The Hegemony of “Specificity” and the Impasse in Audience Research: Cultural Studies and the Problem of Ethnography

Abstract

Kenneth Fearing's poem is remarkable, it seems to me, for its early attentiveness to the way in which the limits of subjectivity were being reorganized by the intrusiveness and the creativity of the commodity in mid-twentieth century America. Not merely an appendage or an accoutrement of a stable, autonomous self, the commodities in Fearing's poem literally constitute the individual. Audience research, ethnography, and the theoretical contributions of Antonio Gramsci figure centrally in virtually all of the narratives. Meaghan. Morris's criticisms of audience-based cultural studies scholarship are significant and troubling. Not only does she demonstrate fairly effectively that such work can be seen as repetitive and formulaic, Morris's analysis of the enunciative practices of ethnographic audience studies is largely correct. This chapter suggest that ethnographic work in the cultural studies tradition has not yet grappled fully with the complexities of subject-formation in the commodified, postmodern world.