Page 196 - Decoding Culture

THE RISE F THE READE R 189
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soap opera) through a strategy of redemptive reading (cf.
Brunsdon, 1991) .
For all the attention attracted by such endeavours, however,
post-structuralist cultural studies has not generally focused on dis­
crimination as an end in itself. The presumption that it was possible
and desirable to categorize both individual artefacts and whole cul­
tural forms in terms of fixed standards of quality had fallen into
some disrepute long before the 'postmodern' fashion for aesthetic
and moral relativism. In practice, aesthetic discrimination had been
absorbed into more all-encompassing judgements about the social
and political role played by particular forms and texts. And while
there is sometimes an element of cultural evaluation in the allega­
tions of 'uncritical cultural populism' directed at recent
reader-oriented cultural studies - especially in attributing to the
likes of Fiske a 'what is popular is what is good' position - the
more forceful arguments have tended to bemoan the loss of a crit­
ical edge in political rather than aesthetic terms. It has certainly
been argued that recent cultural studies has forgone the capacity to
make critical statements about the texts on which it focuses, its
emphasis on active readers permitting only the articulation of dif­
ferent readers' diverse points of view. But the alternative vantage
point proposed by such challenges is based not so much in the
domain of aesthetics as in that of politics.
To be 'critical' then, in the terms posed by those unhappy with
recent cultural studies, is to relocate texts and readers back into
the socio-political context from which, allegedly, they have been
removed. Judgements of quality now become judgements about
the ideological role of texts and their social consequences,
informed by a political economy of the media and a more general
account of the operation of capitalist social formations. In this argu­
ment, the uncritical pluralism of audience-centred perspectives is
contrasted with what is presumed to be a more desirable critical

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