Page 47 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 38
practice unavoidably takes place in a particular historical situation, and is therefore in
principle of a partial nature. As Hammersley and Atkinson have provocatively put it, ‘all
social research takes the form of participant observation: it involves participating in the
social world, in whatever role, and reflecting on the products of that participation’
(1983:16). The collection of data, either quantitative or qualitative in form, can never be
separated from its interpretation; it is only through practices of interpretive theorizing that
unruly social experiences and events related to media consumption become established as
meaningful ‘facts’ about audiences. Understanding ‘audience activity’ is thus caught up
in the discursive representation, not the transparent reflection, of diverse realities
pertaining to people’s engagements with media.
These considerations lead to another, more politicized conception of doing research. It
is not the search for (objective, scientific) Truth in which the researcher is engaged, but
the construction of interpretations, of certain ways of understanding the world, always
historically located, subjective and relative. It is the decisive importance of this
interpretive moment that I would like to highlight in exploring the possibilities of a
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critical audience studies.
In positivism, the necessarily worldly nature of interpretation is repressed, relegated to
the refuted realm of ‘bias’. It is assumed to follow rather automatically—i.e. without the
intervention of the subjective ‘whims’ of the researcher—from the controlled process of
‘empirical testing of theory’. An apparent innocence of interpretation is then achieved,
one that is seemingly grounded in ‘objective social reality’ itself. In fact, the very term
‘interpretation’ would seem to have definite negative connotations for positivists because
of its connection with ‘subjectivism’. And even within those social science approaches in
which the interpretive act of the researcher—i.e. the moment of data analysis that comes
after data collection—is taken more seriously, interpretation is more often than not
problematized as a technical rather than a political matter, defined in terms of careful
inference making rather than in terms of discursive constructions of reality.
It should be recognized, however, that because interpretations always inevitably
involve the construction of certain representations of reality (and not others), they can
never be ‘neutral’ and merely ‘descriptive’. After all, the ‘empirical’, captured in either
quantitative or qualitative form, does not yield self-evident meanings; it is only through
the interpretive framework constructed by the researcher that understandings of the
‘empirical’ come about. No ‘theory’ brought to bear on the ‘empirical’ can ever be
‘value-neutral’; it is always ‘interested’ in the strong sense of that word. Here, then, the
thoroughly political nature of any research practice manifests itself. What is at stake is a
politics of interpretation: ‘[T]o advance an interpretation is to insert it into a network of
power relations’ (Pratt 1986:52).
Of course, this also implies a shift in the position of the researcher. She or he is no
longer a bearer of the truth, but occupies a ‘partial’ position in two senses of the word.
On the one hand, she or he is no longer the neutral observer, but is someone whose job it
is to produce historically and culturally specific knowledges that are the result of equally
specific discursive encounters between researcher and informants, in which the
subjectivity of the researcher is not separated from the ‘object’ s/he is studying. The
interpretations that are produced in the process can never claim to be definitive: on the
contrary, they are necessarily incomplete (for they always involve simplification,
selection and exclusion) and temporary. ‘If neither history nor politics ever comes to an