Page 48 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

On the politics of empirical audience research 39
end, then theory (as well as research) is never completed and our accounts can never be
closed or totalized’ (Grossberg 1987:89). On the other hand, and even more important,
the position of the researcher is also more than that of the professional scholar: beyond
being a capable interpreter she or he is also inherently a political and moral subject. As an
intellectual s/he is responsible not only to the Academy, but to the social world s/he lives
in as well, consciously or unconsciously so. It is at the interface of ‘ethics’ and
‘scholarship’ that the researcher’s interpretations take on their distinctive political edge
(cf. Rabinow 1986).
Of course, all this entails a different status for empirical research. Material obtained by
ethnographic fieldwork or depth-interviews with audience members cannot simply be
treated as direct slices of reality, as in naturalist conceptions of ethnography. Viewers’
statements about their relation to television cannot be regarded as self-evident facts. Nor
are they immediate, transparent reflections of those viewers’ ‘lived realities’ that can
speak for themselves. What is of critical importance, therefore, is the way in which those
statements are made sense of, that is, interpreted. Here lies the ultimate political
responsibility of the researcher. The comfortable assumption that it is the reliability and
accuracy of the methodologies being used that will ascertain the validity of the outcomes
of research, thereby reducing the researcher’s responsibility to a technical matter, is
rejected. In short, to return to Morley’s opening statement, audience research is
undertaken because the relation between television and viewers is an empirical question.
But the empirical is not the privileged domain where the answers should be sought.
Answers—partial ones, to be sure, that is, both provisional and committed—are to be
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constructed, in the form of interpretations.

TOWARDS INTERPRETIVE ETHNOGRAPHY

I would now like to return to Morley’s work, and evaluate its place in the research field in
the light of my reflections above. To be sure, Morley himself situates his work firmly
within the academic context. And parallel to the recent calls for convergence and cross-
fertilization of diverse perspectives, Morley seems to have dropped his original
antagonistic posture. For example, while in The ‘Nationwide’ Audience he emphasizes
that ‘we need to break fundamentally with the “uses and gratifications” approach’
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(1980a: 14), in Family Television, he simply states that this new piece of research draws
‘upon some of the insights’ of this very approach (1986:15). The latter book is also in a
more general sense set in a less polemical tone than the first one: rather than taking up a
dissident’s stance against other theoretical perspectives, which is a central attribute of
The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, Family Television is explicitly presented as a study that aims
to combine the perspectives of separate traditions in order to overcome what Morley calls
an ‘unproductive form of segregation’ (ibid.: 13). Furthermore, both books have been
written in a markedly conventional style of academic social science, structured according
to a narrative line which starts out with their contextualization within related academic
research trends, followed by a methodological exposition and a description of the
findings, and rounded off with a chapter containing an interpretation of the results and
some more general conclusions. In both books Morley’s voice is exclusively that of the
earnest researcher; the writer’s ‘I’, almost completely eliminated from the surface of the