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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, 'spreadable' 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 increasingly 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 engagement 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 performance . 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.

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 singularity (2004, 58; 144). A video platform such as YouTube is an obvious, low-barriers outlet for performances 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 affinity 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 communities: 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 difference 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 contrast 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

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 in Textuality: Spreadable Media and Performative Communities Since Henry Jenkins, in his seminal book Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), highlighted the unprecedented speed and distribution of various media contents across a great diversity of platforms, and paid attention to the mechanisms underlying their travelling, legalization and (mis)use, these practices, have, if anything, become culturally more significant. Regarding convergence as 'the flow of content across multiple media platforms,' Jenkins stresses the importance of the 'technological, industrial, cultural and social' context to the understanding of these processes. Believing that '[c]onvergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others,' he also highlights the import of 'participatory culture' and 'collective intelligence' (2006, 2-3) to the study of contemporary cultural practices, which often involve the processes of adaptation and appropriation. In his new book Spreadable Media (2013, co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green), Jenkins introduces the notions 'circulation,' 'spreadability' and 'stickiness' to the discourse on contemporary audiences. The 'stickiness' of cultural material (the term was adapted from Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point , 2000) marks its success as measured, for instance, in terms of web traffic of frequent and long viewing time. Jenkins et al. criticize the 'stickiness' model and its focus on countable 'traffic,' suggesting instead the 'spreadability' model to better represent networked reception and the individual audience member's experience: Spreadability recognizes the importance of the social connections among individuals, connections increasingly made visible (and amplified) by social media platforms. This approach may still include quantitative measures of how frequently and broadly content

travels, but it makes important actively listening to the way media texts are taken up by audiences and circulate through audience interactions. (Jenkins et al. 2013, 6) It is quite significant that Jenkins et al. position their notion of 'spreadability' against concepts of audiences that derive from contemporary marketing rather than from academic reception studies. Jenkins at al. have little or no truck with 'processing,' 'reading' or 'interpreting' texts; instead they urge media producers to consider their participating audiences. What is at stake in their paradigm is a participating consumer – albeit redefined as active and authoritative – rather than a reader – a hermeneutic agent. If we seek to retain the hermeneutic perspective, there are a number of questions implied in these tendencies and conceptualizations: To what extent are 'users' still 'readers'? In what ways is reading under the condition of 'circulation' and 'spreadable media' different from the reading of books distributed by a publishing house via your local bookseller? How politically, aesthetically and culturally valid are these fractured works, available in fluid versions within the distributive networks of 'digital prosumption'? Should we see this trend as replenishment or exhaustion and just how transgressive, then, are the spreadable contents of mashup culture (Gunkel/Gournelos 2012)? In what way does the anarchic carnival of web-based participation create a new dialogic and heteroglossic media aesthetics requiring a different set of research tools? Are these the free and creative variations of 'cultural jazz' or merely a playground fostered by Big Bad Media to better situate and flog the products of corporate intertextuality? Arguably, social media provide both a playground and a factory, in which fans are duped to supply their labour for free to capitalists such as Mark Zuck- erberg (Scholz 2013, 8). As Christian Fuchs has argued, the primarily culturalist understanding of participation is flawed as it excludes participation in "economic deci- sion-making" (Fuchs 2011). Well, readers have never been required to own the print- ing presses, either. What is clear, in any case, is that the templates on which reception theory has so far been modelled (such as the reading of literary texts or the viewing of audiovisual texts broadcast on TV or shown in the cinema) need to be modified to account for the relational re-performances of mashup culture and the 'dispersed' media apparatus of social media ("folksonomy," "attention economy," "affinity space"). A new reception studies will need to overcome the self-enclosure of merely thinking about audiences as consumers and start to fully grasp the fact that audiences are themselves producers, publishers and distributors of texts. Adaptation and appropriation are thus 'reception in action.' Let us begin with four examples. Using low-threshold digital platforms of participation (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, MyVideo), all of these examples indicate the way audiences have responded to franchises with a peculiar form of short-lived, but widely disseminated 'illegitimate,' 'mongrel' and 'spurious' text practices, spawning a distinc- tive brand of generic terms for remix clips and remix literature as yet uncanonized by genre or reception theory (e.g. Mashup Texts, Fan Supercut, Literal Video, Fandub, Lip Dub, Synchro, Gag Sub, Animutation, Rickrolling). As the most recent special issue of the journal Adaptation , on "Adaptation and Participatory Culture" suggests, these practices have ushered in a new, pragmatic phase in the study of contemporary intertextualities (cf. Voigts and Nicklas 2013). The study of this "sophisticated ordi- nariness" of this "para-adaptation" (Constandinides 2013) or "BASTARDaptation" (Voigts, forthcoming), that is, of vernacular or 'prosumed' adaptation, can contribute valuable insights to the analysis of contemporary reception. According to an empirical

study by Shifman, vernacular activities are facilitated and marked by six features: "A focus on ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness and whimsical content" (Shifman 2011, 193).

Ex. 1: Pleasure Without Understanding: Star Wars Uncut (2010 – ) Since August 2010, Star Wars Uncut has been available online, a montage of 473 fifteen-second clips that re-enact the movie Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope . 'Cu- rated' by web designer Casey Pugh, the website invited fans to upload collectively an 'amateur' collage of the Lucasfilm franchise. 'Democratically' the clips that garnered most votes were accepted into the finished movie, generating an enjoyable vernacular or grassroots version of the Hollywood franchise. Star Wars Uncut won the Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media in 2010, which makes clear that the low-threshold participation of fans and audiences by now has enormous impact beyond the marketing and PR offices. The fun starts when the sig- nature opening crawl is appendixed with disrespectful comments by anonymous users. Participatory culture is rearing its ugly head and shaking its fist at corporate franchise. Lucasfilm, however, is apparently quite happy with the activities of the derivative 'Limited Lucasfilm.' For the readers/producers of this playful grassroots Star Wars , the franchise be- came a cue, a template, the source material from which to launch their own contribu- tions according to the protocols of appropriation. DIY or DIO ('doing it ourselves') 'mashers' and 'vidders' are clearly supplying their own brand of playful reception. It is an excellent example of what Jenkins et al. mean when they introduce the concept of 'spreadability,' highlighting the surprisingly uncontrolled way in which audiences rework and appropriate source material: The participatory logic of spreadability leads to audiences using content in unanticipat- ed ways as they retrofit material to the contours of their particular community. Such activities are difficult for creators to control and even more difficult to quantify. (Jenkins et al. 2013, 6). We might want to adapt Iser's concept of 'gap' and 'lacuna' here: the Star Wars Uncut website provided access to 'openings' in a given text, in which mashers, vidders and adaptors can play. To pick up a distinction Stanley Fish has made (2001, 36), we might ask: What kind of attention have the Star Wars re-enactors paid to their text? Have they assigned linguistic and semantic density to their fifteen seconds of re- enactment in the way Fish suggests readers of Milton's Lycidas have done? Hardly. They have regarded 'their' fifteen seconds of Star wars as a cue, a template on which to place their performance. These activities are clearly pleasurable and they occur in a shared space that encourages the distribution of knowledge (Gee 2004). But are they a case of "pleasurable understanding," the kind of reading that Jauß (2001, 24) sought to rehabilitate and salvage from formalism or Frankfurt School criticism? Understand- ing might and frequently does occur – as we all know fans tend to be avid readers driven to knowledge excess by emotional involvement. Knowledge (through reading) and understanding (via interpretation), however, are obviously no prerequisite for dressing up as Darth Vader and playing or performing amateur Star Wars with a cou- ple of friends. The distance between reader and text that Jauß posits at the beginning of the hermeneutic process is not even there. On the contrary, fans tend to perform material which they perceive as very close and dear to their hearts.

Ex 2: Participation Without Fandom: Untergangers and Downfall Parodies (2007 – ) Participatory (rather than interpretive) commmunities frequently find their templates irrespective of marketing strategies, expert culture and frequently in breach of copyright. Mashers and vidders, to provide yet another prominent example, have prepared hundreds of hilariously subtitled variations on Hitler's (or Bruno Ganz's) outburst in Downfall (Der Untergang) . The Downfall parodies, one of the Web's most productive and endurable meme fields, are example no. 2. In 2009, the online daily telegraph published an overview of twenty-five Downfall parodies "worth watching," and de- veloped a typology that indicated the cultural priorities of the meme creators (meta- parodies, technology and gaming, sport, internet, miscellaneous). Since the first pa- rodically subtitled mashup appeared on YouTube in 2007, the so-called 'Untergang- ers' have maintained a presence, for instance on the HitlerRantsParodies channel (Stacy Lee Blackmon) and discussions on the political stance, implications or impact of these parodies have erupted. There is a Hitler parody wiki, which lists more than 2,800 memes and sub-memes. One sub-meme, for instance, is an interview with Bru- no Ganz captioned with fake subtitles, in which he comments about the fact that millions of viewers of the Downfall parodies have changed his career as an actor. On the Downfall parody wiki, all the characters in Downfall and its vernacular incarnations receive a detailed character analysis (both within and without the 'Parody Universe'). Currently, "Der Untergang: The Parody" is running, the second attempt to have the Untergangers collaborate on a spoof version of the entire film. 1 Interestingly, Untergangers are not necessarily fans of either Oliver Hirschbiegel's film (or Ganz or Hitler for that matter). More often than not, the concept of 'fandom' does not do justice to participatory communities seeking an outlet for their messages. In 2012, the Downfall parody was controversially mashed with the "Gangnam Style" video. Increasingly, these parodies have included meta-parodies in which Hitler rants about fidelity criticism in adaptation studies or about the massive presence of downfall parodies or about the 'lameness' of Downfall parodies or explains how to make a downfall parody. Downfall parodies have also been taken very seriously by academics. Shifman calls it a "memetic video," which in contrast to the stable 'viral' video, "lures exten- sive creative user engagement in the form of parody, pastiche, mashups or other derivative work" (2011, 190). Clay discusses copyright issues related to the meme and recounts how 19-year-old computer student Chris Bowley prepared and uploaded the parody meme 'Hitler Gets Banned From Xbox Live' (2011). Within an hour, Bowley was threatened with legal action by copyright owner Constantin Film, probably fol- lowing a cue from Sony, the copyright owners of Xbox (Clay 2011, 228). Constantin first reacted to the appropriation of its content with blanket take-downs of Downfall parody videos on YouTube (Clay 2011), but has now reversed this policy. What is clear, however, is that the clip from Der Untergang , in which a character who has become a worldwide symbol of evil cracks up in emotional excess, is not so much an interpretation as a cultural appropriation and transformation: The vidders do not read or interpret Hitler or Der Untergang ; instead they mine the movie for clips that can be

1 The video titles on YouTube are "Hitler finds out about the Downfall Parodies," "Hitler pissed about too many Downfall Parodies" and "Hitler actor Bruno Ganz interview about Youtube Downfall Paro- dies." .

transformed as material for remix and mashup. Hitler's speech (and, more specifically, the English subtitles are not so much lacunae to be filled with interpretative meaning (Iser), but transformable, 'mashable' content. For Horwatt (2009, 87-88) remixing subverts the 'distribution only' model criticized by Brecht and Baudrillard. The creative jazz of collective intelligence does not merely 'receive' cultural products to be assessed on a vertical axis of cultural value, but it generates its very own canoniza- tions and subversions. Obviously, the meta-parodies are most instructive for the analysis of the phenom- enon. The meta-parody "Hitler reacts to the Hitler parodies being removed from YouTube" (20/4/2010) by user "Plankhead" is worth quoting in full as it makes an exemplary, hyperbolic case for users deprived of their platform by corporations such as Constantin. In this, the scene is merely a German-language rant template to be filled at will in the subtitles, so that the term 'parody' does not do justice to the intertextual scope: Hitler: Everyone who has submitted a takedown notice to YouTube on behalf of Constatin [sic] film AG please leave the room now. What the fuck is this shit?! Their movie's been getting so much free publicity from this meme for the past two years! Before people started making fun of this scene, there were only a few people outside of Germany who knew about Downfall! The movie got international attention because of YouTube users' hard work. And now they pull this shit? People worked hard on those videos, and millions of other people loved them! I even made one about Hitler being upset that someone else had taken his Hitler parody video idea! It was fucking great! Now there's nowhere to put it. Hans Krebs: My Führer, we can probably reupload it on Vimeo or DailyMotion! Hitler: Nobody uses Vimeo and DailyMotion! YouTube is the de facto standard! Wilhelm Burgdorf : My Führer, they don't get takedown notices sent to them as much as YouTube! Hitler: Yeah! That's because copyright trolls don't look at Vimeo or DailyMotion, just like everyone else! Christ! This is such bullshit! I mean, they shouldn't even be able to do this! Haven't they ever heard of Fair Use? Title 17, U.S.C., Section 107? Parody is not an infringement of copyright! These bastards wouldn't even have a case if this were brought up in court. But nobody uploading a video to YouTube has the money to de- fend themselves in a copyright infringement lawsuit! So we all have to just lie down and put up with this! Whatever happened to freedom of speech? Why are these fucking dinosaur old media corporations allowed to take that away? I mean, you'd think YouTube would stand up for this. They're owned by Google, for chrissakes. A billion dollars is pocket change to them! Aren't they supposed to be all, 'Don't Be Evil'? But nooooo…Instead of fighting for the rights of their users, they pander to the interests of these fucking idiot movie studios! Sure, it's not Google's fault that the takedown notice law is so broken and ill-conceiveved [sic], but come on! I mean, they pulled out of Chi- na for shit like this. Google's basically doing the same thing the British did in 1937: They're doing nothing while these fucking Nazis start destroying the world! Traudl Junge [to Gerda Christian] : Don't worry, he'll realize the irony soon. Hitler: I thought that we could have nice things on the Internet. I thought that we were free to make fun of Hitler on the Internet. But I guess not. And nobody will care. Everyone's gonna get upset about how corporations can illegally take down parodies. But tomorrow, they'll forget all about it and watch cat videos. I fucking hate cats.

Ex. 3: Struggling for Presence: Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" (Lit- eral Video, 2009) The literal video version of the song and video clip from 1983 (written and produced by Jim Steinman and recorded by Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler for her fifth studio al- bum, Faster Than the Speed of Night ) is another interesting example of subversive canonization. It is an example of a viral music video, a classic Internet meme. It rep- resents a number of clips (peaking around 2009, when about 100 variants were uploaded on video sharing platforms) that appeared subsequent to the success story of a literal video redub of A-ha's "Take on Me," which was uploaded on YouTube by Dustin McLean in October 2008. The clip is used here not just as an example of a creative and convincing meme parody (according to Time magazine it was the 6th best viral video of 2009), but as a good example of a pragmatic response to a cultural text and the ensuing struggles about its circulation as a cultural text. The literal music video is "a parody of an official music video clip in which the lyrics have been replaced with lyrics that describe the visuals in the video" (Leah Greenblatt) – generating a very special type of ekphrasis as the visual information is duplicated on the audio channel or the subtitle captions. As a text, the literal video is an example of ekphrastic overnarration. Ekphrasis is defined as the verbal representation of a text through a non-verbal sign system. Here, a singer, replacing 'Bonnie Tyler' on the audiotrack for a first-person voice-over narrative, creates a dialogue with the 'chorus' answering her ekphrastic narration, and with the images. In these two conflicting representations, the words take primacy, exerting power over the image, and manifold ironies emerge from the verbal narratives, which 'anchors' the visual narratives in a dismissive counter-narrative, exposing the silliness of the vision track's excessive visual tropes. A cultural studies reading can identify a media parody, full of ironies at the expense of the visual narrative: the supposedly 'serious' dream aesthetic typical of the 'visual flood' narrative of early to mid-1980s clips ( Time magazine: "MTV at its most rokoko" (Duff 2009)) is critically undermined. Pointing out the critical distance to the 1980s visual and pop business conventions, the 'literal video' exposes the inanity of the pompous pseudo-depths and self-importance of early promotional pop videos. Here is the beginning of the lyrics laid over the music track and video (the chorus appears in brackets): (Pan the room.) Random use of candles, empty bottles, and cloth, and can you see me through this fan? (Slo-mo dove.) Creepy doll, a window, and what looks like a bathrobe. Then, a dim-lit shot of dangling balls.

(Metaphor?) Close-up of some candles, and dramatically posing. Then, stock footage of a moon in the sky. (Bottle shot.) Messing up my close-up with a floating blue curtain. Now, let's see who's coming in from outside.

(Double doors open.) Why aren't I reacting in this shot?

(Ringo Starr? Lined eyes.) Guess I should be acting, but I'm not. The parody made this meme transgressive. This critical distancing clearly constitutes a case for the text: as a parody, the literal video version has a legal right to comment critically on a given work as the song and video "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is re- positioned and ironized. It is a case of a cultural appropriation rather than an illegal copy and thus the case against uploading it as a copyright infringement (in case of "substantial similarity" and "financial damage" according to US Copyright Law) is weak. As Gunkel (2012, 46) argues, this parasite mashup is legitimized by its parodic creativity. Thus, we have introduced another major difference between reader- response and intertextual remix: Performing what one reads inevitably transgresses copyright: [...] mashup and remixing are patently and unapologetically illegal. Produced by appro- priating, decontextualizing, and recombining the creative material of others, the mashup is a derivative "composition" that violates the metaphysical concept of originality, the cultural status of the author and the authority of authorship, and every aspect of intellec- tual property law and copyright. (Gunkel and Gournelos 2012, 11) It is instructive to briefly survey the circulation of this meme. It is the sixth video uploaded by David A. Scott – currently it has garnered an impressive 10 million clicks. The clip's popularity was the direct consequence of the 'viral' circulation via a number of multipliers and popularizing networks: the online version Entertainment Weekly , the Twitter accounts of actor Ashton Kutcher und celebrity writer Perez Hil- ton. The first million views took place within ten days, the count rising to four million within four months (see Wikipedia, sv. "Literal Music Video"). Whereas for a long time, Sony EMI sought to bar and prevent Scott's parody, it paradoxically resulted in renewed interest for the fledgling career of 1980s star performer Bonnie Tyler. The circulation of 'memes,' this case study in cultural distribution suggests, is in- dicative of an "attention economy" (Goldhaber 1997), where money flows to attention (rather than attention flowing to money). As copying is ubiquitous in digital cultures, what is unique and what cannot be copied may acquire value. Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired, suggests that a set of conditions supports the spread of cultural data: Immediacy (this is why people still pay for hardcover books or films in movie thea- tres), personalization (i.e. the stickiness of a product tailored to one's needs), interpretation (for Kelly, this is contextual information), authenticity (such as: signed copies), accessibility (as in cloud computing, relieving the burden of ownership), embodiment (that is, bodily presence, for instance in book readings by authors), patronage (as in crowdfunding, see cases from Radiohead to Amanda Palmer) and, most importantly in attention economy, findability (Kelly 2008). Beginning the study of audiences with issues of circulation and 'findability' one realizes that the idea of reading as a process that begins with opening a book has already cut off quite important aspects of cultural reception.

Ex. 4: Passionate readers in the text: Lost in Austen (2008) Ex no. 4 is Lost in Austen, a 2008 British television serial produced by Mammoth Screen for the private sector broadcaster ITV. In Lost in Austen , participatory culture is re-appropriated for traditional broadcast media. It tells the story of how the young Austen fan Amanda Price from Hammersmith, who appears as a more youthful Brid- get Jones, is transported into the fictional universe of Pride and Prejudice . In an attempt to appropriate the 'participatory,' 'engaged' Lebenswelt -hermeneutics of Austen- ites and Darcymania, the serial writes the user (Amanda) into the text and has her liaise romantically with Darcy. Eventually, the initial mixing of fictional levels is reversed, when Darcy is allowed to enter contemporary Hammersmith. Thus, the serial is not only playful, ironic, metafictional and distancing: As the reader (Amanda) replaces the author (Austen), it may be described as an Austen mashup, responding to participatory culture. In Lost in Austen the chick flick rom-com fan fiction collides with the authorial Austen. Contemporary circulation, these examples make clear, replaces close readings with passionate transformations. Some of the hostilities to reading participatory culture have been successfully addressed in reception study. Readers concerned that amateur texts in academia undermine canon building might want to consult Jane Tompkins's study of how politicized reception created a canonized Hawthorne and a marginalized, suppressed Susan Warner (Tompkins 2001, 151). Or they may be re- minded with Gary Taylor (2001, 102) of how the Romanticists appropriated and re- created Shakespeare in their very own image. Objections to the Jenkins tenet that fandom is central to a way a culture operates may be refuted with Claudia Johnson's

delightful historicization of fandom: In the case of Jane Austen, she argues, profes- sional readers started to police and normalize passionate readings more than a hun- dred years ago (Johnson 2001, 129). Finally, John Frow's theories on "regimes of value," heavily influenced by Pierre Bourdieu, might be used to both interrogate academia's role in suppressing readings based on voluntary affiliation and to criticize the ways in which fans, mashers and vidders establish their own, alternative regimes. A blog post or a message posted by a 'friend' in a social network, these days, may thus be more endowed with cultural value and credibility than the online edition of the New York Times or The Guardian .

3. Readers, Audiences, Performers: a Short History of Reception Studies Reception studies need to take into account a networked reception that is observable beyond the artificially elicited responses of questionnaires. Since the mid-1990s, when computer game studies began to investigate the 'non-trivial' efforts of immersive and interactive game-playing in a formalist and narratological context, the unease with traditional hermeneutics (i.e. text-based readings and hermeneutic strife enacted between book covers) and traditional reception theory (discussing textual signals or reading processes) has been growing, as an overview of the lacunae of traditional reader-response theory and the 'power viewing' of cultural studies makes. Having risen in the 1960s from the deathbed of New Criticism, an inertia marked by stale formalism, author essentialism, de-politicization and canon traditionalism (Bratich 2008), reception studies is still around and it is useful. Paving the way for empirical reception studies and explorations of affect (Winko 2003; Steinhauer 2010), it also helps overcome the academic tribalism of po-co, gender, cultural study (Nafisi 2003; Mailloux 2008). As Goldstein and Machor have argued: Reception study, which says that an audience's interpretive practices explain a work's meaning, has grown remarkably because it accepts this explosion of literatures and interpretive methods. (Goldstein and Machor 2008, xii) The more it takes into account texts produced by groups of people traditionally positioned as 'just readers,' the more reception study is interrelated with studies of intertextuality, adaptation and appropriation – other fields which continue to be fed by the explosion of literatures and interpretative methods. The new introduction to Linda Hutcheon's seminal Theory of Adaptation notes that only a wide notion of adaptation can do justice to this proliferation, as adaptation "has run amok" (2013, xiii). Hutch- eon covers participatory culture via the new afterword by Siobhan O'Flynn, but, un- fortunately, she does not evoke reception study to reflect how adaptations (and performances) are, in essence, 'reception in action.' The study of reception has also become a hallmark of the cultural studies approach above all to the visual media of film and TV, but also to other popular media such as music and games. The cultural studies focus on media audiences augments communication studies' historical focus on instrumental, applied and functional audience research with a more critical perspective derived from the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. Holub argues that traditional hermeneutic reader-response theory has been important for cultural studies, asking how cultural products are transformed and modified at the threshold of language and cultures (2003, 141). Thus, Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauß have been building blocks of, for instance, the reader-oriented film studies of Martin Barker (2000) and Janet Staiger (2005) or the

fan fiction studies of Cornel Sandvoss (2005). Immersive, 'engaged' reading may come at a cost of aesthetic distance (Jauß/Iser vs. Jenkins, cf. Sandvoss 2005, 145). It is hardly surprising that Jenkins's key terms 'stickiness' and 'spreadability' take their cue from Fiske's notion of 'producerly' texts (Jenkins et al. 2013, 45-46). In his fa- mous 1980 essay "Encoding/Decoding," Stuart Hall's notion of audiences allowed for 'negotiated readings' in which audiences struggle with preferred readings, modify and partially reject them according to their own cultural frameworks, and even oppositional readings which either disagree with or ignore the suggested meanings. I do not think, however, that this included the playful variations of Hitler/Ganz's emotional excess or the literal video parodies of Bonnie Tyler. This take on cultural narratives is both more and less than 'oppositional' as it degrades a given text as merely an objet trouvé to be transformed at the hands of its audience and as it is therefore unclear if the re-contextualization is always and necessarily and in overtly political terms 'oppositional .' Star Wars Uncut gained the support of Lucasfilm – thus, by definition, it is neither oppositional nor transgressive, but rather participatory. When John Fiske started to celebrate the 'active' viewers of cultural studies in his concept of 'audiencing,' he introduced the key word 'use' to mean more than its very limited semantic scope in the politically naïve 'uses and gratifications' model of communication studies. His term 'formations' already seems to imply the instable smart mobs and nomadic interpretive communities of social media: Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industry can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing project to produce their popular culture. (Fiske 2010, 19) Similarly, John Hartley's notion of 'Power Viewing' (Hartley 1992, 84-116) seems in uncanny ways to anticipate the contemporary participatory audience. In The Politics of Pictures , Hartley described TV audiences as pervasive (everywhere) and pervaded (by other cultural practices). For him, watching TV was an activity both useful (eco- nomically) and meaningful (culturally). Indeed, as watching TV was 'conspicuous consumption,' as fashionably non-functional activity it could be seen almost as transgressive (= a non-functional, excessive 'waste of time'). Jack Bratich charts the hostile responses to audience-focused cultural studies in his essay, "Activating the Multitude" from 2008. As Jim McGuigan sought to re-establish critical cultural studies, castigating the celebratory model of consumer sovereignty (Jim McGuigan), even Morley warned that fetishising 'pleasure' may lead to cultural relativism (Morley/Brunsdon 1999). For some, 'audiencing' is a sign of an "acceptance of capitalism, even an active desire for it" (Bratich 2008, 40). PR industries are not imposing their will, it is true, but "cultivate, tap into, and redirect audience powers to their own ends" (41). From the TV audiences of the 1990s, explored in numerous empirical studies, 2 it is only a small leap to the creative audiences wasting their time in the dispersed pockets of social media resistance (often via notions of interactivity, performativity and networking). Thus, one significant change in the defining collections in American reception studies by Goldstein and Machor published in 2001 and 2008 is the gradual incorporation of fan-based reception (for instance, in the 2008 essay by Rhiannon Bury). Gregory Sporton enthuses about networked audiences, who emphasise

2 For example, Ien Ang (1991); Morley/Brunsdon (1999); Janice Radway (1984), or Roger Silverstone (1994).

"collaboration and reformulation rather than originality," stressing the unpredictability in the responses of these "partners" in networked authorship (2009, 71). An instructive case is presented by the appendix Claire Monk published with her empirical survey of heritage film audiences in 2011. Her book-length study (2011a) is the first thorough data-based study of audiences of heritage and costume film audiences, based on research conducted via sample audiences culled from ads placed in the London paper Time Out and at various local National Trust Centres, whose responses were mined via questionnaires. Clearly, Monk took a cue from classic meth- odologies of cultural studies research pioneered by, for instance, Janice Radway's study of readers of romance. In November 2011, however, Monk deemed it necessary to publish an appendix to her study, surveying the online fan activities around E.M. Forster's Maurice and its various incarnations – a set of texts and practices she had neglected in her study. Significantly, Monk replaced clumsy questionnaires with textual readings of fan fiction and fan vidding and, equally significantly, she found marked contrasts between the presumably conservative Forster audience and the drift of – equally moderate – academic readings on the one hand and the fan responses on the other, "by turns emotionally engaged and highly irreverent, sexually frank and politicized" (Monk 2011b, 39). In view of the wild intertextualities available online, the view that homosexuality is merely an undercurrent in Maurice becomes untenable for Monk: it "is contradicted by just about everything we have witnessed of fan responses" (Monk 2011b, 39).

4. Conclusion: Citable Material and the Performative Self The case of Claire Monk's appendixed study of online audiences makes clear that online fan communities actively shape and change the meanings attributed to texts. It also makes clear that online fan activities change the methodological basis of reception study. The problems of questionnaires highlighted by Ralf Schneider and others (such as: the empirical reader as mere construct, limited number of parameters, limited complexity of questions, lack of interpretative power) are replaced by a different set of problems: the transience of data, the anonymity of the social media tribes, textual diversity, canonicity etc. It should be clear, however, that a paradigm shift of significant proportions is oc- curring. Under the conditions of a short-circuited distribution and consumption of cultural products (see below), 'prosuming' audiences do not just read, decode, process and interpret texts, but (as 'users') inhabit, appropriate and, frequently, destroy or deconstruct them, sharing or claiming them for transformation and using them for community-building purposes. Jenkins et al. conceptualize this as post-distribution 'circulation,' "where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways" (2013, 1). In terms of traditional models of cultural reception, this ought to be re- modelled as a 'short-circuiting,' which becomes evident whenever action is taken to delimit the free circulation of textual material (for instance via anti-piracy action such as the SOPA bill):

Circular Model of Cu ltural Communication, Graeme Burton (2002, 54)

Ex. January 2012: Wikipedia, "Anonymous" vs. SOPA ("Stop Online Piracy Act", US bill)

Mashup or 'bastard' culture creates a hybrid and relational connectivity "between various applications and sources" (Schäfer 2011, 106), forging heterogeneous "interactions between users and corporations, and the connectivity between markets and media practices" that are "inherently intertwined" (Schäfer 2011, 11). It follows that the presence of adaptations and appropriations of 'franchise' narratives is a crucial and permanent condition of texts that "have textual 'hooks' or key signifiers, which cannot be identified in advance" (Burgess 2008, 105). It is only through performative modes of perception that these textual markers become evident in the first place. Performa- tive reception modes (complied video 'answers,' parodies, comments, shares, embed- dings, even 'likes' and 'dislikes') enable other texts to 'plug into' these key signifiers and ensure a temporary popularity on video platforms. It is text in motion – which is well expressed in the term 'citability' (from Latin, citare , to set in movement). This is Jacques Derrida's term for the capacity for projection into multiple contexts (in his rejection of the idea of a literal meaning). For Derrida, the transferability and endless potential for re-contextualization of writing is central: "Every sign, linguistic or non- linguistic, spoken or written, [...] can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break every given context [...]" (1982, 320). In this sense, Jenkins's use of notions of spreadability (similar to, for instance, George Landow's theorizing of hyper- text) is still linked to poststructuralist paradigms. The 'virality' of these textual phenomena is a direct consequence of, and crucially dependent on, permanent processes of adaptation and appropriation. Thus, the re- performance of texts is not merely an epiphenomenon that can be separated from an 'original' text. On the contrary, the short clips on YouTube are becoming viral only because essential and continuous modes of participatory re-performances are at work. Taking into account current activities of 'mashing' cultural texts one may tenta- tively conclude that models based, above all, on interpretative activities are only part- ly useful in discussing Downfall parodies or other 'memetic' remixes. It follows that

even transcending the analysis of surface or deep structures of a text by incorporating situative factors (situation model) or audience 'world knowledge' or cognitive mechanisms that regulate the process of understanding does not do full justice to the appro- priating and transforming of texts. Rather, we must take into account models prepared for the analysis of performance: reception studies should not just focus on the cognitive processes of understanding, but on the cultural practicalities of staging texts. Useful cues might be provided by the study of cultural agency (copyright, franchising) but also by psychoanalysis (narcissism). As Shifman concludes: […] memetic videos and their derivatives focus much more on the performative self. Uploaders become both the medium of the meme and its message: their faces and bod- ies are integral parts of these clips. Thus, such videos are emblems of a culture saturated with personal branding and strategic self-commodification. (2011, 200) The concepts of 'presentification,' 'spreadability,' 'affinity space,' 'prosumption,' 'remix,' 'appropriation,' 'memetics,' 'bastard culture,' 'citability' and the 'performative self' should, in my view, be taken even more seriously in future accounts of what happens between texts and audiences. Reception studies should continue to take their pragmatic and performative turn.

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