Fandom

Identities and Communities in a Mediated World

Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, Cornel Sandvoss

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814732380
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

We are all fans. Whether we log on to Web sites to scrutinize the latest plot turns in Lost, “stalk” our favorite celebrities on Gawker, attend gaming conventions, or simply wait with bated breath for the newest Harry Potter novel—each of us is a fan. Fandom extends beyond television and film to literature, opera, sports, and pop music, and encompasses both high and low culture.

Fandom brings together leading scholars to examine fans, their practices, and their favorite texts. This unparalleled selection of original essays examines instances across the spectrum of modern cultural consumption from Karl Marx to Paris Hilton, Buffy the Vampire Slayer to backyard wrestling, Bach fugues to Bollywood cinema¸ and nineteenth-century concert halls to computer gaming. Contributors examine fans of high cultural texts and genres, the spaces of fandom, fandom around the globe, the impact of new technologies on fandom, and the legal and historical contexts of fan activity. Fandom is key to understanding modern life in our increasingly mediated and globalized world.

Part I

Fan Texts

From Aesthetic to Legal Judgments

1

The Death of the Reader?

Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture

Cornel Sandvoss

Concerns over meaning and aesthetic value have continually haunted media and cultural studies. In many ways the field of fan studies epitomizes these concerns. The relative neglect of the question of aesthetic value (see also Hills, this volume) has made the field of media and cultural studies (hereafter cultural studies) a popular target as a “Mickey Mouse” subject. On the one hand, this is, quite literally, true: fan studies have focused on popular texts from horror films via sports events to, indeed, comics. Beyond this, however, the notion of a “Mickey Mouse” subject implies a lack of depth and theoretical rigor. It is on this level that it remains most hurtful, especially when such criticism is reiterated by those in neighboring disciplines such as literary theory. Echoing such themes and pointing to structuralism paving the way for the rise of cultural studies, Eagleton accuses the new discipline of taking advantage of the fact that,

methodologically speaking, nobody quite knew where Coriolanus ended and Coronation Street began and constructed an entirely fresh field of enquiry which would gratify the anti-elitist iconoclasm of the sixty-eighters[….] It was, in its academicist way, the latest version of the traditional avant-garde project of leaping barriers between art and society, and was bound to make its appeal to those who found, rather like an apprentice chef cooking his evening meal, that it linked classroom and leisure time with wonderful economy. (Eagleton 1996: 192)

If Eagleton’s words were addressed to the discipline as a whole, nowhere do they reverberate more loudly than in fan studies. Fan studies have indeed eroded the boundaries between audiences and scholars, between fan and academic more than any other field (see Hills 2002; Tulloch 2000). To Eagleton, the blurring of these formerly distinct categories has led to a decline in analytic depth and an ideological stagnation: “what happened in the event was not a defeat for this project, which has indeed been gaining institutional strength ever since, but a defeat for the political forces which originally underpinned the new evolutions in literary theory” (1996: 192). Eagleton’s critique raises a number of important questions: have fan studies unduly neglected aesthetic value and thus become complicit in the decline of literary quality and theory alike? Have sociological studies of fan audiences in their emphasis on the micro over the macro, on fans in their subcultural context over wider social relations, undermined progressive traditions and forms of radical enquiry, as Bryan Turner (2005) has recently suggested? Are fan studies unwittingly part of a revisionist wave that has suffocated the final sparks of 1960s radicalism? Or is Eagleton’s critique just the bitter réplique of a scholar who in the shifting sands of history sees the scholarly foundations of his discipline running through his hands, witnessing the dunes of social, cultural, economic, and technological relations upon which all intellectual projects are built shifting from his field of inquiry to another?

In order to answer these questions by comparing the traditions and aims of literary theory with those of fan studies, we need to find a point of—if not compatibility—convertibility between these two fields. This point is found in the shared essence of both disciplines: the analysis and interpretation of meaning in the study of texts and their readings.

Texts and Textuality

While both disciplines share a focus on texts and the meanings that evolve around them, they already diverge in their definition of what actually constitutes a “text.” Our common understanding of texts is rooted in the idealization and imagination of closed forms of textuality that have shaped the study of written texts from the rise of modern aesthetics in Enlightenment philosophy via the Romantics, who “denied any influence from previous writers and asserted the text’s utter uniqueness” (Gray 2006: 20), to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological search for the author’s pure intent in literary texts. “Textual studies” have thus, as Gray notes, “a long history of fetishizing the text as a solitary, pristinely autonomous object, and this notion of textuality has exerted considerable pressure, particularly on literary and film studies” (2006: 19–20). In fan studies, however, the task of defining the text has been rather more complex. To understand the origin of this difficulty, we need to briefly draw the admittedly crude distinction between form and content. Take the following textual fragment or statement: “My name is Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D.” To those who share English as a common language, the content of this brief sentence appears clear, but it is quite impossible for anyone, myself included, to describe its content in any form other than its meaning or, even if I could, to communicate this content to others. When I summarize the content of this statement as “someone is called Serenus Zeitblom, and he has a doctorate in philosophy,” I am already describing the meaning I have generated in the act of the reading. All encounters with textual structures thus require ideational activity that inherently ties the text to its reader. No text (and content) exists independently (see Fish 1981; Holub 1992; Iser 1978).

This is, of course, hardly news. Yet, while we cannot separate content from meaning, we can observe how meaning changes in different forms of communication. If we set the same utterance or textual fragment into different contexts, its meaning, or at least its possible meanings, change. In the case of face-to-face interaction—let’s say we meet someone on the street who introduces himself with the above words—the someone who is or claims to be Serenus Zeitblom is effectively limited to the person who has been seen or heard to make this statement. Here, the reciprocity of the text limits its possible meanings. The reader of this chapter in contrast will have found it more difficult to identify who the name points to when reading the above statement. The utterer of these words does not correspond with the author, leaving you with countless possibilities as to who the possessive pronoun in “my name” refers to. It is this fundamental difference in form between written and spoken texts that Paul Ricœur accredits with what he labels as “difficulties of interpretation”: “in face-to-face interaction problems [of interpretation] are solved through a form of exchange we call conversation. In written texts discourse has to speak for itself” (1996: 56). Our observation that texts change meaning through their form, in conjunction with Ricœur’s assessment of the changing role of authorial intent in written texts, points to two important differences between fan texts and literary texts. First, in studying media audiences, we are confronted with a variety of different textual forms around which fandom evolves: alongside written texts, these include audio and sound, visual texts, audiovisual texts, and hypertexts.

The second difference concerns the way fan texts are formed across these media. Here, I owe the reader three belated definitions of “fans,” “texts,” and “fan texts.” In my earlier work, I defined “fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (Sandvoss 2005a: 8). In its inclusion of both texts and narratives, this definition mirrored a level of uncertainty. While we all have a sense of who fans are, conceptualizing the textual basis of their fandom seems far more difficult. Hills (1999) distinguishes between popular texts (fictional) and popular icons (factual) as possible fan objects. On the level of the author, this distinction is of course correct. In the cases of literary fandom (see Brooker 2005b) or fandom based on television shows, texts are written or controlled by copyright and license holders; they are in one form or another authored. In contrast, we do not describe popular icons such as musicians, actors, or athletes, or other fan objects such as sport teams, as deliberately authored texts. Even where those in the center of the public gaze aim to maintain a public and hence staged persona, fans’ interests often focus on what lies behind the public façade, as is exemplified in the title of celebrity biographies from The Real David Beckham (Morgan 2004) to Albert Goldman’s (2001) notorious The Lives of John Lennon. However, the popularity of such biographies already signals that we cannot rely on authorship as a defining element of textuality; indeed, the success of these books is often not based on their actual author, who may be unknown to readers, but on the subject—the object of fandom. Whether a given fan object is found in a novel, a television program, or a popular icon, fan objects are read as texts on the level of the fan/reader. They all constitute a set of signs and symbols that fans encounter in their frames of representation and mediation, and from which they create meaning in the process of reading. Consequently, what is needed is a broad definition of texts that is not based on authorship, but on texts as frames of realizable meanings that span across single or multiple communicative acts, including visual, sound-based, and written communication. Yet, what the example of celebrity biographies shows is that we need to reflect on textual boundaries too. As we remove authorship as the essence of textuality, the notion of the single text that can be distinguished from other texts becomes impossible to maintain, as it is now not by the producer but by the reader that the boundaries of texts are set (Sandvoss 2005a; 2005b).

The capability of media audiences to define textual boundaries is inextricably linked with their media of delivery. The home-based and mobile media through which most fan texts are consumed—television, radio, magazines, walkmen and iPods, the Internet—are firmly entrenched in the structure of everyday life in late industrialism, embedding the act of reading in a social and technological context that is not only nonreciprocal (Thompson 1995), but in which textual boundaries at the point of production are evaded through the technological essence of such media as spaces of flow (see Williams 1974; see also Corner 1999). Television finds its true narrative form in seriality (Eco 1994), while the hypertextuality of the Internet forces the reader/user into the active construction of the text’s boundaries. Moreover, through notions of genre and the capitalist imperative of market enlargements that drives them, textual motives from narratives to fictional characters and popular icons are constituted and reconstituted across different media. A sports fan will read and watch texts in reference to his or her favorite team on television, on the radio, in newspapers, in sport magazines, and, increasingly, on the Internet; soap fans (Baym 2000) turn to the World Wide Web and entertainment magazines as part of their fandom; the fan of a given actress will watch her in different films but also follow further coverage in newspapers or read the abovementioned celebrity biographies. Fan objects thus form a field of gravity, which may or may not have an urtext in its epicenter, but which in any case corresponds with the fundamental meaning structure through which all these texts are read. The fan text is thus constituted through a multiplicity of textual elements; it is by definition intertextual and formed between and across texts as defined at the point of production.

The single “episodes” that fans patch together to form a fan text are usefully described by Gray, drawing on Genette, as “paratext” that “infringes upon the text, and invades its meaning-making process” (2006: 36). As the fan text takes different forms among different fan groups—namely, the audience sections “fans,” “cultists,” and “enthusiasts,” with their different use of mass media, which Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) describe—the balance between urtext and paratexts changes. In Gray’s words, to the degree that “we actually consume some texts through paratexts and supportive intertexts, the text itself becoming expendable” (2006: 37). What follows is a radically different conceptualization of “texts” than in literary theory. Individual texts at the point of production are part of a wider web of textual occurrences and the meanings derived from them. These textual elements are read in the context of other texts. Intertextuality is thus the essence of all texts. While many contemporary fan texts such as The Simpsons, on which Gray focuses, or South Park are based on parody and thus more ostensibly intertextual than others, meaning construction through text and context does not by itself allow us to distinguish between literary and mediated texts. The field of comparative literature, for instance, draws on the long-standing tradition of motive and theme research. Yet in each and every case, the textual field in which the individual text is positioned will allow the reader to construct different meanings.

On a most obvious level, this relates to existing knowledge. Those readers with an interest in twentieth-century German literature will not have been quite as clueless about who the abovementioned Serenus Zeitblom was. They will have recognized the sentence “My name is Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D.,” as the opening sentence of the second chapter of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, in which the narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, apologizes for his belated introduction. It is then a form of preexisting interest or what we might call an object of fandom (the work of Thomas Mann) that allows us to create meaning through contextualization that will have remained hidden to other readers—just as if the sentence in question had been “My name is Slim Shady,” different paratexts would have come into play for different fan groups. Beyond this, Mann’s Doktor Faustus serves as a lucid example of intertextuality in literary works in their literary and multimediated context: “the life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a friend,” as the subtitle of its English translations goes, is an adaptation of the Faust motive—the selling of one’s soul to the devil for earthly talents, powers, or knowledge—that spans through all forms of textuality in European literature and storytelling, beginning with the late medieval German myth via Goethe’s Urfaust to Bulgakov’s Macmep u Mapzapuma, poetry (Heine’s Der Doktor Faust), theater such as Paul Valéry’s fragment Mon Faust, music by Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, and the Einstürzenden Neubauten, filmic adaptations, including Murnau’s Faust: Eine Deutsche Volkssage, to comic supervillains such as DC Comics’s Felix Faust, to name only a few.¹ Beyond such direct adaptations, the Faust motive resurfaces in a plethora of popular texts including George Lucas’s Star Wars. Yet, Mann’s Doktor Faustus is not only part of an intertextual web; it also, like Mann’s preceding work, is based on an ironic gesture of the narrator, the by now familiar Serenus Zeitblom, which takes back the narrative and the pretense of representing the real; a gesture in Mann’s work that according to Adorno (1991) reflects the crisis of the narrator in the modern novel as a direct consequence of the proliferation of new modes and media of representation, namely, film (see also Benjamin 1983). The difference between intertextuality in mediated and literary texts is thus one of degree rather than kind. For both sets of textuality, the crisis of the text (in its boundaries at the point of production) is thus the crisis of the narrator as literary and actual figure: the author him- or herself.

The fan scholar, coincidentally, is thus no more or less an “apprentice chef” than the philologist. Both rely on intertextual knowledge to interpret text and context. To the degree that the fan text is constituted on the level of consumption, the reading position of the fan is actually the premise for identifying the text and its boundaries—rather than to an apprentice chef, the fan scholar compares to a restaurant critic, who to do his job also needs to know how to cook.

On a wider point, our reflections of what constitutes a text coincide with the critical reflections on authorship and textuality in structuralism and poststructuralism. The study of fans further underlines a process of growing intertextuality, multimediated narrative figures, and multiple authorship that has eroded the concept of the author that, as Barthes (1977) notes, reached its zenith in the formation of high modernity as the culmination of a rationalist, positivist capitalist system. It is indeed Barthes’s analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine that accurately prefigures the condition of textuality as decentered and refocused on the level of the fan/reader I have sought to describe here:

A text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning […] but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash[….] A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (Barthes 1977: 146–48)

If the poststructuralist turn in Barthes’s work furnishes us with a conceptual basis for the study and analysis of fandom, it is his earlier work and structuralism in general that allowed cultural studies to extend the study of interpretation and meaning beyond literary texts. As Eagleton notes resentfully (1996: 192), “structuralism had apparently revealed that the same codes and conventions traversed both ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, with scant regard for the classical distinction of value.” When Eagleton laments the disappearing boundaries between Coriolanus and Coronation Street, he has thus already identified the guilty party. Eagleton’s critique of course fails to acknowledge that the formation of structuralism was itself a reaction to changing forms of textuality that much of literary theory had been unable to address, continuing the study of literary texts as if they existed in splendid isolation. This, however, is not to dismiss Eagleton’s concern over value out of hand. Many studies illustrate how fans themselves—from Tulloch and Jenkins’s (1995) and McKee’s (2001b) Dr. Who to Cavicchi’s (1998) Springsteen and Thomas’s (2002) The Archers fans—are concerned with value. Yet, if Eagleton’s comparison between cultural studies and literary theory is ill judged for lacking recognition of the multiple methodological grounds for the rise of the former and the inability to address new forms of textuality of the latter, his warning that in its heightened emphasis on structuralist and poststructuralist approaches cultural st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Fan Texts
• Part II Beyond Pop Culture
• Part III Spaces of Fandom
• Part IV Fan Audiences Worldwide
• Part V Shifting Contexts, Changing Fan Cultures
• Part VI Fans and Anti-Fans
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index