Activating the Multitude

Abstract

Abstract To speak of active audiences today is an act that runs the risk of self-de-activation. What branch of media cultural studies has been so thoroughly pilloried as active audience studies? With the pendulum swing toward economic analyses over the last ten years, what does it mean to revisit reception, especially one as “excessive” as active audience studies? I turn to the “active audience” moment in reception and cultural studies (exemplified by Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the Gramscian culmination in John Fiske’s work) as a way of rethinking audience powers and of inquiring into an ontology of media subjects.1 I will argue that, while the active audience moment recognized the ontological level of audience powers, it took on a number of theoretical and political burdens that stopped it short of developing its own radical findings. These discursive and conjunctural limits included overemphasizing decoding (language, reading), inheriting the equation audience = consumer, and working within a constraining hegemonic politics of Gramscian power/resistance. Finally, I evaluate the backlash against active audiences, or the de-activation moment.