Page 74 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies 65
In this respect, I agree with Talal Asad’s argument that a ‘politics of poetics’ should not
be pursued at the expense of a ‘politics of polities’:

The crucial issue for anthropological practice is not whether
ethnographies are fiction or fact—or how far realist forms of cultural
representation can be replaced by others. What matters more are the kinds
of political project cultural inscriptions are embedded in. Not experiments
in ethnographic representation for their own sake, but modalities of
political intervention should be our primary object of concern.
(Asad 1990:260)

CONSTRUCTING POSITIONED TRUTHS

How, then, can culturalist audience studies benefit from this self-reflexive rethinking of
ethnography within contemporary anthropology? First of all, we should recognize that
just as representations of ‘culture’ are, in a manner of speaking, inventions of
anthropologists (Wagner 1981), so too are representations of ‘audience’ invented by
audience researchers, in the sense that it is only in and through the descriptions conjured
within the discourses produced by researchers that certain profiles of certain audiences
take shape—profiles that do not exist outside or beyond those descriptions but are created
by them. In this respect, academic audience researchers do not differ from market
researchers: they are both in the business of creating audience profiles. But their politics,
and therefore their rhetorical strategies and epistemological legitimizations—in short, the
stories they tell—differ, given the disparate institutional conditions in which both groups
have to operate.
Once again, this does not mean that people’s involvements with media as audience
members in everyday situations are not real or non-existent; it only means that our
representations of those involvements and their interrelationships in terms of ‘uses’,
‘gratifications’, ‘decodings’, ‘readings’, ‘effects’, ‘negotiations’, ‘interpretive
communities’ or ‘symbolic resistance’ (to name but some of the most current concepts
that have guided audience research) should be seen as ever so many discursive devices to
confer a kind of order and coherence onto the otherwise chaotic outlook of the empirical
landscape of dispersed and heterogeneous audience practices and experiences. The
question, then, is what kind of representational order we should establish in our stories
about media consumption. And in my view, culturalist audience studies, especially,
should be in an excellent position to tell stories which avoid the objectification of
‘audience’ for which market researchers inevitably strive in their attempts to make the
chaos of media audiencehood manageable for the cultural industries. The latter is clear,
for example, in the constant search for new strategies of ‘audience segmentation’ within
market research. At the same time, the very difficulty of producing satisfactory ways of
segmenting the audience in clearcut, mutually exclusive categories suggests that market
researchers too are confronted with the ultimate intransigence of audience chaos (see,
e.g., Diamond 1993).
In a sense, radical contextualism is born of a creeping awareness of this chaos, and a
welcome attempt to do more justice to it in our representations of audience practices and