Chen on the Audience-Commodity As Fictitious

Most neo-Marxists worry about the narcotic effect of the cultural industry and the interpellation of the ideological state apparatuses. Reacting to the pessimistic imagination about how audiences watch television, some Leftist scholars of cultural studies attempt to encourage and reveal alternative and oppositional readings of television texts. However, Dallas W. Smythe’s (1977) materialist approach conceptualizing watching television as working and the audience as commodity has distinguished him from researchers who fail to recognize the mechanism of the commercial television economy. Trying to rescue communication studies from the “jungle of idealism,” Smythe insists that any audience’s reading of a television text occurs under a certain structure of commodity exchange, thus textual and ideological analyses are secondary to the political economic analysis of advertiser-supported communication systems. In this paper, I have conceptualised the audience commodity as fictitious, betting on the future exploitation of labour, and the commercial television economy as credit-sustain accumulation - its rise and future decline are related to structural contradictions and collective struggles in capitalist society from the very beginning of this century...