Page 126 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational media system 117
could be ‘negotiated’ or even occasionally subverted in recalcitrant audience readings.
John Fiske, the most exuberant ambassador of this position, has pushed it to an extreme
in several provocative publications by virtually declaring the audiences’ independence in
the cultural struggle over meaning and pleasure (e.g. 1987a, 1987b; see also L.A.Lewis
1990; Jenkins 1992). In this version of cultural studies the researcher/critic is no longer
the critical outsider committed to condemn the oppressive world of mass culture, but a
conscious fan, whose political engagement consists in ‘encouraging cultural democracy
at work’ (Fiske 1987b:286), by giving voice to and celebrating audience recalcitrance.
As Morris has remarked, what we have here is ‘a humane and optimistic discourse,
trying to derive its values from materials and conditions already available to people’
(1988a:23). However, what does it amount to as cultural critique? There is a
romanticizing and romanticist tendency in much work that emphasizes (symbolic)
resistance in audience reception, which, according to Morris, can all too easily lead to an
apologetic ‘yes, but…’ discourse that downplays the realities of oppression in favour of
the representation of a rosy world ‘where there’s always a way to redemption’. Similar
criticisms have been voiced by other critical theorists (e.g. Modleski 1986; Schudson
1987; Gripsrud 1989; Budd et al. 1990).
But this kind of ‘selling out’, I would argue, is not the inevitable outcome of the
ethnography of reception. In this respect, it is unfortunate that the politics of reception
analysis has all too often been one-sidedly cast within the terms of the liberal defence of
popular culture, just as uses and gratifications research could implicitly or explicitly, in
theoretical and political terms, serve as a decontextualized defence of the media status
quo by pointing at their ‘functions’ for the active audience (cf. Elliott 1974). Similarly,
research into how audiences create meanings out of items of media culture has often been
used as an empirical refutation of the elitist argument that mass culture stupefies, numbs
the mind, reinforces passivity, and so on. There is something truly democratic about this
discourse, and I would be the last to want to question the importance of attacking the
damaging impact of the high/low culture divide, which still pervasively informs—and
limits—national cultural and educational policies, for example. However, revalidating the
popular alone—by pointing to the empirical fact that audiences are active meaning
producers and imaginative pleasure seekers—can become a banal form of cultural
critique if the popular itself is not seen in a thoroughly social and political context. In
other words, audiences may be active in a myriad of ways in using and interpreting
media, but it would be utterly out of perspective to cheerfully equate ‘active’ with
‘powerful’, in the sense of ‘taking control’ at an enduring structural or institutional level.
It is a perfectly reasonable starting point to consider people’s active negotiations with
media texts and technologies as empowering in the context of their everyday lives
(which, of course, is the context of media reception), but we must not lose sight of the
marginality of this power. As Michel de Certeau has remarked about the clandestine
tactics by which ordinary women and men try to ‘make do’ in their everyday practices of
consumption:

[T]his cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is
unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible