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Relocating the site of the audience

a
Martin Allor
a
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies , Concordia
University , Montreal
Published online: 18 May 2009.

To cite this article: Martin Allor (1988) Relocating the site of the audience, Critical Studies in
Mass Communication, 5:3, 217-233, DOI: 10.1080/15295038809366704

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 CSMC
Critical Studies in Mass Communication

Relocating the Site of the Audience

MARTIN ALLOR

—This essay analyzes the status of the audience as a theoretical construct. It

discusses the contributions and liabilities of recent critical revisions of models of
audience drawn from political economy, post-structuralism, feminist reader-response
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 01:34 04 January 2015

criticism, cultural studies, and postmodernism. The essay argues against the useful-
ness of a unified conception of audience effects. Finally, it develops an epistemological
framework for reconstructive theorizations of the concrete structures and practices
studied as audience issues. [A critical exchange follows the essay.]

HE QUESTION of the audience from its parent discourses, structural

T remains at the center of mass com-
munication research, not only as a core of
functionalism and social psychology.
The field continues to oscillate, within
research questions but as an underlying these traditions, between the voluntarism
theoretical problematic. The elaboration of a conception of the full human subject
of the questions of the effects tradition in as agent of meaning making and the
uses and gratifications, agenda setting, determinism of a conception of the indi-
and cultivation analysis offers the most vidual as the object of socialization pro-
immediate examples of the continued cesses.
line of questioning within the dominant Both of these conceptions of the indi-
paradigm. But the concept of audience is vidual/social relationship have tended to
more importantly the underpinning prop bracket out analysis of the mediations
for the analysis of the social impact of between the practices of individuals and
mass communication in general. The social rules, codes, and ideologies. Oper-
concept of audience has come to cover the ating within the terms of either socializa-
space of the individual/social distinction tion or learning theory, traditional
in locating the site of the impact of the audience research has reproduced a sim-
media. As a general theoretical pivot ple causal model that infers either the
point, it has allowed the field to extend power of the media or of the individual
the assumptions about the place of the from media content or self-attribution
individual within the social formation data (Slack & Allor, 1983).1 The more
general power of this conception of the
audience is evinced by the moral panics
Mr. Allor is Assistant Professor of Communi- that have located the debates over the
cation Studies, Concordia University, Mon- social impacts of media at the site of the
treal. He thanks Lawrence Grossberg, Jen-
nifer Daryl Slack, Ellen Wartella, and espe-
individual in front of the machine. From
cially Elspeth Probyn for critical comments panic over the impact of the movies that
on earlier drafts of this essay. led to the Payne Fund studies in the late

Critical Studies in Mass Communication Copyright 1988, SCA

5 (1988), 217-233
 218
AUDIENCE THEORY
1920s to the recent examples of research
on the effects of video games, it has been
this individual that has centered debate.
Media have served as the anchor point
of the twentieth century question of how
it is that the individual becomes social.
The audience as the site of research and
debate is not simply the extension of the
subject of social psychology. It is the
subject in question, our anxiety over our
dual status as agent and object located at
a specific site. The groups who have been
considered most at risk (children, wom-
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en, and the lesser educated) are symp-
tomatic of what the question poses and of
the underlying conception of the human
subject that has operated in the field: a
certain conception of the adult male.
Subjects not considered completely
"adult" have served as the model of
problematic audiences. Within this con-
ception of human subjectivity, the
human individual stands apart as an
autonomous unit separable from systems
of signification or social practices but
paradoxically functioning at different
moments of analysis as a faceless mem-
ber of a class of people or as the author of
his or her own sensibility. This underly-
ing unity of conception behind the oscil-
lation between determinism and volun-
tarism in traditional audience research is
symptomatic of the position of the subject
in the social sciences in general in the
twentieth century (Henriques, Hollo-
way, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine,
1984).
The nature of the mediations between
the individual and the social, and the
nature of the power relations that cir-
culate in that gap, also has been one of
the founding questions of the critical
human sciences. It is the question of the
nature of these mediations that has cen-
tered the critique of the mainstream
within critical studies. Stuart Hall
(1982; 1985) and Todd Gitlin (1978),
SEPTEMBER 1988
among others, have critiqued the ideo-
logical liabilities of the dominant para-
digm. Critical researchers, whether
operating from the grounds of political
economy, feminism, film theory, dis-
course analysis, psychoanalysis, cultural
studies, or postmodernism, have begun
their projects by critiquing the tradi-
tional conceptualizations of the audience.
These analyses have isolated a number
of liabilities in traditional approaches to
the question: theoretical humanism, the
oscillating pivot between voluntarism
and determinism, the lingering influence
of the methods of market research, and
linear logics of inquiry. These same crit-
ical traditions have developed alterna-
tive, if competing, approaches to the
question of the social impact of mass
communication and to the question of
audience.
My purpose here is theoretical clarifi-
cation. I consider the range of critical
discourses on the audience and analyze
the ways those discourses have reframed
the problematic of individual/social me-
diation. In addition, I consider the ways
that these critical approaches reproduce
many of the liabilities of traditional con-
ceptions of audience. I go on to argue
against the usefulness of a unified con-
cept of audience for understanding the
individual/social dichotomy and for ana-
lyzing the ideological and social effects of
the media and mass communicated dis-
courses. Finally, I suggest an epistemo-
logical framework for understanding
how the deconstruction of the concept of
audience can lead to a nonreductionist
, reconstruction of the research questions
of media studies. The goal, therefore, of
this theoretical clarification is a limited
one. On the one hand, I interrogate a
range of representative critical problem-
atics circulating around the figure of the
audience in terms of their analyses of the
mediation among individuals, texts, and

CSMC
the social formation. On the other hand,
I sketch out a position on the direction
for further analysis and theorizing that I
hope will lead to further debate.2
I begin with an epistemological guide-
post. In the 1857 introduction to Marx's
Grundrisse (1939/1973), there is a short
section on the method of political econo-
my. Marx makes a distinction between
something like apparent and concrete
theoretical conceptions, that is, between
the conceptions of totalities contained in
traditional political economy and in
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materialism. The example he uses is
population. Population seems to be a
concrete concept; it seems to have a mate-
rial referent, to identify a collective iden-
tity. But, for Marx (p. 101), population
is a "chaotic conception of the whole," an
already abstracted representation (vor-
stellung). Any attempt at analyzing the
social formation that begins with popu-
lation will confront the need to draw
finer distinctions (nation, regions,
classes) within the illusory totality. In
contrast, Marx argues that a concrete,
materialist conception of objects of
inquiry arises from the starting point of
the analysis of multiple determinations
such as nation, regions, and classes, not
global structures such as population. In
his own words, "The concrete is concrete
because it is the concentration of many
determinations, hence the unity of the
diverse" (p. 101). In materialist analysis,
then, a conception of a totality can only
be concrete if it comes as a result of
analysis, not as a starting point (Hall,
1974). In more contemporary theoretical
terms, this point suggests the need for a
deconstructive/reconstructive logic of in-
quiry to pry apart the condensations
contained in "chaotic" conceptions and
to articulate lines of analysis around
particular sites of intervention. The
audience, as it is used as a concept within
mass communication research, is just
219
ALLOR
such a chaotic conception of the whole.
As the site of the problematic of media-
tion between the individual conscious-
ness and the social sphere, it reproduces
the tradition of abstract conceptions of
totality that extend from population to
the public, the crowd, the mass, the
popular, and the subject.
In considering critical approaches to
the question of audience, I foreground
the moments these approaches isolate
concrete contradictions. More impor-
tantly, I suggest how, by taking the
abstract totality of audience (or similar
conceptions) as a starting point, these
critical approaches have tended to repro-
duce alternative abstractions that pivot
around single planes of contradiction,
such as gender, class, or subjectivity in
general, rather than multiple determina-
tions. Reducing inquiry to a single level
of analysis has both theoretical and polit-
ical costs. The theoretical cost is that the
analysis merely reproduces abstractions
borrowed from other disciplines. The
political cost is that the analysis limits
the possible forms of intervention.
In giving a brief résumé of a range of
critical approaches to audience, I focus
on several factors: the qualities of the
audience (and the human subject) that
they identify, the particular ways that
they position the audience in relation to
the social sphere, the model of social
power they employ, and the way that
they work to maintain the theoretical
space of the audience as an abstracted
totality. I consider, in turn, political
economy, post-structuralist film theory,
feminist reader-response criticism, cul-
tural studies, and postmodernism.3
POLITICAL ECONOMY
The main thrust of political-economic
analysis has been to shift attention away
from the question of individual effects to
 220
AUDIENCE THEORY
the circulation of communications as
commodities and to the question of the
market structure and state/corporate
power relations.4 The question of impact
on the individual has usually been in-
ferred within Marxist models of reifica-
tion and alienation. The political econ-
omy of communications, however, has
over the last decade directly addressed
the site of the audience in the debate
inaugurated by Dallas Smythe's article,
"Communications: Blindspot of Western
Marxism" (1977; see also Jhally, 1982;
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Murdock, 1978). From within the labor
theory of value, this approach concep-
tualizes the audience as the commodity
form of advertiser-supported media
because it is the audience's potential
attention that is sold to the advertiser.
The approach frames leisure time as
off-the-job work time that produces and
reproduces labor power:
The material reality under monopoly capi-
talism is that all non-sleeping time of most of
the population is work time. This work time
is devoted to the production of commodities-
in-general . . . and in the production and
reproduction of labour power. . . . Of off the
job work time, the largest single block is time
of the audiences which is sold to advertisers.
(Smythe,1977,p. 3)
Granting its most obvious limitation of
narrowing the question of audience to
advertiser-supported communication sit-
uations, this particular analysis, nev-
ertheless, has pointed out some of the key
ways that the audience, as a sedimented
concept, functions within the broadcast
industry (perhaps most cogently in its
analysis of the 24-hour rock video chan-
nels, where the distinction between pro-
gramming and advertising tends to dis-
solve). But, as a model of the relation of
the practices of audience to social power,
the approach is restricted by its function-
SEPTEMBER 1988
ing solely within a capital logic. It takes
the broadcast industry's positioning of
the audience as an adequate material
description and simply reverses its mean-
ing within the terms of Marxist labor
theory. The audience function, then,
becomes simply a subset of the alienation
effects already critiqued within the
Marxist category of commodity feti-
shism: television viewers are alienated
from their own acts of labor in conceiv-
ing of their "work" as leisure. Other
practices of the audience, such as the
reading of media texts, are subordinated
to the global analysis of labor power.
The political liability of this theoreti-
cal restriction is even clearer in recent
elaborations. Sut Jhally and Bill Livant
(1984; 1987) extend the argument
directly to the question of the production
of surplus value and to the nature of
watching as a productive practice. They
(1984, p. 22) argue more rigorously
within Marxist labor theory and attempt
to offer an audience-centered account of
commodity production within capitalist
media by conceptualizing "watching
time" as productive labor: "Just as
workers sell labour power to capitalists
so audiences sell watching power to
media owners; and just as the use value
of labour power is labour, so the use
value of watching power is watching, the
capacity to watch." In this view, the
social practices of television viewing,
normally thought of as a form of con-
sumption, are directly productive of val-
ue. The practices of watching either
produce necessary value or surplus val-
ue: "In programmes, audiences create
meanings for themselves while in adver-
tising audiences create meaning for capi-
tal" (Jhally & Livant, 1984, p. 36). The
argument condenses corporate and rep-
resentational practices with the interpre-
tive practices of television viewers. The
 221

CSMC ALLOR

audience, here, functions as an abstract their conditions of existence? Providing a

representation of productive labor prac- metapsychological answer to this ques-
tices that allows for the making of mean- tion involves a condensation of psychoan-
ing consonant with capital formation. alytic accounts of primary identification
The argument, for example, fails to con- processes and the practices of the
sider that meanings for oneself and audience in watching films. For exam-
meanings for capital could be constructed ple, Christian Metz (1982, p. 49) props
by viewers in both programs and adver- his account of the cinematic signifier and
tisements. its positioning effects on a phenomeno-
The political liability of this position logical privileging of the act of looking:
is in its theoretical subordination of "The spectator identifies with himself,
questions of consciousness and human with himself as a pure act of perception
subjectivity to the analysis of commodity (as wakefulness, alertness): as the condi-
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relations. In attempting to link the tion of possibility of the perceived and

nature of the audience to the questions hence as a kind of transcendental subject,
and levels of abstraction of Marxist which comes before every there is."
political economy, the approach ignores From the ground of this psychoana-
viewing practices and other levels of lytic account of primary identification,
determination. The abstract totality "au- post-structuralist film theory developed
dience," then, merely is made cotermi- a sophisticated account of the discursive
nous with another totality "labor," and production of secondary identifications.
the critique of the conditions of audience Within this approach, the audience
membership is epochal: The develop- member becomes the spectator within
ment of the mass media represents the the text, filling subject positions within
continued material appropriation of particular discursive practices. In the
human activity, the expansion of the moment of "high" Screen theory, the
domain of capital. textual forms of dominant media systems
(e.g., the classical continuity editing sys-
tem) were related to psychoanalytic
accounts of the construction of ways of
POST-STRUCTURALIST seeing and forms of investment (feti-
FILM THEORY shism, scopophilia). In focusing on the
The materialist approach to the processes of subject formation, film the-
audience within film theory over the last ory displaced the problem of audience
decade has drawn upon different theo- activity and effects (and questions of the
retical sources, particularly the decenter- social formation) onto the level of dis-
ing of the subject within structural course. The spectator was a construction
Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. of the text/in the text:
Post-structuralist film theory has dis-
placed the question of ideological effects What moves in film finally, is the spectator
and the nature of the individual/social immobile in front of the screen. Film is the
regulation of that movement, the individual
relationship onto the discursive plane. Its as subject held in a shifting and placing of
questioning has been directly epistemo- desire, energy, contradiction, in a perpetual
logical and ideological: How is it that the retotalization of the imaginary (the set scene
cinematic and televisual texts position of image and subject). This is the investment
viewers in relationships of knowledge to of film in narrativization; and crucially for a
 222
AUDIENCE THEORY
coherent space, the unity of place and vision.
(Heath, 1981, p. 107)
By approaching the practices of the spec-
tator through the generalized question of
the subject and the "suturing" opera-
tions through which film stitched view-
ers into passive forms of interpretation,
Lacanian film theory rewrote the
audience as the subject strictly within the
terms of its metapsychological problem-
atic. The question of the social effectivity
of viewing was repositioned within an
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analysis of the necessary precursor to
sociality, subjectivity. This problematic
conceptualizes social power as the repro-
duction of forms of interpellation and
investment. But the rigor of the posi-
tion's account of the inscribed relations
between textual systems and their
potential viewers has tended to preclude
the integration of any other level of
analysis.
The more recent revisions of this
problematic have begun to deal with the
problem of the dichotomy between the
discursively constructed subjectivity of
texts and the actual practices of viewers.
Their main focus, however, has been to
construct more detailed accounts of par-
ticular textual systems (Kuhn, 1985) and
to assume homologies between particular
forms of address and socially occurring
ideological structures. In an account of
MTV, for example, E. Ann Kaplan
(1986, p. 12) argues that "MTV con-
structs a decentered, a-historical model
spectator, which coincides with the cul-
tural formations of contemporary teen-
agers who appear to live in a timeless but
implicitly 'futurized' present." As the
position has developed, then, the central
condensation of audience/spectator/
suture has continued as the central
abstraction and framing problematic.
The analysis of audience remains largely
a discursive operation.
SEPTEMBER 1988
FEMINIST CRITICISM
AND THE READER
North American literary criticism has
undergone a series of transformations
over the last 20 years.5 The literary
canon has been broadened and has
become less important, and the method-
ological hegemony of the formalism of
New Criticism has eroded. The reasons
for these shifts are complex, but among
the most important has been the chal-
lenge of feminism. Within their political
moment, different feminisms have inter-
vened to disrupt the status quo within
the academy. As a series of theoretical
accounts of the effectivity of gender
within the social formation, feminism
has challenged the received problematics
of all the human sciences. And, as critical
practices, feminism has called into ques-
tion the role of literary criticism itself.
Among the feminist revisions within
literary criticism, the most significant
with regard to the question of audience
have been those that interrogate the rela-
tions between gender and reading.
Building from the assumptions and
methods of reader-response theory (Iser,
1978) and North American feminist psy-
chology (Gilligan, 1982), reader-
oriented feminist criticism has intro-
duced the "audience function" into
critical practice in two ways. First, in
critiquing the textual "maleness" of the
literary canon, it has extended critical
investigation to "feminine" genres
(melodrama, Gothic novels, the Harle-
quin romance). Second, in privileging
gender as the pivot point for the ques-
tioning of the reader's role in the effectiv-
ity of literature, it has offered the possi-
bility of grounding the universality of
ideal readers at a particular site of social
difference.
Feminist reader-response criticism,
then, has developed a broad problematic

CSMC
of gendered textual practices (modes of
address, represented experiences) and
gendered reading practices. It relates
critical readings of novels to gender-
ascribed interpretive schema. More sig-
nificantly, the position also develops
models for hermeneutic inquiry into
readers' interpretations. The position
employs social psychological research on
gender differentiated schema (i.e., infer-
ential structures, language styles [Craw-
ford & Chaffin, 1986]) within a phe-
nomenological model of reading. What
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emerges is a particular model of gen-
dered engagement with "the Other."
For example, Elizabeth Flynn (1986,
p. 268) utilizes a typology of reader/text
relations drawn from Georges Poulet:
The reader can resist the alien thought or
subject and so remain essentially unchanged
by the reading experience. In this case the
reader dominates the text. Or the reader can
allow the alien thought to become such a
powerful presence that the self is replaced by
the other and so effaced. In this case the text
dominates the reader.... A third possibility,
however, is that self and other, reader and
text, interact in such a way that the reader
learns from the experience without losing
critical distance; reader and text interact
with a degree of mutuality.
Flynn utilizes these ideal types of read-
er/other relations to frame an inquiry
into gender differences in reading litera-
ture. Feminine readings, she suggests,
rarely dominate the text but more often
involve empathetic identification with
characters and represented experiences
or negotiate a critical distance that can
only come after identification. She
argues that the attributes of feminine
psychology ("sensitivity to emotional
nuance" and "the ability to empathize
with and yet judge" [p. 286]) are coter-
minous with those of accomplished liter-
ary readers. The reader, then, emerges
223
ALLOR
in this account as a problematic conden-
sation of a gendered interpretive compe-
tence, an ideal phenomenological herme-
neutic critic, and life experiences within
patriarchal social formations.
The strengths and liabilities of a con-
densed model of text/reader relationship
are even clearer in work that focuses
more specifically on the social consump-
tion of women's genres. Tania Modles-
ki's work (1982) draws on a psychoana-
lytic theory and sociological accounts of
women's practice to provide an analysis
of the pleasure of reading popular wom-
en's narratives. "The formal properties
of daytime television thus accord closely
with the rhythms of women's work in the
home. Individual soap operas as well as
the flow of various programs and com-
mercials tend to make repetition, inter-
ruption, and distraction pleasurable" (p.
102). Modleski finds homology among
form of life, narrative structure, psychi-
cal structure, and interpretive pleasure.
Reading women's narratives is simulta-
neously pleasure and capture within
patriarchal representations. Modleski
makes sense of the popular genres by
reading texts and social practices as mir-
roring structures. While she argues
against phenomenological models of
response (its positive political interven-
tion), real readers are less a presence in
the analysis than a structuring absence.
The reader in this account is the form of
investment capable of articulating par-
ticular forms of narrative representation
and gendered social practices. Reading
as psychic work simultaneously produces
passivity and pleasure. Power invests the
site of the audience in the production of
colonized fantasies.
Janice Radway's more elaborated
analysis of the practice of reading
romance fiction (1984) presents the same
oscillation between the critic's analysis of
the genre's textual features and the fans'
 224
AUDIENCE THEORY
interpretations. Radway's reading of her
respondents' talk frames consumption as
both escape and instruction, a symbolic
response to lived contradictions:
Romantic escape is, therefore, a temporary
but literal denial of the demands that women
recognize as an integral part of their roles as
nurturing wives and mothers. It is also a
figurative journey to a Utopian state of total
receptiveness where the reader, as a result of
her identification with the heroine, feels her-
self the object of someone else's attention and
solicitude, (p. 97)
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Radway, however, quickly returns to the
textual questions of romance, construct-
ing an idealization of her readers in
order to ask how Harlequin romance
responds to, frames, and ultimately
restrains the consequences of patriarchy:
The reader thus engages in an activity that
shores up her own sense of her abilities, but
she also creates a simulacrum of her limited
social world within a more glamorous fiction.
She therefore justifies as natural the very
conditions and their emotional consequences
to which her reading activity is a response,
(p. 214)
Radway reads her respondents within
the terms of oppositions similar to Mod-
leski's. The romance readers' talk is a
manifest symptom of latent ideological
work. The activity of reading is both
strategic negotiation (escape and instruc-
tion) on the psychological level and ulti-
mate incorporation at the social level.
The "audience" that emerges in these
feminist critical engagements is less one
of gendered readers than gendered read-
ings. Even in work that includes inter-
views with readers, the practice of criti-
cism privileges text and context over the
reader. The critic interprets from the
grounds of (and in relation to) two dis-
cursive fields: literary criticism and femi-
nist political analysis. The hermeneutic
circle runs from critic to the genre to the
SEPTEMBER 1988
work the genre does for the social forma-
tion and back again.
While this feminist criticism has
placed real women's readings of mass
produced narratives in question, it has
not so far called into question the cer-
tainty of its own readings by placing
them in dialogue with the readers' inter-
pretations. The position does not fully
investigate the ways in which the prac-
tice of reading women's popular narra-
tives "works" in relation to other prac-
tices or other planes of determination
such as age, race, sexual orientation, and
class. Rather, the critical act judges the
ideological work the texts do for the
patriarchal context and interrogates
women's readings for Utopian moments
within the capturing discourse. The sub-
ject of these reading practices, then, is the
abstract and general female psyche ana-
lyzed as the construction of patriarchy.
The "gendered reading" of the audience
functions as the emancipatory space
between sociality and textuality.
CULTURAL STUDIES
The critical approach that has most
directly taken up the question of the
audience has been cultural studies. At
face value, the greatest strength of this
media studies work has been to attempt
to relate the question of audience inter-
pretation (decoding) to several levels of
determination. Seeking to directly link
discursive, textual, and social processes,
cultural studies recentered the question
of audience and power at the site of
grounded interpretive practices:
The audience must be conceived of as com-
posed of clusters of socially situated individ-
ual readers, whose individual readings will
be framed by shared cultural formations and
practices pre-existant to the individual:
shared "orientations" which will in turn be
determined by factors derived from the objec-
 225

CSMC ALLOR

tive position of the individual in the class nexus of class and educational/occupa-
structure. These objective factors must be tional determinations.
seen as setting parameters to individual The levels of determination brought to
experience, although not "determining" con- bear on the site of audience within cul-
sciousness in a mechanistic way; people tural studies are then somewhat less
understand their situation and react to it complex than they first appear. Class,
through the level of subcultures and meaning
systems. (Morley, 1980, p. 15) discursive competencies, and the prac-
tices of decoding were investigated in
This subcultural approach to the relation to only one axis of power: the
audience seems to have the advantage, at reproduction of dominant representa-
first glance, of theorizing both the dis- tions of the social formation.
cursive and the social structural determi- More recent work on the audience
nations on individual decoding. It within cultural studies has attempted to
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approached social texts (Morley, 1980; overcome the condensations contained in

1981) within a conception of limited the decoding model by situating levels of
polysemy. The model of "preferred read- determination. The most predominant
ings" and structures of decodings (domi- work returns to a discursive or textual
nant, negotiated, and oppositional) level of analysis. Ien Ang's analysis of
framed a way of investigating the rela- Dallas fans' letters in the Netherlands
tionships among discursive structures, (1985) pushes toward a textual analysis
social location, and positioned interpre- of television melodrama and its construc-
tive practies. Upon closer examination, tion of a "tragic structure of feeling" as
however, this investigation of the prac- an ideological form. John Fiske's discus-
tice of audience members can be seen to sion of television's popularity (1986)
be limited by the larger theoretical prob- centers on a semiotic analysis of the
lematic within which it has been polysemy of particular texts. And Tony
framed. Bennett (1986), in developing a model of
The media studies work inaugurated "reading formations," has extended the
at the Centre for Contemporary Cul- work on audience as a discursive compe-
tural Studies should be seen as a subset tence.
of the center's larger questioning of the Perhaps more interesting is recent
role and functions of ideology and hege- work that has focused on specific sites as
mony in "democratic" social formations. articulations of multiple determinations.
That is to say that the encoding/decod- David Morley's most recent work (1986)
ing model that framed the audience isolates the family as a social contextuali-
research within cultural studies placed zation of decoding and analyzes televi-
the question of the audience firmly sion viewing as a strategic instrumental-
within the ambit of the sociological pull ity within family processes. Thus
of the problematic of hegemony. The Morley turns from the decoding model
kinds of decodings that were investigated of his earlier studies to a more situated
originally were limited in two ways. analysis of the concrete determinations
First, the studies focused on news and circulating in and between television
public affairs programs, semiotic systems practices and family processes. Similar-
most obviously engaged in the represen- ly, Valerie Walkerdine (1986), drawing
tation of the social order. Second, the upon a more clinical model of psycho-
subcultural groups studied fit quite analysis than Screen theory, traces the
mechanically into positions located at the ways in which the practice of home video
 226
AUDIENCE THEORY
watching interpenetrates with preexist-
ing familial positionings. Finally, An-
gela McRobbie (1984) considers dance
as a site of consumption/production, a
move that enlarges the range of audience
activity studied from a concern with "ac-
tive" electronic media reception and the
decoding of meanings:
Dance evokes fantasy because it sets in
motion a dual relationship projecting both
internally towards the self and externally
towards the "other"; which is to say that
dance as a leisure activity connects desires for
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the self with those for somebody else. It
articulates adolescence and girlhood with
feminity and female sexuality and it does this
by and through the body. (p. 144)
In these most recent analyses of the
audience, cultural studies has moved
away from the liabilities of the class/
ideological condensations of the decoding
model. These studies focus on the spe-
cific locations where people "consume"
video and broaden the question of the
audience to the articulations between
leisure practice and identities. The artic-
ulations among class, gender, subcul-
tures, reading formations, fantasy, iden-
tity, and ideology become the ground of
questioning rather than the reproductive
logic of decodings that necessarily make
meanings for the dominant formation.
Generative abstractions replace con-
densed abstractions.
POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism, the most recent devel-
opment within critical discourses on the
media, offers both a dizzying concatena-
tion of sites and levels of analysis and a
new direction into the question of the
individual/social relationship. Postmod-
ernist theory circulates in a wide variety
of disciplines, but it has been the work of
Jean Baudrillard that has led to a radical
rewriting of the media/audience rela-
SEPTEMBER 1988
tionship.6 Baudrillard's project involves
the destruction of sociological models of
the reproduction of the social formation.
He challenges the veracity, indeed the
referentiality, of socialization models
that describe the relation of the individ-
ual to the social field of norms or
ideology.
For Baudrillard, the social exists as a
global plane of effectivity, an open sys-
tem of systems entailing all action and all
structures. Within this social field, the
collective action of individuals is regu-
lated neither by law nor by rationality
but by information flows as stimulation
(simulation). The increasing circulation
of signs, media, and representational sys-
tems over the last century collapsed the
real into its simulated representations.
Since knowledge of one's conditions of
existence depends on a closed circuit of
signs about signs, no grounds remain for
the individual to recognize collective
identities (class, gender) around which
"authentic" action might take place.
This version of postmodernism chal-
lenges not only traditional socialization
models, it refuses any notion of media-
tion between the individual and the
social, between signification and the real.
This collapse of the subject into the social
and of the real (and representation) into
simulacra predicates dual axes for the
play of power: the media and the mass.
The aggregate of individuals absorbed
into the electronic media function in
Baudrillard's variant of postmodernism
as the locus of (and metaphor for) social
action that is no longer based on meaning
or identity. The audience as the mass is
simultaneously the object (the end point)
of simulations and the disinterested sub-
ject of the circulation (the enactment) of
indifferent social action:
Quite different is the refusal of socialization
which comes from the mass [the audience];

CSMC
from an innumerable, unnamable and anon-
ymous group, whose strength comes from its
very destruction and inertia. Thus, in the
case of the media, traditional resistance con-
sists of reinterpreting messages according to
the group's own code and for its own ends.
The masses, on the contrary, accept every-
thing and redirect everything en bloc into the
spectacular, without requiring any other
code, without requiring any meaning, ulti-
mately without resistance, but making every-
thing slide into an indeterminate sphere
which is not even that of non-sense, but that
of overall manipulation/fascination.
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(Baudrillard, 1983, pp. 43-44)
This audience functions as the central
pivot point for postmodernism's destruc-
tion of the subject and the social. Bau-
drillard locates power at the site of the
disinterested viewing of the mass. In the
absence of collective identity, resistance
takes the form of "hyperconformity": the
mass resists in the "fatal" strategy of the
recycling of signs.
The "mass" in postmodernism func-
tions as a term that denies the possibility
of any collective representation of indi-
viduals and as an immense theoretical
condensation that allows the theorist to
speak at the same time (and in the same
way) of individual psychology, class
action, and social codings. Baudrillard's
"mass" has been incorporated into
audience analysis in two key ways. The
first has been in the elaboration of the
general model of the simulation of the
masses in the media, particularly televi-
sion. The second has been in the analysis
of new cinematic or televisual forms in
relation to their simulation affects on
implied viewers. In developing the first
tactic, Arthur Kroker (1985, p. 40) has
argued:
The audience is constituted on the basis of
"its relation to the object and its reaction to
it"; the audience is nothing more than a
"serial unity" ("beings outside themselves in
227
ALLOR
the passive unity of the object"); membership
in the TV audience is always only on the
basis of "alterity" or "exterior separation";
. . . "abstract sociality" is the false sociality of
a TV audience which as an empty, serial
unity is experienced as a negative totality.
The television audience becomes in this
account the ideal specification of the
mass. Outside any social connection or
personal embodiment, it becomes the
perfect metaphor for a model of media
power that echoes the totalizing vision of
the Frankfurt School's critique. In devel-
oping the second tactic, recent film and
television analysis focuses on purely tex-
tual features, such as pastiche, genre
blending, and self-referentiality, as rep-
resenting new forms of sociality. Texts as
different as Miami Vice and Pepsi com-
mercials or Happy Days and Jane Fon-
da's Workout are seen as foregrounding
forms of identification that have more to
do with simulation effects than ideology.
In a manner similar to Screen theory,
these postmodernist critiques tend to
condense conceptualizations of the au-
dience with the simulating positions that
are interpreted in these texts (e.g.,
Morse, 1987-1988; Polan, 1986).
The conception of mass in postmod-
ernism opens up the question of the
effectivity of the audience/text relation-
ship outside of the consideration of prac-
tices of making meaning. Power in this
model is centered on relations of affect
rather than ideological reception. This
opening, however, has been sealed off by
lines of inquiry that condense the
audience/mass, on the one hand, with an
account of the death of the social and, on
the other, with accounts of differences in
contemporary discursive forms. (One of
the paradoxes of postmodernism is that,
while it begins with a critique of repre-
sentation, its analytic practice is even
more exclusively textual than that of
post-structuralism.) Both of these lines
 228
AUDIENCE THEORY
of inquiry evacuate the site of audience
in its specificity in favor of general theo-
retic accounts of sociality and textuality
in the late twentieth century. In rejecting
the problematic at the heart of audience
research (effects as mediating), postmod-
ernism points out absurdly, as it were,
the impossibility of constructing a single
analysis of audience. By pushing the
concept of an abstracted totality to its
logical extreme, postmodernism signals
the necessity of partial reconstructions of
both the individual and the social as
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levels of abstraction in media studies.
CONCLUSION
The concrete determinations isolated
by these critical approaches to the
audience function point, in their very
heterogeneity, to the absurdity of trying
to use the question of the audience alone
to cover the social processes of mediation
and social power within communication
studies. The range of levels of analysis
and effectivity represented by these
approaches should suggest the heteroge-
neous planes upon which "audience"
effects occur. It is the specificity of these
determinations that needs to be investi-
gated further: the affective alliances
drawn through the pleasure of media
consumption, the gendering of interpre-
tation, the practices of decoding within
cultural forms, the subject positions
located within discursive spaces, and the
positioning of the audience within the
capital logic of the commodity and the
production practices of the networks.
More importantly, we need to (recon-
struct the lines of articulation among
these determinations, in all their contra-
dictions.
The audience exists nowhere; it inha-
bits no real space, only positions within
analytic discourses. The institutions,
individuals, and practices that provoke
SEPTEMBER 1988
the questions of the subject as social are
only open to our gaze through the lenses
of particular problematics. Within the
range of critical approaches, this social
subject has taken on a variety of names:
labor, the subject in the text, the gen-
dered reader, subculture, the mass. The
place of the audience is thus multiple,
located within the social processes of
labor power, interpellation, gendered
embodiment, decoding, and simulation,
among others.
Within their various problematics of
the audience, the approaches construct
condensed relations between their mod-
els of the individual and singular articu-
lations of social power. Each approach in
its own way has tended to duplicate the
linearity of the arguments of the effects
tradition. Each position proclaims (in its
differences) a specific social subject in
relation to a mediated sociality. Each
position specifies the "audience func-
tion" as a single plane of determinitive
relations between the individual and the
social.
Within the political and analytic
insights of these accounts, there remains
an abstracted reification of the individual
in front of the machine. Each position, in
its account of the audience, begins with
the question of what individuals do with
texts or with an analysis of the work
textuality does on the individual. This
naive epistemological realism ("We all
know that audiences are real individu-
als.") duplicates the liabilities that the
concept of population posed for political
economy. It elides the ways in which the
question of power through mediation
necessitates the analysis of determina-
tions that cut across the practices of
incorporation in message systems.
If we, as a discipline, are going to
move forward on this issue, the central
problematic of the field, we first have to
deconstruct the "audience's" unity into

CSMC
constituent and constituting moments.
The project of reconstructing the analy-
sis of social mediation and mass commu-
nication research necessitates this move-
ment between isolatable levels of
abstraction. This kind of construction of
the unity of the diverse would constitute
a new mode of work and the beginning at
least of a different model of the relation
between analysis and intervention
within the human sciences.
This analytic reconstruction of the
determinations that condense around
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mediation and the social subject will fail,
however, if it does not then return to a
reconstructive engagement with individ-
uals in the quotidian. Each of the critical
approaches considered here begins with
a rejection of both the voluntarist prob-
lematic of the full human subject and the
determinist problematic of false con-
sciousness. Each begins with an analysis
of one form, or more, of the mediations
between the individual and the social.
But each, in its analysis, moves away
from a consideration of individuated
social practices in favor of a more
detailed analysis of another scene. Even
the most ethnographic of accounts (i.e.,
Morley, Radway) move from the prac-
tice of their respondents into textual/
ideological analyses.
What is involved in such textualized
approaches to the audience is a certain
form of disavowal:
What is disavowed . . . is the complex rela-
tion of "intellectuals" to "the masses": "our"
project of analyzing "them" is itself one of
the regulative practices which produce our
subjectivity as well as theirs.... Our fantasy
investment often seems to consist in believing
that we can "make them see" or that we can
see or speak for them. If we do assume that,
then we continue to dismiss fantasy and the
Imaginary as snares and delusions. We fail
to acknowledge how the insistent demand to
see through ideology colludes in the process
229
ALLOR
of intellectualizing bodily and other plea-
sures. (Walkerdine, 1986, p. 195)
Put in other terms, analyses of "audience
effects" that operate only from the
ground of the deconstruction of the cer-
tainty of the subject and meaning evac-
uate the materiality of individuality as
they reify it. In order to take the social
subject seriously, the heterogeneous
practices that frame individuated en-
gagements with texts, discourses, and
ideologies need to be taken into account.
To continue in failing to do so condemns
us to addressing the audience in the
conditional mode, as if it took up un-
problematically the positions analysis
prescribes for it.
A reconstructive approach to theory
building, and to research practices,
begins with a rejection of both epistemo-
logical realism and relativism. It concep-
tualizes the role of analytic abstractions
strategically, as conditional frameworks
that enable the investigation of concrete
determinations and that facilitate their
articulation with other sites of analysis
and intervention. Critical approaches to
mass communication do not function as
normal science. The instability of objects
of analysis has tended to pull theory and
research into either a form of disciplin-
ary borrowing (phenomenological social
theory and participant observation) or
into a practice of convergent theory con-
struction (textual analysis and psycho-
analysis, political economy and television
criticism). These practices of borrowing
and convergence have led to most of the
productive new areas within the field. At
the same time, however, they have led
to the premature closure of levels of
analysis.
A reconstructive approach to theory
and research around the questions stim-
ulated by the abstraction "audience"
would reject a simple realism concerning
 230
AUDIENCE THEORY SEPTEMBER 1988

its object of inquiry. It would recognize articulation of the concepts of cultural

that behind the abstraction there are
different (at times incommensurate)
questions concerning the relations
among individuals, texts, practices, so-
cial organization, and social power.
Moreover, it would reject both borrow-
ing and convergence as sufficient
approaches to the elaboration of theoreti-
cal concepts or research protocols.
Reconstruction is a conjunctural practice
in the sense that it seeks to specify and
articulate different research questions in
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studies, discourse theory, and postmod-
ernism. I believe that the most "recon-
structive" work I have discussed, that of
Grossberg (see note #6) and Walkerdine,
interrogates the relationships among
individuals, social practices, and dis-
course in this strategic manner. They do
not privilege their concepts as stable
truths, and they attempt to move
between the specificity of precise objects
of inquiry (affective alliances, television,
and family process) and the specificity of

open tension. Unlike the various heterogeneous theoretical problematics.

approaches I have discussed, it does not
seek to subsume differences under the
rubric of a single conceptualization.
My concerns in this essay are less with
revealing truth or error than in specifica-
tion. Likewise, I am not offering a true
or overarching "field theory" of audience
that integrates the analysis of labor pow-
er, interpellation, socialization, engen-
dering, resistance, or simulation. My
own work on audience questions is
within the cultural studies problematic.
It analyzes the relations between textual
systems and discursive articulations of
collective identities. But I do not concep-
tualize this work as an answer to the
question of audience. I frame it as an
inquiry into the discursive construction
of social identities and as a theoretical
The openness of this approach to
research and theory construction will
allow us to avoid both the theoreticism of
abstract conceptions of audience and the
naive realism of a great deal of entho-
graphic research into individual au-
dience member practices. The rewriting
of the site(s) of audience, then, will
necessitate our commitment to a collec-
tive engagement with each other's work.
Looking through both a microscope and
a telescope at the same moment is a
difficult task. But the Habilites contained
in our continued monocular investiga-
tions of the ways in which the subject
becomes social (of the individual's
appropriation of pleasure and meaning)
present us with difficulties of a different
order. D

NOTES
1
It is symptomatic of the linearity of the epistemology of traditional approaches to audience that
recent methodological discussions tend to reduce the problem to one of qualitative/quantitative
rapproachment or of a simple convergence between "textual" and "empirical" approaches (see Jensen,
1987).
2
A more extensive elaboration of the epistemological and political tenets of a reconstructive approach
to these issues will be found in my forthcoming book, In Private Practices: Rethinking Audience (in
press). For a similar epistemological questioning of concepts within political analysis, see Schwartz and
Mercer (1981).
3
This critical survey is a strategic one in the sense that it is meant to be a signpost, across theoretical
problematics, to the liabilities inherent in the kind of analytic closure that arises from abstract
conceptualizations of objects of inquiry. The examples discussed are not exhaustive of the range of
positions in play: they are representative of a wider practice of theorizing. Moreover, none of the
 231

CSMC ALLOR

positions is exhaustively analyzed. T h e positions themselves are not mutually exclusive. Feminist theory
is a major presence in all of the domains discussed. There is a good deal of overlap among the models of
textuality contained in film theory, cultural studies, and postmodernism. Finally, it should be clear that
my purpose is not to adjudicate the truth or falsity of the various concepts at hand. Rather, in evaluating
the strengths and liabilities of each conception of audience, I hope to engage with others in the process of
continuing to theorize. T h e order of presentation of positions thus reflects my own theoretical
commitments within cultural studies and the current debates over the status of postmodernism.
4
For a discussion of the general contribution of political economy to communication, see Garnham
(1986).
5
It should be clear from this discussion that feminist contributions to the critical analysis of audience
cut across the fields of film theory and cultural studies and are not limited to the reader-response
approach. In any case, the works discussed in this section are not pure examples of reader-response
criticism. They could be more properly described as feminist engagements with the practice of textually
based analysis of the impacts of ideologies.
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6
It is of course misleading to privilege Baudrillard's position as the major problematic within
postmodernist accounts of audience functions. Because the term "postmodernism" labels a contradictory
spectrum of positions, its articulations are complicated and beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless,
I think it is inarguable that the move away from questions of representation and decoding ideally
expressed in Baudrillard's work has functioned as a kind of master code for other, more synthetic,
postmodernist analyses of audience. See Grossberg (1987) for an approach that works through both
cultural studies and postmodernism.

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