“The use of theory’ in feminist analysis has been said to threaten feminism as a political force. This collection of work by leading feminist scholars engages with the question of the political status of poststructuralist theory within feminism. Against the view that poststructuralism necessarily weakens feminism, Feminists Theorize the Political affirms the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential. The essays in Feminists Theorize the Political speak to the questions that emerge from the convergence of feminism and poststructuralism: What happens to feminist critique when traditional grounds and foundations – experience, history, universal norms – are called into question? Can feminist theory problematize the notion of the subject without losing its political effectivity? Which version of the subject is to be questioned, and how does that questioning open up possibilities for reformulating agency, power, and sites of political resistance? What are the consequences of a specifically feminist reformulation of difference? What are the uses and limits of a poststructuralist critique of binary logic for the theorization of racial and class differences, the position of the subaltern?”

right now I am not entirely sure that that has answered my question and I need to digest it some more and do further research on why theory is so highly contested.

He believed that popular culture was made by ‘the people’ and not produced by a culture industry (as opposed to Adorno’s views) “Audience Power” An audience can interpret texts and can decipher mass media’s ideological messages with their own interpretations. Whilst Fiske’s standpoint is not intended to be a right wing response to Adorno and Horkheimer’s left wing cynical opinions, he believes that we are not dupes, manipulated by the industry. He doesn’t in fact concur that there is such a thing as ‘an audience’ but rather individuals with their own complex ideas and ‘social allegiances’

Whilst accepting we live in a capitalist and patriarchal society, he doesnt think that popular culture is something produced from ‘above’ but more that it is a reflection of what is popular. He suggests that record companies, film makes produce many failures and that there are more flops than hits which emphasizes his point that consumers buy what they want to buy and are not manipulated in a drone like fashion to spend money on anything and everything.

Fiske believes that whilst there is a preferred meaning in texts, consumers can and do create their own reference point to various readings and reinterpret them to suit their individual viewpoint.

Where Adorno and Horkheimer would see a mass produced icon such as Madonna as being churned out to an audience of passive consumers, settling for an image of someone marketed worldwide, Fiske challenges this concept, believing that Madonna is someone who connects with an audience and who is meaningful for them. They buy her records and invest “a unique set of meanings” as consumers. He believes that Madonna owns her sexuality and that fans see her as someone in control of her life, not manipulated by anyone ‘pulling her strings’. Her fans relate to her ideals and way of being in the world which then enables them to be empowered themselves

I tend to agree more with Adorno and Horkheimer when referring to Madonna. We are given a particular view of Madonna (for instance) Clearly she is a strong and feisty woman, but she has a massive publicity machine behind her ensuring that we, the audience, are led to believe she is in charge of her own image and destiny. And,as a relevant aside, what male equivalent is there who would also be described as strong and feisty, or is that just taken for granted?
 
His views on the likes of X Factor are that we, the audience (despite his non belief in ‘an audience’ as such) empathise with the contestants and follow their journeys. We buy their records because we want to support them, having shared their triumphs and struggles.

His theory of structuration looks at whether individuals or social forces shape our identities. He combines both the traditional theories of sociology with contemporary viewpoints. Micro and macro activities feed into eachother; individuals repeat acts and thereby social structures are formed and changed, i.e. micro level activity and social structures are fused and the acts of the individuals reproduce the structure (I’m not sure I totally get this)

There are traditions, moral codes etc which are established but, if they are ignored, changed, replaced or reproduced differently (ok, I think I am getting it now)

Criticised for being too eclectic due to his fusion of theories regarding micro individual actions together with macro grand social forces.

He believed Marx to be less significant in the world of contemporary sociology arguing that there is a strong desire to investigate more sophisticated and contemporary theories about how the world works now.

Somewhat frustrated with the divisions in politics, he created ‘the third way’ – a mix of left and right wing policies (“centrism”)

Hall’s Theory of Coding and De-Coding suggested that whilst an author of a text will encode certain ideological meanings within it, a user of that same text may decode  will be different from the aim of the producer of the text. His belief, like that of Fiske, is that we are not simply passive acceptors of texts and that an audience finds its own meaning, dependent on our own cultural background, which explains why there are such varied interpretations of texts within media discourses. There is a ‘margin of understanding’ between the intended meaning and the received response.

Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School for Social Research (est. 1923), a group of Germany, Jewish intellectuals. “Media Power” Their distaste for mass media was heightened by Hitler’s use of the media for propaganda as well as their distaste with American popular culture which wasnt deemed good enough for their preferred bourgeois taste. (Bourgeois tastes refer to a middle class sensibility whereas Adorno surely would not see himself as middle class?)

Adorno believed that capitalism simply fed people with unsophisticated and sentimental false needs which enabled them to remain passive and indifferent to the politics around them and therefore unwilling or unable to question the world around them. Their minds dulled by a diet of ‘McCulture’ (my definition)

They referred to the mass media as ‘the culture industry’ i.e. the music industry, movie business which produces entertainment in order to make profit. They detested the term ‘culture’ being reduced to a set of capitalist marketable products; this was not produced by ‘the people’ but more by an industry, churned out by commercial organisations as commodities.

Choice is an illusion. We buy what is available to us, based on a limited range offered by the industry. We are manipulated into believing that we are unique in our ‘choices’ but really, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, we are simply drones, being manipulated to become objects in the game of formulaic, marketable consumers whilst becoming passively satisfied in a brainless, conformist way of being. “…conformity has replaced consciousness” (Adorno 1991)
 
Reality tv such as The X Factor, Pop Idol happily show us their own cynical machinations and we love it. We are pacified by a shallow industry which, according to Adorno, is why Marx’s revolution didnt happen – we are fragmented from the community and world around us, stultefied by what we consume as viewers, readers of a conformist media.

We believe that we are individuals and are not affected by mass media; Adorno and Horkheimer believe that we wouldnt know any different, so brainwashed are we.

Their views can be seen as arrogant and snobbish and John Fiske would disagree with their standpoint.

It will, I hope, be a way to focus my mind, to become more disciplined in my writing rather than my scribbled notes in various journals (as much as I love my journals, I believe that this way of writing will ensure that I think properly and clearly, regardless of whether anyone out there reads it or not and frankly, at this moment in time, I don’t care. It’s for me, not you)

It will be a place to try out my new vocabulary and enable me to be a ‘better student’. It’s going to be good, I know it is.

(excerpt): Is Antichrist a misogynistic movie? That, inevitably, is in the eye of the beholder. Von Trier constructs the drama as a fun-house of terrors; a warren of dark nooks and crannies, spring-loaded with trap doors and rearing phantoms. Here is a film that explicitly confronts the director’s intertwined fears of primal nature and female sexuality. But does a fear of femaleness automatically equate to hatred? I’m not convinced that it does. Yes, the “She” character is anguished and irrational; a danger to herself and those around her. And yet for all that, she proves more vital, more powerful, and oddly more charismatic than “He”, the arrogant, doomed advocate of order and reason. In one audacious scene, Von Trier has Dafoe blunder through the bracken where he encounters a talking fox who informs him that “chaos reigns”. Reason, the director implies, is a paltry defence against elemental forces. Chaos reigns.

There are so many reviews of the film, mostly fairly negative and mostly surrounding the female mutilation scene; less comment has been made (from what I have read) on the fairly disturbing scene involving bludgeoning the leg of Willem Dafoe’s character. There is so much to say about this film that I want to ‘get off my chest’ but I will come back to it later.