Page 106 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

94 COLIN SPARKS

The crucial failure and danger of most cultural analysis are that
dynamic, living grounded aesthetics are transformed and transferred
into ontological properties of things, object and artefacts which may
represent and sustain aesthetics but which are, in fact, separate. The
aesthetic effect is not in the text or artefact. It is part of the sensuous/
emotive/ cognitive creativities of human receivers, especially as they
produce a stronger sense of emotional and cognitive identity as
expanded capacity and power—even if only in the possibility of
future recognitions of a similar kind.
(Willis, 1990:24)
One must make allowance for the fact that this passage was written as an
attempt to persuade the Gulbenkian Foundation of the value of popular
culture, but even so it is striking how far the resources of The Long
Revolution, and its essentially non-ideological and expressivist ideas about
culture, are redeployed. In Willis’s account, the variety of working-class
youth subcultures is once again the expression of life situation.
The fate of the ‘encoding/decoding’ model is slightly different. Hall
appears to have abandoned the attempt to develop this any further at the
start of the 1980s. The media are barely discussed directly in The Hard
Road to Renewal, despite the fact that they must surely have been
considered central to the struggle for hegemony in contemporary society.
When they are mentioned, it is simply as ‘ventriloquists’ for Thatcherism
(Hall, 1988:52–3). The elaboration of the decoding moment of the model
was one of the most successful aspects of cultural studies during the
period. In this respect, Morley’s book The ‘Nationwide’ Audience was
genuinely seminal in that it opened the route to the ‘ethnographic’
approach to the audience. In its original form, this book was the second
part of a study which also involved an attempt to produce an account of
the embedded codes of the ‘Nationwide’ television programme. In the
subsequent elaboration of this strand of analysis, the concern with the nature
of the text which forms the basis for the decoding has usually been absent.
Starting from the perception that there are observable differences in
decoding, emphasis has shifted to the activity of the audience, which is now
conceived of as a much more shifting and transitory phenomenon than it was
originally. While Morley has been careful to distinguish himself from the
more extreme formulations, there can be no doubt that the tendency of the
work in this field over the last years has been towards the radical
indeterminacy of audience readings (Morley, 1992:23–32). In The
‘Nationwide’ Audience, and in some of his subsequent work, Morley made
a serious effort to investigate how far particular decodings could be related
to social position. In the writings of other prominent figures who have
developed this line of thinking, most notably John Fiske, any concern with
determination has completely vanished. His central concern is with the