Page 71 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 62
significance and effectivity would be quite unwieldy and exhausting indeed, if not over-
ambitiously megalomaniac. This may be a reason why it seems easier to talk about
ethnography than doing actual ethnographic work with audiences. This is also why the
CRICT work is so significant, although not without its own problems and dilemmas. Let
me sketch what I see as their main gist.
As we have seen, Morley and Silverstone have singled out two contextual frameworks
for television consumption, namely the domestic and the technological. But at the same
time they (rightly) state these contextual frameworks cannot be separated from ‘the wider
context of social, political and economic realities’ (1990:32). The confusing consequence
is that they seem to be somewhat unclear as to how to articulate the plethora of other
contexts they theoretically envisage. Those of nation and gender are mentioned explicitly,
but we could easily imagine a virtually endless, varied list of other contexts: race, class,
ethnicity, regional location, generation, religion, economic conjuncture, political climate,
family history, the weather, and so on and so on—into the main thrust of the project. If
not held in check, awareness of the infinity of intercontextuality could lead to
contextualization gone mad!
To put it differently, imagining the radical, that is, eternally expanding contextuality of
the particular meanings produced through media consumption would imply the taking up
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of an impossible position by the researcher, namely the position of being ‘everywhere’,
ceaselessly trying to capture a relentlessly expanding field of contextually
overdetermined, particular realities. Although such a position may be epistemologically
logical, it is, in the end, untenable ontologically, let alone pragmatically. No excursion
into the real, no matter how ethnographic, can ever encompass such all-embracing
knowing. As Jonathan Culler observes:

[C]ontext is boundless, so accounts of context never provide full
determinations of meaning. Against any set of formulations, one can
imagine further possibilities of context, including the expansion of context
produced by the reinscription within a context of the description of it.
(Culler 1983:128)

How then to get out of this dead-end? How can we come to terms with the inherently
contradictory nature of the radical contextualist claim, without succumbing to what
Clifford Geertz has called ‘epistemological hypochondria’ (1988:71)? The answer, I
would suggest, following Geertz, should be sought not in wanting to be epistemologically
perfect, but in the uncertain trajectories of the politics of narrative and narration, of story
and discourse. That is, by admitting that the ethnographer cannot be ‘everywhere’ but
must always speak and write from ‘somewhere’, we can leave the remnants of logico-
scientific thinking (as embodied in the epistemology of radical contextualism) for what it
is in favour of narrative modes of reasoning and representation, in which not only the
contexts of media consumption, but also the contexts of ethnographic knowledge
production itself are taken into account (see, e.g., Richardson 1990).
It may be illuminating, in this regard, to turn briefly to some (meta-) anthropological
literature, where the status of ethnography has recently been discussed more extensively
(see, e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Fox 1991). In practice,
ethnographic studies of media consumption tend to take communities of audiences—such