Page 26 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Institutional knowledge: the need to control

In ‘The Imaginary Signified’, film theorist Christian Metz (1975) has identified an acute
problem for the film industry. The problem will come as no surprise to those who run the
industry, for they are daily confronted with its practical repercussions. But its theoretical
repercussions have been less charted. Here is how Metz has characterized the problem:

In a social system in which the spectator is not forced physically to go to
the cinema but in which it is still important that he [sic] should go so that
the money he pays for his admission makes it possible to shoot other films
and thus ensures the auto-reproduction of the institution—and it is the
specific characteristic of every true institution that it takes charge of the
mechanisms of its own perpetuation—there is no other solution than to set
up arrangements whose aim and effect is to give the spectator the
‘spontaneous’ desire to visit the cinema and pay for his ticket.
(Metz 1975:19)

Conjured up here is the problem of institutional reproduction. The cinema can only
continue to exist if and when enough people are willing and prepared to be regular
members of the film audience, but the film industry does not have the means to provide
itself with a guarantee that people will not one day stop going to the movies. The problem
seems to be a rather far-fetched one, because since the turn of the century, when the
cinema first entered our cultural life, the world has obviously turned into a place full of
filmgoing women, men and children. However, the principle of the problem is
undeniable, and that it is not entirely hypothetical, is easily exemplified by the sharp and
steady decline in cinema-going since the 1950s, when television made its entrance in
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people’s homes (Docherty et al. 1987; Gomery 1985). At stake, then, is the institution’s
control—or better, lack of control—over the conditions of its own reproduction.
Broadcast television faces similar institutional problems: it too cannot take its
audience for granted. Contrary to other social institutions such as the school or the
family, television (as well as all other mass media) does not have the means to coerce
people into becoming members of its audience. Television audience membership is not a
matter of compulsion or necessity, but is principally voluntary and optional. Therefore,
the television institution is ultimately dependent upon people’s unforced appetite to
continue watching day after day. Again, the problem seems far-fetched given television’s
manifest success in securing huge audiences for its transmissions, but this still does not
mean that that success comes naturally and effortlessly. On the contrary, numerous
institutionally orchestrated activities such as the publication of TV guides, advertisements