Television and Everyday Life

Nationwide
project
involved analysis both of the codes and the ideological qualities of the texts of
the programmes followed by a study of audience response. His later work on
television in the family restructured that relationship once again into a ‘natural’
setting in which a broader range of determinations (especially gender) and
indeterminacies (the patterns of viewing within the family) could be identified.
But each step, in one sense at least, marked a recognition of the increasing
‘power’ of the viewer to define a relationship to the programmes on the screen.
Drawing on the work of Frank Parkin, Morley, in the 
Nationwide
study,
found, apparently to his surprise, that class was no simple indicator of reading,
nor of the ability to distance one’s own readings from those that were supposedly
preferred by the texts. In addition, even for those who might, and did, articulate
an oppositional reading to the texts of 
Nationwide,
there was no guarantee that
that opposition would extend to the dominant ideological frames of the
programme as a whole. What Morley comes to argue is that viewers must be
understood as being situated at the site of a number of overlapping and plausibly
contradictory discourses, some having their origin in the media, but all needing
to be accounted for if the specific nature of the relationship between text and
reader is to be understood:
We need to construct a model in which the social subject is always seen
as interpellated by a number of discourses, some of which are in parallel
or reinforce each other, some of which are contradictory and block or
inflect the successful interpellation of the subject by other discourses.
Positively or negatively, other discourses are always involved in the
relation of text and subject, although their action is simply more visible
when it is a negative and contradictory rather than a positive and
reinforcing effect.
(Morley, 1980, 162)
This is (or was) all very well. But the model did not emerge, nor indeed perhaps
could it, since what Morley was saying, plausibly, but not terribly surprisingly,
was that television viewing (and the relationship between text and viewer)
was a complicated activity, and could not be examined simply either by the
analysis of the text’s supposed interpellations or by an over-simple account of
class position.

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On the audience
151
Class, in any event, was to a significant extent replaced by gender in Morley’s
later work. Couples of a more or less homogeneous class position were
interviewed about their television viewing. This work was informed by other
research, particularly from within feminist cultural studies which sought to
distinguish male and female relationships to the medium and to place those
differences within the context of differential power relations both within and
outside the family. Watching television was seen then to be a highly gendered
activity, gendered in relation to the hierarchies of domestic politics, and in the
consequent different qualities of time-use and control over space (see Seiter 
et
al.,
1989, 230). Choices of programme, freedoms to watch favourite
programmes, the interruptability or non-interruptability of viewing, all were
seen both as gendered and as subject to the dynamics of the culture of the
family. Morley’s later work with myself took some of these ideas further, both
methodologically and theoretically, by attempting a more intensive ethnographic
approach to the study of family life and media use (Morley and Silverstone,
1990), and I will have something to say about this shortly.
So Morley’s research was, as I have suggested, resolutely sociological. The
pleasures described by individuals in relation to particular programmes or genres
were pleasures ultimately to be explained, with no intervening variables, by
class or gender position. The dynamics of the relationship, the mechanisms of
engagement or disengagement, were left open, an empty space. But despite
this, what links his project with others 1 have so far discussed within this
broad grouping of reception studies, is the view of the relationship between
viewer and text as dialectical. Texts confine but do not confirm readings and
viewings. Audiences create but, like Marx nearly said of history, not on the
basis of texts of their own making.
Each of the analysts I have just considered finds a focus on a different
component of that dialectic, constructing within his or her own theory both
specificities of text: genre in the case of Radway and Livingstone, individual
programmes in the case of Katz and Liebes, individual programmes and then
‘television’ in the case of Morley; and specificities of audience: individual
‘fans’ in Radway; focused groups in Katz and Liebes and Morley; individual
interviewees in the case of Livingstone; and marital couples in the case of
Morley. I have identified some of the methodological components of these
studies precisely because they are material in defining both the way in which
each researcher constructs the problem and of course the way in which the
problem is perceived to have been solved.
All of this work advances our understanding of the crucial elements of
audiences’ activity (though what is meant by activity is still not yet clear) in
relation to television’s fragmented and continuous texts. Audiences
themselves have emerged as plural, and significantly so, particularly in the
more sociological accounts. Yet none of these reception theorists and
researchers has provided entirely satisfactory explanations of the

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152
Television and Everyday Life
relationship between sociological and psychological variables in the
audience’s relationship to television. The elements of the dialectic of the
socially situated yet individual reader and his or her relationship to texts and
social structures remains problematic. Social psychology has been unable to
break through to the analysis of the structures within which the observable
and discursible interactions of everyday life take place. Sociology, despite
its claims, has yet to specify the ways in which individuals whose
relationship to the medium, to its programmes and its genres, who may well
be constrained by the material realities of social life, are nevertheless
involved in complex processes of engagement with television 
as
individuals.
Without understanding the former we will have no sense of the kind, quality
and power of the constraints affecting the viewer from political, economic
and more broadly social structures, which are both extra-textual and
embodied in the various forms of television’s textuality. Without
understanding the latter we will have no explanation of the bases for
defining the differences and the dynamics of audiences’ relations to
the medium.
However for all its significance, the problem of the individual and the social
as a basis for analysing audiences is only part of the story. The preceding
discussion has certainly identified other areas which remain problematic, which
overlap, but which can and should be addressed head on. The first is the
identification by reception theorists of the audience as active. And the second,
which I have already briefly addressed, is the problem of the relationship
between audience and text. I shall now, albeit somewhat schematically, try to
summarise what the issues are and how far we have come in resolving them.