John Fiske and the building of cultural studies

There is a personal dimension to these reflections on the passing of John Fiske, who left us in July 2021. I taught alongside John Fiske for seven years at what was, at that time, the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT) – later to become Curtin University – in the 1980s in Perth. We worked together on developing what was one of the first cultural studies programs in Australia, team-taught subjects on cultural studies theory, television, and popular culture, co-authored (with Bob Hodge) a book of semiotic analyses of Australian popular culture, and collaborated with John Frow, John Hartley, and Bob Hodge in the establishment of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies – Australia's first cultural studies journal. Some years older than me, John Fiske remained a valued mentor well beyond his time in Australia, and his support and advice was fundamental to the development of my academic career.

In thinking about how the cultural studies community might look back on John Fiske's career, I was reminded of the interventions Henry Jenkins, among others, ¹ had made more than a decade ago. Henry Jenkins’ several ‘Why Fiske still matters’ pieces (2005, 2011), and the ‘Fiske Matters’ symposium held in Madison in 2010, were to some extent recuperative enterprises, aimed not only at honouring a valued teacher and mentor but also at reassessing John's contribution to building the field of cultural studies over the 1980s and 1990s. It is notable that such a reassessment was deemed necessary. John Fiske was, by any account, a major figure in the development of television studies, and cultural and media studies internationally. Nevertheless, there was clearly a genuine concern among some of his colleagues about how cultural studies might, over time, view his legacy.

I will return to that concern later on, but I want to begin my own treatment of this legacy by offering a perspective that so far has not been part of any published discussion of John Fiske's contribution to our field. To do this, I want to turn to the period when Fiske worked in Australia, from 1980 to 1988. At that time, cultural studies was an emerging rather than an established field in Australia, as it was just beginning the process of becoming a significant international location for cultural studies teaching, scholarship, and research. Those who may have followed John Fiske's career only after his move to the US in 1988 may not be aware of the extent to which the dramatic development of Australian cultural studies in the 1980s was indebted to John Fiske's building of institutional support, and his personal investment in the locally based scholars who identified with such a project.

Building cultural studies in Australia

When John Fiske arrived in Australia in 1980, there was good work going on in the new humanities, especially in literary theory and film studies, but cultural studies was only just beginning. There was a two-tier university system, with the universities in one tier and ‘colleges of advanced education’ (CAEs), similar to the UK's polytechnics, given a slightly more vocational and interdisciplinary focus in the second tier. Several universities had been established with an interdisciplinary mission in the 1970s, but it was in the CAE sector where there was a greater degree of interest in developing new interdisciplinary programs in the humanities and social sciences. While cultural studies was implicated in the small steps being made to imagine how popular culture might be studied, it was film studies, communications studies, and to a lesser extent media studies, that were at the leading edge of these interdisciplinary initiatives through the 1970s. With the CAEs being relatively new institutions, and with the interdisciplinary universities (Griffith University and Murdoch University) seeking to differentiate themselves from the traditional discipline-based universities which dominated the system, there was considerable opportunity for developing innovative teaching programs in the humanities and social sciences.

Fiske came to the Western Australian Institute of Technology as a ‘principal lecturer’ (the sector's equivalent to full professor at the time), which made him the most senior appointment in our field in Australia. In similar ways to John Tulloch, an associate professor at Macquarie University who had previously found himself in this position, Fiske was immediately thrust into what was effectively a national advocacy role. The university system in Australia at the time, it has to be said, was not of the highest quality. Arts faculties were still run by an elite class fraction of Anglophile (largely) men, who were challenged by the changes happening in the new humanities – the discovery of ‘theory’, the attacks upon disciplines, and the interest in broadening the scope and politics of the scholarly and research interests of their fields. Introducing new programs in such a context was certainly possible, but in the case of brand new interdisciplinary fields like cultural studies it could be difficult, even in the CAEs where this old guard was less dominant. In most cases, the successful establishment of programs in media and cultural studies required the production of authoritative supporting documents, drawn from external referees who were themselves drawn from the ‘right quarter’. Fiske worked out very quickly that his English background placed him de jure in that right quarter, and he exploited it expertly to our benefit. He supported initiatives in media, television, and cultural studies for universities and CAEs around the country, assuring reluctant heads of school and puzzled deans that these were legitimate fields of teaching and research, that they were already established in the UK and the US, and that it was worth investing in them. Literally no-one else was in the position to play such a role at that time, and Fiske's embrace of that responsibility made a major contribution to the significant expansion of cultural and media studies teaching and research programs in Australia over this period.

Personally, I had been doing my best to establish something like a cultural studies program at WAIT before John arrived. My instincts were good, I think, but I didn't actually know very much about how such a program should look. This was a very interdisciplinary school, with a distinctively diverse student body with many mature-age and first-generation undergraduates. My (still relatively dim) awareness of what was happening in the UK at the Open University encouraged me to think this might be the right place to try something like that. My attempts to convince my colleagues were, I am sure, memorable for their passion and (possibly) their ferocity, but I did not win many hearts or minds. When John arrived, I was away on study leave, and so he was immediately lobbied by my irritated colleagues, warning John about this young piece of work who had been trying to redesign their offerings. Typically, from what he was told, John thought that he’d probably get along pretty well with this difficult person and organized to meet with me as soon as possible on my return. Our connection was immediate, and his careful and canny support resulted in the program's establishment and success. He knew how to design such a program, and possessed the gravitas and patience to get it through those committees. As for me, he undertook to improve my education, opening up his library of British cultural studies materials – the Open University course handbooks, the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) Working Papers series, and more – to induct me into the history and theory of the British roots of cultural studies.

Support of this kind, investing time in a younger colleague and encouraging their development, was central to John Fiske's contribution to building cultural studies in Australia. Most of those who were interested in teaching and researching in cultural and media studies at this time were young, often without a continuing position, and in many cases working in institutions where they had to fight for some intellectual space for cultural studies. This was occurring at a turning point in the professionalization of the university system in Australia, and this generation tended to be better credentialled than many of their more senior colleagues. Unlike some of their older professors, many had doctorates from good universities outside Australia, and were committed to publishing their work. What they lacked would now be described as ‘professional development’ – an understanding of what they needed to do to build a rewarding career in the contemporary university, what their rights and opportunities were, and how to think of themselves as part of an intellectual community that was larger than Australia. Many of us had to be taught how to do the things that contemporary postgraduates now do as a matter of course. In my own case, for instance, I had not considered the possibility of writing a book from the work I had been doing with my students before John encouraged me to do so. Fiske filled a gap in the provision of career mentorship, personal encouragement, and informed advice for many young cultural studies scholars around Australia. ² He was particularly keen on helping them get their work published and directed to an international readership. His spruiking of the quality and distinctiveness of the work going on in Australia to his editor at Methuen/Routledge, Jane Armstrong, was responsible for her undertaking her first commissioning trip to Australia to seek new authors in the mid-1980s.

The development of the pioneering Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, launched in 1983, was very much John's idea. At that time, while there were a few Australian-based writers who had managed to find an international readership for their work (Meaghan Morris is the most prominent example), Australian-based scholars without an international profile had difficulty publishing their work, particularly if it was focused on Australian subject matter. Setting up a local journal not only provided a publishing outlet for these individuals, it also set up a platform that foregrounded the best of the work that was coming out of Australian cultural studies. The distinctiveness of that work was the reason why Routledge made us an offer to take the journal over from the local editorial team and to relaunch it as what is now the premier international journal Cultural Studies. This did raise its own problems. Since the transition coincided with John's move to the US, there were genuine concerns that the Australian dimension of the journal would diminish or disappear entirely as the editorship moved with him. While his successor, Larry Grossberg, worked diligently to protect our interests, the journal did eventually lose that Australian identification. Realistically, one sees in retrospect, the internationalization of the journal was always going to have that kind of outcome, given the disparities in scale and volume between what was going on in Australia and what was happening in the UK and the US. By that stage, however, bridges had been built and other Australian cultural studies journals, such as the still-running Continuum, had come onstream.

Of course, later on over the 1980s and 1990s, other talented émigrés from the UK and Europe would also play foundational roles in Australia – John Hartley, Tony Bennett, and Ien Ang, among them. John Fiske was the first, however, and he had the distinctive focus on building national platforms which would enable the field as a whole to develop. He was not at all interested in becoming what the universities now call a ‘rockstar’ academic himself, and there was little opportunity for developing that kind of status in Australia at that time in any case. Rather, and with great enthusiasm and energy, Fiske just got on with the job of working towards the growth and maturation of Australian cultural studies. Much of this was done one on one, and in private – reading people's work, advising on book proposals, writing references for promotions, encouraging new ideas for research and publication, and so on. When he left for the US, however, it was relatively sudden and, regrettably, there was little opportunity for those of us in Australian cultural studies to collectively acknowledge his service to us. Fortunately, I was able to invite him to return to Australia in 2000 to address what was the first international television conference to be held there, at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He presented the lead keynote, a prescient exploration of the likely political consequences of the early tendencies in surveillance market profiling, and he was received with great warmth and affection. It was one of the last presentations he gave before retiring from the university.

After Australia

There is no doubt that Fiske was a hugely influential international figure in the early development of a cultural studies approach to television studies. Reading Television (1978), co-authored with John Hartley and published within Terry Hawkes’ important ‘New Accents’ series for Methuen, is arguably one of the most significant contributions to the serious development of television studies that proceeded from the 1980s onwards. Drawing upon Saussure, Althusser, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss for their methods of textual analysis, Fiske and Hartley's approach to television texts dramatically broke with the conventional dismissal of the content of television as trivial, meaningless, and meretricious. Television Culture (Fiske, 1987) was the next step in the project that Reading Television had initiated, elaborating more sophisticated models for the analysis of television texts, before Fiske cast his net more widely with the three books aimed at ‘reading’ popular culture: Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (1987) co-authored with Bob Hodge and myself, Reading the Popular (1989a) and Understanding Popular Culture (1989b). All of these continued an argument that had also informed the earlier work on television: differentiating between popular culture and mass culture in order to retrieve the potential of audience agency and to better understand how audiences created their own meanings and pleasures from the popular texts they consumed or ‘lived’, and the cultural practices in which they engaged.

The move to America in 1988 eventually saw Fiske undertake a more direct engagement with the politics of the social, as he turned from what had been a focus on the practice of textual analysis that had drawn from semiotics and structuralism, to what was actually a more sociological interest in the structure and function of the relationships between the media, culture, and power where he drew upon the work of de Certeau, Foucault, and Bourdieu. Power Plays, Power Works (Fiske, 1993) and Media Matters (Fiske, 1996) might be seen in this way. The beginning of Power Plays, Power Works is particularly ambitious in setting out a whole theory of the politics of culture; it was much less interested in providing the synthesizing and explanatory surveys that had shaped the earlier books. In both of these books, the point of the analysis is political and theoretical as much as it is pedagogic. One might suggest that Fiske, the translator or popularizer of existing cultural studies approaches, had taken a back seat to Fiske, the theorist, who wanted to articulate his own distinctive position. Certainly a great many of his articles and chapters in the last decade of his career were focused upon theoretical debates. The focus of both these later books was upon race and gender, keenly contested areas of theoretical and political debate within US cultural and media studies at this point, and spoke directly (and provocatively) to a US readership in presenting Fiske's account of how power was structured in their country.

Whether or not John Fiske wanted this to happen, with his move to the US he did end up becoming the ‘rockstar academic’ that he hadn't been in Australia. The extent to which that had occurred was brought home to me when I was sitting beside him for the opening session of the famous ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ conference, organized by Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, at the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois in 1990. We were seated towards the back, and when John asked a question in response to the first paper – introducing his question by identifying himself – virtually the entire 800-person audience, as one, turned around in their seats to see him. There were very good reasons for this prominence, of course. His books were widely used by large cohorts of grateful graduate students as they grappled with what were unfamiliar theoretical materials, and he was a charismatic personal presence. An exceptional teacher in the classroom, he was also a gifted presenter in larger contexts, able to deliver complex and well-organized lectures apparently without notes, and always supported by a cleverly curated and often highly entertaining selection of slides and videos. Energetic and engaged, his passion for the subject filtered through a lively and mischievous sense of humour, he responded generously to questions and criticism from his audiences. There was usually an edge to these performances, too. As Henry Jenkins has noted, Fiske enjoyed ‘playing the bad boy’ (2005: xxiii), and was often deliberately provocative in how he made his arguments, and indeed in the territory upon which he chose to make those arguments.

That said, it was not hard to be provocative in early 1990s cultural studies. As the field was picking up speed and moving into the higher gears, the debates about what it should do, and how it might do it, had become diverse, extensive, robust, and at times personal. While the introduction of textual analysis had generated much initial excitement, this was fading as other approaches developed and competed for representation. The focus on the polysemic text had inevitably led to questions about what audiences might actually do with these texts, and so there was a growing body of work on audiences and what cultural studies at the time called ethnographic research. The focus on audiences’ agency, in turn, led to a backlash from those who were concerned that this work risked understating the power of the larger overdetermining structures within which audiences were provided with their choices. The political economists, in particular, accused cultural studies of ignoring the political structures which framed the relationship between the media and culture, and of lacking sufficient interest in understanding the media industries and their regulatory environments. Within cultural studies itself, there was also the question of whether the field was losing its oppositional politics as it became more respectable, more institutionally embedded, and more popular (among publishers, in particular). Some versions of cultural studies were accused of being complicit with the industries and tendencies it had originally set out to critique, while there was also a continuing concern about what would happen to that original oppositional politics (especially around race and class) once cultural studies succumbed to the embrace of a highly professionalized American academy.

Over the 1990s, Gray and Lotz (2012: 66) have suggested, John Fiske proved to be something of a ‘lightning rod’ for almost all of these areas of contestation, criticism, and debate. Where cultural studies was accused of quietism and cultural populism (McGuigan, 1992), or in Meaghan Morris’s (1996) essay, ‘banality’, it was Fiske who was named as the ‘exemplary figure’ (McGuigan, 1992: 159) of the wrong kind of cultural studies. This, for McGuigan, was a cultural studies which displayed ‘abjectly uncritical complicity with prevailing “free market” ideology and its hidden powers’ (1992: 159). The account of cultural studies outlined in Fiske's early textbooks was also accused of oversimplification. Morris characterized it as running ‘perilously close to this kind of formulation: people in modern mediatized societies are complex and contradictory, mass cultural texts are complex and contradictory, therefore people using them produce complex and contradictory culture’ (1996: 159–60). The focus on the ‘activated text’, the ‘active audience’, and the potential for resistant readings, all issues that are investigated in Television Culture, generated the criticism that Fiske was too optimistic about what these kinds of agency might actually deliver. Indeed, I was myself one of those who argued that the progressive effect of ‘this multitude of textual possibilities’ was compromised by the fact that ‘the textual system may be more porous than the social system’ (Turner, 2003: 99). While these criticisms certainly reflected legitimate concerns and related to issues within the field that were widely debated over quite some time, it is also notable how frequently John Fiske became the ‘exemplary figure’, singled out as the key representative of what were actually widespread tendencies and areas of contest and debate within the field as a whole. ³

The pedagogic project

If Fiske was indeed a lightning rod for criticism over this period, there is also a view that at least some of this criticism was ‘ill-spirited and personal’, at times misrepresenting his actual positions or reducing them to caricature (Gray and Lotz, 2012: 70). If that is indeed the case, then it is worth considering why. One reason for this may lie in what seems to be a reaction against the kind of academic enterprise in which he was engaged. In my view, and notwithstanding his increasing activity as a theorist and a political analyst over the 1990s, what Fiske was up to over his career was more a pedagogic than a theoretical project. Or, as Henry Jenkins has put it while making a similar point, ‘as a theorist, Fiske was also always a teacher’ (2005: xxxiv). The early television books, together with his Introduction to Communication Studies (Fiske, 1982), while not all explicitly framed as textbooks, were structured either as introductions to cultural studies analysis, or as both an introduction to and an application of what was proposed as a new way of understanding popular culture. They were accessibly written and set out to translate the complexities of cultural studies theory into a simpler discourse – much in the way we might do as teachers when introducing complicated ideas to a first-year undergraduate class, with the full intention of adding nuance and detail at a later point. Furthermore, the early books on popular culture, Myths of Oz, Reading Popular Culture, and Understanding Popular Culture, were about popularizing cultural studies: readable, simplified, and engaging analyses of familiar sets of so-called ‘lived texts’ employed as a means of attracting popular interest in, and some understanding of, cultural studies’ approaches. ⁴

Both of these publishing strategies – writing textbooks and engaging in popularization – were crucial contributions, in my view, to the building of cultural studies both beyond and within the academy. Indeed, they constituted part of what was brave and distinctive about this emerging field of writing, teaching, and research. But they were still a risky business within the academy. While they certainly attracted readers who were new to cultural studies, they risked compromising the seriousness with which Fiske's work was regarded by his peers. Within the humanities and social sciences in general, the writing of textbooks has customarily been seen as a second-order activity, dependent on the work of others and not usually regarded as original research. There hasn't always been such a clear distinction in cultural studies and its version of media studies, however. Early on, within a new and still developing field, some textbooks played a substantially formative role, establishing an agenda, clarifying approaches and practices, and in some cases providing original formulations or syntheses that were subsequently adopted by scholars publishing in the more elevated formats of research monographs and journal articles. Both Reading Television and Television Culture did that, but Fiske was not the only one to do this kind of work. Small popularizing books opening up new theoretical territory (such as, say, Hebdige's Subculture [1979] in the New Accents series), or textbooks setting out new approaches to an established field (such as Hartley's Understanding News [1982], which was published in Fiske's Studies in Communication series), played a significant role in cultural studies’ development over the 1970s and 1980s.

Nonetheless, it is not hard to see how radically a project of popularization and translation ran against the grain of a cultural studies project that was so fully engaged in a process that was not (I would suggest) one of theoretical clarification, as Hall once put it, but probably more realistically of theoretical elaboration and complication. There is also the possibility that the precise character of Fiske's commitment to the notion of the popular – the underlying element of romanticism within it that attracted, inaccurately in my view, the label of populism – did not sit well within the more hard-nosed (and, yes, rigorous) Marxist formation that was customary within the British origins of the field. Within the US, while his direct engagement with US politics and culture might well have been regarded positively, it is clear that within some quarters it was not. Perhaps this could have been foreseen. Fiske's readiness to take on such complicated socio-historical issues as the US's dealing with race, and his fearless wading into debates around gender at a point when the historical resistance to feminism from within cultural studies’ beginnings were being discussed in quite dramatic terms (Brunsdon, 1996; Hall, 1992; Women’s Studies Group, 1978), made it almost inevitable that he would hit trouble. After all, he was a white, male Brit presuming to teach Americans something about America –and if he succeeded, that was probably almost as galling as if he failed. Nonetheless, all of that reinforces the possibility that the dismissive treatment to which his work was at times subject was indeed, at least to some extent, personal. The scale and extent of Fiske's celebrity, the degree to which this may have seemed like a ‘cult of personality’, may be implicated in the degree of animus evident in these treatments of his work; at times it does seem as if his critics just wanted to ‘bring him down a peg or two’.

All of that said, though, the temperature of these debates also indicates what was at stake here. This was the framing and reframing of the project of cultural studies at a point when it was now up and running. It mattered very much how that took place, and where that reframing positioned the field (or the discipline) for the future. Fiske's work is so important, and attracted so much attention, precisely because it took place along that fault line – on the one hand, vigorously involved in translating, synthesizing and popularizing the theoretical dimensions of cultural studies in order to make them more useful for the kind of critical analysis the politics of cultural studies demanded, and on the other hand treating popular culture with an optimism and a determined insistence on individual agency that risked, at times, looking as if it was running against the grain of that politics.

Cultural studies and its histories

Reviewing John Fiske's career at a moment like this inescapably reminds us of the dynamism of these first few decades of cultural studies. Thinking about some of the debates which accompanied that career, however, raises questions about how well equipped contemporary cultural studies is to review its early histories, and to evaluate the contributions of individual scholars to those histories. While it was relatively unproblematic for us to properly acknowledge the contributions made to the shared histories of cultural studies by pioneering figures such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, or Stuart Hall, it seems to me that there is an emerging challenge for us as we accept the task of acknowledging the legacies of that next generation – a generation that is now beginning to retire, or withdraw from the field, or regrettably pass away. This generation played a fundamental role not just in continuing the ongoing work of theoretical development but also in prosecuting the spread and purchase of cultural studies. This was not just an internal expansion – the field growing and diversifying in its approaches and interests. It was also the expansion of cultural studies’ international reach, the establishment of an institutional presence in many locations, its gradual take-up as something like a theoretical lingua franca for the so-called ‘new humanities’ interdisciplines, and ultimately permeating the conceptual frameworks unthinkingly applied every day by commentators and analysts from outside the academic field when they referred to ‘the culture’ in ways that implicitly understood it as a ‘whole way of life’. This ‘second generation’ was also, however, writing and teaching over a period when there was vigorous debate, even at times deep division, over what cultural studies might be, what it should do, and even whether and to what extent the field of cultural studies should set out to police its borders.

In some cases, the issues at stake were never really resolved and so the intellectual differences became more or less embedded in the ongoing shape and character of the project of cultural studies. For example, there are still the unresolved debates about the institutionalization of cultural studies, whether it should seek to replicate the disciplinary formations of other fields of teaching and research, and indeed the desirability of constituting cultural studies as a discipline at all (Grossberg, 2010; Rodman, 2014; Turner, 2012). Further, while thinking of itself as field of continuing contestation and theoretical clarification has certainly made cultural studies a robust environment for debate, it may also have encouraged a tendency to see each new development in the field as superseding, rather than building upon, what had gone before. As cultural studies has aged, it has formed generational strata that, typically, tend to focus most intently on their own formation and on what differentiates them from what has gone before. It is easy to imagine that such a tendency could affect how appropriately cultural studies deals with the legacies of those whose contributions were viewed as important at the time, but have been subsequently displaced. There is also, of course, cultural studies’ fabled presentism, and the still patchy engagement with its own histories that raises further questions about what kind of recognition might be afforded to the work of those who shaped these histories but who are no longer at the forefront of the practice of cultural studies in the present.

All of that said, it is important that cultural studies maintains an interest in assessing its histories, in properly understanding how they were built, and in acknowledging those whose work created the conditions for the practice of cultural studies – work which it is too easy to take for granted once its achievements are in place, and the struggles involved too easy to forget. Cultural studies needs its memory, and the legacies of figures such as John Fiske are fundamental to that.