One of cultural studies’ preoccupations—and really, this goes without saying—is the audience. Works as early as Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) emphasized the value of asking what readers do with what they read (or listeners with what they hear, or viewers with what they see), rather than presuming to deduce their reactions from the texts themselves. From Hoggart to the CCCS to encoding/decoding to the Nationwide project to textual poaching to acafandom to spreadability—the through-line is clear.

In this context, I want to ask a pointed question about aesthetics. I have been teaching a graduate seminar this semester on production culture and aesthetics, a topic that was inspired in part by Shawn VanCour’s excellent Antenna post on the aesthetic turn in media studies. He argues for “the value of a specifically production-oriented approach,” and although I agree, I was more struck by his description of how the media effects researchers from radio’s early years were asking questions about aesthetics. They were concerned with media’s experiential dimensions, and thus they brought “aesthetics” back to its Greek roots (it derives from αἰσθάνομαι, which refers to perception or experience).

Indeed, this question of experience is not new. Aristotle posed it in his Poetics, where he was concerned with tragedy’s ability to lead an audience to a point of catharsis. Rudolf Arnheim posed it in his book on radio, where he asked about the psychology of the listener, whom he assumed to be passive. David Bordwell posed it in the first section of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, where he proposed that people watching a film make and test a series of hypotheses as a way to make sense of its plot and structure. This list is far from complete—in fact, it’s really just a reflection of the syllabus from my media aesthetics seminar.

But there is at least one aspect of this experiential dimension that cultural studies scholars have largely neglected. It seems to me (and I’m hedging for a reason) that part of our experience of a media object exists prior to and outside of language. Let’s call it a “gut reaction,” but let’s take that metaphor at face value—it’s a moment when our body registers a response that we can’t quite capture in words. Language here does both too little and too much—too little in that we don’t have words to describe what we feel in our gut (at least not completely), and too much in that the words we do have always mean more than we intend. (When we use a word, we must account for how the people we are responding to used it, just as that they accounted for its prior uses. The effect is additive: words accumulate meaning in ways beyond any individual’s control.) We must translate from our gut to our mind (that is, from raw experience to an account that’s mediated by language) and we lose something in the translation.

So why do I hedge above? Why “it seems to me”? Even my assertion that we experience media this way is subject to the double bind of language, its simultaneous deficiency and excess. This is an idea we can intuit, but—it seems to me—we can’t describe it without denaturing the experience itself. So what is the analytical value of this intuition? Are there ways to observe this experience directly or indirectly? What insight can it provide into the broader range of phenomena related to audiences? What insight can it provide into the moment of production VanCour highlights? Finally, what does cultural studies stand to gain from examining the aesthetic experience of the media?

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I’d like to invite other Antenna contributors to continue this discussion. I’ve contacted a handful of potential contributors already, but I want to extend the invitation more broadly. If you are interested, please feel free to email me (conway dot kyle at gmail dot com) or the editors. You needn’t respond to the questions I’ve posed here, although I’d love to hear others’ thoughts. I’m eager to encourage as rich and wide-ranging a discussion as possible.

Each time I go, it’s the words that strike me the most. Which words are used and why they matter seem to determine and say so much about the distinct cultures that are coming together. An example from FoE5 came in a panel on “crowdsourcing.” That word is buzzish and frequently used, and I never realized how much I should hate it until that panel was over. Discussion followed a disturbing pattern as the panelists began to circle around the notion that crowds needed leaders, or “benevolent dictators” as the panelists dubbed them. And thus a panel that I thought would be a bottom-up panel about audience and citizen power ended up being quite remarkably top-down in focus. This even led to Jonathan Taplin, film producer and USC prof, opening a later panel about journalism with the pronunciation that he’d never seen good art created by a crowd.

“Crowd” was the problem here. If we see audiences, agents, actors, citizens, individuals as crowds, we’re per force rolling them into an undifferentiated bovine mass. Indeed, setting a crowd versus artists was a semantic trap, in some sense, since surely once a crowd develops something, we use different words to describe them. I’m sure all of Taplin’s movies, for instance, were created by a crowd of people, but he and others likely called them the cast and crew. Or once voices of brilliance rise up from a crowd, we give them a new title and extract them from the crowd. Consequently, to invoke the crowd in this regard is to create the ultimate third party straw men. Why do so if not for rhetorical purposes, to reinstate the power of the individual creator, to argue for the lack of wisdom of the crowd and the need for benevolent dictators (!), and hence in some regards to circle the wagons around the author as God figure.

The crowd in crowdsourcing, therefore, might seem utopian and fuzzy at first blush, but ultimately it’s doomed to bovinity by the presence of the word “crowd.” If I use this example, though, it’s not (just) to register my grumbles with that panel (and, to be clear, the panel had some great contributions besides the benevolent dictator stuff), but moreso to make a larger point about the value and need for meetings such as FoE in general. Since these words really matter, and a lot of them get chosen sloppily, then get reused again and again till they become gospel. Let me counter the above example, then, with one with a happier ending. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and others have been trying to slay the word “viral” (as in, “that video went viral”) at FoE for a while now, preferring a model of “spreadability” that focuses attention on the agents at the heart of the process, not on some externalized process of biological contagion. They want us to think of why people spread things and share them, in part so as to force producers to realize that thinking, intelligent audiences (not “crowds”) are needed for things to “go viral.” And they’ve made great inroads. If anyone had “viral” on a FoE5 bingo card, they likely would have lost that game.

I’m sure that skeptics and diehard grumps would read my account of “crowds” and decide that this is why academics and producers simply can’t talk with each other. Indeed, I’ve heard all too many sadly stupid and childishly puerile critiques of things like FoE and the Convergence Culture Consortium that romanticize living in an ivory tower to the nth degree. But instead I see these as examples of why such meetings are so vital, and why I’m so thankful that Jenkins, Ford, Green, and co. remain dedicated to making them happen. At first I thought FoE would help me learn of new gadgets and trends and such, and while it does that too, it’s the chance to stop and think about the words we use to describe what’s happening, which ones we should toss, and which ones we need to change that excites me the most.