Page 40 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

On the politics of empirical audience research 31
some of the implications of this perspective on doing ‘critical’ research for an evaluation
of the current developments in audience studies as I indicated above.
More concretely, what I will discuss and try to elaborate in this chapter is what I take
as the political and theoretical specificity of the cultural studies approach as a ‘critical’
perspective, from which David Morley, coming from the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, has developed his work (see Hall et al. 1980; Streeter
1984; Fiske 1987b). I will set this perspective on audience studies against some
developments in and around the uses and gratifications approach, where an interest in
‘ethnographic’ methods has been growing recently. In doing this I will not be able to
discuss the wide range of concrete studies that have been made in this area. Rather I will
restrict myself, somewhat schematically and all too briefly, to the more programmatic
statements and proposals pertaining to the identity and the future development of the
field, and evaluate them in the light of what I see as important for a critical cultural
studies approach. Furthermore, it is not my intention to construct an absolute antagonism
between the two approaches. Rather, I would like to highlight some of the differences in
preoccupation and perspective, in order to specify how ethnographic or ethnographically
oriented studies of media audiences can contribute to a ‘critical’ approach in the sense I
have outlined. Before doing this, I will first give a short sketch of the intellectual arena in
which Morley intervened.

THE PROBLEM OF THE DISAPPEARING AUDIENCE

The ‘Nationwide’ Audience appeared at a time when critical discourse about film and
television in Britain was heavily preoccupied with what Morley (1980a:161), following
Steve Neale, calls an ‘abstract text/subject relationship’, formulated within a generally
(post) structuralist and psycho-analytic theoretical framework. In this discourse, primarily
developed in the journal Screen, film and television spectatorship is almost exclusively
theorized from the perspective of the ‘productivity of the text’. As a consequence, the
role of the viewer was conceived in purely formalist terms: as a position inscribed in the
text. Here, the subject-in-the-text tends to collapse with ‘real’ social subjects. In this
model, there is no space for a dialogical relationship between texts and social subjects.
Texts are assumed to be the only source of meaning; they construct subject positions
which viewers are bound to take up if they are to make sense of the text. In other words,
the reading of texts is conceived in ‘Screen theory’ as entirely dictated by textual
structures.
It is this model’s textual determinism that fuelled Morley’s dissatisfaction.
Theoretically, it implied an ahistorical, asocial and generalist conception of film and TV
spectatorship. Methodologically, the analysis of textual structures alone was considered
to be sufficient to comprehend how viewers are implicated in the texts they encounter.
Politically, this model left no room for manoeuvre for television viewers. They are
implicitly conceived as ‘prisoners’ of the text. It was against this background that Morley
decided to undertake an empirical investigation of how groups of viewers with different
social positions read or interpret one particular text: an episode of the British TV
magazine programme Nationwide. One of the most important motivations of Morley’s
intervention, then, was to overcome the textualism of Screen theory’s discourse, in which