Page 16 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 7
people’s daily lives in the modern world. Indeed, the popular television audience has
been one of the key analytical sites in the expansion of cultural studies in the 1980s (for
the best overview, see Morley 1992). Mostly, the emphasis has been on how audiences
are active meaning producers of texts and technologies, and that meaning production is
dependent on the very intricate requirements of the micro-politics of everyday life (those
related to gender being one of them). Given the interest in exploring the micro-politics of
media consumption in everyday contexts, it is not surprising that there has been a great
investment in ethnographic methods of research. I do not need to elaborate on this
methodological dimension here—it is a theme I return to in several of the following
chapters.
These studies have produced a wealth of new knowledge about media audiences, so
much so that they are now sometimes called ‘the new audience research’—a label I
utterly dislike because it reinforces the misleading assumption that ‘audience’ is a self-
contained object of study ready-made for specialist empirical and theoretical analysis. In
light of this pigeonholing, there is a pressing need to position this kind of work more
squarely in a broader context of cultural and social theorizing. This is especially
necessary because, as they have become more established and more popular, the ‘new
audience research’ have also suffered from an image problem in cultural studies. Most
importantly, they have been accused of exaggerating the power of audiences in
constructing their own meanings, promoting a ‘cultural populism’ (McGuigan 1992)
where the audience is celebrated as cultural hero. And true, there is certainly a
redemptive bent in the inclination of this work to ‘save’ the audience from their mute
status as ‘cultural dopes’ (Brunsdon 1989). However, I contend that there is nothing
inevitably populist about the suggestion that audiences appropriate television in ways
suitable to their situated practices of living. John Fiske (1993) is right to stress that this
appropriative power of the audience is the power of the weak; it is the power not to
change or overturn imposed structures, but to negotiate the potentially oppressive effects
of those structures where they cannot be overthrown, where they have to be lived with.
The romanticization of this position, often inspired by a superficial adoption of Michel de
Certeau’s (1984) theory of everyday life as the site of subversive tactics, comes when the
term ‘resistance’ is adopted tout court, without qualification, to evoke people’s
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resourcefulness and creativity in ‘making do’ in less than advantageous circumstances.
But the recognition that audiences are active meaning makers does not have to lead to
their romanticization. Rather, it can be the starting point for a discussion about both the
reach and the limits of modern designs of ordered social life, about the cultural
contradictions of life in (post) modernity.
One of the problems here is precisely that the new audience studies have been seen as
promoting the idea of ‘the active audience’—the very notion that engenders its populist
credentials. The ‘active audience’ has been held up as a rejection of all that classical
critical theory—especially that of the Frankfurt School trajectory—has been committed
to criticize: the increasing commercialization and commodification of the cultural and
media industries. The emphasis on the ‘active audience’ has been taken to be a refutation
of the thesis, derived from this line of critical theory, that the masses are ‘victims’ of the
system, arguing instead that because audiences are ‘active’ in their pursuit of pleasure
from watching TV—making their own choices and meanings—popular television is a site
of cultural democracy rather than cultural oppression. But this rendering of the ‘active