Política económica en el modelo neoliberal

[I]f I have not sought to get people to speak about…[their passion or fandom], it is not just because the subject ‘speaks for itself’, but also because in matters of admiration and celebration every request for justification produces a backlash. For, in inducing interviewees…to provide an account of their experience, one forces them out of their participatory stance…and throws them into a position of justification.

(Heinich 1996:xiii)

My focus in this chapter on ethnographies of fandom will lead me to suggest that all too often fan ‘justifications’ are accepted as cultural facts by ethnographers, rather than being subjected to further analysis. I would argue that the recent boom in ‘fan studies’ has produced the figure of ‘the fan’ within a highly specific cultural studies’ narrative. Work on fandom has formed a key part of the move towards valorising active audiences, and this use of the fan has resulted in an extremely partial and limited examination of fan practices. Fandom has been curiously emptied of the dimensions which, I would suggest, most clearly define it: dimensions of affect, attachment, and even passion, as well as, crucially, the dimensions of commodification through which these processes are enabled and constrained.

Fan ethnographies: emphasising the knowledgeable fan

The significantly affective nature of the fan’s attachment renders ethnographic methodology problematic in this context; it cannot be assumed (as is so often the case in cultural studies) that fandom acts as a guarantee of self-presence and transparent self- understanding:

We should emphasise from the outset that the pleasure can be so intense that it almost cannot be articulated by those experiencing it. We were struck repeatedly in our interviews and informal conversations with fans by the strength of their passion for, devotion to, and sheer love of daytime television, to an extent often beyond their own comprehension.

The ethnographic process of ‘asking the audience’, although useful in many cases, constitutes a potentially reductive approach. It assumes that cultural activities can be adequately accounted for in terms of language and ‘discourse’, rather than considering how the question ‘why are you a fan of…?’ itself causes the fan to cut into the flow of their experience and produce some kind of discursive ‘justification’.

Cultural studies’ ‘ethnography’ has rarely pursued this insight, failing to consider processes of auto-legitimation within fan culture, and instead depicting these processes as fan ‘knowledgeability’. This emphasis on the fan’s knowledge, and on the display of knowledge, acts, in part, as an alibi for the ethnographic process: given the fan’s articulate nature, and immersion in the text concerned, the move to ethnography seems strangely unquestionable, as if it is somehow grounded in the fan’s (supposedly) pre- existent form of audience knowledge and interpretive skill. And yet this grounding figure of ‘the fan’ is itself a reduction of subjectivity; a reduction which operates as a foundational legitimation of, and for, ethnographic methodology. Fandom is largely reduced to mental and discursive activity occurring without passion, without feeling, without an experience of (perhaps involuntary) self-transformation. This ethnographic version of fan culture seems to have no inkling that discursive justifications of fandom might be fragile constructions, albeit socially-licensed and communal ones. This is not to argue that fans cannot discuss their feelings, passions and personal histories of fandom in any meaningful manner. Far from it. Instead I am trying to emphasise that fan-talk cannot be accepted merely as evidence of fan knowledge. It must also be interpreted and analysed in order to focus upon its gaps and dislocations, its moments of failure within narratives of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity, and its repetitions or privileged narrative constructions which are concerned with communal (or subcultural) justification in the face of ‘external’ hostility. Previous fan-ethnography has largely erred on the side of accepting fan discourse as interpretive ‘knowledge’. My aim here is to reconsider fan discourse as a justification for fan passions and attachments.

Analysing the affective nature of the fan-text attachment means that ‘asking the audience’ cannot act as a guarantee of knowledge. As Michael Haslett discusses in the Doctor Who fanzine Skaro, Who fandom as a community typically presents particular justifications of its collective love for the programme, but these justifications are—to a great extent—merely a way of defending the fan’s attachment against external criticism:

Harken to…some stirring rhetoric about ‘WHO’ having the most flexible format on British television, something about its narrative range incorporating horror, sci-fi, fantasy, historical adventure and comedy, to name but a few of its multiple genres. ‘This is what makes Doctor Who so great’ they all say, from haughty academics, drawing their fan pensions, to members of the greedy brat- pack. Alas, these are often merely the empty homilies of unimaginative plodders, with most of us doubtless having succumbed to using this stock favourite slice of hyperbole in the past… It is no more than a cloud of smoke, a cult phrase repeated parrot-fashion, perhaps to hide the fact that we cannot agree on what Doctor Who is or should be.

Fan-ethnography would readily uncover this discursive mantra, by which I mean a relatively stable discursive resource which is circulated within niche media and fanzines and used (by way of communal rationalisation) to ward off the sense that the fan is ‘irrational’.1 If Doctor Who fandom relies on the justification of a ‘cult phrase’ stressing the format’s flexibility, then an equivalent defence for Star Trek fans would concern the progressive politics and multiculturalism of the original crew. However, if ‘asking the audience’ is sufficient in itself, then such discursive structures and repetitions would tend to be accepted at face value rather than being considered as defensive mechanisms designed to render the fan’s affective relationship meaningful in a rational sense, i.e. to ground this relationship solely in the objective attributes of the source text and therefore to legitimate the fans’ love of ‘their’ programme.

Addressing the question ‘why are you a fan of this particular text?’, it seems that fans typically register some confusion or difficulty in responding, before then falling back immediately on their particular fandom’s discursive mantra. This process—the marked absence of an explanatory framework for one’s intense devotion which immediately shifts onto the firmer ground of discussing textual characteristics—is neatly encapsulated within (then-President of ‘Six of One’, The Prisoner Appreciation Society) Roger Langley’s contribution to The Prisoner: A Televisionary Masterpiece (Carraze and Oswald 1990):

Why has a television series…played a big part in my life of over 20 years? I still do not know!… If you are reading this new book, you must already be interested in The Prisoner! So, what do we share? Is it the acting of Patrick McGoohan, the beauty of Portmeirion, the excitement of the episodes or the strange atmosphere of the episodes as a whole? Is it the issues raised by the stories, the strange happenings in the Village, the unusual music or the striking costumes? These things, and many more, are all vital ingredients of The Prisoner, providi ng many reasons for its appeal.

(Langley in Carraze and Oswald 1990:12, my italics) The fan cannot act, then, as the unproblematic source of the meaning of their own media consumption. This is not necessarily to recap the ‘fallacy of meaningfulness’ uncovered by Hermes (1995)—which emphasises the ritualistic rather than primarily semiotic use of media such as women’s magazines. Instead I would describe the belief that fans can fully account for their fandoms as a ‘fallacy of internality’. The assumption here is that sense and understanding are securely present inside the fan community, whereas external academic narratives—whether they are psychological, psychoanalytic or socio-logical— are somehow fraudulent or imposed upon the phenomenon that they attempt to explain away (see, for example Bacon-Smith 1992). This ‘fallacy of internality’ neglects the extent to which internal fan community understandings are collectively negotiated precisely in order to ward off the taint of irrationality, and in order to present a public and rationalised face to the world outside the fan culture. The fallacy of internality assumes that the ‘in-group’ is a source of pristine knowledge. It neglects the sociological dynamics whereby the culturally devalued ‘in-group’ of media fandom is compelled to account for its passions.2

I am hence refuting the adequacy of ethnographic methodology in this precise instance (and not across all instances of media consumption in all contexts and modalities) on the basis that the positivism of such empirical work is insufficiently positivist: it typically ignores the structured gaps and replications within the discursive frameworks which are used by fans to account for and justify their fandoms.

But what of the various fan-ethnographies that have been produced, and which form the canon of ‘fan studies’? Henry Jenkins (1996:263) contrasts his own Textual Poachers to more ‘traditional participant-observer approaches’. This is because Jenkins’s work doesn’t present an ‘outsider’ entering into—and discovering the cultural truth of—the ‘field’ of fandom. The term ‘ethnography’ is often used rather loosely in media and cultural studies, sometimes indicating little more than hour-long interviews with respondents. In its original anthropological context, the term implies a lengthy immersion in the field being studied. (And this ‘field’ is typically thought of as being alien to the analyst, who has to come to understand a different way of life.) On the basis of these definitions of the term ‘ethnography’ as it has been used in classical anthropology, Jenkins argues that another study of fandom, published in the same year as Textual Poachers and written by Camille Bacon-Smith, more fully deserves the label of a traditional ‘fan-ethnography’.3 This is because Bacon-Smith presents a participant- observation of sections of Star Trek fan culture in which she self-consciously represents herself as ‘the ethnographer’ entering an unknown subcultural field, determined to understand its practices and activities.

Bacon-Smith’s conclusions validate her methodology very precisely and without remainder: she veritably scrapes away at the layers and layers of misdirection which the fan community presents to her as an initial ‘outsider’ who gradually, over the course of years of research, learns the ropes. Indeed, the power struggle between insider and ethnographer-outsider is explicitly depicted by Bacon-Smith in terms of her own ethnographic quest narrative:

as an ethnographer, I found myself searching for the heart of this community: what made it tick?… The deeper I penetrated the community, the more elusive my goal became.

Of course, a community gives certain signals when an outsider approaches the heart of its culture. In the beginning the heart is hidden—often in plain sight—passed over, casually dismissed by those in the know. Later, as the importance of the practice…starts to emerge from the dense fog of apparent communal indifference, the intrepid ethnographer finds herself swamped with data—explanations that agree too closely with one another, that offer tidy answers to her questions with no loose ends to unravel.

When the investigator gets too close, the community sidetracks with something of value, something that conserves the risk the ethnographer knows is present but that does not expose too much.

(1992:224 and 226) Bacon-Smith is clearly highly aware of the self-mythologising narrative of her account,4

Despite her exaggerated presentation of such a narrative, Bacon-Smith nonetheless relies on it to determine her account of the ‘evasive’ fan community. She concedes her desire to ‘jump up and down and scream “Look what I found! A conceptual space where women can come together and create—to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on women’s public behaviour! Not a place or a time, but a state of being”’ (ibid.: 3). This introductory admission is presumably intended to reassure the reader: Bacon-Smith wants to jump up and down, but ‘a colder mind prevails’ and we are returned to the hallowed halls of strictly objective and affect-less academia. As such, Bacon-Smith’s presentation of the fan community plays its own narrative games of expectation, disruption and delay with the reader. Bacon-Smith chides Jenkins for using the fan community to further his own ‘political agenda’ (ibid.: 282), but it is hard to see how her own account could refute such an accusation.

Bacon-Smith announces her academic identity as ‘Ethnographer’ (see also Bacon- Smith 2000). By doing so, she positions herself as a kind of detective, using the conventions of the murder mystery or detective-thriller to frame her account of fandom. She is the seeker of knowledge, the character who will prevail. It is her ‘colder mind’ which is able to circumvent the stalling tactics, distractions and diversions of the fan community. Bacon-Smith’s account is one of a world of clues and misdirections, a subcultural fan world charged with meaning. This narrative construction resembles the principles of Sherlock Holmes’s ‘empirical imagination’ where ‘the truth is right there to be read on the surface of things, had we the wit to see. Mundane facts become marvels and wonders—clues, evidence, proof’ (Atkinson 1998:109). And Bacon-Smith’s version of events, which I have quoted above, fits entirely and uncannily into Pierre Bayard’s analysis of the detective novel. Where the truth of a fan culture is always in plain sight, but where fans attempt to distract the detective-ethnographer, we find: ‘the principle of truth hidden by its obviousness…[and the second mechanism, that of] [d]istraction…. This time we are dealing with a negative disguise. It is not that the truth is made unrecognisable, but that the false…is dressed up to draw attention to itself’ (Bayard 2000:21, 24).

This highlights a further problem with fan-ethnographies; the extent to which they use narrative conventions from popular fiction, thereby allocating certain narrative functions to their respondents and the fan community. It may be impossible to avoid writing academically without providing a narrative shape to one’s ‘theoretical’ account (meaning, non-judgementally, that all theories are also stories). It is still a problem for ethnographers, however, that their accounts may so closely resemble the conventions of certain genres. This resemblance means that such accounts are unable to construct more complex characterisations of fan culture beyond a sense of ‘communal conspiracy’ to be battled by the detective-ethnographer (Bacon-Smith), or a sense of ‘communal creativity’ to be recognised and valued by the scholar-fan (Jenkins). As Van Maanen has observed: ‘literary tales [ethnographies using the conventions of literature] may be so tied to the representational techniques of realistic fiction that they distort the very reality they seek to capture’ (1988:135).

depicting fan cultures as inherently positive or as miniaturised models of academia. In my own rather less heroic narrative template, the character of ‘the academic’ abandons the construction of easily legible moral dualisms (thereby creating a meta-dualism between those who champion a cause or a fan community and those who refuse to draw moral and communal lines clearly around ‘us’ and ‘them’). This abandonment of moral dualism is perhaps an academic version of ‘anti-hero’ fiction in which characters we are expected to sympathise with (‘the academic’ and ‘the fan’) may also possess unwanted or undesirable attributes. The work of Jenkins and Bacon-Smith seems to embody two sides of the same coin: both refuse to let go of one-sided views of fandom. Jenkins sees Bacon-Smith as presenting a falsely negative view of fans (Jenkins in Tulloch and Jenkins 1995:203), while, in turn, she castigates his work for presenting a falsely positive view (Bacon-Smith 1992:282). And oddly enough, the ‘reality’ of fandom that each seeks to capture in broadly ethnographic terms may well exist between their respective moral positions.

My own position here is close to that established by Jensen and Pauly (1997). They decry the way that theories of media audiences tend to construct these audiences as ‘other’ to the investigating academic (ibid.: 195). However, Jensen and Pauly conclude that ‘if subjects are imagined as deficient in their articulation of their own experience, then there is not much chance that the researcher will learn anything from those subjects’ (ibid.: 166). This, however, is a view which assumes that ‘learning’ is only possible on the basis of the other’s full or ‘non-deficient’ self-articulation. On the contrary, I would suggest that what academics need to learn is that their own accounts are also ‘deficient’, meaning that this cannot be used as a way of (morally) devaluing other subcultures and communities.5What academics can learn from subjects who are unable to articulate their own experiences is that they, too, may not be able to articulate the full meaning of their own experiences, therefore no longer existing in a fantasised ‘authoritative’ space outside any cultural struggle over meaning. This possibility is closed off by Jensen and Pauly’s assumption that the ‘good’ subject is self-present, articulate and always capable of full self-explanation without remainder; a perfect restatement of academic imagined subjectivity.

Another related and very real problem for fan ethnographies is what they assume will count as ‘the real’. Although few fan ethnographies dwell on this question, what counts as the ‘field’ to be observed will differ if a psychoanalytic critic is interpreting ethnographic ‘data’ as opposed to a sociologist. The notion that these sorts of problems of academic knowledge and interpretation can be ‘put…to one side’, seems, to my mind, faintly optimistic (Couldry 2000b: 14). This suspension of theoretical debate in favour of ‘getting on with things’ also implies that what counts as the ‘real’ is self-evident and can be detached from arguments over its interpretation. However, rather than accepting the narrative of ethnography as an encounter with the ‘real’ (which is superior to the ‘abstract’ and supposedly ‘unreal’ space of overly-generalising Grand Theory), I would argue that ethnography needs to be based on a reconceptualisation of empiricism so that ‘the real’ consistently encompasses not only the discourses and routines of everyday life (Silverstone 1994), but also the possible absences in discourse, and the potential gaps in both academics’ and fans’ reflections on their own identities and cultures. By way of illustrating these possibilities, I will now turn to the practice of autoethnography in which

‘ethnographies of the self’ are produced.

Autoethnography: narratives of the fan, narratives of the self In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man…. The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science… The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory.