Page 56 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Understanding and theorizing cultural change 47

The more important issue, however, is whether or not we see power and
resistance as all that is always already there in what people think and do;
in my case, what they think and do with television. My own view is that,
like power, sociality, too, is already there in the practices that comprise
daily life, and, if cultural studies’ analysts were to acknowledge this, then
their understanding of power would be that much more sophisticated
and complicated.
(Lembo 2000: 80–1)
His argument is that, in drawing on the insights of authors like Butler concern-
ing the discursively performative nature of social life, but subjecting such
focus on discourse to critique through the insights of interactionist sociolo-
gists like Goffman, a different type of understanding of the full sociality of
television can be produced. This is a view and approach with which, it should
be clear on the basis of the arguments of this book so far, I have much sym-
pathy. Moreover, Lembo in part at least shows some of the complexities of
the place of television through a very engaging consideration of the different
degrees of mindfulness that is part of the practice of turning on the television
in the evening. This both explores the varying levels of agency that are involved
in this process and also shows how television is implicated in forms of every-
day routine with respect to work, family interaction domestic responsibility,
and so on.
Lembo, in my view, therefore captures a number of important themes
that run through this book. However, there are some problems with his analy-
sis, the consideration of which can contextualize the overall approach to
be drawn from the discussion in this book. First, while his analysis usefully
critiques aspects of previous approaches in pointing towards the need to con-
sider sociability, as his own discussion progresses it becomes more like a rather
conventional text audience study, which could have fitted into some of the
discussions of the uses made of TV, and so on. In this respect, despite the
overall aim, the more full understanding of social life around television is not
achieved. Second, the analysis focuses on television. While this is justifiable in
terms of the aims of the study, and by the fact that television is the most
popular contemporary mass medium, it does mean that the roles of other
cultural forms and the interactions between different media are not con-
sidered at any length. This is by no means a fault only of Lembo’s work, as the
recent tradition of audience studies has been dominated by the analysis of
television. Third, the wider processes of cultural change that impinge on the
processes of television sociability and provide a context through which they
alter are little considered. This is a commonly expressed criticism of studies
that focus on the micro-processes of everyday social interaction. In this respect
the point is something of a cliché. However, it is important to recognize that
there does need to be consideration of the way in which the wider social and
cultural processes contextualize the way in which ordinary life is lived out.
Finally, despite offering a significant critique of previous theorizations of the
way in which audiences have been studied the theoretical approach that
Lembo then uses is under-developed with respect to the overall nature of the
evidence that he provides for the reader.