Following in the footsteps of Michel at the P2P Foundation, I'm going to be posting sections of the piece I wrote for the inaugrural issue of Audience 2.0. I'm looking forward to the web-publication's launch, but I wanted to give this article some air after the time of writing in August. So expect, over the next week or so, to see the serialized version, the full version appearing on its own page sometime in the near future.

What follows is the second section. The third is called "Audience and Spectacle"

The Audience and Celebrity Culture

The audience is large, the audience is faceless and undifferentiated. It is held together solely through its relationship to the speaker. It is anarchic—it must-be-controlled though outside forces. We need only to look so far as 20th-century celebrity culture to see this at work. Take, for example, Nathanael West's novella The Day of the Locust. At the very climax of the piece, we find protagonist Tod Hackett lost within, and washed about by a mob of regular folks in LA. Before they morph into an amoral, apolitical mass, these people are neighbors, friends, and the tritely individualized people he encounters on a daily basis. They had all gathered to watch what we would now call a red-carpet procession at a movie premier. Before the stars arrive, people retain a certain amount of individual selfness: they have names and they have faces. Yet at the point when the celebrities arrive, a madness takes over the crowd and their thin shells of identity break—those who once were weak and calm are strong and violent, those who once were neighborly are lecherous, those who were singular have become indistinct.

This shift happens partly in reaction to the perceived concentrated individuality of celebrity. The star is the “speaker” in this case, and LA is the audience. The constituents are powerless in front of the hyper-individual, the faced-one. The crowd of formerly autonomous entities are transformed into an undifferentiated, heaving, yet entirely anticipated multiplicity of violence and amorality—and while their force is great, it is undirected and necessarily the subject of control. As police swoop in to tame the mass, Tod has already lost all autonomous singularity in relation to his surroundings; his interior and exterior are enmeshed. He has difficulty differentiating himself and the siren he hears and his consciousness from his imagined painting.

What West highlights so well is the relationship between the perception of the celebrity hyper-individual and the hypo-individuals who constitute the audience. Celebrity culture represents a low point of the value of audience. The speaker's over-concentrated subjectivity leads to disproportionate power and control over the entities-made-faceless that make up the audience.

There was a time when I would commute into Boston every day through North Station, housed beneath the venue that was then called the Fleet Center. One evening on my way home, I ran into the arrival of several hundred attendants of a Shakira concert. Walking toward my track was particularly difficult, and I missed the train.

While waiting for the next departure, I noticed that a vast majority of the Shakira-attendees were dressed almost identically. They wore puffy hats with brims slightly angled to one side; tight, ornately patterned shirts exposing their midriffs; and mellow-toned skirts and jeans. Their style was not necessarily a common one—not one that I had specifically noticed before—but a mass of young women surrounded me, who had all apparently followed a dress code for the event.

I am hardly in a position to critique another's fashion decisions, but that evening revealed to me the power that the construct of celebrity has over the audience. Shakira's mere presence indicated to the young women that they must wear this set of clothing. The audience was subject to her implicit control. In most cases the outfit might demonstrate a prescribed uniqueness, but when placed next to such concentrated subjectivity as the singer, it stripped them of a faced individuality and transformed them into “the audience.” Celebrity culture breeds this stark gap between those who are allowed an autonomous self and those who are denied one. Even if the celebrity identity is created through a non-autonomous process, the end result, as seen publicly, is this purity of self.

The audience exists only in a relationship with the hyper-individual. On the one side are delicate egg-shell identities waiting to break, and on the other is the solid, impenetrable identity of celebrity. The audience may harbor a potential for action, but demands a measure of exterior control—the police in The Day of the Locust, ushers at the Shakira concert. And when this potential action is unleashed, it is anarchic.

The audience has a sad lot.