Page 159 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 150
the weak that has characterized most of nineteenth- and especially
twentieth-century history.
(Wallerstein 1991:217)

In other words, the negotiations and resistances of the subordinate, bounded as they are
within the boundaries of the system, unsettle (but do not destroy) those boundaries.
It is convenient at this point to return to John Fiske and to recontextualize his
celebration of the bottom-up power that television audiences evince in the construction of
their own meanings and pleasures. To be fair to Fiske, his writings are much more
complex than the simplified reiterations would have us believe. In no way is he simply an
apologist for liberal pluralism. On the contrary, he derives his relative optimism from his
analysis of (mainly US) commercial television as ‘the prime site where the dominant
have to recognize the insecurity of their power, and where they have to encourage
cultural difference with all the threat to their own position that this implies’ (1987a:326).
The problem is that Fiske tends to overestimate (and romanticize) precisely that threat.
This threat simply makes the task of the television industries to retain their dominance
more complicated and expensive (but not impossible), just as the dispersion and
proliferation of viewing practices makes the task of audience measurement more
complicated and expensive—and therefore, it should be said, more wasteful, more nasty,
more aggressive. Furthermore, it should be noted that the encouragement of cultural
difference is, as I have argued above, part and parcel of the chaotic system of capitalist
postmodernity itself. In this sense, it would be mistaken to see the acting out of difference
unambiguously as an act of resistance; what needs to be emphasized, rather, is that the
desire to be different can be simultaneously complicit with and defiant against the
institutionalization of excess of desire in capitalist postmodernity. At most, the resistive
element in popular practices is, as Michel de Certeau (1984) has suggested in The
Practice of Everyday Life, a matter of ‘escaping without leaving’.
Meaghan Morris has criticized the fact that the idea of what she terms ‘excess of
process over structure’ has led to ‘a cultural studies that celebrates “resistance” as a
programmed feature of capitalist culture’, and to ‘a theoretical myth of the Evasive
Everyday’ (1992:464–5). Indeed, such a celebration can easily take place when the acts
of ‘evasive everydayness’ are taken at face value, in the context, say, of closed circuits of
communication (where departure from ‘preferred readings’ can be straightforwardly read
as ‘evasion’, this in turn heroized as ‘resistance’). However, if we place these acts in the
more global and historical context of the chaotic system of capitalist postmodernity, then
their ‘political’ status becomes much more ambivalent. Then we have to take into account
their significance in a system which already incorporates a celebration of limitless flux as
a mechanism within its ordering principle. What is built-in in the culture of capitalist
postmodernity is not ‘resistance’, but uncertainty, ambiguity, the chaos that emanates
from the institutionalization of infinite semiosis.
This, then, is how the true realm of uncertainty which characterizes the ‘global village’
should be specified—if we still want to retain that metaphor. It should be clear, finally,
that the unstable multiplicity of this ‘essentially deconstructive world’ (Marcus 1992:327)
no longer makes it possible, as modern discourse would have it, to tell a single, total story
about the world ‘today’. As Stratton has put it, in the postmodern episteme ‘there is no
fixed site of truth, no absolute presence; there are just multiple representations, an infinite