Beyond order and meaning: the global village deconstructed
I can begin to explain this by taking issue with the simplistic idea that existence of diversity is evidence of freedom from power and domination. That is to say, variation – e.g. in audience readings and pleasures – is not the result of autonomy and independence, as the liberal pluralists would have it, but emerges out of the inescapably overdetermined nature of any particular instance of subjective meaning production. The latter is traversed by a multiplicity of power relations, the specifics of which cannot be known ahead of time precisely because their articulations are always irreducibly context-bound. They are not determined by fixed predispositions but take shape within the dynamic and contradictory goings-on of everyday life, of history. In this sense, the existence of different readings is by no means evidence of ‘limited’ power. On the contrary, it only points to the operation and intersection of a whole range of power indeterminacy of meaning can be concretely qualified: indeterminacy is not grounded in freedom from (external) determinations, but is the consequence of too many, unpredictable determinations. Nor does a concern with specific pleasures that people get out of particular media forms ‘totally displace a concern with power’, as Philip Schlesinger claims (1991: 149); on the contrary, theorizing pleasure enables us to develop a much more complex understanding of how certain forms of power operate by paying attention to the intricate intertwinings of pleasure and power – an especially important issue today where ‘the pleasure principle’ has been incorporated in the very logic of consumer capitalism.