This blog post aims to examine, in a balanced manner, the theoretical background and issues that led audience-centered theory to emphasize the creativity of the masses while simultaneously facing criticism of cultural populism.
Through his theory of the culture industry, Adorno criticized mass culture as a device for propagating concealed ideology. He defined ideology as a false consciousness that conceals or justifies relations of domination, and viewed mass culture as a means of mass manipulation that reproduces the ideology of the ruling class. Consequently, the masses were assessed as cultural beings who are deceived. Furthermore, Adorno argued that the content and form of mass-cultural products became so standardized and schematized that they no longer even needed to feign the appearance of art. However, his theory revealed limitations in its lack of concrete critical methodology and its overly negative view of mass culture as a whole. Subsequent research advanced in two directions: analyzing the ways mass-cultural texts are signified, or exploring new possibilities within mass culture. The former is the Screen School, which adopted Althusser’s theory, while the latter is Fiske, who shifted the focus to the audience.
The early Screen School, building on Althusser’s perspective that the subject is constituted by ideological effects, criticized the concept of ideology as false consciousness and analyzed how specific ideologies engage in the process of subject formation through popular culture texts. They viewed ideology as a cognitive framework through which individuals interpret and experience their material conditions, explaining that it leads individuals to misperceive themselves as autonomous agents and internalize dominant values. In particular, the Screen School analyzed the ideological effect whereby specific formal devices or modes of representation within a text cause its perspective to be equated with self-evident truth. However, their analysis focused excessively on elucidating the mechanisms by which the dominant meaning presented by the text is accepted, failing to sufficiently account for the diverse interpretive possibilities of the audience that could contradict the text’s intended meaning.
It was within this critical context that Fisk’s audience-centered study of popular culture emerged. Fisk shifted the focus of research from political aesthetics to popular aesthetics, emphasizing that audiences actively produce meaning during the process of consuming texts. In other words, the central axis shifted from the question of whether mass cultural products reinforce or delay political struggles to the question of why specific texts are popular with the masses. He viewed the masses as fluid actors navigating diverse positions according to their social interests. Commercially produced mass cultural texts are not self-contained mass culture but merely resources utilized by consumers. It is only through the process of consuming this resource, producing new meanings according to their own interests and desires, and creating resistant or escapist pleasures, that the masses complete popular culture. Fisk acknowledges that Hall’s distinction between dominant, negotiated, and counter-interpretations suggested the possibility of alternative interpretations, but criticizes him for ultimately placing the ‘preferred interpretation’ based on the dominant meaning of the text in the most important position. As an alternative, Fisk emphasizes the creative tactics of everyday life, drawing on the discussions of de Certeau. That is, popular culture is constituted by the creativity of the subaltern, who, while utilizing the provided resources, does not fully submit to its power.
Fisk distinguishes the popular discernment performed by the masses from Adorno’s aesthetic discernment. Unlike aesthetic discernment, which evaluates a text’s intrinsic qualities, popular discernment emphasizes everyday appropriateness, semiotic productivity, and flexibility in consumption patterns. It is crucial that popular culture texts function appropriately according to each recipient’s situation and encompass diverse possibilities for meaning production. Therefore, the focus of analysis must shift from text structure to the concrete practice of reading the text, transitioning from the question “What are we reading?” to “How are we reading?”
To illustrate this, Fisk presents the case of female viewers watching “The Price Is Right,” a quiz show where contestants guess product prices. This program applauds women’s consumption skills—long treated as peripheral compared to men’s wage labor—and elevates them as objects of public enjoyment. Women watching reaffirm the value of their everyday knowledge and skills, becoming aware of the economic and sexual oppression structures within the existing system. Fisk particularly reads the carnivalesque elements described by Bakhtin within the female audience’s enthusiasm. While the audience’s fervor serves to functionally maintain the existing order by virtually satisfying the desire to escape everyday norms, it simultaneously possesses a destructive power that subversively exposes social norms by breaking free from the femininity prescribed by patriarchy. Even when quiz shows employ capitalist and patriarchal discourse as their central codes, the resistant, evasive meanings and pleasures emerging from the mass consumption process can function as catalysts to expose and dismantle that discourse. Fisk saw popular culture not only as promoting progressive change in everyday life but also as potentially laying the groundwork for subsequent radical political transformation.
However, Fisk also faces criticism for overestimating the value of popular pleasure and overlooking the social production system surrounding the masses. Keller points out that while audience-centered approaches did overcome the one-sidedness of textual determinism, they ultimately culminated in a cultural populism that excessively glorified popular pleasure and mass culture. Critics argue that Fisk overlooked the fact that audiences themselves are products of the conditions shaped by the cultural production system, meaning their preferences and expectations can also be formed within the structural effects of popular culture. This critique has become even more pertinent in today’s algorithm-based platform environment, suggesting a need to reexamine the relationship between audience autonomy and structural constraints.
