Page 200 - Decoding Culture

THE RISE OF THE READE R 193

But even if this kind of realism is unacceptable - and I have not
tried to make a sustained case for it here - the problems to which
it is a response are real enough. Whatever the preferred solution,
what has to be avoided is a situation in which theories become all
but immune to empirical arbitration, and research methodologies -
where they are considered at all - are cast in terms of one accept­
able route to truth. This is the situation that has characterized
cultural studies for much of its history, and which continues to do
so in its time of 'crisis'. Only by systematic epistemological reflec­
tion and debate can we hope to overcome such widespread
methodological confusion.
Lurking behind these epistemological issues we find still more
basic theoretical divisions, above all those reflecting fundamental
assumptions about the nature of social and cultural reality. In the
course of this book I have tried to show the ways in which 'top­
down' accounts of the relationship between people and their
culture have dominated cultural studies thinking, whether in the
form of subject-positioning theories or dominant ideology models.
Although there are undoubted differences between the perspec­
tives here represented by Screen theory and the work of the CCCS,
on this matter - and for all the CCCS' insistence on its interest in
active agency - they broadly coincide. In Giddens' sense quoted
earlier, they are 'objectivist' in inclination, viewing society (via cul­
ture and ideology) as having priority over the individual. We have
seen how these traditions of thought faced increasing difficulties in
conceptualizing various features of culture that simply would not fit
into predominantly top-down forms of analysis. These failings bred
dissatisfaction, and from that dissatisfaction has come an acceler­
ating drift toward more 'bottom-up' perspectives in the shape of,
among others, audience ethnography and 'cultural populism'.
What we see in audience ethnography and cultural populism is
a determined attempt to move cultural studies toward subjectivism,

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