Keywords for Media Studies by Ouellette Laurie; Gray Jonathan; & Jonathan Gray

Author:Ouellette, Laurie; Gray, Jonathan; & Jonathan Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC052000 Social Science / Media Studies
Publisher: NYU Press

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Mass

Jack Z. Bratich

Every time we talk about a mass we invoke an amassing. Whether via ratings measurement, political fantasy, or aesthetic judgment, an assemblage presents itself. As Raymond Williams famously put it, there are “no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1997, 20). He took this nominalism one step further by claiming that we interpret masses “according to some convenient formula . . . it is the formula, not the mass, which it is our real business to examine” (20).

In its nineteenth-century expression, the mass emerged as an idea composed of other ideas (of bodies, spaces, identities, and affects). On one end of the idea spectrum, the physical convergence of bodies in streets and squares pose a challenge to capitalist power consolidation: the crowd. On the other, the regulative ideal of a democratic assembly poised to deliberate on matters of concern: the public. Near this pole, experts attend to the apathy of mediated subjects, persuading them to participate in a political system ostensibly for their own benefit. Closer to the first pole, the target is hyperpathy, or excessive action (often through media practices) that might interrupt passage to the other extremity.

Somewhere along the continuum, we encounter the mass: a statistical abstraction, an amorphous subject that could trend toward either pole and thus needs governance. In other words, the mass mediated. As idea, it enabled the administration of the emerging collective power of mediated subjects via persuasion and dissuasion. The mass as mediation required an array of agencies and mechanisms to make it speak and make it silent: market researchers, propagandists, media managers, moral reformers, and cultural critics. It was configured as woman (unruly, fickle, irrational) and as inhuman (statistical abstraction, average, gray)—almost always a danger. The mass (as inchoate soup of affects) was a problem that prompted a target of interventions: measurement, management, marketing, moral control. The mass also (as concept) resulted from those interventions, which were solutions that depended upon giving a name to their emergent target. How could these emergent mediated powers be rendered intelligible, even useful? At the same time, how could their excess, their immoderation be neutralized?

The mass described here refers to mediated subjectivities, or what is still called by zombie lovers an “audience.” On another level, mass was the modifier for the technical system broadly speaking: “mass communications,” “mass media.” As Raymond Williams reminds us, mass was always a misnomer, as the one-to-many media process of twentieth-century communications was more accurately called broadcast. The word “mass,” by appearing in the name of both structure (mass media) and subject (masses), instituted and perpetuated their distinction. In other words, the “mass” pointed to a network of associations whose specific connections and extensions were trumped in favor of a bad abstraction. It was an escape from micro-differentiations as an effort to control the proliferation of populations and their media making.

In hindsight, we see the mass as a distraction (rather than the distraction so often attributed to the masses). Mass took us away from a

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