Page 10 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction: media audiences, postmodernity
and cultural contradiction

The essays collected in this book have been written in the course of a decade—a decade
which has been characterized by irrevocable and accelerated postmodernization in many
fields of social and cultural practice. Since the 1970s the discourse of postmodernity has
gradually but definitively taken hold of the Western world. These essays bear the mark of
this present mood and can be read as attempts to come to terms with some of its
theoretical and practical implications. They do this with respect to a rather humble site of
discursive knowledge: media audiences. In this Introduction, I will indicate how the
postmodern—as a historical trend and as a mode of knowing—has impacted on (our
understanding of) media audiences, especially television audiences. At the same time, I
will also suggest how a critical theoretical and analytical engagement with audiences—
which, as I have argued elsewhere (Ang 1991) and throughout the essays to follow,
necessarily involves a deconstruction of the very unity and solidity of ‘audience’ as an
object of analysis—can highlight and illuminate some of the consequences of what some
have called ‘the condition of postmodernity’ (Lyotard 1984; Harvey 1989; Jameson
1991).
In the course of the 1980s, the label ‘postmodern’ to describe the world became
virtually inescapable—that is, increasingly pertinent and widely accepted, a part of
popular commonsense. I remember occasions, earlier in the decade, when those annoyed
by the hype could still afford either to dismiss any talk about ‘postmodernism’ as a
passing fad, or to reject the very notion of the postmodern as a vacuous, meaningless
category. As the end of the century approaches this is clearly no longer possible: the
implications of the so-called postmodernization of the contemporary world—economic,
social, cultural—have become too insistent to ignore or refute, if still incompletely
understood in its diverse, complex and contradictory facets. Dick Hebdige (1988:182) has
noted that as the 1980s wore on ‘postmodern’ has clearly become a buzzword with an
enormous degree of semantic complexity and overload. But while many of us have by
now become rather blasé about anything having to do with postmodernism—and in some
respects rightly so—I still think it is necessary to continue to learn in much greater detail
and with much more nuance about postmodernity, or about what ‘living in a postmodern
world’ might mean; to go beyond the many sweeping generalizations and platitudes
enunciated about it. In my understanding, one of the most prominent features of living in
a postmodern world means living with a heightened sense of permanent and pervasive
cultural contradiction. But if this is so, how does this manifest itself in the concrete
texture of our daily lives? The essays in this volume can all be read as emanating from
this concern with the concrete, even ‘empirical’ level of the cultural contradictions of
postmodernity. From a variety of angles they attempt to clarify not only that
contemporary television audiencehood can best be understood as a range of social
experiences and practices shot through with cultural contradiction, but also that looking
at these experiences and practices provides us with an excellent inroad into what it