Introduction: media audiences, postmodernity
and cultural contradiction
The essays collected in this book have been written in the course of a decade—a decade
which has been characterized by irrevocable and accelerated postmodernization in many
fields of social and cultural practice. Since the 1970s the discourse of postmodernity has
gradually but definitively taken hold of the Western world. These essays bear the mark of
this present mood and can be read as attempts to come to terms with some of its
theoretical and practical implications. They do this with respect to a rather humble site of
discursive knowledge: media audiences. In this Introduction, I will indicate how the
postmodern—as a historical trend and as a mode of knowing—has impacted on (our
understanding of) media audiences, especially television audiences. At the same time, I
will also suggest how a critical theoretical and analytical engagement with audiences—
which, as I have argued elsewhere (Ang 1991) and throughout the essays to follow,
necessarily involves a deconstruction of the very unity and solidity of ‘audience’ as an
object of analysis—can highlight and illuminate some of the consequences of what some
have called ‘the condition of postmodernity’ (Lyotard 1984; Harvey 1989; Jameson
1991).
In the course of the 1980s, the label ‘postmodern’ to describe the world became
virtually inescapable—that is, increasingly pertinent and widely accepted, a part of
popular commonsense. I remember occasions, earlier in the decade, when those annoyed
by the hype could still afford either to dismiss any talk about ‘postmodernism’ as a
passing fad, or to reject the very notion of the postmodern as a vacuous, meaningless
category. As the end of the century approaches this is clearly no longer possible: the
implications of the so-called postmodernization of the contemporary world—economic,
social, cultural—have become too insistent to ignore or refute, if still incompletely
understood in its diverse, complex and contradictory facets. Dick Hebdige (1988:182) has
noted that as the 1980s wore on ‘postmodern’ has clearly become a buzzword with an
enormous degree of semantic complexity and overload. But while many of us have by
now become rather blasé about anything having to do with postmodernism—and in some
respects rightly so—I still think it is necessary to continue to learn in much greater detail
and with much more nuance about postmodernity, or about what ‘living in a postmodern
world’ might mean; to go beyond the many sweeping generalizations and platitudes
enunciated about it. In my understanding, one of the most prominent features of living in
a postmodern world means living with a heightened sense of permanent and pervasive
cultural contradiction. But if this is so, how does this manifest itself in the concrete
texture of our daily lives? The essays in this volume can all be read as emanating from
this concern with the concrete, even ‘empirical’ level of the cultural contradictions of
postmodernity. From a variety of angles they attempt to clarify not only that
contemporary television audiencehood can best be understood as a range of social
experiences and practices shot through with cultural contradiction, but also that looking
at these experiences and practices provides us with an excellent inroad into what it
means, concretely and empirically, to live in a culture that can be described as
‘postmodern’.
All too often ‘the postmodern condition’ is constructed as a structural fait accompli, a
homogenized, one-dimensional and increasingly global reality, as if there were a linear,
universal and radical historical transformation of the world from ‘modernity’ to
‘postmodernity’. Such totalizing accounts run counter to what I see as some of the more
enabling aspects of what the postmodern—as a heuristic category—signifies, namely the
very dispersal of taken for granted universalist and progressivist assumptions of the
modern. If the Enlightenment project of modernity was based on a belief in the
possibility of a world singularly organized around the principles of universal reason,
rationality and truth, then postmodernity signals not so much a radical end of the modern
era, its wholesale supersession and negation by an alternative set of beliefs, but rather an
awareness and recognition of the political and epistemological limits of those
principles—what Lyotard (1984) has called the loss of master narratives. This prevailing
incredulity towards modern metanarratives has been the result not only of having gone
through, but also of living with the not altogether sanguine consequences of a historical
phase in which modernist self-confidence and optimism literally ruled and shaped the
world. The current appeal of the phrase ‘new world disorder’—meant not only as an
ironic debunking of the lofty pronouncement of a New World Order after the collapse of
state socialism in Eastern Europe but also to signify a more general sense that the world
today is in a state of malaise, if not ‘out of control’—suggests the pervasiveness and
intensity of a postmodern ‘structure of feeling’, to use Raymond Williams’s (1977) term.
Postmodernity here ‘denote[s] a way of (…) living with the realisation that the promise of
modernity to deliver order, certainty and security will remain unfulfilled’ (Smart
1993:27). This doesn’t mean that chaos is the order of the day, but that any sense of
order, certainty and security—i.e., of structure and progress—has now become
provisional, partial and circumstantial. The postmodern doesn’t cancel out the modern,
but highlights the impossibility of the latter’s completion as a universal project while still
having to grapple with the complex and contradictory heritage of an unfinished (and
unfinishable) modern, warts and all. In this sense, the postmodern articulates the
deepening and elongation of the cultural contradictions which were inherent in the
modern itself. Living in a postmodern world, in the words of Angela McRobbie, is living
‘within the cracks of a crumbling culture where progress is in question and society seems
to be standing still’ (1994:22).
The essays in this book have all been written, in one way or another, under the
influence of such a questioning of modern certainty. They also aim to question—
implicitly rather than explicitly—the globalizing narratives of postmodernism itself. Thus
we have to ask: which culture is crumbling, for whom is progress in question, and
when/where does society seem to be standing still? The intellectual challenge posed by
the postmodern, as I see it, consists of the need to come to grips with the emergence of a
cultural space which is no longer circumscribed by fixed boundaries, hierarchies and
identities and by universalist, modernist concepts of truth and knowledge. In this sense,
what this book—in line with my earlier books Watching Dallas (1985) and Desperately
Seeking the Audience (1991)—hopes to contribute to is a move away from various
modernist ways of understanding television audiences, which I believe have dominated
established traditions of communication research and which now have generally reached
Living room wars 2
their point of exhaustion. Why? Because television itself has undergone massive
postmodernization—manifested in a complex range of developments such as
pluralization, diversification, commercialization, commodification, internationalization,
decentralization—throwing established paradigms of understanding how it operates in
culture and society into disarray. This transformation of television points to the central
‘mover’ of postmodern culture: an increasingly global, transnational, postindustrial, postFordist
capitalism, with its voracious appetite to turn ‘culture’ into an endlessly
multiplying occasion for capital accumulation. This has resulted in a seemingly
unstoppable ballooning of the volume and reach of television and other media culture in
the last few decades, which can therefore no longer be conceived as an easily
researchable, contained and containable reality. The ‘dominant paradigm’ of mass
communication research, firmly locating itself in modernist social science, has become
obsolete because its scholarly apparatus was not able to grasp the new questions and
issues which emerged out of the ‘mess’ created by the postmodernization of television.1
This ‘crisis’ of the dominant paradigm, addressed in some of the essays in this book, was
significantly paralleled by the simultaneous growth since the mid-1970s of what we now
know as ‘cultural studies’, a mode of intellectual work which readily addresses the
elusiveness of the postmodern in its ongoing commitment to interdisciplinarity and
openness of theorizing (Hall 1986b). Since the early 1980s, it is within the emerging
discourses of cultural studies that new ways of understanding audiences, not only of
television but also of other media, have been most productively developed.
What the essays in this book perhaps most pertinently unfold—what they
‘represent’—is the gradual, uneven and not always easy carving out of some interpretive
frameworks for such an understanding, which I by no means want to present as in any
way definitive or complete (indeed, this would run against the postmodern spirit itself).
They explore the implications of what I believe are not only the central theoretical
assumptions of cultural studies, but also a key historical feature of postmodern culture
itself: that the cultural pervades everyday life and that cultural meanings are not only
constructed, but also subject to constant contestation.
Once we move from a modernist to a postmodern understanding, from a disciplinary
discourse to a cultural studies one, the very status of ‘media audiences’ as a discursive
category changes. ‘The audience’ no longer represents simply an ‘object of study’, a
reality ‘out there’ constitutive of and reserved for the discipline which claims ownership
of it, but has to be defined first and foremost as a discursive trope signifying the
constantly shifting and radically heterogeneous ways in which meaning is constructed
and contested in multiple everyday contexts of media use and consumption. As I have put
it elsewhere, any representation of the social world of television audiences can only be
conceived as:
a provisional shorthand for the infinite, contradictory, dispersed and
dynamic practices and experiences of television audiencehood enacted by
people in their everyday lives—practices and experiences that are
conventionally conceived as ‘watching’, ‘using’, ‘receiving’,
‘consuming’, ‘decoding’, and so on, although these terms too are already
abstractions from the complexity and the dynamism of the social, cultural,
Introduction 3
psychological, political and historical activities that are involved in
people’s engagements with television.
(Ang 1991:14)
To put it differently, as far as I am concerned, studying media audiences is not interesting
or meaningful in its own right, but becomes so only when it points towards a broader
critical understanding of the peculiarities of contemporary culture. Not only is it
important to remember that audience-related practices only acquire significance, and can
only be meaningfully comprehended, when they are articulated with other, non-audience
practices (after all, people are not always acting out their membership of a variety of
media audiences). What we also need to take into account is the very historical
distinctiveness of living in a world where the presence of mass media—and therefore of
media audiences—has become naturalized. We should resist what mass media research
has generally done, that is, in Todd Gitlin’s words, ‘[certify] as normal precisely what it
might have been investigating as problematic, namely the vast reach and scope of the
instruments of mass broadcasting, especially television’ (1978:206). Gitlin continues by
pointing to the ‘the significance of the fact that mass broadcasting exists in the first place,
in a corporate housing and under a certain degree of State regulation’ (ibid.). Gitlin here
obviously refers to the close connection between mass broadcasting and the emergence
and maturation of social modernity. And while Gitlin tends to argue against any emphasis
on audience research as a result of its, in his view, inevitable collusion with the
‘dominant paradigm’, I believe that we cannot do without some, non-reductionist, nonfetishizing,
perspective on the ‘audience’ if we are to come to grips with life in ‘the
postmodern condition’.
Broadcast television has been one of the most powerful media of modernity. As a
medium of mass communication, it was generally put into motion in the social realm
throughout the core of the Western world at the apex of social modernity, the 1950s and
1960s, a time when confidence in the possibility and superiority of a modernity based on
infinite economic growth and ‘Western’ values (e.g. individual freedom, democracy and
affluence for all) was riding high. These modern societies thought of themselves in selfcontained,
national terms, each capable of maintaining order and harmony through the
consent of the vast majority of the population. This was a modernity ideally built out of a
nationally coherent, if not culturally homogeneous citizenry, whose private lives were
organized within nuclear families living in comfortable, suburban middle-class homes.
Television, typically institutionalized in the centralized mode of broadcasting (Williams
1974; Ellis 1982), was thought to play a central role in the orchestration of the millions of
these individual families into the national imaginary, the rhythms and rituals of the life of
the nation. In 1946, an American TV producer could enthuse about the integrative power
of the then very new medium this way:
Picture a program each afternoon with a chef inviting the house-frau to
cook the evening meal along with him. Right then in the television studio
and in millions of homes across the country, step by step, an entire meal is
prepared for evening’s consumption. All over the country millions of
husbands will come home to identical dinners prescribed by this chef. All
this may seem a little patterned and regimented, but just think for a
Living room wars 4
moment how our government will make use of this type of program to
maintain our economic stability. For example, if the farmers have just
harvested a surplus crop of potatoes, the chef in preparing the daily meal
can feature many potato dishes. On the other hand, if there was a shortage
of any commodity on the market the chef can arrange to work around that
commodity over the economic elements of the country.
(Marlowe 1946:15)
This cosy functionalist fantasy exemplifies how the articulation of ‘centralised
transmission and privatised reception’ (Williams 1974:30) embodied by broadcast
television operated as a modernist cultural technology par excellence. It served to contain
the centrifugal tendencies of spatial dispersion and social privatization which went along
with the suburbanization of modern life because it could, so it was assumed, cement the
isolated households together in a symbolic ‘imagined community’ of the nation
(Anderson 1983). In this sense, high modernity depended upon, and was sustained by, the
transformation of populations into regular and dedicated television audiences (see, e.g.,
Spigel 1992; Silverstone 1994). The dependable existence of such a television audience
can be seen as a founding myth of suburbanized, nationalized modernity. Here we have
the political significance of the television audience in modern culture—as a rhetorical
figure if not a social reality.
For in social reality, television audiences—as historical constructs of populations in
general—have always behaved in less than perfect ways; perfect, that is, in the modern
sense of orderly, responsible, willing. They watch the ‘wrong’ programmes, or they
watch ‘too much’, or they watch for the wrong reasons, or, indeed, they just don’t get the
‘correct’ things out of what they watch. Scholarly interest in television audiences has
generally been consistent with such perceptions of ‘imperfect’ audience behaviour. Mass
communication research, to a large extent a subdiscipline of American functionalist
sociology, has been fuelled by a neverending concern with television’s ‘effects’ and
‘uses’—a concern which betrays an implicit ideological connivance with the modernist
framework.2
After all, what theoretically undergirds this type of investigation is a
perspective where audience behaviour or activity is problematized in the light of their
potential conformation to, or disruption of, ‘normal’ social processes and ordered social
structure. The persistent worry about the ‘dysfunctional’ effects of television on
‘vulnerable’ sections of the audience is indicative of this. For example, in the voluminous
study Television and Human Behavior (Comstock et al. 1978), one of the largest
empirical surveys on this topic ever done in the United States, four such ‘vulnerable’
groups have been singled out for special research attention: women, blacks, the poor and
the elderly. Comstock et al. legitimize this special focus with the liberal argument that
‘[t]hese groups are heavy viewers and the object of concern over whether society is
fulfilling its responsibilities and obligations to them’ (ibid.: 289). It would be more to the
point to say that the very focus on these groups articulates their construction as deviant
from the (white male middleclass) norm which forms the implicit and explicit cultural
core of American social modernity. The frequently resurging moral panic over televised
violence—a panic all too often accompanied by the purposeful ambition among
researchers to find scientifically supported ‘solutions’ to the problem—is another
example of the intellectual bias towards ‘rational control’ in the ‘dominant paradigm’. In
Introduction 5
short, in its ‘tendency to serve either the media industry, its clients, or the official
guardians of society and public morality’ (McQuail 1994:296), mass communication
research, by offering scientific knowledge about the audience (or, more precisely, about
what could be done in order to ‘administer’ the audience), has performed a power/
knowledge function which is particularly characteristic of the modern desire for social
order (Foucault 1980; Bauman 1987; Ang 1991).
My own critical engagement with audience studies took off from what I perceived to
be the limitations of this kind of positivist and functionalist scientific knowledge, for both
epistemological and political reasons. It is clear that there was always something written
out of this knowledge, that the discourse of mass communication research effectively
makes it impossible for us to think about what it means, in qualitative cultural terms, to
be a television audience—or, better, to live in a world where we are all interpellated to
television audiencehood. Relegated to the plebeian receiving end of the highly visible and
public mass communication process, television audiences have been reified as the
invisible, silent majorities of the suburban wasteland, subjected to the objectifying gaze
of social science and authoritative arbiters of taste, morality and social order. What
increasingly became an epistemological strait jacket was the myth of cultural integration
which underpinned the dominant, functionalist view of audiences—a myth which,
ironically, was reproduced in neo-Marxist critical theory through a rewriting of ‘cultural
integration’ as something imposed on audiences by a ‘dominant ideology’. In both cases
the relative autonomy of the ‘receiving end’ outside and beyond the mass
communicational order was unthinkable: the audience was merely a function of the
systemic design, and privatized reception completely subjected to the requirements of
centralized transmission. This, of course, was the source of the looming image of the
‘passive audience’.
Watching Dallas was a direct intervention in this discursive vanishing act. The book
foregrounded the cultural complexity of the site of that receiving end, the diversity and
sophistication, but also the contentiousness of viewer interpretations circulating about the
TV serial which became one of the most prominent symbols of the dreaded
Americanization of European culture. But I would like to stress that the book was never
merely intended as a debunking of the ‘passive audience’. What the book aimed to bring
to the surface, more than anything else, was precisely the heightened sense of cultural
contradiction elicited by the massive popularity of this famous and controversial
American soap opera, especially in Western Europe. It is perhaps not exaggerated to see
the moment of Dallas—the early 1980s—as a key one in the slow unravelling of modern
European culture, based as it has traditionally been on a firm, modernist containment of
commercial mass culture. In this sense, the moment of Dallas was quintessentially
postmodern!
The dissatisfaction I had with the assumptions and presumptions of mainstream mass
communication research was shared by many colleagues. This may itself be seen as a
sign of postmodern times emerging. Thus it was that the 1980s saw the emergence of a
new interest in studying media audiences, all concerned with uncovering and highlighting
the importance of ‘struggles over meaning’ in the reception process of the media. In
short, what these new approaches—discussed extensively in some of the essays in this
book—have brought to the attention was that complex and contradictory ‘living room
wars’ are taking place wherever and whenever television (and other media) sway
Living room wars 6
people’s daily lives in the modern world. Indeed, the popular television audience has
been one of the key analytical sites in the expansion of cultural studies in the 1980s (for
the best overview, see Morley 1992). Mostly, the emphasis has been on how audiences
are active meaning producers of texts and technologies, and that meaning production is
dependent on the very intricate requirements of the micro-politics of everyday life (those
related to gender being one of them). Given the interest in exploring the micro-politics of
media consumption in everyday contexts, it is not surprising that there has been a great
investment in ethnographic methods of research. I do not need to elaborate on this
methodological dimension here—it is a theme I return to in several of the following
chapters.
These studies have produced a wealth of new knowledge about media audiences, so
much so that they are now sometimes called ‘the new audience research’—a label I
utterly dislike because it reinforces the misleading assumption that ‘audience’ is a selfcontained
object of study ready-made for specialist empirical and theoretical analysis. In
light of this pigeonholing, there is a pressing need to position this kind of work more
squarely in a broader context of cultural and social theorizing. This is especially
necessary because, as they have become more established and more popular, the ‘new
audience research’ have also suffered from an image problem in cultural studies. Most
importantly, they have been accused of exaggerating the power of audiences in
constructing their own meanings, promoting a ‘cultural populism’ (McGuigan 1992)
where the audience is celebrated as cultural hero. And true, there is certainly a
redemptive bent in the inclination of this work to ‘save’ the audience from their mute
status as ‘cultural dopes’ (Brunsdon 1989). However, I contend that there is nothing
inevitably populist about the suggestion that audiences appropriate television in ways
suitable to their situated practices of living. John Fiske (1993) is right to stress that this
appropriative power of the audience is the power of the weak; it is the power not to
change or overturn imposed structures, but to negotiate the potentially oppressive effects
of those structures where they cannot be overthrown, where they have to be lived with.
The romanticization of this position, often inspired by a superficial adoption of Michel de
Certeau’s (1984) theory of everyday life as the site of subversive tactics, comes when the
term ‘resistance’ is adopted tout court, without qualification, to evoke people’s
resourcefulness and creativity in ‘making do’ in less than advantageous circumstances.3
But the recognition that audiences are active meaning makers does not have to lead to
their romanticization. Rather, it can be the starting point for a discussion about both the
reach and the limits of modern designs of ordered social life, about the cultural
contradictions of life in (post) modernity.
One of the problems here is precisely that the new audience studies have been seen as
promoting the idea of ‘the active audience’—the very notion that engenders its populist
credentials. The ‘active audience’ has been held up as a rejection of all that classical
critical theory—especially that of the Frankfurt School trajectory—has been committed
to criticize: the increasing commercialization and commodification of the cultural and
media industries. The emphasis on the ‘active audience’ has been taken to be a refutation
of the thesis, derived from this line of critical theory, that the masses are ‘victims’ of the
system, arguing instead that because audiences are ‘active’ in their pursuit of pleasure
from watching TV—making their own choices and meanings—popular television is a site
of cultural democracy rather than cultural oppression. But this rendering of the ‘active
Introduction 7
audience’ is an unnecessarily narrow one, too preoccupied with finding a ‘correct’ critical
position about popular television—a position which, depending on your standpoint,
would be either optimistic or pessimistic. Such priority given to the need for ‘legislative’
political judgement—which, incidentally, mirrors a dominant tendency in debates pro and
contra postmodernism—is itself, as Bauman (1987) has pointed out, a particularly
modernist intellectual preoccupation which obscures rather than illuminates what is at
stake in the ‘cultural turn’ in audience studies. Far from just advocating the optimistic
and self-congratulatory liberal mirage of consumer freedom and sovereignty, I want to
suggest that the new figure of the ‘active audience’ within cultural studies can be taken as
a marker of the very transition from the modern to the postmodern I have been talking
about here. In other words, I want to see the discursive emergence of the ‘active
audience’ as a sign of heightened cultural contradiction in contemporary society.
Of course, the idea that audiences are ‘active’ in their encounters and engagements
with the media is in itself a rather banal observation (Morris 1988a). But it becomes more
theoretically substantial if we understand it precisely in the context of the
postmodernization of television and of culture and society more generally. Jim McGuigan
observes:
Active audience research and the meaning of television in everyday life
took a certain priority during the 1980s. Such research was rarely linked
to the complex economic determinations, technological and policy
changes occurring around television nationally and internationally.
(McGuigan 1992:128)
Similarly, John Corner remarks that ‘so much conceptual effort has been centered on
audiences’ interpretative activity that even the preliminary theorization of [media power]
has become awkward’ (1991:267). McGuigan’s and Corner’s comments do ring true—
there has indeed not been much attention paid to the relation between the cultural and the
economic in most audience studies, new or otherwise, although the same can be said
about most work in the political economy of the media (Golding and Murdock 1991). But
I want to suggest that if we shift the perspective somewhat, if we take the ‘active
audience’ not just as an empirical phenomenon but as the sign for a particular new
problematic, then the apparent gap between the cultural and economic—or that between
emphasis on interpretation and emphasis on effects—ceases to be so great. I want to go
beyond the view that attention to the ‘active audience’ is necessarily antagonistic to a
consideration of media power. Far from it. The ‘active audience’, I suggest, can be taken
as a condensed image of the ‘disorder of things’ in a postmodernized world—a world
which has seriously destabilized the functionalist connection between television and
modernity. This doesn’t mean an end to television’s power, but a reconfiguration of it in
postmodern terms.
There have indeed been rapid alterations surrounding the place and operation of
television itself during the last twenty years or so. We know the symptoms: national
public broadcast TV hegemony (in Europe) was undermined by increasing
commercialization and internationalization; the sweeping reach of network TV (in the
United States) was eroded by the advent of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller, more
specialized and localized channels; not only in the industrialized world but also in the
Living room wars 8
Third World cable, satellite and video cassette recorders have begun to destabilize and
decentralize the institutional and technological arrangements of TV provision which had
been in place for decades. In short, scarcity has been replaced by abundance, state control
by commercial initiative. These are signs of the irrevocable postmodernization of
television, which has corroborated a radically altered landscape for television audiences.
In industry and advertising circles there is talk of the diversification, fragmentation and
demassification of the audience. They have become acutely aware that audiences are not
gullible consumers who passively absorb anything they’re served, but must be
continuously ‘targeted’ and fought for, grabbed, seduced. This shift in institutional
awareness throughout the rapidly globalizing media industries, which intensified during
the 1980s, signifies the emergence of the spectre of the ‘active audience’ at the very heart
of corporate concerns. It is common industry wisdom that it is never possible to predict
the success or failure of a particular film or programme, despite all sorts of safety valves
such as formulaic production, use of stars and celebrities, and market research. Here the
‘activeness’ of the audience is associated rather frantically with its imputed fickleness,
recalcitrance and unpredictability. And with the anticipated expansion and
transnationalization of the communications industries under global capitalism, the battle
for audiences throughout the world will only heat up further as new ‘frontiers’—e.g.
China—are being opened up.
So the ‘active audience’ is not just a scholastic academic invention, populist, liberal
pluralist or otherwise, but a mythical discursive figure quintessentially attached to the
postmodernization of the capitalist cultural industries. In political economic terms, the
shift involves a transition from Fordist to post-Fordist consumption, where audience
markets are increasingly thought of in terms of ‘niches’, made up of flexible tastes and
preferences, rather than in terms of fixed demographics. With increasing competition,
shows are no longer churned out to an anonymous mass audience, but tailored for
specific, hard-to-get audiences. The ‘active audience’, then, is both an expression and a
consequence of what Lash and Urry (1987; 1994) have called disorganized capitalism,
where the instabilities of the free market economy are built into the production system
itself, which has now embraced notions of flexibility, mobility and flow.
The emphasis on audiences as active meaning makers in the new audience studies is
indeed congruent with this modification in industry perspective—and some would argue
that this is exactly why it is theoretically and politically suspect—but to leave it at this
observation would overlook what I see as the more complex, critical significance of the
notion of the ‘active audience’. Let me explain how the figure of the ‘active audience’
can be used productively to illuminate the way in which contradiction, inconsistency and
incoherence pervade contemporary, postmodern culture.
The rapid take-up of video recorders since the late 1970s is a case in point. The
popularity of the video recorder represents a key instance of a symbolic opting out of the
centralized transmission structure of the broadcasting framework. It also effected a major
disturbance of the modern arrangement of television where the distribution and
scheduling of programmes was monopolized by a limited number of powerful central
providers. Significantly, the VCR was (and is) especially popular among groups who
have traditionally been poorly served by centralist, modernist television (such as migrant
groups) or is used to watch material generally excluded from the official imaginary of
‘normal’ social order (such as hardcore porn). What we have here is a clear manifestation
Introduction 9
of the ‘active audience’, but of course this does not imply a conscious intentionality on
the part of VCR users to ‘resist’. It would make more sense to suggest that when given
the opportunity, people opted for ‘choice’: they wanted to decide for themselves what to
watch (and thus contributed to the successful emergence of the video shop), or at least
they wanted to be able to watch programmes at times convenient to them (using the ‘time
shift’ facility of the VCR). In other words, audiences simply retreated from the
integrative pull of modern television here. The VCR disrupted the modern entanglement
between centralized transmission and privatized reception because it displaced the locus
of control over the circulation of cultural texts to more local contexts. With the VCR,
then, we have witnessed the ‘active audience’ in action. This does not mean, however,
that audiences are moving out of the industry’s sphere of influence: rather, that their
relation to the industry is shifting from that of the more or less passive audience-mass to
that of the selective individual consumer.
‘Choice’ is now promoted as one of the main appeals of television to its audiences and
is presented as the ultimate realization of audience freedom. The proliferation of new
technologies—such as satellite TV, fibre-optic cable, interactive television and so on—
and the ever greater range of specialized programming for ever more specialized
audiences is creating an image world which seems to suggest that ‘there is something for
everyone’s taste’—a delirium of consumer sovereignty and unlimited choice. As Jody
Berland has observed: ‘In locating their “audiences” in an increasingly wider and more
diverse range of dispositions, locations, and contexts, contemporary cultural technologies
contribute to and seek to legitimate their own spatial and discursive expansion’
(1992:42). The discourse of choice is a core element of that legitimation. Seen this way,
the figure of the ‘active audience’ has nothing to do with ‘resistance’, but everything to
do with incorporation: the imperative of choice interpellates the audience as ‘active’!
What we have here is a contradiction which is built into the very formation of
postmodern culture. ‘Choice’ is now one of the prime discursive mechanisms through
which people are drawn into the seductions of consumption, but at the same time,
because ‘choice’ is by definition an openended, procedural mechanism—it can be
manipulated but not imposed—there can be no guarantee that people will make the
‘right’ choices, that is, the ones which sustain the reproduction of the ‘system’.
Uncertainty is thus inherently built into the ‘system’ of postmodern capitalism. On the
other hand, if consumers are seen positively as ‘making space’, ‘winning space’, etc., by
activating their own choice—as much of the ‘new audience studies’ have highlighted—
this can also be seen as their final cooption into the political economy of the cultural
industries. In other words, the ‘active audience’ is both subject and object of postmodern
consumer culture.
Mike Featherstone suggests quite rightly that ‘the much-talked-about cultural ferment
and disorder, often labelled postmodernism, may not be the result of a total absence of
controls, a genuine disorder, but merely point to a more deeply embedded integrative
principle’ (1991:20). This ‘more deeply embedded integrative principle’ might not be a
central(izing) mechanism which ensures something like a ‘common culture’, but a
decentralized, self-perpetuating mechanism which operates through an endless
proliferation of choice insistently put on offer by the market forces of an increasingly
global, disorganized capitalism.
Living room wars 10
One observer estimates that as interactive television enters living rooms in some US
cities, consumers will have a choice of 7000 to 14,000 programmes a week. To help
consumers find what they want to watch, an interactive electronic programme guide is
being developed with which they can navigate through this enormous menu (Clancey
1993). By the end of 1995, there will be some 800 transponders available for satellite TV
transmission over the Eastern Asian region, deemed to be the most lucrative market for
global broadcasters today. In a region which is described by some commentators as ‘TVstarved’,
the prospect of increased choice is unsurprisingly and unthinkingly hailed as
‘progress’. But even here ‘[t]he million-dollar question is: how many [channels] are
enough?’ (Asiaweek 1994).
In postmodern culture the discourse of choice has expanded exponentially—it is a
discourse in which the rhetoric of the liberatory benefits of personal autonomy and
individual self-determination has become hegemonic. No longer tied to ‘tradition’ or the
restrictions of class, gender or race, subjects in the postmodern world are now impelled to
constantly reconstruct and reinvent themselves; in pursuit of happiness, life is defined as
the ability to make an ever-increasing number of choices. The concept of ‘life-style’
articulates this particularly postmodern predicament. Life-styles are the fluid and
changeable popular aesthetic formations of identity produced through self-reflexive
consumption and disembedded from stable social networks (Chancy 1994:208; Lash and
Urry 1994:142). But if such postmodern lifestyles suggest a liberation from social
necessity, don’t they also imply a compulsion to activeness, to self-reflexivity, to creative
self-construction? Seen this way, the ‘active audience’ represents a state of being
condemned to freedom of choice.
Far from being romanticized or celebrated, then, it is in this context that the practices
of active meaning making in the process of media consumption—as part of creating a
‘life-style’ for oneself—need to be understood. I want to suggest that the significance of
the new audience studies should not be sought in their deconstruction of the idea of the
‘passive audience’—that figure of an older, arguably modernist paradigm—but in their
exploration of how people live within an increasingly media-saturated culture, in which
they have to be active (as choosers and readers, pleasure seekers and interpreters) in order
to produce any meaning at all out of the overdose of images thrown before us.
Paradoxically, then, postmodern consumer culture requires people to be more
semiotically skilled, more sophisticated or educated in their meaning making abilities. As
Lash and Urry put it, it
is not that the inflation of images leads to an inability to attach meanings
or ‘signifieds’ to images, or even the triumph of spectacle over narrative.
It is instead that the speed at which we attach meanings to signifiers has
and will greatly increase.
(Lash and Urry 1994:55)
But Lash and Urry speak in the name of a too abstracted, generalized ‘we’. After all, for
whom does all this apply? And how do different people in different places, living in
different conditions and under different circumstances, with more or less semiotic skills
and familiarity with postmodern aesthetics, actually attach meanings to the images they
encounter, whether or not they are of their own choosing? I believe that that it is this
Introduction 11
concern with specificity and particularity which has been the special contribution of the
new audience studies—and which I hope the essays in this book further expound. The
ethnographic impulse in this work should be understandable from here. Kirsten Drotner is
lucidly succinct when she says that ‘it is precisely the complexity of ethnography that
makes it popular: it seems better equipped to prise open for analysis the ambivalences of
modernity in its present phase of development’ (1994:343).
McGuigan has made the terse remark that ‘it is not much help for falsely modest
intellectuals merely to record how well ordinary people are doing against the
overwhelming odds’ (1992:249). This is true, but I suggest that what is at issue is not so
much to give ordinary audiences a pat on their backs for doing so well in ‘resisting’; what
is at stake, and what this book attempts to come to grips with, are the contradictions
encountered and negotiated in the ordinary practices of living in a postmodern world. The
cultural politics of these encounters and negotiations are themselves contradictory. On the
one hand, then, McRobbie is right to suggest that ‘[a]s the media extends its sphere of
influence, so also does it come under the critical surveillance and usage of its subjects’
(1994:23). But on the other hand, as I have argued above, active usage as such doesn’t
guarantee any critical purchase, let alone resistance or subversion. As semiotic skills
become more valued and exploited within the cultural logic of postmodern capitalism,
semiotics itself, with its once pathbreaking emphasis on the constitutive role of codes in
the operation of signs, ceases to be a radical theoretical toolkit. As Terry Eagleton wrily
observes: ‘It would be possible to see semiotics as the expression of an advanced
capitalist order’ rather than a critical instrument to expose it (1994:3). Here we have one
instance of what Drotner calls ‘the ambivalences of modernity’, or what I have referred to
as the heightening of cultural contradiction in postmodernity.
This brings me, however, to one last word of caution. This has to do with the danger
of overstating the relevance of audience studies within cultural studies. In this respect, I
want to argue for the need to be aware of the limits of using the trope of media audiences
for understanding contemporary culture. Berland has cogently pointed to the problems of
such an emphasis:
As the production of meaning is located in the activities and agencies of
audiences, the topography of consumption is increasingly identified as
(and thus expanded to stand in for) the map of the social. This reproduces
in theory what is occurring in practice: just as the spaces of reception
expand in proportion to the number of texts in circula-tion, so the time
accorded to reception expands in proportion to (and through appropriation
of) other modes of interaction.
(Berland 1992:42)
Indeed, what is occurring in practice worldwide, under the aegis of postmodern
capitalism, is the increasing colonization of the times and spaces of people’s everyday
lives for the purposes of media audiencehood. But Berland is right to suggest that this
process shouldn’t be mistaken, in theory, as encompassing our ‘whole way of life’, not
even in the postmodern world. Unless we succumb to the fallacy of conceiving
postmodernity as a one-dimensional, totalized reality, then, we must remain sensitive to
those spatio-temporal instances when/where the social exceeds the topography of
Living room wars 12
consumption, where/when people enter into modes of interaction (still) not appropriated
by, or which cannot be properly understood from the perspective of, their subject
position(ing)s as media audiences.
Introduction 13
Part I
RETHINKING AUDIENCES
1
The battle between television and its audiences
Recently, television studies has been confronted with the difficulty of reconciling two
theoretical approaches, the histories of which have largely been unfolding independently
from or in opposition to each other: the ‘sociological’ and the ‘semiological’ approach.
Whereas the sociological approach (embodied in such diverse research trends as the
political economy of the media and the uses and gratifications paradigm) has traditionally
been dominant in mass communications theory, a semiological point of view has gained
popularity during the last two decades or so, as a result of the limitations felt in the
preoccupations of the ‘sociologists’. In summary, these limitations concern the neglect of
the specificity of television as a system of representation, and an over-simplistic idea of
communication as the transmission of transparent messages from and to fully
autonomous subjects.
Instead, semiological approaches have put forward the conception of media products
as texts. The analysis of the construction of meanings in and through televisual discourses
is stressed, as are questions relating to the modes of address presented in televisual texts,
influencing the way the receiver (‘reader’) is positioned in relation to those texts. Thus,
the semiological approach has attempted to overcome any notion of conscious
institutional or commercial manipulation, on the one hand, and of free audience choice,
on the other.
However, discontent with this relatively new theoretical point of view has also been
voiced. The nearly exclusive attention to textual structures is seen to have created new
blind spots: the established semiological approach tends to ignore the social, political and
ideological conditions under which meaning production and consumption take place. As
a way out, more and more researchers insist nowadays on the necessity of combining
sociological and semiological insights. As Carl Gardner and Julie Sheppard have recently
put it:
analysis of any mass medium has to recognise its complex dual nature—
both an economic and industrial system, a means of production,
increasingly turning out standardised commodities and at the same time a
system of representation, producing meanings with a certain autonomy
which are necessarily multivalent and unpredictable.
(Gardner and Sheppard 1984:38)
This new credo in television studies has usually been translated into a formulation of the
so-called text/context problematic. It is stressed that an analysis of a text must be
combined with an analysis of its social conditions of existence. One important dimension
of this text/context problematic refers to the delicate relationship of texts and viewers,
theorized by Stuart Hall (1980a) and others in the so-called encoding/decoding model.
One of the goals of this model was to undermine the implicit assumptions of many
sophisticated, semiologically based analyses, according to which the subject/ viewer of a
text coincides with the subject position constructed in the text. For instance, David
Morley (1980a, also 1981) has attempted to develop an ‘ethnography of viewing’, by
sorting out the different readings or decodings made by different groups of viewers
(defined according to socio-cultural criteria) in relation to a specific set of texts. Working
within a similar theoretical model, Charlotte Brunsdon has adopted a different strategy to
tackle the same problematic: her concern is how female viewers are capable of reading
and enjoying soap operas, a capability which she locates in the specific cultural
competences women have, that is, their familiarity with the narrative structure of the soap
opera genre, their knowledge of soap opera characters and their sensitivity to codes of
conduct of personal life and interpersonal relationships. In other words, instead of
emphasizing the differences between readings or decodings, Brunsdon (1981) has tried to
account for the specificity of the confrontation between one type of texts (soap operas)
and one category of viewers (women).
Both theoretically and politically, this new problematic constructs a more dynamic
conception of the relation between texts and viewers. It acknowledges the fact that factors
other than textual ones play a part in the way viewers make sense of a text. Thus it places
the text/viewer encounter within a firm socio-cultural context. It conceives of viewers as
more than just passive receivers of already fixed ‘messages’ or mere textual
constructions, opening up the possibility of thinking about television viewing as an area
of cultural struggle. However, the model has limitations. Apart from various problems
having to do with, for example, an adequate theorization of the concept of decoding (see
Wren-Lewis 1983), the encoding/decoding model can be said to have a quite narrow view
of the role of the audience: its effectivity is limited to negotiations open to viewers within
the given range of significations made possible by a text or genre of texts. Moreover, this
model’s very conception of the audience tends to be a limited one. Within this theoretical
model, the sole problem is the way in which texts are received/ decoded in specific sociocultural
contexts, failing to take into account that decodings are embedded in a more
general practice of television viewing as such. It then becomes possible to question the
relevance of the concept of decoding, with its connotations of analytical reasoning, for
describing the viewer’s activity of making sense of a text, as watching television is
usually experienced as a ‘natural’ practice, firmly set within the routines of everyday life
(see, e.g., Dahlgren 1983). It goes without saying that a practice which is felt to be
‘natural’ structurally is not natural at all. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the
‘naturalness’ of the experience of watching television has an effect on the ways in which
individual texts are received and dealt with.
What is at stake here is the way in which television audiences relate to watching
television as a cultural practice. What does that practice mean and how are those
meanings produced? One cannot deal with this question without an analysis of the way in
which televisual discourse as a complex whole of representations is organized and
structured, as it is through this discourse that a relationship between television and its
audiences is mediated and constructed. In other words, here too an articulation of the
‘semiological’ and the ‘sociological’ perspectives will be necessary.
In this chapter I would like to propose that different conceptions of the social meaning
of watching television as a cultural practice are at play, and that these differences are
related to the structuring of televisual discourse, with its heterogeneity of representations
and modes of address. In doing this, I would like to stress the specific position of popular
audiences as an effective category in organizing the ‘television apparatus’. First, I shall
The battle between television and its audiences 17