Ocular Democracy and its Challenges

As noted above, democratic theory has witnessed growing attention to the place of spectating in democratic life, with collective observation taking center stage in a field normally devoted to collective action. Footnote ² Green’s (Reference Green2010) claim that spectatorship constitutes the chief political experience of most citizens marks a turning point in this trend insofar as the ubiquity of spectatorship now serves to ground a comprehensive theory of popular empowerment. In turn, Green offers a criticism of contemporary democratic theories, arguing that they presume “vocal” models of politics that fail to capture this experience. Whether pluralistic, deliberative, or participatory, these theories all advance the people’s autonomous self-rule as an ideal. Yet they ground this ideal in the people’s active participation in law making and decision making—interactions from which ordinary citizens are in fact largely excluded. What’s more, this idealization obscures an everyday practice in which citizens do engage: the “nonvocal” activity of spectatorship. Given this criticism, the ocular approach instead seeks to conceptualize the people as, primarily, a spectating body.

To be sure, the argument that most citizens experience political life as nonactors has found support especially since the rise of mass media in the early twentieth century. As Walter Lippmann (Reference Lippmann1993, 3) famously remarked, “The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row.” Yet Lippmann’s claim also exemplifies the typical thrust of such observations: as “mere spectators,” the people appear powerless if not chimerical precisely because their activity is taken to be the inverse of individuated, vocal action. The same indeed holds across most democratic theory: although democrats tend not to embrace Lippmann’s fatalism, they nonetheless often reify his underlying assertion that empowerment requires voice. That is, they find no other means of empowering spectators than by theorizing their capacities to become actors, again seeking to distinguish them from the very condition that defines their collective experience.

How does one theorize power without voice? Here the ocular model offers a correction to the above approaches by locating a distinct relationship to power available only to spectators. Green (Reference Green2010) draws this notion of power from accounts of the gaze articulated across different scholarly disciplines. On these accounts, “empowered” spectatorship involves a “hierarchical form of visualization that inspects, observes, and achieves surveillance” (9)—capacities that Green argues are available to the people insofar as their spectating activities are taken as a necessary condition for political action. That is, political action cannot be noteworthy without an audience. Significant about this observation is that it isolates spectatorship as phenomenologically distinct from action. Unlike the contemporary inaccessibility of action, Green’s claim about the power of spectatorship thus enables him to argue that “spectatorial processes are more truly communal than vocal ones and thus serve a more appropriate foundation for the collective notion of the People” (6).

The “fact” of spectatorship thus yields an all but self-evident criterion for democratic life: if leaders are not able to control how they appear by, say, managing their public interactions, the people can be said to be empowered. Green (Reference Green2010) calls this criterion candor. The attractiveness of candor echoes the above criticism of democratic theory: if the ideal of popular autonomy proves illusory, scholars should instead focus on popular checks on the vocal actors who do in fact occupy positions of leadership. Thus, the ideal of candor seeks to organize political life in such a way that leaders cannot extricate themselves from the popular gaze—that their appearances are not, simply put, canned. Developing this insight, Green champions eye-catching liberal-democratic institutions like presidential debates and congressional hearings, arguing that here candor is effectively “regularized” because actors appear without scripts. Such institutions are less appreciated by democratic theorists because they facilitate neither deliberation nor participation. Yet Green finds their interactions empowering because they are organized explicitly to offer popular spectators something eventful. That is, they make political life “worthy of being watched” by subjecting actors to candid conversations (15). What’s more, in contrast to the illusory ideal of popular autonomy, Green holds that such institutions provide political theorists a standard that is “relatively easy to gauge and measure” (25): when leaders are not engaging in canned interactions, the people can be said to benefit.

I do not wish to deny either Green’s (Reference Green2010) realism in establishing the ubiquity of spectatorship nor the intuitive appeal of candor. However, this intuition manages to translate candor into a standard of empowerment only by tethering it to a static vision of leadership. Notice that the above claim about the distinctiveness of spectating does not indicate what is observed per se but only that watching is a collective activity over which the people should have control. But Green’s subsequent affirmation of hearings and debates relies on the assumption that spectators naturally direct their gaze to that which he posits as inaccessible to them—namely, individuated vocal action. Candor, of course, seeks to deny actors control over the content of their appearances. Yet such empowerment also renders spectators curiously unable to look away from the agents whose content has been, ostensibly, denied. If, in short, spectatorship offers a springboard for a democratic theory more realist in its attention to the people’s everyday practices, why must the object of their gaze also be taken for granted? As Disch argues, realists “ask what motivates us to act the way we do now, taking motivation to be an effect of institutional design, not a matter of will” (Reference Disch2021, 52). Instead, here a lack of voice is translated seamlessly into a claim to power because both are subsumed into a plebiscitarian vision that takes one sort of relationship to be self-evident: the people who watch and the leader who acts. But neither watching nor acting is a mere “matter of will.” Indeed, candor proves “easy to gauge” only because it reifies the constitutive function of “the leader” whose apparent discombobulation serves as a proxy for spectator empowerment.

What does this reification of plebiscite obscure? Here, a juxtaposition of the ocular model with this essay’s opening vignette can prove instructive. On the one hand, Stewart’s (Reference Stewart2019) disaffection that his testimony falls on deaf ears exemplifies the “pathology” identified by Green (Reference Green2010)—that is, that citizens’ empowerment corresponds chiefly to a capacity to vocalize demands. But this conclusion only tells half the story. Stewart also asserts that the conditions of his hearing “should be flipped”—that these specific members of the public are in a unique position to render the hearing less canned and more meaningful. Put differently, Stewart not only seeks to deny congressional actors their means of publicity but also identifies a specific collective agent whose experience having sacrificed and fought for state accountability equip it to probe this legislative process, pose the right questions, and do so in good faith. To be sure, Stewart, like Green, demands candor. But his claim differs insofar as it derives this demand from a normative account about a particular spectating agent capable of resisting the given terms of the spectator/actor distinction: where the Committee has wasted its chance to listen, these first responders would not. Indeed, it is their distinct claim to candor that frames their desire to make a heretofore absentee audience the object of their gaze—to place the Committee “down here” and to force it to answer questions. Curiously, Stewart’s claim to candor gestures to that which Green’s account papers over: the question of how those marginalized from “action” become a spectating body able to direct its gaze and bear witness to what it encounters.

Stewart, of course, does not advance a theory of spectatorship. But his criticism illuminates a significant oversight in the ideal of candor: it occludes how its “objects” capture—or are brought into—spectator attention. Developing this criticism, the following section argues that actors are denied control over their means of publicity only insofar as ongoing vocal interactions “evoke” audiences to “receive” particular claims (Saward Reference Saward2010, 53)—in this case, constitutive performances of candor. In turn, this relationship enables certain types of actors to exploit the very “eventfulness” that ocular democracy champions as a marker of spectator empowerment.

Constructing Candor: The Sincerity Problem

To make sense of the gap in spectator agency identified above, it is first necessary to reassess communicative interactions at the heart of the above account of candor. In defining this concept as a lack of control over one’s means of publicity, Green seeks explicitly to distinguish candor as an “institutional requirement” from the “individual norm” of sincerity (Green Reference Green2010, 25). That is, at issue are not individual actors’ internal dispositions (personality traits that are, evidently, not “easy to gauge”) but rather the dynamics of their appearances. Yet such a clear-cut distinction between sincerity and candor overlooks a defining characteristic of sincerity—and its associated literature—that renders it more difficult to disentangle from candor. Although sincerity surely refers to an internal disposition of an individual actor as Green has it, it is likewise a performance of that disposition and, thus, a norm that is enacted and reified by means of an interaction between an actor and an audience. As Daniel Kapust and Michelle Schwarze (Reference Kapust and Schwarze2016) argue, efforts to reshape the dynamics of such performances occupy canonical arguments across the history of political thought in ways that point to contending “regulative standards” of sincerity: for example, Cicero’s case for decorum and Adam Smith’s case for propriety. This performative dimension of sincerity suggests that an actor’s use of rhetoric—that is, their capacity to successfully “win over” an audience—rests in part on their ability to navigate an existing communicative context such that their performances are recognized as sincere. In turn, the articulation of contending standards suggest that performances of sincerity are “regularized” and “controlled” just like candor’s means of publicity.

The observation that sincerity involves performance has indeed been a source of consternation in democratic theory, especially because a demand for sincerity (i.e., “truthfulness”) is taken as a necessary feature of discourse ethics by deliberative democrats.Footnote ³ As Elizabeth Markovits (Reference Markovits2006, 264) argues, the practical application of this demand holds that “people who speak ‘plainly’ are seen as more natural and real, and therefore more trustworthy.” Yet “plain speech” is likewise “something that is cultivated and practiced,” indeed, much like the modes of expression that are taken to be manifestly “rhetorical” such as those that betray excessive levity, intellectualism, anger, skepticism, or irony. Thus, a sincerity norm naturalizes one rhetorical performance against all others in a given context, effectively legitimating those styles that conform to it. In turn, Markovits maintains that such naturalizations often serve to exclude historically marginalized voices, casting them as inherently insincere and thus, illegitimate.

To speak differently, in other words, is to not speak plainly, and to not speak plainly is to fail to conform to the dominant means of repudiating “rhetorical” modes of expression. Thus, Markovits (Reference Markovits2006, 267) holds that the sincerity norm risks advancing a form of communication more adequately seen as “hypersincere”—that is, speech cultivated to stage a repudiation of rhetoric for an audience that takes such a repudiation as a marker of legitimacy. In repudiating modes of expression seen as more manifestly rhetorical, hypersincerity serves as “an aggressive and intimidating way to shut out other voices.”

I maintain that the above criticism of sincerity illuminates a challenge for the ideal of candor. Insofar as sincerity entails a performative repudiation of those modes of communication that appear rhetorical, this performance navigates the very means of publicity that Green (Reference Green2010) identifies with candor. To orient oneself to the standard of candor is to engage in a communicative context that is, essentially, unscripted. Yet hypersincerity establishes itself precisely in asserting one sort of script as unscripted. Candor, in this sense, champions the very communicative dynamic that hypersincerity seeks to capture: candor attempts to catch its actors off guard, whereas the sincerity norm naturalizes a particular performance of being off guard, as it were. To live up to such a standard in a context shaped by hypersincerity is thus to succeed in maintaining the illusion that one’s plain speech is entirely divorced from the means of its publicity, as ocular democracy has it.

To be sure, I am not insisting on a necessary equivalence between hypersincerity, which naturalizes one particular script as if it were unscripted, and candor, which seeks merely to repudiate all scripts. For example, in a context where most leaders employ plain speech in canned political circumstances (e.g., stump speeches), the normative intuitions behind candor may well equip their interlocutors to expose such speech for what it is. A political actor who has “mastered” only plain speech may find such mastery disarmed in unrehearsed circumstances involving postures such as anger, incredulity, irony, etc. It is in this sense that a commitment to candor can promise to disempower actors who benefit from hypersincerity’s tendency to shut out voices that do not adhere to plain speech. Indeed, it is thus that Green (Reference Green2010, 187) champions the democratic value of the presidential debate as an exemplar of “institutionalized” candor.

Yet this defense of candor points to its limitation and ultimate danger as a standard for empowerment. Consider, for example, the rhetorical dynamics of candor as they unfold in the 2016 GOP presidential primary debates—a case that should align with ocular democracy’s checks on vocal actors yet proves fateful in paving the way for an emergent communicative strategy—namely, that of Trump. The New Hampshire debate features a revealing blunder by then-candidate Marco Rubio, who seems unable to keep from repeating the same stately sounding quip about President Obama. “Let us dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio starts—and then finds himself using the same turn of phrase in several answers, prompting remarks from his interlocutors that he has merely “memorized a 30-second speech,” which they contrast to their more genuine dialogue (The Washington Post 2016). At first glance, this exchange seems to echo the dynamics of candor championed by ocular democracy: the rhetoricity of Rubio’s plain speech is exposed because the debate, unlike canned appearances, denies him control over his publicity. Yet this conclusion only tells half the story. Equally significant is the fact that Rubio is exposed by the debate’s other participants. That is, his interlocutors only expose the scriptedness of his speech in their own efforts to present themselves as more spontaneous, multidimensional, and discerning. In turn, the proclivity to repudiate all interactions that can be likened to a script comes to serve as its own strategy to convey “authenticity”—the very posture that Rubio’s speech sought to convey, had it not been exposed. Then-candidate Trump’s attack on “little Marco” (among many such “eventful” insults) when responding to questions in a subsequent debate employs this very approach: to deny the debate’s normal flow of questions and answers is, after all, to derail a sort of script.

The above example suggests that the denial of a given speaker’s means of publicity may well subvert their dependence on plain speech—and, for that matter, any particular manifestation of the sincerity norm. Yet this case also illuminates that such denials are performed by interlocutors in ways that can continue to reify the communicative dynamics underlying hypersincerity. That is, in exposing the rhetoricity of their interlocutors’ self-presentations, the debate’s participants present the postures that frame their repudiations of existing communicative norms—in candidate Trump’s case, boorishness, a rejection of “political correctness,” scapegoating immigrants, etc.—as contending markers of authenticity. Just as above the appeal of plain speech as ostensibly “free” from rhetoric was weaponized into hypersincerity, here the demand for candor is instrumentalized by speakers to confer an air of authenticity upon their appearances. Yet more worryingly, this instrumentalization now explicitly casts competing political claims and actors as illegitimate precisely because they fail to conform to an “authentic” style, in effect celebrating hypersincerity’s aggressive proclivity to marginalize other voices. So, here the speaker’s demand for candor serves to reassert control over their means of publicity precisely in performing a repudiation of such control.

Such a paradoxical conflation indeed marks a demagogic strategy. Consider, for example, Thucydides’s (1963) account of the Mytilenean debate, wherein Cleon seeks both to castigate his audience’s seemingly insatiable desire for competitive speech making and to present his speech rejecting deliberation over justice as worthy of winning the competition. Thucydides’s account, of course, illuminates the basic difficulty of such a position: Diodotus is easily able to point to Cleon’s rhetorical “foolishness” in attempting to persuade his audience of the pointlessness of persuasion—a repudiation that suggests his speech is premised on its audience’s acquiescence to its own “deception” (3.37–3.43). Yet this narrative also evokes an inverse possibility: insofar as demagogic speech becomes successful, it suggests an already-existing orientation toward self-deception among its audience. That is, the foundational deception of spectators who fail to recognize themselves as an audience being charmed by an orator. In effect, such deception requires its audience to accept the orator’s assertion that the people are both a deliberative body “discussing matters of state” and a univocal agent who must reject deliberation over its own self-interest as nothing but bad-faith rhetoric. In short, Cleon’s failure to persuade the Athenian Assembly reveals the demagogue’s challenge to consist in his effort to displace the foundational rift between orators and spectators with his performative rejection of scriptedness. Missing here is, simply, an audience willing to take the bait.

Thucydides’s (1963) narrative illuminates an intrinsic problem underlying the ideal of candor. Namely, candor’s regularization sustains the conditions of possibility for a particular sort of actor: one who excels, above all, at performing eventful repudiations for their audiences. Trump’s rise indeed illustrates the possibility of such repudiation as a strategy for shaping one’s publicity. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Doron Taussig (Reference Jamieson and Taussig2017) argue, the candidate-turned-president’s “freewheeling rhetoric” enabled him to repackage his unrivaled demonization of opponents, rejection of established institutions and sources of information, and refusal of accountability into a more pointed “rhetorical signature.” That is, in framing his speech acts as continuous repudiations of scriptedness, Trump presented frequent falsehoods, incivility, and incoherence as evidence “that [he] says what he really thinks” (4) and was willing to “break from the convention of carefully scripted rhetoric” normally associated with the presidency (23). Thus, for example, Trump’s frequent refrain that he was both “joking” and “telling it like it is” when facing criticism in effect sought to recast all challenges as examples of scripted humorlessness reflecting rival social visions that attempt to foreclose candid speech. Indeed, the power—and danger—of Trump’s rhetorical signature rested in its specific pretense to pit his departures from rhetorical convention against “traditional” attachments to facticity, civility, and coherence, thereby venturing that a rhetoric of “authentic” audacity could supplant these standards of communicative legitimacy. Or, as Corey Robin (Reference Robin2017, 271–2) puts it, beneath the former president’s apparent ability to sidestep evidence that he is “a liar, a narcissist, a sexual predator, a financial miscreant, an incompetent, and a naïf” was the “promise … that he won’t bore you.” And thus, “the one charge Trump [couldn’t] afford is the claim that he’s dull, reading from a script.”

The above case should thus raise significant doubts that a repudiation of scripts as such serves as an adequate proxy for spectator empowerment. Noting the ubiquity of spectating in democratic life, the ideal of candor errs in conflating popular empowerment with a mode of action that becomes increasingly strategic in this communicative context. To affirm such a strategy is simply to grant newly empowered actors that which their speech acts seek to accomplish—namely, what Kenneth Burke (Reference Burke1955, 64) calls “identification” insofar as those who speak endeavor to establish “common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes” with those whom they address. What’s more, the above rhetorical signature reverberates beyond any single actor: it rather reflects an ascendant communicative phenomenon characterized by a distinctly demagogic manifestation of populist rhetoric that endeavors to tie exclusionary social visions to actors’ repudiations of “political correctness.”Footnote ⁴ As Benjamin Moffitt (Reference Moffitt2016, 38) argues, the recent resurgence of populism is best understood to advance a distinct style involving “repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performance” by “leaders” who seek to “dramatize” the appearance of self-evident representative claims on behalf of “the people.” In contrast to traditional accounts of populism focusing chiefly on the content of tropes comprising distinctions between the people and elites, Moffitt’s focus on style points to the growing role of mediatization in shaping current-day communicative contexts. That is, because actors are increasingly less likely to engage audiences by the “direct” means like Cleon’s in-person oratory, claims about the people require increasingly deft navigations of “the rhythms, demands and processes of media logic” by means of which actors identify their audiences as the people for whom they claim to act (76).

Indeed, this need for spectator identification explains the persistent appeal of “bad manners” in populist leadership on Moffitt’s account (Reference Moffitt2016, 57–63). More than a personality trait, the recurring effort to derail “appropriate” scripts serves to assert the leader’s claim to authenticity across increasingly mediated interactions. That is, insofar as popular audiences find themselves increasingly distanced from the scenes of political action and look to disrupt the techniques that maintain this distance, ill-mannered derailments of dominant “scripts” function as evidence of the leader’s effort to achieve an unmediated encounter with the people. In short, where Cleon could not persuade his assembled audience to reject persuasion, here the dynamics of mediatization supply would-be demagogues with the rhetorical resources to advance their claim to act “for” the people precisely in violating communicative norms. Of course, one may suspect that such performances only further ensnare their audiences in mediatization—that is, as spectators captivated by disruptiveness. Indeed, such enactments of mediated authenticity seek to achieve the very effect conceptualized in the above account of candor captured by hypersincerity: the conflation of an actor’s aggressive and exclusionary “repudiation” with a claim to their spectators’ empowerment. Thus, as Moffitt argues, it follows that populist strategies constitute “the media-political form par excellence” (77).

The demagogue’s ability to exploit their audience’s detachment from existing scripts thus suggests an uneasy conclusion: surely, scripted appearances disempower spectators insofar as they narrow what they see and how they engage—yet the above discussion shows repudiations of scripts to leave spectators no more empowered. Indeed, this problem extends beyond the ossification of any particular performance of repudiation into something like a new script, as in the case of Trump’s rhetorical signature. The problem is rather that such ossifications continue to prime spectators to identify with demagogic repudiations as manifestations of candor. In short, candor’s normalization remains continually exposed to demagogic efforts to conflate candid and canned performances—and ocular democracy’s idealization of candor fails to interrogate such conflations.

How, then, are we to theorize empowered spectatorship? The next section argues that this question requires an account of the dynamics of spectator identification, as suggested in the above account of candor’s instrumentalization. Having proposed a proxy for spectator empowerment drawn from (invariably vocal) repudiations of scripts, the ideal of candor has occluded these dynamics. Missing here is precisely the spectator’s activity in accepting candor as empowering—or, for that matter, in being interpellated as a consumer of scripts that simply champion successful repudiation.

However, to make sense of such activity it is necessary to revise a basic assumption advanced across much democratic theory: the categorical conceptual opposition between spectating and acting as such. Consider, instead, Richard Butsch’s (Reference Butsch2008, 3) definition of “audience,” which takes the latter as “a situated role that people temporarily perform”—that is, not an absence of action but a collective activity that appears in some relation to that which tries to claim its attention. Contra Green (Reference Green2010), this view resists casting “spectators” and “leaders” as predetermined subject positions. Yet this view also raises a challenge for the constructivist perspective from which this discussion has criticized Green. Even as Saward affirms audiences as “agents and actors” (Reference Saward2010, 54), their agency is nonetheless legible chiefly in their reaction to the activities of discrete claim makers categorically distinct from the audiences they seek to construct. To be sure, this approach recognizes that audiences may well contest the claims presented to them (54; see also Disch Reference Disch2010), but in doing so their responses are legible as “counterclaims” (Saward Reference Saward2010, 54) that effectively render them competing claim makers.Footnote ⁵ Put differently, here audiences seem either to acquire agency in becoming vocal or are relegated to accepting the claims imposed on them by exogenous agents. In contrast, I hold that an appreciation of audience construction must resist this trade-off if it hopes to make sense of the process of spectator identification with candor. As Butsch’s emphasis on performance suggests, even “acceptance” by spectators stands in need of explication. In short, to spectate is still to do something, albeit something distinct from the activity of individuated claim making.

Below, I reconsider the question of candor and spectator identification from the perspective of this revision, now attending to candor’s involvement in drawing spectators into particular patterns of activity—both vocal and ocular. Specifically, I turn to a case where candor becomes effectively “regularized,” as ocular democracy would have it, albeit with remarkably perverse results: that of dominant social media practices. Surveying this context, I show that regularized candor can leave audiences at once more committed to spectating, more vocal, and increasingly disempowered.

Social Media and the Problem of Mechanized Irreverence

Recent years have not been kind to social media. Once widely hailed as engines for public expression and mobilization, major social media platforms have lately become mired in charges of monopolistic behavior, mismanagement of user information, facilitation of disinformation, polarization, and censorship. These growing rebukes indicate not merely skepticism of specific platform features but a pointed suspicion that the very effort to realize mass user engagement has served, ultimately, to undermine the participatory vision therein. Yet scholars have proven reticent to embrace this suspicion fully even while continuing to suggest it. Sunstein’s (Reference Sunstein2017) worry noted at this essay’s outset offers an illustrative example here. Sunstein advances perhaps the most wide-ranging criticism of social media’s algorithmic “personalization” of content, linking it to the rise of echo chambers, the fraying of shared experiences, and the “inertness” of a public sphere where individuals remain shielded from competing perspectives. However, he also brackets this criticism from the chief innovation claimed by social media platforms—namely, “the fascinating increase in people’s ability to participate in creating widely available information,” which he simply accepts as “a powerful democratizing function” (27). The result is a curious blind spot in Sunstein’s approach, which decries social media practices and yet refrains from probing their accompanying idealizations of collective agency. It appears that social media leaves users self-obsessed, fragmented, and inert; yet the underlying assumption that greater amplification of “voice” necessarily amplifies democracy somehow continues to elude interrogation.

The discussion below challenges this scholarly tendency. Following the previous section, I hold neither that voice is an unmitigated good that exists apart from its interaction with spectating nor that more voice serves as an adequate proxy for more democracy. Yet the emergence of social media also poses a basic definitional challenge for the above discussion. Recalling Green’s (Reference Green2010) opening observation that current-day political life is characterized by a distinction between elite, vocal actors and the people’s silent spectatorship, it should be immediately clear that activities like tweeting, liking, or otherwise circulating information confound this distinction’s apparent self-evidence. Although such practices surely do not make users into the leaders Green associates with individuated action, social media nonetheless figures spectating as an expressive activity wherein participants vocalize their practices of collective observation. To be sure, the conclusion of the previous section already cast doubt on this distinction, instead asserting that spectating should be understood as a performative activity. Yet social media’s explicit valorization of vocal spectatorship now offers a case in which it is possible to develop this observation into a critical engagement with the dynamics of spectator identification at the heart of candor’s instrumentalization. In turn, this context reveals that spectators can come to limit their capacities for communicative engagement by the same token that they embrace claims to candor.

Consider, first, how spectatorship becomes expressive online. It is crucial to understand that voice here does not simply emerge in a vacuum but is rather shaped by a particular communicative affordance—namely, that of the meme. In making this claim, I am largely following scholarship in media studies devoted to identifying the distinctive attributes of socially mediated interactions in contradistinction to their embodied counterparts (see Milner Reference Milner2016; Phillips Reference Phillips2015; Shifman Reference Shifman2014). As Ryan Milner (Reference Milner2016, 2) argues, online interactions are “premised on participation by reappropriation”—that is, users habitually express themselves by modifying preexisting texts and images such that their addition of “new” content is framed within the parameters of visual and semantic forms recognizable to ever-expanding online communities and thereby easily amenable to mass circulation. In short, memes can be understood as speech acts that “depend on collective creation, circulation, and transformation … by balancing a fixed premise with novel expression” (14) and are thus naturally resistant to “top down” media traditionally premised on “passive” spectator uptake of some content (2). What’s more, the dynamics of memetic circulation implicitly demand spectator participation: Grumpy Cat and Condescending Wonka exist as memes because they maintain the impression that you, the spectator, keep them circulating by means of your own modifications. To be an engaged spectator of digital content is, in effect, to learn to participate in the circulation of memes—and to fail to learn this lesson is to be utterly lost in digital spaces.

Of course, I am not suggesting that all socially mediated participation assumes the form of memetic circulation—nor that memes exist only online. As Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner (Reference Phillips and Milner2017) argue, the above aspects of memetic circulation in fact mirror forms of “folkloric expression” that long predate the internet. Yet what distinguishes social media is the dominance of such communication. That is, a spectator expects to consume memes in their interaction with socially mediated content.Footnote ⁶ Memes, in this sense, are more than a means of communication the “end” of which is, simply, one’s voice; rather, a meme is part of a broader genre whose dominance comes to reshape who spectators are online (see Wiggins and Bowers Reference Wiggins and Bowers2015). As Carolyn Miller (Reference Miller1984, 163) argues, genres are best understood not merely as ways of classifying texts but as “conventions of discourse that a society establishes as ways of ‘acting-together.’” Put differently, genres connect speech to broader patterns of interaction. Thus, Elisabeth Anker (Reference Anker2014, 20) argues that genres “work as a set of interpretive conventions and affective expectations for public political life.” To say that one is a “spectator” of a genre is insufficient. Instead, this claim challenges scholars to ask what one is positioned to do when, say, interpellated as an inheritor of fables or an employee looped into corporate memos. To identify memes as a genre is thus to notice that they, too, position their spectators: they connect the uptake of certain content (in this case, bits of modified text or image) with certain activities (further modification) and dispositions associated with spectators’ identities as circulators of memes.

What, exactly, are these dispositions? Above all, the work discussed above tends to identify a predilection for irreverent humor as a chief aspect of memetic circulation. Given its distinctive modifiability, such communication all but naturally rewards playful reappropriation (see Milner Reference Milner2016, 79–110) and so inspires an ironic disposition toward the content that remains “fixed” in the circulation of memes. One is thus little surprised to find, for example, that political speech is more often couched in humorous terms online than in embodied spaces (see Davis, Love, and Killen Reference Davis, Love and Killen2018). Yet this phenomenon also shapes the social function of such humor: rather than serving as a counterpoint to the myopic propensities of “serious” conversation (or, as the above section had it, plain speech), ironic reappropriation now becomes a dominant communicative form. That is, memetic circulation is characterized by its tendency to subject any content that carries “traditional” markers of seriousness—a known origin, authorship, reference to facticity, stable meaning, and “plainness”—to ironizing. Thus, Phillips and Milner hold that online content is most strikingly distinct from embodied speech by the pervasiveness of Poe’s Law, or the observation that “sincere extremism online (manifesting as bigotry, conspiracy theorizing, or simply being wrong about something) is often indistinguishable from satirical extremism” (Reference Phillips and Milner2017, 78–9) such that interlocutors always seem to be “messing with their audience for a laugh” (51). The most notorious form of this conflation is the practice of trolling, or the seemingly ironic assertion of offensive claims as a means of provocation and harassment; but the potential melding of the serious and the ironic generally underlies all online circulation.

To be sure, the possibility of such polysemy exists in any context where speakers contest the meanings of words—that is, any context that might be called political. But the transformation of this possibility into a defining characteristic of online speech produces a distinct spectating practice: one that entangles an audience’s uptake of content with its continuous vocal repudiation of seriousness. Note, here, the marked shift that playfulness undergoes when it ceases to serve as a reprieve from other dominant dispositions and rather comes to define communicative interaction as such. A social phenomenon like trolling becomes legible precisely when playful modifications are untethered from their prior grounding in wit and creativity and permeate all interactions. Thus, harassment comes to be playful, marginalization comes to be playful, disinformation comes to be playful; in short, anything that departs from the norms of embodied communication fits the bill.

The dominance of such a disposition can carry wide-ranging communicative consequences. That is, the social mechanization of spectatorship-as-repudiation comes to shape user interactions even when the content in question is no longer, strictly speaking, a meme and modification is not, strictly speaking, humorous. Take, for example, the now-commonplace efforts to document the sheer volume of disinformation online (e.g., Simpson Reference Simpson2019). Beyond registering understandable alarm, such efforts need to grapple with the above communicative development lest they neglect the rhetorical appeal of a departure from truthfulness when the latter comes to be associated with scripted stodginess by audiences socialized in the art of irreverent sendups. Existing empirical scholarship has likewise devoted impressive attention to determining the causes of factual misperceptions (Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler Reference Flynn, Nyhan and Reifler2017) and documenting their diffusion (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral Reference Vosoughi, Roy and Aral2018), but there has been comparatively less attention paid to understanding how truth claims as such lose their “traditional” rhetorical appeal in particular communicative contexts. In presuming such appeal to be either natural (provided one learns “the facts”) or merely exogenous to existing communicative practices, scholars risk neglecting what Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt1973, 385) called the “artificially induced inability to understand facts as facts” that follows the newfound capacity “to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.”Footnote ⁷ In what follows, I reconsider the possibility of such artificial inducement—or what I call the mechanization of memetic irreverence—from the perspective of candor.

Recall that above, I established that candor’s appeal could be captured by demagogues who instrumentalize repudiation—and held it necessary to trace how spectators come to identify with particular performances of such repudiation. The dynamics of memetic irreverence now offer a glimpse into this process in one such context. As in the case of plain speech, memetic irreverence first posits an ossified communicative norm (“seriousness”), casting it as a script in need of subversion. At first glance, such subversion again promises to check empowered actors: one may well note the many cases of public figures trying to promote themselves on social media only to be met with widespread circulations of memes featuring their (true or alleged) misdeeds. The proclivity for such spectator responses is in fact a point of pride associated with eventful (to recall Green’s [Reference Green2010] term) derailments on social media. No doubt such derailments exemplify a claim to candor: insofar as public figures seek to appear in a dignified way, they quickly find themselves unable to control the circulation of mocking messages framing their appearance. Yet we misconstrue the dynamics of such candor if we fail to notice that its typical target is not the leader identified by Green, whose public relations stunt runs afoul of a vigilant gaze. Rather, it is those whose voice defies the presumed demographic characteristics for “normal” participation online. For example, as Adrienne Massanari (Reference Massanari2017, 331) argues in her study of such derailments on Reddit, this platform’s valorization of “play and candor” more often facilitates misogynistic activism, especially when grievances are made against the irreverent “geek culture” celebrated on this platform. Milner, too, worries that the “addressivity” of typical memetic content “implies that the reader is male, and content of the images furthers the hegemony of that implied reader” (Reference Milner2016, 125), with memes often recycling racist and sexist “stock characters … in ways that reproduce the invisible insider status of white males” (130). Curiously, such memetic derailments establish candor by the same token that they naturalize the presumed white male spectator’s distinction from vocal stock characters. What’s more, they provide this spectator a chance to attain voice precisely in perpetuating this distinction—that is, in further circulating the meme.

Let me note one such case to outline how memetic circulation amplifies traditionally embodied marginalization. Consider the example of the “social justice warrior,” a constellation of memes featuring female stock characters circulated to mock self-righteous leftist pronouncements identified as naive and often deployed in response to criticism of sexist discourse. From the perspective of its intended audience, this meme serves to expose such criticism as rhetorical posturing—that is, as an effort to impose a script on candid online speech. One may, of course, suspect that the meme itself serves as a sort of script by means of which its spectators are positioned to repudiate any feminist criticism. This is indeed the case because memetic irreverence relies on its audience’s mechanized uptake of stock characters in interpellating spectators as content creators “empowered” by participatory modification. By circulating this meme, a spectator gains voice—but only so in reifying the characteristics of the “social justice warrior” as a fixed premise. Put differently, this manifestation of candor repudiates overly “serious” criticism by the same token that it maintains an all-too-serious imposition of boundaries. “It’s only a joke,” the adage goes: one does not respond to a meme with a list of grievances. Yet as Milner (Reference Milner2016, 129) notes, “for participants who ‘out’ themselves as female, displaying their body is the ‘penance’ demanded for the transgression of interrupting the board’s normalized masculinity.” In effect, the “joke” serves to attach the ideal of candor to a rigid and aggressive policing of speech. In conflating a rejection of “outsider” criticism with such normalization, memetic irreverence thus normalizes the white, male user’s undertaking to transform “passive” spectating into “candid” self-expression—and to become the only agent capable of doing so.

Of course, this example is not meant to suggest that social media are irrevocably bound to reproduce such marginalization. Nor is it to deny that social media are amenable to the rise of significant counterpublics, as in the case of Black Twitter. But it is to suggest that such possibilities cannot help but become entangled in the dynamics of repudiation as long as online spaces facilitate memetic communication. For example, although Milner celebrates social media’s amplification of voice in communities marginalized in traditionally embodied spaces, he also worries that such amplifications often channel participation into the genre of memetic irreverence by drawing it into confrontation with the practices outlined above. That is, counterpublics often deploy memes mocking online sexism and racism—and they often find themselves “further[ing] hegemonic antagonisms” by positing reciprocal irreverence as a presumed disposition of online spectatorship (Milner Reference Milner2016, 135).Footnote ⁸ In conforming to the above genre, such responses continue to position online audiences as consumers and circulators of irreverent memes, effectively reifying the means by which spectators identify aggressive repudiation of criticism and boundary drawing with candor. Such identification is, in turn, reinforced insofar as digital spaces continue to figure “accountability” as the power of existing users to regulate the inflow of newcomers—or, as Jennifer Forestal (Reference Forestal2017, 158) puts it, to “[police] the boundaries of the site.” Indeed, such policing again risks reducing all criticism to mere fodder for further repudiations.

The memetic conflation of repudiation and boundary drawing thus offers an account of how candor’s normalization can yield a distinctly disempowering spectating experience. This is the case because here such normalization socializes spectators to deny each other control over their means of publicity. That is, in providing spectators with a means to assert the ideal of candor, memetic irreverence circumscribes spectators’ own generic dispositions, casting them as audiences relentlessly entangled in the irreverent uptake of content that recognizes only more irreverence as “candid speech.”Footnote ⁹ In essence, such irreverence maintains a practice of spectatorship whose capacity to engage content narrows as participation ostensibly increases.

Moreover, this case suggests that the danger of demagoguery articulated in the above section relies on such a perverse normalization of candor. Recall, again, Trump’s rhetorical signature, which sought to make scapegoating and the rejection of facticity, civility, and coherence “stick” by conflating claims that he was telling it like it is and just joking. Rather than appearing as a contradiction in terms, this section suggests that such claims can come to signal authenticity precisely because they mirror the communicative practices of their audience. That is, in contrast to Cleon’s difficulty as an orator attempting to persuade his audience to reject persuasion, socially mediated demagogic rhetoric finds its success in its leader’s ability to pose as a member of an audience that has already abandoned persuasion. This is accomplished insofar as the leader successfully echoes their spectators’ means of repudiation. In effect, this strategy asserts a shared experience between the demagogue and their audience because both target the same scripts: the leader makes a claim to candor precisely in appearing to join their spectators in repudiating anything that appears to lack the requisite irreverence. In short, the demagogue seeks to capture an audience’s gaze by occluding the basic distinction between actor and spectator, instead appearing merely as another spectator speaking up against canned speech.

A social context marked by memetic irreverence facilitates this very occlusion. For example, this strategy is evident in the 2016 Trump campaign’s efforts to connect candid repudiations of democratic norms with his retweets of followers’ memes—a tactic Jessica Baldwin-Philippi (Reference Baldwin-Philippi2019) terms “the technological performance of populism.” Likewise, this strategy is evident in the defining characteristic ascribed to the “Twitter Presidency” by its early observers—that is, that Trump did not merely exhibit generic “bad behavior” but used social media platforms “as [they were] meant to be used”—that is, as “we” use them in taking up commonplace memetic practices (see Mac and Warzel Reference Mac and Warzel2018). And the lingering effect of this strategy is likewise evident in the grievance maintained by Trump’s base in the aftermath of his abortive coup—namely, that he was “censored” in being deplatformed after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Confronting this grievance, many observers have been quick to point out the obvious deficiency of a claim to free speech advanced against private firms. But the simple dismissal of this claim risks downplaying the persistent entanglement of demagogic candor and socially mediated identification. The problem here rests less in a confusion of private and public fora and more in the effort to cast the state’s chief executive as credible claimant to First Amendment protections normally claimed by citizens against the state. This mismatch arises from the fact that a candid demagogue appears to “gain voice” by the same means as his audience, effectively obscuring the distinction between institutionally empowered actors and spectators. In short, in all these cases spectators find themselves increasingly tethered to a leader who avoids being targeted as such by posing as another irreverent spectator—a posture made possible by the memetic mechanization of candor. To the extent that this posture succeeds, such candor effects a narrowing practice of spectating that is increasingly unable to recognize anything but the demagogue as the “natural” object of its gaze.

Mechanized irreverence thus offers a glimpse into the practices that facilitate ocular disempowerment. Accordingly, this case does more than illuminate the claims advanced by demagogic actors. Rather, it shows that candor poses a distinct concern for any appreciation of audiences as constructed and situated phenomena. Recall, again, that Saward (Reference Saward2010) advanced such an appreciation by situating audiences within the context of claim makers who invoke them. Yet the above case suggests that candor’s place in this process cannot be reduced to any “claim” as such. Candor rather connects the content of a given claim to existing performances signifying unscriptedness. Insofar as such performances come to be dominated by demagogic rhetoric, the constructivist turn must grapple with the fact that claim makers do not merely offer content to audiences but can exploit fault lines in spectating practices to cast themselves as members of the very audiences whose gaze they capture. Therefore, although all acts of representation participate in constructing audiences by mobilizing particular group identities (Disch Reference Disch2010), demagogic candor reveals a distinct problem insofar as it mobilizes audiences themselves to participate in narrowing their own capacities to engage the claim makers they encounter.

This dynamic poses an underlying challenge for any conception of ocular empowerment beyond social media as such. That is, the effort to extricate spectators from canned interactions must involve more than checks on vocal actors; rather, it must theorize how spectators can intervene in their very interpellation as agents defined by some pregiven set of ocular activities. This essay’s final section outlines an approach to this more capacious demand.

Toward a Theory of Eventful Spectatorship

This essay has argued that audiences become disempowered in identifying with performances through which actors reassert control over their conditions of publicity. But this does not suggest a comprehensive rejection of the ocular approach as such. The observation that modern political life is marked by mass spectating and its implication that canned interactions deprive spectators are both crucial building blocks toward a realist democratic theory. Indeed, Green’s (Reference Green2010) approach errs chiefly in obscuring candor’s performative construction in light of these observations. In short, my criticism does not deny that popular empowerment must attend to the ubiquity of spectating but rather advances a more realist perspective on its constituent practices. Following Disch’s (Reference Disch2021) formulation, this perspective requires seeing performances of candor not merely as “a matter of will” but as products of communicative contexts whose terms must be interrogated to theorize ocular empowerment.

To do so, it is necessary to notice, contra Green (Reference Green2010), that the language of candor in fact corresponds to another set of intuitions across intellectual history—one chiefly concerned with the comportment and activity specifically of spectators. Take, for example, the case of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which famously calls on a “candid world” to bear witness to the “Facts” substantiating its grievances (Jefferson Reference Jefferson1776). Note that here candor is neither claimed by certain actors (e.g., the colonists) nor asserted against others (King George). Rather, it is ascribed to an audience in positioning it in a particular way. As Danielle Allen (Reference Allen2014, 90) argues, this ascription “identifies [the Declaration’s] audience as consisting of the kind of living organisms that can connect facts with principles in order to make judgments.” In effect, the authors of the Declaration ask, “are you not capable of candid judgment?” in interpellating their readers as a collective agent able to break from merely consuming existing scripts establishing British colonial authority.

This example suggests that the language of candor can inform a different appreciation of spectatorship. In contrast to ocular democracy’s view of candor as an actor-denying proxy for ocular empowerment, here candor serves to position an audience to ask whether its own practices manage to escape scriptedness. The question of whether the Declaration motivates this task adequately is, of course, outside the scope of this essay.Footnote ¹⁰ But its example offers a fruitful starting point for theorizing candor from a perspective that foregrounds spectatorship as a dynamic and self-reflective practice.

If candor is to avoid obscuring the patterns of disempowerment identified above, it is first necessary to attend to how spectators come together as collective agents. This stipulation requires a critical revision of the chief implication Green (Reference Green2010) ascribes to ocular empowerment—namely, its ambition to champion “eventful” actions by leaders. Green derives this implication from his reading of Hannah Arendt. While Arendt’s effort to theorize spontaneity in human life is often linked to individuated action, Green 20–1) holds that it is in fact rooted in the “recognition of the intrinsic satisfaction of witnessing spontaneous events”—indeed, of the “value” of such actions for those who see them. This reading is correct to rebuke hasty reductions of Arendt’s thought to a mere celebration of heroism, but it misses her crucial inclusion of ocular activities in the very construction of meaningful “events” as such. That is, Arendt’s (Reference Arendt1958, 23) account of the human capacity for action holds that this activity alone “is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.” This is the case because action does not merely connote doing something unplanned but relies on “an audience of fellow men” who maintain the possibility of “organized remembrance” in human affairs (198).Footnote ¹¹ Thus, Patchen Markell (Reference Markell2017, 89) maintains that this conception of action “implicate[s] something that cannot be so easily localized in one person or at one moment, namely, the strength or weakness of that bond that holds people in an ongoing relation of presence and attention to each other and to their world, which Arendt will call ‘power.’” It is not that Arendt takes spectators to be “satisfied” when they see spontaneous actions but that such spontaneity loses its significance without spectators’ mobilization as a collective agent.

In contrast to the primacy of eventfulness as such, this discussion points to an effort to articulate the significance of events that come into being when audiences actively assemble. In fact, the persistence of “eventful” actions without an ability to maintain engaged spectatorship serves as a distinct mark of totalitarian propaganda on Arendt’s account. As she maintains, the “ability to lie” is an “obvious” example of “human freedom”; indeed, lies can be eventful (and draw attention) insofar as they attempt “to change the record” (Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 245–6). But totalitarian movements venture to proliferate the presentation of such counterfeit “events” for “masses whose chief characteristic is that they belong to no social or political body” (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, 348) and whose fundamental dislocation from political activity thereby primes them to find an “escape from reality” appealing (352). The extensive institutionalization of such a dynamic—what the above section associated with the mechanization of irreverence and what Arendt calls “organized lying”—is profoundly disempowering precisely because it translates the typical human desire for eventfulness into a “constant shifting and shuffling in utter sterility” characteristic of eye-catching action presented to detached spectators who have lost the capacity to “believe in the truth of anything” (Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 252–4). Put differently, such “sterility” shows that eventfulness itself can become canned when spectators lose their place as a dynamic collective agent capable of mutually reflecting on their own activity and making normative judgments therein.

This need for collective self-reflexivity suggests a substantively different conception of spectator empowerment. Instead of seeking agents who do things spontaneously before already-constituted audiences, the above discussion suggests that interactions become eventful only insofar as spectators experience the fact of coming together and interrogating what they encounter in doing so. And such collective experiences are meaningful only when spectating is actively practiced rather than assumed as a fixed subject position. We may well call such experiences candid—but only insofar as this approach locates collective efforts to recast the popular gaze at the nexus of candor and spectator empowerment. Thus, here spectators—and not leaders or claim makers—evoke candid eventfulness when they bring what they do in becoming spectators into their own purview.Footnote ¹²

To make sense of this reconceptualization of eventfulness, consider two contrasting ocular developments that have gained attention in light of the Black Lives Matter movement: police body cameras and bystander videos of police encounters. Both developments purport to turn surveillance technologies employed by the state on its own agents, thus endeavoring to achieve surveillance over those in positions of power.Footnote ¹³ Therefore, both can be said to subject policing to the ideal of candor championed by ocular democracy, in effect denying police control over their normal means of publicity. At first glance, it may even seem that bodycams achieve this task to a greater extent insofar as they institutionalize such surveillance as a regular practice, as Green’s (Reference Green2010) standard would have it. Indeed, such regularization has earned bodycams accolades as more “objective” checks on policing—albeit often by police agencies themselves (Newell Reference Newell2019, 61).

This verdict is, of course, inverted by Black Lives Matter activists, who express continued skepticism of bodycams while finding unique value in bystander videos. As The Verge (2021) argues, “using a camera and sharing a video isn’t passive—it is itself an act of protest” that fuels the movement. This claim echoes Arendt’s (Reference Arendt1958) view of eventfulness. In making police the object of surveillance, bystander videos do not merely seek unscripted content. Rather, they render spectating a specific, situated activity. Thus, Mary Angela Bock (Reference Bock2016, 26) holds that “using a camera to document events from a citizen’s perspective creates a unique record, one that represents not only the camera’s facticity but the body’s reality.” The “body” in question is that of the bystander, who enacts a “civic performance” (27) in asserting their presence by means of spectating. Unlike bodycams, bystander videos thus offer examples of what Michael Feola (Reference Feola2017, 207–9) calls “acts of bodily theater” insofar as they “implicate” their very “onlookers.” Put differently, the bystander’s effort to film police encounters is at once an effort to take up agency against practices that anchor citizens’ ongoing inabilities to intervene in racially disparate forms of state coercion. In contrast, the very presentation of bodycam content as “transparent” perpetually minimizes any effort to account for what its audiences do. As in the above discussion of Arendt, at stake here is the very production of a candid spectator’s gaze. That such an agent can recast its gaze—and does so deliberately—is precisely what makes eventfulness normatively significant and not merely eye catching.

To be sure, the “civic performances” outlined above cannot help but render bystanders exceptional agents in contrast to the generic “condition” that Green’s (Reference Green2010) model posits as a springboard for democratic theorizing. But their example nonetheless channels ocular democracy’s realist sensibilities in advancing agentic possibilities from within an experience available to all citizens—namely, spectating. That is, these protesters take up agency from their condition as onlookers—and thus, they advance a new claim to agency in showing citizens recasting their gaze as an event. Doing so, bystander videos illuminate the normative stakes behind this essay’s effort to challenge the “realism” of an approach that does not interrogate ongoing contestation over the practices it thematizes. Where ocular democracy’s reduction of spectating to a fixed activity obscures the construction of a popular gaze enthralled by particular performances of candor, bystander videos exemplify how spectators come to resist such construction.

In summary, this reconceptualization of eventfulness distinguishes spectating practices less liable to become ensnared in mechanized candor. In the previous section, social media supplied a genre of user participation that tethered the uptake of content to a regularization of irreverence. Bystander videos resist this sort of ensnarement insofar as their presentation of content specifically questions who spectators are. That is, they link their audience’s uptake of content to an ongoing effort to interrogate its participation in the very process of genre formation. This effort indeed illuminates a central component of democratic life undertheorized in recent literature: insofar as popular agency involves the production of a collective gaze, empowerment is the set of unfolding interactions by means of which this gaze resists falling into generic spectating practices.