ABSTRACT
This paper was originally written for an interdisciplinary conference on the study of the audience held at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). In that context, where the disciplinary origins of my contribution would be seen as part of a ‘cultural studies’ grouping-as opposed to, for example, psychology or mass communication-I wanted to use an analysis of a particular, historical ‘taste war’ to pose questions about the relation of individual audience practices to a wider social. This was, by implication, to raise questions about how we understand the ‘new’ small-scale ethnographic studies which are coming out of research projects influenced by cultural studies.1 These were not questions about the generalisability of the findings traditionally posed to this type of research, but questions about the very constitution of the social at a theoretical level. Methodologically, as Ang and Hermes (1991) point out, this is partly a problem of the construction of interpretative categories, such as class or gender, ‘whose impact as a structuring principle for experience can only be conceptualized within the concrete historical context in which it is articulated’ (314).
