Page 128 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational media system 119
authenticity. Against this vision, Martín-Barbero proposes to reconceptualize the
indigenous as at once ‘dominated and yet as the possessors of a positive existence,
capable of development’ (1988:460). In this way, we can begin to see the urban popular
not as inauthentic degeneration but as the truly contemporary site where powerless
groups seek to take control of their own conditions of existence within the limits imposed
by the pressures of modernity (see also Martín-Barbero 1993).
In the West, where everyday life is relatively comfortable even for the least privileged,
the struggle for popular survival and self-affirmation seems to have lost its urgency.
However, it is not true that, as Martín-Barbero would have it, ‘in the United States and
Europe […] to talk of the popular is to refer solely to massness or to the folklore
museum’ (1988:464). In the developed world too the popular remains invested with
intense conflict: this is the case even in such a seemingly innocent terrain as cultural
consumption and media reception. To be sure, Martín-Barbero’s assumption that popular
culture is a subordinate culture that stands in a contradictory relation to dominant culture
is hardly unique and is well represented in British cultural studies too, particularly as a
result of its Gramscian legacy (Bennett et al. 1986). However, this general theoretical
assumption has not sufficiently succeeded in informing concrete analyses of media
audiences. Instead, our understanding of media reception—one of the most prominent
practices where the popular takes shape in today’s ‘consumer societies’—is still governed
by the unhelpful dichotomies of passive/active, manipulative/ liberating, and so on. What
a critical ethnography of reception needs to ferret out, then, is the unrecognized,
unconscious and contradictory effectivity of the hegemonic within the popular, the
relations of power that are inscribed within the very texture of media reception practices.
In this context, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis’s (1992) study on audience readings of the
immensely popular The Cosby Show points to the extremely useful insight that hegemony
can operate precisely through popularity, and that this in turn is enhanced by the
polysemic nature of the text: The hegemonic power of The Cosby Show, it turns out,
actually depends upon its ability to resonate with different audiences in different ways’
(J.Lewis 1991:205). To put it more generally, what we need to clarify is the complex and
contradictory ways in which the popular is implicated in the hegemonic, and vice versa.
In the following section, I will sketch one of the trajectories along which we can begin to
stake out this terrain.

THE HEGEMONIC SPECIFIED: THE TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA
SYSTEM

To begin with, it is important to develop a concrete sense of the hegemonic forces that
rule the world today. In too much cultural studies work understanding of hegemony
remains at an abstract theoretical level, evoked rather than analysed, by alluding to basic
concepts such as ‘class’, ‘gender’ and ‘race’. We need to go beyond these paradigmatic
conceptualizations of hegemony and develop a more specific, concrete, contextual, in
short, a more ethnographic sense of the hegemonic (Marcus 1986).
I can only make an extremely sketchy start here, and it seems to me that a good point
to begin is the rather disturbing changes that the international media system—arguably an
important locus of hegemonic forces—is undergoing at present. As we are moving