Page 151 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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such circuits is complicated by feedback loops, processes of exchange and interaction, or
intermediary moments of meaning construction doesn’t make the circuit less closed: there
is no ‘outside’ to the communication. As a result, it becomes impossible to think about
the relation of power and meaning in more multidimensional terms, to recognize the
operation of multiple forms of power at different points in the system of social networks
in which both ‘senders’ (e.g. media) and ‘receivers’ (e.g. audiences) are complexly
located and produce meanings. Instead, power becomes a fixed entity which simply
changes hands from senders to receivers and vice versa. And since, again according to
Curran, critical scholars now acknowledge that audiences are not passive absorbers of
‘dominant ideology’ transmitted by the media but actively produce their own meanings
with the help of the predispositions they bring to texts, a paradigmatic consensus can now
be declared which favours the liberal pluralist idea that ‘[t]here are no dominant
discourses, merely a semiotic democracy of pluralist voices’ (1990:151). Here again is
another invocation of a unified and integrated global village, now as a space in which
power is so evenly diffused that everybody is happily living ever after in a harmonious
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plurality of juxtaposed meanings and identities.
This is what I mean by the closure imposed by Curran’s misappropriation of ‘the new
audience research’ and invention of a ‘new revisionism’. It is a closure which expels any
sense of and for uncertainty, with no place for unresolved ambiguity and contradiction. It
is also a closure which revels in a confidence of having repudiated any notion of cultural
imperialism, any idea of unequal power relationships between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in
the global village. And to be sure, certain tendencies within critical work on audiences
have facilitated this misappropriation, precisely for their lack of clarity about the
theoretical status of this work. Thus, John Fiske’s (in)famous celebration of the semiotic
power of audiences to create their own meanings and pleasures has been widely
interpreted as a confirmation of the liberal pluralist paradise (e.g. Curran 1990:140).
What is more, Fiske’s excessive romanticism and populism has been severely criticized
within cultural studies for its connivance in free market ideologies of consumer
sovereignity (e.g. Morris 1988a). What is important to note here, however, is not so much
the apologetic political consequences of Fiske’s position, but the theoretical
underpinnings of his discourse, particularly his theory of the relationship of power and
meaning.
For example, in Television Culture he describes the relation between television and its
audiences as an antagonism between ‘top-down power’ opposed by ‘bottom-up power’
(Fiske 1987a:314). The latter is predominantly a semiotic power operating within a more
or less autonomous cultural economy, to be differentiated from the economic power held
by the ‘top’, for example the executives of the television industries, operating within the
financial economy. Fiske is right in wanting to differentiate between these two forms of
power—indeed, I would argue that it is precisely by making this kind of theoretical
differentiation that we might begin to overcome the simplistic, one-dimensional concepts
of power inherent in the transmission paradigm (and reproduced by Curran). The
problem, however, is that Fiske tends to exaggerate the strength of the semiotic
democracy by seeing the struggle as a ‘two-way force’ in which the partners are
implicitly considered separate but equal. Again, this rosy conclusion could only be
arrived at by isolating the communication between television and its audiences from the
broader contexts in which both are shaped. Fiske’s radical inclination is thus contained by