Page 181 - Decoding Culture

174 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE
undervalued detailed empirical research, often simply dismissing
it as indefensibly empiricist. Y e t it had become increasingly appar­
ent that any serious attempt to grapple with the relation between
the structuring capacities of cultural texts and the agency of read­
ers needed to understand processes of reading in actual social and
historical contexts. Research into audiences, however, had been
the province of the mass communications research tradition which
was itself dominated by a scientistic model of inquiry and by quan­
titative methods. It is hardly surprising, then, that when cultural
studies came to embrace empirical research into audiences it did
so in qualitative and largely microscopic terms, and even though
Morley's formulation of the project does invoke 'structural consid­
erations', audience ethnographies thus far have done little to
realise that ambition, either conceptually or empirically.
Methodological debate has therefore been less about the chal­
lenge of incorporating a conjoint understanding of structure and
agency - arguably the first requirement for those concerned to
elucidate text-reader relations - than about the inevitable partiality
of ethnographic accounts and their relation to political practice.
These are important issues, of course, and their discussion in the
cultural studies literature has been deeply influenced by the
methodological 'crisis' in anthropological thought of recent years
(Clifford and Marcus, 1986; James et aI. , 1997) . Central to this
'
debate has been the recognition that [ e]thnographic truths are
thus inherently partial' (Clifford and Marcus, 1986: 7) - as are, one
might say, all putative empirical truths - a view which, in a cultural
studies context, leads swiftly on to a series of questions about what
it is that ethnographic accounts actually represent, how they relate
to other representations offered by audience members or other
observers, what political role they might play in a critical cultural
studies, in what forms they should be given expression, and
whether and how the reflexivity of the ethnographer should be

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