“On the Audience Commodity and its Work” is an eye-opening excerpt from Dallas W. Smythe’s larger work, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada. In this entry, I want to discuss not Smythe’s theories, but his language. Smythe’s article shatters the “idealist” qualities of Marxist theories (ha! Would you ever call Marxism “idealist”?) and begins to push for a more objective, concrete, REAL WORLD meaning of commodity, audience, and other abstract terms that are discussed in theory regarding mass communication and capitalism.
Several weeks ago in the course of this study, I experienced a moment of crisis. I believe it was after I read McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” that I stopped myself and said, “Okay, fantastic ideas. I support them completely… but what can be done with them?” So much of the theory I’ve been studying has been a source of frustration for me because I find that the ideas are limited to just their “idea-ness” – they lack a real world application. That real world application seems to be missing in a lot of ideas; communism comes to mind as being one of the best ideas I’ve ever known… but in order to make it work as intended, you need a true miracle. And if you turn to communism without such a miracle, it will undoubtedly turn into a severely distorted and perverted fraction of its intended form.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to accept these ideas as just ideas. I’ve been kidding myself for a few weeks now, saying, “Well, maybe the writers of these pieces knew their suggestions could never work; they were fantastic ideas, not well-grounded plans.” But as much as I love theories (theory for theory’s sake, whoot whoot!), I need to believe that theory can go beyond the realm of ideas and into the now, the real, the concrete. Thankfully, I now have the encouraging voice of Smythe in my head, which confirms that the ideas are just ideas – completely subjective and idealist. Unlike so many other theorists, Smythe pushes for an objective, realist, pragmatic option.
“Messages,” “information,” “images,” and “meaning” – these are words I’ve come across in many of the essays I’ve read so far this semester. But my understanding of the essays was hindered by these words, many of which were specific to the article and to the context that the author had developed for them. “Messages” refers not to some “real world” notion we have when we watch television. Instead, it fits uniquely into Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message.” The problem with the language of theory is that it applies strictly to theory; while attempting to discuss the real world, writers get caught up in the world of ideas and language. In the end, one must read the work of one author in order to understand the work of another author, who is responding to another author, and on and on and on… So much of the discourse surrounding culture, politics, and economy is tied up in the theory rather than in the actual circumstances.
Smythe focuses not on these imagined or supposed relationships between the worker and the boss or between the base and the superstructure. Instead, he discusses the effect of advertisements on the viewer, and the effect of the viewer on the world of advertising. These are simple, almost obvious concepts when compared to the work of McLuhan, Hall, and Habermas. Message, encoding, public sphere… yada yada yada… Who (outside of the cultural studies and political science buffs) really cares to use these words? If we, as critics of culture, are going to propose change, we need to offer language and ideas with which people can identify.
Posted by Kate Cielinski at April 10, 2005 1:37 PM