Commentary: Christian Schroder
Commentary: Christian Schroder
Commentary: Christian Schroder
The concept of ‘interpretive community’ is one of the most used and abused in
reception research over the last ten years. We have invoked this concept as a
panacea to explain ad-hoc all sorts of social conditionings of the reception of media
messages.
In my teaching, for example, when I present a study of how black and white
teenagers produce different readings of a Madonna video (Brown and Schulze,
1990) I ascribe the difference to their membership of different ethnic interpretive
communities. When the boys and the girls in this study diffcr in their decoding I
say that this is due to their membership of different gendered interpretive
communities, adding that the meanings of the ethnic and gcndered interpretive
communities somehow ‘overlap’, ‘crisscross’, or the like.
Jensen (1990: 130) defines interpretive communities as entities ‘characterized not
simply by socioeconomic background variables, but simultaneously by their
discursive modes of interpreting media content’. Nevertheless, his article uses the
concept in at least two different ways, one of which contradicts its own definition.
First the article states that the old and young audience groups of the study (that is
demographic groups) ‘may represent different interpretive communitics’ (Jensen,
1990: 135). Here the culturaYdiscursive dimensions of the definition seem to have
disappeared. Secondly, the article claims that the two twelve-person workshop
groups, selected to represent a diversity of socioeconomic background and gender,
‘present themselves as an interpretive community in the sense of a social collective
with particular interests in communications and culture’ (Jensen, 1990: 142).
Clearly, one could easily think of other workshops whose members wouM make up
such a social collective, for instance if the members were brought together from a
neighbourhood community. But in this study to call the workshops ‘social
collectives’ seems to be a romanticization: the participants were isolated individuals
brought together for the sake of research. They are not, in my view, an interpretive
community, in any sense of the word.
My criticism of this particular article should not bc taken to imply that it is a bad
study; in other respects it is not at all bad. But I hope to have demonstrated,
through these examples of the imprecision with which the term ‘interpretive
Media, Culrure & Society (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 16 (1994), 337-347
Ien Ang (1990) expresses concern that reception studies are too myopic, as they
isolate one moment in the cultural process as being of ultimate significance and
ignore the wider sociocultural conditions of audience practices. She suggests that,
‘what we need is not more ethnographic work on discrete audience groups, but on
reception as an integral part of popular cultural practices that articulate both
“subjective” and “objective”, both “micro” and “macro” processes’ (Ang, 1990: 244).
Similarly Radway (1988) explicitly seeks to dclcgitimate traditional reception
research of people’s media experiences, because these experiences are not, in a
sense, primary to their lives: ‘Our habitual practice of conducting bounded,
regionalized investigations of singular text-audience circuits may be preventing us
from investigating . . . the very articulations between discourses and practices we
deem important both theoretically and strategically’ (Radway, 1988: 366). She
suggests that, as researchers, we should not let ourselves be directed by the circuit
of mass-communicated products, because individuals have no identity as simply
receivers of such products. And we should realize that individualdsubjects precede
the media products they consume: they and their cultural repertoires have been
formed by multiple discourses (interpretive communities?) throughout their lives.
Therefore, what we must seek to understand are ‘the ways in which historically
concrete social subjects articulate together many ideological elements, discourses,
and practices across the terrain of daily life’ (Radway, 1988: 364). And ethno-
graphy should be our method, because it insists that ‘the social is always actively
constructed by living subjects’ (Radway, 1988: 373).
Radway is well aware that if we adopt the perspective of the everyday we are
entering the difficult territory of ‘the endlessly shifting, ever-evolving kaleidoscope
of daily life’ (Radway, 1988: 366) and may find it difficult to retain any sense of how
the media are integrated in this daily life - not to. mention our own role as
researchers in all that! As Radway herself acknowledges, as she proposes to study
the articulation of play and its hegemonic and counter-hegcmonie dimensions on
three cultural sites (the family, the school, the leisure world), the project of
everyday ethnography is ‘potentially unwieldy and unending’ (Radway, 1988: 369).
Ang (1991) proposes a similar research strategy and encounters similar problems
with respect to the relationship between the everyday, the researcher and the larger
society:
Our starting point must be the acknowledgement that the social world of actual
audiences consists of an infinite and ever expanding myriad of dispersed
practices and experiences that can never be, and should not be, contained in any
one total system of knowledge. (Ang, 1991: 155)
about ‘the whole social world of actual audiences, because the very fluid nature of
that world resists full rcprcsentation’ (Ang, 1991: 164).
As I see it, to draw such practical conclusions from a (quite plausible) theoretical
position is tantamount to all but writing the audience out of reality, into the pure
realm of situational discourses -and empirical paralysis (see also Bird, 1992: 257).
In the following, I argue for a position that makes it possible to conceive of actual
audiences in a somewhat more tangible and generalizing manner, without ending
up with the sort of empiricist objectification that Ang sets out to combat.
I agree with Ang that, in principle, rheoreticully, ‘the world of actual audiences is
too polysemic and polymorphic to be completely articulated in a closed discursive
structure’ (Ang, 1991: 14). But then let’s get on with it and produce incompletely
articulated accounts of audience readings and practices which may, in spite of their
(no doubt) multiple shortcomings, provide illuminating insights into the polysemic
and polymorphic relationships between media and penple in the world we live in.
Even though the methodological implications for media studies of the ethnographic
turn have not been focal in the theoretical discussions above, the implicit
methodological agenda has clearly been one that calls not for engaging the
‘nomadic’ individuals of contemporary culture, but the groups and communities
that populate the situational terrain of everyday interaction.
The logic of such situationism is striking: since people live their lives and use
media in various interactive situations, this is where the researcher should engage
them. But, however they are composed, focus groups may be less than ideal
because the constraints created by group dynamics may exclude certain responses,
and because the groups in question are often in no way natural. For instance, the
studies of Morley (1980) and Jensen (1990) fail to capture genuine situated social
interaction because their designs merely bring together a number of otherwise
unrelated individuals.
However, even research which succeeds in engaging natural interactive groups
(such as the family, the peer group) may be problematic: each of the individual
members of such groups or communities belongs to many other groups or
communities. By choosing one of these, for example, the peer group, as the human
unit of research, the researcher unavoidably gives undue priority to that unit, to the
virtual exclusion, or at least obscuration, of all the other interpretive Communities
the individual belongs to.
Of course, in some studies the researcher is specifically interested in the
signifying dynamics andlor interactive practices of one such community: teenagers
and video films (Jerslev, 1992), families and everyday television (Lull, 1980; Jensen
et al., 1993), new communication technologies in the household (Silverstone,
1991), but there is a whole array of interesting questions concerning media
experiences and uses that transcend the single social situation of use, and the single
interpretive community.
If, say, we wanted to explore the role of broadcast news and its social signifying
processes among the population of a country, it would be impossible to do justice to
the vastness of this subject through a study of one interpretive community. To
interview familieshouseholds, for instance, is clearly insufficient if one wants to
capture the multiple interpersonal discourses through which people make sense of
the news, not to mention those internalized discourses of the individual that
originate in his or her discursive socialization.
Taking myself as an example of the ordinary media user, among the inter-
personal news discourses I am involved in during the course of a day could typically
be the following: a t breakfast my family discuss whether a radio news story about a
change in mortgage laws may affect us. At mid-morning I have a telephone
conversation with a colleague a t another university; he is relieved t o have just
heard on the news that additional resources are being provided for universities,
because his two colleagues will now not be fired. Coming home in the late
afternoon I ask a neighbour about his trip to Seville; he replies that the Danish
Pavilion looked much smaller at the Expo than on the TV news. Finally, a t that
evening’s weekly dinner club of four neighbouring families, a vociferous discussion
goes on about the recent wave of refugees and immigrants t o Denmark; the news is
obviously the main source of the arguments they use to support their views.
My solution would be t o use the individual interview in the informant’s home as
the research setting that best does justice to the whole array of cultural discourses
that the individual inhabits -for the simple reason that it does not try t o build any
of them into the interview situation. Even if we want t o study ‘situated viewers’, we
d o not have to ‘situate’ them in natural or simulated groups in order to explore such
situatedness. Seeing the practices of a situational group like the family as the
analytical object does not mean that it can only be studied through a methodology
that regards family practices as also the empirical object.
In other words, a research design that privileges the individual reader does not
automatically prevent us from exploring the multiple sociocultural discourses that
partake in the construction of that individual’s readings and uses of television (or
other media).’ This is ultimately a n empirical question, wc might say, depending on
the actual terms we establish with the individual informants and on the questions
we ask them.
media as argued by Radway (1988). We may equally accept that no individual lives
his or her life as a ‘viewer’: for most of the time people live thcir lives without
seeing themselves as ‘audience’.
However, although we may only know audiences through discourses, they d o
exist outside the hazy world of discourses. And at least intermittently people do see
themselves as being at the receiving end of a mass-mediated circuit, both when they
pick up the phone to protest vociferously to the news-broadcasting institution over
some violation of their moral norms, and when in front of the soap opera screen
they immerse themselves into the imaginary community of pleasure-seekers.
In such situations people are the ‘receivers’ of media texts for the simple reason
that they do nor play the reciprocal role of ‘producers’ of those media texts: others
have put together the signs for the recipients in order that the latter may make their
own sense of them. This theoretical distinction between receptive and productive
roles is well-established within the ethnography of communication in connection
with the concept of ‘communicative competence’:
Since individuals are not islands, but live in a sea of social meanings, reception
research must be able to explain how meanings and meaning potentials become
incorporated in each human being.
The most productive way of conceptualizing individual and cultural meaning
processes is one that builds on the work of the American semiotician Charles S .
Peirce (Schroder, in press b; Jensen, 1991b). Compared with the dominant
Saussurian approach, Peirce’s theory is superior in several ways: instead of seeing
signs as components of a static system, it situates signs in situations of use.
Moreover, Peirce does not confine his semiotics to the study of verbal signs, but
builds a theory which encompasses all human sign systems (Peirce, 1982).
In other words, a Peircean perspective conceptualizes the analysis of media
signifying processes not within a general, abstract linguistic system where meanings
are fixed, and are assumed to be transferred to the recipients’ minds, but in a
communicative context where meanings are only potential until actualized by
socially situated human beings. For Peirce the social situatedness of sign users is a
function of the interpretive communities they belong to. And, as with Fish’s use of
the concept rcfcrred to previously, an interpretive community for Peirce is an
interactive institution (namely the scientific community) that imposes constraints
on the process of semiosis among its members so as to enable them to arrive at
authoritative - if temporary - scientific truth.
In ethnographic reception research we need to retain this understanding of
‘community’: we must reserve the concept for those relatively close-knit interactive
groups whose discourses both enforce and develop the dynamics of meanings and
norms that characterize the practices of their members (families, peer groups,
groups at work, religious communities, and so on).
On this level of interactive social communities we need to set up a division
between, on the one hand, those social communities (such as the family or
neighbourhood) which are constituted independently of any media use, and those
which are constituted by some form of media use on the other.
It is only the latter which are, properly speaking, ‘interpretive communities’,
characterized by ‘the in sitrt sense-making activities of natural media use groups’
(Lindlof, 1988: 83). Examples would be teenage groups gathering around such
cultural forms as video films or rock music, adult cult film audiences, and Radway’s
group of female romance readers. Such interpretive communities may correspond
to natural sociostructural communities such as the family, but it is their media use
alone which defines them as an interpretive community.
We shall have to abandon the use of the term ‘interpretive community’ which
equates it with ‘socio-demographic group’. On the one hand there is something
intuitively plausible in the notion that people’s cultural codes and values are
affected or even produced by the class, gender, ethnic and age relations through
which they have been socialized. On the other hand, these categories have been
objectified and abused by the mainstream in social science research and their
precise modes of influence on the individual consciousness are unclear (see Milroy,
1987: 14). Unease with these categories has led to various attempts to conceptualize
such fundamental social influences in different terms. With respect to class, one of
the more persuasive attempts has been Bourdieu’s concept of habittls (Bourdieu,
1984), which has been aptly summarized as ‘the systems of dispositions structuring
individual practice, including social, political and cultural choices and preferences,
[which] is overdetermined by class belongingness and is internalised in early
childhood’ (Skovmand, 1985: 43).
FIGURE 1
I
1. LANGUAGE AS HETEROGLOT
2. CULTURAL POSITIONINGS
(gender, class, ethnicity)
3. INTERACTIVE COMMUNITIES
t
(media-focused)
/
Interpretive communities \ Social communities
(non-media focused)
On the level of the individual, the working of ‘habitus’ ensures the active
presence of past experiences in the form of schemes of perception, of thought and
of action. Although these schemes are evidently mediated through the interaction
of micro-social communities like the family, the neighbourhood and the peer
group, the habitus which generates them transcends any of these communities.
When in media research we wish to take such subject-forming agencies into
consideration we should therefore not speak of them as ‘interpretive communities’.
One possibility is t o adopt the term suggested by Ang (1991): in a discussion of
situation-transcending factors she suggests the term ‘cultural positionings’ for those
dispositions people ‘actualize within concrete situations, such as those along the
lines of gender, class, ethnicity, generation, and so on’ (Ang, 1991: 184).
Finally, when we try to explain the sources of audience meanings we should not
forget the profound role of the language in the widest possible sense, not as a
system in the Saussurian sense, but as the overarching and heterogeneous symbolic
environment individuals live in, and out of which they create their own communi-
cative repertoires, through cultural positionings and interactive communities. This
is the sense in which ‘language’ in the singular is always already plural: ‘heteroglot’,
or inherently multilingual (Newcomb, 1984: 39).
Summing up, when in media research we try to conceptualize the recipient and
the processes through which meanings are created the reductive chart in Figure 1
may be of help as a heuristic device. In this chart the interpretive repertoires of a n
individual media user are seen as a product ofthe language community as a whole,
ofthe cultural positionings that become established in the course of the individual’s
life history, of the communicative interactions in the interpretive and social
communities of everyday life, and finally of the unique assemblage of these
influences constructed by the individual from moment to moment.
Notes
1. As Jordin and Brunt put it, ‘the individual is not a “social atom”, the simplest
irreducible element of social life but, on the contrary, the most complex element,
the point at which a multitude of shifting social and cultural elements converge’
(Jordin and Brunt, 1988: 234).
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