Paper Keywords: popular culture, pleasure, cultural industry

John Fiske's theory of mass culture is famous for highlighting the initiative, creativity and resistance of the masses, emphasizing the "pleasure and significance" that the masses get from cultural consumption, and excavating and studying the power operation mechanism of mass culture and the process of culture reaching Hangzhou. However, when this kind of cultural research deliberately emphasizes the positive significance of civilian cultural resistance, it ignores the fact that there are still extreme political and economic inequalities in the social structure of western capitalism in the late stage.

First, the ideological origin of John Fiske's theory of popular culture

Fiske's theory of popular culture directly utilizes two contemporary ideological and cultural resources. One is the theory of Desaido, a French cultural theorist. Desai emphasized in his book Daily Life Practice that the ruled social groups can grab some local interests from the ruling cultural system by adopting certain strategies. He pointed out that consumers of popular culture can control its production, but they can control its consumption. In this sense, cultural goods are not only the objects accepted by consumers, but also the resources and materials that recipients can use. The recipient can reverse its use value and function in the process of use, so that it is partly in line with its own interests. Any form of pop culture will lead to subversion or resistance when it tries to exert control. Another ideological resource used by Fiske is the theory of "pleasure" that appeared in 1980s, which directly benefited from Bakhtin's theory of "carnival". This happiness theory regards happiness as an important resource to resist hierarchical order and authoritative control. But the more important support for Fiske's happiness theory comes from roland barthes's exposition of physical happiness. Barthes believes that the body is divorced from ideology, because it is the product of nature rather than culture, so it becomes the last stronghold to resist cultural control. The body provides us with limited space to resist ideology, and the pleasure belonging to the body becomes the opposite of ideology, which has positive significance.

Second, the main contents of John Fiske's theory of popular culture

On the basis of absorbing the above thoughts of Desaido, Bakhtin and Barthes, Fiske constructed a theory of popular culture which is directly opposite to Frankfurt School. Prior to this, the most concentrated and influential exposition on popular culture came from the theorists of Frankfurt School. Adorno, Hawke Hamo and others took a completely negative attitude towards mass culture, believing that the commercialization, standardization, one-sidedness, manipulation and control of mass culture suppressed people's subjective consciousness, creativity and imagination, encouraged instrumental rationality, and further weakened the declining "individual consciousness" and critical spirit in the West.

Fisk first refuted the concept of "mass" by Adorno and others. Adorno and others believe that the masses have become a simple whole because of the long-term depersonalization and simplification of modern social organizations and ideologies. Fisk disagreed with this view. He believes that the public is not a simple whole, but a complex and diverse combination, including various groups formed by interests, political positions and social connections. He pointed out that "any discussion about popularization must take into account various internal opposing forces". "Although the dominant consciousness of capitalism has the power of homogenization, the subordinate groups in capitalist society still maintain quite diverse social identities, which requires different voices that these identities want to adapt to." The masses are complex and diverse, and if mass culture is to be popular among the masses, it must adapt to the complex and diverse needs, so it must also be complex and diverse. However, Frankfurt School just ignores the complexity of popular culture. Fiske further pointed out how the complexity of popular culture came into being and put forward the famous theory of "two kinds of economy". He acknowledged that popular culture has the property of commodity, and pointed out that this kind of culture is different from ordinary commodities. It not only circulates in the financial and economic system, but also circulates in the parallel cultural and economic system. The former circulates money, while the latter circulates meaning and pleasure. From the perspective of financial and economic system, the recipients of popular culture are completely passive, because in the process of production and consumption of financial economy, the recipients themselves have become commodities. Fiske pointed out that the public created a kind of "mass cultural capital" when producing this kind of meaning and pleasure. This "mass cultural capital" contains the meaning and pleasure that the subordinate classes can use to express and promote their interests. There are many kinds of expressions, but they are all in opposition to the dominant force. In Fiske's exposition, we can clearly see the influence of Desaido and the theory of happiness.

Third, question John Fiske's theory of popular culture.

First of all, Fiske's theory of "pleasure" advocates that pleasure and meaning are generated from the resources provided by popular culture. In Fiske's view, the mass culture produced by the cultural industry is the people's own culture and a favorable weapon for the people to subvert and resist capital. In his view, commercial pop culture is progressive in nature, if not radical. Because he saw vitality and creativity in people's trivial daily life, he also found opportunities and motivation for social change. Two low-paid female secretaries tried on clothes at random in a high-end ready-to-wear store, admiring their "stolen" moving images in the mirror and in each other's eyes, and then changed their clothes and left calmly. According to Fiske's point of view, they subverted the original intention of shopkeepers and manufacturers to make money, and broke the attempt of shops to lure consumers to buy through internal decoration. In other words, if you don't have the financial strength to buy real goods, please consume its image and shadow.

It should be pointed out that the acquisition of pleasure is based on politics and economy. Fisk confused two fundamentally different forces. The domination of capital is the same as the right of ordinary people to choose goods in the market, ignoring the basic fact that the choice of goods needs the support of purchasing power. The pleasure of "can't afford it" and "choose not to buy it" is simply not the same. In Fiske's theory, "people who can't afford it" become "people who choose not to buy it", and these people can still enjoy the happiness of choice. Of course, no one can deny the pleasure that consumption brings to people, and sociological analysis is precisely to see who has a greater political and economic foundation to get more and more pleasure from consumption. This kind of cultural research, represented by Fiske, deliberately emphasizes the positive significance of civilian cultural resistance, ignoring the fact that there is still extreme political and economic inequality in the social structure of western capitalism in the late stage. Replacing serious social analysis with light and humorous semiotic analysis will definitely lead to serious misunderstanding of social phenomena.

;