Page 30 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The battle between television and its audiences 21
viewer must somehow be attractive to her/him. In this sense, it seems to be a particular
weakness in Ellis’s account that the position of ‘normal citizenship’ as he defines it tends
to be so contradictory. On the one hand, it is a position of entering the world, a position
of knowledge (of being informed), but on the other hand it is at the same time a position
of withdrawal from the world, a position of ‘sceptical non-involvement’. It seems hard to
imagine how and for whom such a contradictory position can be a position of pleasure,
and thus a positioning which can explain why people like watching television so much. It
will be more adequate, then, to state that the position of ‘normal citizen’ only exists in a
formal sense, abstracted from concrete encounters between viewers and televisual
discourse. Real viewers will never take up the position of ‘normal citizen’: if they find it
pleasurable to be informed, they will be involved somehow in the representations offered
(for both feelings of sympathy and anger are forms of involvement); if they really are
uninvolved they won’t be interested in being informed in the first place and probably
won’t watch at all, or won’t watch attentively. However, as Ellis’s theoretical framework
remains within the problematic of semiologically informed discourse theory, in which
viewer practices only appear from the point of view of textual effectivity, he doesn’t pay
attention to the readability or rather acceptability of televisual discourse from the point of
view of the viewers themselves.
But there is another, related problem which is relevant here. Ellis continually speaks
about broadcast TV in general and tends to give a generalized account of televisual
discourse which is consciously abstracted from the specificities of different programme
categories, modes of representation and types of (direct) address (indeed, his
preoccupation seems to be with what unifies televisual discourse into one ‘specific
signifying practice’) (see Heath and Skirrow 1977). As a result, it becomes difficult to
theorize the possibility that television constructs more than one position for the viewer.
For example, it is characteristic that Ellis’s elaboration of the formal and ideological
structuring of televisual discourse is mainly based on a more or less implicit reference to
news and current affairs programmes. That these parts of television programming are
indeed built on the discursive elements stressed by Ellis seems convincing enough: not
only is there the familiar, though ‘objective’ direct address of the newscaster, but there is
also the mosaic-like, ever-continuing compilation of relatively autonomous, short
segments about the world’s events—a structure based on an implicit appeal to a viewer’s
self-conception as someone who is interested in finding out ‘what’s happening in the
world’, from the position of a disengaged onlooker. The pleasure of this position has less
to do with the impotence of the ‘normal citizen’, as Ellis would have it, than with the
(imaginary) mastery of the world. In this case, then, the rhetoric of televisual discourse is
based on the call: ‘Watch, so that you will keep yourself posted!’ It is a rhetoric which
tends to be inscribed in a journalistic ideology, with its values of interest in public affairs,
topicality and mediated responsibility.
However, many other programme categories do not seem to make the same appeal. In
family quiz programmes, for instance, the direct address of the quiz master tends to be
used to create an atmosphere of cosy togetherness, by literally inviting the viewers to join
the club, as it were, thereby placing the viewer in a position of (imaginary) participation.
(Some quiz formulas even create the possibility for viewers to play their own game at
home.) Here, the rhetoric of televisual discourse is based upon the call: ‘Watch, so that