Page 24 - Decoding Culture

THE STORY SO FAR 17
capacity of cultural forms and the activity of human agency, and the
problem that it raises is that of establishing concepts and methods
which will allow analysts to capture the interrelation of those two
mutually determining features. Both main post-structuralist
approaches to cultural studies tended to emphasize culture's struc­
turing capacity. What is ideology other than the realization of that
capacity in specific interests and particular cultural locations? The
CCCS version, of course, was more open to considerations of active
agency, but in the event lacked the concepts to make that anything
more than a rhetorical possibility. The frameworks that have
emerged in the wake of that failure are united in focusing upon the
activity of what they variously term audiences, spectators or read­
ers, though at the expense of structural understanding. In effect,
the theoretical pendulum has swung toward agency and away from
structure, thereby replacing one limiting conceptual apparatus with
another. In the account that follows I shall return again and again
to this question of the relationship between structure and agency.
It is, I believe, the fundamental issue for any kind of cultural study.

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