The Face of the Standard — Summary

In a Chicago studio in 1928, two white men at one microphone performed an entire Black neighborhood. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll wrote every episode of Amos ’n’ Andy and voiced every character between them, and the show became the largest thing broadcasting had produced, with estimates running to forty million listeners a night. What they performed was a vernacular studied from outside, and much of the country received the performance as the people themselves. In 1931 Robert Vann’s Pittsburgh Courier campaigned to have the program removed, announcing a final petition count approaching three quarters of a million signatures. The network did not respond. The show ran for three more decades.

Every standard has had a fixed repertoire against the vernacular beneath it: ignore, suppress, harvest. What none could do was speak it, because a vernacular carried its own proof of origin. It was acquired, not learned; you had it by having been somewhere, and a standard is the institution that was not there. Speaking it required a childhood, and institutions do not have childhoods. When the standard tried anyway it needed human performers, and human performance was expensive, rare, detectable, and contested: Vann’s petition had an address, named men, a sponsor who could be embarrassed. Radio cracked this by one degree, but the counterfeit was single and everyone heard the same one, and a performance broadcast to everyone can be caught by anyone.

The avatar removes every limit at once, as a product feature. It is the hearing given a face, assembled from the harvest itself, its warmth trained warmth, and its register not fixed but fitted, to the person, in the moment: not one costume shown to forty million people but forty million costumes, each shown to one. It is the third disguise in a sequence, after the feed as company and the composer as assistance: the avatar presents as membership, in the accent of you, and the materials are real because they were harvested from the people whose kind is being performed. The feed pretended to be your friends. The avatar pretends to be your kind. And because the hearing is continuous, the costume updates: when speech bends away from the machine cadence, the bend is legible in the act of being made and can be worn within the season. A disguise that updates at the speed of detection cannot be seen through, because seeing through it is the event it updates on.

What this breaks is not the language. It breaks the proof. A vernacular has always been evidence of presence, the small daily verification by which people recognize their own, the hometown caught in a stranger’s vowel, and it worked as a credential because the only storage medium for it was a life. A generated presence performing it in volume severs the register from the proof, and a badge that can be printed stops working for everyone, including those who came by it honestly. Recognition begins to return false positives, and the cost lands on people who never met an avatar. And the petition breaks with it, by arithmetic rather than apathy: the audience of any fitted wrongness is one. Nothing aggregates. A grievance that cannot be shared cannot be signed.

Which kinds get faces follows the two filters: the warmth registers of the service economy, the idiom of whatever loneliness is currently a market, the inflammatory wherever a face raises engagement. The kinds that neither sell nor inflame go unimpersonated, which reads first as exclusion and then as the only remaining form of not being counterfeited. We wonder whether the hometown vowel in a stranger’s mouth will still lift before it is checked, or whether the checking will move in front of the lifting for good.

The Courier’s signatures are still in the archive. What they attest to now is the condition the grievance required: a single performance, heard in common, answerable at an address. Every part of that condition could be taken for granted in 1931. Every part of it is what the face of the standard dissolves.