Page 46 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 34
as on science. Scott Siegler, formerly CBS vice-president for drama development, has put
it this way:

Because it’s a mass audience—it’s an unimaginably large audience—the
audience tastes are so diffused and so general that you’ve got to be
guessing. You can work off precedents about what’s worked on television
before. You can work off whatever smattering of sociological information
you gleaned from whatever sources. You can let your personal judgments
enter into it to some extent…. But you never really know.
(In Gitlin 1983:22–3)

For all the information available, then, the quest for conquering the audience remains,
more often than not, a matter of trial and error: more often than not do programmes fail to
attract the audiences they were intended to. There are so many variables at play in the art
of television programming, Siegler says, that ‘the whole thing [is] very precise and very
empirical, and at the same time totally absurd and unpredictable’ (in Gitlin 1983:23).
The limits of discursive control are inevitable, because although the television
institutions do have the power to determine the formal boundaries of television culture,
they cannot get to grips with the social world of actual audiences. As Stuart Hall has
remarked,

We are all, in our heads, several different audiences at once, and can be
constituted as such by different programmes. We have the capacity to
deploy different levels and modes of attention, to mobilise different
competences in our viewing. At different times of the day, for different
family members, different patterns of viewing have different ‘saliences’.
(In Morley 1986:10)

In other words, the identities of actual audiences are inherently unstable, they are
dynamic and variable formations of people whose cultural and psychological boundaries
are essentially uncertain. The social world of actual audiences is therefore a
fundamentally fluid, fuzzy, and elusive reality, whose description can never be contained
and exhausted by any totalizing, taxonomic definition of ‘television audience’: the latter
is, as has been suggested, a fictional abstraction which necessarily involves disavowals of
dynamic complexity, of contradiction, of the unforeseen and the accidental. In short,
institutionally-produced discursive constructions of ‘television audience’ are strategic
structurations which are under constant pressure of reconstruction whenever they turn out
to be imperfect weapons in the quest for control.
We can conclude then that there can be no prefixed recipe for controlling the
institution—audience relationship. The institutions are never totally in control, as it were.
Control is always sought after, but never completely achieved. As a result, the conquest
of the audience is never something absolute and definitive; it is always a temporary
victory, perpetually in danger of being eroded, constantly contested, or simply evaded.
Taxonomic definitions of ‘television audience’ are used by the institutions ‘in a situation
of confrontation to deprive the opponent of his means of combat and to reduce him to
giving up the struggle’ (Foucault 1982:225), because they conveniently assign structure