Page 15 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 6
short, in its ‘tendency to serve either the media industry, its clients, or the official
guardians of society and public morality’ (McQuail 1994:296), mass communication
research, by offering scientific knowledge about the audience (or, more precisely, about
what could be done in order to ‘administer’ the audience), has performed a power/
knowledge function which is particularly characteristic of the modern desire for social
order (Foucault 1980; Bauman 1987; Ang 1991).
My own critical engagement with audience studies took off from what I perceived to
be the limitations of this kind of positivist and functionalist scientific knowledge, for both
epistemological and political reasons. It is clear that there was always something written
out of this knowledge, that the discourse of mass communication research effectively
makes it impossible for us to think about what it means, in qualitative cultural terms, to
be a television audience—or, better, to live in a world where we are all interpellated to
television audiencehood. Relegated to the plebeian receiving end of the highly visible and
public mass communication process, television audiences have been reified as the
invisible, silent majorities of the suburban wasteland, subjected to the objectifying gaze
of social science and authoritative arbiters of taste, morality and social order. What
increasingly became an epistemological strait jacket was the myth of cultural integration
which underpinned the dominant, functionalist view of audiences—a myth which,
ironically, was reproduced in neo-Marxist critical theory through a rewriting of ‘cultural
integration’ as something imposed on audiences by a ‘dominant ideology’. In both cases
the relative autonomy of the ‘receiving end’ outside and beyond the mass
communicational order was unthinkable: the audience was merely a function of the
systemic design, and privatized reception completely subjected to the requirements of
centralized transmission. This, of course, was the source of the looming image of the
‘passive audience’.
Watching Dallas was a direct intervention in this discursive vanishing act. The book
foregrounded the cultural complexity of the site of that receiving end, the diversity and
sophistication, but also the contentiousness of viewer interpretations circulating about the
TV serial which became one of the most prominent symbols of the dreaded
Americanization of European culture. But I would like to stress that the book was never
merely intended as a debunking of the ‘passive audience’. What the book aimed to bring
to the surface, more than anything else, was precisely the heightened sense of cultural
contradiction elicited by the massive popularity of this famous and controversial
American soap opera, especially in Western Europe. It is perhaps not exaggerated to see
the moment of Dallas—the early 1980s—as a key one in the slow unravelling of modern
European culture, based as it has traditionally been on a firm, modernist containment of
commercial mass culture. In this sense, the moment of Dallas was quintessentially
postmodern!
The dissatisfaction I had with the assumptions and presumptions of mainstream mass
communication research was shared by many colleagues. This may itself be seen as a
sign of postmodern times emerging. Thus it was that the 1980s saw the emergence of a
new interest in studying media audiences, all concerned with uncovering and highlighting
the importance of ‘struggles over meaning’ in the reception process of the media. In
short, what these new approaches—discussed extensively in some of the essays in this
book—have brought to the attention was that complex and contradictory ‘living room
wars’ are taking place wherever and whenever television (and other media) sway