Page 154 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 142
11 Allor (1988) discusses several branches of critical approaches to mass communication (e.g.
political economy, feminist theory, cultural studies and postmodern theory) and finds them
all epistemologically wanting in their—in his view—monolithic conception of audience. In
other words, according to Allor’s severe judgement, not only positivist audience research but
also theoretical traditions that pretend to be anti-positivist tend to fail in this respect.
12 In the philosophy of knowledge, there has been continuing debate about the nature of the
relationship between knowledge and reality. The debate has often centred around the rival
assumptions of empiricist and conventionalist philosophies of knowledge. In
poststructuralism (which is the most sophisticated branch of conventionalism, and under
which Foucault’s work has often been put), the foregrounding of the effectivity and power of
discourse as the terrain in which meanings, concepts, and categories are constructed, has
often led to a nullification of the material existence of ‘the real world out there’: since we
can only speak about the real in and through discourse, it is superfluous to assume and
address a pre-existent real at all. Such discursive determinism however is problematic
because it collapses the question of ontology into one of epistemology. To shortcut the
debate I would like to quote Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985:108), who have given
the following dissection of the problem: ‘The fact that every object is constituted as an
object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or
with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that
certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But
whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of “natural phenomena” or
“expressions of the wrath of God”, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What
is denied is not that such objects exist externally of thought, but the rather different assertion
that they constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions.’ See also Lovell
(1980); Sayer (1984); Outhwaite (1987).
13 See also Fiske (1987:16–17).
14 Although I cannot think of any other, more suitable term, naming this whole range of
practices and experiences by the single phrase ‘social world of actual audiences’ is in fact a
rather clumsy and inadequate thing to do, because the phrase still runs the risk of retaining
the presumption of some self-evident unity of those practices and experiences, while it is
exactly this unity that I find problematic.

PART I

1
Institutional knowledge: the need to control
1 Docherty et al. (1987) criticize the technological determinism implied in the popular
explanation of the decline of the cinema audience as being directly caused by the rise of
television as the most important mass visual medium. The authors claim that both
developments can be explained, in Britain at least, by the same sociological factors, most
importantly the expansion of home-based consumer culture after the Second World War.
Gomery (1985) discusses the American context of the same phenomenon.
2 It is worth noting here that television was not naturally destined to be a medium for private,
domestic consumption. Early experiments with television technology were set up with
several alternative uses in mind. Television’s initial entertainment setting was that of public
showings on large-screen television in theatres, while it was also envisioned as a monitoring