ABSTRACT
What follows is an attempt to take television audiences seriously as fictional constructs, their fictionality not being taken as a disqualification from, but as a demonstration of the social power of fictions. Watching television is not merely useful, it is meaningful; and those for whom television has meaning are the audience. But from a cultural perspective the audience is not made of "individual viewers". Television's textuality includes the industrial, regulatory, and critical discourses that literally channel what is on the screen, without ever appearing on it; and of course it includes the dialogic participation of its viewers, both during and beyond viewing time. Although it would be a simplification to argue this too strongly, it is nonetheless tempting to suggest that while Foucaultian notions are being applied to the terrain previously occupied by questions of television's social power, questions of textual power have been abandoned to the postmodernists.
