Page 49 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

40 Cultural change and ordinary life

constituting, and that the reading is a certain conjuring and a certain
construction. How do we describe that? It seems to me that that is a
modality of performativity, that it is racialization, that the kind of visual
reading practice that goes into the viewing of the video is part of what I
would mean by racialization, and part of what I would understand as the
performativity of what it is ‘to race something’ or to be ‘raced’ by it. So I
suppose that I’m interested in the modalities of performativity that take
it out of its purely textualist context.
(Bell 1999b: 169)

This is suggestive, but raises a number of questions for the scholar of
audience processes and ordinary life: what/who is the we? What is the rela-
tionship between constituting, conjuring and construction? Are all raced in
the same way? Are all the performative modalities of racing equal? Some of
these questions are similar to those that arose out of some of the attempts to
deal with some of the similar sort of literature that has informed Butler’s work
(for example Althusser and Foucault) within the incorporation/resistance
paradigm in audience studies. Thus, in one respect Butler’s comment suggests
a version of incorporation and hegemony – an active constitution of the raced
subject through interpellation that ultimately constructs a dominant racial
order. In another respect there is the idea of the ‘active’ reader – the conjurer
sounds not dissimilar to the poachers of the fan literature (e.g. Jenkins 1992)
and the attempt to theorize the resistive and active audience. As noted earlier,
the research question for ‘normal science’ in the paradigm is the balance
between them. On yet another plane, we are returned to questions of the
differential way in which audiences might be raced. The danger with these
formulations is that by bearing the marks of a textualist- and ideologically
driven set of theories, performativity ends by textually reinstating questions
that Audiences sought to dispel (see also Butler 1997). Thus, Butler appears to
end up on the ground of the extent to which audiences are incorporated or
resistant. Or, to put it another way, in a social space defined by voluntarism
and determinism (see, in a related vein, the discussion in Lloyd 1999). If this is
the case, can Butler add anything to the arguments of the SPP?
Some general comments are germane. First, I argue that Butler’s argu-
ments cannot be accepted wholeheartedly because of the lack of an adequate
theory of the audience. Second, where there are gestures in this direction in
her work, these are limited by the framework that informs the premises of her
work, which means that she is constrained by IRP-type issues. However, third,
she does offer an important emphasis on how identities, bodies and social
practices are in process through their constitution through performed activ-
ities. I will suggest that the best way to theorize this issue is through the idea of
performing human beings.
Moving to another aspect of the SPP, Crawford (2004) adds to the under-
standing of the simple audience when he questions ‘if audiences were ever
simple?’ and such arguments fall into a trap of ‘presuming that face-to-face
communication is by its very nature direct’ or ‘unmediated’. As he says, this
‘ignores that even direct communication is “mediated” through language,
signs, symbols, culture and power relations. Admittedly, the advent of mass