Page 52 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

On the politics of empirical audience research 43
But, one might ask, do we need empirical research, or, more specifically, ethnographic
audience research, to arrive at such theoretical understandings? Why examine audiences
empirically at all? After all, some critical scholars still dismiss the idea of doing
empirical audience research altogether, because, so they argue, it would necessarily
implicate the researcher with the strategies and aims of the capitalist culture industry (e.g.
Modleski 1986:xi–xii). Against this background, I would like to make one last comment
on Morley’s work here. Due to his academistic posture Morley has not deemed it
necessary to reflect upon his own position as a researcher. We do not get to know how he
found and got on with his interviewees, nor are we informed about the way in which the
interviews themselves took place. One of the very few things we learn about this in
Family Television is that he gave up interviewing the adults and the young children at the
same time, reportedly ‘because after an initial period of fascination the young children
quite quickly got bored’ (Morley 1986:174)! But what about the adults? What were the
reasons for their willingness to talk at such length to an outsider (or was David Morley
not an outsider to them)? And how did the specific power relationship pervading the
interview situation affect not only the families, but also the researcher himself? These are
problems inherent to conducting ethnographic research that are difficult to unravel. But
that does not mean that audience researchers should not confront them, and, eventually,
draw the radical and no doubt uncomfortable conclusions that will emerge from that
confrontation. We can think of Valerie Walkerdine’s provocative and disturbing query:

Much has been written about the activity of watching films in terms of
scopophilia. But what of that other activity, [….] this activity of research,
of trying so hard to understand what people see in films? Might we not
call this the most perverse voyeurism?
(Walkerdine 1986:166)

It is, of course, important for us to recognize the inherent symbolic violence of any kind
of research. However, we cannot renounce our inevitable complicity simply by not doing
research at all, empirical or otherwise. Indeed, such a retreat would only lead to the
dangerous illusion of our own exemption from the realities under scrutiny, including the
realities of living with the media—as if it were possible to keep our hands clean in a
fundamentally dirty world. It is precisely for this reason that I believe that, in the
expanding field of audience studies, an ethnographic approach can and does have a
distinct critical value. Ethnographic work, in the sense of drawing on what we can
perceive and experience in everyday settings, acquires its critical edge when it functions
as a reminder that reality is always more complicated and diversified than our theories
can represent, and that there is no such thing as ‘audience’ whose characteristics can be
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set once and for all. The critical promise of the ethnographic attitude resides in its
potential to make and keep our interpretations sensitive to concrete specificities, to the
unexpected, to history; it is a commitment to submit ourselves to the possibility of, in
Paul Willis’s words, ‘being “surprised”, of reaching knowledge not prefigured in one’s
starting paradigm’ (1980:90). What matters is not the certainty of knowledge about