Page 124 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational media system 115
say that while the theses underlying the ethnography of audiences have been extremely
enabling for cultural studies (e.g. that consumers are not ‘cultural dopes’, but critical
users of mass culture), she is now worried about ‘the sheer proliferation of the
restatements’, which threaten to lead to ‘the emergence […] of a restrictive definition of
the ideal knowing subject of cultural studies’ (ibid.).
Translated freely, the problem signalled by Morris is as follows. The ethnographic
perspective on audiences has led to a boom in isolated studies of the ways in which this
or that audience group actively produces specific meanings and pleasures out of this or
that text, genre or medium. However, while the positivist would be pleased with such an
accumulation of empirical verifications (and elaborations) of a central hypothesis, it is
not adequate for purposes of open-ended cultural critique. On the contrary, self-indulgent
‘replications’ of the same research ‘design’ would run the danger of merely producing an
ever more absolute formal Truth, an empty, abstract, and ultimately impotent
generalization that could run like this: ‘[P]eople in modern mediatised societies are
complex and contradictory, mass cultural texts are complex and contradictory, therefore
people using them produce complex and contradictory culture’ (Morris 1988a:22).
Although audience ethnographies have certainly enhanced and transformed our
understanding of media audiences, I do take Morris’s concerns to heart. For purposes of
cultural critique, validating audience experience or ‘taking the side of the audience’ alone
is not enough. In this sense, the term ‘reception’ itself bears some limitations because,
stemming from the linear transmission model of communication (Carey 1989), it tempts
us to foreground the spatial/temporal moment of direct contact between media and
audience members, and thus to isolate and reify that moment as the instance that merits
empirical examination. A more thoroughly cultural approach to reception, however,
would not stop at this pseudo-intimate moment of the text/audience encounter, but
address the differentiated meanings and significance of specific reception patterns in
articulating more general cultural negotiations and contestations. The conflict-ridden
reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses would be a tragic case in point
here. This case shows how the clash between different interpretive communities can form
a nodal point where complicated political tensions, ideological dilemmas and economic
pressures (e.g. relating to the publishing industry) find their expression in ways which
have worldwide consequences (Asad 1990). This admittedly extraordinary example
suggests the importance of not reducing reception to an individualized, essentially
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psychological process, but to conceptualize it as a deeply politicized, cultural one.
To avoid the ‘banality’ in cultural studies that Morris points to, then, qualitative
reception analysis needs to be placed in a broader theoretical framework, so that it ceases
to be just a sophisticated form of empirical audience research, but becomes part of a more
encompassing understanding, both structural and historical, of our contemporary cultural
condition and the place of the media in it. In other words, what we need is more
ethnographic work not on discrete audience groups, but on media consumption as an
integral part of popular cultural practices, articulating both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’,
both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ processes. That is to say, media consumption can be seen as
one site of ‘the complex and contradictory terrain, the multidimensional context, within
which people live out their everyday lives’ (Grossberg 1988a:25). At the same time, it is
in this very living out of their everyday lives that people are inscribed into large-scale
structural and historical relations of force which are not of their own making. I will have