Page 75 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 66
experiences. It is, in the words of Janice Radway, one way of grappling with ‘the
endlessly shifting, ever-evolving kaleidoscope of daily life and the way in which the
media are integrated and implicated within it’ (1988:366). But as I have indicated before,
the very desire for epistemological conquest implied in the will ‘to do justice’ to endless
contextualization could easily lead to a sense of paralysis, leading to the dictum: ‘Don’t
do ethnography, just think about it.’ Of course, the opposite extreme, ‘Don’t think about
ethnography, just do it’ is equally short-sighted (cf. Geertz 1988:139). For the moment,
the middle ground can be held by doing the thinking with the radical contextualist
horizon always in mind, but at the same time translating our limitations (i.e. our
incapability to be everywhere at the same time) into an opportunity and a responsibility to
make consciously political choices for which position to take, which contextual
frameworks to take on board in our forays into the world of media audiences.
Epistemological considerations alone are bound to be insufficient or even
counterproductive as guiding principles for making those choices, as Morley and
Silverstone’s project suggests, because from an epistemological perspective all contexts
relate to each other, even though one could theorize that not all contexts are alike and not
equally important. It is here that the ‘modalities of political intervention’, to use Asad’s
phrase, gain their pragmatic relevance. It is within the framework of a particular cultural
politics that we can meaningfully decide which contexts we wish to foreground as
particularly relevant, and which other ones could, for the moment, within this particular
political conjuncture, be left unexplored. Radical contextualism can then act as a stance
governed not by a wish to build an ever more ‘comprehensive theory of the audience’,
which would by definition be an unfinishable task, but by an intellectual commitment to
make the stories we end up telling about media consumption as compelling and
persuasive as possible in the context of specific problematics which arise from particular
branches of cultural politics. This is what Stuart Hall means when he argues that
‘potentially, discourse is endless: the infinite semiosis of meaning. But to say anything at
all in particular, you do have to stop talking. […] The politics of infinite dispersal is the
politics of no action at all’ (1987:45). Therefore, it is crucial to construct what Hall calls
‘arbitrary closures’ in our storytelling practice (i.e. epistemologically arbitrary), even
though ‘every full stop is provisional’ (ibid.). Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has
succinctly put it this way: ‘I must know on whose behalf and to what end I write’
(1987:269). That is, our stories cannot just tell ‘partial truths’, they are also, consciously
or not, ‘positioned truths’ (Abu-Lughold 1991:142).
In this respect, Strathern points to the success of contemporary feminist scholarship, a
success which, in her view, ‘lies firmly in the relationship as it is represented between
scholarship (genre) and the feminist movement (life)’ (1987:268). And indeed, in much
feminist scholarship the burden of authorship effectively transcends the tenets of liberal
individualism which pervade conventional academic culture:

Purposes may be diversely perceived; yet the scholarship is in the end
represented as framed off by a special set of social interests. Feminists
may argue with one another, in their many voices, because they also know
themselves as an interest group. There is certainty about that context.
(Strathern 1987:268)