A Micropolitical Study Of John Fiske’s Pleasure Theory

In the postmodern society that aestheticizes daily life,personal pleasure has become an important research object in many fields such as culture,aesthetics,and literature.John Fisk was an important theorist in the field of Western media and cultural studies in the late 20 th century.He advocated a positive and optimistic attitude towards popular culture.Fiske gave high status to pleasure,developed his own ideas in the study of the theory of pleasure in popular culture.This essay will approach Fiske’s theory of pleasure from the perspective of micropolitics.This article will analyze the connotation of pleasure from the level of pleasure,meaning and power.This article will start from the following aspects: the connotation of pleasure,the operation of pleasure politics and the realization of its micropolitical potential.At the same time,there is a reflection on the validity of the politics of pleasure.The first part of the thesis focuses on the micropolitical origins of John Fiske’s pleasure theory.First,the CCCS’s tradition of studying the politicization of culture influenced Fiske’s focus on the political nature of popular culture.Fiske absorbed the resistance tradition of subcultural studies in order to develop resistant audience.The antagonistic force between subordinate and dominator is one of the conditions for the formation of pleasure.Secondly,to analyze Fiske’s pleasure from the micropolitical perspective,it is necessary to consider that this pleasure is generated in the context of consumer society and is a media experience.Finally,Fiske’s starting point in constructing his theory of pleasure is to redefine the people and culture.Fiske gave positive value to the popular and saw culture as the production and circulation of meaning.The second part of the thesis focuses on the analysis of the micropolitical power operation of Fiske’s pleasure theory.Micropolitics is driven by pleasure,both productive pleasure and carnival-like pleasure which may evade or offend power.The former is the generation and discovery of self-meaning,while the latter is the liberation of the body from the subjectivity of social norms.The popular has micropolitical power.The core traits of the popular are mobility and resistance.The excessive readers are fans.Pleasure comes from the active interpretation of the producerly text by the people.The third part of the thesis mainly discusses the realization of the micropolitical potential of Fiske’s pleasure theory.Pleasure is generated by the popular from the relevance of cultural texts and daily life,and relevance is the criterion of mass culture.The combination of relevance and productivity allows the popular to derive meaning from the text for their own use.The popular uses capitalist cultural resources to obtain their own cultural territory,and evade the discipline of social order through the resistance of symbolic power.The micropolitics of pleasure is a potentially progressive force capable of bringing about social change.The fourth part of the paper will reflect on Fiske’s theory of pleasure.Fiske developed the economics of audience pleasure in symbolic pleasure.The popular took the initiative to reproduce their own meaning in symbolic goods.After combining pleasure and power,Fiske saw the progressiveness of pleasure in micropolitics.This is the third path Fiske has found for cultural studies.However,while valuing the initiative of the popular,Fiske also exaggerated this initiative by imposing his own experience on the popular too subjectively.There is a limit to the resistance of popular symbolic pleasure to the system.We should resort to a multifaceted approach to cultural studies.