he terms a 'multi-perspectival' cultural studies, does not seem to find quite the satisfying symmetry which Fiske finds between the fans' assertions and his own semiotic analysis of Madonna's texts. Kellner sees her as 'a site of genuine contradiction'. Madonna presents a multiplicity of shifting identities and personae. This may be empowering to her adolescent fans as they try on a variety of different identities, but Kellner draws our attention also to the market imperatives behind these shifting identities in a media market where rapid turnover is the order of the day. Fashions change bewilderingly, not simply because fans change their minds about what they like and move on to seek an alternative, but also because the media industries are driven to seek to create fashions to stimulate market growth. To survive in a rapidly changing market-place, Madonna, one of whose many identities is definitely shrewd businesswoman, needs to change with it and, if she can, to strive to be one of the motive forces behind such change. She is driven to seek to maintain her old fans whilst gathering new ones amongst the next generation. It's the same balancing act as has to be performed by any established product. Guinness, for example, faced in the 80s the conundrum of how to maintain its loyal and essential, but unfortunately ageing, drinkership whilst at the same time gathering new drinkers amongst the designer lager generation. Madonna may be a more significant cultural icon than Guinness, consuming Madonna may be a more complex and multi-layered process than drinking a pint (though I'm not so sure), but the market realities which both these products have to face is essentially the same. By excluding consideration of political economy from his account and concentrating solely on the cultural economy, Fiske inevitably provides a one-sided and impoverished version of the Madonna phenomenon when compared with Kellner's multi-perspectival approach. In principle, of course, that's not necessarily a criticism. Not every researcher has the skills, time or will to research all perspectives; there is no reason in principle why we should require of an ethnographic study of an audience or semiotic analysis of a text that it should also be a study of the economic determinants of the production and marketing process. The problem with Fiske, though, is that he presents his account as if it is the whole account, as if, despite much left-wing rhetoric in his work, the audience is resisting, the audience is empowered and that is necessarily positive and ultimately emancipatory, whatever the audience's material circumstances, political engagement and access to real power may be.
As Robert Hughes, art critic of Time magazine, has remarked about recent cultural studies work on Madonna, the proposition that 'the blonde bombshell explodes the established order of power', 'undermines capitalist constructions' and 'rejects core bourgeois epistemes ... would certainly be news to my own employers at Time/Warner who recently paid Madonna $60,000,000 for the rights to her work. Some rejection.'
Murdock (1997 : 99)
de Certeau's views
Fiske's views
Ang on Dallas
Brown on soap operas
Hermes on women's magazines
Morley: The Nationwide Audience
Morley: Family Television
Radway: Reading the Romance
Criticisms of reception studies
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