Page 155 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 146
the identity of this universe we will, as Laclau puts it, ‘find nothing else but the
kaleidoscopic movement of differences’ (1991:92), which will probably only result in
further, more insistent and more desperate attempts to map it.
In concrete, historically specific terms, the chaos I am referring to relates to the
enormous proliferation of possible television-viewing practices in the last few decades,
possibilities which have been created by the expansion of the television industries in
capitalist modernity in the first place. From transnational 24-hour satellite channels (e.g.
CNN and MTV) to a myriad of local or regional cable channels dishing up unmanageable
volumes of specialized programming, from video recorders and remote control devices
(which have encouraged ‘zipping’ and ‘zapping’) to TVs watched in ‘uncommon’ places
(laundries, campsites, airports, and so on), and, above all, the very ubiquitousness of
television which makes it bleed into every corner of day-to-day social life—all this can
surely only make for an endless, unruly and uncontrollable play of differences in social
practices related to television viewing: continuous social differentiation bordering on
chaos. It is this chaos which the discourse of liberal pluralism cannot account for, and
which the functionalist rationality of audience measurement technology is designed to
suppress and tame in the form of a statistical order. But it is precisely this chaos which I
suggest we need to take into consideration in understanding the logic of power relations
in capitalist postmodernity. Capitalist post-modernity may have constructed a spatially
integrated, interconnected global village, but at the same time it encourages social
disintegration.

CAPITALIST POSTMODERNITY AS A CHAOTIC SYSTEM

But it is important to properly theorize ‘chaos’. Often chaos is associated with loss of
control, lack of order. Such a conception of chaos—or, in our context, the infinitude of
the social, infinite semiosis—leads to a romanticized view of the practices of everyday
life (such as audience practices) as always evading the structures—institutional,
ideological—imposed upon them, that is to say, as the site of resistance per se. This, of
course, is the position taken up by Fiske. But such a position is informed by a negative
theory of chaos: chaos as lack.
It is instructive here to draw comparisons with the emergence of chaos theory in the
physical sciences. Katherine Hayles, author of Chaos Bound (1990), has given a, for our
purposes, rather fortuitous example of how chaos can be acknowledged as a positive
force in our experience as media consumers:

Every time we keep a TV or radio going in the background, even though
we are not really listening to it, we are acting out a behavior that helps to
reinforce and deepen the attitudes that underwrite a positive view of
chaos.
(Hayles 1990:7)

This positive view of chaos implies the transvaluation of chaos as having primacy over
order. However, Hayles continues, chaos theory does not oppose chaos to order; rather, it
sees chaos as ‘the engine that drives a system toward a more complex kind of order’