Page 150 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 141
(characterized by certainty of order and meaning), but as a totalized yet fundamentally
dispersed world-system of capitalist postmodernity (characterized by radical uncertainty,
radical indeterminacy of meaning).

NEW REVISIONISM?

Such a move is not merely a theoreticist game but is essential if we are to develop a
critical theorizing of the new world (dis)order. I will clarify this by briefly looking at the
presumptions at work in the recent controversy around what some authors have called the
‘new revisionism’ in mass communication research (Curran 1990; see also e.g.,
Schlesinger 1991).This so-called ‘new revisionism’, I should say at the outset, is a
fiction, born of a rather conservative wish to retain ‘mass communication’ as a separate
field of study, on the one hand, and a misrecognition of the radical potential of the idea of
indeterminacy of meaning, on the other. Although I will not spend too much time
deconstructing this fiction, I think it is important to counter some of its assertions in order
to clarify precisely what that radical potential involves. What should be resisted, I think,
is the theoretical and political closure which the fiction of the new revisionism imposes
on our understanding of what ‘mass communication’ means in today’s world.
According to James Curran, this so-called ‘new revisionism’ has fundamentally
transformed what he calls ‘the radical tradition’ of mass communication scholarship. This
transformation is exemplified, says Curran, in the well-known ethnographic studies of
media audiences in cultural studies (about which you have been reading in this book). As
Curran would have it, these studies revise the classic radical stance, which was informed
by a (neo-)Marxist pessimism towards the all-powerful role of the mass media as
transmitters of dominant ideology (and which also undergirds most theories of cultural
imperialism). But now that audiences are conceived as active producers of meaning and
produce a diversity of readings, that ‘oppressive’ role of the media has been considerably
diminished, to the point that there might be no dominant ideology at all. Curran claims
that ‘radical researchers’ now stress ‘audience autonomy’ and have implicitly concluded
‘that the media [have] only limited influence’ (1990:145–6). In this sense, Curran
concludes, previously radical critics have presumably moved towards a more moderate,
pluralist position, so that ‘the critical tradition in media research has imploded in
response to internal debate’ (1991:8). But this is an utterly mistaken conclusion. Curran
could only come to such a conclusion by adopting a narrow conceptualization of power,
as if evidence of diversity in readings of media texts could be equated with audience
freedom and independence from media power! In other words, while the semiotic notion
that meaning is constructed rather than given is now widely recognized throughout the
discipline, Curran retains the mechanical, distributional notion of power of the
transmission paradigm. This, however, is a rather truncated rendering of the radical scope
of indeterminacy of meaning, made possible by objectifying ‘communication’, ‘media’
and ‘audience’, lifting them out of their larger social and historical contexts.
If anything, Curran’s rendering of ‘the new audience research’ indicates that merely
replacing a transmission model for a semiotic model of communication is not enough.
The problem with communication models in general is that they describe the world in
terms of closed circuits of senders, messages and receivers. That the unidirectionality of