Page 43 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 34
articulated with a more general theory of social agency and power. Also, I would suggest
that the idea that texts can generate multiple meanings because readers/viewers can
‘negotiate’ textual meanings is not in itself a sufficient condition for the declared
convergence. For example, Tamar Liebes has suggested that ‘the focus of the
convergence is on the idea that the interaction between messages and receivers takes on
the form of negotiation, and is not predetermined’ (1986:1). However, as I will try to
show below, what makes all the difference is the way in which ‘negotiation’ is conceived.
After all, ‘not predetermined’ does not mean ‘undetermined’; on the contrary.
While uses and gratifications researchers generally operate within a liberal pluralist
conception of society where individuals are seen as ideally free, that is, unhindered by
external powers, in cultural studies, following Marxist/ (post) structuralist assumptions,
people are conceived as always-already implicated in, and necessarily constrained by, the
web of relationships and structures which constitute them as social subjects. This doesn’t
mean that they are stripped of agency like preprogrammed automatons, but that that
agency itself, or the ‘negotiations’ subjects undertake in constructing their lives, is
overdetermined (i.e. neither predetermined nor undetermined) by the concrete conditions
of existence they find themselves in. Following Hall (1986b:46), ‘determinacy’ here is
understood in terms of the setting of limits, the establishment of parameters, the defining
of the space of operations, rather than in terms of the absolute predictability of particular
outcomes. This is what Hall (1986c) calls a ‘Marxism without guarantees’, a non-
determinist theory of determination, or, to put it simply, a recognition of the virtual
truism that ‘people make their own history but under conditions not of their own
making’.
How complex structural and conjunctural determinations of viewership and
audiencehood should be conceived remains therefore an important point of divergence
between ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’ studies. Finally, it is also noteworthy to point out
that, while uses and gratifications researchers now seem to be ‘rediscovering the text’,
researchers working within a cultural studies perspective seem to be moving away from
the text. This is very clear in Morley’s second book, Family Television (1986), on which I
will comment later. In fact, it becomes more and more difficult to delineate what ‘the
television text’ is in a media-saturated world.
In other words, in evaluating whether we can really speak of a paradigmatic
convergence, it is not enough to establish superficially similar research questions, nor to
take at face value a shared acknowledgement of the usefulness of certain methods of
inquiry. Of course, such commonalities are interesting enough and it would be nonsense
to categorically discard them. I do think it is important to avoid a dogmatism or
antagonism-for-the-sake-of-it, and to try to learn from others wherever that is possible.
But at the same time we should not lose sight of the fact that any call for a convergence
itself is not an innocent gesture. It tends to be done from a certain point of view, and
therefore necessarily involves a biased process in which certain issues and themes are
highlighted and others suppressed. And it is my contention that an all too hasty
declaration of convergence could lead to neglecting some of the most important
distinctive features of cultural studies as a critical intellectual enterprise.
A difference in conceptualizing the object of study is a first issue that needs to be
discussed here. As I have already suggested, in a cultural studies perspective ‘audience
activity’ cannot and should not be studied nominalistically, decontextualized from the