Page 174 - Decoding Culture

THE RISE OF THE READER 167

as pleasure, active readership, and constructive polysemy. But
these are not only gender issues; they are also general aspects of
the relation between human agency and culture, aspects that the
main traditions of cultural studies had neglected in their desire to
focus upon culture's capacity to constrain. In response to such
neglect, the 1980s and 1990s have seen the theoretical pendulum
swing away from top-down, dominant ideology models and toward
a rather more open concern with culture's relation to active agency.
These changes have provoked claims that there is an emerging
'paradigm crisis' in cultural studies, and it is this topic that forms
the focus for this chapter. I shall examine the changing state of cul­
tural studies theory and method as it is embodied in two main
developments, before going on to make some observations about
the 'crisis'. Both developments derive from what is sometimes
described as a postmodern attempt to reconceptualize media audi­
ences as more diverse and active contributors to processes of
interpretation and communication. The first is particularly con­
cerned to document that 'activity' as it is found in natural social
settings, tending to make use of a variety of methodologies that
have been loosely - perhaps too loosely - categorized as 'ethno­
graphic'. The second development revolves around the emergence
of a kind of celebratory and allegedly uncritical semiotics of popu­
lar culture, a form of so-called 'cultural populism' that has provoked
considerable debate. The two developments are not unrelated, but
they are sufficiently different in their emphases to merit separate
treatment here.

Audience ethnography

We have already seen in general terms how the issue of active
readership edged to the fore in the later stages of both Screen

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