Communication

Theory

Communication
Theory

Fifteen:
Jack Z. Bratich Three

August
2005

Pages
Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting 242–265

Early Audience Studies

This article examines early problematizations of “the audience” in communica-

tion studies (in Michel Foucault’s sense of problematization). Using Michael
Hardt and Toni Negri’s concept of the “multitude,” the author argues that the
audience is a product of discursive constructions, but that these constructions
themselves draw upon the ontological practices of what may be called “audi-
ence powers” or “mediated multitudes.” Problematizations of the audience in
communication studies are examples of what Negri calls “constituted power,”
as they seek to capture conceptually the immanent practices of audience con-
stituent powers. Concentrating on 3 early audience discourses (propaganda,
marketing, and moral panics), the author assesses how audience power pro-
voked these problematizations and argues that an ontology of media sub-
jects and audience powers offers new perspectives on audiences and audi-
ence studies.

The field of audience studies goes on because its object is a fugitive. It

should not be surprising, then, that proclamations about the end of the
audience are commonplace. The gradual erosion over the past few de-
cades of ontological questions in audience studies and cultural studies
has contributed to these pronouncements. A few decades ago, the “au-
dience” was a relatively unproblematic term (Dahlgren, 1998). The fu-
gitive audience may have been difficult to research and hard to measure,
but it was still a common-sense reality. The audience was out there; it
was just a matter of sharpening the research tools to understand it. Now,
however, the audience is a contested term. The goal of research is not to
accumulate better knowledge of an object out there, but to ask what
kind of knowledge is possible and desirable (Dahlgren, 1998).
To pursue the question “whither the audience?” this article uses
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s (2000, 2004) social theory of subjectiv-
ity to focus on three early models and discourses (propaganda, market-
ing, and moral). I ask, what does a conceptual shift from audience to

Copyright © 2005 International Communication Association

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“audience power” or mediated multitude do to the field of audience

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

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

A problematization takes a variety of practices, habits, and experiences

and isolates them into an object of concern or discussion. Sometimes
this takes the literal form of a “problem” or threat (such as youth audi-
ences in relation to sexual or violent imagery); other times the
problematization creates a source of anxiety or worry. In each case, lots of
time, energy, and resources are spent isolating and analyzing an object.
Furthermore, problematizations are not simply idealizations or ab-
stract linguistic postulates. As a number of Foucauldian researchers have
argued, problematizations are the conceptual “carvings out” that make
reality intelligible and thus enable practices to “take place” (Bratich,
2003; Burchell, 1991; Dean, 1996; Foucault, 1997; Rabinow, 1997).
Very material practices follow from (and produce more) problem-
atizations. In the present case, the audience is an anchor and alibi for a
variety of decisions. Problematizing audiences constitutes a fundamen-
tal part of public policy, educational initiatives, corporate production,
cultural programming, research funding, even the interpersonal proto-
cols of families in the domestic sphere.
Audience as Mediated Multitude/
Audience Power
This constructivist approach is crucial, as it both wards off the traps of
naïve empiricism and shifts attention to the discursive investment in cre-
ating, knowing, and modifying the audience. In other words, it directs
our perspective to knowledge production and power relations in the
cultural field.
However, this position is not sufficient in allowing a thorough under-
standing of the audience question. As a supplement we can turn to the
methodological strategy proposed by Hardt and Negri (2000) in Em-
pire. They employed a two-pronged method, what they call the “criti-
cal-deconstructive” and the “constructive/ethico-political” (p. 47). The
former aims to “subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures”
by examining the dominant discourses and hegemonic problematizations
as such (pp. 47–48). This corresponds to the third generation of cultural
reception studies above, as it works on the terrain of the discursive pro-
duction of the category audience. A discourse analysis of the hegemonic
languages that problematize the audience would be the method here.
The second component is the constructive and ethico-political, which
for Hardt and Negri (2000) means entering the terrain of the ontologi-
cal. Whereas the first approach may offer a glimpse into alternative prac-
tices and processes (by critically exposing the exclusions performed by

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discourses), this second approach begins with those “alternative” prac-

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

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program stabilizes these forces into an object of concern or study that

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

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There is another version of audience power that bears mention here,

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

Amassing the Audience: Early

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

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dence, and through this sovereignty machine “the multitude is in every

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

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ing populations (Hacking, 1990; Mattelart, 1996; Rose, 1999). Given

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

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heavals, and the attendant production of new subjectivities (citizens,

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

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as the effects on people by media. Whether media were envisioned as

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

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sive” as a modifier, however, and certainly not to describe the resulting

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

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revolved around experimenting with these audience powers, with what

would and would not work to activate audiences. The study, and fine-
tuning, of motivational radio programs and films for soldiers and citi-
zens (like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight film series (1943–1945) spoke
to the belief in the immense power of audiences to act. Eruptions of
audience activity such as that accompanying the War of the Worlds
(Welles) broadcast in 1938 fascinated researchers for generations. Cantril,
Gaudet, and Herzog’s (1940) famous Princeton study attempted to de-
lineate which elements of the audience body filtered the messages and
which ones were eager to accept the reality effect of the program.
The classic works defining the limited-effects tradition (like Lazarsfeld
et al.’s People’s Choice and Robert Merton’s Mass Persuasion) all sought
mitigating factors in media reception, either internal to the media sub-
ject, like selective exposure and retention, or in other subjects, like opin-
ion leaders. For both diret- and limited-effects researchers, the target
was similar: understanding and directing dispersed, fragmented, and un-
decided populations. They managed multitudes while not always rely-
ing on media to do the brunt of the work.
The variations in audience reception so enthralled researchers that
the limited-effects tradition remains the bedrock of the empirical ap-
proach. The audience as mass came to be defined through its variations
and heterogeneity instead of through an equation with a homogeneous
and amorphous mob. Thus, the work that criticized the direct-effects
model retained this fundamental problematization of audience powers
as reactive. Rather than finding audiences passive (as lack of activity),
they were characterized by the capacity to be affected, the power to be
activated.
Although audience power was recognized through testing, this ex-
perimentation was performed within a functionalist paradigm (Mattelart
& Mattelart, 1998). The empirical tradition recognized media subjects
and sought to understand constituent audience power in order to reab-
sorb it into the social body. This functionalist approach experimented
with all of the powers of the audience as a way to manage possible
deviations and reorient these capacities toward the homeostatic tendency
of the social body.
What is important here is to recognize that even in the canonical
moment when the audience-as-mass was positioned as hopelessly and
fundamentally passive, the problematization of audiences spoke to the
anxieties over audience power. At stake fundamentally was the capacity
of subjects to be acted upon, and then to act, in their relation with me-
dia. So, whereas this era is canonically defined by its belief in the great
power of media, it can just as well be described as the anxiety over the
great power of media subjects.

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Marketing: The Desiring Audience

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

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 Amassing the Multitude

Audiences were problematized as a set of desires (e.g., aspirations for

self, family, society; imagination of the good life, an optimistic future,
and their own place in it) and the capacities to satisfy those desires.
These desires and wills preexisted the marketing “audience,” being
bound, for instance, to traditional institutions like church, family, state,
communal mores, ethnic rituals, and customs. Advertisers, rather than
imposing their will on passive audiences, tapped into and redirected
these immanent capacities.
With the increasing reliance on psychological techniques of persua-
sion, marketers further understood audiences to be producers of affect.
These subjects’ capacities were “exercised” and redirected via images
and persuasive techniques. The early history of public relations was
also marked by this recognition of audience power. The influence of
Freudian thought on early PR advocates, such as like Walter Lippman
and Edward Bernays, resulted in defining humans as essentially irratio-
nal and driven by the unconscious. Lippman, for instance, made it clear
that audiences were not passive; in fact, audience appetites were such
that they needed exercising via images (Ewen, 1996, pp. 154–158).
Of course, this tapping and channeling selected some desires over
others, exacerbated some while denying others, created new ones (e.g.,
anxieties over modernization, self-identity, and courtship), and provided
alienating and self-defeating solutions. The immanent capacities of au-
dience power were led to the particular resolution in the commodity
form, but this was only the goal and endpoint. While ultimately chan-
neling these impulses toward consumption, early marketers nonetheless
could produce the audience-consumer only by recognizing and address-
ing the generative powers of media subjects.3
In each of the above problematizations of the audience as mass (the
vulnerable audience of propaganda and the desiring audience of con-
sumer society), media subjects were defined through their irrationality,
as a bundle of emotions, impulses, and desires. Rather than dismiss
these accounts for not cultivating the innate capacities for informed and
reasoned choice, however, we can at least acknowledge that their
problematizations rested on a belief in the powers of the mass. Whether
positioned as a threat or a resource, subjects were acknowledged to be
able to produce their own sense, to activate desires through a relation
to media, and to enhance their own power with media. However, this
audience constituent power was acknowledged, then countered, by the
propaganda and market frameworks, which sought to transform these
impulses for their own interests, winnowing audience potentialities into
prescribed pathways. The response to audience constituent power ulti-
mately dampened and froze the capacities in their self-valorizing open-
endedness and potentiality.

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Moral Panics Framework: The Vulnerable,

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

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 Amassing the Multitude

ence of comic books on juvenile delinquency, focusing on residents of a

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

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thority, these discourses found renewal in the taming of the threat to

that authority. In this way, audiences “are produced institutionally in
order for the various institutions to take charge of the mechanisms of
their own survival” (Hartley, 1992, p. 105).
Whereas scapegoating media is one tactic of rejuvenation here, it is
only at the level of a competing discourse of initiation. Viewing the scene
from the perspective of audience power adds another layer of analysis.
In terms of audience power, it is much more significant that active media
subjects (in this case youth) were transformed into helpless victims of
media power and thus in need of further guidance and assistance. Audi-
ence power here is reduced to the activity of emitting SOS signals. Once
again, a problematization of the audience as vulnerable transforms au-
dience power into two agents: active media power and pacified audi-
ence. Media subjects are reduced to dangerous deviant behavior, ren-
dered objects of a moral gaze, and their capacities are activated as sub-
jects in need of intervention.
Problematizing the Audience-Mass
and the Multitude
We can now return to Raymond Williams’s claim that critical work
should examine the formulas through which masses are interpreted.
Problematizing the audience as mass serves a variety of material inter-
ests and produces practical effects. From the most explicit political sense
of moral regulation and censorship to the strategic interests of propaganda
and public relations to the transformation of citizens into consumers, the
mass audience circulates in discourses of power and representation.
In these discourses, audiences are both passive and highly excitable,
mute and excessively articulating. Discourses seek to bolster themselves
via protecting the mass (the propaganda and moral frameworks) or via
activating certain potentialities in that mass (the propaganda and mar-
ket frameworks). Problematizing the audience as a vulnerable mass thus
requires a selection process, a displaced recognition of the mediated
multitude, and a rechanneling of power towards the problematizing dis-
course. Defining the problem in this manner raises and denies the imma-
nent forces of media subjects, splitting this constituent power into two
constituted powers: (a) a determining agency (the media) and (b) a de-
termined object (the audience). Both of these new powers become posi-
tions within the problematizing discourse and a target of numerous ap-
plications (protection, regulation, and mobilization).
In sum, these three discourses transformed the multitude into a mass.
As Michael Hardt argued:

The masses and mob are most often used to name an irrational and passive social force,
dangerous and violent because so easily manipulated. The multitude, in contrast, is an

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

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

Proposals for Future Work

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

259
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Theory

tance of early amateur ham operators to radio’s emergence); it would

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

260
 Amassing the Multitude

would happen if activity and productivity preceded these chains, even

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

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Theory

control has created a set of subjects who are increasingly interconnected,

nomadic, and flexible. Jodi Dean’s (2002, 2004) focus on communica-
tive capitalism would supplement the more sprawling argument of Hardt
and Negri. The audience, as media subject at the intersection of these
social forces, becomes problematized in its continuous modulation, in
its technological hybridity, and in its increasing mobility. Drawing also
from Deleuze’s (1990a, 1990b) writings on Societies of Control (which
he also dubs Societies of Communication) and the growing
governmentality studies literature (e.g., Balnaves & O’Regan’s, 2002,
“Governing the Audience”) could augment this approach.

Conclusion: The Active (End of the)

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

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tagonistic will to struggle that could motor future cultural production,

and what forms these powers will take.

Jack Z. Bratich is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Author
Rutgers University.

1
The essay concentrates on media audiences. This is crucial to note, as other research fields have Notes
a different tradition of problematizing the audience. In the performance studies tradition, the his-
tory of the audience revolves around the live audience, in which the site of performance and mate-
rial copresence comes to define the audience (see Butsch, 2000). The unruly corporeal audiences
produce their own attending counterdiscourses and problematizations, and their history deserves a
separate analysis.
2
Cruz and Lewis (1994) have noted this early tension between marketing (the malleable audi-
ence) and propaganda (the vulnerable audience) as a fundamental ambiguity of the early audience.
3
On top of this redirecting, market researchers ideologized the audience power as “consumer
sovereignty” in which audience-consumers operate under rational (at times irrational) choice theory.
This early appreciation for immanence also led to later manifestations of consumer research, such
as the ease with which “critical consumer studies” celebrates “active audiences” and clings tena-
ciously to the uses and gratifications model of consumer behavior
4
Loosely borrowing the term “moral panics” from Stanley Cohen (2002), I note here the close
link between panics over youth and panics over media. It is difficult to think of them in isolation, at
least since the beginning of the 20th century.

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