Page 147 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Conclusions 135
constraints. This, of course, is the ultimate power of the television institutions, the
ultimate basis of their control over the audience.
However, the fact that instances of watching television are ‘controlled’ in this way
‘does not catapult them out of micro-situations’, as Knorr-Cetina (1989:36) has put it.
Thus, recognition of the situational dependency of actual audience practices and
experiences can shed a new light on the fundamental unpredictability of ‘viewing
behaviour’—that irritating ‘fickleness’ of the audience that television industry managers
often complain about. It is only in concrete situations that people do or do not comply to
the rules for ‘watching television’ that the institutions implicitly lay down through their
scheduling and programming strategies in their attempts to conquer the audience as
effectively as possible. Statistically constructed differentiations between categories of
viewers notwithstanding, concrete viewers sometimes zap or zip, sometimes don’t. This
time they watch the commercials, another time they don’t. Sometimes, when the situation
is right, they decide to watch an educational programme attentively in order to learn from
it, at other times they wouldn’t bother.
Seen from this perspective, then, variability rather than consistency of ‘viewing
behaviour’ is the order of the day. From this perspective, what are called ‘viewing habits’
do not represent a more or less static set of characteristics moored in an individual or a
group; they are no more than the temporary and superficial snapshots of a never-ending,
dynamic and complex process in which ‘the fine-grained interrelationships between
meaning, pleasure, use and choice’ (Hall, in Morley 1986:10) are shaped in millions of
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situations. From this perspective, ‘television audience’ is a nonsensical category, for
there is only the dispersed, indefinitely proliferating chain of situations in which
television audiencehood is practised and experienced—together making up the diffuse
and fragmentary social world of actual audiences.
This brings me to the broader implications for the kind of knowledge emerging from
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the thoroughly ethnographic thrust of this perspective. Obviously, emphasis on the
situational embeddedness of audience practices and experiences inevitably undercuts the
search for generalizations that is often seen as the ultimate goal of scientific knowledge.
In a sense, generalizations are necessarily violations to the concrete specificity of all
unique micro-situations; therefore, it is knowledge about particulars not the general that
this perspective tends to highlight. As Stephen Tyler (1986:131–2) has put forward in a
suggestive metaphor, ‘It is not just that we cannot see the forest for the trees, but that we
have come to feel that there are no forests where the trees are too far apart, just as patches
make quilts only if the spaces between them are small enough.’ This is not to imply that
as researchers we can say something only about one singular micro-situation—one tree or
patch—at a time. We can, through some procedure of comparative analysis, look for what
situations have in common and in what ways they differ (cf. Marcus and Fischer 1986).
But it is unwarranted to add up the results into an ever more generalized, comprehensive
system of knowledge that comprises the forest or quilt, i.e. the whole social world of
actual audiences, because the very fluid nature of that world resists full representation.
The epistemology this implies cannot be reconciled with received notions of cumulative
scientific progress, and the partiality at stake is stronger than the normal scientific
dictates that we study problems piecemeal, that we must not overgeneralize, that the best
picture is built up by an accretion of rigorous evidence (Clifford 1986). There is no whole
picture that we can strive to gradually ‘fill in’, because actual audiences are temporally