Audience Engineering

In the mid-19th century, the popularity of tours by European virtuoso performers (Fanny Elssler, Jenny Lind, Leopold de Meyer, Ole Bull, etc.) had promoters and city leaders scrambling to find venues large enough to accommodate the increasingly large audiences. Older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans typically had standing theaters or churches that could hold large numbers of people, but many towns and smaller cities had to improvise. Jenny Lind, to the embarrassment of genteel Boston observers, for example, performed in the Fitchburg, Massachusetts, railway station.

Mass meetings of all kinds soon became in demand. Audiences marvelled at the emotions created by huge crowds, especially in urban communities, where residents could suspend their normal isolation and anonymity and see themselves literally gathered, as a single entity. Boston’s National Peace Jubilee, for instance, developed by band leader Patrick Gilmore in 1869, to celebrate the end of the Civil War, was the largest single concert gathering in the United States, including an orchestra of 1,000 (along with a total of 11,000 singers) and an audience of 50,000, all in a temporary coliseum, constructed entirely out of wood.

Interior of the Coliseum of the 1869 National Peace Jubilee

In 1872, Gilmore did it again in the World Peace Jubilee. Architect William G. Preston redesigned the since demolished 1869 coliseum on an even bigger scale, with a seating capacity of 100,000 (and a 2,000-pice orchestra and a chorus of 20,000). 

At events like this, the thunder of applause was as interesting as any performer; indeed, the physicality of the moment created excitement out of risk as much as pleasure. Flyers for the 1869 Jubilee advertised "AN IMMENSE COLISEUM, The largest structure in America, capable of accommodating FIFTY THOUSAND PERSONS, has been erected especially for this occasion." And, as one writer said about the Peace Jubilee in 1872: “Not the least moral feature of the Festival is the applause,--so overwhelming in its demonstration that timid souls have said their prayers and trusted blindly in the stability of wooden rafters.”

Gilmore tried to downplay this risky excitement in his own accounts of the festivals, but clearly it was part of the appeal: “The builders, contractors, architects, and building committee were all gentlemen of great experience, and fully appreciated the responsibility of their task. They knew that the safety and security of Fifty Thousand lives were in their hands, and they took every precaution to guard against accident by making the structure strong and solid enough to bear ten times the weight and pressure to which it would ever be subjected…From morning till night, for weeks and months, the Building Committee, one or all, were almost constantly on the ground, watching every inch of progress made. Fully satisfied that everything possible was being done which the knowledge and experience of the builders and their own foresight could suggest to make the structure safe beyond a doubt, they turned a deaf ear to the malicious rumors that would have swept away all confidence…” (From Patrick Gilmore, History of the National Peach Jubilee and Great Musical Festival, 1871: 277).

Big audiences didn’t disappear—you start to see the impact of mass meetings and concerts, especially, in sports, where stadium construction increases to accommodate audiences for baseball and football. As an article from a gymnasium construction company states, "It is announced in the newspaper column that the Yale football management is to make determined effort to accommodate all the spectators who may wish to attend the Yale-Harvard football game this fall, a condition of affairs which has not existed in previous years. Some 4,000 additional seats are to be erected, giving the gridiron stands a seating capacity of about 31,000. The new stands will be so erected as to close the corners and fill in the sides. Comparison with the Harvard stadium, used for the first time last year, still shows a greater capacity at Cambridge. The Harvard stadium proper seats about 25,000 persons, but by means of additional stands 35,000 can be accommodated. (American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol 1, September 1904-August 1905. Boston: American Gymnasia Company: 11)

Temporary “stands” were one thing; it became clear by the 1890s that the lasting appeal of sports would require more scientific examination of how create solid, safe, and enduring audience structures. I’m only beginning the exploration of this particular science, but here’s a glimpse, from a paper on “live loads”—another term for audience!--delivered at the meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1904:

"It is freely admitted the writer’s results give figures greatly in excess of those given by the accepted authorities (outside of some municipal building laws), both in the United States and in Europe, but the experiment is one very easily tried by anyone who may feel unconvinced. Doubtless, mixed crowds of men and women, such as football spectators, may weigh less per square foot, with an equal degree of personal discomfort, than the body of students in the writer’s experiments. It should be remembered that a closely packed crowd is not likely to be in a mood to take calmly any undue deflection or appearance of weakness in the floor, and the result of such seeming insecurity is not pleasant to contemplate. In the writer’s opinion, such floors as those of passageways, corridors, standing-room in theaters, assembly rooms without fixed seats, ballrooms, etc., should be calculated for a weight closely approaching 150 lb. per sq. ft., or, in some cases even more, without exceeding the unit stresses of Mr. Schneider’s Paragraph 17. Possibly, a large standing assemblage, such as is common at political meetings, likely to applaud by stamping; or, a throng of dances; or a body of drilling soldier, might call for an additional impact provision."(C. C. Schneider, “The Structural Design of Buildings.” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 997: 443-444)

An image from C. C. Schneider's 1904 paper on "live loads."

Loving Lincoln

In honor of Lincoln's birthday, the American Antiquarian Society's Past is Present blog discusses sources on Lincoln and features a detail from an 1860 political cartoon, "The Republican Party Going to the Right House." The cartoon mocks depicting his supporters as social deviants, radicals, and crackpots, including pickpockets, free love advocates, Mormons, socialists, free blacks, and, yes, ardent followers. The woman closest to Lincoln (drawn with masculine features) treats him inappropriately like a celebrity, asserting her "passional attraction" to his "lovely face."

Over at the New York Times Opinionator online, Ted Widmer has published several linked articles that consider Lincoln's 1861 inauguration train tour in which he notes Lincoln's celebrity status and the frantic crowds that greeted him at stops:

Earlier inaugural journeys had also been public affairs. Washington’s trip from Mount Vernon to New York was a “prolonged coronation ceremony” – in Trenton, a chorus of “young virgins” threw flowers in his path, a custom we have wisely discontinued. Jackson’s journey from Tennessee was well-chronicled, as a westerner came in to clean the Augean stables of Washington. But nothing on the scale of Lincoln’s trip had ever happened. It had elements we recognize from our own time: the peculiar thrill of the traveling celebrity and his entourage, lurching from city to city, like a touring rock band (Tonight Only: Lincoln!); the frenzy of crowds, eager to catch a glimpse of this new American idol...

Finally, teacher and writer Jim Cullen, at his blog American History Now, has posted a tribute to Lincoln that brings the love of Lincoln into the present.

The Erotic Economy of Fandom

Cultural studies scholars have long recognized the defiant nature of fandom; in early fan studies, fans are always somehow negotiating hegemony, or poaching texts, or resisting the mainstream. While writing Tramps Like Us, I reacted warily to these characterizations. While creative re-use of texts and resistance to producers' intentions were certainly elements of music fan culture, defining fans' experiences in that way did not quite fully characterize the appeal of fandom for fans themselves, who talked mostly about strong feelings of connection, knowing, and transformation.

There is a complex relationship between fan practices and the context of late capitalism in which those practices have been made most meaningful. I still believe, as I stated in Tramps Like Us, that fandom is inextricably linked to the commodification of culture since the late 1700s. And in my new work, Listening and Longing, I spend much time describing public, commercial, musical entertainment and its appeal to early consumer/listeners. But I remain convinced that we need to remain open to ways of thinking about what fandom is, and why it matters, beyond mere oppositional politics (however sympathetic one might be with the goal of that approach). I think it's the only way to accurately work out the entirety of fandom's history and significance.

Fans love stars, works, styles, culture. How do we think about that love more fully? I have, in the past, written about the passion of fans in terms of religious discourse. Another way to think about it, perhaps, is the "commerce of the creative spirit" as explained in Lewis Hyde's The Gift. First published in 1983, it was released in a 25th anniversary edition in 2007. It's essentially a series of essays that probe the idea of gifting in non- or pre-capitalist cultures, using the knowledge built from that exercise to better understand the value of creativity in Western industrial-capitalism.

Hyde's book begins by setting up a dichotomy of an “economy of eros” against an “economy of logos” (vaguely reminiscent of Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), where “cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason is to enthusiasm.” Hyde then places artistic expression into this framework, arguing that artistic expression functions in the realm of eros and enthusiasm, having value not in the monetary power of contracted ownership but rather in the social bonds created by its ritual release and circulation. As he says,

The art that matters to us--which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience--that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with price...

Later, he explains:

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.

Hyde means to give courage to those who live and work at the margins of the market economy and outside of the framework of achievement (making money) that has characterized much of American capitalism. What I really like about the book in terms of fan studies is the way in which his articulation of the gift—as the establishment of a bond that powerfully endures by being passed on—touches on many of the ways that fans describe their love of cultural commodities. And, in the end, Hyde is open to thinking about gifting as multilateral. When he's thinking only about artists, he reductively opposes them (in ideology and condition) to capitalists; when he's thinking about consumers, he better recognizes how messy things can be and how, sometimes, despite one’s surroundings or the origins of the roles they inhabit, one’s emotions can imbue unexpected meaning to any action. As he says, “The conflict between freedom and the bonds that gifts establish is not absolute, of course. To begin with, gifts do not bring us attachment unless they move us.” Or: “Within certain limits, gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized.” In other words, people in a capitalist culture--especially in a capitalist culture—must work out, in each moment, the extent to which their actions will be erotic or rational. It seems to me that, at the experiential level, this is a useful way to think about the history of audience enthusiasm.

Football's Continuous Ovation

Before the establishment of professional football (the American Professional Football Association was founded in 1920), there was college football. Many of the core practices of American football (or "new football") were worked out in this time period, from team cheers to rules of play to techniques for keeping crowds off the field. Interestingly, even a cursory reading of reports from before 1920 shows the extent to which the audience was very much a part of the experience. While today fans might cheer, in the 1890s cheering itself was seriously considered a “play,” contributing to the outcome of any game. For example, regarding the Yale-Princeton Game of 1892, one writer complained that the crowd was not involved enough; Yale won despite the spectators’ lackluster involvement. (“Yale and Princeton, -92.” The Illustrated American, Vol. 12, December 10, 1892, 579):

“The new football,” says a writer in the Nineteenth Century, “is a far more effectual arouser of the unregenerate passions of mankind than either a political gathering or a race meeting…At a modern football match…it is a distinct point that the players are human beings, with sensibilities much on a par with the sensibilities of the spectators. These latter are well aware of the fact. And it is by playing loudly upon their sensibilities that the spectators endeavor to incite their darlings to strain every nerve to win.” 

Not very loudly did the forty odd thousand persons present at the football match, played between the Yale and Princeton teams at the Manhattan Athletic Field, New York-city on Thanksgiving Day, play upon the susceptibilities of the young collegians, but sufficiently loudly to incite Yale to win by 12 to 0. 

It was not nearly as interesting a game as that played between Yale and Harvard at Springsfield, Mass., the Saturday before, for it was a metropolitan game. It was the right thing to see, and probably half the people present knew nothing about and cared less for the game. At the Springfield game, on the other hand, nearly every one who saw it knew something about football and everyone was enthusiastic. In New York it is not "good form" to express too loudly your ‘unregenerate passions….

There are many more descriptions and issues around audience for pre-professional football, some of which I will deal with in separate posts. For now, let me share a description of the emotions of the crowd during a college game, by Freeman Furbush. (“Football As We Find It.” National Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 2, November 1897: 161+). For him, football is all about the spectators. Humorous pieces like this, offered at a time when football was growing as popular entertainment, helped to educate naïve readers—including the literary-minded, middle-class subscribers to National Magazine--about how to think about their own potential participation in the game.

Baseball Fever in Song

I've been starting to think about early baseball fans. I can get at the secondary literature from Providence, but it's become clear that I'll also need to travel to some archives (and perhaps the Baseball Hall of Fame) for primary source research. I would like to study, for instance, an actual copy of Thomas W. Lawson's The Krank: His Language and What it Means (1889), one of the first, book-length, contemporary interpretations of baseball fandom in the U.S.

The Library of Congress appears to have some interesting holdings around baseball, as well. To my delight, I've noticed that they have lots of sheet music about the game, mostly from the early 20th century. Songs provide a glimpse into the enthusiasm for baseball or, to be more accurate, the perceptions of that enthusiasm among Tin Pan Alley songwriters. I'm aware of the pitfalls of interpreting song lyrics without reference to their articulation in musical performance (which can significantly alter their meaning), but for the purposes of offering examples of this musical evidence, I have reproduced some of the lyrics, here. Go learn the songs on piano and tell me what you think!

First, here is a very early one, "The Base Ball Fever," from 1867. Notice the reference to baseball fashion among women in the stands; gender is an issue in modern sports fandom, and it looks as if it was in 1867, as well.

Classics of Fan History: Fandemonium!

Fred and Judy Vermorel's Fandemonium! The Book of Fan Cults and Dance Crazes, first published in 1989 and now out-of-print, continued the themes of their earlier work, Starlust (1985), by celebrating the excesses of pop culture fandom. While Starlust featured the sexual fantasies of fans for pop celebrities in the 1980s, Fandemonium! provided an historical context for that work, tracing the development of various kinds of public hysteria, celebrity cults, and dance manias in 20th-century Europe and the U.S. It was lavishly illustrated with images and press clippings, and designed with the cut'n'paste sensibility of a manic scrapbooker (as if the Vermorals could not keep up with the deluge of mass-mediated material coming at them).

The goal of the book was to highlight the "passions engendered by consumerism." Making loose connections to Tarantism and St. Vitus's Dance and modern forms of mania, the Vermorels focused on everything from the fan riots at the 1927 funeral of film star Rudolph Valentino to jitterbugging to Beatlemania to mosh pits. The "True Stories" chapter featured fragmentary descriptions of celebrity fans impersonating their idols, trying to touch stars, turning star-related merchandise into fetish objects, and stalking. Sections on rock'n'roll assessed the rise of "THE GIRL," a role of "no particular gender," defined by being excitable, vulnerable, and a "consumer idealist/ideal consumer." The book's visual content was intentionally provocative, highlighting the human body: people dancing wildly, fainting behind crowd-control barriers, or in various states of delirium and ecstasy at concerts.

When I first encountered this book, I was suspicious of the unabashed sensationalism of the Vermorels' approach. The connection they were trying to make between the "historical" and the "hysterical" seemed to me overly selective, ignoring less-demonstrative fans like book lovers or more-organized fans like baseball kranks. They used a definition of fandom that fully embraced the portrayals of journalists and other elitist critics of popular culture: fandom was about unruly mobs and stalkers rather than human enthusiasm and connection. And in a move typical of cultural studies work in the 1980s, it casually flipped Adorno-esque cultural critique on its head: the Vermorels asserted that fandom was not about control by the media and its star machinery but about resistance to that control.  Thus frenzy and chaos were specifically meaningful:

"But don't knock hysteria. It's not just an irrational force which sends people into self-destructive frenzy. It's also a problem-solving behavior which helps us make emotional sense out of cultural shock and social trauma. Through tis florid and erotic displays we symbolically negotiate our unspoken desires and quite literally 'shake off' constraints by affirming the instinct for pleasure.'"

Now, however, I recognize that this was one of the first works in fan studies to address the breadth of fandom's history, bringing together and juxtaposing diverse instances of fan-like behavior over time. Perhaps there is legitimate link between medieval epidemics, 19th-century manias, and modern fandom, even if it's only the discourses used to describe those behaviors. The Vermorels make that issue worth exploring in more depth. And while I still have serious reservations about the Vermorels' definition of fandom as simple fanaticism about stars and find their history distortedly selective, I can get behind some of their broader goals of doing fan history, as stated in their brief but brilliant "Afterword":

This book is about showbiz in its widest sense. It bypasses distinctions and truisms dear to particular tastes or specialisms. Like the difference between rock and pop. Or the origins of rock'n'roll somewhere between the blues and post-War teenage affluence...They all come out of a preoccupation with the stars' or industry's point of view. A history of kings and queens, coronations and abdications, which would seem ridiculously outmoded and woefully elitist in any other subject. 

Paradoxically, when you look at it from the consumer's vantage point, showbiz seems a more integrated phenomenon than is usually presented...Focusing on the pleasures, necessities and ambivalences of consuming popular entertainment, on all consumers of all popular entertainment, also creates a definition for showbiz beyond genre and fashion, even beyond particular media...

So often the critic/fan/prof is driven to imagine (or to wish) that the origins of showbiz fascination lie somehow or somewhere in the objects of this fascination....Whereas all the time it's only the fan who has the imagination and talent and tenacity to reinvent such fascinations every single day. The magic of stars is in the work of fans.

Fandom is wider and more significant than we thought, and history has a multiple vantage points. Can we continue to build new scholarship on those principles?

Talk at UT Austin

On February 7th, I'll be giving a talk in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas, Austin. Hope to see my one blog follower there--you know who you are. Seriously, the topic will be "Music Audiences, Ethnographic History, and the Construction of New Pasts." I'm basing it on my latest work about the avid audiences for urban music concerts, exhibitions, and shows between 1840 and 1880. The topic necessarily addresses sound and hearing (which leaves little historical evidence, as currently defined), and it involves people who have, for the most part, remained anonymous in American history. I will talk about the methodological challenges of locating and investigating the experiences of such people and the ramifications of bringing their world to light. 

Hanging on Every Word

In our mediated hyperculture, it is difficult to imagine how listening to a lecture could be a form of popular entertainment. Not so, however, in the 19th century, where oratory was big business, involving legions of travelling celebrity speakers and regular, large, and eager audiences. As Harper’s Monthly explained in 1855: “New England is dreadfully belectured. Every evening of the week usually brings some 'entertainment' of the kind, as it is courteously termed. The Mercantile Library of Boston, like an immense corporation doing a tremendous business, runs, as it were, two express trains of lectures during the week.”

Ordinary people frequently sought out speakers, reflecting in their diaries about they heard. In fact, they tended to treat public lectures and speeches as they did sermons: sources of life-changing wisdom. A good lecture was one that galvanized the audience, moving them to act. Thomas Augst has written about this use of oratory as a "technology of the self" in The Clerk’s Tale; what interests me is the extent to which such attention might also be characterized as a form of fandom. Relying on the framework of authorship, the history of oratory is often about the power of speakers, but the other side of that power, of course, is the enthusiastic embrace of listeners.

Political oratory was especially meaningful to its audiences in the 19th century. Samuel P. Orth, (“Government By Impulse, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 100 (July 1907): 1-9) summed it up in the context of William Jennings Bryan’s electrifying—but failed—run for president in 1896: 

“The American people love their orators. No other people flock as we do to hear sonorous sentences, well-rounded periods, plausible epigrams, multiplied alliteration, and picturesque metaphors. Nowhere else is a resonant voice so potent as in America. Where else in the world, and in history, could be reenacted the scene that witnessed the nomination of an obscure newspaper reporter for the highest office in the gift of a great nation, because of the full orotund of his voice and the appealing figures of his speech? And what greater tribute could be paid to man than was vouchsafed by the assembled thousands gathered from every state at the eastern gateway of the continent, to greet the necromancer of words as he returned to his native land from a world tour? It is not Bryan the statesman, nor Bryan the sage, nor Bryan the politician, but Bryan the orator, whom the masses adore.

The political orator exercises a mystic sway. The enchantment of the human voice is singularly complete over the average American audience. They will stand in downpouring rain for hours, they will fill the largest hall to suffocation, they will gather in unwieldy crowds at monster mass meetings, to hear a mighty wielder of phrases; they will get out of bed at unseemly hours in the morning, or stay up until midnight, to hear a stump speech from the rear platform of the train that bears the favored orator from town to town in a journey of triumph. 

And why do we love to hear our orators? It is not merely idle curiosity, for curiosity is transitory; it vanishes speedily, once that it is satiate. Nor is it surely for the logic or the wisdom or the originality of the orator. The public speaker who has a reputation for syllogisms or philosophy speaks to empty benches. We love to hear our political orators, not for what they teach, but for what they inspire. They make us enthusiastic. We love the thrills they give, the impulses they radiate. The function of the stump speaker is not conversion or conviction, but stimulation. In some degree all republics have magnified the gift of speech. The spoken word is the medium of legislation and agitation. From the village debating club to Congress, volubility is the much sought gift.”

There is certainly something about the ritual occasion of political speech that evokes strong feelings of civic participation. It suppose that's why I still watch my political party's national convention on television every four years. Some of what you see is so old-fashioned, it seems almost a mockery of the past (plastic skimmer hats and balloons, really?). However, it's still part of the political process, and I feel like I need to be “in” it even if not “at” it. There is also the fact that democracy remains fundamentally a persuasive art, and in politics, speaking is still the primary medium of action. Public political speech is almost always a speech act--directing, declaring, and committing. Most of all, though, political rhetoric demands response. The situation of an eloquent leader, poised before an expectant audience, is a social drama with potential legislative consequences. Most of the time, hearing a good political speech reminds people of their values, their ideal strivings, and new possibilities to consider. Sometimes, however, when audiences are ready to do something with the words they hear, oratory sparks action. 

The State of the Union is Tuesday.

Recreating Performance Environments

There are many excellent histories of urban theater architecture; there are few that give us an understanding of actually being a concert or theater-goer on a particular night in 1855 or 1870 or 1903. What was playing? How did the inside of a theater look from various viewpoints? What was it like to sit with others in a crowded house?

Of course, scholarship and narrative description can represent such experience. For example, Thomas Forrest Kelly’s First Nights and First Nights at the Opera address some of these questions for specific premieres of musical works and operas. Vera Brodsky Lawrence’s monumental multi-volume Strong on Music re-creates the whole world of music and theater in New York City between 1840 and 1860, using George T. Strong’s mid-19^th century diary and a detailed mining of journalism from the period.

However, there are also a number of digital approaches, a few of which I will note here:

Mapping the Moment is an interesting interactive map of theater and entertainment in Nottingham, England, in the 19^th century, including performance venues, performances, and census information.

The Lost Museum, is an archive and re-creation of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. The simulation lets you see and hear the museum's rooms, some of which contain historical commentary.

Virtual Vaudeville engagingly recreates New York City’s Union Square Theater in 1895. It’s a sophisticated simulation that allows you to experience a vaudeville show, in “real” time, while also exploring the space of theater. 

For a related but different take on virtual recreation of entertainment venues, the Urban Simulation Team of UCLA creatied an architectural simulation of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It needs people, but it's still pretty cool. 

I’m only beginning to explore all this. If Ubisoft can bring 15th-century Italy to life, with attention to historical accuracy, in Assassin's Creed II, why not a night out in an antebellum city? For a scholarly summary of the issues, see Hugh Denard. 

Harmless Insanity: Bibliophilism v. Bibliomania

The excerpt below, from Henry Howard Harper's Booklovers, Bibliomaniacs, and Book Clubs (1904), is an early attempt at explaining what Joli Jensen, in 1990, called “fandom as pathology." I’m not sure the author succeeds in moving beyond the disease metaphors! Good point, at the end, though, about how some people, more than others, are apt to be labelled maniacal.

"It should be remembered that one possessing a fondness of books is not necessarily a bibliomaniac. There is as much difference between the inclinations and taste of a bibliophile and a bibliomaniac as between a slight cold and the advanced stages of consumption. Some one has said that 'to call a bibliophile a bibliomaniac is to conduct a lover, languishing for his maiden’s smile, to an asylum for the demented, and to shut him up in the ward for the incurables.' Bilbio relates to books, and mania is synonymous with madness, insanity, violent derangement, mental aberration, etc. A bibliomaniac, therefore, might properly be called an insane or crazy bibliophile. It is, however, a harmless insanity, and even in its worst stages it injures no one. Rational treatment may cure a bibliomaniac and bring him (or her) back into the congenial folds of bibliophilism, unless, perchance, the victim has passed beyond the curative stages into the vast and dreamy realms of extra-illustrating, or 'grangerizing.' People usually have a horror of insane persons, and one might well beware of indulging a taste for books, if there were any reasonable probability that this would lead to mental derangement. There could be furniture-maniacs, rug-maniacs, and china-maniacs, but people do not generally hesitate to purchase furniture, rugs, and china for fear of going crazy on the subject, and no more reason is there why rational persons should hesitate to make a collection of good books for a library, for fear of being called bibliomaniacs. In Sesame and Lilies Ruskin says: 'If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad—a bibliomaniac. But you never call one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books.'"

Banking Reading

Two online sites to note about historical research on reading are the Reading Experience Database and the “A Place of Reading” Exhibit.

The Reading Experience Database (RED), begun in 1996, is extraordinary—an accumulated collection of descriptions of reading over centuries, from a variety of English language sources (mostly from autobiographies and literature). It is one of the go-to places for learning more about the changing practices of reading.

“A Place of Reading” is a wide-ranging overview of reading in early America, including an image bank of people reading in various private and public spaces. The bank is less expansive than the RED but nevertheless interesting; while iconographic research has somewhat of a hold in music studies, it has not had wide application in literary studies (Garrett Stewart’s The Look of Reading being a notable exception).

It would be great to see more collections of evidence on listening, dancing, viewing, and other audience behaviors about which we know very little historically.

Teaching Audience

I’ve been teaching reception theory at Rhode Island School of Design since 1998. If reception theory is still a bit marginalized in humanities disciplines, it’s definitely an odd approach in an art and design school, where students are primarily focused on learning how to create and produce. However, that is the reason why I think it’s important to teach it: it provides a small counterweight to the power of intention (“This work articulates my struggle to make sense of my upbringing”), or, conversely, to its casual abandonment (“People can feel whatever they feel.”). I want my students to glimpse that creativity and meaning are far more complex and non-linear, far more deeply contextualized (in moments, communities, and pasts), than most would like to acknowledge. 

In some semesters, I have been more provocative than in others: 

Mostly, I’ve just tried to introduce undergraduates to the classics in the field. From the early to the mid-2000s, I focused on theories about different forms of cultural expression: literature, film, television, and music. We read Iser and Radway, Eisenstein and Staiger, Kubey and Katz, Adorno and Hebdige. As I wrote in the catalog description for "Reception Theory and Popular Culture" in Fall 2000:

In this course, we will explore the ways various scholars have conceived of popular culture audiences, from early psychological analyses of reading to current historical and ethnographic investigations of popular music. By focusing on the differing ideas of audience and methods of audience research within and across these disciplines, we will discuss the impact of, and problems with, ideas of reception, consumption, and resistance. 

To the extent that reception studies and debates have unfolded in separate disciplines, this comparative framework was useful. Studying reception this way, though, was also limiting. I found, over time, that students did not necessarily have access to a meta-discourse that would enable them to move outside of disciplinary conceptions. There was also a lot of repetition that made the course into a kind of "parade of theories," with the students passively watching the authors march triumphantly by. That led me to start thinking about reception more anthropologically—not as a response to particular forms of expression, or even particular works (as reception is often conceived in literature and music), but rather as a culturally- and historically-contingent behavior that merges consumption, attention, sensation, association, memory, and enthusiasm—in short, what we might call “audiencing.”

For the past several incarnations of my reception theory course, I’ve moved to a different structure that avoids my previous formalism for a new focus on themes and debates around the whole notion of “receiving” art. I don’t know if the students care, but personally, I find not having to think about reception in strict disciplinary terms quite freeing. (Of course, doing so is the luxury of someone teaching in a department called “History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences”). At any rate, this spring I will give it another try: 

Audience (Spring 2011)

Stemming from developments in literary criticism and media studies in the 60s and 70s, the field of audience studies examines the complex ways that people read, view, and hear---or “receive”—artistic expression. Its radical emphasis on audiencing as a primary source of meaning has been controversial, challenging fundamental concepts of authorship, creativity, critical authority, and the work. In this course, we will analyze classic audience studies from across fields in the arts and humanities and explore the ramifications of those studies for disciplinary practices in art and design.

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Reactions

In this brief introductory section of the course, we will examine the concepts of “authorship” and “intention” against which reception theory is traditionally defined.

Introduction

      February 21

Authorship

February 23: Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of ‘The Author,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, (Summer, 1984), pp. 425-448.

February 28: Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, Nos. 5 & 6 (1968) www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/; Michael North, “Authorship and Autography,” PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 5. (Oct., 2001), pp. 1377-1385.

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Frameworks

How do audiences—readers, spectators, listeners—make sense of artistic expression? We will consider “audiencing” from a number of perspectives: phenomenology, biology, history, psychology, and sociology.

Interpretive Moves

March 2: Wolgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, On Interpretation: I (Winter, 1972), pp. 279-299.

March 7: Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring, 1976), pp. 465-485.

Rhetoric and the Senses

March 9-14: Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O Factor. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Emotion, Cognition, and Response

March 16 Roger Pouivet, “On the Cognitive Functioning of Aesthetic Emotions,” Leonardo, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2000), pp. 49-53.

March 21 Noel Carroll, "Toward a Theory of Point-of-View Editing: Communication, Emotion, and the Movies," Poetics Today, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 123-141; Charles Carson, "'Whole New Worlds': Music and the Disney Theme Park Experience," Ethnomusicology Forum, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Nov. 2004), pp. 228-235.

Sum: Frameworks of Interpretation

March 23 Paper #1 Due

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Issues

We will evaluate reception theory by looking at particular problems and debates in audience studies, including fandom, participation, and politics.

Popular Culture and Politics

April 4: Adorno, “The Culture Industry” (at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm.

April 6: Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) at https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema.

Fandom

April 11 Daniel Cavicchi, “Loving Music: Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in the 19^th Century,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Cornell Sandvoss, Jonathan Gray, and C. Lee Harrington, editors. New York: New York University Press, June 2007.

April 13 Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, 'Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption and Rethinking Textuality' from Participations  -http://www.participations.org/Volume%204/Issue%201/4_01_graymittell.htm

Participation and Technology

April 18-20 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.

Sum: Issues in Reception

April 25 Paper #2 Due

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Practices

What’s the use of audience studies? We will think about the implications of reception theory for various fields of art and design.

Provocations and Challenges

      April 27-May 2 Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in 

            American Culture. Random House, 2007.

Your Own Art and Design

May 9 Steven W. Dykstra, “The Artist's Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Autumn - Winter, 1996), pp. 197-218.

May 11 Jeffrey L. Meikle, “Material Virtues: On the Ideal and the Real in Design History,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1998), pp. 191-199.

Sum: Audience Research and Practice

May 16 Presentations

May 18 Presentations

Paper #3 Due on Liberal Arts Exam Day – May 23

Celebrity

Celebrity, an important element in the history of fandom, is the theme of the Winter 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly. While I remain suspicious of theories that describe fan behavior as a mere byproduct of the cultural machinery of celebrity (with the associated hand-wringing about the superficiality of consumerism, modern life, etc., etc.), any historical understanding of audiencing needs to take into account the workings of public performance and fame. 

The issue collects some intriguing historical passages: Plato on Protagoras's "entourage" in 432 B.C., Heinrich Heine on Lisztomania in 1844, John Dos Passos on Rudolph Valentino's death in 1920, the "fan base" for Jesus in 30, Charles Mackay on Mesmerism in 1795, Charles Dickens on the readers hounding him in 1842, and other topics. No theorizing, really, except for Lewis Lapham's introductory essay, which tends to rely on the artificiality-thesis of Daniel Boorstin's The Image (1962). In its historical scope, the issue reminds me of Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown (1986), which I would recommend (and which I should re-read!).

Varieties of American Enthusiasm

Like many editorials about avid behavior in the 19th century, the “The Absurdities of Enthusiasm” (The Galaxy, July 1873, 141-145) has a slightly mocking tone. Nevertheless, it is a bit more sympathetic than most: “Enthusiasm seems to me a kindling of the soul toward a favorite object or idea, to almost the entire controlling of our thoughts and purposes and emotions. By its very nature it is uncalculating and unselfish. In this, you can distinguish true from false enthusiasm. But this effervescence of the imagination often leads to mental intoxication, and the understanding reels and totters. Hence the element of absurdity. The enthusiasm of some souls is so grand that we are never tempted to smile at their eccentricities.”

After accounting for various European enthusiasms--for mathematics, alchemy, the Holy Land, South Seas speculation, tulips--the writer observes: “The Americans cannot boast of superior coolness. We had a Jenny Lind fever, and an excitement about Dickens which might be called an intermittent attack, for the “Notes” gave a chill between the spasms of wild admiration. We play croquet rainy nights aided by glimmering lanterns, and are ready for base-ball matches while a digital stump remains. We shake hands with our heroes until the poor member resembles a dropsical lobster; run the maddest kind of races on the Mississippi; and chew more tobacco and burst more engines than any other country. Then we had the “Moris Multicaulis” to an insane degree. (I prefer to appear learned, and so leave this a mystery to many). And not many years ago we had the hen fever. The papers were full of the excitement. The largest kind of eggs were laid—on editors’ tables—and extraordinary prices were paid for the fashionable fowls. Mr. Burnham, the gentleman who raised the excitement, assures us that in the summer of 1850 dozens of full-grown men, enthusiastic hen-fanciers, came to his house for Cochin China eggs at one dollar each, and on being informed that there were none at present, would sit down and wait three of four or six hours for the hens to lay them a few. ‘Who’s dead?’ the stranger would query, seeing the rows of vehicles standing in long lines by his fence.”

Conclusion: “Enthusiasm is a good thing. If you have it, be thankful. You will need it all before you get through life.”

Nightlife in Philadelphia, 1849

Nathan Beekley, a young clerk in Philadelphia, kept a diary in 1849 in which he chronicled his frequent and fascinated attendance at plays, concerts, shows, sermons, and parades. The city's increasing array of commodified entertainments (as fellow resident Joseph Sill remarked in 1840, "There are now 4 Theatres open every night—and 1 Equestrian Circus! Rather too much for Philadelphia!”) was a significant source of new kinds of cultural experiences and obsessions. For some young, rural, white men, away from their families for the first time to work in the city's merchant shops and manufactories, the diversions were almost overwhelming. The American Antiquarian Society, which holds Beekley's remarkable diary, is currently making its contents available online at Clerk and the City.