Page 266 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

254 LOOKING BACK AT NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS

of view. Putting to one side for the moment the ‘new’ cultural studies
which embraces this ‘power to the audience’ approach, what it does
nonetheless raise as a critical question is precisely on what grounds
experiential, ethnographic material can exist within the kind of connective
cultural studies work which is the complement to the more immediately
political project of New Times.
If the key issue for New Times remains, however, that of how to make
sense of social phenomena without unduly relying on ideology, then
writers like Morley, whose sociological sense disallows attributing to the
audience the enormous powers of opposition which this new
cultural studies work permits, have also played an important role in
disputing the totalizing power of ideology. Here attention is paid to the
significant slippages which occur in the spaces which intervene in the
passage of reading, watching or consuming. McGuigan, Frith and others
conflate the careful attention to the interactive surface of texts with
experience seen in the work of Morley (1992) and Ang (1991) with the
more ambitious claims of others to find resistance in the act of turning the
television on. The two terms of abuse from McGuigan et al. that keep
reappearing are ‘fashionable’ and ‘celebration’. I will return to the charge of
being ‘fashionable’ later. For now McGuigan sees in Hall’s New Times
work and in all the authors cited above (in addition to myself) a kind of
‘cultural populism’. By this he means a stretching out on the part of the
theorist to understand that the popular pleasures experienced by ordinary
people in the space of leisure or consumption or indeed in ‘family life’, can
contain elements untarnished by or unanticipated by capital or even
provided by capital but at least reworked by the consumer in the practice
of consumption. McGuigan mistakenly interprets Stuart Hall as pursuing
this kind of analysis even further. He claims Hall sees ordinary people as
‘active pleasure-seekers’ and ‘trusts in the good sense of their judgement’
(McGuigan, 1992:38).
This suggestion, discounting for a moment the scale of misrepresentation
here of Hall’s writing, allows McGuigan and others, in particular Frith and
Savage, to argue that cultural studies has abandoned all commitment to
understanding relations of power and powerlessness, dominance and
subordination as they are expressed in culture. For them the New Times
writing is the ultimate example of recantation. The simple existence of
clear signs of opposition and resistance in the heartland of consumer
culture means that politics is happening anyway. This, argue Frith and
Savage, allows New Times to feel obliged to do no more than mention it
and otherwise sit back and enjoy the sound of the tills ringing up more
sales. Frith and Savage are even more aggressive than McGuigan in their
account of this new kind of cultural studies, as the title of their polemic
suggests. ‘The pearls and the swine’ sets a new and unwelcome standard in
male intellectual-left combat. In the light of such antagonism let us stand