Audiences: A Sociological Theory of

Performance and Imagination

Introduction

Contributors: By: Nicholas Abercrombie & Brian Longhurst

Book Title: Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination
Chapter Title: "Introduction"
Pub. Date: 1998
Access Date: March 24, 2017
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9780803989627
Online ISBN: 9781446222331
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446222331.n1
Print pages: 1-2
©1998 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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© Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst 1998

Introduction
Audiences are problematic. From both left and right they have been the subject of concern
and debate. On the one hand, this has been expressed through fears about the effects of the
mass media on a variety of different audiences; on the other, there is worry about the role of
the media in the ideological framing of responses to key issues. Given the centrality of these
debates, which recur perennially within media discourse itself, it is not surprising that the
study of audiences has represented a key growth area of activity in the social sciences and
humanities in recent times. There is now a vast amount of research and many books and
articles on the audience, in particular the audience for television. Our view is that many of the
fears and conventional debates about the audience are seriously misplaced. In this book,
therefore, we want to argue for a new way of understanding the development of audience
research and more importantly for conceptualizing the current accumulation of evidence on
audience processes. Our book thus characterizes the past, classifies the present, and points
to the future.

To develop our argument we have organized the book into six chapters. We begin by arguing
that research into audiences has been structured by three paradigms. The development and
main concerns of the first two of these paradigms are outlined in Chapter 1, which also
suggests that these paradigms are, and should be, superseded by a third. The
characterization of this paradigm and arguments for its power to understand contemporary
audiences are set out in the rest of the book. We argue that to understand this paradigm, and
audiences, it is important first to distinguish three different types of audience: simple, mass
and diffused. This we do in Chapter 2. We shall argue that the diffused audience and the
interactions between the three audience types can only be understood through the lens of the
paradigm we shall label as Spectacle/Performance.

The most important general dimensions of the Spectacle/ Performance paradigm are outlined
in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 identifies and characterizes what we shall call a circuit of
spectacle and narcissism. Here we point to the centrality of performance, the way in which
spectacle leads to the aestheticization of everyday life, and the constitution of the narcissistic
society of modernity. Chapter 4 develops this argument through the consideration of the
resources which drive and fuel the circuit. Here we emphasize the role of imagination and
fantasy in the construction of community.

Chapter 5 develops these themes in a more specific way. Taking up contemporary arguments
about fans and enthusiasts, it points to the power of the Spectacle/Performance paradigm in
understanding the complexity of the interactions in the contemporary audience and identifies
a continuum in the audience, which is characterized as differentially skilful and productive.
Further, Chapter 6 locates our argument in terms of other issues in current sociological
concern. We shall suggest that consideration of audience issues leads, inter alia, to new
understandings of phenomena of trust and social inclusion and exclusion. Thus, in ways that
we hope will become clear, and perhaps controversial, we see this as not simply another book
about audiences (and more particularly the television audience), but an argument that
modern advanced capitalist societies, and the processes of sociation characteristic of them,
cannot be understood adequately without seeing them as characterized by relationships
between performances and audiences in the senses we shall identify.

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