Page 23 - Decoding Culture

16 DECODING CULTURE

decline by mid-decade and, reacting against the perceived
excesses of the past, researchers turned their attention away from
the ideological power of texts and toward the individual pleasures
and interpretive freedom of readers. Although the full implications
of this shift are still not clear, two somewhat different ways of con­
sidering readership can be discerned. In one, so-called 'audience
ethnography', the primary emphasis is methodological. By study­
ing people's reading practices in considerable empirical detail, this
approach seeks to do justice to the contextual richness of their
responses. Qualitative interviewing and participant observation
have become preferred methods here, with 'thick description' the
analytic goal. In the other, to which the label 'cultural populism' has
been applied, the main focus is upon readers' capacity to resist
social pressures through inventive appropriation of culture. Critics
of this view (and there are many) argue that in attending so single­
mindedly to processes of cultural consumption, the theory tumbles
by default into an uncritical celebration of popular culture. The
radical theories from which cultural studies drew strength and
originality 20 years ago are thus left high and dry. Indeed, some of
those most dismayed by this turn of events have gone so far as to
suggest that, in consequence, 1990s cultural studies faces a para­
digm crisis. That may well be so, though, as I shall argue in
Chapter 7, the causes and character of the 'crisis' are not as simple
as that.
I am acutely aware of the limitations of the abbreviated story
that I have just told. It omits whole sub-plots, its characters are little
more than cardboard, and it has no clear ending. However, treated
generously it will serve as an introductory outline for the much
fuller account that is to follow. Because of the starkness of its sim­
plification it also helps to foreground the one very general issue
that has informed every stage in the development of cultural stud­
ies. I described this earlier as the tension between the structuring

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