It’s Just a F***king Date: Part 2 of a multipart review of a book that isn’t for me
Part 2, or Why the audience for this book is invisible
Why do this? If, as I said in my previous entry, this book is not for me, then why should I write about it? At least partly because I am a close reader of texts - we all are - and it is amusing to me to think critically about the things that I read; and because Greg and Amiira’s book sits in a fascinating and important place in the contemporary culture. This is not a joke.
It’s Just a F***king Date, like every text has three audiences: the ideal audience - the one the author imagines when composing; the real audience - the one that actually reads the book; and the implied audience - the one that a reader can infer from the text. That last one is fairly complex, so let’s leave it for now. The real audience in this case is me (or you, or anyone who actually reads the book) and I have already dealt with me. So let’s begin with the first audience, the ideal audience.
The ideal audience in the one the author (in this case Greg and Amiira) imagines when they write the book. When one writes one must imagine the person to whom they will write. It is absolutely necessary, and one of the things that makes a good writer is the ability to imagine this audience with precision and insight. To make an absurd illustrative example, imagine a writer who is able to write fluently in both French and Arabic. That author will have to decide whether or not her ideal audience, the one who she most wants to reach, speaks French or Arabic in order to begin composing her work. The work has not yet been written and so the audience does not exist yet in fact. The audience must be imagined by the author before writing in order to choose the correct language. It is the first decision she will make and it is fundamental.
This ideal audience is necessary for a writer to proceed. But it only ever really exists in the moment of writing. It’s not real, it’s ideal. It is a constructed entity that is imagined into being as an act of creation just as fundamental as the act of composition itself. It’s a sort of remanent, a by-product of the creative process that gets discarded once publication begins. But it is still there as a proposition the author makes about the importance of their work. It says, “This is the audience I have identified as needing attention, this is the group I have decided exists and deserves talking to.”
The real audience is the one that reads the book. I mean, in real life. It is composed of the actual humans who encounter the work, either directly (by reading it) or mediated (by hearing about, reading a summary, or reading a review). A mediated audience can still have knowledge and form opinions about the work. Most people who know “Here’s lookin’ at you kid” probably have not actually seen Casablanca, but remain an audience for it of sorts.
This is the problem for any author. Because a lot of people who the real audience comprises are not in the ideal audience and will receive the work in a different way than the author meant it to be received. French critic Roland Barthes says that the author is “dead” for this reason. To imagine that the author’s intentions are the unifying lens through which we can understanding the “meaning” of a text is to limit that meaning to one context, when really the meaning of a text will depend on the reader’s circumstances and ability to see the “tissue” (in Barthes’ word) of influences and anxieties that make up a text. Authors don’t talk to audiences, they transmit different ideas to different people without a directional hierarchy. This is especially true of “classic” works of literature. I am not who Jane Austen imagined would read Pride and Prejudice, and neither are you. She could not have imagined the social context we live in and the thing is that every audience brings their own assumptions and experiences to a work. Is Austen talking as herself in her time and place, relating an idealized version of courtship, trying to tell a universal love story, examining aesthetic philosophy, or writing a coded text to other women in her class anonymously? We cannot know for certain.
This brings us to the implied audience. The implied audience is the one that you or idea can construct from the book. Since we can never truly know the author’s ideal audience (and that audience might change in the author’s understanding during the writing process and after publication) we, the members of the real audience, can only construct the ideal audience in our heads by trying to imagine what the author was thinking. The implied audience tells us who the author seems to have tried to reach and therefore what kind of messages or goals the author has. If we believe that the author of a tactical fighting manual is trying to reach members of the US military, then that leads to a very different understanding of the work from an implied audience of developing world revolutionaries.
This leads us to why the audience for It’s Just a F***king Date is invisible. The ideal audience is imaginary. It is not real and only exists in the mind of the author. The real audience exists. But because the act of reading is solitary and ephemeral, that audience is real on singly and alone. We do not exist to each other, only to ourselves as readers in the act of reading. And the implied audience is the mirror of the ideal audience. It is also imaginary, but it is being imagined by the real audience. The “audience” is not a discrete thing that can be pointed to and identified.
But we all agree that there must be an audience and that it must be greater in size than one person. This book in particular gives us a great window in order to “see” the invisible audience. It’s Just a F***king Date is a collaborative book. There is not a single, unitary authorial voice. The authorial pronoun is “we” and in some parts the book breaks into two distinct voices, Amiira and Greg.
These representations of multiple, conversational voices identify a group audience that feels, or wants to feel, a kind of solidarity with each other. The use of two voices introduces an ambiguity in the authorial voice that erases the top-down idea that an author talks to the reader and the reader listens. This addresses Barthes’ contention that the hierarchical view of a single author speaking to the reader limits the possible avenues of engagement with the text by erasing the hierarchical authorial voice beforehand. These dual, collaborative voice allows a space for the reader to feel like they have both the right to participate in the narrative like a conversation and that they have the right to reject or disbelieve the author(s). The combination of viewpoints within the text highlights the differences that each reader brings to the text, but also unites them in a dialogue with the authors. The result is an imagined community of real audience members that feel something other than the solitude of reading, but rather something like the emotional engagement of discussion.
Multiple voices could complicate a narrative, introducing an ambiguity that leaves the reader off balance and troubled by the potential for mistake or misinterpretation. This is best exemplified by William Faulkner’s use of multiple narrative voices in The Sound and Fury. There the many narrative voices obscure the author himself and introduce the idea that a radical ambiguity exists in all narrative, calling into question the ability of any of us to truly understand events after the fact, up to and including historical events and the truth of our own lives. This does not seem to be Amiira and Greg’s purpose. Instead the multiple voices reinforce the one message: date’s are important for what they are, but not to be taken seriously as life events. They are a tool for you to get to the kinds of emotional positions that you desire. Likewise, the multiple narrators are a tool to excavate the kind of audience interaction that the authors are looking for. In this case it creates an atmosphere of dialogue. This is both comforting, and it invites the advice-seeker to learn through experience (their own, and the experiences of Amiira and Greg equally) and not by being taught a set of unbreakable rules by an all-knowing narrator. This in turn seems to serve two important goals of the book. First, that the reader ought to become self-reliant and independent of negative social expectations and influences. And second, that the reader should feel like they are not alone, and instead are members of a supportive group whose separate experiences can be shared openly. This emphasis on an open narrative structure and collaborative learning fosters a solidarity among the advice-seekers who can gain strength from this new association instead of feeling adrift and pressured into other, more destructive associations.
More in Part 3: or, Gender and the New Romantics