1) the notion of ‘active audience’ refers to a couple possible readings. the first reading, as you note here, is the unusually complex way that an individual receiver of information will interpret codes, information, aesthetic production, etc. the second reading, which i try to address in this post, refers to the assumption that social change emerges _necessarily_ out of social contradictions due to the complexities of production, distribution, and interpretation. the pejorative way that the ‘active audience’ paradigm is usually attributed to Fiske refers more to the latter question here — otherwise stated as the notion that dialectical progress is made merely through acts of reception regardless of political will. the problem with this argument, if Fiske indeed makes it, is that it allows for any affirmative or critical viewpoint to serve as activity, relativizing the purpose of social justice methodologies. if Fiske’s critics read him correctly, they are right that we cannot just assume any act of reception or consumption to be dialectical, especially anti-democratic interpretations of information. but i offer that Fiske has been misinterpreted in part because he is less invested in a specific political project. his work is more directed at devising a methodological logic for ‘reading’ information. as i write in the first post of this series, this doesn’t excuse flaws in argument, but i do hope that it clarifies a longstanding misconception about the tradition he’s working in. by looking at the more general intellectual history of his arguments, it should be quite clear that he’s a birmingham thinker dedicated to a slower long-term form of political intervention. and i do think he’s one of the more sophisticated readers of how ‘circulation’ works in the tradition.

2) on the point of the sustainability of his argument, i broach the question of media literacy to point to a central claim of his work — that social processes can be viewed tangibly in acts of depiction, representation, and circulation. any aesthetic reading regardless of its novel or sophisticated qualities, according to Fiske, is already immersed in a ‘discursive’ logic and has consequently been coded for some kind of social reception. if his claim about aesthetics is correct is, of course, a worthwhile question. i do reject perspectives that artificially separate one form of judgment from larger deliberative processes.

I have only a casual understanding of Fiske, so these posts are proving to be quite useful. Now, a question, and an objection, regarding an issue you raise in the third to last paragraph–Fiske’s aesthetics versus those of Bourdieu.

Some historians, and I count myself among them, read a statement like this and begin to wonder about how Fiske arrived at certain conclusions that he did:

“An audience is not automatically or merely “active”; cultural analysis requires that a discursive formation carry historical engagement with cultural logic and hold coherent views for how to reconcile social contradictions.”

Does he just posit this? Cultural analysis may require x, y, or z. But that doesn’t make it so. More specifically, as a historian of film style like myself–one who has affinities for elements of discourse analysis and for those figures, like the cultural historian of art Michael Baxandall, who very much influenced Bourdieu–will wonder how it is that Fiske comes to reason that viewers aren’t “automatically or merely ‘active.'” (And I wonder what you mean by “mere,” incidentally.) This, it seems to me, is NOT something that can simply be posited by an analytical approach; it is itself an empirical question.

In other words, the relationship between viewers and culture is complex. Here, viewers may be more active; there, “culture,” or forces working on individuals with or without their cognizance, approval or control, may play a more prominent role. In addition, this is empirical from a cognitive science perspective. One could investigate the extent to which viewers’ choices affect outcomes in their own viewing, and by extension in the cultural products then created for their consumption.

These questions and concerns would seem to be vital in considering whether Fiske’s aesthetics can do explanatory work.

Thoughts?