We might argue that jeans have two main social foci ...

[rogergx]

I am reading John Fiske's Jeaning of America and find it hard to understand the bolded sentence in paragraph 2. My questions are what are the differences between "semiotic" and "sociological"; why the two foci are mainly semiotic?; "why 'youth' the first focus is not consided one social category (like age)?" The same is with 'working class'. Thanks.


1
Of 125 students of mine, 118 were, on the day that I asked, wearing jeans. The deviant seven, also possessed jeans, but did not happen to be wearing them. I wonder if any other cultural product—movie, TV program, record, lipstick—would be so popular? (T-shirts were as widely owned, but much less regularly worn. ) Students may not be typical of the population as a whole, though jeans are widely popular among non-students in the same age group, and only slightly less widespread among older age groups. So thinking about jeans is as good a way as any to begin a book on popular culture.

2
Let's dismiss their functionality first, for this has little to do with culture, which is concerned with meanings, pleasures and identities rather than efficiency. Of course jeans are a supremely functional garment, comfortable, tough, sometimes cheap, and requiring “low maintenance"—but so, too, are army fatigues. The functionality of jeans is the precondition of their popularity, but does not explain it. In particular, it does not explain the unique ability of jeans to transect almost every social category we can think of. We cannot define a jeans wearer by any of the major social category systems— gender, class, race, age, nation, religion, education. We might argue that jeans have two main social foci, those of youth and the blue-collar or working class, but these foci should be seen as semiotic rather than sociological, that is, as centers of meaning rather than as social categories. So a middle-aged executive wearing jeans as he mows his lawn on a suburban Sunday is, among other things, aligning himself with youthful vigor and activity (in opposition to the distinctly middle-aged office desk) and with the mythic dignity of labor —the belief that physical labor is in some way more honest than wheeling and dealing is deeply imbued in a nation whose pioneers are only a few generations in the past, and is, significantly, particularly widespread among the wheelers and dealers themselves.

 

[jutfrank]

The writer puts it very clearly. Youth and the working class should be seen as centers of meaning rather than social categories. He then goes on to explain very well what he means by that in the next sentence, with an example.

 

[rogergx]

The writer puts it very clearly. Youth and the working class should be seen as centers of meaning rather than social categories. He then goes on to explain very well what he means by that in the next sentence, with an example.

Thank you for your reply. But I hope you can clarify some of my speculations:

1)Does the writer mean that social category or social foci do not work, but meanings are important?

2)And the executive example is to illustrate that he is seeking after meanings from wearing jeans but not put himself in a certain social category, isn't it?

3)In summary, the writer is putting "culture", "meanings" in one category (can explain the popularity of jeans), "social category" "social foci" on the other (cannot explain popularity of jeans), and put them in contrast against each other. Is this conclusion right?

 

[jutfrank]

1. No. He means that the social foci should be seen as centers of meaning, not social categories. He's not talking about the category of people who are young or the category of blue collar workers. He's talking about the ideas of being young and working class, and what these ideas mean.

2. No.

3. No.

As I said, the example given makes it clear. Look:

So a middle-aged executive wearing jeans ... is ... aligning himself with youthful vigor

The middle aged-executive is not young, but he's wearing clothes that people associate with being young. Although he belongs in the social category of being middle-aged (he can't escape this biological fact), he can still try to have some of the youthful vigor that the jeans imbue.