Page 76 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies 67
This is not the place to enter into a debate about Strathern’s confident assertion that
feminism can provide a certainty of political context for academic work; after all,
feminism itself is increasingly questioned in terms of its status as a general political roof
for women’s interests. (On this theme, see further the essays in part II of this book.)
Nevertheless, what matters here is the self-conception of feminism as an imagined
community that manages to construct a commonality of interests, which enables feminist
scholars to develop and entertain a sense of commonality of worldly purpose. For the
academic and professional community of audience researchers, of course, determining
the political context of their work is much more difficult, for they do not form, and
cannot possibly form, a special interest group. They do not, in any sense, form an
imagined community bound together by a unifying set of extra-academic social or
political aims and purposes. But this is precisely the reason why it is all the more
important for us to construct such aims and purposes, to define the modalities of political
intervention which can energize our interest in knowing audiences, to actively create the
‘arbitrary closures’ that can give audience studies a sense of direction and relevance in an
ever more uncertain, complicated world. This is another way of saying, quite simply, that
what we need more than ever is a renewed agenda for audience studies, one that is drawn
up by considerations of the worldly purposes of our scholarship.
This brings me back, finally, to the conjuncture of change in our contemporary
mediascape, which arguably poses the most pressing global context for audience studies
in the years to come. It is clear that the initiatives of the transnational media industries are
bringing about significant and confusing transformations in the multicontextual
conditions of audience practices and experiences. At the same time, these large-scale
structural developments have made the predicaments of postmodern audiencehood ever
more complex, indeterminate and difficult to assess, not least because of the
ubiquitousness of these developments. There no longer is a position outside, as it were,
from which we can have a total, transcending overview of all that’s happening. Our
minimal task, in such a world, is to explicate that world, make sense of it by using our
scholarly competencies to tell stories about the social and cultural implications of living
in such a world. Such stories cannot be comprehensive, but they can at least make us
comprehend some of the peculiarities of that world; they should, in the listing of Geertz,
‘analyze, explain, disconcert, celebrate, edify, excuse, astonish, subvert’ (1988:143–4).
To be sure, these are very liberal aims, but they form the basis for Abu-Lughold’s (1991)
more radical claim that our writing can either sustain or work against the grain of the
tremendous discursive and economic powers of, in this instance, the global media
corporations. How can we give substance to such claims by mobilizing the radical
contextualism of ethnography? I can only give a partial, doubly partial, answer to this
question, in the form of some proposals that reflect my own concerns and interests.
One political problematic which is barely addressed in audience work relates to the
problem of public policy in an age of so-called consumer sovereignty. In their search for
viable antidotes to the hegemonic logic of commercialism, media policy makers—and I
am thinking here especially of the European tradition of public service broadcasting—
have, for better or worse, often resorted to a discourse of ‘quality’ and ‘minority
programming’. But in doing this, public broadcasters still have not always managed to
overcome paternalistic or elitist attitudes towards the television audience that pervade
classic public service broadcasting ideology. In my view, this is the result of