Page 46 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

On the politics of empirical audience research 37
is in itself interesting given the decades-long hegemony of positivism and the quantifying
attitude in audience research. Furthermore, the growing influence of alternative
‘paradigms’ such as ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism should certainly be
welcomed. The problem with many ‘mainstream’ claims about the usefulness of
qualitative methods, however, is that they are put forward in the name of ‘scientific
progress’, without questioning the epistemological distinction between Science and
commonsense which lies at the heart of positivism. The aim still seems to be the isolation
of a body of knowledge that can be recognized as ‘scientific’ (in its broadest meaning),
the orientation being one towards the advancement of an academic discipline, and,
concomitantly, the technical improvement of its instruments of analysis.
A cultural studies perspective on audience research cannot stop short at this level of
debate. For a critical cultural studies, it is not questions of methodology, nor ‘scientific
progress’ that prevail. On the contrary, we should relativize the academic commitment to
increasing knowledge per se, and resist the temptation of what Stuart Hall (1986b:56) has
called the ‘codification’ of cultural studies into a stable realm of established theories and
canonized methodologies. In this respect, the territorial conflict between ‘mainstream’
and ‘critical’ research, quantitative and qualitative methods, humanistic and social-
scientific disciplines, and so on, should perhaps not bother us too much at all in the first
place. As James Carey once remarked, ‘[p]erhaps all the talk about theory, method, and
other such things prevents us from raising, or permits us to avoid raising, deeper and
disquieting questions about the purposes of our scholarship’ (1983:5). And indeed: why
are we so interested in knowing about audiences in the first place? In empirical audience
research, especially, it is important to reflect upon the politics of the knowledge
produced. After all, scrutinizing media audiences is not an innocent practice. It does not
take place in a social and institutional vacuum. As we all know, historically, the hidden
agenda of audience research, even when it presents itself as pure and objective, has all
too often been its commercial or political usefulness. In other words, what we should
reflect upon is the political interventions we make when studying audiences—political
not only in the sense of some external societal goal, but, more importantly, in that we
cannot afford to ignore the political dimensions of the process and practice of the
production of knowledge itself. What does it mean to subject audiences to the
researcher’s gaze? How can we develop insights that do not reproduce the kind of
objectified knowledge served up by, say, market research or empiricist effects research?
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How is it possible to do audience research which is ‘on the side’ of the audience? These
are nagging political questions which cannot be smoothed out by the comforting canons
of epistemology, methodology and Science.
Of course it is not easy to pin down what such considerations would imply in concrete
terms. But it could at least be said that we should try to avoid a stance in which ‘the
audience’ is relegated to the status of exotic ‘other’—merely interesting in so far as ‘we’,
as researchers, can turn ‘them’ into ‘objects’ of study, and about whom ‘we’ have the
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privileged position of acquiring ‘scientific’ knowledge. To begin with, I think, critical
audience studies should not strive and pretend to tell ‘the truth’ about ‘the audience’. Its
ambitions should be much more modest. As Grossberg has suggested, ‘the goal of
[critical research] is to offer not a polished representation of the truth, but simply a little
help in our efforts to better understand the world’ (1987:89). This modesty has less to do
with some sort of false humility than with the basic acknowledgement that every research