Enunciation vs destination : how a phenomenological point of view on media audiences is also a political one

This paper is based on Derrida’s deconstruction of significance, and focuses on how media-based discourses organize the audience in a public space. In audience studies, the text/reader relationship remains a difficult point because it remains unclear how to account for the fact that the media structure perception, although they do not determine it. To solve this contradiction, we need to link together facts and possibilities (empirical and transcendental levels) in a way that keeps alive this relationship between a text and a reader. This is what Jacques Derrida’s work makes possible.
We’ll mainly use his concepts of “address” and “destination”. The “address” might be considered as an attempt to translate the linguistic “enunciation” into phenomenological terms: the address modifies reference and thus inscribes the reader in a “world”. As for the “destination”, it refers to a model where communication is indeterminate (“incalculable”). This model gives readers the opportunity to create previously unseen kinds of worlds, or communities of “common sense”. In this way, this model is political.
Our analysis allows us to account for both representations of the world and places given to readers in this world, so that we can describe, with this “sharing of the sensory”, mediated experience as political.