Page 198 - Decoding Culture

THE RISE F THE READE R 191
O
dimensions of the 'crisis', discussion quickly leads back to broader
theoretical and methodological issues. And even if all aspirations to
make critical judgements are dismissed, whether aesthetic or
socio-political, there still remains a substantial core of method­
ological and theoretical difficulties. Consider methodology. As we
saw in the first section of this chapter, although methodological
self-consciousness has not loomed large in the cultural studies lit­
erature, where it has recently come to the fore it has been more
concerned with the 'problem' of the partiality of ethnographic infor­
mation than with more general issues of epistemology and method.
Furthermore, while it is true that a division between methodolog­
ical individualism and methodological holism is implicit in several
of the critiques of 'cultural populism', there has not been any sus­
tained discussion of such issues. Now this is hardly the place to
re-examine either the lengthy debate about methodological indi­
vidualism in the social sciences (d. O'Neill, 1973) or those more
general epistemological arguments that emerged as a result of
sociology's 1970s move toward more ethnographically inclined
methodologies. While cultural studies may well have something to
learn from the earlier methodological travails of its sister social
science disciplines, it can only do so by exploring those method­
ological problems as they are now encountered in a cultural studies
context.
In these circumstances, furthermore, the logically prior episte­
mological issue - the problem that underlies specific divisions
already touched on in this chapter, such as individualism versus
holism or ethnographic description versus structural explanation -
is the lack of clarity in cultural studies about the status and function
of 'theory'. For some, theory has meant no more than generaliza­
tion - statements that go beyond specific textual descriptions or
evaluations. For others, theory equates to philosophy at least in as
much as the latter is understood to involve speculative and abstract

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