18

From Audiences to Media Subjectivities

Mutants in the Interregnum

Jack Z. Bratich

The current media age has been described as one of transition and an interregnum, an in-between age marked by uncertainty, experimentation, and unpredictability (Jenkins, 2006; Levy, 1997). This era is one of transformation in which old categories disappear and new ones take their place. These assessments are often filled with optimism and a faith in progress. But in-between states are not solely times for improvement. Antonio Gramsci (1971) describes such states as a crisis in which “the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass” (pp. 32–33). The interregnum produces change, but this change is best defined as a series of mutations. While we are not able to predict what will arise, we are obligated to evaluate the mutants we are becoming, as new hybrids bring with them a “terrible ambiguity” regarding their powers (Negri, 2003).

What are the new mutations in media studies? What is living and what is dead? Better yet, what is undead? These questions seem especially pertinent when addressing one of the traditional objects of media study: the audience. Has the audience disappeared along with mass or broadcast media? Has it turned into something else? Perhaps the “people formerly known as the audience,” as Jay Rosen (2006) puts it, can tell us, in their monstrosity, something of the history of audience studies. The moments of dissolution of certain paradigms allow researchers to see the hegemonic epoch differently. Remediation thus does not just apply to technological form and content but to the concepts that accompany those forms. Here we will explore some of those concepts, specifically ones relating to the media subjects called audiences.

This chapter argues that we can still learn much from examining the construction of that audience. Key terms in contemporary new media studies (e.g., convergence, collective intelligence, interactivity) carry with them a series of issues that have surrounded the discursive construction of audiences throughout the twentieth century, namely the dynamics of power relations and subjectivity. The audience itself is a convergence of discursive problematizations of what we could call “media subjectivities.” This chapter explores a number of these problematizations in order to extract the specific dynamics around them that are still relevant, including the relation of individuality and collectivity, activity and reactivity, composition and organization. Ultimately, I argue, audience studies reaches a limit with the emergence of interactivity (and its mutations interpassivity, interactivism, and inter-reactivity), but a limit that allows us to productively mine the past for new ways of thinking about media subjects.

Problematizing the Audience

As a number of scholars have noted, “the audience” is a construction (Alasuutari, 1999; Allor, 1998; Ang, 1992; Bennett, 1996; Hartley, 1992). Specifically, different ways of conceptualizing the audience are the product of problematization, which Michel Foucault (1988) defines as “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). These problematizations have a history that needs studying.

The audience has been an object of concern, sometimes a “problem” or threat, other times a source of anxiety, and at others a target for cultivation (Bratich, 2005). The audience is a result of a particular configuration of power/knowledge: as a category, it emerges from various agents, institutions, and desires. These are more than ideas, as practices follow problematizations. The audience acts as anchor and alibi for a variety of decisions (public policy, educational, corporate production, cultural programming, funding, domestic rules).

The field of media studies needs not merely to recover the problematizations of the audience but to reopen them. The future of the audience is in its virtuality – its pre-forms that have not yet been actualized. A virtual, as Pierre Levy (1998) defines it, involves cracking open an actual to reveal the knot of tendencies or forces that invoked a resolution (the actual). Actualization is more than a selection among already constituted alternatives (a realization of one possible among possibles). Rather, it constitutes a solution to problem(s). Any entity (in this case a settled notion of an audience) invokes the specter of the improbable, the fluctuation, and thus the virtual (Terranova, 2004). Investigating the audience means asking: what are the knots that gave rise to the solution only to be occulted afterward?

What happens when we remediate and reopen a concept like audience? We not only account for the myriad associated concepts (mass, public, popular, identity, receiver, citizen, consumer) but open up the volatile tendencies that prompted both a number of possibles and the actual solution. We are thus not encountering a “new” audience, or even a post-audience (if by that we mean after the audience). Instead, we will find ourselves in a dispersed milieu of practices that come to define media subjectivity. The key dynamics involved in understanding recent developments in participatory media culture (interactivity, sociality, co-creation, collectivity, affectivity) thus find a virtual existence throughout the history of audiencing.¹

Collective Subjects: Composition and Organization

What is this media subjectivity? For one thing, we need to examine it as the nexus of power and subjectivity. How were media subjects brought into being, rendered knowable, and made into a subject upon which to intervene? A methodological key here is to remove the individual from the center of the analysis. Instead, we focus on collectivity and powers. How does the history of audiences (especially in its earliest stages) present a portal into understanding the ways of assembling and theorizing collectives?

Understanding media subjectivity as a collective matter means foregrounding the capacities of a collective body whose existence is mediated. This phrase is one of the virtuals encased in the history of audiences and their problems/solutions. How does it take on a special tenor in an age defined by participation, collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and interactivity?

We can turn here, as many autonomist social theorists do, to Spinoza, and ask: what is a mediated body capable of ? Helpful are Spinoza's fundamental insights into capacity, affect, and bodies, now situated within the techniques of media subjectivation:

These problematizations are not just invented in a discursive vacuum – they respond to activities of media subjectivation already occurring (Bratich, 2005). As we will see, they try on the one hand to neutralize and pacify some media actions (preventing enemy propaganda from reaching targets, dissuading alternative and dissenting practices). On the other, they attempt to capture, discipline, and shape media capacities (as market, public opinion, social movement, national identity, lifestyle, community).

Problematizations of audiences have been epistemological propositions, but they have also been interventions. They act on other actions, as conduct on conduct. Problematizations are actions that signify certain ways of being at the same moment that they encounter other beings. And how can we characterize the latter terms here (actions, conduct, beings)? Audiences are both the objects of audiencing discourses and signs of something that exceeds these capturing discourses. What is this excess, this surplus? The discussion below teases out a number of concepts that allow us to get to the ontology of this surplus: accumulation, self-valorization, composition, and constituent power.

Audiences are linked to the history of what Toni Negri (2005) calls ontological constitution and “ontological accumulation.” In characterizing capitalism, his autonomist approach argues that accumulation not only belongs to capitalist regimes of value-production but also emerges “from below, from the base of life” (Negri, 1999). Species-being – defined as the capacity to take powers as objects of will, consciousness, and practice – can encounter capital without being reduced to capitalism's interruptions and forms of violence. The autonomist concept of self-valorization refers to how this value-generation of creative acts infuses the immanent needs and desires of the producing community and avoids being fully captured by capital (Cleaver, 1979; Dyer-Witheford, 2004; Negri, 1991; Virno & Hardt, 1996).

Audiencing takes an audience as an object of discipline, management, and encouragement (within limits). But as a composition, constituent power, capacity, and social value (what I have elsewhere called audience-power or mediated multitude), it is never fully captured by these discourses. Processes of media subjectivation exist alongside or within the audience problematizations, constituting the longue durée of accumulation and self-valorization. What media subjects do, as audiences and despite them, creates surplus: accumulations of value, power, and social relationships that no longer depend on external mechanisms to organize them or to realize their virtues. This ontological foundation is “a concrete substratum which neither the conscience nor the memory attest, but only the continuity of struggles. And all the modifications, breaks and radical innovations gather around that constructed and re-found base, around that dynamic profile of a subjective ontology” (Negri, 2005, p. 138).

It helps to think about this subjective ontology if we introduce a bifurcation, drawn from Gilles Deleuze's reading of Spinoza. Within the forms of interaction, two processes emerge: organization and composition (Armstrong, 1997). Organization refers to processes that externally mediate the forms according to transcendent values and ideals. Power here is “a principle of organization which subordinates the activity of things to a transcendent order” (Armstrong, 1997, p. 47). This “plan of organization”

Composition, in this Spinozan framework, designates immanent processes of transmission and transduction that begin at the lowest, most mundane interactions to combine capacities. Composition refers to how bodies enter into relations with one another (how they affect and are affected) – a coming-together which cannot be predicted from the component parts or interactions. This kind of plan “has no supplementary dimension; the process of composition must be apprehended for itself, through that which it gives, in that which it gives” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 128; see also Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 265–272). Composition involves “experimentally combining powers, by entering into different relations; only in this way are the powers and capacities of any particular body discovered” (Armstrong, 1997, p. 48).

Audiences exist as both organization and composition. Each problematization is a practical intervention and mediation that exists somewhere on the continuum between transcendence and immanence, operating on different plan(e)s. Audience as organization is produced through a problematization – a selection and a resolution. It is a discursive capture around forms and functions, assembled for particular ends and often with hidden structural principles. It is a constituted power (Negri, 1999).

Audience composition refers to the immanent processes of media subjectivation.² Recently, terms like “grassroots,” do-it-yourself (DIY), bottom-up, peer-to-peer, and co-production have been proffered to understand these processes. Composition refers to the experimental, the emergent, the not-yet-formed, the virtual. It is the milieu out of which the problematizations are formed. Composition is the noise to the selection mechanisms of the discursive captures; it primarily exists in virtuo, as constituent power. While we can begin the empirical work of naming and recovering some lost practices, it is vital to understand the virtual existence of practices before relying on those that are actual (and thus recoverable).

In this ontological dimension we can locate the political; specifically, the relation of audiences to democracy. Democracy here is not relegated to the political order often assumed in media studies, for instance, work on audience citizenship (Butsch, 2008). This privileging of the citizen (as member of a polity, as a nation-state subject), while offering numerous insights into the various discourses that problematized media subjects, remains at the level of constituted power. It takes for granted a particular sociopolitical order with its accompanying subject positions (as forms and functions). But constituent power, according to Toni Negri, has a broader scope. As a creative force, it is closely tied to interactions and associations defined as the powers of demos or multitude. Alberto Toscano (2005) notes that an ontological analysis begins with “forms of interaction,” political associations defined by a democratic dynamic against transcendence.

Drawn from Spinoza's understanding of democracy as immanence, this multitude subjectivity is self-organized (composed of interactions whose constituent power refuses and resists capture by constituted power), in order to carefully cultivate, nurture, and affirm immanent powers. It is a type of direct democracy, but one that does not presume a people that is already ready to rule – it requires attention to the interactions that compose subjectivity (individual and collective). One would have to gauge any democratic order (as constituted power) insofar as it captures or encourages democracy (as constituent powers). A more familiar version of the question here, often put to modernity, is how does each epoch of productive forces provide and inhibit emancipatory potential? How do mediated forms amplify or interfere with the expression and affirmation of powers?

In the remainder of this chapter, I consider these dynamics of organization and composition through a variety of terms associated with audiences: masses and publics; consumers, receivers, spectators, social identities, active audiences (decoders), and finally fans. In each case, I examine the compositional issues embedded in the problematization. This approach draws a thread through these terms to unravel the knot encased in each. The point here is to see the “post-audience” within the audience, to identify themes that prefigure, persist, and mutate today. I then assess how the recent reconfiguration of media culture (the interregnum) reworks these associations, unleashing dynamics that take on new names. Audience studies goes on because its object has disappeared: what new mutants appear in the interregnum and how were they already incubating in its previous formulations?

Associated Terms³

In this section I examine the early twentieth-century conceptualization of emergent media collectivities. These problematizations of media collectives as masses and publics offer key themes relevant to studying contemporary media subjects. Each attempt at conceptualizing the audience encodes an ambivalence, namely one of capture and overflow, of harnessing audience-powers yet not allowing them to get out of control. How did these audiences, through their newfound media powers, become both a resource and a threat to governance? How do today's interactivated media subjects find themselves within this ambivalence?

Masses

As Raymond Williams famously put it, there are “no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1997, p. 20). He takes 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). So what was at stake in defining media subjects as masses? To answer that, we need to return to the moment when amassing, mediated or not, was an object of concern.

The mass finds a predecessor in crowds. Sociologists, among others, have continually returned to the second half of the nineteenth century to understand the emergence of collective social agents. Crowds (and the more narrowly organized mob) were defined by Gustav Le Bon and Charles McKay via associations with irrationality, loss of individuality, passion, and imitation (Blackman, 2007; Borch, 2007; Brennan, 2004; Butsch, 2008). The amassing of a multitude was seen through biopolitical lenses, as a matter of health, disease, and contagion (Blackman, 2007; Brennan, 2004; Terranova, 2007). In other words, understanding crowds existed within a discourse whose objective was managing populations. The problematizations of audiences-as-masses took traits from this physical crowd and applied them to a faceless mass.

This is only one strand of audience history, the one tied to mass media. Audiences were already active as politically charged collective subjects (Butsch, 2008). During the French Revolution, a people – formed in some ways as audiences of plays and printed matter – mobilized against the monarchy. In the United States counterpart, performative publicity stunts like the Boston Tea Party called forth an audience to be provoked to action. After the Revolution, theaters became sites where Republicans contested Federalists, as audience members, over the control of what was happening on stage.

But there was one watershed event that fundamentally transformed the relation between composition and organization of collective powers, thereby setting the tone for future audience dynamics. As Richard Butsch (2008) persuasively argues, the history of audience rights took a severe turn in the Astor Place Opera House Riot of 1849.⁴ The Astor Place riot was a threshold event in the articulation between audience participation and the democratic tradition of rights and customs. In these crowd actions we see a shift from the rights of the audience to stop a performance to the right of an individual member to spectate without disruption. Butsch also notes that the crackdown on theater audiences was a crucial way of policing the streets in response to working-class organization. In this moment, amassing and problematizing the theatergoers as a violent mob severed the connection of audiences with the Revolutionary heritage. Constituent power was disaggregated and the compositional capacities of media subjects were disrupted.

Media subjectivity was transcendently organized, first by treating audience actions as crimes to be policed. After bloody repression, a new organization appeared, one that installed the rational individual at the center of audience political subjectivity (endowed with the right to consume in peace, to choose his or her commodity in a disciplined space) (Butsch, 2008, p. 32).

These kinds of amassings later proved troublesome in other sites of reception, such as early cinemas. This time the problem was not the riotous assertion of rights but the unruly interactions (argumentative, criminal, sexual) at the sites, which brought in a policy apparatus (moral, legal, architectural) to discipline cinema spectators. The responses this time were not the brutal repression of bodies on streets but a material reorganization: in addition to enforced behavioral codes (silence during shows), discipline was spatial (fixed seating, ornate theaters, cost-prohibitive entry).

During the same period (1910–1930), the problematizing discourses transformed the masses from an actively unruly agent to a passively suggestible receiver. The earlier analysts of crowds also wrestled with this ambivalence. On the one hand, we have the collective power of too much agency – the danger to norms and constituted arrangements. On the other hand, each individual lacks enough agency – vulnerable to suggestion and imitation, even to hypnosis and the contagion of passions. Moral panic discourses proclaimed that this vulnerable mass needed to be protected from itself, and responded by implementing regulatory codes. Early audience studies was an extension of protection discourses' competitive claims to authority, often involving paternal organization of media subjects around the figure of the child.

What have we extracted so far from this moment of amassing? First and foremost, we have the techniques of managing collective media subjects. At this point the collective is mostly a threat. We could call this a type of hyperpathy, or excessive action (at least from the problematizers' standpoint).⁵ Dangerous crowds occupy a variety of spaces, including ones with media performances.

Media subjects were organized via cultivation, a spectator-discipline according to external standards (at times via codes of audience dress and conduct) (Butsch, 2008). The organization of interactions sought to regulate behavior, producing a political subject founded on austere protocols of rational behavior: media subjectivity as a self-disciplined consumer.

Ultimately, embedded in the problematizations of audiences as masses (its virtual knot) is the emerging collective power of mediated subjects. The constituent power of audiences is defined as a threat to constituted powers (challenging protocols, evading moral gazes, and eroding institutional boundaries). Participation-power, so useful during the Revolutionary period, now encounters its Thermidor. But more than just completely repressing these powers, the reactive constituted power starts to recognize the usefulness of these constituent powers. How, problematizers begin to ask, can we harness and nullify these capacities? For a better understanding of how they answered this question, we turn to the persistent organization of media subjects as publics.

Publics

It is difficult to imagine the history of media subjects apart from their ongoing association with the public. From defining early US print journalism as a Revolutionary force to linking Internet culture with a Habermasian public sphere, the public has been a regulative ideal for the problematization of audiences. Here I want to bifurcate this notion of the public into two political components. The first dimension refers to a political order comprised of citizenship, civic participation, electoral campaigns, and policymaking, as well as the construction of a communicative civil society that underpins them. The second dimension involves mobilizing opinion and consent, and comes in the form of public relations, public opinion, and propaganda.

The public is ambivalently related to the crowd, mob, and mass. At times it is strictly differentiated from the latter concepts, and at others the public draws upon elements of these other terms (within limits). Take the case of Sam Adams, who helped harness the riotous energy of the aggrieved and stood aside as confrontation with the colonial regime occurred. Then, when success was achieved for the emerging political class, this energy was targeted as a security threat (to wit, Adams's role in drafting the Massachusetts Riot Act) (Sandine, 2009).

A brief example related to early US print more clearly illuminates the role of media in this ambivalence. Newspapers (and other print modes of political information) were noted for their abilities to create an impersonal, abstract body of eyes that could act as rational watchdogs on the excesses of government (Warner, 1990). This public sphere would be a space of interaction for men of letters to depersonalize their self-interests toward a greater good.

However, news was not merely a site for the emergence of this political subject. Take this quotation from Thomas Jefferson regarding Shays's Rebellion, in which small farmers rebelled against debt collection and heavy taxes: “the way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them the full information of their affairs thro' the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people” (quoted in Butsch, 2008, p. 81).

Shays's Rebellion was one among many signs that the Revolutionary spirit was still alive, a constituent power refusing to be nullified in a Constitution. Jefferson's sentiment makes clear that it was up to print to act as Thermidor, to prevent constituent power from continuing its ontological movement. When governments could not enact such repression, it was up to media to take on this governmentalized function.

Around a century later, we see a variation on this theme; this time with the tension between constituent and constituted power occurring within the press, namely as the tension that resulted in journalism's professionalization. Professional journalism arose in contradistinction to a type of popular news called “yellow journalism” (Bratich, 2008b; Schudson, 1978). This popular journalism had two components: sensationalism (focus on scandal, imagery, emotion) and muckraking (motivated investigation, exposés of corruption, populist antagonism). The profession authorized itself in the name of the public, now defined against the disorderliness of the popular. The professional public, then, was founded on a management of certain affects (rage, resentment, empathy, pleasure) while cultivating others (scorn, disdain, loyal admiration).

A media-generated public, the key to informed citizenship, was an ideal open to all, but accompanied by the distinction between ideal subjects and the disqualified. These binaries ran down familiar lines: rationality/irrationality, reason/emotion, mind/body, discussion/action. Problematizing audiences as publics involved persuasion as well as dissuasion, the mobilization and immobilization of bodies, ideas, affects.

To understand these dual processes even further, we need to mention briefly key figures that bridge the bifurcated public (for an overview and synthesis of these pioneering perception engineers, see Ewen, 1996). For Walter Lippmann, most people were, when it came to political matters, innocent bystanders. They were deluged with propaganda and did not have the time or resources to make informed decisions. How was a spectator to distinguish the public from the private-disguised-as public? The answer here was to put the public in its place, namely as “interested spectators” (Bratich, 2008b; Ewen, 1996). Meanwhile, intellectual leaders were defined as agents with a special purpose, working to shape perception and assist in constructing that public. For these problematizers (social scientists and other “unseen engineers”), the public is to be formed via identifications with certain interests and alignment with objectives. This is done, for someone like Lippmann, via the symbol and images, which unify disparate positions and conflicting emotions.

In an apocryphal story, it was Lippmann himself who wrote to Woodrow Wilson urging the president to create a public-making mechanism in order to garner consent for the impending entry into the Great War. The resulting Committee on Public Information (or Creel Committee) launched the career of Edward Bernays, regarded as the father of public relations (PR). For Bernays, propaganda was necessary for democracy to narrow choices for the masses. Organization here is a type of winnowing and routing, a conduction of behavior through preassigned canals to fight off competing organizations (enemy propaganda).

George Creel, head of the Committee, saw that it was not enough to unify a population around information or principled beliefs. Needed was not “mere surface unity, but passionate belief in justice of America's cause that should weld the people into one white-hot mass instinct” (in Ewen, 1996, emphasis added). The organization of publics was understood to work via harnessing the affective capacities previously attributed to unruly mass behavior. And it was understood that this organization required tactics that would mask their origins in the external governance agencies. Top-down directives had to appear as persuasion immanent to crowds, even coming from them. To accomplish this constituted-power-disguised-as-constituent power, Creel employed techniques like embedding opinion leaders in the population (e.g., the Four Minute Men). From then on, stealth, peer-to-peer influence in organizing multitudes was to become a fixture.

The problematization of audiences-as-public did “take into consideration the passional character of human existence” (Armstrong, 1997, p. 49). However, it did so to manage them via giving them forms and functions for ends externally imposed on the composition. It would be a mistake to think of this early public-making as a type of propaganda via the “hypodermic needle” model of communications. It is not a matter of injecting a message into people's minds/brains. Rather, it involves a more nuanced perception management: identification, exercising desire, guiding attention. There is no unidirectional insertion by a mechanism here: it draws and attracts, seduces and evokes. As a public-making machine, this early audiencing involved capturing affections and controlling collective attention (Ewen, 1996, p. 136). Moreover, audiences were not just passive spectators but needed to be activated by “signals” to identify enthusiastically with narrative heroes, to inhabit dynamically the position of the official protagonist. A nascent form of active audience research was exhibited here, though it could be more accurately called “activated” audience research.

Managing the growing power of masses was paramount at this time, which meant devising means of recruiting, directing, and harnessing them (Ewen, 1996). The public was to be both domesticated and persuaded (to align with a position): an identification and a recruitment around an Us/Them. According to Edward Bernays, twentieth-century populations were more difficult to coordinate and unify than in the past, since in “modern nation-states any large undertaking needs public approval” (Ewen, 1996, p. 166). On the one hand, masses “throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction” (p. 167). At the same time, those masses cannot escape seduction by enemy forces, so “an antidote to willfulness” must be invented, according to Harold Lasswell (p. 175). The public becomes that antidote, organized through propaganda. Early audience studies was part of a broader public-making dispositif, where pastoral power meets psychology. This dispositif sought to understand how desire is composed in order to direct and conduct the powers toward transcendent ends. The audience is a target of knowledge and interventions – knowing the masses (crowd behavior, social psychology) in order to transform them via media instruments into publics aligned with constituted power.

Most importantly, however, there was an already-existing composition that needed transforming. Remember that the context for the problematization of audiences here is crisis, struggle, war, and specifically the resistance to war, the reluctance to be mobilized. This intransigence against external manipulation is what, for many problematizers, needed eroding via a “white-hot mass instinct” directed by the state for war.

At the same time that a public was being mobilized through persuasion, then, others were being immobilized through dissuasion (Virilio, 2000). The Espionage Act, and later its amended version as the Sedition Act, restricted the types of mediated expression for subjects. The Sedition Act criminalized “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States [. . .] or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.” Arrests were made for speeches, films, newsletters, anti-draft pamphlets, and other media forms. Along with the Palmer Raids, which resulted in mass arrests, these Red Scare, anti-dissent mechanisms all worked to ensure that only particular opinions and actions would be operational in the name of the public. Democracy, then, was the production of a particular type of demos, a constituted one in which the two publics worked together (e.g., one could become a rational citizen after and through PR's dissuasion/persuasion).

To summarize then: one audience dynamic can be defined as Public vs. Mass (exclusion, banishing, dissuasion). Here cultivation is a prophylactic against masses. Suppressing uprisings, defusing dissent, immobilizing actions: mass power here is the inchoate composition whose powers have taken no constituted form but are eroding already existing, constituted forms. This occurred in Jefferson's call for news to act as Thermidor, in the Astor Place crackdowns, and the panics over cinema audience behaviors.

Another dynamic is the Public as Transmuted Mass (mobilization, cultivation, incitement). This appears first in the revolutionary heritage of mediated constituent power. Later, problematizers like Lippmann, Bernays, Creel, and Lasswell find within masses the necessary historical elements (the rise of mass power) that need careful study and conduction. Their mediated dimension is crucial: a wholesale mobilization of images, symbols, and affects, via the emerging systems of film, journalism, advertising, and propaganda, bifurcate mass constituent power into useful and dangerous, both now determined by constituted power. The power of media subjects to refuse and to self-organize was still recognized, so the reactive dispositif (a.k.a. enlightened political leaders) was forced to decompose these emerging forces.

The transmutation of a mass into a public is an action upon what Foucauldian scholars call the “population,” which was a recently emerging object of calculation during the turn of the twentieth century. According to Tiziana Terranova (2007), the public is not derived from a notion of civil society but from the biopolitical element of population. The population emerges along with the domain of the virtual, as an indefinite object imbued with powers and potentials. As Foucault (2005) put it, “the naturality of the population makes it continually accessible to agents and techniques of transformation on condition that these are enlightened, reasoned, led by analysis and calculus” (p. 62, in Terranova translation, p. 137).

Masses bridge the population and the public by recognizing the vitality of collective media subjects, who are no longer primarily repressed but exercised, seduced, provoked, and canalized. The public is thus not just enacted as disembodied information and impersonal action. It arises out of the biological, economic, and spiritual life of a population. Governance mechanisms worked on this biopolitical sphere, including media subjectivity. Sometimes this was directly commissioned by the warmaking state (mobilizing citizens to war and dissuading dissenters). Later, these mechanisms dispersed into the knowledge field – in universities, marketing research units, private foundations and think tanks, and then back into electoral campaigns and public opinion techniques. Attempts were made to organize populations under elite orchestration, while preempting the compositional powers of independent activism. One of the main institutions that directed these populations in their desires and everyday lives is the consumer industry.

Consumers

The problematization of media subjects as consumers has been perhaps the most thoroughly studied development in media studies, so few words will be spent summarizing it here. Leiss, Kline, and Jhally (1997) define modern consumerism as the fusion of communication and selling, a merger of the audience (of mass-distributed ads) with buying subjects (of mass-produced goods). Consumer research throughout the twentieth century sought to understand the powers of desire through social science techniques, in order to stimulate and harness them. Knowledge here, of course, was designed to guide desirous behavior. A population identification shift occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from religious, political, and ethnic traditions to ones based on aleatory individual selves whose desires could now be fulfilled with goods (Lears, 1983). In addition, subjects needed to change the conception of themselves from producers to consumers. A whole series of discourses, techniques, and institutions arose to channel old and new aspirations toward consumption and individualism.

Here we have the foundations for understanding contemporary collectivity: an aggregate of individuations, each with presumed desires that can be resolved individually in the consumer sphere. From the 1920s development of whisper copy/scare tactics to the twenty-first century's “affective marketing” with its emphasis on love and intimacy, consumer audience research has sought to know and insinuate itself into the subjectivation processes. Collective subjectivity is increasingly turned into individual brand attachments, encouraged and spurred via media (ads, stealth marketing stunts, games, environments, social media, and social interactions on and around brand platforms).

Critics of this consumer cultivation of media subjects need mentioning here, especially critical theory most often associated with the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno's culture industry (2001) thesis is key to understanding audience powers and media subjectivity as composition/organization. Within the critical theory framework, the mass was depicted as targets, as deceived, as unable to resist. However, it is important to note that this framework refused to call it mass culture, as this would presume a bottom-up compositional culture that inherently lent itself to conformity and herd-like behavior. The Frankfurt School thus was not exactly an extension of the “culture and civilization” approaches from earlier decades (which themselves drew upon theories of the crowd). The culture and civilization sentiments were defined by fear of the masses, by the nineteenth-century desire to repress or, when able, to domesticate the passions of populations.

The culture industry thesis, in contrast, highlighted the class conflict at the heart of culture (Durham Peters, 2002).⁶ Classes were targeted and turned into masses by the culture industry. They were made to function as interchangeable, akin to industrial products. In other words, the industry operated by organizing media subjects (as consumers, as conformists, as submissive, as passive). Adorno and Horkheimer were describing, in grim and humorous detail, these organizing techniques. The authors bore witness to a tendency of turning culture into a factory, but not to make claims about human beings being conformists, sheep, and dopes. Instead, they used shock theory to activate the will of the industry's subjective targets, to transmute pacified (not passive) media subjects into compositionally active ones.

Critical theory, to be sure, attributed to the massified media subjects a weak capacity for resistance. But this was neither an innate nor ahistorical ontological trait: not inherent in the composition of forces, but an historical artifact. Near the end of his followup (in “Cultural Studies Reconsidered”), Adorno (2000) remarks on the “deep unconscious mistrust” shared by audiences (p. 37). The culture industry is thus responsible for transforming media subjectivity's powers into masses and then despising them, obstructing their tendency toward collective emancipation.

Recipients (a.k.a. Active Receivers)

The earliest propaganda research (later renamed public opinion and persuasion research) defined media subjects partially as passive recipients, as vulnerable (to enemy propaganda). But rather than define audiences as passive, we could say they were potentially activated (by any side's messages). In this way, we could see this early moment as a controlled modification of activating and pacifying receivers.

When persuasion research turned to a limited effects model, then, it was no major departure from early propaganda. Media subjects are still embedded in personal relations, which could be used to the advantage of the compliance seekers. Two-step flow models looked for a flexible counteraction to media subjects' resistance, developed feedback mechanisms to overcome media subjectivity intransigence (or the armored capacity to be affected) by highlighting the importance of human intermediaries.

This two-step tactic is a kind of immersion into composition, using indirect means to guide and organize from the bottom up (recall the Creel Committee's Four Minute Men). Peer influencers operate as what Raymond Williams (1997) called “agents” as opposed to “sources” – they exist as disseminators for others' agendas: bridging, translating, and mediating the transfer of the hidden source's message. In other words, a transcendent organizing effort. Even with limited effects models, then, the rationales remain the same – to understand and direct mobile, nomadic, “undecided” media subjects.

Active receivers take a different track later. As part of public opinion, media subjects can provide feedback (mostly on the effectiveness of campaigns directed at them). This feedback mechanism finds its Cold War pinnacle in the audience research known as “uses and gratifications” – a framework in which the media subject is characterized as an abstract psychological individual guided by reason: a seeker of need fulfillment. As critics note, this approach overemphasized individual needs at the expense of understanding the social basis of needs and practices, overemphasized the mentalistic/psychologistic dimension, and ultimately was too functionalist. Media subjects here were ahistorical and collectivity meant an atomized aggregate of individuals, rather than social interactors and groups (Elliot, 1974).

Spectators

Across the Atlantic, media scholars were not so sanguine about the free, self-transparent media subject. Drawing primarily from the psychoanalytic tradition, film analysts and cinema theorists shaped a large body of work. While their primary object of study was not the audience (but rather the text, narrative codes, or cinematic apparatus), their equation of the audience with spectators set the agenda for much media scholarship. Psychoanalysis as such is preoccupied with the development of subjectivity, so it is no surprise that this spectator takes up a central position in the analysis. The subject of course is not equivalent to an individual. The subject is a temporary location, a space, a position, a function of a structuring system. A media subject was placed by an apparatus, which involved the material arrangement of the representational system, including the theater (lighting, seating, projection, screen) as well as the behavioral codes (immobility of the body, silence) (Bazin, 1967–1971; Metz, 1977). This subject was also interpellated by the dream-like discourse of the textual system.

The spectator's activity entailed another set of operations, understood via psychoanalysis, namely the psychic processes that institute subjectivity. The spectator's actions are unconscious, the dynamic play of forces of desire involving projection and identification (similar subjective processes that earlier in the century formed the basis for organizing techniques of PR and advertising). While psychoanalytic media studies saw its authority wane in the twenty-first century after decades of cultural studies' critique, it bequeathed a number of key insights worth reviving in an age marked by participation, user-generation, and convergence.

This tradition reminds us that self-possession is itself a fantasy. It highlights, first, that users of systems are not free agents but enter into a space determined by codes, apparatuses, programs, and pathways. Moreover, those users do not necessarily (inter)act primarily through cognitive, rational, instrumental means. They are filled with contradictory desires, unconscious motives, and powerful (often hidden) fantasies. Subjectivity depends on identification with the objectives of system and its positions. In an intellectual context where cognitive studies and uses and gratifications models reinstall a single-minded rational individual at the center of research, it is important to preserve these shadow self practices.

Social Identities

Alongside psychology, another critique of the free and abstract individual emerged, but this one was also a critique of that psychoanalytic framework. This one saw social relations as determining identity, which would inform any uptake of the position of spectatorship. Understanding that any media subject is raced, gendered, sexualized meant complicating notions of both autonomous and determined media subjects.

While often called “identity,” this approach has not defined media subjectivity as a univocal, coherent, or self-possessed entity. Understanding audiences as identities meant foregrounding social division, hierarchies, and power differentials – not only to represent diverse media subjects, but also to undermine presumptions of a universal audience. The identity turn recognized texts as ideology, but also highlighted the counterpower of readings to refuse and rework representations. This asymmetry brought antagonism squarely into the heart of media subjectivity. Gender analyses were particularly exemplary.

Within feminist approaches to media subjectivity, gender is more than a demographic category. First, it was noted that the very diminution of mass or pop culture depended on feminizing the audience (Huyssen, 1986; Modleski, 1986; Petro, 1986). Second, much of cultural studies audience research was prompted by gender issues. The salvaging of pop culture from its debased status as low culture or trash culture was done via heavily feminized genres like romance novels (Radway, 1984), soap operas (Fiske, 1987; Geraghty, 1991), and young women's magazines (McRobbie, 1982). Laura Mulvey's (2001) canonical intervention-essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” remains one of the most reprinted essays in media studies. Her partial break from psychoanalysis was even more notable for spurring myriad responses within feminist studies. Gender analyses, far from toeing a particular line about identity in media subjects, were sites of ongoing debate and proliferation of difference.

Janice Radway's (1984) germinal work on romance reading continued this tradition of controversy and brought to light the third element of gender and audiences, namely that gender identity and politics were often negotiated through media forms. Feminism has been directly engaged with the politics of representation and visibility, often within media texts (e.g., images of roles for women, body types, depictions of subordination as well as invisibility).

This concern with media has continued through the contemporary work on third wave, postfeminist, and girlie culture research. Media subjectivity here continues to be concerned with representation; no longer as primarily a source of disempowerment but a type of subjective empowerment. Third-wave feminism raises questions about empowerment through commodity culture, spurring debate about the politics of pleasure and fantasy, and the ability to control appearances as a mode of agency. Moreover, gendered media subjectivity has moved beyond questions of consumption and reception to matters of production, be it via low-fi, DIY media (Kearney, 2006; Piepmeier, 2009), high-tech channels (Banet-Weiser, 2011; Lange, 2007; Senft, 2008), or something in-between like the resurgence of craft culture (Bratich, 2010a; Robertson, 2006).

Girl power, as a mix of unresolvable tensions between agency and conformity, is the perfect example of contemporary audience power issues. The ambivalence of power (as system of oppression and as subjective capacitation) and of desire (as empowered self-expression and as Stockholm Syndrome-like decapacitation) is the forefront of understanding media subjectivity today. Gender and media (and more broadly, identity and media) are not particular cases of media subjectivity (whose unmarked general status is already gendered), but a terrain where contemporary issues around composition/organization are first negotiated.

Active Decoders

The active audience moment, like the identity moment, complicated the uniformity of the psychoanalytic interpellative system and its spectator subject by highlighting the social dimension. There was a gap between the viewing position of ideological spectatorship and the live individuals who occupied it, and this gap allowed for refusals, evasions, and contradictions. Texts can offer specific positions, but they cannot guarantee them.

The active audience turn in cultural studies arose from a different nexus of concerns than the active receiver of uses and gratifications. US mass communications research had operated within a problematic defined originally by persuasion studies, propaganda research, and direct effects on receivers. Media power was questioned for its effectiveness; understanding audiences meant highlighting the capacity of abstract individuals to work around message compliance (an obstacle) or to satisfy freely their psychological needs (a cause to champion). To put it in blunt Cold War terms, British cultural studies examined resistance to capitalist ideology through active audiences, while in the United States the activity of media subjects signified the American exceptionalist triumph of democracy in media culture.

Turning back to the Marxist problematic, then, popular culture became a resource for social actors to create resistant politics. John Fiske (1987, 1989), contrary to many of his detractors, did not simply celebrate or affirm consumer choices as resistant acts. Pop culture itself was not resistance but a site of struggle between power and resistance. Focusing on the vigor and vitality of people demonstrates, for Fiske, the possibility of social change and motivation to drive it. In other words, Fiske's analytic emphasis was on the virtual rather than the actual. His perspective located antagonism and conflict in the heart of what was taken to be homogeneous, common culture. He also framed this active media subject within a longer history of popular intransigence, persistence, and tenacity. He used Michel de Certeau's approach to pop culture (a series of operational schemas embedded in a long history of strategy, games, and war). This opened up commodity culture to an archaic ontology. Media subjectivity was an expression of a being through time, a contemporary formulation of an historical ontology. It is this popular ontology, a type of constituent power, that would enact structural changes – not all at once, but after a long erosion and weakening of constituted power.

Finally, Fiske insisted on a media subjectivity that was not solely defined by a grim political composition whose only exit was a consciousness-raised rational action. Pleasure and play were not distractions from proper political work but part of the composition of one's everyday life that could become sources of resistance and transformation (while also remaining immanent and not just directed toward a transcendent organizational end, even if political).⁷

The active audience moment took a number of directions. Bodily and spatial dimensions were teased out, as in the ethnographies of domestic spaces and relations (Gray, 1999; Hay, 2003; Silverstone, 1996). Fiske's work was pilloried within cultural studies for its purported celebratory sentiments. Consumer culture apologists took it up as justification for the desires of media subjects (turning audience activity into the pluralism of choice rather than the proliferation of conflictual differences).

But perhaps the most prominent and lasting outcome of the active audience turn was the rise of fan studies. Fiske's most famous intellectual progeny, Henry Jenkins, has come to be identified with the success of fan studies, from his germinal Textual Poachers (1992) to the recent touchstone Convergence Culture (2006). What happened in between is significant, as he went from championing the underdog to depicting how the marginal became the victor. It is this line – the problematization of audiences as fans – that will open us up to the contemporary conjuncture that allows an assessment of the future of audience studies.

Fans

A quick summary of fans as media subjectivity is in order. Fans are more than active audiences. They produce their own culture, starting with the creation of artifacts (letters, columns, and zines, as well as collages, clubs, websites, conventions, videos, games). Their activity involves collective display and circulation.

Fan production involves two things relevant for the present argument: creating a community and creating a world. Fandom requires an individual's decoding power but is defined via the ensuing intersubjective and communicative practices. Fans shift across programs (following a genre, auteur, theme) to construct a fan community. Sociality and communication among audience members increase audience power insofar as media subjects increase connectivity and produce cultural value. Second, fans do not just generate interpretations, they make worlds through their own cultural production (videos, fan fiction, gatherings, online communities). As Jenkins (1992) notes, the fictional world is not created by the original text into which an audience steps; it is created by fans through texts and other artifacts (we can think here of such places as the Xenaverse, Buffyverse, or Potterverse).

But here we can extract a key element from the fan problematization by asking: what kinds of worlds? While the capacity of fans to produce worlds expresses the powers of media subjects, it is also done through a necessary attachment to a commodity already given. The text or product's position is ambivalent: it is a resource for community and creative powers, but also an identificatory pole. This is the vexed nature of fan desire – attachments both composed by them and organized by the commodity/brand. The corporate structuration of those worlds not only limits possible extensions (through property battles), it draws value from fan interactions.

The ambivalence results from what social theorists call real subsumption, in which cultural production (even and especially from the grassroots) is fully commodified as value-maker. Fan work is revalorized – as buzz generator, as attention-attractor, as brand-enricher, as community-builder. To celebrate fan movement from the margins to the center of production means overlooking this process.

Instead of a fan victory, we can frame the process as fans being willingly captured or bought off with minor rewards (the flattery of being recognized, the social status within small groups, the occasional financial breakthrough of superfans). At the very least, we could say that fans are encouraged to express themselves as long as the communication is (potentially) valuable. Rather than seeing the marginal subjects as having moved themselves to the center (resulting in power sharing and co-creation), we can see that they were made to function; they were organized to produce financial value and to become workers in a social media factory.

None of this argument denies the empowerment of fans as fans. What is at issue here is the elevation of the fan into the media subject prototype for political actions. The ambivalence of fans as media subjects involves the tension between resistance and conformity. What are the identifications possible in a world constructed by subsumption? What types of antagonism are possible? We can briefly invoke the spirit of subcultures here, as subcultures lent themselves to lifestyle marketing (via their insularity, the internal hierarchies, the underestimation of capital's ability to tap subcultural practices for their value-generation).

With subsumption, where can we locate fan antagonism? While fan power occasionally impacts noneconomic discourses (e.g., religious censors), for the most part antagonism is drawn between fans and owners (be they auteurs like George Lucas or collective controllers like Electronic Blizzard). Fan antagonism, while having a potential for resistance to models of value-extraction and exploitation, is often reduced to modifying some of the terms of engagement. Their identification with, and dependence upon, external commodity forms makes their powers as media subjects more harnessable as majoritarian world-making than resisting in the name of a world to come.

Interactivity as/in the Interregnum

Fan subjectivity takes us to the defining issues of the audience in the interregnum. This interregnum has been referred to as convergence, participatory, configurable, remix, interactive culture. While some analysts narrow this down to recent technical developments, media subjectivity shows us that digital and online tools have intensified and extended already-existing practices. The increase in collective powers (as unruly and harnessable), identification practices, social antagonism, creation of sociality and worlds, and the dynamic between organization and composition all find new salience, even as they are mutating. The following section takes these virtuals from the remediation of audience studies and maps their relevance to the interregnum. I focus on interactivity, not for its own sake but in order to unfold the virtuals in the concept. I also discuss its mutations (interpassivity, interactivism, inter-reactivity).

Convergence culture has been noted for the blurring of boundaries, collapse of binaries, and production of new hybrids (Jenkins, 2006). What are the remixed media subjects? How do we see the past morphing into future forms? Contemporary scholarship has already named some of these mutants: produsers, prosumers, co-creators. At times, these hybrids take previous types and merge them as equals (and then occasionally tease out some minor asymmetries). Do hybrids equalize internal differences or are they composed of unequal elements? How do we reconstitute conflict, contradiction, and antagonism in convergence? A term like interactivity is as good a place to start as any, and the following paragraphs link it to a number of already discussed virtuals (identification, control, labor, conflict) to understand contemporary media subjectivity.

The technical protocols associated with new media have surpassed the most celebratory of the active audience problematizations by making media subjects interactive. How has active production been subsumed into interactivity? We first need to note a distinction made by others, namely interactivity vs. participation. For Jenkins, the distinction runs along human/technology lines: interactivity is technological, determined by design, with the goal of feedback into the system. Participation involves the social and cultural protocols in and around the technical ones. Mark Andrejevic (2007) does not draw such a strict line, noting that interactivity itself takes on different modes. There are two types of feedback: cybernetic (means) and goal setting decisions (ends) (p. 201). Cybernetic participation is a type of interactivity that requires identification with goals, priorities, and values of institutional agents. Feedback is provided to fine-tune means, not determine ends. The steering (the kyber at the etymological root of cyber) is done via dominant actors rather than a publicly determined course. Media subjects, then, are recruited for harmony, alignment, and a shared definition of the situation with those who govern. While Jenkins affirms fans as media subjects with agency to shape courses, Andrejevic finds these subjects fraught with contradictions and muddled desires. The social and cultural protocols that Jenkins separates from the technical ones are themselves a type of governance. Protocols are resources for users but are also codes and techniques that produce subjects who are then used.

The contemporary turn toward a term like users only exacerbates this tension. If we think of users as individuals who instrumentalize a system for their own purposes, we have restored the uses and gratifications model of psychological individuation. Users are also positions within a system, a space much like that proposed by spectator theory, only now with added affordances. Identification with a system is now an interactive affair; alignment entails giving (e.g., feedback). And as the term user's connotations indicate, there is an addictive overattachment to technical protocols, with all of the drug user's ambivalence and contradictions. Media subjectivity's relation to technology begs an analysis of the processes of identification and individuation.

Interactivity, while often linked to freedom and participatory action, has been a resource for control mechanisms in governance and neoliberal capitalism. Andrew Barry's (1998) Foucauldian analysis locates interactivity's usefulness to governing conduct. Liberal governance now involves “intensive interaction with the public in carefully managed environments [which] is expected to maximize and intensify feedback between government and governed, and minimize possibilities for unexpected political controversies and future conflicts” (p. 178). Interactivity here has its roots in the earlier problematization of media subjects as masses. Governance involves an intervention into virtuals, a harnessing of capacities, while preventing useless or even dangerous kinds of emergence. Population management operates here not primarily by exclusion but by calculating and enhancing powers (within channels of conduction).

The labor of media subjects is also a type of interactivity. Dallas Smythe's (2001) contribution to understanding audiences as workers and creative activity now finds new salience. Autonomist media research has updated Smythe to understand the immaterial labor of online brand fans (Arvidsson, 2005), social media users (Andrejevic, 2010; Coté & Pybus, 2007; Hearn, 2010) and gamers (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009). Much attention has been paid to attention as a scarce and highly demanded resource in an age of communicative capitalism and its cognitariat (Berardi, 2009; Dean, 2010). It is here we can complicate the research that flattens labor asymmetries into co-production. Who are the subjects of the “co” in co-production and co-creation? How do they resonate, how do they conflict? What are their identifications and individuations? Some analysts minimize the dissonance by giving consumers a new sovereignty (a digital media version of the way consumer culture studies de-fanged Fiske). But the “co” involves an intricate co-dependence, one imbued with dynamics of exploitation, conflicted identification, willful submission, and the vexed pleasures of media subjects as both users and used.

For recent thinkers of interactivity, Pierre Levy's term collective intelligence is rich and instructive. For Levy (1997), collective intelligence represents nothing less than a “new stage of hominization” (or the becoming-human of the species) (p. xxvi, emphasis added). More than producing a new type of subject, contemporary conditions make subjectivity itself a primary site of intervention: “because it conditions all other activities, the continuous production of subjectivity will most likely be the next major economic activity” (p. 4).

Others picked up on these dimensions a decade later through terms such as crowd-sourcing (Howe, 2006), the wealth of networks (Benkler, 2006), and the wisdom of crowds (Shirky, 2008; Surowiecki, 2004). Here we see an apparent turnaround from the approach to crowds a century earlier. But this is a departure only from the initial moment of problematizing media subjects as masses and crowds (as irrational and easily manipulated) in order to shun or neutralize them. The later version, one that harnesses mass power under the concept “public,” resonates with this twenty-first century valorization. Tapping the powers of online collectivity to solve problems reduces composition to an instrument, organized by mechanisms that determine the problems defined elsewhere. Crowds here are not the unruly mixtures found in compositional gatherings; they do not interact via affect, they do not spread contagions.

Instead, they are an aggregate of disconnected individuals who come to form a temporary assemblage around a predetermined task (e.g., a scientific contest, marketing challenge, or governmental problem). Only when these mass forces have been disciplined, fragmented, and rationalized is it tolerable to “nodalize” them back into connectivity. Using the term “crowds” erases the historical association with unruly composition, replacing it with a public-disguised-as-crowd.

There is indeed much to laud about newfound powers of connectivity and sociality. But reducing these powers to the ability to generate knowledge and value for others, around a loose but homeostatic rationality, erases the antagonism, difference, and asymmetries in contemporary collective virtual powers. Dissuasion is still in operation in the actions of collective intelligence (Bratich, 2010b). Collective intelligence is still embedded in networked institutions of security and sovereignty, preempting the emergence of some user-generated usage while promoting others.

A term like general intellect, coming from the Italian autonomist tradition, enriches the concept of collective intelligence by embedding it in material production practices and subjective struggles. General intellect increases the labor power of workers via their heightened sociality (especially in nonwaged spheres like gaming, social networking platforms, fan sites, and other types of “free labor” [Terranova, 2000]). This results in both a wellspring of value captured by capital and a surplus of connectivity that is immeasurable and thus provokes a crisis in value-extraction.

Interactivity might be the most prominent term for processes of subjectivation in the interregnum, but there are others, actual and virtual. Slavoj Žižek's term inter-passivity, for instance, finds resonance for contemporary media subjectivity. With interpassivity, subjects defer action to machines, actively. Mark Andrejevic (2007) calls it interpassive participation (p. 173). Subjects knowingly submit to the imperatives of the technical, identifying with reified cybernetic objectives while claiming them as their own. This ideological dimension speaks to the constitution of media subjects (as matters of desire, identification, and pleasure) and moreover produces an ersatz participation that blocks its realization. Interpassivity also involves embodiment, as the haptic and kinesthetic dimensions of interactivity mesh with the machinic organization of body habits (Parisi, 2007).

We could also use a term like interactivism to refer to users' engagement with their technological conditions to push the openness of systems, to appropriate their authority, and to shape their vectors. Activist media subjects have taken on these new conditions of interactivity in order to intervene into this crisis and generate new forms of antagonism. Counterglobalization and grassroots struggles in the twenty first century have used the Internet, mobile phones, and social media to mobilize (Berardi, Jacquemet, & Vitali, 2009; Juris, 2005; Kahn & Kellner, 2004; Kidd, 2003). Twitter and Facebook, for example, have been deployed as a crucial extension of both state warfare and social movement composition (Bratich, 2010a). We have seen versions of interactivism also emerge around hackers, modders, social movement media, Low Power FM and community wireless, where the shape of protocols and usage are at stake.

We do not need to focus on digital media to see this process at work. Interactivist media subjects have a long history within communications struggles, involving appropriation of protocols and usage for compositional ends. Here we could cite an entire history of radical media (Downing, 2001) and DIY media like zines (Duncombe, 1997; Piepmeier, 2009). The politics of amateur uses and technical-social competences infused media subjects from early ham radio operators (Douglas, 1987) to CB users (Packer, 2008).

Interactivism involves an historical ontology, a movement through, with, and despite media forms. Interactivist media subjects require a shift in perspective, analyzing media development from below, highlighting the persistent efforts to create a common project through media, the composition of a cooperative ethos and a transversal power. These are often minoritarian practices, but ones whose very resilience is testimony to their virtues. This media constituent power signifies the ongoing accumulation of antagonisms within any media development, and a practical matter of building agency via “experimentation by composition” (Armstrong, 1997, p. 48). We can draw out this vital history as one that defines media subjectivity alongside, under, and against the audience studies that problematized it.

Finally, we can propose another new term, one which foregrounds the ethical component of media subjectivity: inter-reactivity. At play here are the affective processes of subjectivation, both the powers and the feelings that accompany them. Reactivity is a term both Spinozan and Nietzschean in its genesis (due to spatial constraints I will focus on the former). The affective turn often draws upon Spinozist philosophy (most prominently revived in sociopolitical theory by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri), which could use some brief explanation. The affections are the interactions of bodies when they encounter each other. For Spinoza, we begin in a state of reactivity (a receptivity, a power to be affected). These reactive interactions begin at the lowest level of encounters, involving passions and images (the imagination). We are constantly bombarded by random stimuli and find ourselves at the mercy of chance encounters. From these reactive encounters we form powers and relations.

What can we do as reactors? We need to understand the cause of our states – what is it that affects us one way or the other? Specifically, the traces of chance encounters (hidden to us) prevent us from understanding our own powers. Spinoza lays out what practical action needs to take place: we need to transform our subjectivity from being at the mercy of chance encounters to having an understanding of effects upon it, and eventually knowing the causes of those affections. From here we can compose an active, even rational, body by understanding what is compatible, empowering, and affirmative, as well as determine what is incompatible, disempowering, and depleting. Inter-reactivity begins with this reactivity, and examines its acceleration, extension, and intensification with communication technologies and media connectivity. How are subjects filled with affections (passive or active) in their mediated interactions? How does any particular mediated organization of encounters deplete or augment the abilities of the subjects composed? More specifically, can the subjects adequately comprehend how those affections work on them?

Current organizations of multitude powers, with regard to media, produce a “collection of disconnected, isolated individuals able to act together” (Del Lucchese, 2009, p. 350). How do contemporary forms of interaction diminish the powers of subjects, leaving them isolated in their passions, then connecting them via their depletion? The pathological dimension of interactivity is a matter of public problematization. Moral panics regularly frame understandings of digital selves and data subjects around the depleting effects of hypermediation (reviving the early audience research figure of the child-as-victim in need of protection and discipline). But rather than allow these control mechanisms to define the debate and problematizations, critical media studies can address the ethical dimension of interactivity. Media studies needs to contribute intelligently to the understanding of pathologies, the (de)composition of bodies via exhaustion, frustration, peer-to-peer surveillance, judgment, and other debilitating transindividual affects.

With inter-reactivity we return to concepts and processes of composition and organization. We begin with the ethical composition of media subjects, their inter-affective dynamics, but as a passage to modes of organization. This is a passage from ethics to politics. As Hardt, Terranova, Armstrong, and others remind us, the emergence of agency is a practical matter. The multiple must be made. Media subjectivity requires experiments, especially experiments in what Spinoza calls “the art of organizing encounters” (quoted in Hardt, 1993, p. 110). In other words, we do not begin with interactivity but with inter-reactivity, while maintaining the goal of making interactivity: organizing encounters that enhance capacities, knowledge, and common production, and increase constituent power.

Conclusion: Monsters of Reason

From its beginnings, the “audience” signified an expansion of participation while still criss-crossed by exclusions and hierarchies. Early audiences were threat and promise, imbued with a set of powers and potentials that, depending on the discourse and the moment, could be enrolled into particular programs (war, mass consumption) or targeted for regulation (cinemagoing behavior, dissenting populations). Later audience studies, with their own problematizations, increasingly invested in the audience as a site of creativity and resistance. They have left a legacy of analytic tools to understand interregnum media subjects as mutants.

From the early problematizations of audiences onwards, a notion of rationality has been at stake. At times this was predicated on a strict separation of reason and affect (e.g., in the audience-as-mass), especially when the latter was associated with instinct, animality, sentiment, id-impulses, and lower states. But as we have seen, masses were not just negated; they were instrumentalized. The organization of masses meant neutralizing their disruptive crowd-like elements of self-organization while encouraging their mobilizations as publics. The affective dimensions came in the form of populist passions against corruption, sensationalism as affective media, and radical media experiments that challenged governance and civilizing mechanisms. War resistance, populist uprisings, labor organizing, muckraking: these collective powers were diminished and dissuaded.

At the same time, some affective elements were deployed by transcendent mechanisms. Mobilizations for war required emotional stirrings against enemies, “white-hot mass instincts” in favor of state policy, and a majoritarian fear of dissenting subjects. These passions, however, were aligned and disciplined in the name of a public. They were organized from above by PR agencies, propaganda services, and communications agents. Collective powers were activated and pacified, their constituent power transformed into constituted power, and their modes of expression prescribed around desired objectives. Early problematizations sought to create an impassioned alignment and identification, a nascent manifestation of intense inter-reactivity.

This version of rationality is based on an external mechanism that, via organization, depletes subjects by dissuading them from dissent and narrowly shaping their composition as a collective. Media subjects are disempowered by this rationality at the moment it routes them through public channels (elections, feedback on proposals, petitions for attention). This rationality required a constant attention to and modification of the media subjects: tapping the necessary constituent powers to fuel commodity consumption, productive labor, and war campaigns while policing the excesses (actual as well as virtual) of their compositions.

The reactivity at the basis of collective powers is an unavoidable condition, but the point is not to mobilize them via a “community of fear and of non-cooperative imitation” (Toscano, 2005). This mode of organization transmits and binds via fear, fascination, and sadness (in the Spinozan sense of depleting what a body can do). It mobilizes and immobilizes through controlled panics. Even when capacities are enhanced, they are done so for transcendent objectives (such as the audience as-public designed for war, audience-as-active decoder guided toward capitalist consumption, audience-as-active receiver conducted to transfer power to the state, and generally an audience organized to support constituted power). Early modes of organization alienated media subjects (separating a body from what it can do) as well as enervated them (while depending on them). Organization is thinned out by constituted power's prescribed pathways (alignment and identification with institutional authorities). It is also predicated on dissuasion and neutralization of extremes, dissenters, and affectors. This organization depends on disaggregating the powers of that upon which it depends. A tyrannical structure of this sort leads to “a dissolved group of separate, isolated individuals, reduced to enslavement by their own passions and, in a way, crushed by a general will that is already the final and transcendental cause of their own decisions” (Del Lucchese, 2009, p. 350). Constituted power, as a transcendent organization, emerges as an “antagonistic solution” to the compositional powers of media subjects (Armstrong, 1997, p. 45).

Audience studies, in its various guises, can be seen as participating in this despotism, in the attempt to diminish mediated powers by guiding those powers toward particular constituted ends. Some audiences (consumers, receivers, publics, some interactive fans) are constituted for transcendent aims like consumption, war, persuasion, consent. Others, like social identities, active audiences, and interactivists, recognize the immanence of media powers, or at least address the ambivalence of composition/organization (e.g., third-wave feminist media studies). Now, at the “end” of the audience (and therefore of audience studies), we can recover these virtual dimensions of media subjectivity's constituent power, which for so long have been trapped in the relatively stable object “audience.” What is released from the prisonhouse of audience studies? All sorts of mutants – interactors, interpassivists, interactivists, inter-reactors. More than finding names for these figures, remediation unleashes the very dynamics of metamorphosis that Toni Negri (2003) calls the monstrous. Here metamorphosis is more open ended – we might find among audience powers another transmutation of passions to actions, one that corresponds to a different way of transforming constituent power to constituted power, composition to organization. Another path would not seek to eliminate passions (in fact would encourage joyful passions) but seeks, through knowledge and intuition, to transform them. The goal is a subject incapable of taking command but highly capable of producing common associations.

In the interregnum, where the not-yet cannot fully be known or named, audience studies can at least learn to live with, even encourage, the monsters it has heretofore despotically organized. The attempts by audience studies to direct these monsters toward constituted ends (war, fundamentalism, alienated consumption) will ultimately appear as its own subjectivity, whose interventions increasingly appear from the outside as “the antagonistic solution” to the emergence of media democracy and its multitudes. Future audience studies will not only find more names for the mutations in media subjectivity but will describe the ways external mediating mechanisms constantly try to harness yet suppress these mutations toward constituted ends. In other words, future audience studies will see its own work as coming from a particular type of media subjectivity, one requiring its own analysis.

NOTES

1 Audiencing here refers to the discursive practice of making and problematizing audiences.

2 “Media” here is not equated with transcendence but with a series of operations (extension, acceleration, conduction, connection) immanent to the ongoing composition of a collective body.

3 These terms are not exhaustive of the types of associations made. Moreover, the richness of the terms necessarily needs to be pared down in this chapter, not just for the sake of space but to distill the key dynamics that animate contemporary concerns.

4 Two actors (one from the United States and one English) were performing in productions of Macbeth a few blocks from each other on the Bowery. The US actor's working-class supporters prevented completion of the performance by the English actor (considered a colonial aristocrat). Traditionally, the next night's performance would have been cancelled. Instead, the show went on with the English actor. Protests ensued, followed by a massive police crackdown. Militiamen fired into the crowd, with 22 killed and 100 injured.

5 This hyperpathy remains an issue even in the most advanced technological arrangements. Sometimes it still takes place in the streets (e.g., flashmobs, Twitter-infused protests), while at other times it involves the right to disrupt, not performances, but protocols of usage (piracy, hacking, modding).

6 Another path through the Marxist problematic was the political economy approach. For the most part, this framework did not make claims about media subjectivity (unless one defines the corporate media system itself as a subject). But a crucial intervention within audience studies from this perspective came with Dallas Smythe's (2001) famous “communication blindspot” argument, which directly problematized audiences as laborers. Media subjects work for advertisers – their mental labor and attention-power are the sources of commodification for networks. This laboring media subject will become important later in the chapter.

7 As I have argued elsewhere (2008a), Fiske's opening up of the constituent process within media subjectivity was constrained by analytic conditions established by Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model (in which activity was always situated as a moment within signification). It was also an expression of its political conjuncture, locked in a Gramscian politics, in which activity matters insofar as it is a resource for organizing popular consciousness/will.

REFERENCES

Adorno, T. W. (2000). Culture industry reconsidered. In P. Marris & S. Thornham (Eds.), Media studies: A reader (pp. 31–37). New York, NY: Washington Square Press.

Alasuutari, P. (1999). Introduction: Three phases of reception. In P. Alasuutari (Ed.), Rethinking the media audience (pp. 1–21). London, UK: Sage.

Allor, M. (1988). Relocating the site of the audience. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5, 217–233.

Andrejevic, M. (2007). iSpy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Andrejevic, M. (2010). Social network exploitation. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), The networked self (pp. 82–102). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ang, I. (1992). Living room wars. In R. Silverstone & E. Hirsch (Eds.), Consuming technologies. London, UK: Routledge.

Armstrong, A. (1997). Some reflections on Deleuze's Spinoza. In K. Pearson (Ed.), Deleuze and philosophy (pp. 44–57). London, UK: Routledge.

Arvidsson, A. (2005). Brands. Journal of Consumer Culture, 5, 235–258.

Banet-Weiser, S. (2011). Branding the post-feminist self: Girls' video production and YouTube. In M. Kearney (Ed.), Mediated girlhoods (pp. 277–294). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Barry, A. (1998). On interactivity. In S. Macdonald (Ed.), The politics of display (pp. 98–117). London, UK: Routledge.

Bazin, A. (1967–1971). What is cinema? Vols. 1 and 2 (H. Gray, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bennett, T. (1996). Figuring audiences and readers. In J. Hay L. Grossberg, & E. Wartella (Eds.), The audience and its landscape (pp. 145–160). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Berardi, F. (2009). Precarious rhapsody. London, UK: Minor Compositions.

Berardi, F., Jacquemet, M., & Vitali, G. (2009). Ethereal shadows (J. Otey, Trans.). Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Blackman, L. (2007). Reinventing psychological matters. Economy and Society, 36(4), 574–596.

Borch, C. (2007). Crowds and economic life. Economy and Society, 36(4), 549–573.

Bratich, J. (2005). Amassing the multitude: Revisiting early audience studies. Communication Theory, 15(3), 242–265.

Bratich, J. (2008a). Activating the multitude: Audience powers and cultural studies. In P. Goldstein & J. Machor (Eds.), New directions in American reception study (pp. 33–56). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Bratich, J. (2008b). Conspiracy panics: Political rationality and popular culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Bratich, J. (2010a). Digital touch. Ephemera, 10(3/4), 303–318.

Bratich, J. (2010b). When collective intelligence agencies collide. In M. Levina & G. Kien (Eds.), Everyday life in the (post)global network (pp. 11–26). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Butsch, R. (2008). The citizen audience. New York, NY: Routledge.

Cleaver, H. (1979). Reading capital politically. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Coté, M., & Pybus, J. (2007). Learning to immaterial labour 2.0. Ephemera, 7(1), 88–106.

Dean, J. (2010). Blog theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

Del Lucchese, F. (2009). Democracy, multitudo and the third kind of knowledge in the works of Spinoza. European Journal of Political Theory, 8(3), 339–363.

Douglas, S. J. (1987). Inventing American broadcasting: 1899–1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Downing, J. (2001). Radical media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Duncombe, S. (1997). Notes from the underground. New York, NY: Verso.

Durham Peters, J. (2002). The subtlety of Horkheimer and Adorno. In E. Katz, J. Durham Peters, T. Liebes, & A. Orloff (Eds.), Canonic texts in media research (pp. 58–73). New York, NY: Polity.

Dyer-Witheford, N. (2004). The return of species-being. Historical Materialism, 12(4), 3–25.

Dyer-Witheford, N., & de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of empire. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Elliott, P. (1974). Uses and gratifications research. In J. G. Blumer & E. Katz (Eds.), The uses of mass communication (pp. 249–268). London, UK: Sage.

Ewen, S. (1996). PR! A social history of spin. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. London, UK: Routledge.

Fiske, J. (1989). Understanding popular culture. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.

Foucault, M. (1988). The concern for truth. In L. D. Kritzman (Ed.), Foucault, politics, philosophy, culture (pp. 255–267). New York, NY: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (2005). Sicurezza, territorio, popolazione: corso al Collège de France (1977–1978) (Paolo Napoli, Trans.). Milan: Feltrinelli. (Original work published in French, 2004)

Geraghty, C. (1991). Women and soap opera. New York, NY: Polity.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York, NY: International Publishers.

Gray, A. (1999). Audience and reception research in retrospect. In P. Alasuutari (Ed.), Rethinking the media audience (pp. 22–37). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hardt, M. (1993). Gilles Deleuze. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Hartley, J. (1992). Tele-ology. London, UK: Routledge.

Hay, J. (2003). Unaided virtues. In J. Bratich, J. Packer, & C. McCarthy (Eds.), Foucault, cultural studies, and governmentality (pp. 165–206). Albany NY: State University of New York Press.

Hearn, A. (2010). Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and the digital “reputation” economy. Ephemera, 10(3/4), 421–438.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (2001). The culture industry. In M. Gigi Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Key works (pp. 71–101). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Howe, J. (2006, June). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired, 14(6). Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

Huyssen, A. (1986). Mass culture as woman. In After the great divide (pp. 44–64). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers. New York, NY: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Juris, J. S. (2005). The new digital media and activist networking within anti-corporate globalization movements. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597, 189–208.

Kahn, R., & Kellner, D. (2004). New media and Internet activism. New Media and Society, 6(1), 87–95.

Kearney, M. C. (2006). Girls make media. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kidd, D. (2003). Indymedia.org. In M. McCaughey & M. D. Ayers (Eds.), Cyberactivism (pp. 47–70). New York, NY: Routledge.

Lange, P. G. (2007). The vulnerable video blogger. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 5(2). Retrieved from http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/blogs/lange_01.htm

Lears, J. (1983). From salvation to self-realization. In R. Fox & J. Lears (Eds.), The culture of consumption: Critical essays in American history, 1880–1980 (pp. 1–38). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Leiss, W., Kline, S., & Jhally, S. (1997). Social communication in advertising. New York, NY: Routledge.

Levy, P. (1997). Collective intelligence (R. Bononno, Trans.). New York, NY: Plenum Trade. (Original work published 1995)

Levy, P. (1998). Becoming virtual (R. Bononno, Trans.). New York, NY: Plenum Trade.

McRobbie, A. (1982). The politics of feminist research. Feminist Review, 12(1), 46–57.

Metz, C. (1977). The imaginary signifier. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Modleski, T. (1986). Femininity as mas(s)querade. In C. McCabe (Ed.), High theory, low culture. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Mulvey, L. (2001). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In M. Gigi Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Key works (pp. 393–404). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Negri, A. (1991). Marx beyond Marx (H. Cleaver, M. Ryan, & M. Viano, Trans.). Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Negri, A. (1999). Insurgencies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Negri, A. (2003). Negri on Negri. London, UK: Routledge.

Negri, A. (2005). Politics of subversion. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Packer, J. (2008). Mobility without mayhem. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Parisi, D. (2007). Playing the interface: Video games as bodily techniques [Unpublished paper].

Petro, P. (1986). Mass culture and the feminine. Cinema Journal, 25(3), 5–21.

Piepmeier, A. (2009). Girl zines. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Radway, J. (1984). Reading the romance. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Robertson, K. (2006). How to knit an academic paper. Digipopo/Public, 31. Retrieved May 18, 2006, from http://www.digipopo.org/content/how-to-knit-an-academic-paper

Rosen, J. (2006). The people formerly known as the audience [Weblog comment]. PressThink blog. Retrieved from http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html

Sandine, A. (2009). The taming of the American crowd. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Senft, T. M. (2008). Camgirls. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody. New York, NY: Penguin.

Silverstone, R. (1996). From audiences to consumers. In J. Hay, L. Grossberg, & E. Wartella (Eds.), The audience and its landscape (pp. 281–296). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Smythe, D. (2001). On the audience commodity and its work. In M. Gigi Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Key works (pp. 253–279). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds. New York, NY: Little, Brown.

Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text, 63(18), 33–57.

Terranova, T. (2004). Network culture. London, UK: Pluto Press.

Terranova, T. (2007). Futurepublic. Theory, Culture and Society, 24(3), 125–145.

Toscano, A. (2005, January 4). The politics of Spinozism. Paper presented at the Cultural Research Bureau of Iran, Tehran. Retrieved from http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/toscano_spinoza_teheran.pdf

Virilio, P. (2000). Strategy of deception. London, UK: Verso.

Virno, P., & Hardt, M. (Eds.). (1996). Radical thought in Italy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Warner, M. (1990). The letters of the republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Williams, R. (1997). Mass and masses. In T. O'Sullivan & Y. Jewkes (Eds.), The media studies reader (pp. 18–27). New York, NY: Bloomsbury (Original work published 1961)