"Death of the Audience" vs actual audience theory

21 Jun, 2026

I think the current discourse (the one that's not about a cartoon on youtube) is about a literary concept called "the death of the author" and a corollary shitposters have come up with that's gaining traction, that's getting called "the death of the audience." As people don't actually understand the former, the latter is... nebulous, at best.

Pontifus and the link he provides puts this well:

I'm actually here to discuss the latter part, though, not the former.

The problem with all this is that these words mean too many things.

See, I ended up spending a few years brushing against the edges of what we could loosely call "audience theory" when I was in grad school. This is because of a confluence of things: I was doing creative writing while being introduced to theory, so my unexamined assumptions about audience were being sanded down directly by what I was reading; I began to teach introductory composition, a class for people who may have never written anything at all outside of high school requirements, and whose idea of "their audience" began and ended with "the teacher;" and certain things I happened to read in my free time joined up with it all (such as essays by Delany, his novels, and so on). Some of the stuff I was reading for my pedagogy theory classes were directly about audience as well; I ended up doing a presentation on it, my first year teaching, in the intro course I've always referred to as the "how to teach class class." Audience as a concept is actually quite complicated. It's related to, but not the same as the author as a concept. So let's start there, briefly.

When we think of "the author" that is a different thing from "the person who wrote that book" (or drew that picture or whatever). The classic example is Shakespeare. We know almost nothing about the person, but Shakespeare has a clear and present existence in the cultural shared imagination. The author exists even though we know nothing about the person. This is sometimes referred to as the "author function." And that's where the essay Pontifus linked, above, comes in -- the intentional fallacy is when we muddle up the author and the text.

This works in reverse. The audience is and is not "the people who read or look at a work." It's an imagined thing. So, let's refer to one as the "audience function." When a creator is creating a thing, they imagine an audience. If they don't -- at all -- then they're not anticipating releasing the thing to the world. Some subconscious, implicit assumption about "audience" is happening when creation is happening, if there is an intent in the "person making a thing" to ever allow other people to see it.

That assumption can be extremely vague: "maybe people will like it." That assumption may be very specific: some writers have said they imagine their romantic partner reading the book as they're writing and revising it. But there is some imagined audience for works intended to go out there. The "audience function" is always with anyone creating or performing.

Now, the difference here is that it's been common advice for ages to stop worrying about the audience. Public speaking? Imagine the audience naked. Acting? Stop thinking about the audience and think about the people on stage with you. Painting? Stop worrying if anyone will like it and put something on the canvas.

The latest "the audience is dead" meme is just this, reheated. It's a call to focus on the work, not the reception. But, as above, people keep confusing audience and audience-function. So right now, as always, shitposters and those who take them too seriously are trying to sell an imagined creative act where "audience" is totally removed from the equation. And I really do mean it, you can't make stuff if you do that.

You might object that "I just make things for myself." You're the audience then. Really, what that is shorthand for is the thing Stan Lee said (in this interview as far as I can remember, I guess you can check to see if I'm wrong); Kevin Smith asked him how he managed to write the Spider-Man newspaper strip, daily, for decades and decades. Lee said he just wrote the stuff he'd like to see, and assumed he couldn't be so weird that only he would like it. We could get into some material media stuff about Jenkins's "long tail" here, but suffice it to say, if you do something for yourself, you're imagining an audience close to your own tastes and preferences. And we might even argue that's the best way to do it.

But that is because we have a kneejerk reaction to people who aim at audiences. Rightly so, for the most part, since we're all online so much. SEO has broken the internet, and it's only getting worse. But it's not actually bad to have an idea of an audience in your head.

Here's a model I was given in class, via lecture (so I can't link to any sources, sorry), by Susan Bailey -- that's her name, but she's no longer at the school I attended, so I can't shout her out directly. I'd search her up but I'd fear getting the wrong person or something. Anyway, she diagrammed things out with two poles: the actual really truly real writer on one end and reader on the other. In the center of the diagram is the text itself.

So it goes like this:

Writer <> Author <> Implied Author <> Text <> Implied Audience <> Audience <> Reader

We need an example. With a book this is pretty easy. Let's take a first-person narrated text, like Moby-Dick. The writer is Herman Melville, a complicated person with a rough marriage, probable homosexual feelings for Hawthorne, several kids, a disability from a sledding accident, the works.

The "author" is Herman Melville, "the sailing story guy." He'd made his name with his first novel, Typee, and wrote several other sailing stories, including a direct sequel, Omoo, a fantasy everyone had assumed would be another sequel, and then two more general sailing narratives that weren't based on his life like the others. Then he wrote Moby-Dick. You can think, in a professional environment, that the "author" is the persona, the thing created by hype, fans, marketing, and social media presence. You've seen authors use the same headshots in their books for 30 years, I know you have.

So then there's the "implied author." In our book here, that's not Melville. That's Ishmael, the narrator. This is important, because remember, this diagram is mirrored, and Ishmael is in the text. So the implied audience will also be in the text.

Then there's the text, of course. One book, please.

So what's mirrored off the narrator? The Implied Audience. Again, in this novel, that's fairly easy. Ishmael speaks directly to someone.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. (Source)

Moby-Dick is a book often best read aloud, and this is one of the reasons: Ishamel is a great exhorter, a great speaker to strangers at the bar or across the counter. Not all Melville narrators speak this way. The implied audience of Ishmael's speech is another wastrel soul, another thoughtful idler eager to hear tales of the sea and, perhaps, a bit too lazy to come up with an excuse as Ishmael's tale leaves the Ancient Mariner's in the dust.

Now we come to the audience, which is not the reader. Once again, I've chosen this example because this is easy: the audience for Moby-Dick was popular fiction readers of the 19th century in the US and Great Britain. We are not -- and cannot be -- the intended audience for a book unless we're alive when it's published, assuming the work was published commercially within the wishes of that "writer" above, and the team of editors and publishers and printers and so on.¹

Then we arrive at us, humble readers -- the readers. Up and down this chain, at every single link, there are assumptions made, implicit and explicit, intentional and accidental, that affect us as readers and as writers -- or of course as viewers and drawers, listeners and musicians, what have you.

You can't "kill the audience." The audience is in the making, just like the artist is. What you can do is stop worrying about the reader, who is not identical to the audience.

#journal #philosophy #theory