ABSTRACT
Sir Karl Popper is not a name one often encounters in travels through textual theory. But I’m tempted to use it after an article by Martin Allor on the conceptualization of the television audience in current critical debate.1
Allor’s article, in the American journal Critical Studies in Mass Communication, sparked off a series of responses, including this one, which appeared in the same issue (the debate rumbled on in later issues too). I was struck by an apparent struggle going on between polarized textualism and realism throughout Allor’s article, culminating in his conclusion that ‘audience exists nowhere; it inhabits no real space, only positions within…discourses’.2 What struck me about this was not the conceptualization of the audience as existing only in discourse, a position with which I agree (see chapter 6), but the presumption that discourse is ‘nowhere’, ‘no real space’; that is, not real at all, or opposed to ‘the’ real. I am an avowed textualist, and one moreover who has tried to avoid the ‘naïve epistemological realism’ that Allor recognizes in some writings about audiences. But instead of turning to familiar French luminaries to speak about the reality of textual positions, I invoke Karl Popper. A realist philosopher, Popper has plenty to say about science, knowledge and the real. He even has a name for the ‘nowhere’ of discourse. He calls it (without a hint of irony) ‘the third world’.
