Revisiting Concepts of Public Relations Audience Through Postmodern Concepts of Metanarrative, Decentered Subject, and Reality/Hyperreality

Abstract

This article reviews several tenets of postmodern theory to point out how their applications to new, expanded definitions of audience can enhance campaign communication. Postmodernism's acknowledgement of the decentered subject, that an individual does not actually “live” a holistic, planned existence but rather “lives” several discourses/roles imposed on the individual from without, leads to some very interesting questions for public relations professionals who communicate to audiences. Postmodern applications to audience analysis and campaign message design suggest how concentration on the multiple, ever changing frames of references—or “realities”—of any audience member can lead to more effective public relations messages and campaign communication.

KEYWORDS:

• campaign communication
• critique of Grunig's symmetrical model
• decentered subject
• metanarrative
• postmodernism
• power/knowledge relationship
• public relations
• reality/ hyperreality

Notes

1. We disagree with Plowman's (2003) model of postmodernism as a general term that subsumes “critical theory,” “culture,” “feminist theory,” and “chaos theory.” Rather, we see postmodernism as one critical theoretical position that exists alongside and with other critical theories of British cultural studies (also, cultural Marxism); feminist theory; American interpretivism; semiotics and structuralism; and so on.

2. While postmodernism looks at human relationships in general, a related perspective, poststructuralism, which is often associated with Jacques Derrida (1976), looks at relationships in language, particularly the slippage in meaning formation and then engages in what is called “deconstruction” to parse out the multiple meanings that may be generated from a text by an individual, regardless of authorial intent. We disagree with Mickey's (2003) argument that deconstruction is merely interpretation of a text and that deconstruction is a critical practice that uncovers ideologies and cultural context; we see deconstruction as a critical perspective that largely disavows cultural influence or ideological content since it privileges any meaning(s) that an audience member wants to give a text irregardless of author intention or cultural influence.

3. The “post” in postmodernism does not refer to an “era of thought” or historical period insomuch as it is a “mode of thought, of utterances, of sensibility” (Lyotard, 1989, p. 314).