Page 185 - Decoding Culture

178 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE
essential in cultural studies if the newly emerged 'active reader' is
to take her proper place.

Cultural populism

While the 'ethnographic' approach to incorporating active reader­
ship into cultural studies is essentially methodological, vesting
faith in empirical research into real readers, another possibility is
to assert active readership as ontologically foundational and then
reconstruct the cultural studies enterprise accordingly. A good
example of this version of the swing away from strong ideology
models, and one that has attracted a great deal of criticism and
invective, is to be found in John Fiske's work, dubbed 'terminally
uncritical populism' by McGuigan (1992: 49) . Fiske and others are
viewed as misbegotten products of the collapse of hegemony
theory: 'under the strain of its own internal contradictions, the syn­
thesis imploded and ultimately dissolved in the work of some
authors, most notably John Fiske, into an uncritical celebration of
mass-popular cultural consumption'. If we once lose sight of popu­
lar culture's ideological function, the argument runs, and its
embeddedness in specific political economies, then there is noth­
ing left but to admire the capacity of creative readers in the
diversity and inventiveness of their reading practices. What is wide­
spread and popular is what is good, and no space remains for a
critical cultural studies.
Of course, that is a caricature, and a very brief one at that, but it
is not entirely unrepresentative of either 'uncritical cultural pop­
ulism' or some of the attacks made upon it. What could provoke
such division? Let us look more closely at Fiske's work in search of
an answer. Just as the eees were, Fiske is concerned with culture
in relation to resistance and power. As he formulates the issues in

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