Core Post #2

With this week’s readings, we get snapshots of different ways in which scholars have attempted to integrate consumer/fan affect and response into a more synoptic view of the ways in which new (i.e. in this instance, domestically-accessible) media serves as an industrial structure, an aesthetic medium, and a system of communicative signs. Jenkins provides the more optimistic approach, using de Certeau’s idea of literary ‘poaching’ to coordinate fan response with an ideal of ethno-socio-sexual plurality. Andrejevic, while not representative of the most extreme form of opposition to the Jenkins-ites, still lands apart from such idealism, reading participatory culture as a form of market-driven, alienated labor. Seiter’s piece appeals to strict ethnographic method as a means of understanding how these possibilities might show up, in manifest or latent forms, in the intellects and languages of the fans themselves.

In Jenkins’s sense of fandom, I don’t really consider myself to be a fan of anything, and I certainly don’t see fandom of massive IPs like the MCU or Doctor Who as contributing to a consistently radical politics. Also, like Jesse, I simply do not buy Andrejevic and company’s insistence on the fundamental subservience of fans and their actions to market logics. Any critical, evaluative, or affective response to a media product can be taken up once more and integrated into further output for consumption. One might effectively argue that fan cultures—their remixes and rewritings—can more easily be subsumed by media industries than, say, Mulvey’s critique of classical Hollywood, but this merely signifies a difference in degree and not in kind. On that basis, we would have to deny all aesthetic and political formulations that engage in any way with recognizable images, tropes, and narratives; we would be forced back into high modernism for the hope of any sort of media which might amply criticize the institutions opposed. This, of course, runs into the issue of democratized media/art. How can the ‘average’ person, the person without the privilege of a certain degree of cultural capital, recognize themselves and their problems in mere abstractions? Ultimately, I find fan engagement to be a legitimate source for the individual’s acceptance of their pre-given position within a particular cultural matrix and for the uptake of their hermeneutical role within it—their duty to refashion aesthetic and communicative sense in terms of their lived experience as a process of world-building and knowledge-seeking.