Page 23 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 11
TOWARDS ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDINGS

Several theorists have recently begun to radically untangle received conceptions of
audience in order to create a discursive space for new understandings (Nightingale 1986;
Chang 1987; Hartley 1987; Allor 1988; Grossberg 1988; Radway 1988; Silverstone
1990). For example, Martin Allor (1988:228) has criticized the ‘abstracted reification of
the individual in front of the [television] machine’ that marks the self-evident starting
11
point of most research into the television audience. In his view, this starting point
involves a naive epistemological realism which is the direct antecedent of
conceptualizing the audience as an unproblematic category, empirically equated with the
sum of all individuals in front of the machine. To overcome this liability, he suggests that
we do away with the concept of audience altogether. ’The audience exists nowhere; it
inhabits no real space, only positions within analytic discourses’, he states (ibid.).
As illuminating and provocative as Allor’s radical epistemological solution is,
however, it cannot account for the power of the institutional point of view, which is
fundamentally predicated upon stating the valid existence of ‘television audience’ as a
category of others to be controlled. In other words, rather than claiming that the audience
inhabits no real space—which is an idealistic, ahistorical claim—we should say that it
does inhabit a real space: a crucial, institutional space which was installed as soon as the
exploit of broadcast television became an institutional practice. Television institutions
must keep believing that there is such a thing as an audience that can be conquered!
Rather than simply rejecting the concept of audience, then, I prefer to put forward the
theoretical distinction between two realities: between ‘television audience’ as discursive
construct and the social world of actual audiences. I have made this distinction rather
casually throughout this introduction; it is now time to make it more explicit. The
distinction does not just refer to the gap between representation and reality, signifier and
12
signified, discourse and referent. By using the plural term actual audiences, I mean to
do more than just asserting that the television audience should be differentiated and
multiplied into several disparate, more or less coherent and fixed groups, more or less
13
distinct empirical realities. My claim is more radical than this. Whenever I refer to the
social world of actual audiences throughout this book, I use the phrase nominalistically,
as a provisional shorthand for the infinite, contradictory, dispersed and dynamic practices
and experiences of television audiencehood enacted by people in their everyday lives—
practices and experiences that are conventionally conceived as ‘watching’, ‘using’,
‘receiving’, ‘consuming’, ‘decoding’, and so on, although these terms too are already
abstractions from the complexity and the dynamism of the social, cultural, psychological,
political and historical activities that are involved in people’s engagements with
14
television. It is these heterogeneous practices and experiences of audiencehood that
form the elements to be articulated in discourses of ‘television audience’.
But the social world of actual audiences consists of such a multifarious and
intractable, ever expanding myriad of elements that their conversion into moments of a
coherent discursive entity can never be complete. In other words, the fixing of meanings
of ‘television audience’ is always by definition unfinished, because the world of actual
audiences is too polysemic and polymorphic to be completely articulated in a closed
discursive structure. There is thus always a ‘surplus of meaning’ which subverts the
permanent stability and final closure of ‘television audience’ as a discursive construct (cf.