Core Response: Week 6

Research on fandom has often faced backlash for claims regarding the revolutionary potential of

fans. Fans seem to fall comfortably within the boundaries of capitalism, supporting their favourite

franchises either directly through monetary means or, as Andrejevic demonstrates, indirectly through

just expressing their opinions. While there is potentially a sense of empowerment, which, for certain

underprivileged communities, could be revolutionary, this empowerment feeds into the

popularity/wellbeing of the franchise. While some would argue that remix culture poses a challenge

against oppressive copyright laws, more and more, fans are now allowed and even encouraged to

create unauthorized fan works in order to help promote the franchise. Overall, it seems like, at every

turn, fandom is re-appropriated into the capitalist structure and there is no escape, echoing Gitlin’s

bleak outlook from Week 3. 

At the same time, however, to see the audience as cultural dupes would be to underestimate

the capabilities of the general public; the Birmingham School taught us to do better than that.

Therefore, I resonated heavily with Andrejevic’s nuanced approach to the paradox of

TelevisionWithoutPity.com. While fans on the website produce value for producers in a variety of

ways, they are also critical and ironic in their engagement, creating systems of cultural and social

capital within the fandom itself and challenging the traditionally superior position of producers. The

fandom enacts fetishism almost to perfection, applying the logic of “I know very well, but

nevertheless” to their playful engagement with popular culture. “I know Twilight sucks, but

nevertheless, I love it.” 

I see this ironic turn as different from the affective engagement described by Jenkins, which

lacks aesthetic distance and searches for genuine pleasure. I think that the ironic turn is definitely

something that fandom studies should now begin to take up more. As many popular press articles

have suggested, the Internet is bringing us into an age of irony. Research on fandoms should

consider online fandoms as a different beast, one at the intersection of multiple cultural codes borne

from memes, remix, social media, and fandom. While I am less interested in labelling the acts of

online fandoms as revolutionary or subversive, I am interested in how the industry has

appeased/taken up/taken advantage of what they see as revolutionary acts. Is irony feeding back

into production? If so, what kinds of shifts will this produce in the industry? On fandom? And on a

more theoretical level, what is our changed relationship with fetishism? And what happens to

revolution when fetishism is all that is left?