ABSTRACT
In enabling television institutions to see their task as that of conquering the audience, institutional knowledge must first of all constitute ‘television audience’ as a manifest, nameable object. Apparently, this is not so difficult to do. In our everyday language we are used to saying that one can draw or attract an audience; one can move, grip, or stir an audience; an audience can be responsive, enthusiastic, unsympathetic and so on. In all these cases, the audience is implicitly granted an autonomous, supra-individual existence. In common sense language, then, the object-ive status of audience is treated as selfevident; audience is assumed to be a given category. However, our ability to speak so confidently and taken-for-grantedly about audience in this way does not come naturally; rather, it is a matter of discursive effectivity, conditioned by the taking up-as the etymology of the word ‘audience’ suggests-of the performer’s perspective in a theatre. An exploration of some of the basic assumptions and consequences of the general tendency to speak about audience as a given category can illuminate the objectifying mechanisms and operations performed by institutional knowledge.
