Page 154 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 145
identities and all meanings precarious and unstable. Any relative fixation of those
identities and meanings is not the expression of a structural predetermination within a
social order. On the contrary, it is the (temporary and provisional) outcome of, in
Laclau’s (1991) terms, the attempt to limit the infinite play of differences in the site of
the social, to domesticate the potential infinitude of semiosis corroborated by the
principle of indeterminacy of meaning, to embrace it within the finitude of an order, a
social totality which can be called a ‘society’. From this perspective, this ordered social
totality is no longer a pregiven structure which establishes the limits within which diverse
meanings and identities are constituted. Rather, since the social is the site of potentially
infinite semiosis, it always exceeds the limits of any attempt to constitute ‘society’, to
demarcate its boundaries. This is why, as we all know, a ‘society’ can accomplish only a
partial closure, a partial fixing of meanings and identities, a partial imposition of order in
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the face of chaos. That is, any containment of variation and difference within a limited
universe of diversity is always-already the product of a determinate ordering by a
structuring, hegemonizing power, not, as the functionalist discourse of liberal pluralism
would have it, evidence of a lack of order, absence of power. In this sense, the question to
ask about the complex relation between media and audiences is not why there isn’t more
homogeneity, but why there isn’t more heterogeneity!
To illuminate how this altered notion of difference effectively subverts the closure of
liberal pluralist discourse, let me briefly return to the argument I have put forward in
Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991), where I have discussed the history of the
corporate practice of ‘audience measurement’, or, more popularly, ‘ratings’. Over the
years, there has been a progressive sophistication of measurement methods and
technologies, aimed at the ever more detailed and accurate determination of size and
demographic composition of the audience at any particular moment, for any particular
programme or channel. As I have already noted in chapter 3, the latest device currently
being tested in this respect is the so-called ‘passive people meter’, a kind of computerized
eye roaming people’s living rooms in order to catch their gaze whenever it is directed to
the TV screen. The industry’s hope is that this technology will deliver ratings statistics
that can tell the television companies exactly who is watching what at any split second of
the day. However, this very search for the perfect measurement method, which I have
characterized as desperate, is based on the implicit assumption that there is such a thing
as an ‘audience’ as a finite totality, made up of subdivisions or segments whose identities
can be synchronically and diachronically ‘fixed’. I have suggested that this assumption is
a fiction, but a necessary fiction for a television industry which increasingly experiences
the audience as volatile and fickle. A hegemonic, empowering fiction which is positively
constructed as true by the creation of simulations of order in the ranks of the audience in
the form of ratings statistics and other market research profiles.
The paradox of the passive people meter, however, is that it is propelled by a desire to
produce a fully precise representation, a completely accurate map of the social world of
actual audience practices. This progressive rapprochement of representational strategies
and the social, I suggest, is bound ultimately to reveal chaos rather than order. That is to
say, it will turn out that the universe of television-viewing practices can only be
represented as an ordered totality by imposing (discursive) closure on it, because these
infinite, contradictory, dispersed and dynamic everyday practices will always be in
excess of any constructed totality, no matter how ‘accurate’. In attempting to determine