DISCUSION DE RESULTADOS

Thus far, we have occasionally glimpsed at certain theorists which researchers into fandom and ‘subcultures of consumption’ have themselves drawn on. For his work, Jenkins has made particular use of Michel de Certeau. Kozinets and his peers - sometimes via Redhead - have drawn on

Maffesoli. Fiske notes his particular debt to the work of five theorists: Bourdieu, de Certeau,

Barthes, Hall and Bakhtin.214 _{As they have been particularly drawn on in this dissertation, it shall be} worthwhile at this point to consider in greater depth the ideas of three theorists in particular:

Bourdieu, de Certeau and Maffesoli.

Bourdieu’s work has been much admired by theorists of cultural studies, although the relationship has not been mutual (for a discussion of this, see, eg Robbins: 1991).215 In the context of fandom and subculture, three of Bourdieu’s concepts are particularly important: those of habitus, capital

and field. These are, in fact, interdependent ideas central to Bourdieu’s work as a whole. The

concept of habitus, which Bourdieu first introduced in his study of peasantry in Bearn, and properly developed in his Outline of a Theory of Practice216 with reference to his previous ethnographic research among the Kabyle in Algeria represents an attempt to escape from the tendency of social scientists, as outside observers, to ‘elicit’ solid-seeming, timeless structures from the day to day life of the societies they study.217 In place of this, Bourdieu attempts to produce a way of thinking about how structured conventions such as practices of reciprocal gift giving or killing can emerge out of the time-bounded choices made by individuals living their lives. Bourdieu’s central idea is that individuals in such practical circumstances act tactically to advance their interests within the possibilities pre-set by a subconsciously learned repertoire of cultural behaviours, attitudes and expectations.

Extending this idea to complex industrial societies such as France produces the notion of the ‘field’, which Bourdieu describes as ‘a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning

independent of those of politics and the economy’.218 His concept is explained by Patricia

Thompson in terms of the science fiction idea of the force field - an invisible barrier which shuts off an area to the outside world; and real life physics’ idea of a field as a mathematical space described by vectors, which act as axes of a coordinate system.219

In Bourdieu’s conception of things, the axes of the field are provided in turn by varying levels of different types of capital, which introduces the third key concept. Indeed, if a field is, as Bourdieu suggests, a game without formally set out rules, played tactically but unconsciously220 by players who are guided by their individual habitus, then the object of the game would seem to be the acquisition of the various (to some degree interchangeable) types of ‘capital’ which Bourdieu distinguishes: economic capital (that is, economic resources of more or less universal fungibility), social capital (networks of social obligations), educational capital (qualifications) and, of most specific relevance, cultural capital - meaning the acquisition of tastes and aesthetic competencies indicative of high levels of acceptance in a given field. This latter is in turn divided by Bourdieu into three forms: the ‘embodied state’, the ‘objectified state’ and the ‘institutionalised state’.221

Since Bourdieu sees fields as capable of overlapping and containing one another, this would seem to mean that high value cultural capital in one field (for instance, ownership of certain types of art) might be low value or even worthless in another. For Fiske, fan communities can be seen as fields within the larger field (what Bourdieu would call the ‘field of power’) of society, which, by bounding themselves - sometimes aggressively - against the outside world, are able to add a sense of value to the symbolic capital they possess.222

Michel de Certeau defined himself, when pressed, as a historian,223 and arguably his most important personal work was historiographic. Buchanan,224 laments how de Certeau has become known in the Anglo-Saxon world almost exclusively through his book, The Practice of Everyday Life (accurately:

L’Invention du Quotidien), with subsequent translations of Volume 2 of The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking, The Capture of Speech and Culture in the Plural being presented as ‘companion volumes’. However, it is this work which has been most influential (particularly via Jenkins) in the development of thinking on fandom, and therefore it is primarily with The Practice of Everyday Life which I will now be concerned.

Compared with Bourdieu, de Certeau’s thinking in The Practice of Everyday Life provides a useful contrast. In simple terms, if Bourdieu is concerned with the big sociological question of how large scale social structure arises from individual agency, de Certeau’s main concern is with how – these great cultural systems having come into being – individual ‘users – commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules’,225 are able to survive within them. For de Certeau, this means being able to engage creatively, even subversively with the seemingly humdrum and private activities which make up ‘the quotidian’.

De Certeau’s concern here is with how, by opportunism and cunning, ordinary people are able to score little victories against the ‘technocratic and scriptural’ strategies which seemingly dominate the world they live in, and in this way to make their lives liveable. In doing so, he distinguishes between two kinds of actor (or of action), There is the ‘strategy’, which ‘assumes a place which can be circumscribed as proper’226 and which, by virtue of having a proper place is able to ‘produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces’.227 And on the other hand there is the ‘tactic’ which, ‘because it does not have a place... depends on time’, and ‘can only use, manipulate and divert these

spaces’.228 De Certeau’s vision is about (yet again) the folk-heroic fable of the weak overcoming the strong. And he talks about low income French workers who practice the fine art of diverting office time and resources to little personal projects229 and about native South Americans who, without changing the laws and religious practices imposed on them by their colonial masters, made of them (using De Certeau’s own emphasis), something else.230 _{‘A tactic is determined by the} absence of power, just as a strategy is organised by the postulation of power’. But this does not mean that strategies lack very particular characteristics. By the very fact that they are able to control

space, they are able to effect ‘a triumph of place over time’ - which is to say that they are able to plan, systematically, for the future.231 But their very power makes them vulnerable to trickery. For the rationale of strength is such as to make mere feints impolitic.232

One particularly influential working out of this scheme (the one that names Jenkins’ best known book on fandom) is de Certeau’s notion of reading as ‘poaching’. For de Certeau, writing seems to have inherently totalitatarian potential - a point which (perhaps underscored by his own Jesuit commitment) helps to underscore his concern with the Reformation project of fixing a supposedly corrupt society with recourse to immovable systems of written law. The end of this, he (rather prophetically) states is that a ‘scriptural system moves forward on its own; it becomes self-moving and technocratic; it transforms the subjects that controlled it into operators of the writing machine that orders and uses them: a cybernetic society’.233 _{Against this - and more specifically against the} apparatus ‘mass artistic consumption’,234 he offers the tactical practices of readers as ‘poachers’ who bypass the literal meaning of the elite through the ‘transformation of the social relationships that overdetermine his relation to texts’.235

De Certeau addresses and takes issue with Bourdieu on a number of points. He is suspicious of how, as he sees it, ‘even more clever than usual in this case, Bourdieu, outwitting the practices themselves in order to fix them in the labyrinthine developments of his own language, discerns in them several essential procedures’.236 His argument is that, while Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus appears to offer people agency within culture, it ultimately falls back on ‘the most traditionalist sort of ethnology’, in which culture is rendered ‘coherent’ and ‘unconcious’.237 And yet, it may

nonetheless be argued that Bourdieu and de Certeau’s respective thinking can still be reconciled. As de Certeau himself observes, Bourdieu’s theory ultimately explains how culture perpetuates and structures itself, in spite of being produced, in the final analysis, by individual agency. By contrast, de Certeau’s thinking relates to another trend which is equally present: the way in which individuals gain by subtly subverting these structures, and by ‘colonising’ those dominant practices which have

As theorists have moved on from the the idea of subcultures as relatively rigidly defined groupings within a grand, Marxist scheme, so some have turned238 to the ‘neo-tribal’ sociology of Michel Maffesoli and, in particular as found in his book The Time of the Tribes.239 If Bourdieu is concerned with the grand sociological question (alongside other major contemporaries such as Giddens)240, of how apparently stable social structures emerge from individual level behaviour; and if de Certeau is concerned with the way in which individuals creatively take advantage of the possibilities offered by these structures in order to make living space for themselves, then Maffesoli’s central concern is the way in which living space is produced in the face of large scale structures, not by individuals, but by the spontaneous sociality of ad hoc groups. Maffesoli holds that the ‘mechanical’,241 ‘mass’ society of modernity has become ‘saturated’ - that it is no longer capable of further development. As a result, the political, bureaucratic power (‘pouvoir’) in his terminology, has become opposed (antithetically, rather than politically as such) to the raw, primal and, in a Bergsonian sense, vital242

power of the mass of ordinary people, which, to contrast from formal pouvoir he calls puissance. The fragmentation of the modernist mass society, Maffesoli believes, has therefore meant not that people have become ever more individualistic, but rather that they have increasingly reassembled into ‘tribal’ groups formed ultimately around nothing more than basic ‘sociality’ - what Maffesoli calls the ‘glischmorphic’ tendency of humans.243 Given their primal nature, these groups tend to be bound internally by the aesthetic - a word which Maffesoli uses to mean ‘group feeling’,244 and by such basic features as secrecy toward the outside world, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and by the use of ‘masks’ - by which Maffesoli means, for example, particular requirements for dress and hair as seen in youth subcultures of certain kinds.245 But the very importance of ‘masks’ as indicators of membership means that the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in these groups are, in a sense, more performative than essential. In living ordinary modern life, a person can become caught up in a succession of different tribal groupings, moving from one to the next by changing masks, each one hanging together by aesthetic performativity rather than enduring structure.

Maffesoli is adamant about avoiding analytical distance, about getting caught up in the carnivalistic ‘paroxysmal’ nature of his subject matter - so much so, in fact, that he is scornful even of

Bourdieu’s efforts to critique this distance. For Maffesoli, Bourdieu’s ideas of ‘practical beliefs’ and ‘popular theoretical sense’, produce what he calls a ‘centrifugal perspective whose reference lies beyond the object with a more or less explicit judgemental attitude’.246 Nonetheless, in building his theory of the power of group feeling over formal institutional structures, Maffesoli has recourse on a number of occasions to one of the key ‘thinking tools’ of Bourdieu’s sociology: the ‘habitus’ - which, however he traces back to the hexis of Aristotle, rather than directly to Bourdieu’s work.247 For Maffesoli, this concept serves as an alternative building block for sociality to what he sees as Enlightenment insistence on verbal communication as the sine qua non of social relationships. In his view, it may be equally important for people to do things together, to feel things together, or simply to share space - which, indeed, may in itself be real or emotional. This means that his non- technocratic, non-scriptural tribal formations may not so much replace the larger social forms of modern society, as co-exist alongside them, or even within them. Indeed, Maffesoli’s central concern - like de Certeau’s is with ‘the quotidian’ - the experience of everyday life, which he seeks to valorise in the face of what he understands (some would say simplistically)248 as a collapsing modern order. In a sense, then, Maffesoli’s thought occupies a mid point between that of the two thinkers just discussed, in that it offers a roughly similar idea of tactical, impromptu and non-linear ‘resistance’ to that of de Certeau - but at the level of the group, while stopping short of concerning itself (except in an oppositional sense) with a bigger notion of society. Indeed, in spite of

Maffesoli’s determination to present his work in opposition to that of Bourdieu, as with de Certeau, it can be argued that he may be seen as offering a complementary, rather than contadictory

perspective. If Bourdieu provides a set of ‘thinking tools’ for understanding the inner mechanics of subculture, Maffesoli offers an imaginative vocabulary for appreciating its gestalt.