The Argumentative Burdens of Audience Conjectures: Audience Research in Popular Culture Criticism

Abstract

We define "audience conjectures" as claims about specific effects on audiences or claims describing the determinate meaning of a text for audiences. We note that audience conjectures are being advanced by rhetorical critics of popular culture texts without adequate evidence. Our thesis is that if critics make claims concerning the determinate meanings of the text or the effects those texts have on audiences, then the critic should support such claims with audience research. The essay begins with a theoretical and argumentative rationale for audience research. Next we note that audience research is an underutilized resource in rhetorical criticism that engages popular culture texts. We offer a series of examples of essays containing audience conjectures and provide an extended case study contrasting the audience conjectures in a text-centered criticism with audience interpretations gathered through focus group interviews. We conclude by noting three theoretical implications of our argument; namely, that wording in scholarly writing matters, that the lines between social scientific and humanistic research should be blurred, and that audience research enhances the connections between rhetorical and cultural studies.

Active Audiences? The Debate Progresses But Is Far From Resolved

“…At least the wryly regretful group is familiar with the now‐received wisdom (among segments of our field) on why audiences matter (Livingstone, ), established following the enthusiastic response to Stuart Hall's (, p. 131) claim that “a new and exciting phase in so‐called audience research … may be opening up” in his seminal Encoding/Decoding paper. Specifically, in relation to claims about media representations, the study of audience reception has challenged the authority of elite textual analysts to conjure up visions of model or implied, imagined or inscribed readers without thinking to check whether actual readers are obediently falling into line with “audience conjectures” (Stromer‐Galley & Schiappa, , p. 27). In relation to top–down claims about the political economy of communication, the study of audiences‐in‐context revealed the everyday microtactics of appropriation that reshape and remediate media forms and goods, forcing academic recognition of marginalized voices, unexpected experiences, and the importance of the lifeworld in the circuit of culture (Hall, ).…”

Polysemic Scaffolding: Explicating Discursive Clashes in Chappelle's Show

“…Analyses of the program reach disparate conclusions, positioning the sketch comedy in different places in the hegemonic/counterhegemonic continuum, and acknowledging varying degrees of polysemy: Whereas Cooks and Orbe (1993) argue that the program is “not an effective tool for pro‐social learning” (p. 231), Gray (1995) and Schulman (1992) describe both oppressive and transgressive tensions in the show. Stromer‐Galley and Schiappa (1998) identify a rhetorical criticism trend of drawing disparate conclusions about the same text, and label this stultifying critical tug‐of‐war an “interpretive stalemate” (p. 42). The frequency of interpretive stalemates suggests that scholarly critics are not immune to the media effects' principle of selective perception.…”

Decision Structure and the Problem of Scale in Deliberation

“…Because of the complexity of both of these kinds of structures, this guesswork is often very difficult (Rips et al, 1999). People interpret even single messages in diverse and surprising ways because of such factors as the ambiguity of language and their diverse prior interests, knowledge sets, beliefs, and attention (Lupia & McCubbins, 1998; Stromer‐Galley & Schiappa, 1998). When reply and decision structures are implicit, this creates even more ambiguity.…”