Communication Theory

Communication Theory

Jack Z. Bratich

Fifteen: Three August 2005 Pages 242265

Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies

This article examines early problematizations of the audience in communication studies (in Michel Foucaults sense of problematization). Using Michael Hardt and Toni Negris concept of the multitude, the author argues that the audience is a product of discursive constructions, but that these constructions themselves draw upon the ontological practices of what may be called audience powers or mediated multitudes. Problematizations of the audience in communication studies are examples of what Negri calls constituted power, as they seek to capture conceptually the immanent practices of audience constituent powers. Concentrating on 3 early audience discourses (propaganda, marketing, and moral panics), the author assesses how audience power provoked these problematizations and argues that an ontology of media subjects and audience powers offers new perspectives on audiences and audience studies.

The field of audience studies goes on because its object is a fugitive. It should not be surprising, then, that proclamations about the end of the audience are commonplace. The gradual erosion over the past few decades of ontological questions in audience studies and cultural studies has contributed to these pronouncements. A few decades ago, the audience was a relatively unproblematic term (Dahlgren, 1998). The fugitive audience may have been difficult to research and hard to measure, but it was still a common-sense reality. The audience was out there; it was just a matter of sharpening the research tools to understand it. Now, however, the audience is a contested term. The goal of research is not to accumulate better knowledge of an object out there, but to ask what kind of knowledge is possible and desirable (Dahlgren, 1998). To pursue the question whither the audience? this article uses Michael Hardt and Toni Negris (2000, 2004) social theory of subjectivity to focus on three early models and discourses (propaganda, marketing, and moral). I ask, what does a conceptual shift from audience to
Copyright 2005 International Communication Association

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audience power or mediated multitude do to the field of audience research? After this theoretical clearing, I propose a number of research agendas that would further this project.1 Audience, Method, Ontology: Audience as Problematization Pertti Alasuutari (1999) laid out what he called the three generations of reception studies (within cultural studies/media studies). For Alasuutari, cultural studies historical trajectory has shifted from a focus on texts to one on audiences. The first crucial moment was Stuart Halls essay Encoding/Decoding and the voluminous research that followed this model. The second generation was characterized by the method of audience ethnography, which displaced the controlled settings for investigating the variety of decodings (e.g., Ang, 1991, 1996; Fiske, 1987, 1994; Morley, 1992, 1996; Radway, 1984; Silverstone, 1990, 1996). The third generation, constructionist, breaks with the emphasis on empirical audiences altogether and examines media culture and its discourses (especially as these discourses produce and require a conception of the audience). It is this last iteration that has deontologized the audience. As Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney (1998) argued, the audience as such does not actually exist except as idealization (p. 208). Martin Allor (1988) has elaborated the multiplicity of sites and functions the audience can have in research. John Hartley (1992) argued that the audiences are invisible fictions . . . . [They] may be imagined empirically, theoretically or politically, but in all cases the product is a fiction that serves the imagining institutions. In no case is the audience real or external to its discursive construction (Hartley, p. 105). Tony Bennett (1996) has elaborated this, specifically examining how cultural studies notion of the active audience is pedagogically mobilized to authorize critics in the name of empowering readers. In these challenges to audience ontology, audiences are seen not as empirical actors to be examined in their concrete activity, but as discursive constructs, as effects of a variety of programs, institutions, and measuring instruments. Constructionism is a metatheoretical approach that treats audience as signifier and subject position rather than referent and autonomous subject. Doing media studies in this frame entails interrogating the systems that produce regimes of representations (Cruz & Lewis, 1994, p. 5). To study audiences is to study the discourses that take audiences as their object. The method here would be discourse analysis. This article partially emerges from this constructionist framework, adding that audiences are a product of what Foucault (1988, 1997a, 1997b) called problematization. According to Foucault (1988), a problematization is

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not the representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that does not exist. It is the totality of discursive and nondiscursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought. (p. 257)

A problematization takes a variety of practices, habits, and experiences and isolates them into an object of concern or discussion. Sometimes this takes the literal form of a problem or threat (such as youth audiences in relation to sexual or violent imagery); other times the problematization creates a source of anxiety or worry. In each case, lots of time, energy, and resources are spent isolating and analyzing an object. Furthermore, problematizations are not simply idealizations or abstract linguistic postulates. As a number of Foucauldian researchers have argued, problematizations are the conceptual carvings out that make reality intelligible and thus enable practices to take place (Bratich, 2003; Burchell, 1991; Dean, 1996; Foucault, 1997; Rabinow, 1997). Very material practices follow from (and produce more) problematizations. In the present case, the audience is an anchor and alibi for a variety of decisions. Problematizing audiences constitutes a fundamental part of public policy, educational initiatives, corporate production, cultural programming, research funding, even the interpersonal protocols of families in the domestic sphere. Audience as Mediated Multitude/ Audience Power This constructivist approach is crucial, as it both wards off the traps of nave empiricism and shifts attention to the discursive investment in creating, knowing, and modifying the audience. In other words, it directs our perspective to knowledge production and power relations in the cultural field. However, this position is not sufficient in allowing a thorough understanding of the audience question. As a supplement we can turn to the methodological strategy proposed by Hardt and Negri (2000) in Empire. They employed a two-pronged method, what they call the critical-deconstructive and the constructive/ethico-political (p. 47). The former aims to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures by examining the dominant discourses and hegemonic problematizations as such (pp. 4748). This corresponds to the third generation of cultural reception studies above, as it works on the terrain of the discursive production of the category audience. A discourse analysis of the hegemonic languages that problematize the audience would be the method here. The second component is the constructive and ethico-political, which for Hardt and Negri (2000) means entering the terrain of the ontological. Whereas the first approach may offer a glimpse into alternative practices and processes (by critically exposing the exclusions performed by

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discourses), this second approach begins with those alternative practices. This entails a shift in perspective: considering history from the point of view of the res gestae, the power of the multitude to make history (p. 47). This res gestae refers to the subjective forces acting in the historical context . . . a horizon of activities, resistances, wills and desires that resists hegemonic orders while also creating new possibilities (p. 48). In other words, the second methodological approach examines the material dynamics of subjective, self-valorizing practices and productive processes. It is this milieu of subjectivity that spurs dominant codes to create their problematizations in the first place. Rather than give priority to the series of problematizations, the ontological-constructive perspective begins with the notion that any hegemonic discourse selects, limits, and constricts the possibilities of a more expansive field of social practices (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p. 176). This expansive field of potentialities, what Negri (1999) called constituent power, produces meaning and is only partially captured in representation and problematization. In the case of audiences, it means we need to look at the production of subjectivity that constitutes audience practices on their own terms. It entails examining audiences as constituent power (potentia: local, immediate, actual force of constitution) and not simply constituted power (potestas: centralized, mediating, transcendental force of command; Hardt, 1991, p. xiii). The method requires an ontology of audiences to complement the critical deconstructive approach. Rather than assume that the discursive production of subject positions exhausts the field of audience study, the ontological approach seeks to examine the material field of practices performed by the referent of the term audiences, however elusive that referent may be. I am not arguing, then, for a banishing of the constructionist framework in order to get back to the audiences themselves. One way to state this is to say the double method looks both at what audiences do (their practices) and what is done to them in representation (the problematizations). However, this oversimplifies the matter and requires further clarification. Looking at what audiences do assumes the stability of the term audience, which the social constructionist and earlier cultural studies approaches undermine. We may rephrase the matter in the following way: The audience is a problematization, a conceptual capture of a variety of communicative practices and mediated processes of subjectivity. The ontological realm, then, is not one belonging to the audience, but to these mediated subjective forces. Production itself, in the form of meanings, desires, pleasures, and self-value, constitutes media subjectivity. The audience is produced, but also refers to production as such in a communicative context. It is only when a discourse or

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program stabilizes these forces into an object of concern or study that an audience appears. Audience can thus be said to be the end result of conceptual capture, or constituted power. Constituent power, on the other hand, has a less precise analogue. For Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), constituent power is embodied in what they call the multitude. As a concept, the multitude is as amorphous and fugitive as the becoming it tries to name. It names a collective process of production, one that embodies the res gestae and the creative capacities of co-operative social forces, as well as a self-valorizing relation (what they call homo homo and vis viva). As for the audiences constituent power, one could call it a mediated multitude, media subjectivity, or something like audience power. Audience power requires some initial elucidation. First, it should be recognized as a shortened form of audience constituent power. Second, although the Italian notion for this is potentia, I choose to use audience power over audience potential. Potential still seems to retain the connotations of untapped, latent, or nascent activity. This does not resonate with the productive processes I am attributing to mediated multitude (a closer term would be Gilles Deleuzes notion of the virtual). The word power still has some of these qualities (as in capacity) while also carrying a differential and relational quality (as in Foucaults notion of a force acting on another force). Finally, the term audience power can be used as long as we remember that audience is itself not a subject, but the name for the media/human assemblage (in fact, it may be best to think of it as hyphenated: audience-power). Audience power refers to the creative processes of meaning making, the appropriation and circulation of affects, and the enhancement of these very capacities. It does not simply refer to people watching, reading, or listening to mediated texts (no matter how active the consumption). In the traditional transmission model of communication, for instance, the audience is assumed to refer to people who are at the endpoint of the chain of media communication. Audience constituent power, however, does not come after production (located elsewhere). It highlights the collective invention of values, significations, and affectsin other words, the very production of culture itself. Audience power refers to a configuration of humans and communication technologies in which the capacities of production (both semiotic and somatic) are enhanced. Thus audience power entails a fundamental modification of Negris more abstract version of constituent power. Audience power is actualized only through the mediation of communications technologies. Only later, as a reaction to these processes, does an audience appear, via a problematization that places these productive powers at the end of the communication chain.

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There is another version of audience power that bears mention here, namely Dallas Smythes (1981) germinal essay, On the Audience Commodity and Its Work. Smythe proposed a focus on the audience as commodity. This meant demystifying the myth of free time and foregrounding the creative activities of audiences as labor, in which leisure time was spent exerting effort for advertisers. Although he introduced the notion of audience power to media studies, he really only treated it from the perspective of its already commodified form. In other words, while foregrounding the productive power of the mediated multitude, Smythes audience labor has already been expropriated into the commodity-form. As Negri and the other autonomist thinkers have argued, the primacy of subjective labor power would need to precede objective capture. These methodological issues are crucial for this article because much of recent audience studies has relied on the critical, deconstructionist approach. This article retains elements of this approach (by focusing on three problematizing discourses), but recognizes concrete media subjects activities as the immanent horizon from which problematizations are formed. My intervention in audience studies thus draws from Hardt and Negris call for a methodological shift in perspective, one that turns to the ontology of subjective practices in order to open up a different interpretation of audiences and audience studies as a field. It means studying audiences, and especially studying audience studies, from the perspective of constituent power, the motor that provokes discourses of power/ knowledge to take action. In essence, this shift means taking Hardt and Negris analysis of living labor as productive process and transposing it to the cultural field. Placing this subjective figure of the multitude into cultural and media studies may provide a conceptual clearing for a new set of issues around media, culture, and power.

Amassing the Audience: Early Formations of Managing the Multitude The audience has been in crisis since it was generated. The history of audience research is marked by attempts to measure, identify, understand, and target the elusive object. These techniques continually renew themselves, providing consistency to a tradition in the very failure and refinement of conceptual capture. This trajectory of continual crisis is, according to Hardt and Negri (2000), a key marker of the history of Western political thought and practice. For Hardt and Negri, modernity is marked by a series of attempts to measure, contain, and name the multitude. Modernity has instituted a series of sovereign names (nation, people, folk) that attempt to transform immanence into transcen-

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dence, and through this sovereignty machine the multitude is in every moment transformed into an ordered totality (p. 87). With regard to the audience, I argue that this crisis of modernity also marks the perpetual crisis in audience studies. The very emergence of the notion of the audience inaugurates a series of conceptual captures of the mediated multitude, especially via the term mass. How did audiences become masses, or more accurately, how did media subjects become audiences as masses? As Raymond Williams (1961) argued, there are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses (p. 20). He took this nominalism one step further, by claiming that we interpret masses according to some convenient formula . . . it is the formula, not the mass, which it is our real business to examine (p. 20). This is similar to the notion that rather than chasing the real referent of the concept, we need to examine the discursive and nondiscursive constructions and mobilizations of the category. Rise of Social Sciences and the Mass Mass communications arose as a latecomer in the lineage of the social sciences. The rise of mass culture produced new approaches and objects of study in other social sciences before a full-fledged field of mass communications emerged. The audience was not originally a precise object of measurement or of systematic study. It was hardly an object at all, dispersed as it was across a range of discourses and disciplines. Early problematizations of the audience were primarily speculative, performed by social observers, press agents, and critics. Some of the early attempts at observing/reflecting on audiences included pundits reflections on the rise of the penny press in the 1830s, especially around the issues of the potential benefits for the public of increasing the reach of communication, especially to immigrants. Soon thereafter, Alexis de Tocquevilles musings on the American character included his observation that an increase in mass communication would lead to an increase in conformity, thus linking the audience to issues of democracy and creativity. Finally, in the 1880s, the rise of womens magazines emerged from an early conception of a demographic, in which media managers began to think of their mass-mediated products in terms of a typology of readerships (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 12). By the turn of the 20th century, however, the discipline of sociology began to take a more systematic approach to media. Mass media were seen as a necessary component of the newly emerging social formation, as the nervous system of the social body (where society was modeled as an organism, see Mattelart, 1994, p. 36). Methods employed by social research to regulate this organism were designed to manag[e] the multitudes (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 11; Mattelart, 1994).The rise of statistics was linked to a desire to understand and manage sprawl-

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ing populations (Hacking, 1990; Mattelart, 1996; Rose, 1999). Given the mobile and free-floating character of Western subjects in the late 19th century, statistical instruments made judicial and demographic flows measurable, and thus manageable (Mattelart, 1996). These unruly flows were conceptually tamed via the statistical unit of analysis: the average man. This averageness gave a center of gravity to the normal, fused the moral order with the physical order, and reduced social dynamics to a series of calculable effects and types. Early audience measurement was indebted to these instruments, seeking to statistically track and commodify these flows (see Meehan, 1990). The treatment of audience as mass also grew out of the field of collective psychology. Such classic works as Gustav Le Bons The Crowd laid the groundwork for a social psychology of collectives. Although ostensibly a theory of human nature (in which humans are primarily ruled by passions and emotion rather than rational choice), this science of crowds was rooted in social theory. The mass, an anonymous, amorphous aggregate, was linked to large-scale industrialization, the mobility of populations, the concentration of populations into urban spaces, the interlinking of sites via transportation innovations, and the rise of cultural forms corresponding to these developments (Cruz & Lewis, 1994; Mattelart, 1994; Simpson, 1994; Williams, 1961). Cities became defined as sites of mixture, of the breakdown of ethnic tradition and order, and of an emerging conformity (Cruz & Lewis, 1994; Lears, 1983; Leiss, Kline, & Jhally, 1997; Marchand, 1985). In addition, the mass was an outcome of the rise of education and new technologies of transmission (Williams, 1961). This amorphous collective also represented the threat of mental, moral, and physical contagion. As Williams (1961) argued, masses became a new word for mob. Much like the mob and the crowd, masses were essentially ruled by irrational impulses, were easily excited, and led to conformity in conduct. This was a heavily gendered analysis, as these characteristics painted collectives as feminine, thus anchoring representations of the feminine in the populace, and vice versa (Huyssen, 1986; Modleski, 1986; Petro, 1986; Soderlund, 2002). However, mobs and crowds were defined as temporary assemblies that gathered at specific times and places, usually surrounding an event. The masses were abstract: They were always threatening with mixtures, posing dangers of crossing boundaries, and loosening traditional bonds. The mass referred to a more routinized and normalized state of affairs and was thus an abstract and virtual category. As a permanent crisis and continuous threat, this disruption had to be managed. The conceptualization of the audience-as-mass emerged from this broader set of problematizations. Social, political, and economic up-

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heavals, and the attendant production of new subjectivities (citizens, laborers, religious leaders, activists) all created a milieu that finds a countermovement in new measurement techniques and objects of study. Sociology, especially, began to train its eye on the socius itself, analyzing its components and dynamics. The place of media in this emerging configuration of masses and space increasingly became an object of scrutiny and research. With the breakdown in cultural traditions, the massive mingling of immigrants and mobility of nomadic labor, and the skepticism toward traditional institutions, media were considered a major force in creating a national society (Anderson, 1991). Logically, the audience became a paramount concern. For some, like the early Chicago School researchers Robert Park and Charles Horton Cooley, media subjectivities alleviated some shortcomings of modernization (Mattelart, 1994). Park found that newspapers promoted assimilation among urban immigrants and thus acted as an antidote to the disintegrating function of modernization. Cooley, also studying newspapers, found them to enhance variety, and thus remedy fears of mass conformity brought about by the impersonal, anonymous city. This positive role for mass media included gathering up mobile and dispersed populations, creating a national identity, and educating and informing citizens. In sum, mass media ameliorated the pernicious effects of mass society. At the same time, other researchers argued that media contributed to those pernicious effects. Mass media exacerbated the problem of modernization, especially the loss of community through impersonal media technologies, where audiences replace citizens/community members. Thus we see a fundamental ambivalence in the mass media/audience problematic. Media could be harmonizing or disaggregating, centripetal or centrifugal (Carey, 1969; McQuail, 1994; cited in Grossberg, Wartella, & Whitney, 1998). Mass media, in the Deweyian sense of being both source of and corrective for loss of democracy, could thus produce audience subjects that either inhibited or promoted good citizenship. Even while seemingly contradictory, these varying positions indicate an overall concern for and anxiety over the audience. All are grappling with questions like, how powerful is the newly developing mass media? How important is communication to a democracy? How can communication subvert it? What is the medias role in governing and citizenship? What is the capacity of media to affect mobile, dispersed, and varied populations? Within these questions, the audience-as-citizen is fundamental. What can people do with media? What people are constituted via media (here we can read the history of concerns over media and populism, the public, and partisanship)? To put it succinctly, the capacity of actors to produce effects with media was just as important

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as the effects on people by media. Whether media were envisioned as centripetal or centrifugal, as unifier or divider, this early ambivalence spoke to the power of mediated masses, of media subjects as contributing to or blocking new arrangements of culture and economy. The early systematic reflections on audience, within the sociology of media, thus recognized the vital yet ambivalent qualities of audience powers. Propaganda Studies: The Vulnerable and Reactive Audience A few decades later, with the emergence of mass communications as a field of study, this recognition of the power of media subjects takes on a different ambivalence. In this era, the audience/mass gets defined as vulnerable (a passive recipient of influences) and as active polluter (of hierarchies and values). First, we turn to the audience as vulnerable to propaganda. With the success of the Woodrow Wilson-appointed Creel Committee, designed to disseminate propaganda during WWI, and the accepted belief, at least among pundits, that the Germans were defeated primarily through the paper war, propaganda became increasingly an object of fear and admiration (Mattelart, 1994; Simpson, 1994). Simultaneously, the call by Walter Lippman in the 1920s for a scientific approach to mass media research unleashed new ideas and techniques for addressing the audience/mass: public opinion, propaganda analysis, techniques of persuasion, and marketing research. The interwar years increasingly saw a public fear of manipulation, a concern over the power of media to mobilize opinion. What was once the democratic promise for the Chicago School (reaching enormous numbers of dispersed populations), now became an issue of persuasion and manipulation. Studies like Harold Lasswells Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927) and Psychopathology and Politics (1930) were fueled by the will to improve American propaganda as well as defend vulnerable audiences from external forces (Mattelart, 1994; Simpson, 1994). Within propaganda analysis, media subjects were defined as passive and often unknowing recipients of persuasive messages. However, this passivity was not simply a description of a numb or paralyzed audience. It must be remembered that propaganda researchers had two main objectives regarding the homefront: to defend the citizenry against pernicious foreign communication and to mobilize the same citizenry via domestic state communication. This dual goal of propagandato protect from foreign effects and to provoke domestic effectsacknowledged audience power as an increasing component of warfare. The audience/mass was identified with a set of passions, impulses, and irrational desires. Audiences were considered easily provoked, mobilized, and excited. If anything, audience powers were rendered passive, even conceptually pacified. It may not make sense even to use pas-

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sive as a modifier, however, and certainly not to describe the resulting subject of mass media (like the narcotized couch potato figure that later dominated images of passivity). Instead, audiences were identified via their highly charged capacity to be activated. Rather than thinking of audiences as passive, they are more accurately described as reactive. This difference is crucial, as it begins to recognize the capacities of media subject, even if it is the capacity to be affected. The force produced by a human/media assemblage (audience power) was something to be respected, cultivated, and activated for particular policy objectives. It may seem odd to characterize the propaganda framework as one that acknowledged audience power. After all, many communications scholars associate the early persuasion research with the hypodermic needle model of media effects. This direct-effects tradition carries with it the image of a strong media power and a weak audience passively receiving messages. Although this may be the case, it characterizes the persuasion discourse only after it has already performed a conceptual maneuver in response to the threat and promise of audience powers. Media, already immersed in and inseparable from the capacities of audiences, had to be separated and extracted as an autonomous instrument. Propaganda research, confronting the immanence of media in a milieu of active production, tried to isolate media power as an instrument to use on that milieu. The hypodermic needle was an object of fear when used by malevolent others and of desire when used by benevolent selves. Audiences were not neutralized victims, but useful resources: vulnerable and pliable, yes; passive and inert, no. The problematization was formulated in this grammar: a subject (propaganda or propagandists), an instrument (media), and an object (audiences). Yet this formula is itself a technique designed to organize, rechannel, and harness audience constituent power. Audiences are capable of significant production, which begets the desire to make that production serve policy objectives. The heyday of direct-effects research thus emerged in a context that defined the mass audience as easily stimulated, activated, and agitated small wonder, given the mobilizing powers attributed to wartime photojournalism and ad campaigns (Wombell, 1986). In addition, labor organizers successful use of media spurred Ivy Lee to inaugurate countercampaigns that scholars consider the origin of public relations (see Ewen, 1996; Stauber & Rampton, 1995). Given the significance of labor organizing and the proliferation of oppositional and local media during these decades, it is no surprise that the audience would come to connote a heightened capacity for action. Effects-oriented studies that followed, most famously associated with Robert Merton and Carl Hovland, especially during World War II,

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revolved around experimenting with these audience powers, with what would and would not work to activate audiences. The study, and finetuning, of motivational radio programs and films for soldiers and citizens (like Frank Capras Why We Fight film series (19431945) spoke to the belief in the immense power of audiences to act. Eruptions of audience activity such as that accompanying the War of the Worlds (Welles) broadcast in 1938 fascinated researchers for generations. Cantril, Gaudet, and Herzogs (1940) famous Princeton study attempted to delineate which elements of the audience body filtered the messages and which ones were eager to accept the reality effect of the program. The classic works defining the limited-effects tradition (like Lazarsfeld et al.s Peoples Choice and Robert Mertons Mass Persuasion) all sought mitigating factors in media reception, either internal to the media subject, like selective exposure and retention, or in other subjects, like opinion leaders. For both diret- and limited-effects researchers, the target was similar: understanding and directing dispersed, fragmented, and undecided populations. They managed multitudes while not always relying on media to do the brunt of the work. The variations in audience reception so enthralled researchers that the limited-effects tradition remains the bedrock of the empirical approach. The audience as mass came to be defined through its variations and heterogeneity instead of through an equation with a homogeneous and amorphous mob. Thus, the work that criticized the direct-effects model retained this fundamental problematization of audience powers as reactive. Rather than finding audiences passive (as lack of activity), they were characterized by the capacity to be affected, the power to be activated. Although audience power was recognized through testing, this experimentation was performed within a functionalist paradigm (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998). The empirical tradition recognized media subjects and sought to understand constituent audience power in order to reabsorb it into the social body. This functionalist approach experimented with all of the powers of the audience as a way to manage possible deviations and reorient these capacities toward the homeostatic tendency of the social body. What is important here is to recognize that even in the canonical moment when the audience-as-mass was positioned as hopelessly and fundamentally passive, the problematization of audiences spoke to the anxieties over audience power. At stake fundamentally was the capacity of subjects to be acted upon, and then to act, in their relation with media. So, whereas this era is canonically defined by its belief in the great power of media, it can just as well be described as the anxiety over the great power of media subjects.

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Marketing: The Desiring Audience While propaganda discourses defined the audience-mass as needing protection and activation, another contemporary discourse, marketing, focused only on the latter. Much of early audience research was motivated by marketing objectives and performed in advertising agencies. The fusion of selling and communication that came to define advertising agencies in the early 1900s meant the fusion of two subjects: the audience (of advertising media) and the consumer (see Leiss, Kline, & Jhally, 1997).2 The rise of the consumer society was dependent upon the ability to activate media subjects for particular purposes. Audience power was mobilized to alter conceptions of the self from producers to consumers. The consumer was a historically emergent subject that was not simply a buyer of particular products. As many researchers have noted, consumption became a way of being in which desires were channeled toward the self, and identity itself was wrapped up in consuming (Ewen, 1976; Lears, 1983; Leiss, Kline, & Jhally, 1997; Marchand, 1985). When it shifted its textual techniques from information-heavy, product-oriented pitches to transformational promises for the buyer, advertising did more than define particular needs and desires. It trained audiences to think of themselves primarily as consumers, as individuals with desires that could be resolved in the sphere of consumption. Audience power was rerouted and transformed into consumer power. The development of market research into audiences is important for our purposes here in a number of ways. First, it demonstrates the practical application of problematizations. Scrutinizing audiences as objects by articulating them to consumption shows how seemingly abstract definitional changes have effectivity in the social sphere. Second, this meaning-made-practical was crucial to the general shift in the locus of social control from work to leisure and from effort to pleasure (Mattelart, 1994). That is, the multitude was recognized to have a set of capacities outside of the labor power captured in the factory. Leisure is not, thus, only a tool for reproducing and replenishing labor power, but itself becomes a target of social management. This shift can be seen as increasing the sites for the deployment of powerwhat Hardt and Negri (2000), following Foucault, call the context of biopoweras well as being part of the early development of the diffuse factory (Lazzarato, 1996) or social factory (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p. 81; Tronti, 1980). Finally, what market researchers have demonstrated is another early appreciation of the audience as capable of being activated. As others have noted, advertising and marketing have not operated primarily via an external manipulation, but have studied audiences in their concrete specificity (Balnaves & ORegan, 2002; Jhally, 1987; Marchand, 1985).

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Audiences were problematized as a set of desires (e.g., aspirations for self, family, society; imagination of the good life, an optimistic future, and their own place in it) and the capacities to satisfy those desires. These desires and wills preexisted the marketing audience, being bound, for instance, to traditional institutions like church, family, state, communal mores, ethnic rituals, and customs. Advertisers, rather than imposing their will on passive audiences, tapped into and redirected these immanent capacities. With the increasing reliance on psychological techniques of persuasion, marketers further understood audiences to be producers of affect. These subjects capacities were exercised and redirected via images and persuasive techniques. The early history of public relations was also marked by this recognition of audience power. The influence of Freudian thought on early PR advocates, such as like Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays, resulted in defining humans as essentially irrational and driven by the unconscious. Lippman, for instance, made it clear that audiences were not passive; in fact, audience appetites were such that they needed exercising via images (Ewen, 1996, pp. 154158). Of course, this tapping and channeling selected some desires over others, exacerbated some while denying others, created new ones (e.g., anxieties over modernization, self-identity, and courtship), and provided alienating and self-defeating solutions. The immanent capacities of audience power were led to the particular resolution in the commodity form, but this was only the goal and endpoint. While ultimately channeling these impulses toward consumption, early marketers nonetheless could produce the audience-consumer only by recognizing and addressing the generative powers of media subjects.3 In each of the above problematizations of the audience as mass (the vulnerable audience of propaganda and the desiring audience of consumer society), media subjects were defined through their irrationality, as a bundle of emotions, impulses, and desires. Rather than dismiss these accounts for not cultivating the innate capacities for informed and reasoned choice, however, we can at least acknowledge that their problematizations rested on a belief in the powers of the mass. Whether positioned as a threat or a resource, subjects were acknowledged to be able to produce their own sense, to activate desires through a relation to media, and to enhance their own power with media. However, this audience constituent power was acknowledged, then countered, by the propaganda and market frameworks, which sought to transform these impulses for their own interests, winnowing audience potentialities into prescribed pathways. The response to audience constituent power ultimately dampened and froze the capacities in their self-valorizing openendedness and potentiality.

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Moral Panics Framework: The Vulnerable, Yet Threatening, Audience Continuing the propaganda frameworks concern over the vulnerable audience, the moral panics framework signifies the most conspicuous of problematizations (Cohen, 2002; Soderlund, 2002). This framework has come to inform much of media-effects research, especially the research that has contributed to public policies and debates over the triad youth-violence-sex. This media-effects tradition is consistently taken up in the public domain as evidence of media power, as proof of the need to protect and manage the vulnerable audience (often a special population, especially children and juveniles). Regardless of the scholarly debates over the validity of media-effects research, when this tradition is taken up in popular controversies, it becomes a truth-producing discourse, at least as an authoritative source for cultural debates and public policies. Moral frameworks are invoked when media images and sounds are blamed for alleged spikes in youth excess, typically sexual or violent in nature. Marilyn Manson/Columbine and Chucky/James Bulger are perhaps the most spectacular examples in recent memory, but the link between image and violence has a long history in media culture. We might even say that the genealogy of media culture is intertwined with moral panics about that fusion.4 Perhaps the most famous example of this moral discourse in media history is the Payne Fund Study of the 1920s. The rapid diffusion of cinema led critics and moralists to probe this social force. This multivolume study was commissioned to analyze, among other things, the impact of cinema on knowledge of other cultures, on attitudes toward violence, and on delinquent behavior. Critics wanted to know: Was this booming cultural phenomenon destroying parental authority? Was it promoting immorality, ignorance, and rebelliousness? The various experiments conducted in the Payne Fund Studies produced a variety of conclusions, but this variation was ignored in favor of a general conclusion in public discourse that linked frequency of movie attendance to antisocial behavior. Criticisms by media researchers for many of the studies sloppy scientific work had little impact. As another example of problematizations of audiences having pragmatic effects, the Payne Fund study significantly contributed to the context of moral hysteria from which emerged the film industrys early production code and ratings system. This context, as film scholars have noted (Gunning, 1988; Ross, 1999), involved problem behavior both in and out of the theater. Later studies also operated on this moral framework. Frederick Werthams 1955 study, Seduction of the Innocent, examined the influ-

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ence of comic books on juvenile delinquency, focusing on residents of a juvenile detention center. This 1950s research found that the excitement conveyed by the subjects about representations of criminal and deviant behavior provoked and encouraged mimicry among the readers. In the late 1960s, the NIMH continued this concern with juvenile delinquency when it produced a report to the U.S. Supreme Court connecting deviant behavior with television viewing. Although the report provided ambivalent and nuanced conclusions, the public only homed in on the evidence for a link and demanded Senate hearings on the matter. In 1990s Britain, the Newson Report linked the viewing of violent films (video nasties) to antisocial behavior among children, examined in great detail by Barker (1997). Common to these moral frameworks is the concern over youth and deviance. Whether focusing on children or juveniles, what is at stake here is an audience whose deviant behavior is isolated, in keeping with the functionalist paradigm, and correlated with media consumption. The response to this crisis is a call to protect endangered populations from pernicious influences. However, this distinction between powerful media and victimized populations obscures the fact that the threat is not media per se but the audiences themselves. The studies problematize the audience as having the capacities to disrupt the norms of cultural initiation and disciplinary regulations. These are the constituent powers that the discourses seek to curtail, while the studies locate these constituent powers in media influence. Defining media as the problem betrays the scenario of competing discourses of protection. In the moral panics frame, the smooth transition from child to adult, from family to school to military is interrupted. Discourses of moral upbringing and character education are losing hold, while cultural authority is transferred to mass-produced and massdistributed texts (Zelizer, 1992). Which agents and discourses will be authorized to perform passage rites: educators, family, church, the state? Or popular culture? The context for these studies and their problematizations includes a breakdown in traditional forms of upbringing and the need to eliminate potential competitors as threats. The media become defined as a surrogate trainer of morals and proper subjectivities, in the case of younger children, and the substitute initiator of cultural members into adulthood, in the case of juveniles. Media are blamed, and the audience is determined to want protection from that media influence, to be seduced by another set of stories and discourses. The problematized audience wants to return to disciplinary institutions and practices and pleads for a guide. By problematizing the audience as vulnerable and reactive, rather than active, the discourses of protection were able to empower themselves as active agents of intervention into media subjectivity. Struggling with their own waning au-

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thority, these discourses found renewal in the taming of the threat to that authority. In this way, audiences are produced institutionally in order for the various institutions to take charge of the mechanisms of their own survival (Hartley, 1992, p. 105). Whereas scapegoating media is one tactic of rejuvenation here, it is only at the level of a competing discourse of initiation. Viewing the scene from the perspective of audience power adds another layer of analysis. In terms of audience power, it is much more significant that active media subjects (in this case youth) were transformed into helpless victims of media power and thus in need of further guidance and assistance. Audience power here is reduced to the activity of emitting SOS signals. Once again, a problematization of the audience as vulnerable transforms audience power into two agents: active media power and pacified audience. Media subjects are reduced to dangerous deviant behavior, rendered objects of a moral gaze, and their capacities are activated as subjects in need of intervention. Problematizing the Audience-Mass and the Multitude We can now return to Raymond Williamss claim that critical work should examine the formulas through which masses are interpreted. Problematizing the audience as mass serves a variety of material interests and produces practical effects. From the most explicit political sense of moral regulation and censorship to the strategic interests of propaganda and public relations to the transformation of citizens into consumers, the mass audience circulates in discourses of power and representation. In these discourses, audiences are both passive and highly excitable, mute and excessively articulating. Discourses seek to bolster themselves via protecting the mass (the propaganda and moral frameworks) or via activating certain potentialities in that mass (the propaganda and market frameworks). Problematizing the audience as a vulnerable mass thus requires a selection process, a displaced recognition of the mediated multitude, and a rechanneling of power towards the problematizing discourse. Defining the problem in this manner raises and denies the immanent forces of media subjects, splitting this constituent power into two constituted powers: (a) a determining agency (the media) and (b) a determined object (the audience). Both of these new powers become positions within the problematizing discourse and a target of numerous applications (protection, regulation, and mobilization). In sum, these three discourses transformed the multitude into a mass. As Michael Hardt argued:
The masses and mob are most often used to name an irrational and passive social force, dangerous and violent because so easily manipulated. The multitude, in contrast, is an

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active social agenta multiplicity that acts. It is in fact the foundation of all social creativity. (Hardt & Dumm, 2004, p. 173)

For audience studies, this does not mean simply placing one term (audience as multitude) for another (audience as masses). To bring in the concept multitude is to undermine audience as a category, which, after all, names only the mediated multitude as constituted power. It is not the case that 100 years ago audiences were masses, and now we have audiences as multitudes. These are two concepts that address the creative productive practices of media subjectivities. The multitude, as concept, is more just and appropriate to the creative powers of that force. Early conceptions of the audience-as-mass were representations that, when faced with a mediated multitude, attempted to pacify and activate these forces through problematization. It matters little at this stage what those affects, meanings, and desires actually were (their content). The fact that the capacity to produce them posed such a disruptive force that they needed pacification is enough to warrant attention. Emerging out of a milieu of social scientific techniques designed to manage unruly subjects, these audience discourses acknowledged audience constituent power, only to defuse or rechannel it. These discourses themselves were reactive, operating only on a terrain composed of media subjects. These discourses sought to split audience power from itself, dividing constituent power into constituted powers. The audience-as-mass thus contains the traces of all these powers. To return to Hardt and Negris double method: The problematization of the audience in these discourses does indeed produce an object ( la the constructionist model). At the same time, these problematizations are reactive and selective forces that capture already existing practices in specific ways. The field of media subjective processes is primary and constitutes the terrain of the ontological.

Proposals for Future Work

Empirical research. This essay has operated in a conceptual realm, seek-

ing to clear theoretical ground by unsettling certain assumptions in audience studies. It has worked at the level of the constitution of problematizations themselves, but an ontology of audience power can be successful only via the difficult empirical work of locating and recovering practices of the mediated multitude. Although I have occasionally mentioned some examples of audience power (e.g., early labor organizers use of the press, rowdy cinema-going practices), much research could be done to add to this empirical layer. Indeed, a lot of this work has already been done in media history (e.g., Douglas, 1987) on the impor-

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tance of early amateur ham operators to radios emergence); it would just be a matter of reorienting these examples through the filter of audience power. In addition, contemporary research on alternative media practices has provided a wealth of examples (see Critical Art Ensemble, 2001; Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Klein, 2000; Kline, Dyer-Witherford, & de Peuter, 2003; McCaughey & Ayers, 2003; Rushkoff, 1996a, 1996b). It would mean not just finding examples of audience production (e.g., community press or fanzines) but examples that alter the notion of production itself. Active Audience Model. This article focuses on early audience problematizations. How have subsequent discourses and their sovereign names (like public, identity, and popular) addressed audience power? Perhaps the most compelling lineage would be the active audience model in cultural studies. Some might even say that calling audiences a multitude may be simply dressing up the active audience in new, loftier garb. There are indeed many similarities among the projects, and I find great resonance with De Certeaus (1984, 1986) writing on the heterological practices of consumption here, as well as his subsequent cultural studies uptake by John Fiske, Ien Ang, Virginia Nightengale, Janice Radway, Jacqueline Bobo, and others. The issues surrounding wandering or dispersed audience subjects are of particular relevance (Grossberg, 1988; Radway, 1988). Some initial differences with this tradition can be sketched here. The active audience tradition essentially sought to displace and correct previous notions of the passive audience via analyzing what concrete audiences do. They revived the productive capacities of media subjects but within the already given problematic of the audience. That is, productivity was inscribed within constituted power, after a problematization has occurred. My analysis is directed at the level of the problematizations themselves, reinscribing productivity prior to the moment of constituted power, in the constituent power captured by the term audience. In the active audience model, the endpoints of two chains, the communication chain (audience) and economic chain (consumption), are assumed and combined. Activity is located in the fusion of these given positions, where decoding as a consumer has many degrees of freedom, but still within the structured constraints. Perhaps this can be traced to the ambivalence even in Halls (1980) germinal essay, Encoding and Decoding, in which he sought to give decoding a separate set of conditions, while retaining the essential spatial arrangement of the transmission model. Similarly, De Certeau sought to give consumption its own history and economy, but often retained the notion that this autonomy was a secondary reaction to production performed elsewhere. What

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would happen if activity and productivity preceded these chains, even acting as catalysts for their reactive emergence? Contemporary problematizations. The audience as mass emerged in an historical context in the U.S. that included gathering populations in urban centers, dispersion within a national border, the rise of industrialized mass production techniques, the admixture of cultures and traditions in concentrated settings, the expansion of market relations, and the concomitant extension of disciplinary institutions across these spaces (factory, school, army, hospital). Given current globalized conditions, as well as the technological developments in information and communication networking, what are the current discourses that problematize audiences? In an age in which communications and information technologies have integrated into everyday life, what specificity does the audience have? Havent media become less a mass entity than a mobile, variegated, converged, and niched set of practices? Current research on media convergence, mobile technologies, and networked media all make the question of the audience paramount. The fugitive audience has not disappeared per se, instead dispersing in scattered and masked forms in other research. The audience is everywhere being studied, but rarely named as such. Audiences are problematized as mobile, interactive, and highly technologized media subjects in a variety of disciplines and fields, including organizational communication, computer-mediated communication, library studies, telecommunications, information science, social network analysis, distance education, media literacy, and technology studies, to name a few. Studies of cell phone uses and gratifications, pedagogic applications of emerging technologies, and the new mediated arrangements of kinship, identity, and leisure time all belong to this new style of problematization. Examples of this range from the impact of instant messaging on youth identity, to the influence of interactive websites on public journalism, to the networked labor practices in the new office space, to the effect of new technologies on diasporic identity. Smart mobs, electronic democracy, netiquette, new media literacy, virtual communities, and a host of other topics have emerged in which audiences as technologized media subjects have become central, even if not named as such, or named as users, interfacers, players, consumers, targets, participants, and so on. The topics of subjective interconnection, mobility, and global dispersion have come to the foreground of much communication research and, I argue, constitute the new audience studies. Studying these new problematizations could still benefit from Hardt and Negris autonomist toolbox. One could take up their arguments in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) that the integration of information technologies, communication processes, and strategies of biopolitical

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control has created a set of subjects who are increasingly interconnected, nomadic, and flexible. Jodi Deans (2002, 2004) focus on communicative capitalism would supplement the more sprawling argument of Hardt and Negri. The audience, as media subject at the intersection of these social forces, becomes problematized in its continuous modulation, in its technological hybridity, and in its increasing mobility. Drawing also from Deleuzes (1990a, 1990b) writings on Societies of Control (which he also dubs Societies of Communication) and the growing governmentality studies literature (e.g., Balnaves & ORegans, 2002, Governing the Audience) could augment this approach.

Conclusion: The Active (End of the) Audience Within audience studies, the contemporary pronouncements about the audiences disappearance ultimately have a degree of truth value. They speak to the demise of a particular problematization of the mediated multitude. What has withered is not audience constituent powerif anything, that is intensifying with networked technologies. Rather, what is waning is the constituted power of audience, and the discourses that historically have produced it as object. This passing has opened up new ways of conceptualizing audience studies and its fugitive object. Whereas the method of much audience research, including the constructionist approach, entailed analyzing audience powers from the perspective of constituted power, the diminution of that power allows a shift in perspective. This article has tried to follow Hardt and Negri in the broader shift in perspective about historical subjectivity via turning audience problematization on its head: Traditionally we have analytically placed media power first and audiences second. With the waning (and scattering) of the term audience, we can reverse the polarities: active audience power, reactive discourses. As the active subject of production, the wellspring of skills, innovation, and cooperation (DyerWitheford, 1999, p. 65), audience power is self-valorizing. Ultimately, media industries, and the problematizing discourses, need the audience. The audience, as mediated multitude, does not need media industries in order to produce culture, nor the problematizing discourses in order to produce value. Within this methodological shift, the audience is no longer tied to its problematized representation, but returned to the milieu of immanent creative forces. It is this sphere of audience powers that motors those problematizations in the first place, as well as offers the site and resource for new potentials of becoming and collectivity. Among these potentials remains the question of whether audience power has the an-

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tagonistic will to struggle that could motor future cultural production, and what forms these powers will take.
Jack Z. Bratich is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University.
1 The essay concentrates on media audiences. This is crucial to note, as other research fields have a different tradition of problematizing the audience. In the performance studies tradition, the history of the audience revolves around the live audience, in which the site of performance and material copresence comes to define the audience (see Butsch, 2000). The unruly corporeal audiences produce their own attending counterdiscourses and problematizations, and their history deserves a separate analysis. 2 Cruz and Lewis (1994) have noted this early tension between marketing (the malleable audience) and propaganda (the vulnerable audience) as a fundamental ambiguity of the early audience. 3 On top of this redirecting, market researchers ideologized the audience power as consumer sovereignty in which audience-consumers operate under rational (at times irrational) choice theory. This early appreciation for immanence also led to later manifestations of consumer research, such as the ease with which critical consumer studies celebrates active audiences and clings tenaciously to the uses and gratifications model of consumer behavior 4 Loosely borrowing the term moral panics from Stanley Cohen (2002), I note here the close link between panics over youth and panics over media. It is difficult to think of them in isolation, at least since the beginning of the 20th century.

Author

Notes

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