Structuralism and Semiotics, Fiske-Style Ron Becker, Elana Levine, Darrell Newton and Pamela Wilson Edited by Pamela Wilson Published as an Introduction to the second edition of John Fiske’s Introduction to Communication Studies (Routledge, 2010)

In addition to his writing, John Fiske's greatest contributions have been as a teacher and

mentor. In recognition of this, we have brought together here four media scholars who were

mentored by Fiske, during his time at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for a conversation

about Introduction to Communication Studies. We intend this exchange to be suggestive and

exploratory, a probe that we hope will inspire conversations among other readers of these book,

and thus keep alive the spirit of exploration and contestation that were the hallmarks of Fiske's

contributions to Cultural Studies.

Pam Wilson: John Fiske's Introduction to Communication Studies was first published in 1982,

in the formative years of the discipline of "Communication" and also just before the post-

structuralist tsunami of cultural critique reshaped the shoreline of cultural theory. It is interesting

that Fiske named it an introduction to "Communication Studies," as that title clearly points to an

intended audience in this new field of Communication rather than in sociolinguistics or semiotics

or symbolic anthropology (all of whose intellectual traditions it drew upon) or as an introduction

to the blossoming field of cultural studies and what would later become media studies. This

volume was Fiske's attempt to help define and direct the study of Communication away from

what he perceived as a mechanistic transmission model, what he called the "process school," and

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into a focus on how meanings are produced and circulated and interpreted within a cultural

context, which he labelled the "semiotic school."

Examining the volume in its historical context, it clearly lays out the early foundations of

Fiske's theoretical approach as an intellectual descendant of the structuralist semiotics (and

semiologie) of Peirce, Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Barthes. Upon first discovering it (as I only

found this book recently--after two decades of influence by the later Fiske), I felt a bit like an

archaeologist gently brushing the dirt off of a well-preserved model of early Fiske the

structuralist.

In this volume, he lays out each of the fundamental concepts of semiotics and

structuralism more lucidly than I've seen them collected anywhere else, and in a clear language

that is accessible to the undergraduate student. Here, Fiske discusses and explains the basic

principles and mechanisms by which members of a cultural group communicate, share symbol

systems, and imbue their cultural world with layers of meaning.

Here he also diverges from the earlier thinkers (and provides glimpses of his later

emphases) by de-emphasizing the prominence of the sender of messages and shifting an

emphasis to the process of reading, decoding or interpreting: reading, he notes, "is the process of

discovering meanings that occurs when the reader interacts or negotiates with the text. This

negotiation takes place as the reader brings aspects of his or her cultural experience to bear upon

the codes and signs which make up the text. It also involves some shared understanding of what

the text is about....Readers with different social experiences or from different cultures may find

different meanings in the same text." With a strong emphasis on structure, Fiske notes that the

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message is "an element in a structured relationship whose other elements include external reality

and the producer/reader."

Darrell Newton: Perhaps the most significant aspect of Fiske’s work in Introduction to

Communication Studies is his clear, organized approach when addressing matters of signs and

codings, their availability, and their significance to social and cultural relationships. The

structure of his book addresses the main schools within communication studies: those of message

transmission, encoding and decoding, and how channels effectively produce communication

media efficiently, accurately and successfully. However, Fiske clearly defines the “second

school” of communication in a fashion that delineates its intentions to focus upon the production

and exchange of messages, as well as their reception. Further, the subsequent production of

meanings rests with the receiver and signification; he notes that miscommunications or

“misunderstandings” do not necessarily denote a failure to communicate, but could reflect

cultural differences between the encoder/sender and decoder/receiver.

Pam Wilson: This early work provides a vision into the roots of Fiske's thinking and also

reveals a logic and orderliness to his underlying understanding of the workings of culture that

help to illuminate his later work. Much of this early thought seems de-politicized, not as clearly

devoted to questions of ideology as his later work--and only then, filtered through Raymond

Williams and Louis Althusser, with just a mention of Gramsci. It was not until the fuller

integration of Marxist thought--and especially the distinctive way that Fiske brought together the

ideas of Gramsci, deCerteau and Foucault--later in the 1980s and in the early 1990s that Fiske's

work became more infused with questions of power. In style, this early work seems a bit dry and

scientific compared to Fiske's later writing, yet it is important in that we can see Fiske's

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theoretical processes at work and see the seeds of the ideas that will germinate to fruition in the

following decades.

Elana Levine: I think that Fiske lays out in this book all of the assumptions that underlie the

more explicitly politicized turn in Fiske's work after this time, which in part is why I like it so

much as a teaching tool. Once one gets students thinking in this structuralist way, it is a short

leap to the political implications of such thinking and even to the post-structuralist turn. The

book really maps out this leap, in that Fiske eventually does get to ideology and even--a bit--to

hegemony. It's like a map of where his own thought was going, as the growing significance of

first Gramsci, and then de Certeau and Foucault, would continue to build upon these structuralist

insights. But the importance of communication as process of meaning making and negotiation

rather than as unidirectional transmission of message is the essential first step to that more

explicitly politicized way of thinking, and this book guides the reader to make that conceptual

turn.

By leading readers through the theories of language and meaning that translate so

usefully to analyses of all kinds of media texts, Fiske cogently walks us through the nuts and

bolts of a critical/cultural textual analysis. Humanist scholars, and cultural studies practitioners,

most of all, are sometimes criticized for a lack of methodological rigor, a failure to delineate the

methods they use to construct their arguments and draw their conclusions. A major value of

Introduction to Communication Studies is the careful way in which Fiske walks us through those

methods, all the while critiquing the methods and approaches that are less useful from a cultural

studies perspective.

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Darrell Newton: Fiske's acknowledgement of semiotics and the obvious legacy of the

Birmingham School elicits larger values and consequences of academic theory and intent.

Inherently, cultural practices come to be of paramount importance within the critical studies of

subcultural groups and their ways and means of communicative practice. These considerations

greatly informed my academic research into African-Caribbean audiences and British television

and helped me to more closely and critically examine their receptions of televisual texts from, in

this case, the BBC Television Service.

Pam Wilson: As an anthropology student in the late 1970s and a grad student in linguistic

anthropology in the early 1980s--long before ever hearing of or reading Fiske--I was fascinated

by and intellectually rooted in the semiotic approach to culture. Yet I found the endeavor of

anthropology at that time to be troubling in its premises of cultural imperialism and was also

vaguely discomfited by the simplicity with which the structuralist approach explained and

described cultural systems but did not interrogate notions of power and conflict. I left academia

because of this, and it was not until I returned to the university in the late 1980s, with the intent

to learn media production and become a documentary filmmaker, that my life was changed by

reading John Fiske's Television Culture (1989). I fell in love with these ideas and this approach

to understanding the culture I was living and breathing!

As a result, I decided to apply to the University of Wisconsin to pursue a PhD and study

with Fiske. The "post-structuralist turn" that had taken place in the social sciences--which

overlaid the significant theoretical approaches of the post-Marxist thinkers atop the

structuralist/semiotic foundations and, most importantly in Fiske's work, which infused the work

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of Barthes, Gramsci, and deCerteau and Foucault--brought me back into the academy and has

guided my own intellectual thought, my research, writing and teaching since that time.

Elana Levine: Fiske used this text in the semiotics course I took with him almost 15 years ago.

Reading it then (as well as learning from him directly) not only equipped me with some of the

basics of structuralism and the ways in which theories of myth and ideology can be used to

analyze cultural texts, but it also shaped my own work as a teacher and a cultural scholar. I now

believe that introducing students to semiotics and these other concepts is a key first step to their

grasp of cultural studies and their ability to analyze media and culture. This small book provides

an essential foundation in media and cultural studies that can open students' minds to the range

of analyses one might conduct from this perspective. The concepts introduced here have helped

me to build my own understanding of a cultural studies approach--reading them again brings me

back to the days when Fiske's teaching originally walked me through such concepts and helped

make me a scholar of media and culture.

Pam Wilson: Yes, Elana, I appreciate your use of the word "equipped," since I've come to

realize the importance of teaching my students the utility and practicality of using these

conceptual tools to help them to understand the world around them, whether it be interpersonal

behavior or media texts. How do we encode and share meaning, express it through our actions

and images and words? How do those meanings circulate within a larger cultural and political

context? And how are we able to interpret, to decode, to make sense of cultural and media

messages? Fiske's book provides the "equipment" to understand these processes. A semiotic

approach is a cornerstone to critical thinking.

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It is interesting to see now the degree to which Fiske, both in that time and in his own

theoretical position, was caught in the crosshairs between structuralism and post-structuralism,

between modernism and postmodernism. His later work on popular culture shows that he was

fascinated by the postmodern and its trends, yet he was clearly a modernist thinker trying to

understand and come to grips with postmodernity and its pop culture icons.

Fiske embraced post-structuralism even though he himself was always forever a

structuralist thinker—and his biggest critiques, I think, came because critics took his tendency to

create binary oppositions in every situation and interpreted this as being overly simplistic.

However, like Levi-Strauss, Fiske found binary oppositions to be “good to think with” and used

them always to create abstract polarities rather than absolute categories. Any reader of this book

should pursue his writings on the culture and style of television (Reading Television, co-authored

with John Hartley, and the masterful Television Culture) as well as his set on popular culture

from the late 1980s (Reading the Popular and Understanding Popular Culture). My favorite

work of Fiske's, however, is his writing in the early 1990s that more overtly addressed questions

of power and politics: Power Play, Power Works and Media Matters.

Elana Levine: Fiske's explanations of semiotics, ideology, and hegemony remain extremely

useful as teaching tools. Even with older and British examples, my 21st century American

students find his case of the "Young, Bitter, and Black" newspaper headline and photo extremely

helpful in clarifying concepts such as connotation and anchorage. Such concepts are essential to

grasping how to analyze media and cultural texts, to look past their explicit "messages" and

unpack their more subjective meanings. The book's discussion of myth has also been extremely

helpful. Fiske explains this Barthesian concept in a way that allows students to relate it to the

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contemporary context, and to understand its ramifications for social, cultural, and political life. I

find it to be a crucial first step in getting students to understand the concept of ideology, in that

Barthes' myth is so close to a Marxist conception of ideology that it is easy to make the leap from

the former to the latter.

Fiske's examples make this process quite accessible. For instance, I have had many

exciting class discussions with engaged students over the example of women wearing high heels

and whether it signals their acceptance of dominant ideologies of gender! His careful parsing of

strategies one might watch for when conducting an ideological analysis has also been a

productive teaching tool. To be able to ask students to look for strategies such as masking or

incorporation in terms of an example we consider in class, or even to read through Fiske's

application of these ideas to his cases, brings the concept alive.

Ron Becker: Revisiting this book, takes me, too, back to my introduction to the study of popular

culture and reminds me just how foundational semiotics has been in making me think like a

media scholar. Like most contemporary scholars, I rarely (if ever) use the sociolinguistic jargon

(that Fiske so clearly explains here) in my work. Nevertheless, these concepts and the analytical

perspective they give me on the nature of culture, communication, and power undergird

everything I do. When one integrates concepts so deeply, it can be easy to forget what it was like

before you learned them. That certainly happened with me--a fact that made it hard when I

started to teach media and cultural studies to undergraduate students. Although I had taken a

semester-long course with Fiske on semiotics and structuralism, I didn't appreciate the

importance of that semester. Nor did I have the patience to spend that many weeks teaching my

students about the sign, signifier, and signified; about the difference between indexical, iconic,

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and symbolic signs; or about the paradigmatic and syntagmatic. I wanted to rush to the exciting

part.

After 9/11, Newsweek published a special issue with a cover that included an image of a

young, blond, white female child holding an American flag in outstretched arms, looking

upwards. She is sitting on the shoulders of a man who was himself standing amidst a crowd of

seemingly racially diverse adults. Across the top of the cover are the words "The Spirit of

America": a rich text for analysis, obviously. I use this cover in a large Introduction to Mass

Communication lecture class, and while I am usually able to get my students to understand the

basics of what was going on in this cover, I am always disappointed by their inability to apply

those insights to other cultural texts.

I now realize that I can't take that short cut and hope the lesson will stick. Learning the

elaborate jargon of semiology is a necessary baby step in the ability to think critically about

culture, communication, and power. It takes patience and time. Fiske's Introduction to

Communication Studies reminds me of that fact and serves as a great tool to help me change how

students think about media and culture.

Pam Wilson: It seems that we are all agreed both on the historic nature of the book but also on

the potential significance of --and need for a new edition and application of--this book to reinject

the "missing link" of semiotics and structuralism back into the canon of cultural studies. More

clearly than anyone else, Fiske has laid out a foundation here that helps us, and our students, to

understand the basic building blocks that undergird culture and communication, weaving

together a century of thought and creating a well-defined path through what often seems

overwhelming to students and young scholars (especially the accumulated jargon of several

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generations of theorists) and, as Ron Becker noted, better preparing the reader to understand the

"exciting parts" of cultural studies.

This book is truly an overlooked gem that needs to be added to the canon both for its

clarity in articulating the basic premises of cultural studies and for its accessibility to undergrads

as a teaching tool.

___________________________

Contributors:

Ron Becker: I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Miami University. While working on a master’s degree on Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1990s, I took a seminar on the politics of popular culture from John Fiske. I was never the same. I eventually transferred into Media and Cultural Studies program. My first book, Gay TV and Straight America, situates the rise of material on prime-time network television in the 1990s in specific industry and social contexts. My current research project focuses on understanding straight-identified male viewers’ perceptions of "bromance" narratives. I am also working on a larger project that examines ideologies about the sanctity of life and biological reproduction. Elana Levine: I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in media and cultural studies. I often repeat to students Fiske's advice to me when I was searching for a dissertation topic: continue to pursue matters of interest to you; there will be a common thread between them that will eventually emerge and lead you to your topic. My dissertation research eventually turned into my first book, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Duke UP, 2007), and I credit Fiske and his work with shaping my most fundamental understandings of television culture. My current research focuses on discourses of legitimation around television in the era of media convergence. I am also working on a history US daytime television soap opera.

Darrell Newton: I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland, where I teach media studies, film theory and media literacy. I hold an M.A. and Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin where I studied under John Fiske. I also hold a Master of Arts in English from UW-Milwaukee. I recently published an

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essay “Shifting Sentiments: West Indians immigrants, the BBC and Cultural Production,” in Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography from I.B. Tauris Press, and I'm currently completing a book on BBC television policies, Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and West Indian Immigration for Manchester University Press. I have been researching the BBC and giving academic papers in England since the early 1990s.

Pam Wilson: I am an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Communication Program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia, where I enjoy helping students become excited about applying cultural and critical theory to real-life questions about the media in their lives. My research and writing have focused on the historical and cultural politics of media and other representational forms of cultural expression: from television journalism and popular programming to online genealogical communities to Native American and global indigenous media. I am the co-editor of Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics and Practices (Duke University Press, 2008) and have published many journal articles. I am currently researching the early development of cultural self-representation through tourism in Native American communities.