151 ECKART VOIGTS , Braunschweig The Performative Self: Reception and Appropriation under the Conditions of 'Spreadable Media' in 'Bastard Culture' 1. Hermeneutic and Performative Events: DIY and DIO as 'Reception in Action' Recently, Virginia Nightingale's remarkable collection of essays on Media Audiences set out quite soberingly on the idea that there were no audiences left at all. Instead, she argued, picking up cues from Alvin Toffler's terminology coined in the 1970s, audiences have increasingly been replaced with 'prosumers' and their 'produsage.' Nightingale describes how amateur activities on the platforms of social media irritate and confuse audience researchers (2011, 4); precisely this irritation and confusion, which is frequently disregarded by recent audience research, provide the cue for this essay. The portmanteau word 'prosumption' was coined by Alvin Toffler to reflect the in- creasing role of the consumer in shaping the process of production. The (often self- referential) co-presence of producers and consumers is constitutive of this culture of 'prosuming' and YouTube or blogs are the transient Net spaces for these communities of 'prosumption,' spaces that are "characterized by, among other things, the sharing of knowledge and expertise based on voluntary affiliations" (Jenkins 2006, 280). I will discuss the impact of the relational interfaces of mashup culture and social, 'spread- able' media on cultural reception. Thus, I seek to connect reception studies to the world of 'franchising' and 'crowdsourcing,' to the 'vidding,' 'mashups' and 'internet memes,' the user-generated intertextuality on transient video/text platforms and ar- chives (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo). Low thresholds to audience participation are increas- ingly turning cultural reception (as individualized readers or passive viewers) into networked cultural performance. Audiences are thus transformed into partners in textuality, even if their activities may be often subsumed as 'junior' partnerships. Us- er-generated texts may not meet aesthetic standards, may not be visible and may be transient rather than permanent. Just as performances, however, change a theatrical text, the activities of a participatory culture are currently changing the status of the literary and cultural artefact, which turns from an object of interpretation and perusal into material to be played with. It follows that reception and audience studies are in need of a pragmatic turn, going beyond working with reader constructs "inferred from analyses of textual features" (Schneider 2005a, 482) and replacing narrow modes of traditional empirical audience research (e.g. questionnaires) with thorough engage- ment with both audience-produced texts and the processes of networked circulation. In general, the focus in this paper is on what people do with texts, rather than how they process or interpret texts (key concerns of cognitive and hermeneutic approaches to readers). Instead, this essay will discuss issues of distribution , circulation and per- formance . Its starting point is the fact that in the current information-rich environment of video platforms, blogs and social media the activities of fans and 'prosumers' can be related to anti-interpretative modes in reception studies (Miall 2005, 134-139, who invokes Susan Sontag) and to ideas of 'dispersal' and 'DIY' in media theory (classic cues come from Walter Benjamin and Hans Magnus Enzensberger). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 24.2 (September 2013): 151-168. Anglistik, Jahrgang 24 (2013), Ausgabe 2 © 2013 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 152 ECKART VOIGTS , Braunschweig Video platforms and social media environments are, in many ways, performance spaces – and so is, in a way, a book in the process of being read. Hence, the reading of literature must be described as an 'event,' albeit a frequently solitary and silent one. The foundational question asked by Hans Robert Jauß was how a literary event might be assessed by the effects generated by responsive literary history. In using the phrase "a literary event," Jauß combined the idea of reading and the idea of literature as a performance. This is repeatedly echoed, for instance by Attridge who describes "the literary event" as marked uniquely by the aspects of invention, alterity, and singulari- ty (2004, 58; 144). A video platform such as YouTube is an obvious, low-barriers outlet for perfor- mances in a context of intense intertextuality – it is, among other things, a stage. This is suggested not only by the metaphorical use of the term 'platform' for the database (Snickars/Vonderau 2009, 13), but also by its exhibitionist affinity towards film and theatre, maybe in particular to vaudeville (Broeren 2009, 159). Just as the rehearsal room, YouTube is a special instance of an affinity space. What emerges in these affin- ity spaces is both an interpretative 'culture of meaning-making' and a non- interpretative 'culture of presence' (Gumbrecht 2004). With Gumbrecht, the desire for presence might be addressed as the single most important motivator in these commu- nities: reading alone just won't do. And as it is a communal activity: Reading alone Winter Journals just won't do. Thus, whereas the literary event combines the loneliness of reading with the multiple vagaries of literary reception, the participatory events in YouTube and elsewhere are, from their very inception, networked and communal. Meaning- making may be among the goals within these performative activities, but the desire for presence is tantamount. Any scholar of drama and theatre will be alert to the dif- ference between hermeneutics and performativity. for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution Hermeneutics casts the reception of art as a solitary process of interpretation, in which individual or even cultural horizons merge and historical gaps are bridged in the reading process of, ideally, humanistically educated or abstractly idealized readers. Clearly this version of a reading process has been somewhat fetishized at least in the German tradition of hermeneutics and reader-responsePowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) theory and therefore has given rise to severe criticism. Recent German theories of performativity (Wirth 2002; Fischer-Lichte 2004) that have their roots in speech-act theory (Austin/Searle) and gender studies (Butler), have indeed cast hermeneutics as their bête noire . For Fischer-Lichte (2004, 19) hermeneutics and semiotics (i.e. the reading and decoding of texts) are incompatible with performativity (i.e. staging, 'Aufführung '). Most importantly, a performative approach to texts blurs the dividing line between the subject and the object of interaction: re-situated and re-contextualized on a stage shared by audience and performers, texts are not being read and interpreted, but rather, performed. If we apply Fischer-Lichte's ideas to social media, her argument is all the more pertinent: this kind of aesthetic event (rather than aesthetic object) calls for a new theory of production and reception (Fischer-Lichte 2004, 22). Jauß, however, explicitly addressed "literary EVENTS" (my emphasis). In con- trast to Fischer-Lichte, I think that this difference between reading and performing is collapsed in the readers/doers of participatory cultures: we can both read the YouTu- bers' texts (just as they have 'read' Der Untergang or Star Wars ) and observe their rehearsals as (in a sense) there is no end to rehearsal in the theatre. Avid readers are keen to perform what they are sharing in what has been called 'affinity spaces,' places "where people affiliate with others based primarily on shared activities, interests, and Anglistik, Jahrgang 24 (2013), Ausgabe 2 © 2013 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) THE PERFORMATIVE SELF : RECEPTION AND APPROPRIATION IN 'B ASTARD CULTURE ' 153 goals, not shared race, class culture, ethnicity, or gender" (Gee 2004, 67). Rather appropriately, Pugh has used the language of performance to describe fanfic writers, addressing them as "puppeteers" (Pugh 2005, 13). The post-hermeneutic slant of studies of performativity is particularly illuminating. Mere reading and interpreting is not enough – its place is taken by the agents of 'presentification,' driven by the narcissist impulse to make themselves heard in the babble of an information-rich and stimulus-saturated environment. In this view, uploads and comments are ultimately driven by the fragile self-concepts typical of exploitable Western subjects. Anonymous image boards peopled by young male patrons such as 4chan are a case in point. What is crucial in participatory culture is the dynamic, divergent, and even divisive appropriation of texts in performances staged by migrant performative communities as theorized by Howard Rheingold and Henry Jenkins. These smart mobs have entered reception studies as fans in the work of, for instance, Janet Staiger (2005, 114). Activist (as opposed to merely interpretive) communities use spaces such as YouTube primarily as an archive for records of presence – the re-performance of texts as lived-in intertextual 'universes' composed of quotation, pastiche, and parody, but with very little critical distance. What we see on the potentially borderless stage of YouTube is 'understanding in rehearsal' in a situation of conspicuous prosumption: the thresholds to offer one's individual understanding and performance to the (presumably indifferent) world have never been so low. 2. Partners