Page 125 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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this set of theoretical assumptions in mind in charting a conceptual terrain that can inform
such a ‘globalization’ of the ethnographic pursuit. First, however, I want to place the
ethnographic turn within cultural studies in a more substantial historical and theoretical
perspective.

THE POWER OF THE POPULAR: BEYOND IDEOLOGY AND
HEGEMONY

The ethnographic turn in audience studies has functioned as a way of relativizing the
gloomy tendency of an older perspective within cultural studies, namely ideological
criticism. A distinctive assumption of cultural studies is that the social production and
reproduction of sense and meaning involved in the cultural process is not only a matter of
signification, but also a matter of power. The intimate connection of signifying practices
and the exercise of power is a focal interest of cultural studies. As Grossberg notes,
‘Once we recognize that all of culture refracts reality as well as reproducing it as
meaningful, then we are committed as well to examining the interests implicated in
particular refractions’ (1983:46). Consequently, ideology was logically foregrounded in
cultural studies to the point that the cultural and the ideological tended to be collapsed
into one another: cultural processes are by definition also ideological in so far as the way
in which the world is made to mean in a society tends to coincide with the interests of the
dominant or powerful classes and groups in that society. The Gramscian concept of
hegemony is mostly used to indicate the cultural leadership of the dominant classes in the
production of generalized meanings, of ‘spontaneous’ consent to the prevailing
arrangement of social relations—a process, however, that is never finished because
hegemony can never be complete. Since the communications media are assumed to play a
pivotal role in the continuous struggle over hegemony, cultural studies became
preoccupied with the question of how the media helped to produce consensus and
manufacture consent (Hall 1982). This set of assumptions has enabled us to understand
the precise textual and institutional mechanisms by which the media function
ideologically; how, that is, in processes of institutionalized cultural production particular
meanings are encoded into the structure of texts, ‘preferred meanings’ which tend to
support existing economic, political and social power relations.
As a form of cultural critique, this kind of ideological analysis (of which I have only
given a simplified description here) is ultimately propelled by a will to demystify,
denounce, condemn; it is a deconstructive practice which presupposes that the
researcher/critic take up the aloof position of critical outsider. However, this perspective
was soon sided by a countercurrent, which emphasized not top-bottom power, but
bottom-top resistance, itself a form of (informal, subordinate) power. The well-known
work on youth subcultures (e.g. Hall and Jefferson 1976; Willis 1977; Hebdige 1979), but
also the emergence of ethnographic approaches to reception are part of the same trend. It
is a populist reaction which stressed the vitality and energy with which those who are
excluded from legitimate, institutional power create a meaningful and liveable world for
themselves, using the very stuff offered them by the dominant culture as raw material and
appropriating it in ways that suit their own interests. Hall’s (1980a) encoding/decoding
model opened up the space to examine the way in which the media’s preferred meanings