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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Fans: A New Public for Literary & Cultural Studies
In continuing to think about fan culture I sent a query to Francesca Coppa, a long-time student of fan culture and one of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit that is all about fan culture, serving it, studying it, and advancing it. In her reply she mentioned several kinds of ongoing fan scholarship and observed:
I think of all of these as “real” research; the question, perhaps, is what sort of umbrella it would have to be gathered under to “count.” But everyone knows that “fans” are a kind of grassroots academy who know more about the things they are fans of than any “TV and media” scholar!
So, I’m thinking that if the literary academy really wants to reach the general public, these folks should be high on the list. But just what would that entail? These people are actively creating their own artistic expressions in words, images, and sound, and are actively pursuing their own research agendas. What does the academy have to offer these people? Can the academy conceive of a relationship that’s more of a partnership than a relationship conceived around more evaluative essays in intelligible prose?
Because I’m thinking that that’s where the deep action is going to be. Not in trying to reconstruct the glory days of Leavis and Trilling and the rest, but in doing something that’s of this 21st century, something that’s new.
Comments
Probably shouldn’t comment but ...
I’m in some sense a fan. I’ve written fan fiction. I’ve written close-reading criticism of SF. I’ve theorized, minimally, about how academic literary criticism is being done more and more by non-academic amateurs. So I suppose that I should be predisposed to agree with this.
But I don’t. I don’t think that fans know more about the things they are fans of than TV and media scholars. With one important proviso—if the work is so undistinguished that no scholar has ever studied it, then its fans know more about it than anyone else by default.
Otherwise, though, someone whose job is it to study media, and who has taken an advanced degree in doing that, is going to know more than any fan. It has nothing to do with innate ability. It has to do with time spent learning about criticism, learning about different ways of studying culture. A fan can pile up more and more description. They can even have critical insights. A scholar can do that too, plus everything else.
Saying otherwise is just reflexive anti-academicism, it seems to me, a legacy of the high vs low culture disputes that really isn’t worth holding on to. That’s gone, really, even though people on both sides would hopefully like it to come back—fans because it preserves their subcultural boundaries, academics because it preserves their jobs, which are under threat.
Yes, there ideally should be some way of using amateur criticism, of whatever type. But it’s going to occur whether or not it’s used. Something “that’s of the 21st century, something that’s new” looks to me a lot like a mixture of tech-bubble rhetoric and trying to find something good in the academic restructuring that Marc Bousquet writes here about. I mean, perhaps the reason why fans as a whole seem to do so much more descriptive work than academics is that the few TV and media scholars who ever existed are getting even fewer.
A fan can pile up more and more description. They can even have critical insights. A scholar can do that too, plus everything else.
But the pros haven’t done the necessary descriptive work, they really haven’t. And the amateurs aren’t doing it either, at least not that I know of. As a consequence literary studies is in the position biology would be in if handbook entries didn’t tell you, for example, whether the plant had broad leaves or needles, whether the animal lived in the water or on land.
However, amateurs could do much of the necessary descriptive work if they had some reason to think it’s important. The reason is there in a section (The Priority of Description) of the post I did for the National Humanities Center. Now whether or not any amateurs want to join me in such a venture, that’s another matter. But the opportunity’s there.
As for getting the pros to do the work, not likely. Oh some such work is being done in the names of narratology and poetics, but it’s not thorough enough nor do folks seem to see a need for inter-observer vetting and consistency. I’ve been after the pros for fifteen years now and have made little headway, so I’m writing them off for now.
The descriptive vs other conflict is really orthogonal to the whole thing about fans vs academic scholars. As you know, Bob, the rise of Moretti and similar descriptive projects is going to lead to slow conflicts within academia between a group of people who work on the new, database-backed methods of description, and the people who hold to older critical methods.
Drafting fans to do the descriptive work than you think needs to be done is well and good. But the accompanying (quoted) statement than fans really know more than scholars do looks like flattery. They don’t. If the work has to be done by fans because no one else will do it, OK, but that also brings up the question of why no one else will do it. And the answer to that question has to do in some degree with the same anti-academicism that exists in the quote.
Is the descriptive work what needs to done? In some cases, sure, but in some cases, I’m not clear on it. For instance, I remember an old project that you once brought up in which people were doing detailed studies of Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon. (I’m not going to go for geek cred by citing the Japanese names.) But they seemed to miss the most basic thing that pops out about the series, which is that they are made on the assumption that boys are interested in who can beat up who, and girls are interested in familial and social relationships. All of the detail about DBZ power levels and Sailor Moon who-is-related-to-who has been painstakingly and repetitively embedded in these works by the people who made them, under the assumptions above. There is, in a sense, an infinite amount of this description—they are formulas that will be repeated until the series end. So I’d think that the description is obvious, the real questions are about these assumptions. Are they well-founded? Etc.
Bob? There’s no Bob here, Ray.
If the work has to be done by fans because no one else will do it, OK, but that also brings up the question of why no one else will do it. And the answer to that question has to do in some degree with the same anti-academicism that exists in the quote.
I don’t follow this at all. The reason the work’s not being done has nothing to do with the quote. The work’s not being done because it doesn’t fit in with any of the existing modes of academic scholarship. The type of work I have in mind is work that I started doing over 30 years ago, and have done off and on ever since then. But it’s only in the last few years or so that I’ve come to realize that that descriptive work is what most needs to be done, not the same old exegesis wrapped up in cognitive psych or evolutionary psych.
BTW, I didn’t bring up Dragon Ball Z or Sailor Moon. That was someone else. I’ve been working on Osamu Tezuka’s early manga, where doing some basic descriptive work allowed me to see otherwise invisible structures in the text. It’s the texts that most need to be described, not the stories (characters, motifs, settings, events, etc.) in them. That can be done as well, but it’s not at the top of my priority list.
I don’t understand what you mean by “descriptive work.”
I also wonder what sorts of readings such work, performed by groups of readers, will produce. Let’s take a poem: Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (first edition). Let’s imagine that thirty readers spend months producing details descriptions of every aspect of the poem: lists of nouns, lists of verbs, lists of repeated consonant and vowel sounds, data on syllable-per-line ratios, etc. In what way is that an accurate reading of the poem? One man wrote the poem. Any “patterns” that can only be discerned by teams of descriptors working round the clock for months will not be patterns existing intentionally in the poem.
I simply don’t see what knowledge would be produced in such a situation.
I don’t understand what you mean by “descriptive work.”
Well, Luther, if you’re willing to do a little work, that’s easily remedied. Look at the second figure in this December post on “Kubla Khan.” That’s an example of the most basic kind of descriptive work I have in mind. It’s not rocket science, but it does need to be done carefully. Here’s an old publication based on that work; and here’s a somewhat newer publication. Both of those contain considerably more descriptive work that you’ll find in that one diagram. But the sort of thing that’s in that diagram is what most interests me. This account of “The Cat in the Moon” is mostly descriptive – no tables there, but I could make one easily enough.
I’m not interested in the descriptive work simply for the sake of descriptive work. It’s the basis of more sophisticated analytic work. Here’s a Google doc that contains some descriptive work I did on Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis. I did that work to determine whether or not it had a ring-structure (i.e. A B C . . . X . . . C’ B’ A’); it did. Sometimes ring-forms can be discovered fairly easily, such as those in the “Nutcracker Suite” and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” episodes of Fantasia. In those cases I didn’t build a large Word table like I did for Metropolis; but I did have to go through the film slowly, starting and stopping, and taking notes along the way.
How many narratives have ring structures? I haven’t got the foggiest idea. We won’t know until someone’s done the work. Nor do I see the search for ring-structures as the only rationale for this kind of work. Not at all. But it is one thing that does require descriptive work, and it’s something that’s easily explained and understood. Beyond that, and perhaps one or two other things, I haven’t the foggiest idea what we’ll be able to discover once we’ve got 100 or a 1000 or even 10,000 such descriptions. But I’m quite sure we’ll discover things we never new about texts.
As for readings, well, if this kind of descriptive work leads to new readings, that’s fine. But that’s not my primary objective. As you know, I’m interested in other things. I have no trouble imagining that doing this kind of work will prove very useful independently of my most expansive objectives. Doing this kind of descriptive work forces you to pay very close attention to what’s in the text, and that’s useful for many purposes.
BTW, that old Sailor Moon Dragon Ball Z discussion was rather interesting, though a bit oblique the the objective of this discussion.
...“fans” are a kind of grassroots academy who know more about the things they are fans of than any “TV and media” scholar!
This claim is false. The fan communities I’m part of are strong on information that can be accumulated and aggregated: ‘best’ live versions of tunes in a band’s discography, origins of obscure terms in a literary work, road-tested fan-made game supplements, allusions in a specific TV show, etc. Fanwork is well-suited to gathering and constructing that kind of knowledge.
But those same communities tend to be myopic about their chosen fan-texts - they have a hard time treating them abstractly, and generalizing from them. Hardcore Dungeons & Dragons players tend to miss out on the obvious adolescent power fantasies built in to the game (which they enjoy without analysis, of course); Buffy fans often have trouble seeing the narrative purposes of a given relationship-depiction or -transformation, e.g. flipping out about the ‘unfairness’ of a beloved character’s death despite the show’s repeated acknowledgment of that death’s unfairness in the story context; the same Phish fans able to name, say, 100 ‘classic’ concerts or sets might never have heard the African pop or electric Miles Davis tracks that set early templates for Phish’s music; etc., etc., etc.
The first casualty of fanaticism is perspective, context, which is the main job of the critic. (Hypothetically, of course; most critics are rubbish.) Fans tend not to excel at certain kinds of useful critical synthesis. Fan fora are nothing like the fucking academy, which is a good thing as far as it goes.
Which is to say, waxbanks, that the work I have in mind is geared toward fandom’s strengths, not its weaknesses.
Bill - Fair enough, I just find the quote to be, um, characteristically fan-hubristic? :)
Well, more precisely I’d say your correspondent’s remark is typical of the way a naive form of ‘media studies’ has trickled into fan discourse, and I’m worried that academics are going to start believing the hype. There’s nothing more ego-gratifying for fan-scholars than to see fans borrowing their rhetoric, etc.
First off, I’m pretty much in agreement with waxbanks.
There’s something else that this discussion hasn’t touched on: so far, I haven’t seen much talk of the history of fan criticism. The Wikipedia/Memory Alpha/TV Tropes model, whereby fan criticism consists of aggregating more and more facts, is not the only possible model. There was an earlier model of fan criticism that was much more analytical than being able to name every Pokemon character to appear in any medium ever.
That model was to be found in the fanzine. They were published by fans and distributed through fan networks, and so tended to have “the life expectancy of an Italian government and the regularity of a spastic colon,” but they contained actual analysis of the works under discussion. Two fanzines of the 70s and 80s that serve of a good example of this were Trek, devoted to Star Trek, and Amra, devoted to Conan in particular, and Robert E. Howard in general. Trek tended to deal with issues of making the Star Trek universe internally consistent (which was already a precursor of the Wikipedia model), but also dealt with themes encountered in Trek, quality of story-telling, and that sort of thing. Amra would often deal with issues of, for example, how racist Howard was, and if this racism could or should affect one’s enjoyment of his stories, how aspects of Howard’s life affected his characters, etc.
The fanzines were mostly killed by the internet, and so also was the level of criticism you found in them. I’m curious from a cultural studies perspective if groups like the Organization for Transformative Work can tell us both why analytical criticism didn’t really take off with the internet and how fandom might be encouraged to a more analytical criticism.
Hmm…
Old-school wargamers - ‘grognards,’ in the subculture’s charming parlance - constitute a fine example of fan-scholar balance. The game-analytic literature around, say, Diplomacy and Advanced Squad Leader blends historical insight, serious number-crunching, and narrative flair. Its modern equivalent is the fan/player discourse around Magic: the Gathering and board games of similar complexity, which at its best provides both rich description and intergame context.
I’m less gung-ho about fans of traditional (usually serial) narratives as amateur scholars, but my biases are insurmountable on that score, I fear.
Well, you know, the particular program I imagine, as exemplified by some links in an earlier comment (07/29/10 at 04:06 PM) is not an open-ended research project. It’s fairly tightly constrained by the text, whether written, film, or video. The aim is descriptive, and the object is to come up with descriptions that people agree are accurate. It’s not rocket science, nor even neuroscience, much less Theory, but it takes some skill and patience. And, in time, it will produce a useful body of work.
I wouldn’t expert there to be a lot of people willing to do this. But then, if I get more than 2 or 3 to begin, I won’t be able to deal with them. But, two good folks the first year and we do, say, four texts. The next year we add four to the team, with the original two helping to train them. The year after that, we add eight. You can see where this is going.
Buy the time we have, say, 100 texts done, well . . . it will be a resource the scholars haven’t had before. Who knows, maybe someone will get really adventuresome, drop Theory, and stop dabbling in cognitive and evo psych, and actually get serious. Meanwhile, 10, 20, 40, 50 more texts get done.
Bill.
Official Edgar Rice Burroughs tribute site.
Refer to the page of tarzan fan, he is an academic from science rather than art, who has constructed and translated a wide range of interesting sources for possible influences on Burroughs.
http://www.erbzine.com/mag18/1801.html