Page 156 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 147
(1990:23). This is not dissimilar to Laclau’s idea of how ‘society’, or, for that matter,
‘audience’ (as a functional sub-totality within ‘society’), is created out of the attempt to
put an order to the (chaotic) infinitude of the social. In this sense, ‘society’ (or
‘audience’) is, in Hayles’s terms, a chaotic system, or a complex kind of order, an order
whose ultimate suture is impossible because it is a system born out of the precarious
structuration of chaos. If chaos is ultimately impossible to domesticate it is because it is,
as chaos theory would have it, ‘an inexhaustible ocean of information’ rather than a lack,
‘a void signifying absence’ (ibid.: 8). The more chaotic a system is, the more information
it contains, and the more complex the order established out of it. In other words, what
characterizes chaotic systems—and, by extension, social systems—is not so much that
they are poor in order, but that they are rich in information (ibid.: 6). This formulation
illuminates why the passive people meter is likely to be counterproductive (in creating
order in the audience measurement field): it is because it will elicit too much, not too
little information. Too much information will only aggravate the possibility of
constructing the (simulated) orderliness of the ‘audience’, therefore threatening to
foreground the return of the repressed: chaos.
Chaos theory is in fact one more example of the recognition that we live in a ‘true
realm of uncertainty’. In this sense, Hayles rightly brings the emergence of chaos theory
in the physical sciences into connection with the increasing importance of
poststructuralist and postmodern theory in the humanities and the social sciences, not
least in cultural studies. As Hayles puts it, ‘[different disciplines are drawn to similar
problems because the concerns underlying them are highly charged within a prevailing
cultural context’ (1990:xi). This context, we can add, is precisely the context of capitalist
postmodernity. It is in capitalist postmodernity that the presence of chaos constantly
lurking behind any institution of order has become a systemic force. Capitalist
postmodernity, in other words, is a truly chaotic system.
What, then, is the historical specificity of this system, and how can we theorize the
structural uncertainty engendered by and within it? It is illuminating here to reinvoke the
demise of the transmission paradigm of communication theory, as it finds its parallel, at
the level of the social, in the demise of the paradigm of the modern. The modern
paradigm was predicated, as I have said earlier, upon the assumption that modernity,
under the aegis of the expansion of capitalism, is a universal destination for the whole
world, so that history could be conceived as a linear development in which the modern is
designated as the most advanced end-point—literally the End of History—towards which
the less modern, those termed ‘traditional’ or ‘less-developed’, must and will of necessity
evolve. The postmodern paradigm, however, has shattered the certainty of this
universalizing evolutionary discourse. It challenges the assumptions of modern discourse
by questioning the binary counterposing of the modern/Western/ present/Sender/self and
pre-modern/non-Western/past/Receiver/other. The modern and the Western do not
necessarily coincide, and the present has many different, complex and contradictory
faces, projecting many different, uncertain futures. It is this overdetermined, convoluted
and contradictory heterogeneity of the present—characterized by a multiplicity of coeval,
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overlapping and conflicting cultural self/other relationships —which is foregrounded in
postmodernity.
It is important to be precise about the character of this heterogeneity of the present,
and it is here that the notion of chaos, as outlined above, and the force of the infinitude of