Page 32 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 20
fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have knowledge of such a
thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.
(Said 1985:32)

The television audience can be seen as similarly ‘orientalized’ from the institutional point
of view (cf. Hartley 1987). Institutional knowledge is produced as a result of the
symbolic travels that are initiated and orchestrated by the institutions into the obscure
territory of the audience; they lead to a capturing of ‘television audience’ as object of
knowledge, object of scrutiny, object of control. The trip to Port Authority that Tartikoff
was advised to take in order to take some pictures of bus passengers which he should then
hang full-blown in his office, is an almost too fitting metaphorical illustration of this
process, a discursive process in which the television business aims to ‘freeze’ the
audience into a durable and factual thing, an object consisting of manipulable people.
The aggressive connotations are purposefully invoked here: television institutions
need to know the audience because the latter is, in a manner of speaking, the wild savage
which the former want to tame and colonize. One could object to this metaphor by
pointing to the evidently immense success of television to attract audiences: the wild
savage seems so willing to surrender to the colonizer! This is true, of course, but this does
not mean that the colonizer does not meet with any resistance. What the television
institutions are confronted with, rather, is a form of ‘passive aggressiveness’ on the part
of actual audiences. As Gitlin (1983:31) has put it, ‘however passive, deadened, habit-
formed the hypothetical audience may be, the fact remains that they do not have to turn
the dial to a certain spot at a certain hour on a certain evening’.
At stake, then, is an eternal battle between institution and audience, a battle in which
institutional knowledge serves as powerful ammunition (Ang 1985b). It is this battle, or
more precisely, the way in which the battle is articulated in the formalization and
rationalization of institutional knowledge—pre-eminently symbolized by the privileged
status of audience measurement—that will be laid out in the following parts of this book.
First, however, I need to become more specific about the historical varieties in the
economic and cultural institutionalization of television, in order to develop a more
concrete sense of the battleground upon which the institution-audience relationship is
fought out (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3 I will proceed to disentangle the basic
epistemological assumptions by which institutional knowledge manages to objectify
‘television audience’ into a unified, controllable category. Finally, in Chapter 4 I will
point to the inherent instability of this process of objectification: the control mustered by
institutional knowledge is prone to be partial, imperfect, incomplete.