Page 21 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 12
concern with specificity and particularity which has been the special contribution of the
new audience studies—and which I hope the essays in this book further expound. The
ethnographic impulse in this work should be understandable from here. Kirsten Drotner is
lucidly succinct when she says that ‘it is precisely the complexity of ethnography that
makes it popular: it seems better equipped to prise open for analysis the ambivalences of
modernity in its present phase of development’ (1994:343).
McGuigan has made the terse remark that ‘it is not much help for falsely modest
intellectuals merely to record how well ordinary people are doing against the
overwhelming odds’ (1992:249). This is true, but I suggest that what is at issue is not so
much to give ordinary audiences a pat on their backs for doing so well in ‘resisting’; what
is at stake, and what this book attempts to come to grips with, are the contradictions
encountered and negotiated in the ordinary practices of living in a postmodern world. The
cultural politics of these encounters and negotiations are themselves contradictory. On the
one hand, then, McRobbie is right to suggest that ‘[a]s the media extends its sphere of
influence, so also does it come under the critical surveillance and usage of its subjects’
(1994:23). But on the other hand, as I have argued above, active usage as such doesn’t
guarantee any critical purchase, let alone resistance or subversion. As semiotic skills
become more valued and exploited within the cultural logic of postmodern capitalism,
semiotics itself, with its once pathbreaking emphasis on the constitutive role of codes in
the operation of signs, ceases to be a radical theoretical toolkit. As Terry Eagleton wrily
observes: ‘It would be possible to see semiotics as the expression of an advanced
capitalist order’ rather than a critical instrument to expose it (1994:3). Here we have one
instance of what Drotner calls ‘the ambivalences of modernity’, or what I have referred to
as the heightening of cultural contradiction in postmodernity.
This brings me, however, to one last word of caution. This has to do with the danger
of overstating the relevance of audience studies within cultural studies. In this respect, I
want to argue for the need to be aware of the limits of using the trope of media audiences
for understanding contemporary culture. Berland has cogently pointed to the problems of
such an emphasis:

As the production of meaning is located in the activities and agencies of
audiences, the topography of consumption is increasingly identified as
(and thus expanded to stand in for) the map of the social. This reproduces
in theory what is occurring in practice: just as the spaces of reception
expand in proportion to the number of texts in circula-tion, so the time
accorded to reception expands in proportion to (and through appropriation
of) other modes of interaction.
(Berland 1992:42)

Indeed, what is occurring in practice worldwide, under the aegis of postmodern
capitalism, is the increasing colonization of the times and spaces of people’s everyday
lives for the purposes of media audiencehood. But Berland is right to suggest that this
process shouldn’t be mistaken, in theory, as encompassing our ‘whole way of life’, not
even in the postmodern world. Unless we succumb to the fallacy of conceiving
postmodernity as a one-dimensional, totalized reality, then, we must remain sensitive to
those spatio-temporal instances when/where the social exceeds the topography of