Fan Cultures

Matthew Hills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134551989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Emphasising the contradictions of fandom, Matt Hills outlines how media fans have been conceptualised in cultural theory. Drawing on case studies of specific fan groups, from Elvis impersonators to X-Philes and Trekkers, Hills discusses a range of approaches to fandom, from the Frankfurt School to psychoanalytic readings, and asks whether the development of new media creates the possibility of new forms of fandom. Fan Cultures also explores the notion of "fan cults" or followings, considering how media fans perform the distinctions of 'cult' status.

Part IApproaching Fan Cultures

Fan Cultures Between Consumerism and ‘Resistance’

DOI: 10.4324/9780203361337-2

It is not just the imagined subjectivities of the ‘fan’ and the ‘academic’ which clash and imply different moral dualisms, i.e. different versions of ‘us’ (good) and ‘them’ (bad). The imagined subjectivity of the ‘consumer’ is also hugely important to fans as they strive to mark out the distinctiveness of fan knowledges and fan activities. This chapter will therefore examine how ‘good’ fan identities are constructed against a further imagined Other: the ‘bad’ consumer. My aim is to explore how cultural identities are performed not simply through a singular binary opposition such as fan/academic, but rather through a raft of overlapping and interlocking versions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This makes locating cultural ‘power’ or cultural ‘resistance’ in any one group (fans/producers/academics) extremely difficult.

First, though, I want to examine the role that theories of consumption and ‘the consumer’ have played in accounts of fandom, and in fans' own practices. In the second section of the chapter I will go on to argue that the work of Theodor Adorno has been greatly simplified in cultural studies' accounts which have sought to value and celebrate the activities of fans.¹ However, it is not my intention to return to a notion of the fan as ‘cultural dupe’. Instead, I aim to place fan cultures squarely within the processes and mechanisms of consumer culture, given that fans are always already consumers. The third section of the chapter then presents a case study in which I examine what happens to notions of the ‘fan-consumer’ and the ‘fan-producer’ when fan cultures are themselves directly targeted as a niche market. Finally, I examine recent work on Babylon 5 fandom which has been carried out by Kurt Lancaster, work which draws on performance studies rather than cultural studies.

The consumer as other

[F]ans are not true cultists unless they pose their fandom as a resistant activity, one that keeps them one step ahead of those forces which would try to market their resistant taste back to them.

(Taylor 1999:161)

What has given rise to the notion of the ‘resistive’ fan or cultist? I will not argue that this is entirely a fiction of cultural studies researchers seeking to romanticise activeaudiences; specific attributes of cult TV fandom would seem to support the ‘resistive’ label. The dedicated commitments of cult TV fans typically continue long beyond the cancellation of their favoured programmes. This tension between the fans' enduring devotion and the rapid turnover in TV productions is one way in which the cult TV fan can be said to act against the expectations of the TV industry. The fan's emotional investment also results in (and is compounded through) an attention to detail and programme continuity which is often at odds with the producers' need to tell new stories over the duration of a TV series. Fans expect adherence to established tenets, characterisations, and narrative ‘back-stories’, which production teams thus revise at their peril, disrupting the trust which is placed in the continuity of a detailed narrative world by these ‘textual conservationist’ fans.

It is primarily these qualities—as well as an expressed hostility within cult fandoms towards commercialisation and commodification—which have led to the theorisation of cult TV fandom (and other related media fandoms) as somehow anti-consumerist.² This rather one-sided view of fandom (see Cavicchi 1998, especially chapter 3) has tended to minimise the extent to which fandom is related to wider shifts within consumer culture, such as the increase in consumption-based social and communal identities. It has also reduced the significance of consumption and commodification within fan cultures, for example in the potentially curious co-existence within fan cultures of both anti-commercial ideologies and commodity-completist practices.³

As part of this one-sided academic view of fandom, in which fan identities are typically viewed against consumer identities, the place of the specialist retail outlet within fan culture has not been examined. This prior neglect is now receiving some belated correction, for example in the work of Kurt Lancaster (1996). However, it is worth noting that even in his fascinating discussion of the New York branch of Forbidden Planet, Lancaster continues to betray an anxiety over the commodity-status of its contents, moving all too rapidly from the (‘bad’) fan-commodity to the (‘good’) fan-community:

Forbidden Planet is a ‘clearinghouse’ for science fiction commodities that allow people to enter worlds of fantasy…the objects purchased in this store become a means for branching out into other worlds (by reading and fantasising), the participants of which come together in a setting at this bookstore, online, or at a convention.

(Lancaster 1996:34–5)

As well as Lancaster's work on the place of merchandise within fandom, Taylor and Willis (1999:192) include a photograph of the Stoke-on-Trent store ‘Fantasy World’ in their account of fan culture as a type of ‘minority audience’. They observe that ‘within fan cultures there are certain modes of behaviour that are acceptable…activities that are not acceptable are more clearly linked with …dominant capitalist society’ (ibid.). However, this commentary is placed directly below a caption which reads ‘fan groups often consume in specialist shops such as this one’ (ibid.). On the one hand, we are presented with a view of fans as (specialist) consumers, whose fandom is expressed through keeping up with new releases of books, comics and videos. On the other hand,we are told that fans whose practices are ‘clearly linked with’ dominant capitalist society (e.g. they may be trying to sell videos recorded off-air) are likely to be censured within the fan culture concerned. This is not simply a theoretical contradiction; it is an inescapable contradiction which fans live out. While simultaneously ‘resisting’ norms of capitalist society and its rapid turnover of novel commodities, fans are also implicated in these very economic and cultural processes. Fans are, in one sense, ‘ideal consumers’ (Cavicchi 1998:62) since their consumption habits can be very highly predicted by the culture industry, and are likely to remain stable. But fans also express anti-commercial beliefs (or ‘ideologies’, we might say, since these beliefs are not entirely in alignment with the cultural situation in which fans find themselves).

Can this contradiction be resolved by a ‘better’ theory of fan activity? My argument in the next section of this chapter will suggest not: the best we can hope for is a theoretical approach to fandom which can tolerate contradiction without seeking to close it down prematurely. Nor am I suggesting that fans are somehow ‘deluded’ in their anticommercial beliefs. This would also collapse the fans' cultural contradiction into a smooth instance of logical good sense by judging the ‘fan-as-consumer’ position to be true and judging the ‘fan-as-anti-commercial’ position as false. Conventional logic, seeking to construct a sustainable opposition between the ‘fan’ and the ‘consumer’, falsifies the fan's experience by positioning fan and consumer as separable cultural identities. This logic occurs in a number of theoretical models of fandom, particularly those offered up by Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) and Jenkins (1992).

Abercrombie and Longhurst present a ‘continuum’ of audience experiences and identities, ranging from the ‘consumer’ at one end, to the ‘petty producer’ at the other end of the scale, and taking in the ‘fan’, the ‘enthusiast’ and the ‘cultist’ along the way (see 1998:141). Abercrombie and Longhurst's model reproduces exactly the type of moral dualism which places ‘good’ fandom in opposition to the ‘bad’ consumer. They view ‘the consumer’ as somebody who has the least amount of each type of skill that they define and study.⁴ This view of the consumer is an essentially negative one: consumers lack the developed forms of expertise and knowledge that fans, enthusiasts and cultists all possess in ever-increasing and ever-more-specialised forms. Consumers are at the bottom of the pile. Petty producers, for whom ‘the previous enthusiasm becomes a full-time occupation’ (1998:140), are involved in market-organised relations and are able to use their finely-honed skills to produce material professionally which can then be marketed back to their own fan culture.

It might seem odd to suggest that Jenkins's work on fandom participates in a moral dualism of ‘good’ fandom versus ‘bad’ consumption, especially since Jenkins has addressed television fan culture through what he concedes is a ‘counter-intuitive’ lens, beginning from the position that ‘[m]edia fans are consumers who also produce, readers who also write, spectators who also participate’ (1992b:208). This reads like a definite end to any fan-consumption opposition. However, Jenkins's position is complicated by the fact that he revalues the fans' intense consumption by allying this with the cultural values of production: they are ‘consumers who also produce’. But what of fans who may not be producers, or who may not be interested in writing their own fan fiction or filk songs? Surely we cannot assume that all fans are busily producing away? The attempt toextend ‘production’ to all fans culminates in John Fiske's categories of ‘semiotic’ and ‘enunciative’ productivity (1992:37–9) in which reading a text and talking about it become cases of ‘productivity’. This raises the suspicion that the term is being pushed to do too much work, since, short of not watching a programme at all, there appears to be no way of not being ‘productive’ in relation to it (and presumably even the decision not to view would retain an aspect of productivity). What this blanket extension of ‘productivity’ does away with semantically is the tainted and devalued term of ‘consumption’.⁵ But by switching one term for the other, or revaluing fan activities by stressing that fans are consumers who are also (unofficial) producers, the basic valuation of ‘production’ and the basic devaluation of ‘consumption’ continue to be accepted. Fandom is salvaged for academic study by removing the taint of consumption and consumerism.

This type of academic work seemingly colludes with ‘half’ of the fan experience (anticommercial ideology) by writing out or marginalising the other, contradictory ‘half’ (that of the commodity-completist). The contradictoriness of fandom within consumer culture has been examined by a number of writers (Cavicchi 1998; Barker and Brooks 1998; Brooker 1999a, 1999b). But rigid assumptions that fandom and production are valuable, whereas consumption is somehow secondary and lacks value, still need to be contested rather than being used to underpin academic interventions in this area of study.⁶ For as Cavicchi has rightly noted, choosing to discuss fandom either as ‘dependence on, or resistance to, or negotiation with…business’ amounts ‘as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant [to] mistaking the part for the whole, and would [seem to] have more to do with the interpreter's interests than with fan interests’ (1998:63). Janet Staiger has similarly cautioned against cultural theorists' tendency to split fandom into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ components: ‘While most studies of fans emphasize the positive features of exchange and empowerment … I would point out that scholars may need to shift their presumptions even here—although not back to the days when fans were considered pathological spectators… Fandom…cannot be easily bifurcated into good and bad’ (Staiger 2000:54).

Toying with the work of Theodor Adorno…

The work of Theodor Adorno is regularly criticised and dispensed with in academic and academic-fan accounts of fan culture. It is Adorno's perspective on ‘overconsumption’ which is set up and knocked down by Henry Jenkins as the lead-in to his own account of ‘how texts become real’ for their fans (Jenkins 1992:51). Similarly, it is the work of Adorno which is despatched early on in the co-authored work of Tulloch and Jenkins: ‘most of the textual accounts of popular science fiction are embedded in the tradition of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, etc.), with their pessimistic stress on popular culture's tendency to communicate the “common sense” of social order rather than “fantasies” of social change’ (Tulloch in Tulloch and Jenkins 1995a:25).

Adorno and the Frankfurt School theorists are recurrently depicted as elitists, aspessimists, and as ‘unsophisticated’ thinkers intent on demonising mass culture and denying any power or agency to its audiences: ‘Today many people tend to believe that other, more sophisticated approaches to the issue have superseded the Frankfurt School's conception of mass culture as a monstrous and monolithic ideological machine’ (Modleski 1986:156). Open any contemporary textbook and you are likely to be confronted with a statement on the Frankfurt School's arrogance and their view of the ‘passive’ mass audience.⁷ This received wisdom is extremely useful for media studies scholars. It allows researchers to preserve the fiction of ‘linear progress’, i.e. that we definitely now know better than the misguided theorists of the past. However, this version of moral dualism (past views of the passive audience=bad; current views of the active audience=good) resembles an academic version of ‘popular memory’.⁸ Acting as a conservative form of ‘popular memory’, that is, defending the status quo of current theorists' interpretive authority, dismissals of the Frankfurt School carve the history of media studies into a highly reductive ‘then’ and ‘now’: ‘the Frankfurt School and its project are what many in cultural studies feel they must resist in order to consolidate their project’ (Michael 2000:112).

I am not convinced that the simplistic version of Adorno's work which retains wide currency in media studies is particularly useful, beyond its function of legitimating current and ‘superior’ thought.⁹ The selective reading of Adorno means that many helpful links which could be made between Adorno's approach to consumption and the position of the fan as a consumer have been blocked off.

As a starting point to my use of Adorno's work, I will briefly consider how Henry Jenkins (1992a) links Adorno to the ‘toymaker’ in Margery Williams Bianco's fable The Velveteen Rabbit. Jenkins uses the tale of the Velveteen Rabbit as an example of how fans' love for a text can make that text significant in their lives:

Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, who has an interest in preserving the stuffed animal as it was made, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism…yet for the boy, they are traces of fondly remembered experiences, evidence of his having held the toy too close and pet it too often, in short, marks of its loving use.

(Jenkins 1992a:51)

In The Velveteen Rabbit, then, the moral battle is one of the toymaker's authority versus the child's love for his toy rabbit. And in Jenkins's commentary, which takes off from his retelling of the Velveteen Rabbit's tale, it is Adorno's work which stands as the theoretical version of the ‘toymaker’:

Adorno…takes the toymaker's perspective when he describes how prized cultural texts are ‘disintegrated’ through overconsumption as they are transformed from sacred artefacts into ‘cultural goods’…Adorno suggests that musical texts become mere background, lose their fascination and coherence, when they are played too often or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Who’s Who? Academics, fans, scholar-fans and fan-scholars
• Part I Approaching fan cultures
• Part II Theorising cult media
• Conclusion: new media, new fandoms, new theoretical approaches?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index