Reconstruction 8.3 (2008)
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Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: the Mirror of Consumption. Polity Press, 2005.
<1> Recent theorisations of fandom show a tendency towards the sequestration of fan activity and experience as if occurring outside, or at least comfortably on sabbatical from, commodity relationships. This is an old theme. John Fiske's claims for semiotic democracy and Henry Jenkins's celebration of the anarchic pleasures of textual poaching both tended, despite their internal differences of emphasis, to place fandom outside of the commodification process that is central to capitalist relations of cultural production. Matt Hills, one of the "new wave" of fan theorists drawn upon in the text under review still strives to address the dialectic of value as a formative process in fandom. Fandom is a product of "subjective processes" such as the fan's personal attribution of significance – wherein reside use-values - and objective processes related to the formation of exchange value. If it is the case that through niche marketing and segmentation, fans values and authenticities are sold back to them, nonetheless fandom is a zone of non-competitive affective play sustaining, for example, cult geographies which fan attachments are to a non-commodified space or, at the very least, to a space which has been indirectly or unintentionally commodified (Hills, p112 and p151). This characterisation retains a space for a grounded analysis of the interplay of the collective and individual dimensions of fandom. One of the problems with Fans: The Mirror of Consumption is that such analysis tends to be ruled out as a matter of definition. To appreciate this let me note some of the key features of Sandvoss' arguments.
<2> First, a very broad definition of fans is advanced which renders them indistinct from consumers. "I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text in the form of books, television shows, films or music as well as popular texts in the broader sense such as sports teams and popular icons and stars ranging from athletes and musicians to actors" (8). Second, the notion of identity is predominantly individual "the academic analysis of subcultures inevitably carries a different theoretical focus on questions of collective rather than individual identity, of group interaction, style and community. While these are important elements in the study of fandom they are not germane here and will be discussed in further depth only to the extent that they relate to the formation and implications of fandom" (9). An author has no choice but to stipulate limits, but this statement seems circular. Fandom (note the use of a singular noun) is defined in advance as an emotionally private condition of being in which the fan constructs his or her own affective lodging or heimat (66). Third, accordingly a foreshortened view of the interaction between the fan and the text(s) of fandom is advanced: "I am thus proposing a model of fandom as a form of narcissistic self-reflection not between fans and their social environment but between the fan and his or her object of fandom" (98). Narcissism does not mean, pace Kenneth Gergen, an imaginary interpersonal relationship in which the self is conceptualised as performing before and responding to an ever present critically appraising audience. Rather it refers to a self-referential process through which the fan forges a self-reflective text (or mirror) from the intertextual network surrounding a particular star or celebrity. The object of fandom is not the star as one might conclude from the above quotation but the autopoetic, self-referential fan text (164). Since the fan text is produced by the fan "cutting" out a self-selected meta-text from the many texts clustered around a particular object of fascination, then the textually mediated influence of the culture industries is minimal (133). As a consequence the possibility that a star or celebrity might come to colonise the fan's fantasy or that relationships with other fans, advancing their own interpretations and vying for sub-cultural authority, is given short shrift. Fourth, any concept of textual determinism is spirited away, along with any structuring role for polysemy. Fans make their own texts and the ideal text for this activity is neutrosemic - "a text allows for so many divergent readings that intersubjectively it does not have a meaning at all" (126). Although neutrosemy is an ideal type, never entirely realised in a practice, it is an expression of a post-modern semiotics in which intertextuality and the parade of simulacra create a general condition of textual indeterminism. At the proximate level where attachments are forged, pace Hills, the fan encounters no constraints that would require a reflexive dialogue. Fandom is a process of quasi-mediated interaction (as argued by John Thompson) wherein those authoring, or performing in mediated texts are relationally distant from the fan. Further, it is the nature of popular texts that they smoothly conform to the readers' "horizon of expectations", lacking the "blanks" that Wolfgang Iser, a cited example, saw as essential for producing an aesthetic distance. Consequently, the fan's text approximates to a mirror, a text which is a self – extension. So it is claimed that a reflexive relationship between the fan and the objects of fandom is replaced by the relationship between the fan and the singular, idiosyncratic fan text he or she fashions. Ironically as all influences external to this object relationship fade, the fan's text comes to exercise a degree of control (unspecified) over the fan as the myth of Narcissus suggests (109-110). Those who might hastily conclude that the process by which fans turn the objects of fandom into extensions of themselves is part of the commodification process are wrong (162). The fan's narcissistic fascination is by definition a withdrawal from the formal rational logic of capitalist exchange (115-116). As the gap between the text as a commodity governed by exchange value and the fan text as a production of use-value increases, then a potential for a critique and liberation opens up. "Fandom, in pushing the distinction between use-value and exchange value at the heart of industrial consumerism (sic) to its extreme, oscillates between affirmation of the status quo and protest against what is, as a form of, in Marcuse's words, Great Refusal" (165).
<3> For this reader, at least, this is an estranged book. For some this may be its virtue: to advance an entirely novel view of fandom – eschewing a plausible case that some fans may be narcissistic in their orientation some of the time in order to advance the theory of fandom. But too often novelty is not firmly connected to a sustained critique and synthesis of existing positions. The uses and gratifications tradition is an unexamined precedent which, if not managed carefully, confuses the multiplication of the steps in the chain of influence with consumer autonomy. Again, novelty seems connected to a jaunty fuzziness of definition. So for example the fan text (actually, an intertextual field) is set aside in favour of the "true" object of fandom, the singular fan text. But the relationship between these entities is not substantially explored. What if the former was designed to contain the latter – as those engaged in the promotional drive surrounding popular cultural production - tabloid journalism, celebrity websites, blogs and the like – seem to believe? Why does the fan's text not draw upon the fan text as resource for significance? What if collective myths are devices for making the amorphous texts of fandom personally coherent and not as Sandvoss thinks engines of neutrosemy. (134 -136) Is any text neutrosemic to the fan? On larger scale, it is implied that use-value and exchange value are intrinsically in opposition. But capitalism is not opposed to use-values, it needs to produce them in order to complete the cycle of accumulation. Rather it is opposed to use-values that resist being priced. Fan activity may "escape" the formal logic of exchange but this does not mean that fan's are not other-regarding with an eye to future exchange possibilities – witness the activities on E-Bay or the development of fans as sub-cultural entrepreneurs. Returning to the influence of the objects of fandom – the stars and celebrities – might it not be worth considering that the vision of fandom as a self-reflective exercise is an expression of changes in how the stars are now represented to the general public? Is the mirror of fandom in itself a clone of the self-activity of stars in the era of intensive personality commodification? Is Marcuse's One Dimensional Society really the defining text on the sociology of contemporary capitalism?
<4> This book poses some interesting questions. But accepting that a macro-sociology of fandom is flawed and that it was necessary to move to the level of a micro-sociology, is a nano-sociology, with its celebration of the freedom of solitary confinement, a better answer?
References
Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. Routledge, 2002.
AUT City Campus
Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies
Auckland, New Zealand
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