Television Fans 276 «pmnorarv filk recordings and required further studio work to con-Sno audience expectations. Firebird is actively seeking a "break_ hroueh" tape to attract a broader audience for filk and sees such nrofessionalism as necessary for expanding the market for their releases The semiprofessional concerns have been far less willing than the original fan producers to risk violations of copyright law, refusing to allow direct references to media characters or the use of songs not in the public domain. Some hikers have reworded their original media-related songs to give them a more generic quality. Others have written new songs, songs which borrow generic features from science fiction without directly evoking specific copyrighted texts. Filk. built from fragments borrowed nomadically from other media commodities, now runs the risk of itself becoming another commodity as segments of the filk community feud over the proprietorship of songs and the percentage of return each artist will receive. While criticized by some, others stress the degree to which these semiprofessional concerns remain deeply rooted within the fan community. As Leslie Fish explains, 'There is no distinct division between 'professional' and 'amateur' filksinging, since the only way to advertize filkmusic tapes is to print ads in fan magazines and to go to the convention filksings and sing the songs before live audiences" (Personal Correspondence, 1990). Filk's chances of reaching a large audience is limited both by its subject matter, which appeals to the specialized knowledge of the fan community, and its musical conventions, which emphasize spirited singing over refined voices. Most filkers stress that filk will necessarily remain somewhat tied to its folk cultural origins, even as the development of semiprofessional filk companies may alter its economic base. The future of filk will. thus, like its history, be a complex one, torn between its roots in folk cultural traditions and its ties to commercial cultural matenals, originating within the fan community and yet sold back to that community as a commodity CONCLUSION "In My Weekend-Onlv World...». ,y Reconsidering Fandom In an hour of make-believe In these warm convention halls My mind is free to think And feels so deeply An intimacy never found Inside their silent walls In a year or more Of what they call reality. In my weekend-only world. That they call make-believe. Are those who share The visions that I see. In their real-lime life That they tell me is real. The things they care about Aren't real to me. (T J. Burnside Clapp "Weekend-Only World" 1987, Fesarius Publications) "Get a life," William Shatner told Star Trek fans. "I already have a life," the fans responded, a life which was understood both in terms of its normality by the standards of middle-class culture and by its difference from that culture. This book maps some major dimensions ofthat "life." If fans are often represented as antisocial, simple-minded, and obsessive, 1 wanted to show the complexity and diversity of fandom as a subcultural community. This account offers a conception of fandom that encompasses at least five levels of activity: _ ■ a. Fandom involves a particular mode of ™*™J™ * ers watch television texts with close and undivided attention, w, 277 CONCLUSION 278 a nmture of emotional proximity and critical distance. They viCw hľn multiple times, using «he.r videotape players to scrutinize meľningful details and to bring more and more of the scries nar-Zur under their control- They translate the reception process into S Interaction with other fans. John F.skc (1991) distinguishes between senuotic productivity (the popular construction of mcan. incs at the moment of reception) and enunctativc productivity (the articulation of meaning through dress, display, and gossip). For the fan this otherwise theoretically useful distinction breaks down since the'moment of reception is often also the moment of enunciation (as is literally true within the group viewing situations described here). Making meanings involves sharing, enunciating, and debating meanings. For the fan, watching the series is the beginning, not the end. of the process of media consumption. b. Fandom involves a particular set of critical and interpretive practices. Part of the process of becoming a fan involves learning ihe community's preferred reading practices. Fan criticism is playful, speculative, subjective. Fans are concerned with the particularity of textual detail and with the need for internal consistency across the program episodes. They create strong parallels between their own lives and the events of the series. Fan critics work to resolve gaps, to explore excess details and undeveloped potentials. This mode of interpretation draws them far beyond the information explicitly present and toward the construction of a meta-text that is larger, richer, more complex and interesting than the original series. The meta-text is a collaborative enterprise; its construction effaces the distinction between reader and writer, opening the program to appropriation by its audience. c. Fandom constitutes a base for consumer activism. Fans are viewers who speak back to the networks and the producers, who assert their right to make judgments and to express opinions about the development of favorite programs. Fans know how to organize lo lobby on behalf of endangered series, be they Twin Peaks fans exploiting the computer networks to rally support for a show on ľľainT 0f CľCelali0n 0r ,ieau,y and lh<-' Beast fans directing anger nmľr a c ľ*1" Wh0 Vi0laled lheir basit assumptions about the relatiíľJ; ,°m 0rißinales- al le*st in part, as a response to the túlrrrl"sn?S üf lhe CünsumLr in «lation to powerful in- fiTa« hi" ral Pr0duCl,0n and circulation. Critics claim that mercial broaden! '" ^^^ ül lhe ma,kel lu*ÍĽ of COm' «»ng, a commodity audience created and courted CONCLUSION 279 by the culture industries (Tulloch and Jenkins ft««!. ----------- a position is false to the reality fans expen^cľľh^ľľ^' Such into contact with systems of cultural production- mM ''°me tions do indeed market to fans, target them for pro^rT^T*" di/ing, create official fan organizations that workT^H "" dience responses, and send speakers to conventions to promni *"" works or to squash unwanted speculations. Yet network executiT and producers are often indifferent, if not overtly hosiile to fľ opinion and distrustful of their input into the production process Fan response is assumed to be unrepresentative of general public sentiment and therefore unreliable as a basis for decisions The media conglomerates do not want fans who make demands, second-guess creative decisions and assert opinions; they want regular viewers who accept what they are given and buy what they are sold. Official fan organizations generate and maintain the interests of regular viewers and translate them into a broader range of consumer purchases; i.e., spinoff products, soundtracks, novelizations. sequels, etc. Fandom (i.e., the unofficial fan community) provides a base from which fans may speak about their cultural preferences and assert their desires for alternative developments. d. Fandom possesses particular forms of cultural produciion. aesthetic traditions and practices. Fan artists, writers, videomakers. and musicians create works that speak to the special interests of the fan community. Their works appropriate raw materials from the commercial culture but use them as the basis for the creation of a contemporary folk culture. Fandom generates its own genres and develops alternative institutions of production, distribution, exh bilion, and consumption. The aesthetic of fan art celebrates creative use of alreadv circulating discourses and images, an art of evoking and regulating the heteroglossia of television culture. The nature of fan creation challenges the media industry s claims to hold copyrights on popular narratives Once television characters enter into a broader circulation, intrude into our hung rooms, pervade the fabric of our society, they b*U «"***** dience and not simply to the artists who onguiattdthcm^ texts, thus, can and must be -^J^S^S tentially significant materials can better speak ic tural interests and more fully address their desires. Fan art as well stands as a stark contrast » *• «£ acat0 motivations of mainstream cultural P°A*"t^ tessyslems artworks to share with other tan friends. Fandom gene« . CONCLUSION of distribution that reject profit and broaden access to its crca,iVe nrlľs \s Icff Bishop and Paul Hoggett have written about sub-štúral communities organized around common enthusiasms or rests «The values.... are radically different from those embed-L within the formal economy: they arc values of reciprocity and interdependence as opposed to self-interest, collectivism as opposed to individualism, the importance of loyalty and a sense of identity« or 'belonging as opposed to the principle of forming ties on the basis of calculation, monetary or otherwise" (Bishop and Hoggett 1986. 53). Fanzines are most often sold at cost; the circuit stories are made available for fans to make their own copies; fan videos are exchanged on a tape-for-tape basis; filk songs traditionally circulated through word-of-mouth. There is evidence that these practices are beginning to change—and not necessarily for the better. Witness the emergence of semiprofessional publishers of zines and distributors of filktapes, discussed in the previous chapter, yet even these companies originate within the fan community and reflect a desire to achieve a better circulation of its cultural products. Fandom recognizes no clear-cut line between artists and consumers; all fans are potential writers whose talents need to be discovered, nurtured, and promoted and who may be able to make a contribution, however modest, to the cultural wealth of the larger community. In researching this book, I spoke to many who had discovered skills and abilities that they had not recognized before entering fandom: they received there the encouragement they had found lacking from their interactions with other institutions. They often gained subsequent opportunities on the basis of these developed skills. e. Fandom functions as an alternative social community. The song lyrics that open this chapter, like the filk songs discussed in the previous chapter, capture something essential about fandom, its status as a Utopian community. "Weekend-Only World" expresses from nS ,recognUlon tnat Andorn offers not so much as an escape hulnľľn ľ M a,ternative reality whose values may be more Buľnsl rl °Cralic than those held °y mundane society. T. J- dom to the ,fP COmraStS the inlimacy and communalism of fan-t0 the ahenatl0n ™* superficiality of mundane life: Thľ«Uľrm daily' monlhs on «d. The surface all I see Do they hold the things in their hearts CONCLUSION That I do in mine? We talk of mortgages and sports And what's new on TV. But we grow no closer With the passing time. T J. Burnside Clann "Weekend-Only World". 19&7' Fesarius Publications 281 She can spend far less time in the company of fan. in .i. »weekend-only world" of the con, yet she has «lived a Ufa 11 those few but precious hours" and has felt closeness to man! Z were strangers before fandom brought them together She' ™Z power and identity from the time she spends within fan cuhure fandom allows her to maintain her sanity in the face of the indignity and alienation of everyday life: "It keeps me safe through weeks so long between." Writers such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1974), Frederic Jameson (1979) and Richard Dyer (1985), have pointed toward the Utopian dimension of popular culture; its appeal to the consumer is linked to its ability to offer symbolic solutions to real world problems and felt needs. Jameson has shown how mass-culture texts must evoke and manage social and political anxieties and fantasies. Traces of these countercultural impulses remain present, even within texts that otherwise seem reactionary: "Genuine social and historical content must first be tapped and given some initial expression if it is subsequently to be the object of successful manipulation and containment" (Jameson 1979, 144). Richard Dyer has similarly argued that entertainment offers us an "image of something better" than the realm of everyday experience; entertainment gratifies because it holds open the imagined possibility of satisfying spectators' actual lacks and desires. Entertainment, Dyer asserts, teaches us "what utopia would feel like" (Dyer 1985. 222). In a discussion of the American musical, Dyer contrasts popular entertainment with real-world problems: popular entertainment promises abundance instead of scarcity, energy instead of exhaustion, intensity instead of dreariness, transparency instead of manipulation, community instead of fragmentation. Science fiction has often been disciusea as providing readers with the image of a better world, an ™*™1 future, an ideal against which to measure contemponuy oa a refuge from drudgery and constraint (Lefanu, 198»)- 2Q2 CONCLUSION a site for to1 Fan culture rinds that Utopian dimension within popular cultu itc for constructing an alternative culture. Its society is responsive .v, the needs that draw its members to commercial entertainment0 most especially the desire for affiliation, friendship, community Mass culture provides many images of such a world-the tunnel community of Beauty ana the Beast, the expanded family 0f the Enterprise Crew, the political commitment of the Liberator, the ideal partnership of countless cop shows, the merry men of Sher- •aeai «raw u. «uuu« vu„ «w ^ "'cry men of Sherwood Forest the dedicated members of the Blackwood project. The characters in these programs devote their lives to goals worth pursuing and share their hours with friends who care for them more than life itself. The fans arc drawn to these shows precisely because of the vividness and intensity of those relationships; those characters remain the central focus of their critical interpretations and artworks. Life, all too often, falls far short of those ideals. Fans, like all of us, inhabit a world where traditional forms of community life are disintegrating, the majority of marriages end in divorce, most social relations are temporary and superficial, and material values often dominate over emotional and social needs. Fans are often people who are overeducated for their jobs, whose intellectual skills are not challenged by their professional lives. Fans react against those unsatisfying situations, trying to establish a "weekend-only world" more open to creativity and accepting of differences, more concerned with human welfare than with economic advance. Fan-dom, too, falls shon ofthose ideals; the fan community is sometimes rife with feuds and personality conflicts. Here, too, one finds those who are self-interested and uncharitable, those who are greedy and rude, yet, unlike mundane reality, fandom remains a space where a commitment to more democratic values may be renewed and fostered. Noncommunal behavior is read negatively, as a violation of the social contract that binds fans together and often becomes tne focus of collective outrage. Nobody can live permanently within this utopia, which becomes recognizable as such only against the backdrop of mundane o ; worldm'ľhľ^e and 8° fr0m fand0m' findin* this "weekend-bcSnlíT y Can' cnJ°yin«it for as long as possible, before toSS^ľ""!.10 lhe workaday world-Wilhin the few shorl somet ngmTeÄ^^"« «* °lhCr fanS< lhCy ^ 8 °re than the suPerficiaI relationships and shoddy values CONCLUSION 283 of consumer culture. They find a space that allows fh* "what utopia feels like." "uws lnem to discover In a telling critique of the politics of pôstmi Grossberg notes that while we often think of polY "'ľm' Uwr«>ce negative terms-as a rejection or repudiation ofľJľ, resislan<* in it may also have a more positive or celebratory di^C0ndiť _____uon tension Opposition may be constituted by livjne PVť>n „ tarily, within alternative practices, structures and "T'"" even though they may take no notice of the, X& to existing systems of power. In fact, when one wins 'P space within the social formation, it has to be filled °^t ing one cares for passion- questions of desire and plea' sure must be raised as more than secondary epiphenomena (Grossberg 1988, 169-170) P Phenomena. Fandom constitutes such a space, one defined by its refusal of mundane values and practices, its celebration of deeply held emotions and passionately embraced pleasures, random's very existence represents a critique of conventional forms of consumer culture. Yet fandom also provides a space within which fans may articulate their specific concerns about sexuality, gender, racism, colonialism. militarism, and forced conformity. These themes regularly surface within fan discussions and fan artworks. Fandom contains both negative and positive forms of empowerment. Its institutions allow the expression both of what fans are struggling against and what they are struggling for; its cultural products articulate the fans' frustration with their everyday life as well as their fascination with representations that pose alternatives. In making this claim, I am not asserting that fandom necessarily represents a progressive force or that the solutions fans propose are ideologically consistent and coherent. A poached culture, a nomadic culture, is also a patchwork culture, an impure culture, where much that is taken in remains semidigested and ill-considered. As Gross-berg asserts, a politics of consumption: does not say that people always struggle or that when they do, they do so in ways we condone. But it does say. do n theoretically and politically, that people are never merei passively subordinated, never totally manipulatelwc entirely incorporated. People are engaged in struggles , I^^H^^B^^H^^^H CONCLUSION »^^—^^—^^—^^—« 284 within and sometimes againsi reaJ tendentiaj foi ;iI1(l dominations in their efforts to appropriate what they are riven Consequenüy, thou relations to particular practii nd texts are complex and contradictory: they may win something in the struggle against sexism and lose some-thins m the struggle against economic exploitation; they mav both gam and lose something economically; and a|-ihouch lhc\ lose ideological ground, they may win some Sonal strength. (Grossberg 1988, 169-170) The irony, of course, is that fans have found the very forces ihat work to isolate us from each other to be the ideal foundation for creating connections across traditional boundaries; that fans have found the very forces that transform many Americans into spectators to provide the resources for creating a more participatory culture: that fans have found the very forces that reinforce patriarchal authority to contain tools by which to critique that authority. We should not be surprised that in doing so, fans absorb much that we as leftist academics may find aesthetically dubious and politically suspect. What is surprising, particularly in the face of some fifty years of critical theories that would indicate otherwise, is that fans find the ability to question and rework the ideologies that dominate the mass culture they claim as their own. A character in Lizzie Bordan's Born in Flames describes political alchemy as "the process of turning shit into gold"; if this claim is true, there may be no better alchemists on the planet than fans. I am not claiming that there is anything particularly empowering about the texts fans embrace. I am, however, claiming that there is something empowering about what fans do with those texts m the process of assimilating them to the particulars of their lives. f andom celebrates not exceptional texts but rather exceptional readings (though us interpretive practices makes it impossible to maintain a clear or precise distinction between the two). mpH- VS a b00k aboul ľans and fan cullurt-'- !l i« not about the obienľn Uy and U 1S n0t aboul P0Dular texts. J have no particular ca ions hr ľ SlUdy,ng theM lopics and "«»ve done SO on other OO and meto „ necessary lü a lul1 understanding of mass culture (CS °n'y by ***** the structures of the tributes in the on undcrsl"nd what fan interpretation con- wes (thus for e,CnS ľ app,"ünnating these programs for their own • example, my account of Beauty and the Beast ac- CONCLU8ION 285 knowledges generic features of ihr program and ductiofl history as well as the categories by which fan criti 2" uat,.(1 !in«l interpreted .t)r3nly by I. ing lhe Cr * ln;il Mock fan access to the means of mass cultural - ™ wc understand the political dimensiona of their relat.onsh.n 2Z lhc media. I am not privileging the fan here, because I want to decentcr the text or even prioritize consumption over production Indeed, my hope is that fan cnt.cal practice may prov.de a model for a more specifically drawn, more exploratory and speculative style of media criticism: one alive to the pleasures of the text but retaining some critical distance from its ideological structures. What I want to reject is a tradition that reads the audience from the structures of the text or in terms of the forms of consumption generated by the institutions of production and marketing. What I want to challenge is the tendency to create a theoretical fiction that masks rather than illuminates the actual complexities of audience-text relations. Media theorists have always made claims about the audience. What audience research contributes to this debate, then, is not the focus on the audience but rather a reconsideration of the most productive methods for making meaningful generalizations about the nature and character of audience response. Media scholars cannot help but talk about the audience in relationship to media culture: the question is what types of audience(s) we will talk about and whether they will be allowed to talk back. Much of what passes tor critical theory lacks even the most rudimentary grounding in empirical reality, drawing its assumptions about spectatorship through a combination of personal introspection and borrowed author^ The result is a curious theory that cannot be tested anImuabe taken on blind faith. I question what torms ot pepular p^wer can be founded on theories that require our unqucsuoning aa P*nc of hierarchical knowledge and which become accessible only to educated elite. .. cUXA\ec having The problem I confronted upon Mm■"*•«" J alreadv spent a number of wars ,n lhe «««»■£,* rau-the dominant conceptions of television spec.^'^^ ically at odds with my own experience ot UK m ^ ^ ^_ claims of ideological critics »ere total \ imp ^ mMc w missal ol'popular readers as positioned D> ' ' woou„t for the resist its demands. Such approaches cannot begin CONCLUSION 286 ,,nc and circulation of fanzines or the mixture of fascination and frustration that runs through fan discourse. As len Ang writes: Fthnographic work, in the sense of drawing on what wc can oerccive and experience in everyday settings, acquires its critical mark when it functions as a reminder that reality is always more complicated and diversified than our the-ones can represent, and that there is no such thing as 'audience' whose characteristics can be set once and for all. The critical promise of the ethnographic attitude resides in its potential to make and keep our interpretations sensitive to the concrete specificities, to the unexpected, to history.... What matters is not the certainty of knowledge about "audiences, but an ongoing critical and intellectual engagement with the multifarious ways in which we constitute ourselves through media consumption. (Ang 1990, 110) In other words, ethnography may not have the power to construct theories, but it can disprove them or at least challenge and renne them. While I have drawn on theory as a tool for understanding fandom as a set of cultural, social, and interpretive practices, I have not drawn upon fandom as a means of developing a new theory of media consumption. I distrust the move which takes concrete, culturally situated studies of particular fan practices, of specific moments in the ongoing relationship between audience(s) and texts, and translates them into data for the construction of some general theory of the media audience. Fan culture differs in a qualitative way from the cultural experience of media consumption for the bulk of the population. It is not simply that fan interpretations are more accessible to analysis, more available for observation than the transitory meanings produced by nonfan viewers, but rather, participating within fandom fundamentally alters the ways one relates to te evls,on and the meanings one derives from its contents. The fan Qience is in no sense representative of the audience at large, nor account B°f ľm an understanding of a specific subculture to an a theoretic *?l™e *Pectator (* phrase which necessarily remains sure that Z IľT í?n an elhnoßraphic construct). I am not even ÄofLofr] have d,scussed here'fans °f a pariiculir other vaSs „řf rnarnitivcs' are «*«**«% identical with Performers snort« t™' °f Specific media personalities, rock ' ^ S leams or soap operas. These groups will have CONCLUSION 237 s0mc common experiences as well as display differences that arise from their specific placement within the cultural hierarchy and hi ntcrcsts in different forms of entertainment. r [1 strikes me as ironic, however, that before Cultural Stud,cs began to research fan culture, fans were dismissed as atypical of the media audience because of their obsessivcness and extreme passivity- now that ethnographic accounts of fan culture are beginning to challenge those assumptions, fans are dismissed as atypical of the media audience because of their activity and resistance. Both positions portray the fan as radically "Other" rather than attempting to understand the complex relationship between fan culture and mainstream consumer culture. We cannot afford to dodge that question" we can neither afford to move from the extreme case to the eeneral (as has been true of some recent work within the Cultural Studies tradition) nor can we afford to ignore the connection that laces fan culture on a continuum with other media consumption. We can, however, insist that any theory that is constructed to ac-nt more generally for the relationship between spectators and texts not preclude the existence of the practices documented here. We can even hope for theories that can explain their persistence in the face of strong countervailing pressures. A model that sees only media effects on passive spectators falls short of this test; a model Sat allows for different forms of interaction, that posits a more acüve relationship in which textual materials are appropriated and fit o personal experience does not. Fandom does not prove hat a audiences are active; it does, however, prove that not all audiences are passive.