Research Notes Issue 4/ Zones Without People
What is an audience?
You’re reading Research Notes, a newsletter by Brendan Mattox. I read and write on topics related to fiction, memoir, and music journalism. Each issue is centered around text from my daily work, along with some notes about how it relates to what I’m doing as a whole. Please forgive any typos– I’m notoriously terrible when it comes to catching them. Today’s newsletter is a 15-20 minute read.
Attempting to complete an assignment for my Beat Reporting course, one night in 2012, I stood on the sidewalk out front of an all-night bakery in Boston’s North End. The idea was to interview the (usually drunk) patrons as they went in for a midnight cannoli. I was still attempting to be as analog as possible with my reporting; while taking down someone’s quote on a notepad, a passerby who mistook the scene for me getting her number shouted at me: “DUDE USE YOUR FUCKING PHONE!”
Around that same time, I first heard the term prosumer in class, when a journalism professor was discussing some piece of equipment— maybe a Canon 5D DSLR or a Zoom H4n digital audio recorder. Prosumer electronics were set at a mid-range price point ideal for students and “citizen journalists”— another new term to me then— in other words, people trying to get in the game.
I reencountered prosumers while reading Girlhood and the Plastic Image (UPNE, 2014) by Heather Warren Crow. The author, now an associate professor at Texas Tech, explores the term while writing about a turn-of-the-millennium art project entitled No Ghost Just a Shell (2003).
“A hybrid word combing ‘producer’ or ‘professional’ and ‘consumer,’ the prosumer blends the conceptual figure of the DJ with that of the everyday web surfer. Pivotal to the rise of the prosumer are developments in personalized media. For example, Youtube, Facebook, and Tumblr permit an unprecedented extension of authorship (and a concomitant expansion of you-centric advertising); video game companies have legitimized and even encouraged modifications (or ‘mods’) that might otherwise be considered hacking; and personal playlists give MP3 players the ability to perform the supposedly individualized subjectivities of their owners. This is not to say that consumer mods have no potential of reconfiguring dominant power structures, only that these acts of resistance — when they occur — are usually performed within the marketplace using language taken from contemporary advertising.”
The concept behind No Ghost Just a Shell, executed by the French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, was to purchase a digital image of a young girl from a Japanese company that specialized in creating characters for branding and manga, and then distribute her image to a crowd of collaborators be reused in whatever fashion in their own artwork. They named her Annlee (pictured below). “Transforming Anlee into Ann-me,” Warren-Crow writes, “Huyghe, Parreno, and their collaborators…adopt the model of the prosumer, whose active consumption is now an integral part of the global marketplace.”
It can be hard to conceive of just how much things have changed in the last twenty years; when the No Ghost Just a Shell project began, sharing digital images using the Internet was not at all the fact of everyday life that it is now. This change in life is one of the main focuses of Girlhood, and the milieu of the book’s titular plastic images. Thinking about this evolution from the standpoint of today, it brings to my mind the idea that prosumption has always been a part of the millennial experience of the web (Myspace, with its customizable pages, inspired more than one friend to learn to code HTML). It is a technological phenomenon, a result of the merging of not only our eyes, ears, hands, with recording technology, but also our mental faculties. And this period of prosumption, a period in which everyone is a potential author waiting to be published, an artist waiting to be discovered, raises the question: what is an audience?
It’s not an unimportant question, either. Journalism school was more often concerned with who the audience is. As a student I was taught to ‘know them’ (creative writing also included this injunction), yet audience was only ever discussed in economic terms, purely economic ones. The audience was described to me as the people who read a work, and therefore invest something (financial or libidinal) into it. But this naïve definition only goes so far, often eliding a much more hairy discussion about the relationship of journalism and creative writing to the flow of money. Instead, I got a lot of dark jokes about how no one got paid anymore, at least not a living wage, from the very same tenured professors who were trying to illuminate journalism’s practical value for me.
Even then, writing for the people who pay often means a narrow focus on what the people who pay can think of or understand, which has left vast communities unrepresented except by narrow guidelines of what the paying audience can conceive of them. My tweet thread of the year is music writer Deforrest Brown, Jr.’s excoriation of music websites at the end of the 2010s, which left the web littered with dead links to failed media ventures.
Yet within this conception of the audience as “the people who pay,” we can detect a bit of something that points towards a more useful definition of an audience. Clearly, the author and the audience are not in a one-way relationship. They are mutually inclusive, they are of the same population (though they don’t always realize this). This calls to mind some of the brief work that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari did on audiences in the late seventies, while outlining their concept of minor literature. With regards to literature, the pair are particularly enamored with one quote by Kafka, taken from his diaries. “Literature is the people’s concern.” In their essay “Of the Refrain” (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980. pp 345-6), while discussing theorist of speed Paul Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari delve into the problems of population (peopling?) in relation to modern literature:
“The earth is now at its most deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy, but one galaxy among others. The people is now at its most molecularized: a molecular population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interaction. The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of the earth and those of the people…The question then becomes whether molecular or atomic “populations” of all natures (mass media, monitoring procedures, computers, space weapons) would continue to bombard the existing people in order to train it or control or annihilate it— or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip into the first and give rise to a people yet to come.”
In some ways (ways that will lend Deleuze and Guattari to the interpretation of being too complacent with capital), the pair are simply describing the state of affairs of late modernity: people are no longer considered as whole “units” but instead amalgamations of different flows. At its outset, the Internet seemed like the publishing platform most capable of using the random flows of (financial, libidinal) investment to engender these people yet to come. But something went wrong, as one can see when one surveys the Internet today. Within the last few years, and beginning perhaps as far back as the early 2010s (one of my favorite records, Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven, certainly seems like a harbinger of this) there’s been an increasing nostalgia for the early Internet, a time in the not so distant past before the whole network was rerouted through indexing and control platforms like Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Youtube, Substack, etc. These power centers installed themselves alongside the flows of data, essentially tribal or even random, that propagated on the early web. The importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s work to this period cannot be understand. A Thousand Plateaus, released in 1980 and translated into English in 1987, and was especially popular in English-speaking academia through the nineties, when many of the humanities students who came in contact with their ideas would go on to find jobs in the growing digital economy.
Netstalgia requires a bit of editing, of course. The people who used the early Internet were a special class, often populated by people bound up in real world institutions of the military, academia, or techno-capital. But the key Deleuzoguattarian term here would be the transversal connection, which is a connection forged outside of or beyond a formal hierarchy. The early web, pre-indexing, is often recalled fondly for its facility of creating such transversal connections. Like much nostalgia, the promise of the Internet resonates most strong with the people who only saw glimpses of it, teenagers who came online during the turn-of the millennium as this “open internet” was enclosed during the Web 2.0 era, and the same priorities of speed, style, and volume that define our meatspace lives took hold in the cyber world. (As always, it is a question of whose speed and when).
There is a lot of grumbling amongst Internet writers these days. At its core, I feel like the most important question still hasn’t been answered: when anyone can publish, whose work gets priority and how? The whole relationship of writer to audience is inverted by Internet publishing and prosumption, now everyone speaks to no one, a zone without people, while at the same time existing in a space that appears more connected than ever to plastic images of others. “The artist has ceased to be the One-Alone withdrawn into him- or herself, but has also ceased to address the people, to invoke the people as a constituted force. Never has the artist been more in need of a people, while stating most firmly that the people is lacking— the people is what is most lacking.”
This same problem plagued Annlee during Warren-Crow’s case study of No Ghost Just a Shell. Reading a detailed description of the way in which the Annlee project continued even after Huyghe and Parreno attempted to end it, the question that often came back to me was “who was that art for?” The most interesting answer comes in Girlhood and the Plastic Image’s third chapter, “Networking Girlishness,” which is whoever needs it, whenever they need it most. “Networking Girlishness” details a website-art project called mouchette.org, which is presented as the homepage of a possibly suicidal thirteen year-old girl living in Amsterdam, and which features an extensive comments section in which visitors to the site communicated with one another in a properly Netstalgic anonymity. Deleuze and Guattari: “From depopulation, make a cosmic people, from deterritorialization, a cosmic earth…Is it not the nature of creations to operate in silence, locally, to seek consolidation everywhere, to go from the molecular to the uncertain cosmos?”
Find the molecular flow of a work, merge it with yours. To become-molecular, the subject of last week’s newsletter, is to become-imperceptible. This is a mood that feels very foreign to the history of publishing, which has been framed as the constant call is to be counted or countable. It’s an idea that seems particularly difficult to reconcile with journalism, which has need of all the tools of philosophy, art, and science in order to escape its worst fate, which is serve dominant, extractive relationships. Journalists— even many ‘radical’ ones— are the pageboys of capitalism, extracting from molecular populations the sort of information that is useful to their exploitation. How to get beyond this fundamental treason of all writing, which has always served to count, to organize, in the service of a despotic regime? Prosumption, clearly, has not freed it.
Watching, Reading, Listening
This week and for the next several weeks, I am reading the novel Lotte in Weimar (1940) by Thomas Mann. A sequel of sorts to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the novel depicts a visit by the woman who inspired Werther’s female lead (and object of desire), Lotte, to Goethe at his home in Weimar in 1816. Mann uses this (possibly real?) historical event to discuss ideas relating to Goethe’s place in German history, the act of fictionalizing real relationships, etc…but also, for our purposes, offers a look at German social pressures just at the moment when Germany’s fascist machine attempted to destroy Europe.
For some release of pressure around the upcoming election, I’ve been listening to the podcast Election Profit Makers, in which several Gen Xers bet on the election and make fun of Pod Save America.
And lastly, news broke this week that the Trump campaign is already preparing a strategy to cause chaos and prevent a clear result of the election, so that the Trump administration can maintain power. While there is reason to doubt their ability to do so, I still spent Wednesday alternately frightened and furious, as Pennsylvania is a key battleground state (and our State Senate Majority Leader, Republican Jake Corman of central PA, is cited in the Atlantic article being cagey about whether or not he would appoint faithless electors to hand Trump the state’s electoral college votes). I encourage you to donate a few dollars to Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party to support the work we are doing to get out the vote and offer as decisive a victory as possible for Joe Biden and state Democrats in the November election. If you don’t like or don’t want to donate to the Democrats (fair play) please donate to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which is paying off the fines and fees which disenfranchise Florida’s released and paroled felons.