Page 39 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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would like to reflect upon its general implications for our understanding of television
audiences. What kind of knowledge does it produce? What can this manner of doing
empirical research on audiences mean? In short, what are the politics of audience
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‘ethnography’?
In exploring these questions, I want to clarify some of the issues that are at stake in
developing a critical perspective in empirical audience studies. The term ‘critical’ as I
would like to use it here refers first of all to a certain intellectual-political orientation
towards academic practice: whatever its subject matter or methodology, essential to doing
‘critical’ research would be the adoption of a self-reflective perspective, one that is, first,
conscious of the social and discursive nature of any research practice, and, second, takes
seriously the Foucauldian reminder that the production of knowledge is always bound up
in a network of power relations (Foucault 1980). By characterizing ‘critical’ research in
this way, that is, as an orientation rather than as a fixed ‘paradigm’, I aim to relativize the
more rigid ways in which ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’ research have often been opposed to
one another.
Formally speaking, positions can only be ‘critical’ or ‘mainstream’ in relation to other
positions within a larger discursive field. The two terms thus do not primarily signify
fixed contents of thought, but their status within a whole, often dispersed, field of
statements, claims and knowledges, what Foucault calls a ‘regime of truth’. The relations
of force in that field can change over time: what was once ‘critical’ (or marginal) can
become part of the ‘mainstream’; what was once ‘mainstream’ (or dominant) can lose its
power and be pushed aside to a marginal(ized) position. Furthermore, as Larry Grossberg
(1987) has usefully remarked, the term ‘critical’ can bear uneasy arrogant connotations:
after all, is there any scholar whose work is not ‘critical’ in some sense?
This does not mean, of course, that the distinction is totally devoid of any substantive
bearings. In media studies, for instance, the ‘critical’ tradition, whose beginnings can be
located in the work of the Frankfurt School, has generally derived its philosophical and
political inspiration from European schools of thought such as Marxism and (post)
structuralism. In terms of research problematics, ‘critical’ media researchers have mainly
been concerned with the analysis of the ideological and/or economic role of the media in
capitalist and patriarchal society. Furthermore, the epistemological underpinnings of this
kind of work are generally characterized by a strident anti-positivist and anti-empiricist
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mentality.
This distrust of positivist empiricism on the part of ‘critical’ theorists, however, does
not necessarily imply an inherent incompatibility between ‘critical’ and empirical
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research, as is often contended by ‘mainstream’ scholars. Indeed, if doing ‘critical’
research is more a matter of intellectual-political orientation than of academic paradigm
building, then no fixed, universal yardstick, theoretical or methodological, for what
constitutes ‘critical’ knowledge is possible. On the contrary, in my view what it means to
be critical needs to be assessed and constantly reassessed in every concrete conjuncture,
with respect to the concrete issues and directions that are at stake in any concrete research
field. In other words, I am proposing an open and contextual definition of ‘critical’
research, one that does not allow itself to rest easily on pre-existent epistemological
foundations but, on the contrary, is reassessed continuously according to the ways in
which it contributes to our understanding of the world. In the following, I hope to clarify