Page 175 - Decoding Culture

168 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

theory's account of subject positioning and the CCCS' use of the
encoding/decoding model. Neither approach proved able to deal
satisfactorily with the nexus of relations between culture, text and
reader. Lacking concepts appropriate to the task they tended to
submerge the nascent 'active reader' in models that prioritized
determination by, respectively, psychoanalytic processes securing
the subject or socio-political processes securing hegemony. It is not
that exponents of either view were unaware of these limitations. It
is, rather, that the key terms with which they theorized culture
and communication were dualistic, inviting analyses in terms of the
dominance of structures over specific social agents, or, in principle
if not in practice, vice versa.
I shall return to the perils of theoretical dualism later. For the
present it is necessary to get some sense of how reaction against
these views in the 1980s precipitated an alternative approach to
readership, a topic I shall approach by first considering aspects of
David Morley's work in the years following the Nationwide study.
In Chapter 5 we saw some of the ways in which the CCCS study of
Nationwide sought to apply the encoding/decoding model, which
was already a step toward an active audience conception in com­
parison with older traditions of media research. It is now
commonplace to suggest that this study, especially in its most audi­
ence-oriented component (Morley, 1980b) , demonstrated the
inherent limitations of the encoding/ decoding model, and, notwith­
standing Morley's (1992: 10-12) own inclination to dissent from
this judgement, there is no doubt that it marks an initial move
away from the terms of the classic CCCS position. The Nationwide
study, as Morley suggests, may indeed have been retrospectively
misrepresented by Fiske (1987) and Turner (1990) for example,
but this does not mean that they are wrong in seeing it as an early
sign of what was to become a marked conceptual shift.
That shift is certainly apparent in Morley's next study, Family

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