Quotes from John Fiske

We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.

Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery?

The way we make sense of a realistic text is through the same broad ideological frame as the way we make sense of our social experience or rather, the way we are made sense of by the discourses of our culture.

We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.

We now witness the constructive work on a foundation that will endure through the ages. That foundation is the god of science - revealed to us in terms that will harmonize with our intelligence.

The persecuting spirit has its origin morally in the disposition of man to domineer over his fellow creatures; intellectually, in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

The future is hope!

The persecuting spirit has its origin... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins everywhere.

it is impossible for a free people to govern a dependent people despotically without endangering its own freedom.

The alienated audiences was one that was aware of the performance as an arbitrary construction of the real, of the difference between players and characters, and was therefore aware that the people and incidents on stage were there to perform social an ideological actions that could only be understood in terms of their relationship to the dominant ideology. Alienation produced a thinking, interrogative socially aware audience.

In the economies of late capitalism leisure displaces labor, consumption displaces production, and commodities become the instruments of leisure, identity, and social relations.

Chambers (1986) argues that contemporary metropolitan society produces a culture of the spectacle in which the realization of the self is not achieved in the depth of one's inner being, but on the surface, through style, through image, through a series of theatrical gestures (p.11).

There is no pleasure in being duped by the text into a helpless viewer, but there is considerable pleasure in selectively viewing the text for points of identification and distance, in controlling one's relationship with the represented characters in the light of one's own social and psychological context.

What are you, where did you come from, and whither are you bound?"— the question which from Homer's days has been put to the wayfarer in strange lands — is likewise the all-absorbing question which man is ever asking of the universe of which he is himself so tiny yet so wondrous a part.

In capitalist societies there is no so-called authentic folk culture against which to measure the "inauthenticity" of mass culture, so bemoaning the loss of the authentic is a fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia.

Anything out of control is always a potential threat, and always calls up moral, legal, and aesthetic powers to discipline it. The signs of the subordinate out of control terrify the forces of order (whether moral, legal, or aesthetic), for they constitute a constant reminder of both how fragile social control is and how it is resented; they demonstrate how escaping social control, even momentarily, produces a sense of freedom.