Page 37 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 28
popular audience; they don’t represent a positive intervention in the definition of the
‘pleasurable’ itself.
Ultimately, then, it is the impossibility of controlling television consumption and the
audience’s desire to watch television for pleasure which accounts for the contradictions in
television’s rhetoric and the heterogeneity of its address. And as long as popular desires
and preferences are merely seen as negatives which have to be overcome or as an alibi for
placing audiences in a paternalist framework, and as long as the pleasurable itself is not
taken seriously as something to be actively constructed, the agents of commercialism will
be, to use a Dutch expression, the laughing third.

POSTSCRIPT

In the mid-1990s, the landscape of Dutch television has changed completely. The process
of ‘trossification’ that set in twenty years ago has proven to be an irreversible trend,
marking the slow death of the nation’s revered and time-honoured ‘pillarized’
broadcasting system. Commercial Dutch language TV stations operating from outside the
national borders (i.e. Luxemburg) and beaming their entertainment packages down from
satellite now consistently stake the largest claim of the audience market, in the face of
which the old broadcasting organizations—with their residual idealism and obsolete
concepts of what watching television should be about—are left helpless and impotent.
While their protracted struggle for survival may continue for a while, it is certain that
their glory days will never return. This history is not wholly idiosyncratic: in fact, the
Dutch case only exemplifies a much more general demise. Across Europe, the last twenty
years have seen a gradual unravelling of the philosophy and practice of public service
broadcasting, arguably one of the most important vehicles of social modernism in the
twentieth century. By the end of the century, the agents of commercialism are, just as
everywhere else in the world, hegemonic: they are not only ‘the laughing third’, they are
also having, for the time being at least, the last laugh. They now have virtually complete
power in defining our televisual pleasures for us: hedonism is now the official ideology
of the television institution, intimately linked to the desire-producing logic of consumer
capitalism. This is one way we can understand television in the ‘postmodern age’.