Page 51 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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switch into the silent communion with the television set that characterises
so much male viewing.
(Brunsdon 1986:104)

Women’s distracted mode of watching television, then, does not have something to do
with some essential femininity, but is a result of a complex of cultural and social
arrangements which makes it difficult for them to do otherwise, even though they often
express a longing to be able to watch their favourite programmes without being disturbed.
Men, on the other hand, can watch television in a concentrated manner because they
control the conditions to do so. Their way of watching television, Brunsdon concludes,
‘seems not so much a masculine mode, but a mode of power’ (1986:106).
What clearly emerges here is the beginning of an interpretive framework in which
differences in television-viewing practices are not just seen as expressions of different
needs, uses or readings, but are connected with the way in which particular social
subjects are structurally positioned in relation to each other. In the context of the nuclear
family home, women’s viewing patterns can only be understood in relation to men’s
patterns; the two are in a sense constitutive of each other. Thus, if watching television is a
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social and even collective practice, it is not a harmonious practice. Because subjects are
positioned in different ways towards the set, they engage in a continuing struggle over
programme choice and programme interpretation, styles of viewing and textual pleasure.
What kind of viewer they become can be seen as the outcome of this struggle, an
outcome, however, that is never definitive because it can always be contested and
subverted. What we call ‘viewing habits’ are thus not a more or less static set of
behaviours inhabited by an individual or group of individuals; rather they are the
temporary result of a neverending, dynamic and conflictual process in which ‘the fine-
grained interrelationships between meaning, pleasure, use and choice’ are shaped (Hall
1986a:10).
Morley’s empirical findings, then, acquire their relevance and critical value in the
context of this emerging theoretical understanding. And of course it could only have been
carried out from a specific interpretive point of view. Needless to say, the point of view
taken up by Morley and Brunsdon is a feminist one, that is, a worldly intellectual position
that is sensitive to the micro-politics of male/female relationships. Television
consumption, so we begin to understand, contributes to the everyday construction of male
and female subjectivities through the relations of power, contradiction and struggle that
men and women enter into in their daily engagements with the TV sets in their homes. At
this point, we can also see how Morley’s research enables us to begin to conceive of ‘the
ideological operations of television’ in a much more radical way than has hitherto been
done. The relation between television and audiences is not just a matter of discrete
‘negotiations’ between texts and viewers. In a much more profound sense the process of
television consumption—and the positioning of television as such in the culture of
modernity—has created new areas of constraints and possibilities for structuring social
relationships, identities and desires. If television is an ‘ideological apparatus’, to use that
oldfashioned-sounding term, then this is not so much because its texts transmit certain
‘messages’, but because it is a cultural form through which those constraints are
negotiated and those possibilities take shape.