Research development: from ‘decoding’ to viewing context

Chapter 5 Research development: from ‘decoding’ to viewing context

In this short chapter I attempt to outline the sense in which the Family Television project represents a continuation of the work on Nationwide. In retrospect, my own principal concerns in relation to the earlier work were, first, the difficulties arising from the fact that the Nationwide audience study was conducted by interviewing groups of people outside of their homes—i.e. not in their ‘natural’ domestic viewing context; second, the problems arising from the fact that the Nationwide study allowed too little space for the consideration of the contradictory nature of the ‘decodings’ which the same person may make of different types of programme material.

Let us take these problems one by one, starting with the question of the viewing context. This is a relatively simple matter in so far as in the Nationwide study I recruited groups of individuals for interview in the context either of colleges in which they were studying, or of other public locations where they came together, already constituted as groups. While this approach had the obvious advantage of giving me ease of access to groups of people who already functioned as groups, at the same time this strategy had the disadvantage that I was not talking to people about television in the context in which they normally watch it. The problem is that viewing television is done quite differently in the home as opposed to in public places. Indeed, in her article ‘The rules of viewing television in public places’, Lemish (1982) goes some way towards accounting for the very different ways in which television is watched outside the home— whether it is a husband watching a football game leaning on a couch which is for sale in a department store while his wife is shopping, or a woman who has lunch in a store cafeteria and watches her favourite soap opera on a set for sale in a shop, or the situation of travellers watching a news programme in the lobby in an airport. All these are quite different contexts for watching television, and the way in which it is viewed in these contexts will be quite different from the way in which it is viewed in the home. My own interests have increasingly come to focus on the how of television watching—in the sense of understanding how the process of television viewing is done as an activity. This is to prioritize the understanding of the process of television viewing (the activity itself) over the understanding of particular responses to particular types of programme material

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(the level at which the Nationwide audience study is pitched). It is for this reason that, in the Family Television project, the decision was taken to interview families, as family groups, in their own homes—so as to get a better understanding of the ways in which television is watched in its ‘natural’ domestic context. I would wish to argue that this is the necessary framework within which we must place our understanding of the particularity of individual responses to different types of programming.

Regarding the second problem, that of the contradictory nature of responses which individuals may make to different types of programmes, my concerns are the following. In the Nationwide audience study, parallel to the sense in which the particular, empirically observable groups in the survey are to some extent taken to ‘represent’ classes, there is a further sense in which the Nationwide study might be taken to imply that the responses of the individuals in the group—the particular readings which they generate from these programmes in this context—might be taken to ‘represent’ their fundamental, or essential, positions with respect to the totality of cultural practice. Thus, if a shop steward makes an oppositional reading of the Nationwide programme on the Budget, we might be tempted to assume that this is evidence that the other readings he will make of other programmes in other contexts will similarly display oppositional tendencies.

The question at issue here is clearly closely related to the question raised by all the debates about the positioning of the subject and the contradictory nature of our subject positions. In a review of Laclau and Mouffe’s book Hegemony and Social Strategy, Forgacs (1985) makes a number of interesting points. As Forgacs explains, Laclau and Mouffe are critical of the essentialist view that individuals and classes are coherent, unified subjects whose actions and consciousness reflect their underlying essence. Against this, Laclau and Mouffe maintain that human subjectivity, far from being the source of people’s actions and social relations, is the effect of the latter. They argue that it is only in our social relations that we assume ‘subject positions’, and that, moreover, our subjective identity is multifaceted and ‘overdetermined’. That is to say, it is built up out of many different relations which only partly overlap with one another. For instance, the same man may be simultaneously a productive worker, a trade union member, a supporter of a social democratic party, a consumer, a racist, a home-owner, a wife-beater and a Christian. Laclau and Mouffe argue that no one of these ‘subject positions’ can be logically derived from any of the others. No one of them is the ‘essence’ underlying the others.

My own view is that, while Laclau and Mouffe point to a very important problem, they perhaps go too far in the direction of disaggregating subjectivity— to a point where there is no coherence to be had anywhere. The fact that no one subject position can be logically derived from any of the others does not mean to say that no one of these subject positions is in fact more powerful or more generative than another. The fact that all these subject positions may be logically on the same plane does not mean to say that they are necessarily, empirically, all equivalent. It remains possible that some of these subject positions will be more

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powerful than others, and indeed some may be dependent on others. Thus I would not want to go overboard for a position which assumed that people will be likely to produce totally unconnected ‘readings’ or decodings of cultural objects in different contexts, in so far as this would be to assume that basic structural factors could be totally obliterated by contextual variations. However, we do need to tread carefully here.

Perhaps this issue can be made clearer if we take a hypothetical white, male, working-class trade unionist (such as one of those interviewed in the Nationwide project) and try to imagine how he might react to another Nationwide programme, this time in his home context. First, it would seem likely that in his domestic context, away from the supportive/regulative mores of the group of fellow shop stewards with whom he viewed the ‘news’ tape in the Nationwide interview, the intensity of his ‘oppositional’ readings will be likely to diminish. But let us also look at how he might respond to a few items in this hypothetical Nationwide on different topics. So, his working-class position has led him to be involved in trade union discourses and thus, despite the weaker frame supplied by the domestic context, he may well still produce an oppositional reading of the first item—on the latest round of redundancies. However, his working-class position has also tied him to a particular form of housing in the inner city, which has, since the war, been transformed before his eyes culturally by Asian immigrants, and the National Front comes closest to expressing his local chauvinist fears about the transformation of ‘his’ area; so he is inclined to racism when he hears on the news of street crimes by Black youths—that is to say, he is getting close to a dominant reading at this point. But then again his own experience of life in an inner-city area inclines him to believe the police are no angels. So when the next item on the programme turns out to be on the Brixton prison riots he produces a negotiated reading, suspicious both of Black youth and also of the police. By now he tires of Nationwide, and switches over to a situation comedy in which the man and woman occupy traditional positions, and his insertion within a workingclass culture of masculinity inclines him to make a dominant reading of the programme.

So, we have here a person making different readings of the same material in different contexts, and making different readings of material on different topics— oppositional in some areas, dominant in others. He is indeed a ‘subject crossed by

a number of discourses’, but it is he, the particular person (who represents a specific combination/intersection of such discourses), who makes the readings, not the discourses that ‘speak’ to him in any simple sense. Rather, they provide him with the cultural repertoire of resources with which he works.

This is to stress the point that the Althusserian drift of much early cultural studies work (and it is this that, evidently, underlies much of the Nationwide project) tends to reduce the decoder to the status of a mere personification of a given structure, ‘spoken’ by the discourses which cross the space of his subjectivity. However, it is not simply Althusser who is at issue here; much of the psychoanalytic work on the theory of ideology generates an equally passive notion

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of subjectivity, in which the subject is precisely ‘spoken’ by the discourses which constitute that person. I want to try to formulate a position from which we can see the person actively producing meanings from the restricted range of cultural resources to which his or her structural position has allowed access.

Crudely, this is to argue that there is a tendency in the Nationwide project to think of deep structures (for instance, class positions) as generating direct effects of the level of cultural practice. That is a tendency which I would want to qualify more now, examining in detail the different ways in which a given ‘deep structure’ works itself out in particular contexts, and trying to reinstate the notion of persons actively engaging in cultural practice. As Dyer puts the point, ‘one cannot conclude from a person’s class, race, gender, sexual orientation and so on, how she or he will read a given text (though these factors do indicate what cultural code she or he has access to). It is also a question of how she or he thinks and feels about living her/his social situation’ (Dyer 1977). Or, to paraphrase Sartre, it is a question of what we make of what history has made of us.

The further problem with the Nationwide project concerns the relative weight given in that research to understanding the responses which individuals make to types of material which can be shown to them, as against the weight given to understanding which types of material they might see as relevant to them in the first place. To understand this, we need to deal more directly with the relevance/ irrelevance and comprehension/incomprehension dimensions of interpretation and decoding, rather than being directly concerned with the acceptance or rejection of particular substantive ideological themes or propositions. This is, of course, the fundamental limitation of the encoding/decoding model as derived from Parkin’s work—in so far as this framework almost inevitably leads to a focus precisely on the question of whether a particular proposition is decoded in a dominant, negotiated or oppositional way. In retrospect, it seems to me that many of the responses which different groups in the Nationwide audience survey make to particular programme items need to be seen in the context of a perspective which would recognize that many of those groups would simply not have been watching the programme in the first place; or that if they had been in the room when the programme was on they would not have been watching this particular item in the programme. In short, what we have at the end of the Nationwide project is a series of responses to material which is not necessarily salient to the respondents. In effect we only have an account of their decodings of this material because it was artificially supplied to them. The more interesting question perhaps is precisely that of which kinds of material they would be interested in watching and which kinds of material they would not watch. Clearly the question of whether they would make a dominant, negotiated or oppositional reading of a certain type of programme material is less relevant than the question of whether or not they would choose to watch that type of material in the first place. In this connection Lindlof and Traudt quote from the work of Blumer, who provides a useful scenario for thinking about the interpretative procedures standing between the individual user and the mass media. As Blumer says,

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Their interests, their forms of receptiveness, indifference, or opposition, their sophistication or naivity, and their established scheme of definition set the way in which they initially receive the presentation. Usually there is a further intervening stage before the residual effects of the presentations are set in experience and behaviour. This additional stage is an interpretative process which, through analysis and critical judgement, reworks the presentations into different forms, before assimilation into experience. This process of interpretation in the individual is markedly guided by the stimulations, cues, suggestions, and definitions he secures from other people, particularly those constituting his so called ‘reference groups’. Account must be taken of the collective process of definition which, in different ways, shapes the manner in which individuals composing the ‘audience’ interpret and respond to the presentations given through the mass media.

(quoted in Lindlof and Traudt 1983:267) The point here, from my own perspective, lies in the relative weight to be given

to the remarks at the beginning of the quotation about forms of receptiveness or indifference. As I have already suggested, it may well be that this is the fundamental question to be explored, rather than the question of what interpretation people will make of a given type of programme material if they are specifically put in a room and asked to make an interpretation. It is this thread of enquiry that the Family Television project attempted to explore. And it is for this reason that the question of the pertinence or salience of different types of programme material to different family members or to members of families from different social backgrounds was prioritized in this research above the question of their tendencies to make oppositional, negotiated or dominant readings or interpretations of particular types of programme material.