Page 163 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 154
9 Rosengren expresses this view in very clearcut terms, where he reduces the existence of
disagreements between ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’ researchers to ‘psychological reasons’
(1983:191).
10 I have borrowed this formulation from Virginia Nightingale (1986:21–2). Nightingale
remarks that audience research has generally been ‘on the side’ of those with vested interests
in influencing the organization of the mass-media in society, and that it is important to
develop a research perspective that is ‘on the side’ of the audience. However, it is far from
simple to work out exactly what such a perspective would mean. The notion of the ‘active
audience’, for example, often put forward by uses and gratifications researchers not just as
an object of empirical investigation but also as on article of faith, as an axiom to mark the
distinctive identity of the ‘paradigm’, is not in itself a guarantee of a stance ‘on the side of
the audience’. In fact, the whole passive/active dichotomy in accounts of audiences has now
become so ideologized that it all too often serves as a mystification of the real commitments
behind the research at stake.
11 Reflections on the predicaments and politics of research on and with living historical subjects
have already played an important role in, for example, feminist studies and anthropology,
particularly ethnography. At least two problems are highlighted in these reflections. First,
there is the rather awkward but seldom discussed concrete relation between researcher and
researched as concrete subjects occupying differential social positions, more and less
invested with power; second, there is the problem of the discursive form in which the
cultures of ‘others’ can be represented in non-objectifying (or, better, less objectifying)
ways. See, e.g., Angela McRobbie (1982); James Clifford (1983); James Clifford and
George Marcus (1986); Lila Abu-Lughold (1991). Researchers of media audiences have, as
far as I know, generally been silent about these issues. However, for a thought-provoking
engagement with the problem, see Valerie Walkerdine (1986). See also chapter 4.
12 See, for a more general overview of the interpretive or hermeneutic turn in the social
sciences, Paul Rabinow and William M.Sullivan (1979). A more radical, Foucauldian
conception of what they call ‘interpretive analytics’ is developed by Hubert Dreyfuss and
Paul Rabinow (1982).
13 A concise and useful criticism of empiricist mass communication research is offered by
Robert C.Allen (1985: chapter 2).
14 Morley’s main objection to the uses and gratifications approach concerns ‘its psychologistic
problematic and its emphasis on individual differences of interpretation’ (1983:117).
Elsewhere Morley even more emphatically expresses his distance from the uses and
gratifications approach: ‘Any superficial resemblance between this study of television
audience and the “uses and gratifications” perspective in media research is misleading’
(ibid.).
15 Note that in positivist epistemology intersubjectivity is considered as one of the main criteria
for scientific ‘objectivity’. One of the myths by which the institution of Science establishes
itself is that scientific discourse is a process without a subject. Hence the normative rule that
the concrete historical subject of scientific practice, the researcher, should be
interchangeable with any other so as to erase all marks of idiosyncratic subjectivity.
16 All sorts of cautious qualifications as to the generalizability of such ‘findings’, so routinely
put forward in research reports so that the validity of the given typifications are said to be
limited to certain demographic or subcultural categories (e.g. the urban working class), do
not in principle affect this reification of experiential structures.
17 An image of the television audience as consisting of harmonious collectivities is suggested
by Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, when they describe the process of decoding a television
programme as an activity of ‘mutual aid’ (1985). While this idea is useful in that it highlights
the social nature of processes of decoding, it represses the possibility of tension, conflict and
antagonism between different decodings within the same group.