Page 11 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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means, concretely and empirically, to live in a culture that can be described as
‘postmodern’.
All too often ‘the postmodern condition’ is constructed as a structural fait accompli, a
homogenized, one-dimensional and increasingly global reality, as if there were a linear,
universal and radical historical transformation of the world from ‘modernity’ to
‘postmodernity’. Such totalizing accounts run counter to what I see as some of the more
enabling aspects of what the postmodern—as a heuristic category—signifies, namely the
very dispersal of taken for granted universalist and progressivist assumptions of the
modern. If the Enlightenment project of modernity was based on a belief in the
possibility of a world singularly organized around the principles of universal reason,
rationality and truth, then postmodernity signals not so much a radical end of the modern
era, its wholesale supersession and negation by an alternative set of beliefs, but rather an
awareness and recognition of the political and epistemological limits of those
principles—what Lyotard (1984) has called the loss of master narratives. This prevailing
incredulity towards modern metanarratives has been the result not only of having gone
through, but also of living with the not altogether sanguine consequences of a historical
phase in which modernist self-confidence and optimism literally ruled and shaped the
world. The current appeal of the phrase ‘new world disorder’—meant not only as an
ironic debunking of the lofty pronouncement of a New World Order after the collapse of
state socialism in Eastern Europe but also to signify a more general sense that the world
today is in a state of malaise, if not ‘out of control’—suggests the pervasiveness and
intensity of a postmodern ‘structure of feeling’, to use Raymond Williams’s (1977) term.
Postmodernity here ‘denote[s] a way of (…) living with the realisation that the promise of
modernity to deliver order, certainty and security will remain unfulfilled’ (Smart
1993:27). This doesn’t mean that chaos is the order of the day, but that any sense of
order, certainty and security—i.e., of structure and progress—has now become
provisional, partial and circumstantial. The postmodern doesn’t cancel out the modern,
but highlights the impossibility of the latter’s completion as a universal project while still
having to grapple with the complex and contradictory heritage of an unfinished (and
unfinishable) modern, warts and all. In this sense, the postmodern articulates the
deepening and elongation of the cultural contradictions which were inherent in the
modern itself. Living in a postmodern world, in the words of Angela McRobbie, is living
‘within the cracks of a crumbling culture where progress is in question and society seems
to be standing still’ (1994:22).
The essays in this book have all been written, in one way or another, under the
influence of such a questioning of modern certainty. They also aim to question—
implicitly rather than explicitly—the globalizing narratives of postmodernism itself. Thus
we have to ask: which culture is crumbling, for whom is progress in question, and
when/where does society seem to be standing still? The intellectual challenge posed by
the postmodern, as I see it, consists of the need to come to grips with the emergence of a
cultural space which is no longer circumscribed by fixed boundaries, hierarchies and
identities and by universalist, modernist concepts of truth and knowledge. In this sense,
what this book—in line with my earlier books Watching Dallas (1985) and Desperately
Seeking the Audience (1991)—hopes to contribute to is a move away from various
modernist ways of understanding television audiences, which I believe have dominated
established traditions of communication research and which now have generally reached