Page 19 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 7
indispensible for the industry to operate, but there is constant agony in industry circles
about the adequacy of the information they get from audience measurement—adequacy
defined, of course, from an institutional point of view. In other words, the control sought
after is never completely achieved, and has to be continuously pursued by accumulating
ever more information.
It is in the work of Michel Foucault that the epistemological dimension of power has
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been most consistently explored. According to Foucault (1972; 1979; 1980a; 1980b;
1981), knowledge is one of the defining components for the operation of power in the
modern world. Knowledge is an essential condition for the formation and functioning of a
society that relies on the coordination and orchestration of every field of human activity
(labour, politics, education, religion, leisure, welfare and so on) in and through large-
scale institutions. Administration, planning, policy, rules and regulations, discipline—
these are institutional forms of power over the actions and lives of people that can only be
exercised through a whole range of bureaucratic techniques and procedures that imply the
production of knowledge (e.g. statistics, reports, records, documents, programmes, plans,
manuals, directives, formulas and so on). In this sense, Foucault’s perspective shares
Beniger’s (1986) account of the role of the technologies of control in the information
society. In Foucault’s work, however, we find a much more detailed emphasis upon the
way in which power and knowledge are intertwined through concrete discursive
practices—that is, situated practices of functional language use and meaning production.
In these discursive practices, elusive fields of reality are transformed into discrete objects
to be known and controlled at the same time. But this only happens in specific, power-
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laden institutional contexts, that delimit the boundaries of what can actually be said.
More concretely, it is only in and through the discourses that express the institutional
point of view that the dispersed realities of television audiencehood come to be known
through the single, unitary concept of ‘television audience’.
In this context, knowledge can be defined broadly as discourse invested with truth
value. At stake in the discursive construction of knowledge, as Foucault (1980b) has
stated, is not a battle ‘on behalf of the truth, but a battle ‘around’ truth. Truth is not a
universal absolute that exists outside certain historical conditions, but is an
institutionally-produced category which refers to ‘the ensemble of rules according to
which the true and the false are separated’. In this separation process ‘specific effects of
power are attached to the true’ (ibid., 132).
In modern societies, scientific discourse is the source of one of the most powerful
modalities of knowledge. Empirical science’s prestige as the privileged domain of
objective, systematic, verified truth is an effect of its own power to extend itself to ever
more corners of human life, not the result of the inherent quality of its claims (Latour
1987). Empirical science, and the authority of the knowledge produced by it, has become
indispensible to manage and regulate institutional practices, although scientific discourse
is not the only resource of knowledge to which institutions resort in order to govern and
legitimize their own operations. They can also make use of other authoritative discourses
such as legal discourse or ideological discourse—discourses that produce other
modalities of knowledge than science but are in principle equally capable of imposing
themselves as repositories of truth. Even so, we can see a growing reliance on empirical
stocks of knowledge gathered through scientific methods within television institutions.
The ever increasing importance of audience measurement in almost all television