ABSTRACT
Ratings discourse’s object of knowledge, ‘television audience’, is not the transparent representation of pregiven actual audiences. In and through the descriptions made by ratings discourse a certain profile of ‘television audience’ takes shape-a profile that does not exist outside or beyond those descriptions but is produced by them. In this sense, ‘television audience’, as it is constructed in ratings discourse, is a fictive entity. This does not mean, of course, that ratings dream the audience into existence. They are based on actual data on how many and who are watching what. The knowledge produced by ratings is therefore neither false nor untrue. On the contrary, ratings are powerful precisely because of their ability to define a certain field of empirical truth. That regime of truth is fictive, however, because the very terms with which it covers empirical reality inevitably result in a description of the audience that foregrounds certain characteristics but suppresses others. As I have indicated in Chapter 3, the category of ‘television audience’ as such already implies a highly selective delineation of the real, and the very fact that we tend to regard ‘television audience’ as a taxonomic collective having a definite and defineable size and composition is a ‘reality effect’ of ratings discourse (Hall 1982).
