Page 24 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 12
Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Indeed, if ‘television audience’ exists nowhere, actual
audiences are everywhere (Lull 1988b:242)!
The theoretical distinction between the social world of actual audiences (as I define it)
and discursive constructs of ‘television audience’ is an extremely important one: as we
will see, it is the tension between the two that accounts for the basic precariousness of the
institutional point of view, which forms a red thread through the analyses in the pages to
come. The distinction also clarifies why in the end knowledge of ‘television audience’,
constructed from the institutional point of view, will only make us lose sight of the
intricacies of the social world of actual audiences, of what Edward Said (1985:5) would
call the ‘brute reality’ of audiencehood in the modern, television-saturated world we all
live in.
If we are to come to an understanding that does justice to the dynamic complexities of
the social world of actual audiences—an understanding that is ‘on their side’, as it were
(Nightingale 1986)—we must, to begin with, recognize the fundamental irreducibility of
this ‘brute reality’ to any attempt to contain it in an objectified construct of ‘television
audience’ as a category of others to be controlled. Hayden White (1978:5) has
characterized understanding as ‘a process of rendering the unfamiliar… familiar; of
removing it from the domain of things felt to be “exotic” and unclassified.’ What it
comes down to, I suggest, is to find new ways of making the unfamiliar familiar, or more
precisely, to make something that is so familiar in our everyday lives but has retained an
‘exotic’ quality nevertheless, also familiar at the level of understanding, knowledge,
discourse. This book is an attempt to chart the terrain for such a project by removing the
epistemological and political obstacles we are liable to encounter along the road.