The hegemony of “specificity” and the impasse in audience research: Cultural studies and the problem of ethnography

In an astonishing poem entitled “Portrait (2)" published in 1940, the American poet Kenneth Fearing tellingly and presciently limned the profile of an individual now easily recognizable to us as the postmodern subject. “The clear brown eyes, kindly and alert, with 12-20 vision,” he wrote, “give confident regard to the passing world through R. K. Lampert & Company lenses framed in gold; His soul, however, is all his own: Arndt Brothers necktie and hat (with feather) supply a touch of youth.” “Love’s ravages,” Fearing continued, “have been repaired (it was a text book case) by Drs. Schultz, Lightner, Mannheim, and Goode.”.