Page 153 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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BEYOND ORDER AND MEANING: THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
DECONSTRUCTED

I can begin to explain this by taking issue with the simplistic idea that existence of
diversity is evidence of freedom from power and domination. That is to say, variation—
e.g. in audience readings and pleasures—is not the result of autonomy and independence,
as the liberal pluralists would have it, but emerges out of the inescapably overdetermined
nature of any particular instance of subjective meaning production. The latter is traversed
by a multiplicity of power relations, the specifics of which cannot be known ahead of
time precisely because their articulations are always irreducibly context-bound. They are
not determined by fixed predispositions but take shape within the dynamic and
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contradictory goings-on of everyday life, of history. In this sense, the existence of
different readings is by no means evidence of ‘limited’ power. On the contrary, it only
points to the operation and intersection of a whole range of power relations at any one
time, going far beyond linear ‘influence’. This is one way in which the idea of
indeterminacy of meaning can be concretely qualified: indeterminacy is not grounded in
freedom from (external) determinations, but is the consequence of too many,
unpredictable determinations. Nor does a concern with specific pleasures that people get
out of particular media forms ‘totally displace a concern with power’, as Philip
Schlesinger claims (1991:149); on the contrary, theorizing pleasure enables us to develop
a much more complex understanding of how certain forms of power operate by paying
attention to the intricate intertwinings of pleasure and power—an especially important
issue today where ‘the pleasure principle’ has been incorporated in the very logic of
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consumer capitalism.
But I am running ahead of my argument. The point I want to make about the liberal
pluralist account of variation and difference is that it implicitly assumes a closed universe
of readings, making up a contained diversity of audience groupings with definite
identities, equivalent to the liberal pluralist conception of electoral politics where voters
are distributed over a fixed repertoire of parties. It is in this sense that liberal pluralist
discourse conjoins the marketing discourse of market segmentation (where consumers are
neatly divided up and categorized in a grid of self-contained demographic or
psychographic ‘segments’), which is not so surprising given that both discourses are two
sides of the coin of ‘democratic capitalism’. This conception of diversity presupposes that
‘society’ is a finite totality, a ‘unity in diversity’, or, more precisely, a unity of a diversity
of meanings and identities. This concept of social totality is conceived as ‘the structure
upon which its partial elements and processes are founded’, that is to say, as ‘an
underlying principle of intelligibility of the social order’ (Laclau 1991:90–1). In this
sense, difference and diversity refers to the structured partition of that unitary order—say,
the imaginary global village—into fixed parts, such as identifiable readings and audience
groupings (to be uncovered by ‘audience research’).
The idea of indeterminacy of meaning, however, enables us to put forward a much
more radical theorization of difference and diversity, one that does away with any notion
of an essence of social order, a bounded ‘society’ which grounds the empirical variations
expressed at the surface of social life. Not order, but chaos is the starting point. Variation
does not come about as a result of the division of a given social entity into a fixed range
of meaningful identities, but represents the infinite play of differences which makes all