Page 152 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 143
his holding on to the familiar topography of communication: the Sender’s sphere
(production and distribution) is opposed by the Receiver’s sphere (reception and
consumption). Again, a closed circuit, despite the struggle taking place within it. Again,
theoretical closure, systemic certainty. In this sense, Curran’s liberal pluralism and
Fiske’s more radical pluralism tend to collude. In emphasizing this apparent collusion
Curran has rushed towards the conclusion that the ‘new revisionism’ has led critical
theorists to abandon their ‘radical’ concerns. This, however, is a very uninformed
miscomprehension of the current state of affairs in critical theorizing.
In the last two decades or so, a transformation in the theorization of power has taken
place in critical theory—largely through post-Althusserian elaborations of Gramsci’s
notion of hegemony and Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge—not because it no
longer believes in domination but because, in the words of Mark Poster, ‘it is faced with
the formidable task of unveiling structures of domination when no one is dominating,
nothing is being dominated and no ground exists for a principle of liberation from
domination’ (1988:6). This, of course, is another way of evoking the contradictory
condition of ‘free-yet-bounded-ness’ which I noted earlier as characteristic of living in
the global village. In this context, John Tomlinson’s suggestion that the notion of cultural
imperialism should be replaced by the much less determinist (but no less determining)
one of ‘globalization’ is particularly relevant:

[T]he idea of imperialism contains, at least, the notion of a purposeful
project: the intended spread of a social system from one centre of power
across the globe. The idea of ‘globalisation’ suggests interconnection and
interdependency of all global areas which happens in a far less purposeful
way. It happens as the result of economic and cultural practices which do
not, of themselves, aim at global integration, but which nonetheless
produce it. More importantly, the effects of globalisation are to weaken
the cultural coherence of all individual nation-states, including the
economically powerful ones—the ‘imperialist powers’ of a previous era.
(Tomlinson 1991:175)

In other words, critical theory has changed because the structure of the capitalist order
has changed. What it has to come to terms with is not the certainty of (and wholesale
opposition to) the spread of a culturally coherent capitalist modernity, but the uncertainty
brought about by the disturbing incoherence of a globalized capitalist postmodernity, and
the mixture of resistance and complicity occurring within it. The critical import of
audience ethnography, placed within the larger theoretical project of critical cultural
studies, should be seen in this context: it is to document how the bottom-top, micro-
powers of audience activity are both complicit with and resistive to the dominant, macro-
forces within capitalist postmodernity. It has nothing to do with the complacency of
Curran’s liberal pluralism; on the contrary, it radicalizes the ‘radical concerns’ of critical
theorizing. To elaborate on this point, we need to do away with any notion of the closed
circuit of communication, and to embrace fully the the primacy of indeterminacy of
meaning which, I would argue, is essential for understanding how and why capitalist
postmodernity is a ‘true realm of uncertainty’.