Page 31 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Institutional knowledge: the need to control 19
should do in order to sustain a hold over the audience. It is this goal-directed requirement
that binds all forms of institutional knowledge (including research) together, and that
determines their common discursive construction of ‘television audience’ as a category of
others to be controlled.
The pragmatic logic of this construction is evocatively recited by Brandon Tartikoff.
In 1970, when he first explored the possibility of starting a career within the television
industry, the programme director of a local television station gave him some
extraordinary advice. Tartikoff recalls:

He asked me if I had an Instamatic camera and I said I did. He said, ‘Why
don’t you go down to New York, go to the Port Authority Bus Terminal,
and take pictures of the first hundred people who get off the buses? Take
those pictures, blow them up to eight-by-ten glossies, and wherever you
go down to work in television, put those photographs up on the wall
somewhere. And every time you have to make a decision, look at those
pictures and ask yourself, will they like it?’ If I did that, he said, I’d be
very successful in the business.
(In Levinson and Link 1986:247)

Tartikoff did not literally follow the rather unusual advice, but the anecdote is telling
enough because it clearly illustrates the general discursive operation that underpins all
institutional pursuits of knowing the audience. Central to this discursive operation is the
construction of a set of binary oppositions: production versus consumption, ‘sender’
versus ‘recipient’, institution versus audience. As a consequence, a relationship of
confrontation is constituted. From the point of view of the institution, the audience
appears in this discursive structure as a distinct category of others that stands against
itself: ‘us’ versus ‘them’. As Tartikoff’s adviser wondered: ‘Will they like it?’
This subject/object dichotomy reveals the structural position assigned to the audience
from the institutional point of view: the position of object to be conquered. The audience
must, in one way or another, be imagined as addressable, attainable, winnable, in short, a
manœuvrable ‘thing’. In this respect, it is not for nothing that the audience is as often
referred to as ‘it’ as it is as ‘they’. It is through this discursive objectification that the
nexus of power and knowledge exhibits its effectivity.
In his book Orientalism, Edward Said (1985) has demonstrated a similar intertwining
of power and knowledge in what he calls the discourse of ‘orientalism’: a systematic
discourse, inextricably linked to European colonialism and neo-colonialism, in which the
‘Orient’ is imagined and represented in ways which always buttresses and nourishes the
superiority and hegemony of the West. Western observers have, consistently and
persistently, pursued the aim of gaining knowledge about the Orient. But this knowledge
inevitably articulates a power relationship. As Said remarks,

Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign
and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to
scrutiny; this object is a ‘fact’ which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise
transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is