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not in producing meanings, bul in policing and conuolling the excess of meaning ii cannot help producing.* Fisfcc argues that ibe excess allows television fim to olfcf Ihc meanings preferred by Ihc dominant forces. Imi dul use overspill of sue n meaning allows foe resisting or al least evasive meaning to escape this conuoli and Feuer argues it allows foi ihc viewer 10 produce a eoonier-iciLp By exceeding ihc norms, television draw» Mention 10 them and to their ideological function, and by doing so opens up the possibility for contradictory meanings and pleasures to be made. One of Ang's subjects was a Manin who found in the exceasrveDCssof £>o/7m a critique of capitalian; another was a feminist who used iu excess of seilst display to produce oppositional, and vocally expressed. plcasurcs.3■ Elsewhere I have argued thai devices such as irony, metaphor, and jokes depend upon a collision of discourses that generates more meaning potential than any authorial function can control: they depend upon contradictions within segments rather than between ihem. a micro-level hcieroglassra.* Television's recent tendency to self-reflet i vity. tlie explicit actawwlcdpssonl of iu tcitualiiy. is a good example of this collision of discourses and the way U delegates scmiotic power to the viewers. When characters in shows like MoonHg/al/ig refer to the writers or walk off ihc set. when Miami Vict breaks the ISO-degree rule and draws attention to its stylistic devices, or when Magnum PI is shot partially in black and while in an explicit reference la/Hm noir. television is selling up conradicüons with its own realistic mode: it is simultaneously inviting and shattering die illusion of realism. It is significant that this tendency is clearest in those television genres that arc mo»t "authored," closest lo a novel or film, for in these realistic fictional genres television has had to devise different methods from those of spon or news by which lo draw alien lion to ils authorial authority, to demystify iL and. thus, to allow the viewer access to it in a producer ly way. The ""willingness" of realism's "willing Bispension of disbelief" is Central to Ihe pleasures of viewing, ihose producerly pleasures of access to the process of representation, and the reading Position lhal this access promotes. This playful (oying with the boundary between our sense of lbe rcpresenuúon and of Ihc real »ptosis ihe Tmal conlrad«uoa in popular art forms which depend, al least in pan. upon realism's request to willingly suspend disbelief, and il is a necessary coniradiciion for television to exploit. For realism is essentially a unifying, closing strategy of representation, ll is necessarily authoritarian. But the pleasures of television are democratic, lo be round in its diversity, so the fracture of realism, the Inclusion of lbe viewer into the process of rciracntation is ixccssary if television is lo be popular in a heterogeneous society.
Of cenine. lcl£viu<m vcwers realized this long before its producers. Women viewers of soap opera have long been adept at playing with ihis boundary between the representation and the real.'* Their oft-chmnicled and oft-derided belief in die represented characicrs as "real" people if not only a knowing self-delusion entered into to increase their pleasure, but a also one they arc abb to exiricatc themselves from at will, particularly al Ihc first sign of displeasure.'1
Momenta ol television
It is typically accompanied by a critical awareness of ihc conventions of soap opera, and of its conditions of produciion. There it a pleasure in playing with television's tcxluality. in cxploilmg one's ability W Submii oneself to, and to distance oneself from, iu illusion of reality Uut is finally a democratic one. for it allows lbe viewer both control of reading relations and access to the process of representation. ■
Pleasure, semiosis. and ilif ft rr nee
The relationship between pleasure and meaning needs to be rethought. Lmvcrsalisuc notions of pleasure derived from psychoanalytic theory do not get us very far in understanding something as diverse as television. Similarly, notions ot puissance and affective pleasure require an intensity of viewing and a loss of ■objectivity thai do not accord with television's typical modes of reception. Television u not an orgasmic medium. Any theory of televisual pleasure must be able lo account for both ilw diversity of Ihe televisual experience and the activity of die viewers within iL it must derive from the social heterogeneity of viewers and of momcitu of viewing, and from a notion of television icxiuality as delegated scmiosis, what we may call iu scmiotic democracy.
The pleasures of television lie not just m the meanings it provokes, bul also in the access it offers viewers 10 the process of representation itself. This invites them to adopt a producerly reading relation to iu icxiualily that is necessary if they arc to produce from it meanings and pleasures thai arc Subculiirrally pertinent to them. This producerly relation to tbc text is a non-subrccied one that is a precondition for pleasure. Ii has iu parallel, too, in the world of ihe social, for ii it discursively similar 10 the subject's process of making sense of social experience and of the social system that provides the conditions for thai experience; this process, of course, involves also making sense of our own Subjectivity. For this process to be pleasurable there must be some sense of control over al least part of it. some sense of participation in ii. and certainly no sense ol being excluded from iL There is no pleasure in being totally subjected by the social system or in being made a "cultural dope" by a icxi." Scmiotic democracy entails the subject's power to participate in and inlkti meanings of texL social experience, and subjectivity.
The power inherent in this process is both pleasurable and political. But of course it is not undetermined or limitless. Power can only exist in the experience of resistance: democracy is only necessary (or pleasurable) in the face of autocratic forces. The power and the pleasure of making one's own subculturalty pertinent meanings out of television can only exist in recognition that opposing scraioUc forces arc at work in the text. The process of making meanings out of television involves the recognition of authorial, ccniraliiing lines of scoliotic force against which the viewer-produced, dcccnlercd. democratic meanings are opposed. The ccritripeial<cninfugal metaphor is a useful one here: the pleasures of television arc diverse, around the circumference, and can exist only In
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