THE SHORT HISTORY OF RECEPTION ANALYSIS

THE SHORT HISTORY OF RECEPTION ANALYSIS

The history of reception analysis is, indeed, short, but turbulent because of its profound theoretical and political implications. It is commonly acknowledged that the pathbreaking work of Dave Morley (1980), while emerging from the British cultural studies tradition, summed up a long prehistory that had pitted two conceptions of communication against each other. The first broadly conceived school is associated with the logos tradition of the humanities (see Chapter 1), and has approached texts as the locus of meaning to be extracted by (more or less) competent readers through a hermeneutic act. Though similar in certain respects to the ritual view of communication (Carey, 1989:18), work in this tradition has tended to focus its analysis around the text itself rather than its cultural uses. Most important, the tradition as applied to mass media has implied a view of media effects as acting directly and powerfully on audiences. The strong version of this position may be found in the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1977). Another influential version of text-centrism came from film theory, particularly that associated with the journal Screen in the 1970s, which, in assuming powerful, subconscious effects, collapsed the discursive subject anticipated by the text with the concrete social subject interpreting the text.

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The second research tradition that has been rearticulated by reception analysis is the so-called dominant paradigm (Gitlin, 1978) of social science research. Rejecting the transmission model of some early scholarship on effects, in part because the quantitative evidence suggested rather limited effects of media despite their manifest social significance (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955; Klapper, 1960), much work in this tradition had turned to a uses-and-gratifications approach, asking now what individual users do with the media rather than vice versa (Blumler and Katz, 1974; Rosengren et al., 1985). However, following this conceptual advance, most studies have remained within the dominant tradition, being functionalist in theory, quantitativist in methodology, and consensualist in politics.

The reconstructions of audience studies imply a new perspective on the social and discursive aspects of communication theory (Jensen, 1991). In response to the social-scientific tradition, reception analysis notes that any study of media experience and impact, whether quantitative or qualitative, must be based in a theory of representation, genre, and discourse that goes beyond the operationalization of semantic categories and scales. In response to humanistic textual studies, reception analysis suggests that both the audiences and contexts of mass communication need to be examined as socially specific, empirical objects of analysis. The common denominator for the dual social and discursive perspective on communication, then, becomes the social production of meaning. Much theoretical and empirical work has specified this perspective with reference to the asynchronous processes of encoding and decoding media content (Hall, 1973). At each point of the communicative process there is a scope of indetermination which allows for several potential meanings and impacts to be enacted. Also reception is a social act that serves to negotiate the definition of social reality in the context of broad cultural and communicative practices.

The empirical findings on reception so far imply an important theoretical distinction between potential and actualized meanings, concepts which have been developed in literary criticism and semiotics, not least within German reception aesthetics (for a survey, see Holub, 1984; also Suleiman and Crosman, 1980; Tompkins, 1980). The prevalence of readings that differ from the relatively few readings anticipated by media professionals or textual scholars, points both to the polysemy of media discourses and to the existence of quite different interpretive strategies that are applied to the same discourse by different

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audiences. Such interpretive communities (Fish, 1979), or, better, interpretive repertoires (see Chapter 1 in this volume), relying on specific contextualized frames of cognitive and affective understanding, appear to crisscross, to a degree, standard socioeconomic audience categories, hence mediating the further impact of media in ways that are only beginning to be explored in empirical research. Also in cases where socioeconomic and interpretive categories can be seen to denote similar groups, it seems clear that a discursive or interpretive conception of reception is a necessary constituent of a comprehensive theory of the audience.

While being a young area of inquiry, the new qualitative audience research produced several summary volumes in the late 1980s (Jensen, 1986; Lindlof, 1987; Lull, 1988a; Seiter et al., 1989a). Early studies had focused on factual genres, particularly news (see especially Lewis, 1985; Morley, 1980), and had found a variety of alternative or oppositional decodings, depending on the audience’s class and other socioeconomic background, of what appeared to be the (ideologically) “preferred” reading (Hall, 1973). Other work noted that the very mode of address of the news genre carries ideological implications about the substantive role of news and its respondents in political processes (Jensen, 1990a; see also Morley, 1981, on genre). A second body of research shifted the focus from ideology in a political sense to the question of pleasure, asking how the media appeal to recipients as gendered individuals. In particular, “feminine” genres such as the various subtypes of soap opera (Ang, 1985; Hobson, 1982) and romance novels (Radway, 1984) were seen to carry use value, indeed an emancipatory potential for audiences in their family and other social contexts. Also historical and theoretical psychoanalytic work has addressed the relationship between media use and (gendered) identities (de Lauretis, 1984; Modleski, 1984). A further, more heterogeneous group of studies have examined variations in reception with reference to the ethnic, cultural, and subcultural contexts of audiences (e.g. Liebes and Katz, 1990; Lull, 1988a), identifying mass communication as an important resource within other cultural practices. Finally, a few studies have attempted to capture the specific experiential qualities of particular media, for example the difference between film and TV reception (Ellis, 1982), as well as the interrelatedness— intertextuality—of contemporary media as whole media environments (see Bennett and Woollacott, 1987; for a survey, see Jensen, forthcoming). It may be added that similar, qualitative as well as

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quantitative studies that are of relevance for reception analysis have been undertaken in political science (Graber, 1984) and social psychology (Livingstone, 1990), witnessing an interdisciplinary convergence also in the methods employed.