Page 265 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ANGELA MCROBBIE 253

of the category of experience would have been unproblematic. How such
‘voices’ would have found their way into this kind of analysis raises many
more questions than can be realistically dealt with here. David Morley’s
recent review of the current debate in cultural studies on ethnography, and
on recording, documenting and analysing the accounts of ‘other people(s)’
is useful in that it reminds us of the inevitability and indeed the necessity of
authorial mediation in such work (Morley, forthcoming). In the case of
New Times and in relation to the earlier comment made here about the
importance of developing a nexus of institutional, ethnographic and
empirical work, the obvious question is how and why? There is a tendency,
when the question of experience is raised in this way, for it to act as a kind
of touchstone of truth or authenticity; it becomes a point of reference
against which all the other work can be judged. Only through a re-
conceptualization of the category of experience, and with this a good deal
of new thinking on how to use experience fruitfully whether in an
ethnographic context or not, can we move towards a more integrative
mode of analysis which overcomes this idea that ‘ordinary people’ and
‘lived reality’ are out there and somehow not in here. In fact the real
attempt in the position pieces in New Times to articulate the shared
enjoyments and small pleasures of everyday life mark one way of
‘identifying’ oneself as part of that community of ordinary people, without
shifting too decisively into the language of personal experience or
autobiography. However this kind of ‘mention’ remains very much an
undercurrent. It leaves unresolved how spoken voices might be brought
back into the distinctive kind of work which New Times represents. (This
is a slightly different question from that of the status of ‘ethnography’ in,
let us say, television audience studies. For a much fuller account of this
debate see, again, Morley’s paper.)
Only in Bea Campbell’s analysis of three new towns as viewed from the
perspective of some of their female inhabitants, is there any sense of the
lived, dense, textured quality of experience. Work like this, drawn up into
a much fuller study, would indeed accomplish the move towards the kind of
empirical and experiential ‘realities’, the absence of which I argued earlier
left cultural theory open to attack for an overemphasis on representations,
texts and meaning which in turn had produced an unproductive counter-
development in the looking towards so-called active readers and subversive
audiences. This kind of ‘new ethnography’ can be found substantially in
recent American cultural studies. If one of the problems with pure
textuality was the tendency to lose track of wider social and political
realities, then exactly the same criticism can be made of ethnographic work
which finds no reason to connect the now hyperactive textual experiences
of the ‘sample’ to the wider social and historical relations in which these
experiences come to be expressed. The politics is sufficiently revealed in the
activity. This is unsatisfactory even from the most basic sociological point