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The notion of audiences taking pleasure from texts is one which is associated with post- modernism, with feminist critiques and with audience-centred studies. In the first place one may look back to the last section, in terms of the male gaze and the sexual pleasure of voyeurism. Cinema has provided some notorious examples of this kind of gaze and pleasure, including De Palma’s Dressed To Kill (1980). This included a shower scene much criticized for lengthy gratuitous shots of the female protagonist victim. But then the shower has become a stock setting in its own right for this kind of gaze and pleasure (see promotional shots in mail-order catalogues).

In terms of post-modernism and popular culture texts, the idea of audience pleasure has been set up as both a kind of gratification from that text, and as a kind of validation of the text. So the idea is partly that pleasure is a valid response, but also that this validity transfers to the text. It may be populist, but that is acceptable because it is enjoyed. In one sense this is partly a reaction against that kind of analysis that has seen the text as worthy only in relation to its seriousness of purpose. It is also something of a reaction against a post-modernist and Marxist analysis which goes for the ideological nature of a text and what it imposes on the audience. So in terms of audience studies, validating pleasure is also a way of winning back power for the audience.

Fiske (1993) discusses the pleasure of ‘playing with’ the text. The referentiality of post-modern texts encourages this. The construction of computer games like Monkey

Island Two actually makes this play mandatory. Unless one plays with the choices given

and reacts to the ‘problems’ thrown up, there is no text. Take pleasure, play the game – or there is no game. Fiske argues that audiences enjoy ways in which texts both confirm that there are rules, but also take the audience along on narrative journeys that challenge and break those rules. We can experience death – but outside the trauma of social reality. This is where genres in particular can ‘have it both ways’. They depend on intertextuality for their understanding and enjoyment. But precisely because their base material is so well known, it is possible to work off this, to be inventive and challenging.

The taking of pleasure can work on different levels. In the case of game shows, there is a studio audience that is directly involved with the performance. They can enjoy the spectacle, the challenge, the right to respond, at first hand. But then there is the domestic audience, taking pleasure at a distance. There is pleasure in the ritual of the genre – a ritual which is controlled by that lord of misrule, the host. There is pleasure in the possibility of unruly behaviour: the form is largely unscripted. Fiske (1987) – himself drawing on ideas from Bahktin about carnival and excess – sees this kind of populist material as resisting the meanings that might have been imposed by the producer through the text. He talks about ‘a theory of pleasure that centres on the power to make meanings rather than on the meanings that are made’. However, Bourdieu (1984) argues against this kind of autonomy. He proposes the notion of ‘habitus’, in which people are predisposed to respond to experiences in certain ways because they have been so culturalized. We are back to questions about what or who shapes the meanings that come from the experience of engaging with any text. We are circling round the notion of ideology, which lurks behind such ideas about predispositions or about kinds of resistance.

I suggest that, however the post-modernist position tries to marginalize and efface either the presence of ideology or the possible influence of textual features, this is not sensible because it does not actually deal with these two factors. In any case, interests in the working of ideology and the working of audiences on texts do not have to be mutually exclusive.

In terms of feminism in particular, there is literature from Radway through to McRobbie that speaks for the female audience in various ways. Not surprisingly, this criticism addresses what are known as dominantly female texts – the romantic novel, girls’ magazines, television soap operas. The female-ness of the texts and of the pleasures is defined in terms of female subject matter and ways of making sense of this. The pleasure is in, for example, the expression and negotiation of emotion and of relationship within the narrative. The pleasure is in identification with character and situation. In terms of uses and gratifications, the pleasures are about satisfying personal and social needs. Sometimes the pleasure is solitary – Radway’s readers escaping domestic duty in the world of the novel. Sometimes it is shared – Silverstone’s soap viewers talking about how problems in the soap world relate to problems in their own lives, working through problems indirectly by talking about the soap. The problem remains as to whether pleasures are taken or given.

Curiously, the notion of pleasure in texts provides an argument for saying that post- modernism eats itself. So there may indeed be pleasures in the ironies and referentiality of post-modernist form, in the fractured or shadowy narratives of a supposedly typical

post-modern text. But the most popular texts – murder mystery thrillers or soaps, for example – are still resolutely modernist in their structures. The grand narratives are still with us. Reports of the death of modernism or indeed of realism, have been greatly exaggerated.