The Cultural Industry as a Part of the Capitalist Society and Fiskes Argument - Literature review Example

 When the Mini first rolled off the production line in 1959, its producers BMC could never have predicted the cult status the little car would go on to have. Designed as a result of the fuel shortage brought about by the Suez crisis in 1956, the Mini was intended as a cheap and economical run around town for Mums and Grannies. However the Mini was soon to have the likes of Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, not to mention Enzo Ferrari, at its wheel. So, what happened? How did the Mini go from merely functional to so funky that in 2000 its new owners BMW re-launched it, setting the cool ball rolling all over again? As John Fiske argues in his article ‘The Commodities of Culture’, the answer lies in the ‘popular creativity of users’ of the Mini in what he defines as ‘the cultural economy’. The crux if Fiske’s argument lies in the fundamental difference which he recognises between the ‘financial economy’ – that which is openly recognised as lying at the heart of the capitalist system – and what he defines as the ‘cultural economy’. He takes television as his example when he refers to these two economies in relation to the two economies of television. What he means by this is as follows: Initially a standard financial exchange can be seen to be taking place when a television program is sold to a distributor. Here the producer, commodity and consumer can easily be identified. However, unlike with other commodities the story doesn’t end there. This is because television is a cultural commodity, not merely a material one. Thus, once the program is sold it turns from commodity to producer, producing an audience which can then be sold to the consuming advertisers. This he refers to as the cultural industry. The cultural industry is central to Fiske’s argument In this way, Fiske argues, this cultural industry is just as much a part of the capitalist society as what would normally be recognised as industry, producing tangible commodities, in such a society. Its product is what Fiske refers to as the ‘commodified audience’ which can be sold to the advertisers. He uses Smythe to reinforce his argument, showing that capitalism has moved into the realm of leisure, commodifying people as it goes. Fiske’s argument is not doubt sound as far as his analysis of the functioning of a capitalist economy is concerned and certainly, given the constant lamentation of parents’ groups over Pepsi sponsored sports stadiums and the like, this development is unmistakeably in evidence. However, his bombastic tone and clear anti-capitalist stance make his arguments, accurate as they may be, a little hard to swallow. The tone of his article may be well suited to the Marxist-fuelled criticism of the Seventies but today it sounds dated and over the top. However Fiske does not leave the argument here, but moves beyond Smythe going on to undertake a deeper analysis of the case and this is where his originality of thought begins to take shape. He begins to discuss the idea that consumers also attach ‘cultural value’ to all the commodities that they consume, not just to television programs. He explains that commodities have cultural as well as functional values and from this cultural value is born the cultural economy. This economy functions differently to the financial economy, Fiske states, since ‘meanings and pleasures’ are circulated, rather than money. The audience therefore makes the transition from commodity to producer in Fiske’s system, producing the aforementioned meanings and pleasures. Thus, the original commodity in the financial systems becomes a ‘text’ in the cultural economy, full of potential meanings and pleasures. There is by now therefore no real consumer but rather a circulation of meanings, thereby avoiding commodification. This is a neat analysis and convincing for its division of meanings from commodification. It therefore fits well into Fiske’s largely anti-capitalist stance. However, perhaps the biggest short-coming of this argumentation is Fiske’s denial of a person’s ability to produce their own commodities and his reliance on a system of production that gives credibility to his claims. While this theory is internally consistent it does not engage fully enough with external realities. Fiske states that ‘we live in an industrial society, so of course our popular culture is an industrialized culture’. In order to understand ‘popular culture’ in Fiske’s terms it is worth making reference to his book Understanding Popular Culture. Here Fiske reiterates what lies at the heart of this article – the contradictory nature between industry and people. He therefore concludes that this contradiction has a necessary impact on the nature of culture. He states that ‘mass culture is such a contradiction in terms that it cannot exist. A homogeneous, externally produced culture cannot be sold ready-made to the masses: culture simply does not work like that’. (Fiske 1991: 21). Rather, Fiske argues, there exists a popular culture – one created by the people as a result of their variation and diversity. He specifies that ‘popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industry can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture’. An understanding of these concepts is essential for a better grasp of Fiske’s theory. He then goes on to declare that ‘with very few and very marginal exceptions, people cannot and do not produce their own commodities’. Unfortunately he does not go into more detail over this sweeping generalisation which is a key-stone of his argument. With the birth of the internet people have been able, through tools such as blogs and myspace.com, to create and diffuse their own cultural commodities like never before. Indeed with access to instant online self publication, anyone with an internet connection can share their creativity with the world. Further, websites such as ebay.com have for the first time allowed people to sell the commodities they produce without the need for a huge financial outlay. Cottage industries are therefore once more able to participate in the financial market. While the fundamentals of Fiskes’s argument are unquestionably accurate, these short comings are a limitation. However if the belligerent tone of his article is laid aside, Fiske’s article makes for engaging reading. What he very successfully manages to do is to analyse the ‘opposing forces’ to capitalism of the cultural needs of the people. What he means by this is this is the shifting and ever changing set of allegiances which often deny specific categorisation. While the financial economy, based on the capitalist model, attempts to appeal to what people have in common and deny difference, the cultural economy continually pluralizes the meanings and pleasures it offers. Rather than a class struggle, Fiske sides with Hall in recognising a struggle of the ‘popular force versus the power bloc’. The power bloc in this case is the unifying nature of the financial economy while the popular force is the multi faceted cultural economy. It is in this way, Fiske argues, that it represents an opposing force. Fiske maintains that while capitalism requires some degree of diversity, social differences go beyond that which capitalism requires. Capitalism can exploit gender differences by targeting men and women differently, but it has no use for feminism, based as it is on a patriarchal arrangement. Similarly while racial differences work in capitalism’s favour, black separatism holds not benefits for it. In this way they move beyond the control of capitalism. Capitalism, Fiske suggests, prefers difference based on class division. This allows it to fracture society and maintain a form of control. The class system is at the heart of the capitalist system to the extent that legislation and government controls are based around it. Indeed the wealthy can only maintain their position as a result of the existing social order which maintains that ‘social subjectivities required by the economic system’. The openness of popular culture to a plethora of interpretation irrespective of class difference moves against this rigidity and promotes the fluidity of thought and inter-relations which is in opposition to the capitalist system. The proof which Fiske provides for this argument lies in an investigation into the workings of the advertising industry. His evidence is both compelling and well measured and its optimistic tone adds to its credibility. He states that the amount of effort and money spent on the advertising industry is evidence for how wide the gap is between the social diversity required by the economic system and the actual amount of social diversity in reality. He argues that social diversity far exceeds that required by the system which is why advertising is in a constant struggle to keep pace. Fiske concludes from this that there is a vast amount of advertising because it can never achieve its aim ‘of containing social diversity within the needs of capitalism and of reducing the relative autonomy of the cultural economy from the financial’. This is an interesting and largely convincing way of supporting his theory of a cultural economy which functions apart from the financial economy. It is a shame, therefore, that Fiske does not elaborate on his choice of the phrase ‘relative autonomy’. He uses this term several times throughout his article but fails to qualify what he intends by ‘relative’. Clearly there is some degree of reliance of the cultural economy of the financial since a relatively small percentage of commodities are produce by the consumers themselves. A discussion of how autonomous it really is would help to significantly reinforce Fiske’s theory. It is, in fact, necessary to have knowledge of Fiske’s other works in order to understand this distinction. In Television Culture Fiske argues for an ‘absence of any direct sign of [an audiences] role in the financial economy which liberates them from its constraints.’ In this way he argues that the cultural economy has power independent of the financial economy. This power ‘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...they are harder to control [because] meanings and pleasures circulate in it without any real distinction between producers and consumer’. (Fiske 1987: 313) This statement helps to clarify the relatively autonomous nature of the cultural economy. Fiske draws a distinction between the success of advertising to sell to manufacturers and distributors, which obviously participate fully in the capitalist system and the comparatively difficult task of selling to individuals, who clearly don’t fit into such categorisation. Clearly saturation of the market accounts for some of this failure but the truth of this phenomenon is widely recognised. He supports this claim by mentioning that eighty to ninety percent of new products introduced into the market place fail in spite of extensive advertising campaigns. Fiske, however, remains uncharacteristically optimistic in the face of what he regards as a sustained advertising bombardment. He does not believe that people, and especially children, are commodified by advertising and rather regards their assimilation of jingles into playground rhymes or taunts as a modification ‘for their own cheeky resistive subcultural purposes.’ He argues that in this way the children turned the advertising text into their own popular culture. He cites two recent surveys demonstrating the ineffectiveness of most advertising and in this way confirms his argument that the cultural economy is resistant to the power bloc of the financial economy. This theory has also been taken up by Abercrombie in his article ‘Authority and Consumer Society’. He too maintains an optimistic view of the extent to which advertising manages to control consumers and his arguments re-enforce Fiske’s, lending weight and credibility to the sustainability of his arguments. He, like Fiske, divides his article into an analysis of a power struggle, this time between what he terms as ‘producer’ and consumer’. (Abercrombie 1994: 44). He mentions the fact that advertising is now consumer rather than producer lead and makes use of market research to try to assess the desires of the consumer. Fiske’s theory that the advertiser is constantly chasing is brought to mind as too is his idea that people are multi-faceted and not easily contained within classifications. Abercrombie (53) also supports the idea that the consumer ultimately resists advertising, citing consumer protest groups as a manifestation of this phenomenon. Abercrombie clearly puts Fiske’s theoretical ideas into a factual, reality based framework. That they stand up to this test is a testament to the validity and internal consistency of Fiske’s theory. So, how does this analysis help to explain the phenomenon of the Mini? If the cultural economy is supposed to resist the financial economy and if the Mini is merely a consumable commodity, how did it weave itself into the very fabric of popular culture? Fiske has the answer to this question. He concludes that ‘if a particular commodity is to be made part of popular culture, it must offer opportunities for resisting or evasive uses or readings, and these opportunities must be accepted’. It is exactly in this way that the Mini became a cult car. The original intention of the car was subsumed by an ‘evasive reading’ as Fiske would say, which meant that it became seen as a symbol of youth and an expression of independent thinking not just a cheap way of getting to the shops. In fact the coolest Mini was the modified version, such as George Harrison’s psychedelic car, showing an active subversion of the functional for the outlandish. In fact the story of the Mini fits perfectly into the two economy models which Fiske argues for in his article. BMW’s choice to re-launch the Mini in 2000 also fits into Fiske’s model. Fiske argues that the financial economy is always on the heels of tactics of resistance, aiming to transfer them out of the cultural economy and back into the financial one. He mentions the example of ripping jeans stating that ‘tearing or bleaching one’s jeans is a tactic of resistance; the industry’s incorporation of this into its production system is a strategy of containment.’ Thus BMW’s re-launch is also a strategy of containment. The Mini the second time around is not sold on is economy but rather on its status of cool and quirky. In this way BMW have appropriated the sense of Mini which was circulating in the popular culture and placed it into the financial economy. In fact, many Mini enthusiasts were horrified by the new BMW version. This is because once the car is return to the economic economy it loses its cultural value and has to begin the process all over again. It is clear that overall Fiske makes a strong case for his argument that in order to be popular, cultural commodities have to appeal in two contradictory directions. Initially they must appeal to the homogenous needs of the financial economy. If the product can reach many consumers and be reproduced by the current processes in the ‘cultural factory’ it will create a good economic return. In order to do this it must appeal to what people have in common – in Fiske’s view the dominant ideology – and submit to the commodifying forces of capitalism. However the cultural commodity must also be flexible enough to mould to the cultural needs of the people and allow itself to be pluralized and given new meanings by the popular forces. Only time will tell if the new Mini will make this transition. Works Cited Abercrombie, Nicholas (1994) ‘Authority and Consumer Society’ in The Authority of the Consumer. Ed. Abercrombie. Nicholas, Keat, Russell & Whitely, Nigel, London: Routledge Fiske, John (1987) Television Culture: Popular Pleasures and Politics. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Fiske, John (1991) Understanding Popular Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Fiske, John (2000) ‘The Commodities of Culture’ in The Consumer Society Reader. Ed. Lee Martyn, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Read More