audience as construct, cinema as spectacle

There is a distinction between film (and television) audience “as a discursive construct” of the institution and “the social world of actual audiences”, as Ien Ang points out in her book Desperately Seeking the Audience.

She argues that the institution continually seeks to conquer the audience by positioning it as “a market to be won” for the commercial industry and as “a public to be served with enlightened responsibility” for the public broadcaster.

Meanwhile, the social world of actual audiences eludes such measures of control.

The real audience will forever frustrate institutional attempts at controlling it, talking about it, packaging it and selling it – because it is not a single “taxonomic collective” in the way the institution persists in constructing it. The world of real audiences is the social world of real concrete people.

The notion of a taxonomic collective of film spectators (as audience) then, relies on a process of counting individuals, representing them as numbers (box office figures) and grouping these numbers into objectified categories of others to be controlled. These figures are not, as Ang argues, “the innocent reflection of a given reality, but a discursive construct which can only be known and encountered in and through discursive representations such as…the statistical figure”.

In short, cinema as spectacle finds its other in the institutional construction of an audience.

This is a premise of something I’m working on now…and will hopefully lead somewhere else after ‘the task’ is done… somewhere that says if cinema X above is the institutional p.o.v then cinema Y exists outside of the institution and is necessarily therefore… cinema as practice that loses (and finds) itself in the other…somewhere there.