Page 41 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Television audience as taxonomic collective 29
construct, it introduces an element of symbolic abstraction, which directs our thinking
and our imagination in some directions and not others.
Thus, lumping people together as so many members of a ‘television audience’ already
stresses something that compounds and unifies them, i.e. a type of observable activity,
usually labelled ‘watching television’. Basically, it is people’s shared orientation toward
some focal point—a centre of transmission, a centre of attraction—that turns them into
‘audience members’. In this context, the idiosyncracies of the individual people making
up an audience, as well as the specific interrelations between these people, do not matter:
audience as taxonomic collective is in principle a term of amassment (‘We all watched
the football game on television yesterday’). At the same time, representing audience as a
collection of people also implies an act of demarcation, of categorization: some people
are considered part of it, others not. In other words, in the discursive act of putting people
into a single taxonomic collective ‘television audience’ becomes constructed as a distinct
category.
Aggregating and clustering people as members of the distinct category of ‘television
audience’ are discursive mechanisms which establish the very representability of
‘television audience’ as a thing-like, objective phenomenon. Fundamentally, then, the
representation of ‘television audience’ as a taxonomic collective provides us with an
exterior perspective from which it can be imagined as an isolatable empirical
phenomenon, a factual entity ‘out there’ existing in and for itself, possessing
unambiguously describable features.
Here then we have the bottom-line discursive operation of the institutional point of
view on the audience. Whatever information, images or beliefs about the television
audience are constructed within television institutions, they always draw upon the
assumption that ‘television audience’ is a separate category of people, objectively
distinguishable from the non-audience. Representing ‘television audience’ as a taxonomic
collective enables those working within the institutions to imagine the audience as
variable in specific features but nevertheless absolute in its given existence as object
ready to be conquered, just as the ‘Orient’, as Said (1985) has shown, is constituted as an
ontologically stable fact in the discourses of Orientalism. To put it differently, once the
taxonomic conceptualization of ‘television audience’ as aggregate of people is used as an
implicit, taken-for-granted starting point, a workable ‘operationalization’ of the category
of audience has been created on the basis of which it becomes possible to gain more
elaborate knowledge, empirical or non-empirical, about the constitutive parts of the
category, i.e. the so-called audience members. All forms of knowledge about the
audience produced within television institutions, including Tartikoff’s fantasy trip to Port
Authority, exemplify this procedure: knowing ‘television audience’ is equated with
knowing a cluster of audience members as if they were exemplars of an alien species.
Not only the audience-as-market, but also the audience-as-public is essentially
imagined as a taxonomic collective within commercial and public service institutions
respectively. If a market consists of a set of anonymous consumers grouped together
according to some objectified common characteristics (e.g. demographic variables), a
public is generally made up of a collective of citizens who are seen as bounded together
in an imagined community such as a nation, sharing a common ‘national culture’ (as in
the case of the BBC), or a political community, sharing a common ‘popular culture’ (as
in the case of the Dutch socialist broadcasting organization VARA) (Anderson 1983).