j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

1/24

CommunicationTheory

242

Amassing the Multitude: RevisitingEarly Audience Studies

This article examines early problematizations of the audience in communica-tion studies (in Michel Foucaults sense of problematization). Using MichaelHardt and Toni Negris concept of the multitude, the author argues that theaudience 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 incommunication 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 theaudience are commonplace. The gradual erosion over the past few de-cades of ontological questions in audience studies and cultural studieshas 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; itwas 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 toaccumulate better knowledge of an object out there, but to ask whatkind of knowledge is possible and desirable (Dahlgren, 1998).

To pursue the question whither the audience? this article uses

Michael Hardt and Toni Negris (2000, 2004) social theory of 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

CommunicationTheory

Fifteen:Three

August2005

Pages242265

Jack Z. Bratich

Copyright 2005 International Communication Association

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

2/24

Amassing the Multitude

243

audience power or mediated multitude do to the field of audienceresearch? After this theoretical clearing, I propose a number of researchagendas that would further this project.1

Audience, Method, Ontology: Audienceas ProblematizationPertti Alasuutari (1999) laid out what he called the three generations ofreception studies (within cultural studies/media studies). For Alasuutari,cultural studies historical trajectory has shifted from a focus on texts toone on audiences. The first crucial moment was Stuart Halls essay En-coding/Decoding and the voluminous research that followed this model.The second generation was characterized by the method of audienceethnography, which displaced the controlled settings for investigatingthe variety of decodings (e.g., Ang, 1991, 1996; Fiske, 1987, 1994;Morley, 1992, 1996; Radway, 1984; Silverstone, 1990, 1996). The thirdgeneration, constructionist, breaks with the emphasis on empirical audi-ences altogether and examines media culture and its discourses (especiallyas these discourses produce and require a conception of the audience).

It is this last iteration that has deontologized the audience. AsGrossberg, Wartella, and Whitney (1998) argued, the audience as suchdoes 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 thatserves 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 studiesnotion of the active audience is pedagogically mobilized to authorizecritics in the name of empowering readers.

In these challenges to audience ontology, audiences are seen not asempirical actors to be examined in their concrete activity, but as discur-sive constructs, as effects of a variety of programs, institutions, andmeasuring instruments. Constructionism is a metatheoretical approachthat treats audience as signifier and subject position rather than ref-erent and autonomous subject. Doing media studies in this frameentails interrogating the systems that produce regimes of represen-tations (Cruz & Lewis, 1994, p. 5). To study audiences is to studythe 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), aproblematization is

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

3/24

CommunicationTheory

244

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 experiencesand isolates them into an object of concern or discussion. Sometimesthis takes the literal form of a problem or threat (such as youth audi-ences in relation to sexual or violent imagery); other times theproblematization creates a source of anxiety or worry. In each case, lots oftime, 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 haveargued, problematizations are the conceptual carvings out that makereality 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 avariety 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 PowerThis constructivist approach is crucial, as it both wards off the traps ofnave 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 thecultural field.

However, this position is not sufficient in allowing a thorough under-standing of the audience question. As a supplement we can turn to themethodological 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). Theformer aims to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structuresby examining the dominant discourses and hegemonic problematizationsas such (pp. 4748). This corresponds to the third generation of culturalreception studies above, as it works on the terrain of the discursive pro-

duction of the category audience. A discourse analysis of the hegemoniclanguages 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

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

4/24


245

discourses), this second approach begins with those alternative prac-tices. This entails a shift in perspective: considering history from the pointof 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 historicalcontext . . . a horizon of activities, resistances, wills and desires that resistshegemonic orders while also creating new possibilities (p. 48).

In other words, the second methodological approach examines thematerial dynamics of subjective, self-valorizing practices and produc-tive processes. It is this milieu of subjectivity that spurs dominant codesto create their problematizations in the first place. Rather than give pri-ority to the series of problematizations, the ontological-constructiveperspective begins with the notion that any hegemonic discourse se-lects, limits, and constricts the possibilities of a more expansive fieldof social practices (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p. 176). This expansivefield of potentialities, what Negri (1999) called constituent power,produces meaning and is only partially captured in representationand problematization.

In the case of audiences, it means we need to look at the productionof subjectivity that constitutes audience practices on their own terms. Itentails 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 tocomplement the critical deconstructive approach. Rather than assumethat the discursive production of subject positions exhausts the field ofaudience 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 statethis is to say the double method looks both at what audiences do (theirpractices) and what is done to them in representation (theproblematizations). However, this oversimplifies the matter and requiresfurther clarification. Looking at what audiences do assumes the sta-bility of the term audience, which the social constructionist and earliercultural studies approaches undermine. We may rephrase the matter inthe following way: The audience is a problematization, a conceptualcapture of a variety of communicative practices and mediated processes

of subjectivity. The ontological realm, then, is not one belonging to theaudience, but to these mediated subjective forces. Production itself, inthe 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

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

5/24

CommunicationTheory

246

program stabilizes these forces into an object of concern or study thatan 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 lessprecise analogue. For Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), constituent poweris 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. Itnames a collective process of production, one that embodies the res ges-tae and the creative capacities of co-operative social forces, as well as aself-valorizing relation (what they call homo homo and vis viva).

As for the audiences constituent power, one could call it a mediatedmultitude, 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 audiencepower over audience potential. Potential still seems to retain the con-notations of untapped, latent, or nascent activity. This does notresonate with the productive processes I am attributing to mediatedmultitude (a closer term would be Gilles Deleuzes notion of the virtual).The word power still has some of these qualities (as in capacity)while also carrying a differential and relational quality (as in Foucaultsnotion of a force acting on another force). Finally, the term audiencepower can be used as long as we remember that audience is itself not asubject, but the name for the media/human assemblage (in fact, it maybe 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 ofthese 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 thechain of media communication. Audience constituent power, however,does not come after production (located elsewhere). It highlights thecollective invention of values, significations, and affectsin 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. Thusaudience power entails a fundamental modification of Negris more ab-

stract version of constituent power. Audience power is actualized onlythrough the mediation of communications technologies. Only later, as areaction to these processes, does an audience appear, via aproblematization that places these productive powers at the end of thecommunication chain.

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

6/24


247

There is another version of audience power that bears mention here,namely Dallas Smythes (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 leisuretime was spent exerting effort for advertisers. Although he introducedthe notion of audience power to media studies, he really only treated itfrom the perspective of its already commodified form. In other words,while foregrounding the productive power of the mediated multitude,Smythes audience labor has already been expropriated into the com-modity-form. As Negri and the other autonomist thinkers have argued,the primacy of subjective labor power would need to precede objectivecapture.

These methodological issues are crucial for this article because muchof recent audience studies has relied on the critical, deconstructionistapproach. This article retains elements of this approach (by focusing onthree problematizing discourses), but recognizes concrete media subjectsactivities as the immanent horizon from which problematizations areformed. My intervention in audience studies thus draws from Hardt andNegris call for a methodological shift in perspective, one that turns tothe ontology of subjective practices in order to open up a different inter-pretation of audiences and audience studies as a field. It means studyingaudiences, 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 andNegris analysis of living labor as productive process and transposing it

to the cultural field. Placing this subjective figure of the multitude intocultural and media studies may provide a conceptual clearing for a newset of issues around media, culture, and power.

Amassing the Audience: EarlyFormations of Managing the MultitudeThe audience has been in crisis since it was generated. The history ofaudience research is marked by attempts to measure, identify, under-stand, and target the elusive object. These techniques continually renewthemselves, providing consistency to a tradition in the very failure andrefinement of conceptual capture. This trajectory of continual crisis is,

according to Hardt and Negri (2000), a key marker of the history ofWestern political thought and practice. For Hardt and Negri, modernityis marked by a series of attempts to measure, contain, and name themultitude. Modernity has instituted a series of sovereign names (na-tion, people, folk) that attempt to transform immanence into transcen-

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

7/24

CommunicationTheory

248

dence, and through this sovereignty machine the multitude is in everymoment 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 ofthe notion of the audience inaugurates a series of conceptual captures ofthe 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, thereare no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses (p. 20).He took this nominalism one step further, by claiming that we interpretmasses according to some convenient formula . . . it is the formula, notthe 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 andmobilizations of the category.Rise of Social Sciences and the MassMass communications arose as a latecomer in the lineage of the socialsciences. The rise of mass culture produced new approaches and objectsof study in other social sciences before a full-fledged field of mass com-munications emerged. The audience was not originally a precise objectof measurement or of systematic study. It was hardly an object at all,dispersed as it was across a range of discourses and disciplines. Earlyproblematizations of the audience were primarily speculative, performedby social observers, press agents, and critics. Some of the early attemptsat observing/reflecting on audiences included pundits reflections on therise 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 Tocquevillesmusings on the American character included his observation that anincrease 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 womens magazines emerged from anearly conception of a demographic, in which media managers began tothink 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 sociologybegan to take a more systematic approach to media. Mass media wereseen as a necessary component of the newly emerging social formation,

as the nervous system of the social body (where society was modeledas an organism, see Mattelart, 1994, p. 36). Methods employed bysocial research to regulate this organism were designed to manag[e] themultitudes (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 11; Mattelart, 1994).Therise of statistics was linked to a desire to understand and manage sprawl-

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

8/24


249

ing populations (Hacking, 1990; Mattelart, 1996; Rose, 1999). Giventhe mobile and free-floating character of Western subjects in the late19th century, statistical instruments made judicial and demographic flows

measurable, and thus manageable (Mattelart, 1996). These unruly flowswere conceptually tamed via the statistical unit of analysis: the averageman. This averageness gave a center of gravity to the normal, fused themoral order with the physical order, and reduced social dynamics to aseries of calculable effects and types. Early audience measurement wasindebted to these instruments, seeking to statistically track and commodifythese 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 Bons The Crowdlaidthe groundwork for a social psychology of collectives. Although ostensi-bly a theory of human nature (in which humans are primarily ruled bypassions and emotion rather than rational choice), this science of crowdswas 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, theinterlinking 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 anoutcome 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 anew word for mob. Much like the mob and the crowd, masses wereessentially ruled by irrational impulses, were easily excited, and led toconformity in conduct. This was a heavily gendered analysis, as thesecharacteristics 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, mobsand crowds were defined as temporary assemblies that gathered at spe-cific times and places, usually surrounding an event. The masses wereabstract: They were always threatening with mixtures, posing dangersof crossing boundaries, and loosening traditional bonds. The mass re-

ferred to a more routinized and normalized state of affairs and was thusan abstract and virtual category. As a permanent crisis and continuousthreat, this disruption had to be managed.

The conceptualization of the audience-as-mass emerged from thisbroader set of problematizations. Social, political, and economic up-

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

9/24

CommunicationTheory

250

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 itscomponents and dynamics. The place of media in this emerging configu-ration of masses and space increasingly became an object of scrutinyand research. With the breakdown in cultural traditions, the massivemingling of immigrants and mobility of nomadic labor, and the skepti-cism toward traditional institutions, media were considered a major forcein creating a national society (Anderson, 1991). Logically, the audiencebecame a paramount concern.

For some, like the early Chicago School researchers Robert Park andCharles Horton Cooley, media subjectivities alleviated some shortcom-ings of modernization (Mattelart, 1994). Park found that newspaperspromoted assimilation among urban immigrants and thus acted as anantidote to the disintegrating function of modernization. Cooley, alsostudying newspapers, found them to enhance variety, and thus remedyfears of mass conformity brought about by the impersonal, anonymouscity. This positive role for mass media included gathering up mobileand dispersed populations, creating a national identity, and educatingand informing citizens. In sum, mass media ameliorated the perniciouseffects of mass society.

At the same time, other researchers argued that media contributed tothose pernicious effects. Mass media exacerbated the problem of mod-ernization, especially the loss of community through impersonal mediatechnologies, 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 orcentrifugal (Carey, 1969; McQuail, 1994; cited in Grossberg, Wartella,& Whitney, 1998). Mass media, in the Deweyian sense of being bothsource 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 indicatean overall concern for and anxiety over the audience. All are grapplingwith 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 medias role in governing and citizenship?What is the capacity of media to affect mobile, dispersed, and varied

populations? Within these questions, the audience-as-citizen is funda-mental. What can people do with media? What people are consti-tuted via media (here we can read the history of concerns over mediaand populism, the public, and partisanship)? To put it succinctly, thecapacity of actors to produce effects with media was just as important

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

10/24


251

as the effects on people by media. Whether media were envisioned ascentripetal or centrifugal, as unifier or divider, this early ambivalencespoke to the power of mediated masses, of media subjects as contribut-

ing to or blocking new arrangements of culture and economy. The earlysystematic reflections on audience, within the sociology of media, thusrecognized the vital yet ambivalent qualities of audience powers.Propaganda Studies: The Vulnerableand Reactive AudienceA few decades later, with the emergence of mass communications as afield of study, this recognition of the power of media subjects takes on adifferent ambivalence. In this era, the audience/mass gets defined as vulner-able (a passive recipient of influences) and as active polluter (of hierarchiesand 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 acceptedbelief, at least among pundits, that the Germans were defeated primarilythrough the paper war, propaganda became increasingly an object offear and admiration (Mattelart, 1994; Simpson, 1994). Simultaneously,the call by Walter Lippman in the 1920s for a scientific approach tomass media research unleashed new ideas and techniques for addressingthe audience/mass: public opinion, propaganda analysis, techniques ofpersuasion, and marketing research. The interwar years increasingly sawa public fear of manipulation, a concern over the power of media tomobilize opinion. What was once the democratic promise for the Chi-cago School (reaching enormous numbers of dispersed populations), nowbecame an issue of persuasion and manipulation. Studies like Harold

Lasswells 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 externalforces (Mattelart, 1994; Simpson, 1994).

Within propaganda analysis, media subjects were defined as passiveand often unknowing recipients of persuasive messages. However, thispassivity 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 propagandato protectfrom foreign effects and to provoke domestic effectsacknowledged

audience power as an increasing component of warfare.The audience/mass was identified with a set of passions, impulses,

and irrational desires. Audiences were considered easily provoked, mo-bilized, and excited. If anything, audience powers were renderedpas-sive, even conceptually pacified. It may not make sense even to use pas-

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

11/24

CommunicationTheory

252

sive as a modifier, however, and certainly not to describe the resultingsubject of mass media (like the narcotized couch potato figure that laterdominated images of passivity). Instead, audiences were identified via

their highly charged capacity to be activated. Rather than thinking ofaudiences as passive, they are more accurately described as reactive. Thisdifference is crucial, as it begins to recognize the capacities of mediasubject, even if it is the capacity to be affected. The force produced by ahuman/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 onethat acknowledged audience power. After all, many communicationsscholars associate the early persuasion research with the hypodermicneedle model of media effects. This direct-effects tradition carries with itthe image of a strong media power and a weak audience passively re-ceiving messages. Although this may be the case, it characterizes thepersuasion discourse only after it has already performed a conceptualmaneuver 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 milieuof active production, tried to isolate media power as an instrument touse on that milieu. The hypodermic needle was an object of fear whenused by malevolent others and of desire when used by benevolent selves.Audiences were not neutralized victims, but useful resources: vulnerableand 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 capableof 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 thatdefined the mass audience as easily stimulated, activated, and agitatedsmall 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 thesedecades, it is no surprise that the audience would come to connote aheightened capacity for action.

Effects-oriented studies that followed, most famously associated withRobert Merton and Carl Hovland, especially during World War II,

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

12/24


253

revolved around experimenting with these audience powers, with whatwould 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 Capras Why We Fightfilm series (19431945) spoketo the belief in the immense power of audiences to act. Eruptions ofaudience activity such as that accompanying the War of the Worlds(Welles) broadcast in 1938 fascinated researchers for generations. Cantril,Gaudet, and Herzogs (1940) famous Princeton study attempted to de-lineate which elements of the audience body filtered the messages andwhich ones were eager to accept the reality effect of the program.

The classic works defining the limited-effects tradition (like Lazarsfeldet al.s Peoples Choice and Robert Mertons Mass Persuasion) all soughtmitigating 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 targetwas 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 thatthe limited-effects tradition remains the bedrock of the empirical ap-proach. The audience as mass came to be defined through its variationsand heterogeneity instead of through an equation with a homogeneousand amorphous mob. Thus, the work that criticized the direct-effectsmodel retained this fundamental problematization of audience powersas reactive. Rather than finding audiences passive (as lack of activity),they were characterized by the capacity to be affected, thepower 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 subjectsand sought to understand constituent audience power in order to reab-sorb it into the social body. This functionalist approach experimentedwith all of the powers of the audience as a way to manage possibledeviations and reorient these capacities toward the homeostatic tendencyof the social body.

What is important here is to recognize that even in the canonicalmoment when the audience-as-mass was positioned as hopelessly andfundamentally passive, the problematization of audiences spoke to the

anxieties over audience power. At stake fundamentally was the capacityof 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 greatpower of media, it can just as well be described as the anxiety over thegreat power of media subjects.

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

13/24

CommunicationTheory

254

Marketing: The Desiring AudienceWhile 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 motivatedby 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 (ofadvertising media) and the consumer (see Leiss, Kline, & Jhally, 1997).2

The rise of the consumer society was dependent upon the ability toactivate media subjects for particular purposes. Audience power wasmobilized to alter conceptions of the self from producers to consumers.The consumer was a historically emergent subject that was not simply abuyer of particular products. As many researchers have noted, consump-tion became a way of being in which desires were channeled toward theself, and identity itself was wrapped up in consuming (Ewen, 1976; Lears,1983; Leiss, Kline, & Jhally, 1997; Marchand, 1985). When it shifted itstextual techniques from information-heavy, product-oriented pitches totransformational 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 beresolved in the sphere of consumption. Audience power was reroutedand transformed into consumer power.

The development of market research into audiences is important forour purposes here in a number of ways. First, it demonstrates the prac-tical application of problematizations. Scrutinizing audiences as objectsby 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 socialcontrol from work to leisure and from effort to pleasure (Mattelart,1994). That is, the multitude was recognized to have a set of capacitiesoutside of the labor power captured in the factory. Leisure is not, thus,only a tool for reproducing and replenishing labor power, but itselfbecomes a target of social management. This shift can be seen asincreasing the sites for the deployment of powerwhat Hardt andNegri (2000), following Foucault, call the context of biopoweraswell 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 earlyappreciation of the audience as capable of being activated. As othershave noted, advertising and marketing have not operated primarily viaan external manipulation, but have studied audiences in their concretespecificity (Balnaves & ORegan, 2002; Jhally, 1987; Marchand, 1985).

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

14/24


255

Audiences were problematized as a set of desires (e.g., aspirations forself, 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, beingbound, for instance, to traditional institutions like church, family, state,communal mores, ethnic rituals, and customs. Advertisers, rather thanimposing their will on passive audiences, tapped into and redirectedthese 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 imagesand persuasive techniques. The early history of public relations wasalso marked by this recognition of audience power. The influence ofFreudian thought on early PR advocates, such as like Walter Lippmanand Edward Bernays, resulted in defining humans as essentially irratio-nal and driven by the unconscious. Lippman, for instance, made it clearthat audiences were not passive; in fact, audience appetites were suchthat they needed exercising via images (Ewen, 1996, pp. 154158).

Of course, this tapping and channeling selected some desires overothers, exacerbated some while denying others, created new ones (e.g.,anxieties over modernization, self-identity, and courtship), and providedalienating and self-defeating solutions. The immanent capacities of au-dience power were led to the particular resolution in the commodityform, but this was only the goal and endpoint. While ultimately chan-neling these impulses toward consumption, early marketers nonethelesscould 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 (thevulnerable 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 dismissthese accounts for not cultivating the innate capacities for informed andreasoned choice, however, we can at least acknowledge that theirproblematizations rested on a belief in the powers of the mass. Whetherpositioned as a threat or a resource, subjects were acknowledged to beable to produce their own sense, to activate desires through a relationto media, and to enhance their own power with media. However, thisaudience constituent power was acknowledged, then countered, by the

propaganda and market frameworks, which sought to transform theseimpulses for their own interests, winnowing audience potentialities intoprescribed pathways. The response to audience constituent power ulti-mately dampened and froze the capacities in their self-valorizing open-endedness and potentiality.

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

15/24

CommunicationTheory

256

Moral Panics Framework: The Vulnerable,Yet Threatening, Audience

Continuing the propaganda frameworks concern over the vulnerable

audience, the moral panics framework signifies the most conspicuousof problematizations (Cohen, 2002; Soderlund, 2002). This frameworkhas come to inform much of media-effects research, especially the re-search that has contributed to public policies and debates over the triadyouth-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 andmanage the vulnerable audience (often a special population, especiallychildren 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 anauthoritative source for cultural debates and public policies.

Moral frameworks are invoked when media images and sounds areblamed for alleged spikes in youth excess, typically sexual or violent innature. 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 mighteven say that the genealogy of media culture is intertwined with moralpanics about that fusion.4

Perhaps the most famous example of this moral discourse in mediahistory is the Payne Fund Study of the 1920s. The rapid diffusion ofcinema 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 towardviolence, and on delinquent behavior. Critics wanted to know: Was thisbooming cultural phenomenon destroying parental authority? Was itpromoting 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 ofa general conclusion in public discourse that linked frequency of movieattendance to antisocial behavior. Criticisms by media researchers formany of the studies sloppy scientific work had little impact. As anotherexample of problematizations of audiences having pragmatic effects, thePayne Fund study significantly contributed to the context of moral hys-teria from which emerged the film industrys early production code and

ratings system. This context, as film scholars have noted (Gunning, 1988;Ross, 1999), involved problem behavior both in and out of the theater.

Later studies also operated on this moral framework. FrederickWerthams 1955 study, Seduction of the Innocent, examined the influ-

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

16/24


257

ence of comic books on juvenile delinquency, focusing on residents of ajuvenile detention center. This 1950s research found that the excitementconveyed by the subjects about representations of criminal and deviant

behavior provoked and encouraged mimicry among the readers. In thelate 1960s, the NIMH continued this concern with juvenile delinquencywhen it produced a report to the U.S. Supreme Court connecting deviantbehavior with television viewing. Although the report provided ambivalentand nuanced conclusions, the public only homed in on the evidence for alink and demanded Senate hearings on the matter. In 1990s Britain, theNewson 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 anddeviance. Whether focusing on children or juveniles, what is at stakehere is an audience whose deviant behavior is isolated, in keeping withthe functionalist paradigm, and correlated with media consumption. Theresponse to this crisis is a call to protect endangered populations frompernicious influences. However, this distinction between powerful me-dia and victimized populations obscures the fact that the threat is notmedia per se but the audiences themselves. The studies problematize theaudience as having the capacities to disrupt the norms of cultural initia-tion and disciplinary regulations. These are the constituent powers thatthe discourses seek to curtail, while the studies locate these constituentpowers in media influence.

Defining media as the problem betrays the scenario of competing dis-courses of protection. In the moral panics frame, the smooth transitionfrom 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 beauthorized 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 andthe need to eliminate potential competitors as threats.

The media become defined as a surrogate trainer of morals and propersubjectivities, in the case of younger children, and the substitute initia-tor of cultural members into adulthood, in the case of juveniles. Mediaare blamed, and the audience is determined to want protection fromthat 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 theaudience as vulnerable and reactive, rather than active, the discourses ofprotection were able to empower themselves as active agents of inter-vention into media subjectivity. Struggling with their own waning au-

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

17/24

CommunicationTheory

258

thority, these discourses found renewal in the taming of the threat tothat authority. In this way, audiences are produced institutionally inorder 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 scenefrom the perspective of audience power adds another layer of analysis.In terms of audience power, it is much more significant that active mediasubjects (in this case youth) were transformed into helpless victims ofmedia power and thus in need of further guidance and assistance. Audi-ence power here is reduced to the activity of emitting SOS signals. Onceagain, 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-Massand the MultitudeWe can now return to Raymond Williamss claim that critical workshould 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 senseof moral regulation and censorship to the strategic interests of propagandaand public relations to the transformation of citizens into consumers, themass 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 themselvesvia protecting the mass (the propaganda and moral frameworks) or viaactivating certain potentialities in that mass (the propaganda and mar-ket frameworks). Problematizing the audience as a vulnerable mass thusrequires a selection process, a displaced recognition of the mediatedmultitude, 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 twoconstituted 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

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

18/24

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

19/24

CommunicationTheory

260

tance of early amateur ham operators to radios emergence); it wouldjust 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 audienceproblematizations. How have subsequent discourses and their sovereignnames (like public, identity, and popular) addressed audiencepower? 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, andI find great resonance with De Certeaus (1984, 1986) writing on theheterological practices of consumption here, as well as his subsequentcultural studies uptake by John Fiske, Ien Ang, Virginia Nightengale,

Janice Radway, Jacqueline Bobo, and others. The issues surroundingwandering 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 theproblematizations themselves, reinscribing productivity prior to themoment of constituted power, in the constituent power captured by theterm audience.

In the active audience model, the endpoints of two chains, the com-munication chain (audience) and economic chain (consumption), areassumed and combined. Activity is located in the fusion of these givenpositions, where decoding as a consumer has many degrees of freedom,but still within the structured constraints. Perhaps this can be traced tothe ambivalence even in Halls (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 ownhistory and economy, but often retained the notion that this autonomywas a secondary reaction to production performed elsewhere. What

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

20/24


261

would happen if activity and productivity preceded these chains, evenacting 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 inurban 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, andthe concomitant extension of disciplinary institutions across these spaces(factory, school, army, hospital). Given current globalized conditions, aswell 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? Havent media become less a mass entity than a mobile, var-iegated, converged, and niched set of practices?

Current research on media convergence, mobile technologies, andnetworked media all make the question of the audience paramount. Thefugitive audience has not disappeared per se, instead dispersing in scat-tered and masked forms in other research. The audience is everywherebeing studied, but rarely named as such. Audiences are problematized asmobile, interactive, and highly technologized media subjects in a varietyof disciplines and fields, including organizational communication, com-puter-mediated communication, library studies, telecommunications,information science, social network analysis, distance education, medialiteracy, 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 ofproblematization. Examples of this range from the impact of instantmessaging on youth identity, to the influence of interactive websites onpublic journalism, to the networked labor practices in the new officespace, 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 astechnologized media subjects have become central, even if not named assuch, or named as users, interfacers, players, consumers, targets, partici-pants, and so on. The topics of subjective interconnection, mobility, andglobal dispersion have come to the foreground of much communication

research and, I argue, constitute the new audience studies.Studying these new problematizations could still benefit from Hardt

and Negris autonomist toolbox. One could take up their arguments inEmpire (2000) and Multitude (2004) that the integration of informationtechnologies, communication processes, and strategies of biopolitical

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

21/24

CommunicationTheory

262

control has created a set of subjects who are increasingly interconnected,nomadic, and flexible. Jodi Deans (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 thesesocial forces, becomes problematized in its continuous modulation, inits technological hybridity, and in its increasing mobility. Drawing alsofrom Deleuzes (1990a, 1990b) writings on Societies of Control (whichhe also dubs Societies of Communication) and the growinggovernmentality studies literature (e.g., Balnaves & ORegans, 2002,Governing the Audience) could augment this approach.

Conclusion: The Active (End of the)

AudienceWithin audience studies, the contemporary pronouncements about theaudiences disappearance ultimately have a degree of truth value. Theyspeak to the demise of a particular problematization of the mediatedmultitude. What has withered is not audience constituent powerifanything, that is intensifying with networked technologies. Rather, whatis waning is the constituted power of audience, and the discoursesthat historically have produced it as object. This passing has opened upnew 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 ashift in perspective. This article has tried to follow Hardt and Negri in

the broader shift in perspective about historical subjectivity via turningaudience 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 inorder to produce culture, nor the problematizing discourses in order toproduce value.

Within this methodological shift, the audience is no longer tied to its

problematized representation, but returned to the milieu of immanentcreative forces. It is this sphere of audience powers that motors thoseproblematizations in the first place, as well as offers the site and re-source for new potentials of becoming and collectivity. Among thesepotentials remains the question of whether audience power has the an-

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

22/24


263

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 atRutgers University.1 The essay concentrates on media audiences. This is crucial to note, as other research fields havea 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 audiencesproduce their own attending counterdiscourses and problematizations, and their history deserves aseparate 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 consumersovereignty 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, suchas the ease with which critical consumer studies celebrates active audiences and clings tena-ciously to the uses and gratifications model of consumer behavior4 Loosely borrowing the term moral panics from Stanley Cohen (2002), I note here the closelink between panics over youth and panics over media. It is difficult to think of them in isolation, atleast since the beginning of the 20th century.

Alasuutari, P. (1999). Introduction: Three phases of reception. In P. Alasuutari (Ed.), Rethinkingthe media audience (pp. 121). London: Sage.

Allor, M. (1988) Relocating the site of the audience. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5,217233.

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.New York: Verso.

Ang, I. (1991). Desperately seeking audiences. London: Routledge.Ang, I. (1996). Living room wars. New York: Routledge.Balnaves, M., & ORegan, T. (2002). Governing audiences. In M. Balnaves, T. ORegan, & J.

Sternberg (Eds.), Mobilising the audience (pp. 1028). St. Lucia, Australia: University ofQueensland Press.

Barker, M. (1997). The Newson report. In M. Barker & J. Petley (Eds.), Ill effects (pp. 1231).London: Routledge.Bennett, T. (1996). Figuring audiences and readers. In J. Hay, L. Grossberg, & E. Wartella (Eds.),

The audience and its landscape (pp. 14560). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Bratich, J. (2003). Making politics reasonable: Conspiracism, subjectification, and governing through

styles of thought. In J. Bratich, C. McCarthy, & J. Packer (Eds.), Foucault, cultural studies, andgovernmentality (pp. 67100). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Burchell, G. (1991). Peculiar interests: Civil society and governing the system of natural liberty.In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality(pp. 119150). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Butsch, R. (2000). The making of American audiences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Cantril, H., Gaudet, H., & Herzog, H. (1940). The invasion from Mars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.Carey, J. (1969). The communications revolution and the professional communicator. In P. Halmos

(Ed.), The sociology of mass-media communicators (pp. 2338). Keele, UK: Keele University.Cohen, S. (2002). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers (3rd ed.).

New York : Routledge.Critical Art Ensemble. (2001). Digital resistance: Explorations in tactical media. New York:

Autonomedia.Cruz, J., & Lewis, J. (1994). Introduction. Viewing, reading, listening: Audiences and cultural

reception. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Dahlgren, P. (1998). Critique: Elusive audiences. In R. Dickinson, R. Harindranath, & R. O. Linn

(Eds.), Approaches to audiences (pp. 298310). London: Arnold.Dean, J. (2002). Publicitys secret. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Author

References

Notes

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

23/24

CommunicationTheory

264

Dean, J. (2004). The networked empire: Communicative capitalism and the hope for politics. In P.Passavant & J. Dean (Eds.), Empires new clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (pp. 265288).New York: Routledge.

Dean, M. (1996). Foucault, government, and the enfolding of authority. In A. Barry, T. Osborne, & N. Rose

(Eds.), Foucault and political reason (pp. 209230). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

De Certeau, M. (1986). Heterologies: Discourses on the other (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1990a). Control and becoming. In Negotiations (M. Joughin, Trans.; pp. 169176).New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1990b). Postscript on control societies. In Negotiations (M. Joughin, Trans.; pp. 177182). New York: Columbia University Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999). Cyber-Marx: Cycles and struggles in high technology capitalism. Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press.

Ewen, S. (1976). Captains of consciousness: Advertising and the social roots of the consumer cul-ture. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ewen, S. (1996). PR! A social history of spin. New York: Basic Books.Fiske, J. (1987): Television culture. London: RoutledgeFiske, J. (1994). Audiencing: Cultural practice and cultural studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln

(Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 189198). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Foucault, M. (1988). The concern for truth. In L. D. Kritzman (Ed.), Foucault, politics, philosophy,

culture (pp. 255267). New York: Routledge.Foucault, M. (1997a). Polemics, politics, and problematizations. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Foucault,

ethics: Subjectivity and truth (pp. 111120). New York: New Press.Foucault, M. (1997b). Preface to the History of sexuality (Vol. 2). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Foucault,

ethics: Subjectivity and truth (pp. 199206). New York: New Press.Grossberg, L. (1988). Wandering audiences, nomadic critics. Cultural Studies, 2, 377391.Grossberg, L., Wartella, E., & Whitney, C. (1998). MediaMaking. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Gunning, T. (1988). From the opium den to the theatre of morality: Moral discourse and the film

process in early American cinema. Art and Text, 30, 3040.Hacking, I. (1990). The taming of chance. New York: Cambridge University Press.Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media,

language. London: Hutchinson.Hardt, M. (1991). Translators foreword: The anatomy of power. In A. Negri, The savage anomaly.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hardt, M., & Dumm, T. (2004). Sovereignty, multitudes, absolute democracy: A discussion be-tween Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negris Empire. In P. Passavant &J. Dean (Eds.), Empires new clothes. New York: Routledge.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Hartley, J. (1992). Tele-ology: Studies in television. London: Routledge.Huyssen, A. (1986). After the great divide: Modernism, mass culture, postmodernism. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press.Jhally, S. (1987). The codes of advertising: Fetishism and the political economy of meaning in the

consumer society. New York: St. Martins Press.Klein, N. (2002). No logo. New York: St. Martins Press.Kline, S., Dyer-Witheford, N., & De Peuter, G. (2003). Digital play: The interaction of technology,

culture, and marketing. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press.Lasswell, H. (1927). Propaganda technique in the world war. London: Kegan Press.Lasswell, H. (1930). Psychopathology and politics. New York: Viking Press.Lazarsfeld, P., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). The peoples choice: How the voter makes up his

mind in a presidential campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce.Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labour. In P. Virno & M. Hardt (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy:

A potential politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Lears, J. (1983). From salvation to self-realization: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the

consumer culture, 18801930. In R. Fox & J. Lears (Eds.), The culture of consumption: Criti-cal essays in American history, 18801980. New York: Pantheon Books.

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

8/7/2019 j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

24/24


265

Marchand, R. (1985). Advertising the American dream: Making way for modernity, 19201940.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mattelart, A. (1994). Mapping world communication: War progress culture (S. Emanuel & J. Cohen,Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mattelart, A. (1996). The invention of communication (S. Emanuel, Trans.). Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press.Mattelart, A., & Mattelart, M. (1998). Theories of communication. London: Sage.McCaughey, M., & Ayers, M. (2003). Cyberactivism. New York: Routledge.McQuail, D. (1994). Mass communication theory: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Meehan, E. (1990). Why we dont count: The commodity audience. In P. Mellencamp (Ed.), Logics

of television (pp. 117137). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Merton, R. (1946). Mass persuasion: The social psychology of a war bond drive. New York: Harper.Modleski, T. (1986). Femininity as mas(s)querade: A feminist approach to mass culture. In C. MacCabe

(Ed.), High theory, low culture (pp. 3752). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Morley, D. (1992). Television, audiences, and cultural studies. London: Routledge.Morley, D. (1996). The geography of television: Ethnography, communications, and community.

In J. Hay, L. Grossberg, & E. Wartella (Eds.), The audience and its landscape (pp. 317342).Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Negri, A.(1999). Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state. Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press.

Petro, P. (1986). Mass culture and the feminine: The place of television in film studies. CinemaJournal,25, 521.

Rabinow, P. (1997). Introduction. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Foucault, ethics: Subjectivity and truth (pp.xixlv). New York: New Press.

Radway, J. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy and popular literature. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press.

Radway, J. (1988). Reception studies: Ethnography and the problems of dispersed audiences andnomadic critics. Cultural Studies, 2, 359376.

Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Ross, S. J. (1999). Working-class Hollywood: Silent film and the shaping of class in America.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

Rushkoff, D. (1996a). Media virus! Hidden agendas in popular culture. New York: BallantineBooks.

Rushkoff, D. (1996b). Playing the future: How kids culture can teach us to thrive in an age ofchaos. New York: HarperCollins.

Silverstone, R. (1990). Television and everyday life: Towards an anthropology of the televisionaudience. In M. Ferguson (Ed.), Public communication: The new imperatives (pp. 173189).London: Sage.

Silverstone, R. (1996). From audiences to consumers: The household and the consumption of com-munication and information technologies. In J. Hay, L. Grossberg, & E. Wartella (Eds.), Theaudience and its landscape (pp. 281296). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Simpson, C. (1994). Science of coercion: Communication research and psychological warfare 19451960. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smythe, D. (1981). Dependency road: Communications, capitalism, consciousness, and Canada.Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Soderlund, G. (2002). Sex panics and city papers in America, 19071917: Mass media and publiccontroversy over the traffic in women. Unpublished dissertation, University of Illinois.

Stauber, J., & Rampton, S. (1995). Toxic sludge is good for you: Lies, damn lies, and the publicrelations industry. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

Tronti, M. (1980). The strategy of refusal. In S. Lotringer & C. Marazzi (Eds.), Italy: Autonomia/post-political politics (pp. 3661). New York: Semiotext(e).

Welles, Orson. (1938, October 30). The War of the Worlds. [Radio broadcast]. New York: Colum-bia Broadcasting System, Mercury Theater.

Wertham, F. (1955). Seduction of the innocent. London: Museum Press.Williams, R. (1961). Culture and society. London: Random House.Wombell, P. (1986). Face to face with themselves. In P. Holland, J. Spence, & S. Watney (Eds.),

Photograpphy/Politics: Two (pp. 8481). London: Comedia/Photography Workshop.Zelizer, B. (1992). Covering the body: The Kennedy assassination, the media, and the shaping of

collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x

Documents