Page 134 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational media system 125
hegemonic response to the very real American hegemony in the field of cultural
production and distribution, but as itself a hegemonic strategy that tends to marginalize
the more elusive popular responses of ordinary Europeans. More specifically, I suggest
that the official definition of ‘Americanization’ as an unambiguous threat should be
relativized by looking at the contradictory losses and opportunities allowed by it. As
Marcus and Fischer suggest,

the apparent increasing global integration suggests not the elimination of
cultural diversity, but rather opportunities for counterposing diverse
alternatives that nonetheless share a common world, so that each can be
understood better in the other’s light.
(Marcus and Fischer 1986:136)

What I have tried to conjure up, then, is the broad range of creative practices which
peoples in different parts of the world are inventing today in their everyday dealings with
the changing media environment that surrounds them. The often hazardous and
unpredictable nature of these practices make them difficult to examine with too
formalized methods: it is an ethnographic approach that can best capture and respect
them in their concrete multifacetedness. Here, then, lies the critical potential of an
ethnography of audiences that evinces global and historical consciousness as well as
attention to local detail. In the words of Marcus and Fischer,

since there are always multiple sides and multiple expressions of
possibilities active in any situation, some accommodating, others resistant
to dominant cultural trends or interpretations, ethnography as cultural
criticism locates alternatives by unearthing these multiple possibilities as
they exist in reality.
(Marcus and Fischer 1986:116)

Its emphasis on what is rather than on what could be makes ethnography a form of
cultural critique that is devoid of utopianism. But then, we live in particularly non-
utopian (or post-utopian) times—which is, of course, precisely one of the central features
of the ‘postmodern condition’ (cf. Lyotard 1984; Ross 1988; Rorty 1989). The de facto
dissemination of the transnational media system is an irreversible process that cannot be
transcended, only negotiated. In such a situation, a critical perspective that combines a
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radical empiricism with open-ended theorizing may be one of the best stances we can
take up in order to stay alert to the deeply conflictual nature of contemporary cultural
relations across the globe. It is a form of cultural critique which is articulated by, and
gives voice to, ‘pained and disgruntled subjects, who are also joyous and inventive
practitioners’ (Morris 1988a:25).