Page 127 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 118

for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products
through which a productivist economy articulates itself
(de Certeau 1984:xvii, emphasis added)

To be sure, one of the important contributions made by ethnographic studies of reception
is exactly the ‘signing’, ‘reading’ and ‘symbolizing’—the documenting, the putting into
tangible discourse—of the fragmented, invisible, marginal tactics by which media
audiences symbolically appropriate a world not their own. This is no doubt what Fiske
meant by encouraging cultural democracy, and he is right. However, if the ethnography
of reception wants to elaborate its critical function, it cannot avoid confronting more fully
what sociologists have dubbed the micro/macro problematic: the fact that there are
structural limits to the possibilities of cultural democracy à la Fiske, that its expression
takes place within specific parameters and concrete conditions of existence. In short, we
need to return to the problematic of hegemony.
If the euphoria over the vitality of popular culture and its audiences has tended to
make the question of hegemony rather unfashionable in some cultural studies circles, it is
because the popular came to be seen as an autonomous, positive entity in itself, a
repository of bold independence, strength and creativity, a happy space in which people
can arguably stay outside the hegemonic field of force. The problem with this argument
is that it conceives the relationship between the hegemonic and the popular in terms of
mutual exteriority. However, in a culture where power is mostly exerted not through
brute force but through ‘soft’ strategies of persuasion and seduction, incorporation and
interpellation, it would make more sense to locate the hegemonic within the very texture
of the popular. As Colombian communication theorist Martín-Barbero has noted, ‘we
need to recognize that the hegemonic does not dominate us from without but rather
penetrates us, and therefore it is not just against it but from within it that we are waging
war’ (1988:448). Therefore, he is wary of a ‘political identification of the popular with an
intrinsic, spontaneous resistance with which the subordin-ate oppose the hegemonic’
(ibid.). Instead, what should be emphasized is ‘the thick texture of
hegemony/subalternity, the interlacing of resistance and submission, and opposition and
complicity’ (ibid.: 462). The resulting forms of cultural resistance are not just ways to
find redemption, but also a matter of capitulation; invested in them is not just pleasure,
but also pain, anger, frustration—or sheer despair.
Martín-Barbero’s Latin American perspective, informed as it is by the harsh and ugly
realities spun off by the subcontinent’s unequal economic development, profound
political instability and day-to-day social disorder, especially in the explosive urban
areas, can not only help to undermine the Euro- and Americocentrism of much cultural
studies, but also, more positively, (re)sensitize us to the messy and deeply political
contradictions which constitute and shape popular practices. In Latin America, the
popular is often nostalgically equated with the indigenous, and this in turn with the
primitive and the backward, the disappearing ‘authentic popular’ untouched by the forces
of modernity. From this perspective, the unruly, crime-ridden, poverty-stricken culture of
the urban popular, concentrated in the favelas, the barrios, and other slums, but diffusing
its subversions from there right into the hearts of the modern city centres, could only be
conceived of as contamination of indigenous purity, as an irreconcilable loss of