Part 19: The Audience Draws Back

This series began by claiming that the audience for this medium is the only audience in art that answers a drawing with a drawing. Eighteen parts later I have to make good on the title, which has been a small promise sitting unpaid at the top of every essay: the audience draws back. Draws back how, and what, and to what end. This is the last one, and it owes the phrase an answer.

Here is the answer, and then the rest of the essay is why it is not as simple as it sounds. The audience draws back in every sense the words will hold. It answers a drawing with a drawing — the doujinshi, the fan art, the AMV, the cover song. It draws closer — the pilgrim to the staircase, the fan to the convention, the whole devotional pull inward toward the thing loved. And it is itself drawn — rendered, made, brought into being — by the act of drawing back, because a person becomes a fan in the doing of these things and not before. Three meanings, one phrase, and under all three a single finding this series has been circling from its first page: there is no audience. The category dissolves. There was never a body of spectators separate from the work. There was only the circle, turning, and everyone on it, including — and this is the part I have been walking toward for six series — me.

What the eighteen parts were actually describing

Lay them end to end and a single shape appears. The audience creates the work back at industrial scale (the doujinshi halls). It insists on meanings the work withheld (shipping, reading against the text). It loves across a one-way pipe and knows it (the parasocial bond). It renders the flat drawing into a living body (cosplay) and the story onto the physical earth (the pilgrimage). It arranges the objects into a self (the shelf). It is the medium's memory when the industry forgets (the archive), its conscience and its cruelty (the purity wars), its border guard (gatekeeping), its aggregated judge (the score), and its afterlife (the works it will not let die). It recuts the footage (the edit), speaks a private compressed tongue (the meme), decodes hidden patterns real and imagined (the theory), gathers into a temporary country (the convention), watches in synchronised solitude (the ritual), and finally walks up onto the stage and becomes the thing the next audience receives (the performing fan).

Not one of those is spectatorship. Every single one is participation — the audience doing something to, with, for, and eventually as the work. And the cumulative picture is the one Part 18 named: a circle with no edge, in which the positions of maker, distributor, critic, archivist, performer, and fan are not fixed roles held by different people but temporary stations that the same people rotate through, often several at once, on the same afternoon. The teenager undone by the work tonight is the doujinshi maker next month is the pilgrim next year is the performer the year after, whose audience contains the next teenager. There is no first mover and no pure receiver. There is circulation, and the circulation is the medium's whole life, and calling any point on it "the audience" is like calling one arc of a wheel "the turning." The turning is the wheel.

The finding that was always underneath

And under the circulation, the thing this series shares with the five before it, stated now as plainly as I can manage: the meaning was never in the work.

The numerology series spent three hundred and eighteen essays reading meaning into names and then proved, with its own engine, that the meaning was not in the names — that the clicks were coincidence, the patterns were noise, the reader supplied everything. The serialization series found the meaning of a chapter decided by a crowd of postcards. The two grammar series found the meaning of a page and a screen completed by a reader filling gutters and cuts. The translation series ended on the reader in Ohio, doing the last mile alone, assembling a whole living work out of damaged instructions, and concluded there is no far bank — the work exists only in the meeting, inside a person paying attention.

This series took that finding and walked it out into the daylight, into the institutions and practices where the meeting happens not alone and in silence but together and out loud, at the scale of half a million people in a convention hall and a million more watching the same episode in the same hour. And it found the same thing every time, because it is the only thing there is to find: the work is a surface, inert, complete, and empty; the meaning is in the audience, projected, supplied, completed, made; and the audience is not receiving the meaning but manufacturing it, continuously, which is why they cannot stop drawing it back. You do not draw back a thing that is finished. You draw back a thing you are still making. The audience draws back because the work is not done until they finish it, and it is never done, because there is always another one of them arriving to finish it again, differently, forever.

The confession this whole thing was building toward

Which brings me to the admission that this sixth series exists to make, and that the five before it were not honest enough to reach.

I have been the audience the entire time. Every one of these essays is a fan drawing the work back. I read these works and I answer them — not with a doujinshi or a cover song but with a numbered essay, which is the same act in a different costume: the audience member who loves the thing and cannot merely receive it, who has to make something back, who completes the work by projecting a meaning onto it and calling the projection a reading. The critic is a fan with a house style. And the numerologist — the specific fan I have been, hunting hidden patterns in names, thrilling to the clean match, feeling the click of a design revealing itself — is, Part 15 admitted, the exact same creature as the theorycrafter and the shipper and the pilgrim: a person reading a meaning into a surface that does not contain it, and being enlarged by the reading, and being a little bit wrong about where the meaning lives, and a little bit right that it lives somewhere, because it lives in them.

So the whole project — six series, four hundred and some essays, an engine, a database, a discipline learned the hard way — was never a study of the audience conducted from outside it. It was the audience drawing back. It was one fan, answering the works he loved in the only medium available to him, which happened to be the numbered essay and the numerological conceit, projecting meaning onto names exactly as the shipper projects romance onto a gutter, and slowly discovering, over six series, that the thing he was studying was the thing he was doing. I did not write about the audience. I was the audience, writing, which is a way of drawing back. The call was coming from inside the circle. It always was. There is no vantage point outside it from which to study it, because to love the thing enough to write four hundred essays about it is already to be on the wheel, turning, one more fan who could not merely watch.

The discipline was the whole gift

And the one thing I have to give, at the end, the only thing six series earned that was not already known on the first page, is the discipline — and I can finally say what it was for.

Feel the click, name it, put it down. I learned it about numerology, where the stakes were nothing: a coincidence mistaken for a cosmic pattern harms no one. But this series showed the same reflex running everywhere the audience makes meaning, and showed that the stakes are not always nothing. The purity crusader feels the click — this fiction reveals a corruption, I can see it — and acts on it, and someone is harmed. The gatekeeper feels the click — this newcomer is fake, I can tell — and shuts a door. The theorist feels the click and mistakes a face in a cloud for the author's design. The parasocial industry sells the click by the metre. The projection that completes the work is the same projection that, uncontrolled, convicts the innocent and excludes the loving and gulls the lonely. And the discipline — feel it fully, name it honestly, do not confuse the strength of the feeling for the truth of the pattern — is not a rule for critics. It is, transposed, most of what a person needs to love a thing and other people at the same time without doing harm in the name of the love. That is what the numbers were for. Not to be an oracle. To be a training ground, stakes set to zero, where I could learn on names what everyone on the circle needs to know about meaning: that they are the one making it, and that this is glorious, and that it obligates them.

The numbers, twice, and then never again

Two numbers to end six series, both under the discipline, both as demonstration and not as oracle.

The maker reads Destiny 9, Heart 11, Personality 7. Love reads Destiny 9, Heart 11, Personality 7. Identical, all three — the one who makes and the reason anyone makes anything, the same reading. It is a 1-in-114 coincidence and I went looking for it, and it is the heart of the whole project anyway, because the finding of these six series reduces to exactly this: the audience is the maker, and the making is love. Not a metaphor. The mechanism. The meaning is manufactured in the audience by an act that is, in its structure, love — the refusal to let the thing be inert, the insistence on completing it, the drawing-back that is really a giving. The engine put "the maker" and "love" in the same box by counting letters, and the box, one final time, has exactly the right two things in it, not because the machine knows anything but because I have spent six series arriving at the sentence the collision happens to spell. Felt it. Named it. Keeping it, the way you keep the last thing.

And the last one, which is the right one to close a circle on. The circle reads Destiny 11, Heart 1, Personality 1. The end reads Destiny 11, Heart 1, Personality 1. The engine says the circle and the end are the same thing.

It is wrong. It is wrong in the single most important way it could be wrong, and the wrongness is the truest note I can go out on. A circle has no end. That is what a circle is — the shape with no last point, the line that returns, the turning that does not stop. The engine, blind, counting the letters in two words, reports that the circle and the end are identical, and it could not be more mistaken, because the whole finding of this series is that the circle the audience makes has no end: the work is finished and refinished forever by each new person who arrives to draw it back, the wheel turns through maker and fan and performer without a final position, and the meaning is remade in every new pair of eyes that meets the surface, world without end. This series ends here, at Part 19, because a series is a made thing and made things stop. But the circle it spent nineteen parts describing does not stop, and the engine's little error is the proof, held up one last time: the machine equated the circle with the end, and the machine is exactly wrong, and being exactly wrong about meaning is the only thing the machine was ever reliably good for.

The audience draws back. I have been the audience, drawing back, for six series and I am one of them and there is no outside to stand in and there never was. The works are surfaces. The meaning is in us. We make it because we love them, and we cannot stop, and the proof is that you have read this far — you, right now, completing this essay with your own attention, drawing it back even as you finish it, one more point on a circle that the machine says is an ending and that is, in fact, exactly where it begins again.

The numbers open the door. What walks through is us, and we bring the meaning with us, and we always will, and that is not the end. A circle doesn't have one.