Page 41 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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the relation of text and subject is dealt with ‘as an a priori question to be deduced from a
theory of the ideal spectator “inscribed” in the text’ (Morley 1980a:162). By looking at
how one text could be decoded in different ways by different groups of social subjects,
Morley’s intention, in which he was successful, was to demonstrate that encounters
between texts and viewers are far more complex than the textualist theory would suggest;
they are overdetermined by the operation of a multiplicity of forces—certain historical
and social structures, but also other texts—that simultaneously act upon the subjects
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concerned. What The ‘Nationwide’ Audience explores is the notion that the moment of
decoding should be considered as a relatively autonomous process in which a constant
struggle over the meaning of the text is fought out. Textual meanings do not reside in the
texts themselves: a certain text can come to mean different things depending on the
interdiscursive context in which viewers interpret it.
The significance of Morley’s turn towards empirical research of the television
audience should be assessed against this critical background. It is first of all a procedure
that is aimed at opening up a space in which watching television can begin to be
understood as a complex cultural practice full of dialogical negotiations and
contestations, rather than as a singular occurrence whose meaning can be determined
once and for all in the abstract. Doing empirical research, then, is here used as a strategy
to break out of a hermetically closed theoreticism in which an absolute certainty about the
ideological effectivity of television is presumed. Thus, when Morley says that the relation
of an audience to television ‘remains an empirical question’, what he is basically aiming
at is to open up critical discourse on television audiences, and to sensitize it for the
possibility of struggle in the practices of television use and consumption—a struggle
whose outcome cannot be known in advance, for the simple reason that encounters
between television and audiences are always historically specific and context-bound.

ACADEMIC CONVERGENCE?

The ‘Nationwide’ Audience has generally been received as an innovative departure within
cultural studies, both theoretically and methodologically. If Screen theory can be
diagnosed as one instance in which critical discourse on television suffered from ‘the
problem of the disappearing audience’ (Fejes 1984), Morley’s project represents an
important acknowledgement within cultural studies that television viewing is a practice
that involves the active production of meanings by viewers. But the book has not only
made an impact in cultural studies circles. Curiously, but not surprisingly, it has also been
welcomed by adherents of the uses and gratifications approach, one of the most
influential ‘mainstream’ strands of audience research in mass communication
scholarship. These scholars see books such as Morley’s as an important step on the part
of ‘critical’ scholars in their direction, that is, as a basic acceptance of, and possible
contribution to, a refinement of their own basic axiomatic commitment to ‘the active
audience’. At the same time, some uses and gratifications researchers, for their part, have
now incorporated some of the insights developed within the ‘critical’ perspective into
their own paradigm. For example, they have adopted semiologically informed cultural
studies concepts such as ‘text’ and ‘reader’ in their work. This move indicates an
acknowledgement of the symbolic nature of negotiations between media texts and their