Page 184 - Decoding Culture

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THE RISE F THE READE R 177
partial and can never simply be taken to represent participants'
views. But nor are they nothing more than convenient fictions.
Combined with research using other methodological approaches -
triangulated, to borrow a jargon term - they potentially constitute
an assembly of variously described materials in relation to which
we formulate models. Clearly this returns theory to centre stage -
it is within the terms of our theories that we develop models, and it
is in relation to these models that we describe and redescribe the
phenomenal world. But this is not Theory' in the grand capitalized
sense. This is theory as a language of analysis and as an instru­
ment of explanatory understanding.
It is through the development of this theory that the 'structural
considerations' that Morley wants to incorporate into his ethno­
graphic approach can be brought into play. But such theorizing
cannot be an inductive by-product of audience ethnographies, as
some researchers seem to assume. To construct models of audi­
ence activity we need to draw on theoretical as well as empirical
resources, and, in particular, develop concepts which will allow for
the conjoint conceptualization of structure and agency. I suggested
earlier that cultural studies thinking has been restricted by a com­
mitment to dualistic forms of theorizing, classically viewing
structures as modes of ideological constraint, but more recently, in
the rise of the active reader, affording considerable degrees of
freedom to agents over structure. Audience ethnographies have
swung with the theoretical pendulum toward the latter position, if
not from theoretical intent, then as a matter of methodological
default. This precisely parallels the kind of dualism that Giddens
(1984) identifies as a basic difficulty in the development of modern
sociological theories, and one which, he argues, can only be
resolved by generating concepts which ensure that we understand
structure and agency in conjoint terms - the one always implying
and presupposing the other. This is the kind of thinking that will be

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