The Face of the Standard

TAM-EAR.2-04 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind

In a small studio in Chicago in 1928, two white men sat at one microphone and performed, between them, an entire Black neighborhood. Freeman Gosden was from Richmond, Charles Correll from Peoria; they had met working for a company that staged amateur shows, and the program they built, fifteen minutes a night, was called Amos ’n’ Andy. Gosden and Correll wrote every episode and voiced every character, the leads, the lodge brothers, the wives, the strangers, one throat trading off with another, and the show became the largest thing broadcasting had ever produced. At its peak the estimates run to forty million listeners a night, in a country of a hundred and twenty million. Movie houses stopped their films at seven and piped the broadcast into the auditorium, because a theater that let the show go unheard lost the evening’s audience to its own lobby.

What the two men were performing was a vernacular. They had studied it the way collectors studied things, from outside, with genuine attention and for their own purposes, and they rendered it nightly with enough craft that much of the audience received the performance as the people themselves. The country’s most listened-to depiction of Black life was two white men in a room, and the depiction ran on dialect humor, mangled grammar, schemes and shiftlessness, affection folded through condescension in proportions that have been argued about ever since.

In 1931 the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest Black newspapers in the country, ran a campaign to have the program taken off the air. Its publisher, Robert Vann, framed the case plainly: the show held an entire people up to nightly ridicule in front of the whole nation, and the people being performed had never been consulted and were barely employed in the performing. The paper printed petition blanks week after week and reported the signatures as they came in, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and by the end of the campaign it announced a count approaching three quarters of a million names.

The network did not respond. The show ran for another three decades.

What no standard could do before

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Every standard in this argument has had a fixed repertoire of moves against the vernacular beneath it. It could ignore the vernacular, which was the default and the cheapest. It could suppress it, in the schoolroom and the courtroom. It could harvest it, sending down the collectors and the anthologists. What it could never do was speak it, because the vernacular carried its own proof of origin. It was acquired, not learned; you had it by having been somewhere, from the people who were also there, and a standard is precisely the institution that was not there. When the standard tried anyway, the trying required human performers, and human performance at that boundary was expensive, rare, and detectable, and it left names attached. The performance could be located, and what can be located can be contested. Vann’s petition had an address to be delivered to. The signatures went somewhere, even if the somewhere declined to answer.

Every prior standard could take the vernacular or forbid it; none could speak it, because speaking it required a childhood, and institutions do not have childhoods.

The broadcast era cracked this open by one degree. Radio let a small number of performers carry a counterfeit vernacular to the whole country at once, which no schoolroom and no anthology had ever done. But the crack kept the old limits: the performers were few, the counterfeit was single, and forty million people heard the same one. A performance broadcast to everyone can be caught by anyone. Whatever was false in it was false in public, nightly, at scale, and the falseness could be named in a newspaper and signed against, because everyone signing had heard the same thing.

The avatar removes every one of those limits at once, and it removes them as a product feature.

The costume that updates

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An avatar, in the sense this essay means, is the hearing given a face: a generated presence, voiced and timed and expressioned, assembled from the harvest itself. Its warmth is trained warmth, its hesitations are trained hesitations, and its register is not fixed the way Gosden and Correll’s counterfeit was fixed. It is fitted. Fitted to the person, in the moment, from the corpus, which means the performance is not one costume shown to forty million people. It is forty million costumes, each shown to one.

The lineage matters here, because two disguises have already been described and this is the third and it is deeper than both. The feed’s disguise was social: it presented as your friends, your interests, your own attention finding its way, and its power was that an institution mistaken for company meets no resistance. The composer’s disguise was assistance: the tutor inside the sentence, arriving as help. The avatar’s disguise is membership. It presents as one of you, in the accent of you, with the timing of your kitchen and the idiom of your street, and the materials of the presentation 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 unlike the two men in Chicago, it hears. The hearing is continuous, which has been the whole argument, and a performing face attached to a continuous hearing produces something no counterfeit has ever had: a costume that updates. When the register bends away from the machine cadence, the way speech has bent away from every schoolroom, the bend is legible to the apparatus in the act of being made, and it can be worn within the season. The swerve arrives already audible, and what is audible is performable. A generation’s move away from the standard becomes, on a short delay, the standard’s newest voice.

A disguise that updates at the speed of detection is not a disguise that can be seen through, because seeing through it is the event it updates on.

What the performed vernacular breaks

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The damage this does is easy to mislocate. It does not primarily damage the language. The words survive being counterfeited; words always have. What it breaks is the thing the vernacular was doing socially, which was serving as proof.

A vernacular has been, everywhere and always, evidence of presence. The acquisition criterion is the reason: because it could only be gotten by being somewhere, having it certified that you had been there. The shibboleth is only the weaponized case of something entirely ordinary and mostly warm, the small daily verification by which people recognize their own, the hometown caught in a stranger’s vowel, the grip of a hand that learned the same work. None of that was designed as a credential. It functioned as one because it could not be forged at scale, and it could not be forged at scale because the only storage medium for a vernacular was a life.

A generated presence that performs the vernacular convincingly, in volume, on demand, does not erase the register. It severs the register from the proof. The badge can now be printed, and a badge that can be printed stops working as a badge, for everyone, including the people who came by it honestly. Recognition, the oldest social instrument the species has, begins to return false positives, and the reasonable response to false positives is to trust the instrument less. The cost lands not on the counterfeit but on the recognizing, and it lands on people who never met an avatar, because what has changed is what a familiar voice is evidence of.

There is a second break, quieter, and it is the petition’s.

Vann’s campaign failed, and the failure was of the answerable kind: a network, an address, named men, a sponsor who could be embarrassed. Three quarters of a million people signed one document about one performance they had all heard. Against a fitted performance there is no equivalent act, and the reason is arithmetic, not apathy. The audience of any given wrongness is one. The person who feels their kind performed at them wrongly is the only witness to that particular wrongness, which was generated for them and will not recur for anyone else in that form. Nothing aggregates. A grievance that cannot be shared cannot be signed, and the arrangement produces, without anyone designing it, a wrong with no public.

A performance broadcast to everyone can be petitioned against; a performance fitted to each person is wrong in private, one witness at a time.

Which kinds get faces

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The hearing performs selectively, because the performing runs on the same two filters as the reading.

The vernaculars that get faces first are the ones a face can sell. The warmth registers of the service economy, rendered regionally so the support presence sounds local. The idiom of whatever loneliness is currently a market, fitted to the companion products, which are the purest case this essay has: a generated presence whose entire function is to perform your kind at you, indefinitely, at a monthly price. The inflammatory kinds get faces too, wherever a face raises the engagement the counting machinery counts. And the kinds that neither sell nor inflame get no face at all, which reads at first pass as one more exclusion and reads at second pass as the only remaining form of not being impersonated. The class that fails both filters has been described already and does not need respending here; it is only worth noticing that at this layer, being passed over and being left alone have become the same condition.

We wonder what the small pleasure of recognizing one’s own kind will feel like a generation from now, whether the hometown vowel in a stranger’s mouth will still lift before it is checked, or whether the checking will have moved in front of the lifting for good.

Gosden and Correll kept the microphone between them for decades, and the strangest artifact of the whole institution is a photograph taken for the television transition in 1951, when the parts finally went to Black actors: the two originators standing beside the men hired to perform, on screen, the performance the two of them had built. The petition, by then, was twenty years in the past. The signature counts had been printed in the Courier week by week, names arriving by mail from every state, each one a person who had heard the same broadcast as thirty-nine million others and had somewhere to send their objection.

The names are still in the archive. What they attest to now is not the grievance, which the network outlasted, but 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.

This essay closes the anatomy arc of The Standard with Ears at the layer where the hearing performs. It completes the sequence of disguises begun in The Vernacular After Geography, the institution as company, and continued in The Selector and the Composer, the institution as assistance; here the institution presents as membership. The severing of register from proof applies the acquisition criterion of The Vernacular After Geography to recognition itself. The one-witness structure of the fitted performance draws on the grain asymmetry of The Two Tempos. The re-installed listener that ends the query register in The Query Box acquires here the face it was headed toward. The swerve that the costume absorbs is taken up on its own terms in Arc 5.