Page 138 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Conclusions

Understanding television audiencehood

We must make allowance for the complex and unstable
process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and
an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-
block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an
opposing strategy.
Michel Foucault (1980a: 101)

BEYOND THE INSTITUTIONAL POINT OF VIEW

First, a short recapitulation of what this book has argued so far. Television audiencehood
is a pervasive social and cultural reality in the late twentieth century. In a multitude of
ways, sometimes routine sometimes exceptional, television plays an intimate role in
shaping our day-to-day practices and experiences—at home but also outside it, at work,
at school, in our conversations with friends, family and colleagues, in our engagements
with society, politics and culture. However, our understanding of what all these practices
and experiences mean, what they imply and implicate, has remained scant. We do not
have a sophisticated vocabulary with which we can usefully speak about the nuanced
predicaments of our television-saturated world, either in a general sense or in particular
instances. The ‘we’ I am incorporating here refers to the rather loose community of
scholars, critics and other intellectuals, whose general task in a free and democratic
society it is to interpret and comment upon important developments and events that affect
our common conditions of existence. Given television’s conspicuousness in
contemporary culture and society, this poverty of discourse, this lack of understanding is
1
rather embarrassing indeed, if not downright scandalous.
In this book, I have tried to relate this lack of understanding with the preponderance of
the institutional point of view in existing knowledge about the television audience. This
point of view is primarily advanced and materialized in the knowledge produced within
the television institutions—knowledge that is explicitly aimed at facilitating the
institutions’ ambition to ‘get’ the audience. Institutional knowledge is not interested in
the social world of actual audiences; it is in ‘television audience’, which it constructs as
an objectified category of others to be controlled. This construction has both political and
epistemological underpinnings. Politically, it enables television institutions to develop
strategies to conquer the audience so as to reproduce their own mechanisms of survival;
epistemologically, it manages to perform this function through its conceptualization of
‘television audience’ as a distinct taxonomic collective, consisting of audience members
with neatly describable and categorizable attributes.
What I hope to have shown in Parts II and III, however, is that even in its own terms
institutional knowledge is lacking. Institutional knowledge does not only offer us limited