Page 35 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 26
discourse which had until then been absent and which could be experienced as something
new and different: a popular mode of address which is presented as independent from
ideological world views and fixed cultural identities. Instead, this address is constructed
around another type of involvement: one which is characterized by instant pleasure. It is
an address in which pleasure is equated with ‘entertainment’; in which fun is not only
presented as perfectly legitimate but also as being in opposition to ‘boring information’
or ‘education’.
Most explanations of ‘trossification’ usually refer to changes in the ideological make-
up of Dutch society during the late 1960s, in which the influence of solid ideological
subcultures as the basis for constructing identities and as guidelines for living was
waning and was being replaced by valueless pragmatism and superficial and senseless
consumerism. For instance, an often-heard ironical remark in this respect points to the
observed paradox that so many working-class people who vote for the Labour Party
become members not of the socialist broadcasting organization (which they supposedly
should have done had they been conscious of their social position), but of TROS, thereby
proving to be too weak to resist the seductions of commercialism! What is overlooked in
this explanation is the relative autonomy of watching television as a cultural practice, and
the distinctive micro-politics inscribed in it. What is at stake here is a struggle for
pleasure: or, more precisely, a struggle about the definition of watching television with
pleasure, and not about the definition of watching television in a socialist way (or as a
Roman Catholic, or as ‘normal citizen’, and so on). In other words, what matters from the
audience’s point of view is whether television discourse constructs positions of pleasure
in its representations, and not whether these positions are ideologically correct.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that audience preferences are only directed towards
programmes which fall into the category of ‘entertainment’. Indeed, the institutional
categorization of televisual discourse, which constructs an opposition between the serious
(=what really matters) and the popular (=easy pleasure), obscures the fact that, from the
point of view of audiences, ‘information’ can also be pleasurable. The problem is that in
televisual discourse ‘informative’ programmes, especially when they are about ‘serious’
politics and culture, are too often constructed as the important—and thus unpleasurable—
which viewers are supposed to watch because it is ‘good for them’. As a result of such an
address these parts of televisual discourse will often be rejected as ‘useless knowledge’
and as attempts to put something over on you.
Of course, it is not true that the traditional organizations don’t make use of the
pleasurable as a working principle for creating audience involvement. However, from
their point of view, pleasure in itself is not enough. It even seems to be something dirty to
them. They mostly seem to claim to give more than simple pleasure, thereby
marginalizing the pleasurable itself and making it instrumental to the overall ‘pedagogic’
framework of their programming. It is this ambivalent attitude towards pleasure and the
pleasurable which has given the explicitly commercially oriented organizations the space
to monopolize the work of constructing and defining the pleasurable in an active and
positive way. Ideologically, watching television with pleasure is the only thing they claim
to offer.
At the very least, then, this should lead us to another ironical remark. It seems that it is
the very logic of commercialism, because it is a wholly opportunistic logic without any
explicit missionary impulses, which, to quote Ian Connell, ‘led the way in making