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.Crucially, it offered the promise, andsometimes the opportunity, for change.Hegemony was bound to beliefs and passionsso deep as to form the very substance of a practice of life.During the seventies Gramscian thought battled with another Marxist mode ofsocial analysis, dubbed structuralist.Structuralist analyses abandoned the category ofculture, and offered an account of society (heavily influenced by the revisionist Frenchcommunist, Louis Althusser) as an assemblage of relatively autonomous (i.e.onlyloosely connected and self-determining) institutions the education system being themost important of these which in turn produced forms of knowledge and value (so-called signifying practices ) that, in the last instance, were organised so as toperpetuate capitalist relations of production.The struggle between Gramscianism and structuralism gradually dissolved duringthe eighties.At that point Stuart Hall (who took over Raymond Williams role as Britishcultural studies most influential theorist and who had worked through these intellec-tual debates most carefully and articulately) was working with a model which tookaccount of a pluralist, de-centred, post-Fordist society, in which different social andcultural fields (economic, political, cultural) are in constant and constantly changinginteraction with one another, without any field determining the others, although theeconomy continues to provide the constraints within which the others move (Hall1996, 44).(This is the kind of model I invoke in slightly different terms above.) In thismodel, particular interactions between social and cultural fields are local, and need nothave implications for society as a whole.Rather, each interaction has power effectsinsofar as it conditions individual lives.Furthermore, individuals have a number ofdifferent, often mutable identities rather than a single fixed identity, and this spread ofidentities, and the occasions for invention and recombination that it throws up, form aground for political and cultural agency.Indeed, leaving this particular theory aside, the understanding of individual andcommunal agency shifted over the years.Take as an example a relatively early workfrom the Birmingham school such as the collectively written Policing the Crisis (Hall etal.1978).This showed that the media panic around a 1973 mugging in Handsworth bya young black man helped the state to inaugurate policies that controlled not so muchcrime but black male youth as such.It demonstrated that ideology thought of as theset of generally accepted beliefs and stereotypes was constructed by the interactionof different, and sometimes conflicting, forces, many with long and complex histories,and worked towards the hegemony of racist values and constraints on black people slives.Here black youth were seen as subjects of ideology, policing, media scares and soon, rather than as players negotiating and opposing dominant forces in the social field.This vision of victim passivity was to change in cultural studies of the eighties, whenindividuals came to be regarded as agents rather than as subjects of larger ideologicaland social structures.As a result, the politics of representation became paramount.In22 GENRES AND GENEAL OGI ESthis move, representation took on two meanings: it referred, first, to the way thatparticular social groups were represented, especially in the media, and the politicalgains to be won by critiquing such representations where they stigmatised; second, itreferred to the way in which representative politics disempowered specific interestsand identities and reduced political agency, especially that of minorities in theAmerican sense.The next step away from subaltern passivity for British cultural studies was towards ethnography that is, the study not of representations (such as TV shows or adver-tisements) or of institutions but the analysis of how culture is used and understood byactual individuals and groups.Ethnography takes two forms.It can be quantitative ,which involves large-scale surveys and (usually) statistical analysis.However this kindof research ultimately belongs more to social sciences than to cultural studies.It canalso involve interviews with small groups or individuals so-called qualitativeresearch.By and large British (and Australian) cultural studies turned to this latterform of ethnography in the late seventies, in a move that marks its most profound breakwith predominantly textual and archival humanities disciplines such as literary criti-cism and social theory.At first, cultural-studies ethnography concentrated on howaudiences of varying class, gender or ethnicity accepted or rejected the political slant ofnews programmes and the like.But partly because it soon became clear that the less-privileged members of society often preferred conservative programmes, it moved onto the impact of television, reading, music, etc.on the everyday life of consumers,drawing attention to the pleasures, evaluations, fulfilments, bondings and constraintsinvolved in cultural life.By the nineties, much British cultural studies ethnographyinvolved reporting on fans of particular genres, by researchers who were themselvesfans as well as academics in a word, organic intellectuals for taste subcultures
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