John Fiske > Quotes

“In the economies of late capitalism leisure displaces labor, consumption displaces production, and commodities become the instruments of leisure, identity, and social relations.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Because men's idea of masculinity can rarely be realized at work they have developed a masculine style for their leisure and social activities that consists of excessive signs of masculinity in an exaggerated and compensatory display. The same gap between the ideological ideal and social experience also explains the sexism and aggressiveness of much adolescent male style, for, like lower-class men, young boys are also denied the social means to exercise the power that our ideology tells them is the prerequisite of their masculinity.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Gless's lexical shift from "sexiness" through "femininity" to a "real strong lady" is a discursive shift and therefore has sociopolitical dimension. "Sexiness" is from an explicitly patriarchal discourse, "femininity" is from a discourse that attempts to naturalize gender construction and difference in terms of the status quo and is therefore implicitly patriarchal, whereas "real strong lady" is from a discourse that consciously opposes and exposes both the explicit and implicit patriarchy of "sexiness" and "femininity".”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“On the other hand, identification as a relationship of audience to performance disguised the arbitrarily constructed nature of the performance and encouraged the audience to experience the representation as though it were the real, and, in particular, to see characters as individually real people. This blurring of the distinction between the representation and the real disguised the fact that people and incidents were on stage to perform ideologically determined actions and made them appear as innocent, objective relections of reality. It made them appear prodcuts of nature, not of culture.
Identification encouraged the audience to share the experiences and emotions of the characters and thus produced a feeling audience, not a thinking one, an accepting not an interrogative one, and one that understood incidents and actions through individual experience rather than through a sociopolitical framework.”
― John Fiske

“There is no pleasure in being "duped" by the text into a helpless viewer, but there is considerable pleasure in selectively viewing the text for points of identification and distance, in controlling one's relationship with the represented characters in the light of one's own social and psychological context.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Identification then becomes a process of imaginative wish fulfillment which can be, and is, criticized from at least two points of view. The moralists criticize it on the grounds that it is mere escapism, and in encouraging people to imagine a better existence for themselves discourages them from working to achieve it in reality. At the other end of the spectrum, the ideologists argue that identification is the process whereby the values of the dominant ideology are naturalized into the desires, almost the instincts, of the individual, and are thus endlessly reproduced and perpetuated.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Chambers (1986) argues that contemporary metropolitan society produces a culture of the spectacle in which the realization of the "self" is not achieved in the depth of one's inner being, but on the surface, through style, through image, through "a series of theatrical gestures" (p.11).”
― John Fiske

“it is impossible for a free people to govern a dependent people despotically without endangering its own freedom.”
― John Fiske, The American Revolution

“The alienated audiences was one that was aware of the performance as an arbitrary construction of the real, of the difference between players and characters, and was therefore aware that the people and incidents on stage were there to perform social an ideological actions that could only be understood in terms of their relationship to the dominant ideology. Alienation produced a thinking, interrogative socially aware audience.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Anything out of control is always a potential threat, and always calls up moral, legal, and aesthetic powers to discipline it. The signs of the subordinate out of control terrify the forces of order (whether moral, legal, or aesthetic), for they constitute a constant reminder of both how fragile social control is and how it is resented; they demonstrate how escaping social control, even momentarily, produces a sense of freedom.”
― John Fiske, Ulysses S. Grant, an Illustrated Biography

“directions the quantity of achievement has been so marked”
― John Fiske, A Century of Science

“the”
― John Fiske, The American Revolution

“What are you, where did you come from, and whither are you bound?”— the question which from Homer’s days has been put to the wayfarer in strange lands — is likewise the all-absorbing question which man is ever asking of the universe of which he is himself so tiny yet so wondrous a part.”
― John Fiske, The Unseen World and other Essays

“In capitalist societies there is no so-called authentic folk culture against which to measure the “inauthenticity” of mass culture, so bemoaning the loss of the authentic is a fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia.”
― John Fiske