Page 47 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The limits of discursive control 35
to an opponent which is perceived as threateningly unstructured: huge, dispersed, elusive,
unseen. Unfortunately, however, the ‘opponent’ will never give up the struggle, which is
merely to say that it will always eventually resist the structure assigned to it.
Writing about problems of cultural description and representation in anthropology,
James Clifford (1986:10) has noted, ‘“cultures” do not hold still for their portraits.
Attempts to make them do so always involve simplification and exclusion, selection of a
temporal focus, the construction of a self—other relationship, and the imposition or
negotiation of a power relationship.’ The same thing happens to the social world of actual
audiences, I argue, when ‘television audience’ is conceptualized as a taxonomic
collective, holding still for its portrait. How television institutions construct such
portraits, and the difficulties they encounter in the process, is plotted in the next two parts
of this book.