Page 190 - Decoding Culture

THE RISE OF THE READE R 183
claims does mean that it is possible to construct readings of his
position that are less open to McGuigan's swingeing criticisms.
One such reading and defence is that of Storey (1993: 182-199),
who rightly observes that McGuigan's and others' assertion of the
superiority of an alternative political economy approach to culture
is not self-evident. 1 shall not follow this argument through here,
not because it is unimportant, but because it falls into precisely the
dualistic traps that mar cultural populism in the first place. If it was
the perceived one-sidedness of traditional top-down views that gave
rise to Fiske's and others' excess of bottom-up rhetoric, then to
respond to the latter in the same terms is a recipe for endless and
futile oscillation between opposed positions.
The more interesting question to ask is, do the cultural populist
attempts to rewrite the cultural studies project in the light of an
ontology of active readership resolve the problems that occasioned
their emergence in the first place? The answer to this question is
surely no, for the simple reason that they remain trapped within
the same dualistic framework as those against whom they react.
What is required is not an insistence on micro-meanings and cre­
ativity against macro-structures and constraint, but an attempt to
rethink the form of relation between these two in non-reductive
and non-dualistic terms. In examining this possibility in the context
of social theory, Giddens suggests that a general distinction
between what he calls 'objectivism' and 'subjectivism' lies behind
such dualistic conceptions. 'By the former of these notions,' he
writes (Giddens, 1986: 530) , 'I mean that perspective in social
theory according to which the social object - that is society - has
priority over the individual agent, and in which social institutions
are regarded as the core component of interest to social analysis.
Subjectivism essentially means its opposite. According to this
standpoint, the human agent is treated as the prime center for
.
social analysis ' The drift toward subjectivism that Giddens saw in

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