Introduction
In a recent issue of Ladies Home Journal, a psychologist offers advice to readers on “how to recharge your love life and revitalize your marriage.” A quiz questions the reader about the amount of time she spends talking to and touching her partner in the course of a typical week. But when the reader turns the page to compute her score on the quiz and assess the health of her interpersonal life, she encounters a nasty surprise. Though the quiz itself included no questions about television viewing, the obedient respondent must now compute substantial penalties for every minute she spends alone or with her spouse watching television. The author, Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., explains:
Before you analyze your score, you must reduce your MIMs (marital investment minutes) by a penalty deduction. Subtract the time you spend each week, either alone or with your husband, watching TV. TV addiction is one of the most detrimental influences on the American marriage. As a shared addiction it is among the worst, because it robs the relationship of time for intimacy while each person contributes in the theft.1
This article exemplifies many of the ways television watching is usually talked about: as an addiction, as a passive, individual activity which precludes direct communication with others, as an impediment to fulfilling family relationships. All these deleterious effects are thought to increase in direct proportion to the amount of time the television is turned on in the home.
There is something suspect about this cluster of beliefs about the effects of television viewing, for, as David Morley puts it in Chapter one of this book, “‘television zombies’ are always other people…. It is a theory about what television does to other, more vulnerable people.” These “other” people helpless before the television set are implicitly feminine. Women are the ones responsible for maintaining psychic and social well-being through the institution of the family – the very things television is so often thought to destroy. Beliefs about television viewing have much to tell us about our assumptions about gender, the family, and society, for, as Hermann Bausinger argues, “often people speak of television when they mean society in general.”2 Before introducing the individual papers collected here, we wish to situate this book in relation to the dominant paradigms in media studies today; critique the concept of audience pleasure as it is used in this book; describe the status of “critical” media studies; and finally, discuss the relevance of this work to postmodern theories of television.
Our title Remote Control has a double meaning. The institution of television controls us at a distance. It emanates from some place far away, yet it makes its presence constantly felt in our everyday lives. As the gadget we use to change channels, the remote control symbolizes the viewers' selection, control, and manipulation of television broadcasts. Our frustrated “zapping” of commercials has become the American television industry's worst nightmare. The work gathered in this volume does not share a common theoretical or methodological base, but it does share an interest in changing the way we think about television viewing. The authors conceive of television viewing as a complicated social experience, where different meanings are made of television programs by different viewers. The field of mass communications has given us the stimulus-response, or “hypodermic needle,” theory of the mass media, with its simplistic notion of direct effects, and the “uses and gratifications” approach with its emphasis on individual, psychological meanings rather than social and ideological ones. Though an enormous number of quantitative studies grounded in these perspectives and insistent on proving the researcher's neutrality and objectivity continue to be conducted every year, they have proven quite inadequate to the task of understanding television viewing. Most of the authors in this volume are academics trained in cultural and critical studies, who bring to bear on the question of audience research an interest in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism, rather than a background in positivist social science. They are primarily interested in the social contexts of viewing and the way that audiences' interpretations of television programs are influenced by race, nationality, class, age, and gender.
If the uses and gratifications researchers have attempted to upgrade the viewer by stressing an “active” audience, the articles presented here are based on the assumption that television spectatorship is much more complicated than the poles of activity and passivity can accommodate. The authors recognize that much is at stake in talking about television and its assumed effects: political and economic agendas are always served by conceiving of the audience as controlling or controlled, as duped or resistant, as making meanings or receiving them. This book attempts to move cautiously toward a reconsideration of specific audiences, an understanding of the various kinds of pleasure which television can offer, and new perspectives – ones initiated by people outside the academy – on the relationship between ideology and television. No unified theoretical position emerges from these papers. Indeed, many contradictions arise among them, between the critique of television ideology and the analysis of audience pleasures, between the significance of the text and the determinations of the viewing context.
As Charlotte Brunsdon points out in Chapter six television audience studies have proliferated after a period of preoccupation with textual analyses of television, as an attempt, in part, to verify empirically the kinds of ideological readings constructed by (white and middle-class) critics. While the new critical interest in television audiences can be traced to the end of the 1970s and, more specifically, to the publication of David Morley's study of Nationwide,3 it was in 1986 that the debate on television audiences emerged as the focus of scholarly attention at gatherings such as the International Television Studies Conference in London. It was also in 1986 that we planned the symposium at which the papers collected here were eventually presented. While more work on audiences has appeared in the meantime, the essential problematics and challenges posed by audience studies remain the same. This book offers a variety of positions and approaches to research in order to promote debate and scrutiny of this turbulent area of study and debate.
All of the work collected here exists in an uneasy relationship to the mainstream mass communications and sociological research paradigms in the United States. The case studies presented in Chapters seven to twelve deal with extremely small samples, which can make no claims to representativeness. Instead of adopting the neutral objective stance of the mainstream empiricist, the authors are calling for an active and politically engaged production and interpretation of interview material. Rather than offering white middle-class college students (in their role as experimental subjects) as the universe of media audiences, as mainstream mass communications research has often done, the subjectivities of the audiences, including that of the researcher, are not only investigated but tied to specific historical moments and cultural contexts.
A variety of research methods adapted from quantitative sociology have been used in the studies of television viewing collected in this volume. Central to most of these studies is the question how (specific) audiences make meanings and pleasures in their engagement with television programs in the context of everyday life. But to look at television in this context presents many problems. How can we study what goes on when people watch television, when so much viewing takes place in private, in the domestic sphere, in the context of intimate relationships? How can we study talk about television? While there is agreement here on the usefulness of qualitative interviewing techniques, considerable variation exists in terms of contact time, how the interviews were conducted, the appropriate settings for the interviews, the uses of group interviews, and the problem of contacting television viewers willing to be studied and willing to talk about their experience with the media.
At best, we should constantly undergo a process of self-examination about whom this knowledge is for and how it is being presented. The challenge is to describe a variety of experiences with television – women working together in an office (Hobson, Chapter eight), Israel's different ethnic groups (Liebes and Katz, Chapter eleven), German families (Rogge, Chapter nine), the elderly in one housing project (Tulloch, Chapter ten), soap opera fans in the Pacific northwest (Seiter et al., Chapter twelve) – without reducing the participants to essentialist categories: age, race, class, gender. We must look at how the models of audience research proposed here – relying on a particular kind of willing participation and expenditure of time – adapt themselves to the study of social groups who are different from the researcher. In a profession overwhelmingly dominated by middle-class whites, this problem must be openly and regularly discussed. The methodologies of audience research provoke deeply political questions about the role of the academic researcher, which feminist sociologists have been careful to point out.4 How does the researcher deal with issues involving her own authority, withholding or providing information, and the pretext of neutrality? What is the responsibility of the researcher to her “subjects” or “informants”? Finally, what is the relationship between the scholar's own analysis of the television text and the viewer's? As Ien Ang reminds us (Chapter five), what is at stake in audience studies, no less than in textual studies, is a politics of interpretation.
The goal is for this kind of empirical work to incorporate the perspectives of people of color, of the elderly, gays and lesbians, women, and the poor – those whose voices have not been heard in media research so far, and who do not constitute the desirable demographic groups targeted by advertisers – into the study of the media in society and the development of alternative media.5
The politics of pleasure
The idea that television offers its audiences experiences that are genuinely pleasurable, if constrained in ways that are economically and ideologically determined, has been central to the work done by scholars in television criticism since the 1970s. The enormous body of work on television soap operas – a genre once regarded as especially pernicious and objectionable – has had as its impetus the explanation, if not the valorization of the particular kinds of enjoyments it offers its audience, in particular its audience of women. The issue of pleasure has motivated many contemporary studies of popular culture and the popularity of certain television programs often serves as the implicit justification to address such texts as adequate objects of criticism.
In the context in which audience pleasure has recently been used, heady political claims have been made about the experience of television. For John Fiske (Chapter three), oppressed groups use the media for pleasure, and this pleasure involves the production of gender identities, subcultural indentities, class identification, and racial solidarity. Such a position provokes many questions about the definition of pleasure in audience studies. One way to approach the problematic of “pleasure” in audience studies is to ask why this concept is being used at this point to valorize an activity – television viewing – that has usually been represented as particularly harmful? John Fiske argues that the pleasure of television viewing is often oppositional: it is a pleasure that comes from resisting dominant ideology, from defining one's self or one's group or one's subculture as different. In this sense, television reinforces “the power to be different” and therefore, the possibility for change. For this reason, Fiske believes it is necessary for the critic to refuse to judge other people's media pleasures, as criticism and research on culture have historically done. However, we are still far from having developed an adequate, contextualized understanding of the question of pleasure(s) and the media. The issues that scholarship needs to investigate further have been summed up by Simon Frith: when popular culture critics place themselves on the side of the consumer, “the resulting politics of pleasure cannot easily be separated, historically, from the politics of leisure, from struggles over education, time and space, cultural capital or from the question of signifying power – who can make meanings stick?”6
Academic enthusiasm over the (re-)discovery of pleasure must be tempered with a number of cautionary points. First, no matter how popular certain media experiences become in terms of sheer numbers, there is nothing inherently progressive about pleasure. But stating the question of pleasure in these terms implies the danger of theorizing the pressing issues in much too abstract terms. Therefore, we have to remind ourselves that the relationship between pleasure and politics has to be historicized, contextualized, and specified. For example, the way that the domestic context of television viewing determines the unequal distribution of pleasures between men and women is a very significant area for study, as David Morley's and Ann Gray's work has demonstrated. Second, as Ien Ang argued in our discussions at Blaubeuren, “you win something when you find something pleasurable, but you can lose something at the same time.” In its provision of certain kinds of pleasures, television precludes others. For example, soap operas allow women viewers to take pleasure in the character of the villainess, but they do not provide characters who radically challenge the ideology of femininity. Furthermore, the popularity of US television programs on export around the world should not make us forget that other forms of television might also please (and, possibly, please better). In our concern for audiences' pleasures in such programs, we run the risk of continually validating Hollywood's domination of the worldwide television market. Finally, we must remember to think about other emotional states besides pleasure that may be produced by watching television. For example, television also evokes feelings of rage. As Larry Gross points out in Chapter seven on gay and lesbian audiences, viewers may be enraged at stereotyping and denigrating representations. In our interviews in Oregon (Chapter twelve), we were often reminded that continual commercial interruptions and summer reruns also enrage rather than please viewers. While this may be a more difficult topic for investigation than media pleasures, it may also lead to work with audiences which would have clearer implications for media activism.7
Uses of the “critical”
For readers unfamiliar with the range of current debate in the study of television, the ways in which the term “critical” is used in this book may be confusing. Several different meanings of the term come together in the kinds of work included in this volume, and exemplify some of the debates engaging media researchers. Each of these meanings is also associated with a line of argument against audience studies that have been put forward by other scholars in the field.
The term “critical” may simply mean pertaining to the practice of criticism. It is this sense of the term which informs the work of Liebes and Katz, when they use “critical ability” to refer to the kinds of skills that are generally considered the province of the professional critic (Chapter eleven). While “critical” is only sometimes used in this sense in the papers collected here, a background in criticism and a concern with television words, images, and stories as text informs much of the work here. Indeed, we are engaged throughout this book not just with audiences, but with the history and practice of television criticism. While questions of textual interpretation have played a crucial role in the British tradition of cultural studies, it has been almost entirely ignored in US mass communications research. Since the 1970s, scholars from literature and film departments have taken on the question of the meaning of television, and dubbed their intellectual terrain “television studies” rather than mass communications. This tradition has tended to produce textual analyses of the media from a vantage point of high culture, especially literary theory.
A second important association of the term “critical” (one which many literature and Germanistik scholars would reserve exclusively) is with the so-called critical theory of the Frankfurt School, exemplified by the work of scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. In this, the narrowest sense of the term, “critical” refers to work which follows in the Frankfurt School tradition by combining psychoanalytic and Marxist theories into a broad social critique.
Today, the term “critical theory” is often used by scholars in a wide range of disciplines to embrace both the work of the Frankfurt School and that of post-structuralists, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. In this usage, critical theory refers broadly to those philosophical traditions which mistrust empiricism and positivism and insist on the relationship between knowledge and power. While many of the scholars represented in this volume share the Frankfurt School's insistence on a “critical” theory of society, they are struggling to overcome deterministic notions of the media's all-pervasive power without going to the other extreme of celebrating the freedom and autonomy of the viewer. In the present debate about the meanings of being “critical,” it is increasingly important to understand the political situation which produced the discourse of the Frankfurt School and compare it to the one which produces ours today. In this direction, papers in this volume by Robert Allen, Ien Ang, Charlotte Brunsdon, and David Morley trace the intellectual history of the past twenty years and what produced the interest in television audiences.
Recently, attacks on audience studies have been mounted by some who see this kind of work as implicitly and necessarily collusion – simply doing the industry's market research for it. The alternative offered is doing textual analyses, which are presumably untied to any economic interests. In Tania Modleski's discussion of audience studies – peculiar in that none of her examples involve actual empirical work – the danger is seen in “writing apologias for mass culture and embracing its ideology” and “reproducing in their methodologies the very strategies by which consumer society measures and constructs its audiences.”8 For Modleski being “truly critical” means maintaining a critical distance from mass culture. But this position reflects an anxiety over the contaminating effects of mass culture which is one of the least helpful remnants of the Frankfurt School position. Furthermore, we must recognize how academic and critical discourse on the right and the left also serves a system of class distinctions. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us:
The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile – in a word, natural – enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.9
Both textual analysis and the study of audiences are bound up with the historical and economic context in which academics work. Neither approach can be seen as free from ideology or the service of political and economic interests: all intellectual labor is implicated in this context. The tendency to represent the conflict as one of either audience study or textual analysis allows the discussion to degenerate into a squabble over disciplinary turf. Instead, the methodological and theoretical differences of the two approaches should be used to improve understanding of the ambiguities of the academic discourse on television and its cultural significance. To cast the argument in terms of mutually exclusive approaches prevents interdisciplinary work and masks what are presumably the shared interests of television scholars – working toward a more politically engaged research, a better understanding of audiences, and better media.
The “critical studies” perspective cautions against an exuberance over the discovery of “real audiences,” the danger of lapsing into a happy positivism in our methodologies, and an overreading of points of resistance. And indeed, political dangers are involved in audience research. Modleski is right to remind us that it is in the media industries' interests to adapt to the pleasures and tastes of economically attractive audience groups. Thus, audience studies and textual studies have to be informed by a high degree of theoretical awareness and political responsibility.
Many of these meanings of “critical” are also implicit in the way that the term identifies an area within mass communications research, especially in the US, where it carries a polemical charge by opposing itself to mainstream or institutional research. “Critical communications research” identifies a range of research topics, but often focuses on the political economics of the media. Mike Budd and Clay Steinman have stated the critique of cultural studies by political economists this way:
As cultural studies gains influence in North America, Australia and elsewhere, its work will be increasingly vitiated if it cannot break down the detailed intellectual division of labor which so uncannily resembles that of the capitalist society it seeks to understand. The political economists and others who study concentration of ownership, economic imperialism and other institutional questions may have the mistaken notion that texts, and culture generally, don't matter very much, but that doesn't mean we can ignore economic determination.10
The most serious lack in the audience studies presented here is the integration of a political economics perspective. There is a great deal of work which urgently needs to be done in this area. But the political economics perspective should not be used to diminish the importance of audience studies. David Morley (Chapter one) has reminded us of the tendency within Marxist analysis to neglect consumption in order to “prioritize the study of ‘production’ to the exclusion of the study of all other levels of the social formation.” This relentless employment of an economist model adapted from classical Marxism to the media studies has as only one of its shortcomings a firmly masculinist orientation. From the Frankfurt School to Jean Baudrillard, consumption is feminine and bad, production is masculine and good.11 Often in this book, a simple reversal of terms – the television viewer as producer – is used to redeem the audience. In our efforts to understand the workings of culture and ideology, however, we might do better to rethink the usefulness of the production/consumption dichotomy.12
Finally, scholars sometimes use the term “critical” to identify any research which has something negative to say about the media: as though all that is called for is taking a moral stand against the media (as journalists and The Ladies Home Journal regularly do). Such a meaning is frequently found in the famous Ferment in the Field issue of the Journal of Communication, where “critical” occasionally identifies any work which does not involve quantitative and survey research methods. It is this plethora of meanings which has made the term of dubious usefulness as a way of identifying intellectual positions. More interesting than unpacking these differences in usage may be examining why the term “critical” has become so overdetermined in meaning, and why left academics want so badly to identify themselves and define their practices this way.13
Postmodernism
At the present time, much of television studies is dominated by a discussion of writing in critical theory and aesthetics which seeks to define the postmodern. Though they share some of the same concepts, postmodern approaches to television have remained somewhat indifferent to audience studies. Defining postmodernism continues to be a very confusing business because of the blurring of boundaries between “postmodernism as a set of stylistic phenomena and postmodernism as a socio-economic phase.”14 Television represents a specific form of commodity culture in a particular phase of late capitalism as well as a medium whose aesthetic strategies implicate a very different spectator from that of cinematic realism or literary modernism. One of the most difficult problems in relating television audience studies to postmodernism is, in Andrew Ross' words, “in effect it (postmodernism) has been used as an epithet to describe a staggering range of objects, practices and styles: right or left, hot or cold, dead or alive.”15
Audience studies are inspired in part by a recognition typical of postmodernism of “the instability of ideological processes,” especially where the media are concerned. In its philosophical versions, one of postmodernism's central notions has been the deconstruction of essentialist concepts of identity. The cherished Enlightenment belief in “the existence of a stable, coherent self” has been thrown into “radical doubt.”16 This is an extremely important development for audience studies, in that it presents the possibility of shifting subjectivities on the part of the viewer. To varying extents, television has been seen simultaneously as symbolizing and as producing this kind of identity crisis.
Jean Baudrillard's work has been influential within television studies. While indebted to the Frankfurt School, he makes a radical break with traditional Marxist positions. His is the latest example of a cultural critique inspired by political economics (the postmodern as label for societies marked by late capitalism's intense need to stimulate consumption) that expresses a massive cultural pessimism in such notorious phrases as “the death of the social.” The cultural consumer of postmodernism has been repeatedly compared to the schizophrenic; Baudrillard has drawn him or her as one who “sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty at an infinite distance from his universe of origin.”17 It is no accident that Baudrillard's extremely abstract work has not yet offered much help in the study of the specific social and historical locations of viewers and their interpretations of specific television texts and genres. Thus, in Lawrence Grossberg's words, “a theory that celebrates otherness fails to acknowledge the difference between experiences, real historical tendencies and cultural discourses and meanings, as well as the complex relations that exist between them.” In order to account for these differences, we need to move back and forth between the abstract theories of postmodernism and local, particular practices.18
In textual analysis, broadcast television has been seen as embodying postmodern aesthetics, with its relentless intertextuality, its reworking of popular culture, its effacement of history. As a theory of aesthetics, postmodernism offers the possibility – yet unrealized – of dissolving the rigid distinctions between high and low art so characteristic of modernism. Television has provided the raw material for the avantgarde to produce postmodern art, while itself borrowing freely from experimental film and video. The problem of periodization which postmodernism poses looms even larger in popular culture criticism than it does in literature and the visual arts. Where and when was modernism, if television is now postmodern? Television critics have found music television, commercials, and programs such as Miami Vice or Moonlighting to be especially good examples, which lend themselves to the tendency within postmodernist television criticism “to privilege the medium over the message, style over substance, and form over content.”19
But many television genres, including those which address themselves specifically to women as audience members, have so far failed to fit the mold. In television studies as elsewhere, the postmodern debate has tended to exclude questions of gender.20 This is perhaps the primary reason why theories of postmodernism do not figure prominently in this book, where feminist readings, domestic politics, soap opera, and particular local practices of television viewing are the primary concern. As Elspeth Probyn has warned: “In the midst of all this – in the timeless pass from the modern to the post, from marxism to postmodernism – we seem to have lost the impulse to push politics into the everyday.”21
While postmodern theory has tended to lead scholars back to the television text, the work presented in this book insists on the necessity of meeting people outside academic culture to discuss television – mindful of just how problematic that interaction may be. What we offer are readings “from below,” mindful of their mediation by our own discourses. It is the reluctance of television scholars to engage in this kind of research which may explain the fact that while everyone seems to be talking about television audience studies, surprisingly few of us trained in cultural studies are actually doing them. The reasons for this reluctance may involve the Angst of leaving the secure academic context to listen and talk to social groups different from ourselves about television. But such an encounter is a necessary starting point if we are to understand our own positions as academics and the barriers to our political effectivity. As Janice Radway has put it:
In learning how others actively make their own social worlds differently from the way we make our own, perhaps it might also be possible to identify together those points where articulations and alliances could be forged across borders in the service of a future not yet envisioned and therefore neither necessarily lost nor secured.22
The first six chapters take up theoretical considerations in audience studies and the following six consist of case studies of various audiences. The book begins with David Morley's overview of research on media audiences and critical work on television texts. Morley traces the various theoretical influences – semiotics, cultural studies, film theory, psychoanalysis – which have led to a departure from the traditional paradigms of mass-communication research and to an interest in studying media audiences. Morley stresses the role of social factors in the production of meaning from television; the impact of genre on patterns of viewing and negotiations of meaning, and the importance of contextualizing television viewing within the framework of everyday life. His chapter plays an essential role here in introducing the reader to the intellectual history which informs most of the book's contributions.
Similarly, Robert Allen's “Bursting bubbles” traces the development of genre criticism in film and literary theory, defining genre as a classificatory discursive strategy which allows patterns of textual structure to be connected to the groups in society for whom these patterns are meaningful. The term “soap opera” serves as a catch-all for different discursive relationships between a variety of textual features and at least three major interpretative communities: television industry workers, critics, and viewers. For Allen, theories of the viewer's engagement with soap operas are marked by disjuncture between the implications of the term in critical discourse and the ways in which generic knowledge is employed by viewers in making sense of and deriving pleasure from soap operas.
John Fiske suggests abandoning altogether the categories of “text” and “audience” as separate analytical entities. Instead, television watching should be conceived of as a process of meaning production in which the “text” is merely a substratum from which the viewer may construct various realizations. Television must be analysed not in terms of political economy, but in terms of cultural economy, in which viewers reject their role as commodity and become a producer of pleasures and meanings. Television provides flexibility due to specific textual and intertextual characteristics which militate against closure and the inscription of the dominant ideology. Because of the openness of the televisual text and the diversity of patterns of engagement on the part of the viewer, the process of watching television precludes theoretical fixation and can only be approached in terms of moments in the semiotic process, where textual and social lines of force intersect. This approach demands a researcher who is not a detached scientific observer but a critic-as-fan, who shares discursive competence, social history, and pleasures with the viewers under study.
In “Live television and its audiences,” Claus-Dieter Rath focuses on live television in terms of production and reception. Live programs – which are especially common on European television – allow insights into institutional value systems such as topicality and what determines the selection of suitable broadcast material. The very mode of live presentation renders events meaningful and important. Rath outlines aspects of viewer engagement which are vital in live broadcasts: the identification of the viewer with physical actions, the alignment of the viewer with the field of vision of the camera, and the merging of the public and private spheres. Through live broadcasts, television forms a collectivity based on the experience, “I also will have seen.”
Chapters five and six challenge the methods and the assumptions underlying audience study itself. Ien Ang criticizes recent tendencies which point to a “new consensus” between the previously opposed “critical” and “mainstream” camps in mass communications research. She draws attention to the fact that despite shared terminology, both approaches are based on epistemological concepts which are fundamentally opposed and make any methodological synthesis impossible. For Ang, the positivist will to truth cannot be reconciled with the hermeneutic and political orientation of critical cultural investigations.
Charlotte Brunsdon expresses reservations about the apparent displacement of textual criticism by audience studies. The concentration on diverse modes of television reception is misleading, since all cultural texts may be engaged with in a variety of ways. Brunsdon argues that the interest in audiences expresses a search for the authentic in the study of a medium whose aesthetics is strongly marked by a lack of authenticity. Brunsdon describes the shift from text to audience in the institutional history of television studies as a development from the interest in “redemptive readings” of popular culture texts, from the recognition of intertextuality and postmodernism, and from the use of the autobiographical in feminist criticism. But for Brunsdon the choice of what is recognized as constituting a single text is a political as well as a critical matter, and retaining the notion of the text is therefore crucial to the development of television criticism and aesthetics.
These theoretical articles are followed by case studies of the audience, some of which focus on audiences for particular genres and some on specific groups within the audience. We begin with “Out of the mainstream: Sexual minorities and the mass media.” One of the most important insights of the approach to media effects developed by Larry Gross in his work with George Gerbner was that habitual television viewing results in mainstreaming: it “tends to cultivate in viewers … a relative commonality of outlooks and values”(see Chapter seven). On the other hand television works towards a “symbolic annihilation” of minorities and their norms and values. Gross draws attention to the important role of the mass media in offering images of the Other, which have an impact on straight audiences, as well as in the particularly difficult process of social identification for gays. Using examples from several media, Gross discusses three patterns of response, ranging from an internalization of mainstream norms to active resistance through film and television productions by and for gays and lesbians.
In “Soap operas at work,” Dorothy Hobson investigates the ways in which British soap operas enter the realm of work through everyday conversations with colleagues. Hobson stresses that communication about media contents is interspersed with accounts of personal experience and stories which are frequently only touched upon in the programs under discussion. Apart from providing a permissive framework for articulating personal concerns, conversations about soap operas tend to reinforce group solidarity because they draw on experiences shared by all members of the group.
In “The media in everyday family life,” Jan-Uwe Rogge discusses the functions of media use as they are interwoven with a family's need for communication. Rogge recognizes the ways that various interests among family members and their different biographies affect the meaning of the media in everyday life. His emphasis in a research project involving interviews with hundreds of families in West Germany is on change in media consumption and changes in the everyday life of the family. Rogge discusses a number of family case studies to illustrate how changes such as unemployment alter the family's use of and feelings toward television. Rogge argues that the historical individual's media reality has many facets, expressing “cultural orientation and day-to-day life-styles” and defining “interpersonal relationships and the emotional and communicative climate in a family.”
John Tulloch's chapter centers on the elderly, a group which has been largely neglected in media studies, which have tended to concentrate on studies of children and youth. As with women viewers, the elderly have been especially prone to stigmatization and stereotyped as manipulated and addicted television viewers. Tulloch's interviews reveal that the meaning of television series derives to a large extent from their integration in daily routines of the elderly and their meticulously executed schedules of organization and caring. In the second part of his chapter, Tulloch examines the way that the social category of age is related to class. Throughout, Tulloch takes a self-reflexive approach to his interviews and raises important questions about ethnographic interviewing as a method.
Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz compare the interpretations of Dallas made by Israeli viewers from four different ethnic communities (Arab, Russian, Moroccan, and kibbutzim). After gathering responses in group interviews, Liebes and Katz analyse the viewers' critical abilities, i.e. how much they discussed the program as a constructed, conventional narrative. The authors did find that viewers outside the US had diverse strategies for defense against the perceived message of Dallas and frequently voiced their moral or ideological opposition to the show.
Finally, we present a report on our own research in “‘Don't treat us like we're so stupid and naïve’: toward an ethnography of soap opera viewers.” It is based on a series of group interviews with soap opera viewers in Oregon carried out in 1986. The study is part of a larger research project on the history, production, and reception of American daytime soap operas based in the American Studies Department at the University of Tübingen. Starting with a discussion of recent work on the practical and methodological problems presented by an “ethnography of reading,” the paper problematizes the ethnographic principles underlying our interview study. Problems of ethnographic authority as well as the special nature of gendered discourse in all-women interviews are raised in this context. The interview material is analysed in terms of the way that soap operas are scheduled around women's work in the home, the way viewers described the soap opera as text and as genre, and a reconsideration of Tania Modleski's influential work on the textual position of the “ideal mother.”
It is this research project which introduced us to the problems of studying the television audience and inspired us to bring together an international group of scholars in Blaubeuren to discuss these issues. This book presents a variety of the positions taken and topics debated at that symposium. We hope that it will lead to a refinement of methods, a clarification of theoretical positions, and a thoughtful reconsideration of television and its audiences.
The academic pendulum swings along the fine line between re-seeing and revisionism: valorisation of consumption replaces insistence on production; recognition of escapism replaces the search for engagement; the centrality of contradiction makes way for the importance of identity; work makes way for relaxation and politics makes way for pleasure. Each of these shifts is important and necessary where it occurs under pressure of a specific theoretical and political demand. The difficulty is in slowing the process which turns a radical shift into a new orthodoxy.23
Notes
1 Paul Pearsall, “Love Busters,” Ladies Home Journal, October 1987, p. 98.
2 Hermann Bausinger, “Tolerant Partners: On the Intertwining of Communication and Para-Communication” (paper presented at the symposium, “Rethinking the Audience: New Tendencies in Television Research,” Blaubeuren 1987), p. 11.
3 David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980).
4 For a feminist consideration of qualitative methodologies see Helen Roberts (ed.) Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge & Keg an Paul, 1981); and Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein (eds) Theories of Women's Studies (London: Routledge & Keg an Paul, 1983). Janice Radway critiques her own research methods in “Identifying Ideological Seams,” Communication 9 (1986): 93–123, and in her introduction to the British version of Reading the Romance (London: Verso, 1987), pp. 1–18.
5 For one of the best examples of work which fulfills this kind of promise see Jacqueline Bobo's “The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers,” in Deidre Primbrawm (ed.) Female Spectators Looking at Film and Television (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 90–109.
6 Simon Frith, “Hearing Secret Harmonies,” in Colin MacCabe (ed.) High Theory, Low Culture (New York: St Martin's Press, 1986), p. 57.
7 For a discussion of the political usefulness of rage, see Julia Lesage, “Women's Rage,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and Cultural Interpretation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 419–28. Lawrence Grossberg has suggested that the study of affect may solve the problems inherent in the issue of pleasure. See his “History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 73–4; and “Postmodernity and Affect: All Dressed Up With No Place to Go,” Communication 10, nos 3–4 (1988): 271–93.
8 Tania Modleski, “Introduction,” in Tania Modleski (ed.) Studies in Entertainment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. xi–xii.
9 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 7.
10 Mike Budd and Clay Steinman, “Television, Cultural Studies, and the ‘Blindspot’ Debate in Critical Communications Research,” in Gary Burns and Robert Thompson (eds) Television Studies (New York: Praeger, forthcoming).
11 See Andreas Huyssen's “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other,” in After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 44–64; also Tania Modleski's excellent critique of Baudrillard, “Femininity as Masquerade: A Feminist Approach to Mass Culture,” in MacCabe, High Theory, Low Culture, pp. 32–57.
12 John Caughie has made this argument in “Popular Culture: Notes and Revisions,” in MacCabe, High Theory, Low Culture, pp. 156–71.
13 For examples of the various positions within mass communications see Ferment in the Field, a special issue of Journal of Communication 33, no. 3 (1983).
14 Philip Hay ward and Paul Kerr, “Introduction” to the Screen issue Postmodern Screen 28, no. 2 (spring 1987): 5.
15 “Postmodernism and Universal Abandon,” Communications 10, nos 3–4 (1988): 252.
16 Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 624.
17 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Hal Foster (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), p. 128. See also Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trans. Paul Foss (New York: Semiotexte(e), 1983).
18 Grossberg, “History, Politics and Postmodernism,” p. 74.
19 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “(Re)Watching Television: Notes Toward a Political Criticism,” Diacritics (summer 1987): 100.
20 This point has been made by a variety of feminist writers: Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations,” pp. 621–41; Terry Lovell, Consuming Fictions (London: Verso, 1987), pp. 153–62.
21 Elspeth Probyn, “Memories and Past Politics of Postmodernism,” Communication 10, nos 3–4 (1988): 309.
22 Janice Radway, “Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects,” Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1988).
23 John Caughie, “Popular Culture: Notes and Revisions,” in MacCabe, High Theory, Low Culture, p. 163.