Media reception from the standpoint of the subject: A specification of the agentic recipient via Critical Psychology

For Audience and Reception Studies (ARS) to increase its societal impact, the contribution proposes an expansion of its theoretical and methodological framework by drawing on insights and concepts developed on the grounds of subject-scientific Critical Psychology (Holzkamp, 2013). Crucially, a subject-scientific media reception approach emphasizes 1) that reception always already implicates production, as an attempt to participate and contribute to the development of societal conditions, and 2) that the audience researcher is just as much a receiver of mediated knowledge as the research participant, and thus a co-subject in the research process. As will be illustrated, this has major consequences for conceptualizing agency in ARS and for conducting empirical research, for instance in the light of recent debates of the ‘small acts of engagement’ (SAOE) concept (Hartley et al. 2018; Picone et al., 2019): in order to evaluate the scale and impact of a media engagement (as ‘small’ or not), a subject-scientific approach would need to situate the question among those that are practicing this engagement, i.e. the concrete audience members.
A critical-psychologically informed approach to media reception builds on the critique of stimulus-response-models of human behavior and nuances the concept of the active recipient (Schenkel, 1988). Its core concept is agency, which clearly encompasses informational and communicative aspects (Sevignani, 2019), and which cannot be understood individually, but only in social and societal association with others. The precise interplay is however never obvious, but must be reconstructed from the diverse individual standpoints. Subjects not only live under different conditions, mediated by their position and location in society, they also have their own reasons to act or not to act under these conditions in their everyday life. Therefore one cannot deduce these reasons and premises from an external ‘objective’ analysis of society or of the audience. Researchers need to cooperate with other audience members to find collective ways for sustaining and expanding individual agency. Thus publics are needed to gain agency together in processes of conflictual cooperation (Axel, 2010), by inquiring into the contradictory nature of media reception. Contradictions emerge given the individuals’ subjective necessity of expanding the possibilities of life and of mitigating the risk of losing agency, for which they are also dependent on reproducing conditions of asymmetrical communicative power that may counter the expansion of agency.
Such a dialectical view on agency’s contradictions in everyday life sheds new light on seemingly innocuous forms of ‘everyday activism’ (Vivienne, 2013) such as SAOE, as potentially potent media audience interventions into corporately controlled content flows. But how potent are these interventions from the audience member’s varying standpoints? What is in it for the engagers’ agentic development given their respective conducts of everyday life? Central to such an inquiry would be to extend the concept of ‘the audience’, so that it encompasses both the designers of content flows, as well as the audience researcher (Chimirri, 2013), who all are audience members themselves.