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Reception study: Ethnography and the problems ofdispersed audiences and nomadic subjectsJanice Radway aa Duke University.

Online Publication Date: 01 October 1988To cite this Article: Radway, Janice , (1988) 'Reception study: Ethnography and theproblems of dispersed audiences and nomadic subjects', Cultural Studies, 2:3, 359 -376To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/09502388800490231URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502388800490231

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© Taylor and Francis 2007

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RECEPTION STUDY: ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE PROBLEMS OF DISPERSED

AUDIENCES AND N O M A D I C SUBJECTS

n recognition of the fact that we who are gathered together at these meetings are constituted as communities of particular sorts by the worlds of words we construct and inhabit, I should like to begin today by focusing briefly on the specific word that has

occasioned this session (Brodkey, 1987).' That word is, of course, 'audi- ence'. I want to pause long enough to consider its origins and its conceptual legacy because the term itself presently denotes a crucially important and much contested arena in communication studies and therefore deserves re-examination. But I also want to call attention to the word for a moment because I think an acknowledgement of its etymology may help us to think reflexively about our own status as speakers and writers and about the ways in which our situation structures and perhaps inadvertently limits our research efforts.

As a careful investigation of the etymology of 'audience' would show, the word emerged first in the context of face-to-face communication. The Oxford English Dictionary notes in fact that 'audience' was first used abstractly to denote the individual activity of hearing (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971: 559). To 'give audience' was to 'give ear' or attention to what had been spoken by another. By extension, then, the word came to be used nominally to refer to a group of persons within hearing, to an assembly of listeners. They were an at~dience because, as individuals, they could give audience to the words of another. The fact that it was this word that was later used by metaphorical extension to refer to the readers of a book suggests how naturalized the speech situation had become as the model for all social communication. Although the readers of a book were nowhere physically assembled and thus could not simply hear the words of another, either as individuals or as a group, the very use of the word to refer to readers suggests that all reception had been conceived as a

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variation of listening. What such a schematic etymology highlights is the original linkage of the word 'audience' with human speech and discrete, relatively unmediated situations of communication where one individual, in the presence of another, can hear his or her interlocutor's oration or conversation.

The conceptual legacy embedded in the word 'audience' was extended and complicated by formalist literary theories as well as by early mass- communication theories. Virtually all of them retained the notion of the audience as a unified aggregate of similarly endowed individuals who passively read or hear the words and therefore the message of another. Comprehension in such models is conflated more or less with the act of hearing, and, in the case of printed texts, the social practice of reading is conceptualized as the simple reception of a message, however complex. The message itself is conceived as a fixed, enduring entity that remains unchanged by the transmission process which delivers it in identical fashion to that aggregate group of receivers, the audience.

Of course, we no longer use the term in such a way, we now reassure ourselves, because we have variously begun to question the notion of a single coherent message and to challenge the conception of transmission as mere physical delivery or transfer (Ang, 1987; Fiske, 1987; Gross, 1987; Morley, 1987; Seiter et al., 1987). At the same time we have begun to distinguish rather precisely between passive hearing or reception and the more active move of adopting a particular mode of attending to the communications of others. And yet, even as we have attempted to refine our models of communication and to redefine both the site and process of reception, we have done so largely by seeking to complicate the conception of audience rather than by jettisoning the word entirely and its conceptual baggage along with it. The very fact that we have found it so difficult to begin somewhere else suggests that the word and its legacy may be more important to us than we know. Indeed, it seems possible that we have been unable to discard the concept in part because it may be crucially important to our self-understand- ing and to our comprehension of our social role.

We may cling to the word in spite of our awareness of the difficulties it presents because of the persistence of an unconscious, naturalized, common- sense understanding of the process of communication which has itself developed in the context of our own concrete social position. I am referring here to the fact that we are people who actually do speak frequently, publicly, and in person, both to students and to peers. We are, after all, situated within an institution grounded most fundamentally on the lecture and on the desire to make ourselves heard. Our audiences are frequently assembled quite literally before us and we enter into the speech situation with particular intentions to convey often quite determinate meanings. We are teachers, we must remember, bent on communicating certain ideas to students. Even when we function as writers, we frequently operate within a highly circumscribed social sphere. When we conceive an article and send it out for review or publication, more often than not we have a very specific sense of who is likely to read our work. Our distant readers may have only

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mediated access to our pronouncements , but, because we can quite accurately imagine not only the specific faces in that crowd but how those individuals might receive and react to our work, those readers may indeed appear to us as if they were assembled as a highly specific aggregate before our eyes. No wonder we find it so difficult to theorize the dispersed, anonymous, unpredictable nature of the use of mass-produced, mass- mediated cultural forms. If the receivers of such forms are never assembled fixedly on a site or even in an easily identifiable space, if they are frequently not uniformly or even attentively disposed to systems of cultural production or to the messages they issue, how can we theorize, not to mention examine, the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of cultural circulation and consumption? 2

Perhaps it should also be said here that our powerfully naturalized conception of people who use mass-produced cultural texts as an audience of receivers subtly privileges the moment of enunciation as production and focuses attention on the subsequent circuit of exchange. To think of someone as a listener or receiver in an audience, obviously, we must first assume the existence of the speaker/producer and the thing to be received. This may well result from the fact that, as teachers, we inevitably locate ourselves precisely within a circuit of production and reception and no doubt take our own priority for granted) Our professional self-definition and success, in fact, depend at least partly on how effectively we have 'gotten through' to our students. We have the power to give tests, after all, and do so in order to ask the question, 'Have they properly received our ideas? '4 It is perhaps this commonsense understanding of our own activity which has led to the analogical reasoning which specifies that what is worth studying about communicat ion is how particular circuits of cultural exchange are established, how they operate, and to what effect. Thus we understandably have engaged ourselves in the examination of how particular kinds of books, films, television shows, and forms of music are produced and received. What, we have wanted to know, happens to a mass-produced text when it is widely circulated among a vast population? In my own case, how are romances taken up by women who constitute their principal audience (Radway, 1984)?

In formulating the question that initiates our research in this particular way, we unconsciously limn the image of a social order where power is precisely lodged at the point of enunciation. In such a discursive system, where people are constructed principally as receivers of the messages of others, those people can wield power in only the most circumscribed of ways. They are admitted only the power of refusal, that is, the power to refuse to listen. Even if they are found to exercise that power, the integrity of the original text is never placed in question, its objective status as the real is assumed. Nor are the power and the priority of the speaker challenged in any fundamental way. Furthermore, in so constructing the circuit of exchange as the crucial site of field for research, we inevitably begin by assuming that individuals in the audience are already stitched into a particular kind of relation with the speaker or writer. Consequently we limit the kinds of questions that might be asked about the individuals so conceived. Because

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they appear in our discourse only as the receivers of messages which are themselves both temporally and theoretically privileged, those individuals are rarely if ever presented as active subjects, let alone as producers of culture.

I want to emphasize here that in objecting to the privileging of speech or writing as production I do not mean to imply that those who control cultural production and the culture industries are ineffective or that they do not have the power to endow others with representations that subsequently structure their understanding of themselves and their culture. But I do want to suggest that our conflation of cultural production with the moment of enunciation alone and our coordinate assumption that that moment is always necessarily primary and determining may originate at least in part from our own situation within the apparatuses of cultural production and with our perception of our own power and our self-interest in legitimating it. Thus the conflation may work actively to ratify our commonsense experience of the world. As has happened with so many others, our conceptions may be validating our own social situation even as they are obscuring their own material and social origins in that situation. To thwart more successfully the determining effects of our social position, we may need to rethink the process of cultural circulation from a new point of view - now not from our point of view as speakers, but from a point of view we share with others in our everywhere-mediated society, the point of view of the active, producing cultural worker who fashions narratives, stories, objects, and practices from myriad bits and pieces of prior cultural production.

Before I elaborate this suggestion and explore the possibilities for an altered research practice which would focus on the complexities of everyday cultural use, I want to reflect briefly upon another feature of academic social organization which tends to reinforce our tendency to conceive cultural practice on the model of a production-reception circuit. ! am referring, of course, to the practice of disciplinization which has its own complex etiology and history, as do the individual disciplines themselves. But, whatever the origins of the habit of carving up the social body into discrete regions, the practice itself has the institutional effect of discursively distinguishing forms of human production from each other and distancing the students of each from one another. Disciplines like English, art history, film studies, or journalism are grounded at least partly on the assumption that they deal distinctively with identifiably distinct objects, and thus their practitioners take for granted the further assumption that others' languages and practices will not be adequate to the observation, description, and analysis of 'their' objects. Thus we are constituted as specialists by the discrete technical languages we wield but also by the very fact that in learning a disciplinary language we are ourselves disciplined, which is to say, taught how to police ourselves by respecting the territorial boundaries and limits already erected as the consequence of a prior survey of the social body. By internalizing that map, what we learn is where and how our authority can be exercised and

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how to locate the near boundary of the frontier beyond which it is too risky to venture.

Of course one might object here that all of this has become a moot point in the present intellectual environment, where the prospects for interdiscipli- nary work are being explored virtually everywhere. While this is true to a certain extent, it is also the case, it seems to me, that most work on culture still begins by taking for granted the warrants that have founded particular disciplines, which is to say, certain specific assumptions about the essential distinctiveness of particular objects and texts as well as about the specific ways in which they should be approached. Thus even when we make an effort to place cultural production and reception socially and historically, and thus to understand how the complexities of determination produce important variabilities in the way in which historical actors intervene in these processes, we still initiate our inquiry by beginning with texts already categorized as objects of a particular sort. Audiences, then, are set in relation to a single set of isolated texts which qualify already as categorically distinct objects. No matter how extensive the effort to dissolve the boundaries of the textual object or the audience, most recent studies of reception, including my own, continue to begin with the 'factual' existence of a particular kind of text which is understood to be received by some set of individuals. Such studies perpetuate, then, the notion of a circuit neatly bounded and therefore identifiable, locatable, and open to observation. Users are cordoned off for study and therefore defined as particular kinds of subjects by virtue of their use not only of a single medium but of a single genre as well. No matter how intense our interest in the subsequent, more dispersed cultural use to which such forms are put in daily life by historical subjects infinitely more complex than our representations of them, our practical and analytical starting-point is still always within the producer-product-receiver circuit.

The limitations of our disciplined research practices and our common- sensical interest in communication circuits are increasingly a problem, I have come to believe, because we have had to grapple in recent years with theories of culture, ideology, and subjectivity which ask us to think of social formations and cultural practices in new ways, all of which confound a simple transmission model of cultural communication. There is no time to map the nuances of the present theoretical environment. But I should like to stress the disquieting importance for reception studies and for ethnography of recent theoretical interventions which have foregrounded the con- structed, shifting nature of subjectivity - its 'nomadic' character, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1977) - and its interpretation with discourse: the fact that it is actively produced in what Stuart Hall (1986), following Antonio Gramsci (1971), calls 'practices of articulation'. Subjects are nomadic, Larry Grossberg (1988) has added, n o t simply because individuality is fragmented but rather because individuality is articulated, which is to say, spoken and constructed, 'out of a . . . wandering through everchanging positions and apparatuses'. As Hall (Grossberg, 1986b: 53)

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himself has recently put it, 'a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects.'

Although such a theory of subjectivity has many consequences, both for intellectual work and for political strategy, its most immediate result in this context is to effect a subtle but extremely important transformation in how we think of cultural production and use. In its dual recognition of the historical priority of socially produced discourses and the unalterable fact of temporal human existence - a position Grossberg (1986a: 65) has characterized, in describing Hall's position, as one of 'theoretical antihu- manism and political humanism' - such a theory asks us to pursue the question of how multiple, publicly constituted discourses call to social subjects who, in turn, through complicated processes of identification, actively locate themselves within at least several of those discourses.

I want to stress two features of this intricate, multilayered process. It is essential to understand that multiple discourses are produced within and permeate a social formation. Although some of these certainly cohere and ultimately support each other, others do not (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). As a consequence, social subjects can be multiply addressed by discourses that coincide or overlap, but they can also be addressed by discourses that contest and even contradict each other. This possibility for discontinuity highlights the other feature of the larger process of subject formation I want to stress - that is, the fact that social subjects actively participate in the process (although by that participation they do not fully control it or its effects) by deliberately articulating bits and pieces from several, often competing, discourses themselves. Hall captures the duality and active nature of this process nicely in his observation (Grossberg, 1986b:53) that common British usage of the word 'articulation' implies both speaking or 'languaging' and the activity of making a link. Social subjects, in effect, actively and articulately participate in the production of subjectivity at the moment that they forge articulations between ideological fragments and larger discourses which are always already offered to them because of the priority of the social formation. In effect, they are spoken by discourse even as they speak through multiple discourses themselves. It is for this reason, in fact, that Hall insists that it is impossible to read off a subject's ideology from any simple construction of his or her social position within a social formation. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau's particular formulation of the notion of articulation, Hall has observed (Grossberg, 1986b: 53) that 'the political connotation of ideological elements has no necessary belongingness, and thus, we need to think the contingent, the non-necessary, connection between different practices.'

Whatever else such a formulation entails, it certainly enjoins us to try to understand the ways in which historically concrete social subjects articulate together many ideological elements, discourses, and practices across the terrain of daily life. The theory suggests in fact that it is the specificity of the

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multiple linkages that accounts for the concreteness as well as for the fluidity of nomadic subjectivity. Indeed, I want to underscore the fluidity of subjectivity here precisely because these linkages are contingently and actively forged in practice and therefore can be altered or replaced by other practices. Indeed, it is the very breaks, fissures, or seams in the bricolage that results from the practices of articulation which can become the site of further political activity, by which I mean deliberately managed processes of disarticulation and rearticulation. However, to identify where rearticulation might be attempted, it becomes essential to focus first on the links or seams that have already actively been made between social practices and thus in our case to resist the habit of constructing subjects as the passive receivers of single unified discourses embodied in specific media and genres (Radway, 1986a).

The preconditions for such activity have already been established in recent work that attempts to rethink the reception of central products as itself a form of practice. Thus we have begun to learn more about how specific historical subjects actively engage with the narrative and televisual forms they prefer (Morley, 1986; McRobbie, 1984; Ang, 1982/1985). But the emerging theories of dispersed subjectivity ask us, perhaps even more insistently, to go beyond this as well. They suggest that, if we are to comprehend the intricate piecework of articulation and something of its political consequences, we must investigate the multitude of concrete connections which ever-changing, fluid subjects forge between ideological fragments, discourses, and practices. This is not a wholly original obser- vation, of course, for many students of popular culture have come to the same conclusion almost simultaneously as we have begun to discover the extremely complex nature of the engagement that occurs between social subjects and even one media form. Thus we are hearing more and more calls like this one from Larry Grossberg (1988):

The critic has not only to map out the lines of this mobility [among positions and apparatuses] but also [to] recognize that only by entering into this nomadic relation to the media can [she or he] map the complex social spaces of media effects. We need a vocabulary to describe the shifting and

contradictory partial relations of nomadic subjectivity which is always moving along different vectors and changing its shape, but always having a shape

I agree with both of the points Grossberg makes here. But it does seem to me that even as we work out such a vocabulary for nomadic subjectivity we must also identify a plausible stance or point of view from which these multiple negotiations can be investigated, just as we must craft a research practice that will enable us to accomplish the project. Indeed, there is a crucial ambiguity in his observation that the critic must both chart the terrain of articulations and enter into the nomadic relations to the media, the articulations that ultimately produce media effects. The activity of mapping

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is, in fact, a complex process that involves representing a terrain from a distant point of view, a point of view that must be relinquished if one actually wants to move about in the terrain in order to get from one point to another. But, if the map is to work effectively as a guide, it must accurately represent not only the terrain itself but also where previously created routes are joined to others. Production of a useful map, then, necessitates at least some firsthand familiarity with the environment acquired through the temporary assumption of an inhabitant's point of view. It would seem, then, that mapping is therefore dependent upon, but not equivalent to, an expedition or survey which itself travels the various trails already produced.

Leaving the cartographic metaphor for a moment and returning to the theoretical problem of how best to investigate articulation and its role in subject formation, I should say that what has begun to worry me is the possibility that our habitual practice of conducting bounded, regionalized investigations of singular text-audience circuits may be preventing us from investigating, except in a limited way, the very articulations between discourses and practices we deem important both theoretically and strategi- cally. The legacy we may need to dispense with is our commonsense assumption that, no matter what the question, we should begin with the particular circuit carved out of the social and made manageable by our discipline and mastery of it. We may in fact need to confront the possibility that, while our propensity for dissection may foster ease of analysis and therefore serve professional purposes, it may also block the processes of understanding how the parts of social bodies are actively related and therefore hinder any effort to figure out how old linkages might be broken, how new linkages might be made.

However, if we are n o t to begin "with reception, that is, with multiple instances of television or film viewing, radio listening, concert going, or book reading, where should we start? Instead of segmenting a social formation automatically by construing it precisely as a set of audiences for specific media and/or genres, I have been wondering whether it might not be more fruitful to start with the habits and practices of everyday life as they are actively, discontinuously, even contradictorily pieced together by historical subjects themselves as they move nomadically via disparate associations and relations through day-to-day existence. In effect, I have begun to wonder whether our theories do not impress upon us a new object of analysis, one more difficult to analyze because it can't be so easily pinned down - that is, the endlessly shifting, ever-evolving kaleidoscope of daily life and the way in which the media are integrated and implicated within it. s The map, it seems to me, must be enlarged, but I do not see how its lofty survey can be produced without a prior expedition through the already inhabited, already elabor- ately built-up cultural terrain. Ethnography may still be the most effective method for organizing such an expedition because it makes a concerted effort to note the range of daily practice and to understand how historical subjects articulate their cultural universe. At the same time, it has traditionally refused to rest content with an account of the simple contents of consciousness, since it has always been preoccupied with determination.

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Unfortunately, however, the ethnographic method has been applied until now in an extremely limited fashion both to reception studies and to media analysis. In anthropology, of course, an ethnography is a written account of a lengthy social interaction between a scholar and a distant culture. Although its focus is often narrowed in the process of writing so as to highlight kinship practices, social institutions, or cultural rituals, that written account is rooted in an effort to observe and to comprehend the entire tapestry of social life. An extensive literature has been elaborated by anthropologists attempting to theorize, among other things, the nature of the relationship between culture and social behavior, the epistemological status of 'data' gathered in the field, the nature of 'experience' itself, and the status of explanatory social theories imported from the ethnographer's own cultural universe (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986). Despite these not inconsequential difficulties, however, anthropologists have at least aimed through ethnography to describe the ways in which day-to-day practices of socially situated individuals are always complexly overdetermined by both history and culture.

The goals in ethnographic studies of the media have been more narrowly circumscribed largely by that disciplinary construction I spoke of earlier. Despite our interest in practice and use, those of us who have turned to the ethnographic method to understand how specific social subjects interact with cultural forms have none the less always begun with a radically circumscribed site, a field surveyed and cordoned off by our preoccupation with a single medium or genre. Even when we have attempted to understand not simply how women read romances or families watch television but also how those activities intersect with, contradict, or ratify other cultural practices carrying out the definition of gender, for example, we have always remained locked within the particular topical field defined by our prior segmentation of the audience of its use of one medium or genre. Conse- quently, we have often reified or ignored totally other cultural determinants beside the one specifically highlighted. Thus in my own analysis of a small group of romance readers there is no discussion whatsoever of the ways in which the practice of romance reading might be articulated with practices organized by and centering on race or class. Ethnographers of media use have also tended to rule out as beyond our purview questions of how a single leisure practice intersects with or contradicts others, how it is articulated to our subjects' working lives, or how it is used to contest the dominance of other cultural forms.

This kind of bracketing can be justified legitimately, of course, by citing the virtues of modesty, the limitations of individual expertise, and the material conditions of our professional lives. We are after all limited human beings, masters of only a few ideas, and bound by convention and contract to publish at regular intervals. But it is precisely the way in which these historical, material, and social limitations circumscribe our ability to take the complexities of articulation as our subject which concerns me. Is it not possible to design a research practice that would both take account of our individual limitations and provide for a collective mapping of tlqe social

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terrain equal to the ambitious, majestic scope of our recent theories of subjectivity and intertextuality? Additionally, can ethnography -which has tended to center its accounts on a conception of the individual as coherent, unified, and present to the self - manage to capture the fluid, destabilized, ever-shifting nature of subjectivity produced through the articulation of discourses and their fragments? Can we, in short, manage a study of the dispersed construction of everyday life by beginning with the multitude of practices engaged in by actual, historically situated social subjects who are neither stable nor unified?

As I puzzle over these extremely difficult questions, I have begun to think about the possibilities of a collaborative project that would begin within the already defined boundaries of a politically constituted municipality and attempt to map there the complex, collective production of 'popular culture' across the terrain of everyday life. I suggest accepting already established political boundaries not to assign priority to a community's manner of constituting itself but rather to take the process of prescribing such a boundary and the concomitant self-definition(s) as one of several subjects of inquiry. How, we might ask, is a single municipality composed of distinct, overlapping, even contentious communities and subgroups? I suggest collaboration not as a panacea solution to all of the problems involved in elaborating an appropriate point of view for the study of the cultural terrain but as a practical, though flawed, way of overcoming some of the limitations of the individual scholar. Finally, I suggest a study of the production of popular culture within the everyday as a way of trying to understand how social subjects are at once hailed successfully by dominant discourses and therefore dominated by them and yet manage to adapt them to their own other, multiple purposes and even to resist or contest them. By studying the extremely heterogeneous set of practices through which the popular is produced in relation to the legitimate culture or within its interstices, we might render visible the unceasing and heretofore unacknowledged cultural work through which nomadic subjects and dispersed groups confound the unity of domination by articulating together discursive fragments and practices from many different sources and regions. We may be able to see them, then, not simply as audiences, as receivers of the messages of others, but rather as active individuals who productively articulate together bits and pieces of cultural material scavenged from a multitude of sites and who, in doing so, nomadically, perhaps even slyly, take up many different subject positions with respect to the dominant cultural apparatuses.

To make this even more concrete, I should say that what I have in mind is a project that would take as its object of study the range of practices engaged in by individuals within a single heterogeneous community as they elaborate their own form of popular culture through the realms of leisure and then articulate those practices to others engaged in during their working lives. By beginning with leisure, I am, of course, employing an arbitrary distinction, since popular practices may also be initiated and elaborated within the realm of work. However, I think it is justifiable, for the practical reasons that it suggests a conceptual starting-point and narrows the range of study, and for

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the more substantial reason that it accords with the fact that within a society dominated by increasingly rationalized, fragmented, and routinized work the search for some measure of creativity and freedom has been driven out of the public realm into the privatized, individualized realms of leisure, play, and consumption (Susman, 1984: May, 1980; Peiss, 1986; Jameson, 1979). My proposed project, then, is grounded in a more traditional form of ethnographic fieldwork-that is, in a fairly lengthy stay within a community. This would be undertaken now not by a single scholar but rather by a team whose members would fan out across a range of sites. Their purpose would be to understand how the popular realms of leisure and play are constructed conceptually in opposition to the serious and the practical in that community, how leisure and play are elaborated within and across a range of different practices, and how actual subjects within the community them- selves articulate a multitude of leisure practices together as well as against practices understood to be part of other cultural regions.

Clearly, this sort of project threatens to be potentially unwieldy and unending. Thus I have additionally begun to wonder whether it might be possible to narrow the range of focus a bit more by concentrating on just a few crucial sites where the significant conceptual oppositions are actively labored over and the greatest variety of relevant articulations might be made. I wonder, therefore, whether a collaborative team could collectively and comparatively survey the production of the popular by examining the elaboration of play within the family, in the school, and in what I would like to call leisure worlds. What I intend this term to refer to here is the entire range of practices elaborated around a hobby, avocation, or leisure activity such as the books, magazines, catalogues, exhibitions, and tours focused on the activity of gardening. The ethnographic team would seek to map the way in which the myriad practices engaged in within all three of these realms are or are not articulated to those of labor or work in an effort to understand the political consequences of concrete articulations and particular forms of dispersed subjectivity. But, obviously, I need to explain why I think these sites can be legitimately privileged and I need to specify in greater detail what such a team might want to look for at each site.

As Tony Bennett (1986: 19) has recently argued, popular culture cannot be defined essentially 'as a fixed inventory of cultural forms and practices' but must be conceived relationally with respect to its conceptual others, that is, with respect to all that a social formation deems n o t popular culture. Looming large within that set, of course, especially within contemporary America, would be legitimate or high culture, the culture of the serious and the important. ~ As Bennett further elaborates, popular culture

consists of those cultural forms and pract ices . . , which constitute the terrain on which dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural values and ideologies meet and intermingle, in different mixes and permutations, vying with one another in their attempts to secure the spaces within which they can become influential in framing and organising popular experience and consciousness.

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As he goes on to say, it consists not of two separated compartments- a pure and spontaneously oppositional culture 'of the people' and a totally administered culture 'for the people' - but is located in the points of confluence between these opposing tendencies whose contradictory orientations shape the very organisation of the cultural forms in which they meet and interpenetrate one another. The three sites I have proposed are principal locations at which this

confrontation between the popular and the dominant, officially legitimated culture occurs. The first two, in fact- the family and the school - are primary sites for the elaboration of the distinctions between them. The third is an especially important site in contemporary society because the opposition between the popular and the dominant is at once perpetuated and contested, since it is there that their traditional hierarchical relationship is established in order to be momentarily overturned. Although leisure worlds are conceptualized as sites for the pursuit of what are still referred to as 'merely' hobbies or avocations, they are increasingly and ironically the very realms in which individuals invest most of their energy, money, and time. For many individuals and subgroups, in fact, the conceptually subordinated leisure world is the primary site for the elaboraton of what is taken to be meaningful identity. What we need to know, it seems to me, is not only how this particular production of subjectivity is managed and how it does or does not intersect with practices elaborated elsewhere, especially within the realm of the work, but also how the very idea of the leisure site is constructed and isolated off in the first place as the locus of pleasure, play, creativity, and freedom. We need to know, finally, whether the small victories won there in the search for empowerment can ever be transposed into other regions and built upon as a base for further contestation of the dominant social order.

The whole process of conceptual distinction between the popular and the dominant, the carnivalesque and the serious, begins, I think, within the family as its members practically distinguish play from other activities and negotiate with each other over who plays at what, where, and when (White, 1983; Bakhtin, 1968). In many families, as play is increasingly defined after infancy as something children do with other children and only occasionally engage in with their parents, the very idea of play is constructed in opposition to adulthood and all that adults do, which is to engage in serious business. This sets in motion, it seems to me, a process Allon White (1983) has called 'the social reproduction of seriousness', which he identifies as perhaps the central activity of contemporary schooling. Although schools certainly do cement the distinction by carefully dividing the carnivalesque playground from the serious classroom, I think the process of separating the messiness of play from the order of work begins much earlier in the home. It is begun, it seems to me, as soon as parents discipline play by confining it to special rooms, by associating it with special technologies called toyswhich adults don't have, and by engaging in it only when 'busyness', or, of course, business, does not intervene first. But it is important to remember that these

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distinctions are not uniformly enforced and that they very likely vary with respect to class, race, and gender. Our ethnographic team, it seems to me, would want to map as precisely as possible the variations in how these essential distinctions are initiated, constructed, and practiced in the everyday.

The team would also obviously want to look at how negotiations are managed over the appropriate use of electronic technologies, especially television. As Dave Morley's (1986) work has shown us, television is implicated in the social relations of families, and it is employed as a tool to further or to contest power relations already established through other practices. But we also know from our own anecdotal experience and from other research that families take different positions with respect to the legitimacy of television-watching, as some limit their children's viewing, others confine it to certain times of the day and still others proscribe it entirely. Its particular conceptual construction as at least partly illegitimate entertainment is furthered through parents' own viewing practices and through their talk about television's quality, the problems it poses as an escape from their own chores or their children's homework, and its relationship to other forms of more legitimate leisure occupations such as book-reading. Once again, it seems to me that what our team would want to investigate is how the differences between these technologies of enter- tainment and play and the technologies and practices surrounding school, work, and chores are produced and elaborated on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, the team would want to ask, I think, how the practices that evolve the distinction between play and work construct a subject more or less favorably disposed to the practices and technologies associated with the dominant, legitimate, serious culture, how they position that subject in such a way as to be interpellated more or less effectively by its stories, narratives, and discourses.

This topic would need to be further pursued within the school, since it is there that the distinction is elaborated most fully and where children are asked quite explicitly to acquiesce to the hierarchy they already understand, although they may not yet have submitted to it completely. As Allon White (1983: 12) has observed:

from the outset, the modern school system is predicated upon the enclosing and exclusion of the carnivalesque from its territory. The serious act of growing up and acquiring knowledge begins by inculcating the child with a primary law of double exclusion: where knowledge is, play is not: where play is, knowledge is not. The provision of playgrounds in schools puts ~ames, exuberant bodies, scatology, sexual exploration, dirt, jokes and pleasure in an open enclave where they cannot contaminate the realm of 'pure' knowledge.

Of course, it is also the case that schools vary enormously in the way in which they construct these boundaries and in how diligently they police them. Playgrounds can be no more than concrete slabs, allowing for the importation of all sorts of games, activities, and objects like radios, skateboards, and bikes; or they can be carefully organized and subdivided

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lots with special spaces for organized games like basketball and softball and for gymnastic play on architecturally designed climbing structures. Simi- larly, work can be divided so rigorously from play that play itself can be left relatively uncolonized by the strictures of the dominant, serious culture. On the other hand, as White (1983: 13) has observed 'with newer liberal teaching methods the classroom [can be] taken out into the playground: educational games and toys [can] colonise and "clean up" playground culture and appropriate it for the purposes of education'. In pursuing these differences, our team would want to investigate how these patterns of boundary enforcement affect children's later investments in leisure pursuits, media entertainments, and the popular culture. Obviously it would also want to raise the question how this affects children's capacity and tendency to locate themselves within the dominant discourses about school and work and thus their ability to produce for themselves, through articulation, subject positions that do or do not accord with the needs of the dominant culture.

In proposing the idea of leisure worlds as a third principal site of investigation, I hope to extend the concern with the boundary between the dominant and the popular into the world of adolescence and adulthood. What I have in mind here is a variation on the study of subcultures reconceived now simply as loose, multiple, and fluid social groupings produced around particular leisure interests, activities, or media use. Even a cursory glance at any evening newspaper will suggest how segmented, stratified, elaborated, and organized American leisure has become. Com- munity calendars announce the meetings of stamp collectors, orchidists, van customizers, photography enthusiasts, to name only a few, and they publish the locations of aerobics classes, gardening seminars, yoga classes, and boat shows, among innumerable others. Nearly all of these activities bring together people who pursue these interests avidly and regularly with other enthusiasts, and nearly all of the practices that are involved are dependent on knowledge and information produced elsewhere by legitimated experts. At the same time, the people who define themselves through such organized activities also take part in other leisure pursuits and use the media in much less focused ways. Although there would be much to explore here with respect to the range of articulations that might be made across a set of leisure pursuits, I suspect our ethnographic team would want to learn how and when individuals tend to develop focused interests and what sorts of social functions they perform. The team would also want to ask what sorts of relationships individuals construct between their multiple leisure worlds and their world of daily work. We would want to know how subjectivity is concretely elaborated within specific leisure practices and then look at the continuities, disjunctures, and contradictions between that subjectivity and the other positions taken up by such subjects as they move into other cultural regions.

It should be clear by now that what fuels my suggested project on the place of the popular and play in everyday life is a larger question about the role of the culture of leisure and consumption at the present historical moment. Is it,

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I want to ask, a site of empowerment where individuals experience pleasure and affective intensity and therefore construct themselves as knowing, powerful subjects? Can they learn there how to act in new ways so as to return to the more successfully dominated realms of human life with renewed purpose and capacities to resist? Or, on the other hand, does this culture function as little more than a playpen, a confined space where the dirt and disorder of the unruly child can be banished and given free reign so that the child might later be better integrated into the adult cultural order, now disciplined, duly washed, and appropriately instructed? Is the culture of leisure and consumption now the principle arena for the securing of hegemony or is it the last site where a measure of freedom can be noisily, deviously, invisibly wrung from necessity and ideology?

I pose only questions here because neither have I their answers nor have I succeeded in imagining fully the process through which those answers might be sought. But these are the questions that have begun to preoccupy me as I confront an increasing disjuncture - the disjuncture I see and feel between the windless, already lost world described by theories of postmodernism (theories I find disturbingly persuasive) and a world not yet surrendered, still being struggled over by living subjects. Thus I end always in these troublesome mental dialogues about how to conceive social practice with another, more personal question about what purpose such conceptions should serve. Knowledge to what end? I wonder finally how to effect a particular articulation. How is it possible to articulate (in both senses of the word) the practice of intellectual analysis of the place of the media and cultural production in everyday life to the quest for social change? More particularly, can such a project be carried out within the school - for, no matter how much we may wish to forget it, we are situated resolutely within this quintessential institution of social reproduction, in an institution whose findings are often written off by our students and the rest of the society as merely bookish and therefore irrelevant. The adjective 'academic' after all is frequently used not only derogatorily but even as a term of abuse. Is it possible, finally, to preserve the gains secured by the distance and abstraction of intellectual work and yet continue to respect the particula- rities and concreteness of subjective experience in such a way that the distance between them can continually be negotiated and renegotiated by many more individuals than has heretofore been possible?

I don't really know, finally, but I continue to turn to ethnography because as a practice it is predicated implicitly on the assumption that to move out into an alien world, the field as it were, is also necessarily to attempt to leave another one behind. It is ethnography's insistence that the social is always actively constructed by living subjects that I find potentially helpful. That insistence can authorize attempts to understand the complexities of a distant world's construction by those who inhabit it even as it can be turned back reflexively upon the construction of our own in order to expose the peculiarity of the articulations with which we produce it. Linda Brodkey (1987" 101) has argued that ethnography creates the preconditions for research and social responsibility if only because it asks us to remember 'that

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the worlds of words separating "us" from " them" are not natural boundaries, but social borders of our own making'. In learning how others actively make their own social worlds differently from the way we make our own, perhaps it might also be possible to identify together those points where articulations and alliances could be forged across the borders in the service of a future not yet envisioned and therefore neither necessarily lost nor secured.

Duke University

Notes

This is a much reworked version of a paper entitled 'Where is "the field?": ethnography, audiences and the redesign of research practice', delivered at the 1987 International Communication Association meeting in Montreal. I should like to thank all who attended the session for their questions and comments, and I should especially like to acknowledge the helpful observations of len Ang and John Fiske, the other participants on the panel. I should also like to thank Ellen Wartella for first helping me to clarify the issues that were beginning to trouble me about the problem of the audience in communication studies. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Larry Grossberg for his close reading of the original draft and for our many subsequent conversations about how best to investigate cultural reception. As will be clear from our exchange here, we haven't managed to persuade each other completely, but I am happy to acknowledge the effect of Larry's skepticism, clarity, and precision upon my own formulations. Since this paper is at least initially preoccupied with the intellectual legacy of the fact that academics are indeed speakers in highly determinate speech situations, I have attempted to preserve the mode of address adopted initially for my ICA audience.

1 I should like to acknowledge the influence of Linda Brodkey's work on my thinking in this paper and thank her for our many discussions about the nature of academic practice and the politics of pedagogy.

2 In speaking of 'cultural circulation and consumption' here, I am referring to the complex social processes by which cultural products and messages are produced, distributed, and used within a population. Hereafter, however, I will not use the term 'consumption' to designate the activity of use because I feel the connotations of passivity and ingestion that attach to it are unhelpful theoretically. On this subject, see Radway (1986b).

3 In other words, we understand ourselves to be the 'authors' of our own enunciations. For a discussion of the misunderstanding of language upon which such a conception is based, see Barthes (1977).

4 The traditional, authoritarian model of pedagogy has been analyzed and criticized, of course, by radical theorists of education (Giroux, 1983; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1985).

5 I am, of course, neither the first nor the only one to have recognized the importance of the concept of 'everyday' life. See, for instance, de Certeau (1984), Fiske (1988), and Willis (1987).

6 My thinking on this particular issue has been enormously affected by the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (Stallybrass and White, 1986; White, 1983).

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