TV: Battleground of Representation.

(Part 6)

It is fine to admit that;

But it is very hard to admit that in institutions is it more than one person (mostly) making decisions on behalf of still more people, and that, crucially, a decision must finally be reached. This pragmatic understanding of management practices is not part of the normal ambit of the cultural theorist but they would do well to accommodate it.

For example we could reverse the situation and, in a hypothetical world, put Ang and Hartley in control, using their 'superior' knowledge to take into account not just the 'multiplicity of audiences' but also the "complexity and dynamism of the social, cultural, psychological, political and historical activities" (Ang p22) of audiences. For Hartley the battle is already won with the "radical" SBS here to save the day (p200). This idealised, imagined territory would be free from the imperatives of profit, ratings and by implication, audiences Here we would end up with Ang's foregrounding of abstract and "immaterial" goals in public service broadcasting.

This is why Ang can support public service broadcasters whose earlier ignorance of audience measurement in a purer and less complicated past seems so attractive and becomes a blessing in disguise. Her complaint is that now this TV Eden is being corrupted by base commercial instincts that are "inadequate as a form of cultural and philosophical self-reflection" (Ang p152). Needless to say self-reflection would paralyse most decision-making processes or at the very least render them as inherently subjective judgments. Somewhere, though, these abstract concepts must materialise.

The institutional system, as analysed by its critics, and in some cases its supporters, aims as material goals (more money through higher ratings) using immaterial methods (i.e. Twitchell's statement that, "the key to understanding programming is that no one really knows what will work" - p222), to address the non-material needs (entertainment, information) of a non-material (irreducible, uncontrollable) audience. I appreciate that one can be an epistemological skeptic and quote Foucault - "A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence - even and perhaps above all, in all aspects of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately related to our bodies and to our everyday life" in the Introduction to Ang 1990, p1 - but the ineffable nature of 'truth' as a basis of knowledge has been a problem for science, not just social science, since the theory of relativity undermined the paradigmatic institutional edifice of A.J. Ayers' logical positivism. There is no clear and simple answer.

This lack of a clear-cut answer can induce paralysis fostered by a lack of knowable or usable certainty upon which a decision, any decision, can be based. This is too large a question to ever fully answer and so instrumentally science 'suspends disbelief' so that some qualified progress is possible. Hartley's impassioned plea is therefore wasted. What does it matter that:

So audiences are just a representation, an important point, but then again so is money (and languages, nations, etc.). The economic models as utilised in the social practices of institutions can easily work with such a representation of an audience as a salable commodity that supports or (re)produces another (an institutional dominance through economic success). The critic cannot simply decry the fact of representation. The critic too must adopt an instrumental position and proceed to the next and more important problem: it is the representation of power and those who consequently hold the power to represent, to choose and control the forms of the representation that best suits their interests, that is at stake. The critic has much more fertile ground for investigation into the dominance of institutional constructs if it is the way in which these constructs are used that are contested, finally delivering a more workable construct from their more useful proposed alternative.