Editor’s note: This essay was originally delivered as a craft lecture. Part of the material was originally included in Dederer’s book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Knopf 2023).
The need to lock the door is becoming greater and greater. Whole books are written about setting down our phones, husbanding our attention.
We simply know too much. The amount we know disrupts our experience as the audience for art. The exchange that happens between artist and audience has become mitigated and therefore our communion with art has become disrupted.
The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about an artist’s life. It’s something that happens to us. We turn on Seinfeld and laugh at Kramer, and whether we want to or not, we think of Michael Richards’s racist rant. This movement toward knowingness began with the birth of mass media, grew in the last century, and has flowered in our moment. There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.We bought albums for no better reason than the fact we liked their covers. We lost hour after hour at the record store, flipping through the bins until something—a font or a photo or a mood—caught our attention. An album was an inscrutable object. If it wasn’t worthy of Rolling Stone magazine’s notice, then it was well-nigh impossible to know what exactly you were holding in your hands.
Biography was elusive. A friend tells of haunting the bookstore as a child in the late 1970s and early 1980s, hoping, hoping there would be a new book about the Beatles. But there never was.
It was hard even to find the art itself. You had to hunt. We had a vague unsettled sense there was art occurring, if you could only get your hands on it. Maybe it felt different in New York or some other capital, but in Seattle—a briny backwater—you sort of groped your way toward cultural knowledge.
Certain documents that gave you information about art were imbued with an almost occult power.
Friends sent postcards of paintings they’d seen at faraway museums; these were hoarded and pinned to my bulletin board.
In my dorm room at college, I kept on my desk a biography of Diane Arbus, a book I handled like a fetish object. She’d been a person. Imagine that.
As a teenager, I got a job at the newsstand in Seattle’s University District. Between customers I endlessly thumbed through the British magazines NME and Melody Maker and i-D, looking for signs of life (and music) elsewhere. Occasionally I purchased a copy, and hung on to it for months or years.
From my high school history teacher, I borrowed—okay, stole—a copy of the cultural history Fin-de-Siècle Vienna by one Carl Schorske. This was another fetish object. Remember, you could not see images of art on the internet. Carl Schorske was as a god to me. A cultural historian. It sounded like a dreamy way to spend one’s life. I ran my fingertips over the reproductions of Klimt and Schiele paintings, images that had not yet become shopworn by millions of clicks.
Most of what I knew about movies I learned from my obsessive reading of the newsprint calendar from the Neptune repertory theater. Each calendar day got a little square describing the scheduled screening; from that grid, with its tight little paragraphs, I learned about George Cukor and Eraserhead and Sam Peckinpah and I Am Curious (Yellow).
Such documents were important in finding out about the mere existence of works of art, let alone the biographies of their makers.
Things have turned around now. We know too much about everything; we have become collapsed with the makers of the art we consume.
The phrase “parasocial relationship” is a previously somewhat obscure sociological term that has been batted about the internet with greater and greater frequency—a spreading usage reflecting the increase in the phenomenon it describes: the belief that we have real emotional connections with the artists whose work we love.
We all know how this feels. It’s a different feeling from simply loving an artist’s work—it’s the feeling that you know this artist personally, as a friend, and what’s more, they possess the same knowledge of you. You are immersed in their biography and by some strange irrational emotional logic you believe that they too are immersed in your biography. It’s a piece of obviousness that the internet has exacerbated this false-yet-extremely-real-feeling connection; indeed it could be said that this feeling of connection is the main product of social media; the commodity it is selling and re-selling.
If that sounds creepy, well, it is, a little. This intense engagement with the biographies of the famous can be fun, but like many fun things, it isn’t necessarily healthy. In a 2010 paper on the nature of parasocial relationships, the sociologist John Durham Peters explores the way the phenomenon arose in the era of broadcast journalism. Radio and TV broadcasters seemed to be directly addressing each person in the audience—a kind of address that was a break, historically speaking, from previous forms of public speaking, when a speaker or actor would address a crowd en masse. It was hard not to feel these broadcasters were speaking directly to you! Peters delivers a stunningly deadpan line: “How we take broadcast personae is a measure of mental health.” In other words, our brains aren’t necessarily well equipped to handle this feeling of being spoken to directly even as the speaker is actually addressing multitudes. Combined with our extensive knowledge of celebrity biography—knowledge we inhale as much as acquire—this leads to massive category errors.
We now exist in a structure where we are defined, in the context of capital, by our status as consumers. This is the power that is afforded us. We respond—giddily—by making decisions about taste and asserting them. We become obsessed with this thing, mega-fans of that. We act like our preferences matter, because that is the job capitalism has given us. And here’s the funny thing—our choices and our preferences do matter, because something has to. Our selves are constructed from the shitty stuff of consumption, but we remain feeling people nonetheless. We feel things about people who don’t know us (and like protagonists in a terrible late-capitalist love triangle, they themselves are probably busy feeling things for people who don’t know them).
The idea of connecting with the other in a bodiless fashion (the basis for the entire internet economy) has been the dream of technology since its earliest days. According to Peters, the early pioneers of radio technology were preoccupied with how transmissions could flow directly from one brain to another.
The ideal, for early technologists, was telepathy: the ethereal transmission of thoughts, the most elegant solution possible to long-distance human connection (or any human connection). All distance between us, collapsed, just like that.
The problem with broadcasting, or with art, is that the flow only occurs in one direction. From the speaker to the receiver; from the artist to the audience. Telepathy, perfect union, is what we seek. Art—unlike broadcasting or the internet—becomes a meaningful stand-in for that union. The artist undergoes the rigor of making, and that creates the conditions for the audience to consume. The audience member sets aside her own ego, her own self, and participates in the dream built by the artist. There is a right relationship there—the relationship takes place on the page or the canvas. Parasocial relationships don’t operate in that way, though. They create a category error for the consumer: a belief in a relationship that exists outside the art.
We’re all wandering around in a mistaken daze of failed telepathy.
This can benefit the artist (she sells more books); but mostly it benefits tech behemoths that monetize these relationships and—in the words of the social psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff—use your information to trade on “behavioral futures markets.” In this sense, all of us who participate in parasocial relationships are workers creating money for somebody else.
In other words, we’re making a rod for our own backs, building an economy that is stealing from us, and the thing that it’s stealing from us is attention.
People ask me what I learned from publishing my 2023 book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, and honestly the biggest takeaway is that I wish I knew less. Wish I was not so enmeshed with the art I’m consuming. Wish I could return to those days when a book came to me through the ether, utterly unknown.
I was in New York the week the book launched. At a bookstore, I happened to meet Carrie Brownstein from the band Sleater-Kinney and also the show Portlandia. Sleater-Kinney was on tour and she had a day off between shows. I asked her what she was up to in New York and she said she was walking around the city looking to find art that she knew absolutely nothing about.
This seemed to me an incredible plan. A way to escape the attention economy, or at least try to. I decided to follow suit whenever possible. What is gained by this course of action, or rather this course of attention? Some quality of real telepathy, some true collapse with the artist. For an audience member, that kind of attention has all kinds of benefits, including pleasure. For a writer or artist, that kind of attention and connection to the work has another kind of benefit. Artists need influences. We don’t work alone. We work in connection to other artists. If we are preoccupied with the biography of the artist; if we are lost in a haze of parasociality (not sure if that’s an actual word), then lose the ability to find out more about ourselves as writers or artists from the work itself. It’s very important to protect that personal response to the work; to understand what moves us, to allow ourselves to be influenced.
Too often we are preoccupied by the story of the artist surrounding the work—we are preoccupied by the moral feeling we have about the artist. In fact, one of the most valuable things an audience member or artist or writer can do is try to relearn how to respond to art; how to love it. How to find it beautiful. We don’t make decisions about beauty. Beauty happens to us. In a 1995 interview, the critic Dave Hickey distinguished between the beautiful and beauty. “The beautiful is a social construction. It’s a set of ambient community standards as to what constitutes an appropriate visual configuration. It’s what we’re supposed to like. Beauty is what we like, whether we should or not, what we respond to involuntarily.”
Exterior forces want to tell us what is beautiful; we must resist. Hickey goes on: “Beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities. Communities of desire, if you wish.” This is another way to say fandoms. Beauty—our experience of it, rather than our idea of it–is a powerful force, an emotional force.
A writer must learn to recognize this force. She has to learn to love what she alone loves, not what she is supposed to love or what is correct to love. And then she must begin to allow herself to be influenced by it. From that real relationship to the work, communities of desire can grow—she can find her fellow people, her fellow audience members and she can become more than someone who is locked into a social construction and a commercial dynamic. I have seen this happen in my own life. The more I allow myself to be influenced by the kind of work I really love, the more I am able to find a cohort of writers and a cohort of readers with whom I feel genuine community.
That requires me to focus less on what I know about the artist, and more on what I find in the book itself.
Parasocial relationships keep us in a funny in-between place, where we are not quite alone, not quite experiencing privacy, but we’re not experiencing the real union of subjugating ourselves to an artist’s vision. We are getting the worst of both worlds.
So we must learn to lock the door of our attention. How is this done? I am not quite sure, except, as in so many cases, by becoming aware of the problem. Inspired by Carrie Brownstein, I now go to the movies absolutely unburdened by almost all knowledge of the film. (Boy, was Poor Things a shocker.) I mark up books with a pen as a way of creating a thread between me and the author. In order to do that, strangely enough, I need to forget the author’s biography. I need to experience the self, her self, that exists only and forever on the page. Not because I believe in some bullshit assertion about separating the art from the artist, but because I need the art—I need the influence—more than I need the woman or her biography
This kind of influence interrupts the very idea of ownership of art. As Jonathan Lethem writes in his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence”:
“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.”
This is how language creates a shared experience: In her memoir Idiophone, while trying to envision a new way of making art, Amy Fusselman meditates on the game of telephone. Everyone has played it: A word or phrase is whispered from person to person around a circle, until it arrives back where it started, having turned into an entirely new word or phrase, as if by magic. What this means, Fusselman suggests, is:
“Telephone is not a game about a single person having an important idea.
Telephone is a game about the movement of ideas and the movement of language across and through people.
Telephone isn’t about one all-important writer flapping their handmaiden-hands alone in a room…
It requires the absence of a single territorial author-mind.”
This kind of communion—where we inhale another’s memory, where we embrace and adopt another’s experience—can be thought of as anti-capitalist, the absence of a single territorial author-mind. As audience members, we are not mere consumers. As artists, we are not mere protectors of copyright. Instead, we are caught in a web of influence—if only we would let ourselves really feel it. Paradoxically enough, it is only by locking the door against information, against biography, against parasocial relationships that we can come to this place of connection.
