Page 122 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational media system 113
cultural research and cultural criticism. Ultimately, doing cultural studies does not mean
contributing to the accumulation of science for science’s sake, the building of an ever
more encompassing, solidly constructed, empirically validated stock of ‘objective’
knowledge, but participating in an ongoing, open-ended, politically motivated debate,
aimed at evaluating and critiquing our contemporary cultural condition. In this context
topicality, critical sensibility and sensitivity to local specificities are more important than
theoretical professionalism, methodological purity and generalized ‘truths’. French
Marxist psychologist Michel Plon told me years ago, non-apologetically, ‘I don’t work
hard enough because I read too many newspapers.’ In my view, above all else it is this
worldly attitude that is required for doing cultural studies.

MEDIA RECEPTION AS FOCUS OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Cultural studies has gained an enormous popularity in the past decade or so. It has
become a preferred intellectual ‘meeting point’ for scholars who are searching for
alternatives, not only to the worn-out paths of the ‘dominant paradigm’, but also to the
increasingly sterile reiterations of classical critical theory (e.g. Hardt 1989). The work of
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (e.g. Hall et al. 1980) is
generally seen as the source of the emerging tradition, but its influence has spread to
many critical-intellectual corners in advanced capitalist societies, although paradoxically
enough less so in continental Europe than in Canada, Australia and, particularly, the
United States (see, e.g., Ang and Morley 1989; Blundell et al. 1993; Frow and Morris
1993; Stratton and Ang 1995).
What I want to do here is give a short sketch of some of the central issues related to
media and communication that have preoccupied cultural studies, and clarify the lines
along which the formulation of cultural critique within this tradition has developed. I will
also suggest some themes which I find particularly pertinent for cultural studies to take
up in the present period of massive economic, political and technological transformation
of our media environment. In Europe and elsewhere, the question of ‘national identity’
has been particularly prominent in official responses to these changes. I will focus my
discussion on this issue. The European case will only be rendered obliquely, however,
because I think that European problems are hardly unique (although certainly historically
specific and distinctive) in a world that moves progressively towards global integration,
at least at the structural level of political economy. Finally, to pick up a central theme of
this book, I will highlight the importance of an ethnographic approach in assessing the
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cultural impact of these current developments.
These concerns reflect a personal point of view—a perspective coloured by the
politics of my own work, which has centred on ways of conceptualizing and
understanding television audiences. Watching Dallas (Ang 1985), in which I analysed
letters from viewers about the infamous American prime-time soap opera, was ostensibly
an attempt to probe the ways in which audiences interpret and give meaning to a popular
television text, but its broader political context was the then rampant public outrage about
the ‘Americanization’ of European public broadcasting. In showing how Dallas fans
were silenced and thus disempowered by a dominant official discourse which
categorically rejects such programmes as ‘bad mass culture’, I wanted to disarticulate the