Page 44 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

On the politics of empirical audience research 35
larger network of social relationships in which it occurs. The aim of cultural studies is not
a matter of dissecting ‘audience activity’ in ever more refined variables and categories so
that we can ultimately have a complete and generalizable formal ‘map’ of all dimensions
of ‘audience activity’ (which seems to be the drive behind the uses and gratifications
project; e.g. Levy and Windahl 1984, 1986). Rather, the aim, as I see it, is to arrive at a
more historicized and contextualized insight into the ways in which ‘audience activity’ is
articulated within and by a complex set of social, political, economic and cultural forces.
In other words, what is at stake is not the understanding of ‘audience activity’ as such as
an isolated and isolatable object of research, but the embeddedness of ‘audience activity’
in a complex network of ongoing cultural practices and relationships.
As a result, an audience researcher working within a cultural studies sensibility cannot
restrict herself or himself to ‘just’ studying audiences and their activities (and, for that
matter, relating those activities with other variables such as gratifications sought or
obtained, dependencies, effects, and so on). She or he will also engage herself/himself
with the structural and cultural processes through which the audiences she or he is
studying are constituted and being constituted. Thus, one essential theoretical point of the
cultural studies approach of the television audience is its foregrounding of the notion that
the dynamics of watching television, no matter how heterogeneous and seemingly free,
are always related to the operations of forms of social power. It is in this light that we
should see Morley’s decision to do research on viewers’ decodings: it was first of all
motivated by an interest in what he in the quote at the beginning of this chapter calls ‘the
ideological operations of television’.
It is important then to emphasize that the reference to ‘the active audience’ does not
occupy the same theoretical status in the two approaches. From a cultural studies point of
view, evidence that audiences are ‘active’ cannot simply be equated with the rather
triumphant, liberal pluralist conclusion, often displayed by gratificationists, that media
consumers are ‘free’ or even ‘powerful’—a conclusion which allegedly undercuts the
idea of ‘media hegemony’. The question for cultural studies is not simply one of ‘where
the power lies in media systems’ (Blumler et al. 1985:260)—i.e. with the audience or
with the media producers—but rather how relations of power are organized within the
heterogeneous practices of media use and consumption. In other words, rather than
constructing an opposition between ‘the’ media and ‘the’ audience, as if these were
separate ontological entities, and, along with it, the application of a distributional theory
of power—i.e. power conceived as a ‘thing’ that can be attributed to either side of the
opposing entities—cultural studies is interested in understanding media consumption as a
site of cultural struggle, in which a variety of forms of power are exercised, with different
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sorts of effects. Thus if, as Morley’s study has shown, viewers decode a text in different
ways and sometimes even give oppositional meanings to it, this should be understood not
as an example of ‘audience freedom’, but as a moment in that cultural struggle, an
ongoing struggle over meaning and pleasure which is central to the fabric(ation) of
everyday life.
I hope to have made it clear by now that in evaluating the possibility or even
desirability of a paradigmatic convergence, it is important to look at how ‘audience
activity’ is theorized or interpreted, and how research ‘findings’ are placed in a wider
theoretical framework. So, if one type of ‘audience activity’ which has received much
attention in both approaches has been the ‘interpretive strategies’ used by audiences to