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.Therefore the analysis of cultural formsand practices should involve a search for contradictions, taboos, displacementsin a culture that might fracture the fiction of homogeneity.As Richard Johnson(1979b) has noted, Gramsci s view of the relation between the base and the super-structure is unique because it assumes, as its very ground, the existence of massive disjunctions and unevenness.As a consequence of the incompletenessof any hegemonic tenure, there is always some residue of previous formations,surviving concrete features of a society that cannot be grasped as the dominantmode of production and its conditions of existence (1979b: 233), but that stillneed to be explained.4 Since the turn to Gramsci, cultural studies is betterequipped to provide such explanations.THE RETREAT FROM IDEOLOGY: RESISTANCE, PLEASURE ANDTHE NEW REVISIONISMReaders might remember how vigorously cultural studies resisted the politicaleconomists top-down version of ideology; such a view marginalized the culturalinto a mere effect of other forces and reduced the subject to a mere junction boxwithin a complex but remote communications system.Cultural studies has been,constitutionally, much happier with bottom-up versions of ideology; suchversions attribute power to the subject and to the subcultural group to intervenein the signifying and political systems, and to produce change.Culturalism clearlyadhered to such a view, and many structuralist interrogations of the Althusseriandominant ideology thesis indicated their sympathy with it too.Gramsci s theoryof hegemony does seem uniquely well designed for its ultimate deployment as theconsensual principle within cultural studies conceptions of ideology.It doesallow for power to flow bottom up , and severely qualifies assumptions about theeffectiveness of power imposed from the top down.It is not alone, however, in itsrole as a support for theories of resistance to ideological domination.The latterhalf of the 1980s was marked by a proliferation of interest in the ways in whichideologies fail to determine, fail to interpellate the subject, fail to prefer readings.We have already seen how such a function has been served by the appropriation ofethnography within audience studies; there are other locations as well.181 CENTRAL CATEGORI ESDe Certeau and resistanceMichel de Certeau is an influence in this area.In The Practice of Everyday Life(1984), de Certeau emphasizes the tactics employed by subordinated groups towin small victories from larger, more powerful and ultimately determiningsystems.De Certeau argues that, while members of popular culture cannot gaincontrol of the production of culture, they do control its consumption the waysin which it is used.Like ethnographic audience researchers, de Certeau empha-sizes how creative popular culture is, how its members continually seek out waysof operating that serve their own interests while appearing to acknowledge theinterests of the dominant group.If popular culture has to make do with what isoffered to it, it still has the potential to make over these offerings to its own ends.De Certeau suggests that much of this making do with and making over ofcultural forms and products is subversive; it represents the victory of the weakover the strong.Examples of the kinds of practices in which such subversionsoperate include reading, shopping, cooking, even renting an apartment:[Renting] transforms another person s property into a space borrowed for amoment by a transient.Renters make comparable changes in an apartmentthey furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the languageinto which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, throughtheir accent, through their own turns of phrase etc, their own history
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