Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies

This article examines early problematizations of “the audience” in communication studies (in Michel Foucault's sense of problematization). Using Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's concept of the “multitude,” the author argues that the audience is a product of discursive constructions, but that these constructions themselves draw upon the ontological practices of what may be called “audience powers” or “mediated multitudes.” Problematizations of the audience in communication studies are examples of what Negri calls “constituted power,” as they seek to capture conceptually the immanent practices of audience constituent powers. Concentrating on 3 early audience discourses (propaganda, marketing, and moral panics), the author assesses how audience power provoked these problematizations and argues that an ontology of media subjects and audience powers offers new perspectives on audiences and audience studies.