One of the things that has troubled me throughout my reading of Louise Rosenblatt and the other Reader-Response theorists is who they mean when they refer to "the reader." In part, my concern stems from the fact that my own responses to literature don’t seem to me to be in accord with how these writers say "readers" respond. During this same time, I stumbled onto John Fiske’s statement about television audiences that rather rocked my world: he contends that audiences aren’t necessarily influenced by the media. Having been one of those people who has advocated regulation of television violence, for instance, because I believed it influenced children to be violent, I was stunned by Fiske’s position. At first, I thought perhaps he was a fringe element, even though his argument was consistent with critical theory.

So, I decided I wanted to investigate this issue of "reader" or "audience" as it is defined by the postmoderns. Though I said in my proposal for this project that I wanted to look into how the "post-structuralists" used the term, what I really meant was, I think, the post-modernists. I’m quite shaky on the meanings of all the terms. What I was interested in was determining how the thinkers who are influential right now perceive "audience." Part of my goal was to come to a better understanding of the role of the reader or audience in creation of meaning. That interest, of course, results from my wanting to know what an author/speaker’s role/authority is in a communication.

My research was quite frustrating, but ultimately somewhat rewarding. The frustration came in simply getting the materials I wanted. John Fiske refers repeatedly to a particular group of individuals: Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin Volosinov, Stuart Hall, John Hartley, David Morley, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes. So, my original plan was to just go read what they had to say. Though I knew that entailed a lot of pages, I didn’t see that as an insurmountable problem. I would just have to read a lot in a short time.

Nice idea, but it didn’t work. I discovered that the University of Arizona library doesn’t have many of the works I wanted and that most of the ones it does have are checked out, on hold, or lost and, therefore, not accessible. So, after a couple of frustrated recall and interlibrary loan efforts, I began to simply scrounge for material. Surprisingly, I came up with a lot -- not all I wanted, but a lot. (I was never able to get ahold of Volosinov’s one book, for instance, nor to find much of anything said about him.) So, even though much of what I’ve learned is second-hand, I will use it anyway.

The bottom line is that there seem to be two major ideas about audience floating around out there. One is the Marxist view, which holds that people are shaped by what they read and watch, and the neo-marxist view, which holds that they aren’t. A possible third is reflected in what some interpreters say is Derrida’s position -- that communication is impossible. If there is no communication, there can be no audience. But, I’m not ready to tackle that possibility!

The Marxist view is a less than unified, single view. There are, in fact, several different positions subsumed under that heading, for instance, the "Economic" view. What they have in common is the idea that the media impose interpretations, values, beliefs on readers/audiences, that readers/viewers are little more than dupes.

Eco’s view is a bit more generous than that, but nonetheless in the ballpark. Probably one of the key elements of Eco’s discussion of audience/author relations is that authors select their readers. (He says "create," but he doesn’t mean that literally.) "The reader is strictly defined by the lexical and the syntactical organization of the text: the text is nothing else but the semantic-pragmatic production of its own Model Reader." (p. 10) Essentially what he means is that all the linguistic, stylistic and literary choices an author makes limits who is able to understand what he/she writes. "To organize a text, its author has to rely upon a series of codes that assign given contents to the expressions he uses. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible reader . . . supposedly able to deal interpretively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them." . . . . . . . . .

". . .[E]very type of text explicitly selects a very general model of possible readers through the choices (i) of a specific linguistic code, (ii) of a certain literary style, and (iii) of specific specialization-indices.. . ." (p. 7).

In the following pages, Eco discusses how the author goes about this, saying finally that "the ‘author’ is nothing else but a textual strategy establishing semantic correlations and activating the Models Reader." (p. 11). I find that extremely interesting for a couple of reasons. I don’t particularly like the characterization of author as an inhuman "strategy," but I do like his statement that the author is the one who directs interpretation. Though he recognizes that what he calls ‘closed texts’ are open to every possible aberrant reading, (p. 8) he says that ‘open texts" are structured so they can’t be misread: "The reader is strictly defined . . ." (p. 10)

I don’t want to get sidetracked into his idea of "Open" vs. "Closed" texts. Suffice it to say that the main difference seems to me to be how careful the author is to define an audience or reading.

"The addressee is bound to enter into an interplay of stimulus and response which depends on his unique capacity for sensitive reception of the piece. In this sense the author presents a finished product with the intention that this particular composition should be appreciated and received in the same form as he devised it." (p. 49) This reminds me of what I said in class and in my journal about the readers for my poetry. I have specific, particular readings I want made, and the crafting of the poems was aimed at forcing those readings. As I read Eco, that is precisely what an author does. And I take Eco’s presentation to be validation of that.

Eco also says that any work is bound to get varied interpretations and that "the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed." (p. 49) He does not mean here that any interpretation goes, though. In discussing Medieval poetics as exemplar of authorial control, he says, "what in fact is made available [through moral, allegorical, and anagogical readings] is a range of rigidly preestablished and preordained interpretive solutions, and these never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author." (p. 51) "Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance." (emphasis in original, p. 63)

What all this says to me is that Eco sees the author’s role as quite important in literary interpretation. While he recognizes the infinite opportunities for readers to construct their own readings, he seems to consider legitimate only those that are within the interpretive parameters set forth by the author. Those parameters include choice of language, choice of words, syntax, chronology, characterization, etc. -- all the literary elements over which authors have choice. These elements privilege particular readers and readings. He also reckons with contemporary authors such as Bertold Brecht, choosing not to choose and thereby foregoing the authorial power/privilege of channeling interpretation in a particular direction.

Reader, audience, then, is more or less passive. The author selects audience, and the author manipulates audience; the medium for both selection and manipulation is the text. As Eco himself notes, this view of the relationship between author, text, and reader follows Bakhtin. According to Mary Klages, in Bakhtin’s view, "all words or utterances are directed toward an answer, a response. In everyday speech, words are understood by being taken into a reader’s own conceptual system, filled with specific objects and emotional expressions, and being related to these; the understanding of an utterance is thus inseparable from the listener’s response to it. All speech is thus oriented toward what Bakhtin calls the ‘conceptual horizon’ of listener; this horizon is comprised of the various social languages the listener inhabits/uses. Dialogism is an orientation toward the interaction between various languages of a speaker and the languages of a listener."

But, Klages goes on, that’s everyday speech. Poetic style works differently. "The writer of prose is always attuned to his/her own language(s) and alien languages (I.e., the languages of listeners), and uses heteroglossia . . . to always be entering into dialogue with readers. The fiction writer is always directing his/her ‘speech’ (I.e., writing) toward the possible responses of readers, and is always trying to find more things to say, more ways to say it, so that readers can understand the message." (emphasis mine)

Both of these are consistent with what Lavers calls the "constitutive role of established institutions." (p. 21) She quotes Barthes as saying that "[o]ne does not make meaning just anyhow" and that ". . . This relationship, this desire to merge with the work, ultimately with the experience which impelled the writer to write, in effect turns the reader into a writer." (p. 28) Barthes believed ". . . That the writing subject . . .was dispersed throughout his writing. . .," that one encodes "suitable marks of one’s intentions so as to make them unmistakable.. . ." (p. 38) In another work, Barthes distinguishes between "reading" and "criticism." He says "[t]o go from reading to criticism is to change desires, it is no longer to desire the work but to desire one’s own language." (p. 94)

Thus, I take Barthes to also hold the view that the author determines how his/her material will be interpreted and that he sees this working in the same way Eco describes -- by selectively encoding.

Both Barthes’ and Eco’s position assumes that, essentially, the reader in manipulated by the author’s encodings into responding in a particular way. This is what I termed above as the Marxist position, and it has dominated thinking about audience, particularly television audience, but also reading audiences, for most of the present century. This also seems to be Valentin Volosinov’s view. While he doesn’t speak directly about audience or readers in the one piece I was able to find, his discussion of the origin of signs is instructive. Basically, he says that meanings can arise only between members of a group. He is adamant about shared group membership. Thus, it seems to follow that views could not be imposed by outsiders. There would simply be no understanding, no basis for communication. "Signs emerge, after all, only in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another. . . . . . . . Consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently, only in the process of social interaction." (p. 247)

However, there is another view, the one I labelled above as the neo-marxist view. And, while I find the arguments for this position compelling, I don’t believe they dominate outside the academy. For instance, following the incident in Paducah, KY, in which the 14 year-old shot several of his classmates, several spokespersons explicitly linked Carneal’s actions to a movie. Despite Fiske, Stuart Hall, David Morley, John Hartley, and many others, the dominant view seems to be that the public is manipulated by the media. Rather than argue their position, though, I will simply report what they say.

The dominant voice on this side is Stuart Hall. Hall, who once directed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), is generally classified a Marxist culturalist. This position differs from the classic Althusserian Marxism in that " . . . it emphasizes the actual experience of sub-groups in society and contextualizes the media within a society which is seen as a complex expressive totality." (Chandler, n.p.) Hall’s main contribution to this debate seems to be that ". . . The mass media do tend to reproduce interpretations which serve the interests of the ruling class, but they are also ‘a field of ideological struggle.’" (Chandler, n. p.) Hall lays out the idea of "dominant," "negotiated," and "oppositional" readings.

The "dominant" reading is the preferred reading. As a critical theorist would phrase it, this is the reading preferred by the dominant class and toward which the text attempts to direct viewers. A "negotiated" reading is one which tweaks the preferred reading to make it compatible with the viewer’s own social position. An "oppositional" reading is one in which the meaning a viewer takes is one the producers (the dominant class) do not sanction. Fiske says that ". . . [o]nce the ideological, hegemonic work has been performed, there is still an excess meaning that escapes the control of the dominant and is thus available for the culturally subordinate to use for their own cultural-political interests." (1986, p. 403)

John Hartley says

Obviously, Hartley does not see the audience as passive dupes, but as active controllers of meaning.

Likewise, David Morley believes that "[p]eople don’t passively absorb subliminal ‘inputs’ from the screen. They discursively ‘make sense’ of or produce ‘readings’ of what they see. Moreover, the ‘sense’ they make is related to a pattern of choices about what and when to view which is constructed within a set of relationships constituted by the domestic and familial setting in which it is taking place. The ‘rational consumer in a free and perfect market’ . . . is a myth." (p. 8)

To conclude, the main players on this side of the argument -- what I have called the neo-marxist side -- are Hall, Fiske, Hartley and Morley. While each has a slightly different research focus, they seem to agree with the idea of reading set forth by Hall and with the idea that readers/viewers control [determine, create, make] the meaning they derive from the media. Furthermore, it is often difficult to separate them very thoroughly from Eco, Barthes, Volosinov, etc., because their ideas form the basis for the theories of these later writer. The largest difference between the two groups is determinism. Because the Marxists generally believe that individuals are absolutely products of their environments, they tend to see them as passive. The later writers, though still believers in cultural determinism, see that very determinism as shielding the individual from incursions from alien cultures.

I find myself still completely uncertain of where I stand. As I mentioned in my journals, my long-ago encounter with blue-collar "readings" of Archie Bunker (as well as my course work in General Semantics -- Korzybski, Hayakawa, Harris, etc.) makes me very susceptible to the arguments for negotiated and oppositional readings. On the other hand, that is not a view of author and text I like. Neither, though, do I much like the idea of viewers as dupes. My reading for this project, which was considerably larger than my reference list, makes it seem pretty clear that these are the choices, though. One either accepts that the readers is a passive dupe and the writer controls meaning, or one accepts that writers attempt to control meaning (preferred reading), but readers extract their own meanings from the text. I’m not ready to commit to one or the other.