Page 27 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 18
try to show that televisual discourse constructs a variety of types of involvement for
viewers; in the second part, I shall illustrate how this heterogeneity of positionings has
functioned socially and culturally in the history of Dutch television. However, much of
what I am to say will not be more than (theoretically informed) speculation, which will
need further refinement.

THE TELEVISION INSTITUTION AND HETEROGENEITY OF
ADDRESS

An institutional approach will serve as a starting point. I use the term ‘institutional’ in its
comprehensive meaning, as applied, for example, by Christian Metz in relation to
cinema: ‘The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry […] it is also the mental
machinery […] which spectators “accustomed to cinema” have internalised historically
and which has adapted them to the consumption of films’ (1975:18–19). Although this
formulation remains caught within the well-known semiological framework in so far as
the position of the spectator/audience is only dealt with as a discursive/institutional
effect, such a starting point has the advantage that it analyses cinema-as-such as a
distinctive system of representation, to which people are ‘drawn’ in peculiar ways. An
analogous argument may be applied to television. It enables us to move away from the
isolated text towards an analysis of the ways in which television-as-such, as a discursive
system, addresses and ‘interpellates’ people as potential viewers.
More precisely, an institutional approach opens up the possibility of reflecting on how
the contextual is already structurally implied in the textual. That is to say, the structures
within which televisual discourse is produced necessarily create an environment within
which a certain type of consumer activity is assumed and ‘propagated’. Thus, the
production of texts and the organization of a general context of consumption are closely
interlinked. Again, Metz has given an imaginative description of the problem concerned
(although I will not follow his psychoanalytic colouring of the picture here). Thus he
writes about the task set to the cinematic institution:

In a social system in which the spectator is not forced physically to go to
the cinema but in which it is still important that he should go so that the
money he pays for his admission makes it possible to shoot other films
and thus ensures the auto-reproduction of the institution—and it is the
specific characteristic of every true institution that it takes charge of the
mechanisms of its own perpetuation—there is no other solution than to set
up arrangements whose aim and effect is to give the spectator the
‘spontaneous’ desire to visit the cinema and pay for his ticket.
(Metz 1975:19)

Applied to television, then, the question can be formulated as follows: how does
television as an institution succeed in making people buy TV sets and in making the idea
of watching television seem attractive? Which strategies has it developed to persuade
people to become members of the TV audience? It might be useful here to bear in mind
that television has tended to be very successful in completing this ‘mission’, in making its