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March 01, 2005

Fandom as a Materialist Aesthetic: Debbie Gibson and Pierre Bourdieu

Fandom as a Materialist Aesthetic

by Ted Friedman

Presented at Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture,
Duke University, April 1995.

This paper is an attempt to describe a certain kind of relationship to mass culture - a way of being a "fan" that resonates with my own experiences, and seems to gibe with the sensibilities of many of the taste cultures I've observed, but which I haven't seen talked about much in Cultural Studies. I want to make a case for the style of consumption I'll be describing as an implicitly materialist, perhaps politicized aesthetic. My argument will begin by bouncing off Bourdieu, because the kind of perspective I'll be outlining here is distinctly, and most notably, a repudiation of the Kantian, formalist aesthetic Bourdieu describes in Distinction. And in fact, I think fans can be seen as engaged in a project analagous to Bourdieu's own. But I'll be moving off from Bourdieu in a couple of other directions, because I don't think the attitude I want to talk about is exactly what Bourdieu indicates in his description of the "popular aesthetic," either. So I'll try to situate this attitude in the context of other accounts of consumers' relations to mass culture, as I give a few examples of what I mean by a "materialist aesthetic." 1

Let me begin with a personal example of what I want to talk about. When I was a college radio DJ, I'd occasionally get to interview independent-label acts who'd drop by the station before playing a local club. I remember one particularly awkward conversation with the band Yo La Tengo. My co-interviewers and I had these wonderful artists, whose music we all loved, in the studio with us, and all we could think to ask was, "um . . . do you think your video will get played on MTV? How's the distribution for your current record? Would you like to get signed by a major label?"

The band, who certainly had more of a personal - and financial - stake in these issues than we did, nonetheless grew exasperated at our philistinism. They wanted to know, "Don't you have anything to ask about our music?"

Well, no, we didn't. We knew why we liked their music - Ira Kaplan's a great guitar player, Georgia Hubley has a wonderful voice - but we really didn't need to know much more about it.2 What we wanted to know was where Yo La Tengo stood in the big culture game. How many fans listened to them? How many records did they sell? What were the chances they'd turn into rock stars?

This seeming obsession with commerce over culture is typically dismissed as the crassest sort of bottom-line, lowest-common-denominator cynicism. It's the perspective I saw Siskel and Ebert bemoaning just the other day, complaining about how the news these days is only interested in reporting the top grossing movies of each week, rather than on highlighting artistic accomplishments. An affront to critical respectability, it's the antithesis of the "art-for-art's sake" attitude identified by Bourdieu as the "Kantian aesthetic." At the same time, as I'll discuss further in a minute, it doesn't coincide with most of the descriptions and justifications of fandom I've seen in Cultural Studies. It's not a subversive act of "textual poaching" - it's a kind of allegiance, a kind of loyalty. It's not so different from rooting for a sports team, or a political candidate. You develop an investment in a particular band, movie star, or TV show, and you want to see it do well against the competition.

I should point out that the flip side - the subculture's fear that their heroes will "sell out" and become huge - is just as much defined by this dynamic. Either way, the response is determined by the artists' commercial reception, rather than by intrinsic qualities of the artists' texts.

But in scandalously ignoring artistic content, this form of appreciation is often perceived as a guilty pleasure, even by those engaging in it. It remains haunted by the specter of the Kantian aesthetic, which remains the legitimating mechanism for most pop culture claims to "authenticity." I knew as I asked my questions to Yo La Tengo that they were a fan's indulgences, the idle chit-chat a band might make before getting to what's really supposed to matter: the music.

But looking back on that conversation, I'm not so sure I had anything to feel guilty about. Music is music, but when you start talking about record sales and MTV airplay, you're getting closer, I think, to the meat of cultural politics. I want to take some of the stigma away from these conversations - I want to recognize the way this form of pleasure is distinctly useful. Like Bourdieu's "popular aesthetic," it's an attitude which radically challenges the Kantian isolation of "art" from life. It insists on grounding aesthetic appreciation - and pleasure - in a knowledge of the conditions of cultural production and consumption. But at the same time, it's not simply, as Bourdieu defines the popular aesthetic, "the affirmation of the continuity between art and life." It's more self-consciously mediated than that.

Let me explain what I mean in terms of ideas about commodification - one of the alternate vocabularies to Bourdieu's suggested by Professor Jameson last night, but which I think has problems of its own. The relationship I'm describing between fan and cultural commodity can certainly be considered a form of fetishization. The commodified object - the record album, the baseball card, the comic book - is invested with seemingly magical properties. But at the same time, the fan's knowledge in a sense demystifies the commodity - it situates that fetishized commodity within its material conditions of production, distribution, and marketing. I'd argue that the fan's pleasure is a fetishization without mystification. This model of consumer pleasure, I think, is crucial for cultural critics to understand and learn from, because it offers the possibility of recognizing and critiquing the injustices of capitalism and the vagaries of the market without insisting on an ascetic renunciation of the pleasures of commodity culture. It offers the hope, I think, for a commodification without illusions.

Let me clarify my point with an example of one kind of fan behavior: baseball card collecting. In the last twenty years, baseball card collecting has grown from a childhood pleasure rarely noticed by adults, into an industry selling over $1 billion of cards every year.

In the process, many critics have complained that collectors have lost sight of the purpose of collecting - that they seem more interested in the market value of their cards than in the players they represent. But the irony here is: if the fans put so much thought and effort into understanding and following the baseball card market, so that they know as much about the economics of baseball cards as any executive at Topps, how can you describe their relation to the commodity itself as mystified? Fetishized, certainly - these so-called "investments" mean something more to their owners than simple stock certificates would. After all, there are easier ways to make money. Baseball cards are commodities of deep personal and mythic resonance, nostalgically evoking the childhood practices of card collecting and the many years of baseball history. But when the collector follows every turn in the baseball card market, conscious of every reason for a rise or fall in a card's price, the cards are no longer, I think, mystified commodities - or at least, they're mystified in a new, importantly different way.3

Let me give another example from sports fandom of the tension between Kantian and materialist perspectives. The typical baseball fan's complaint during the strike was, "why do I have to hear all about how much money baseball players are making? Baseball should be a game, not a business" - a perfect example of a desire to divorce cultural appreciation from its economic context. The irony, however, is that it's the logic of being a baseball fan which makes following players' salaries so interesting. Even while protesting a disdain for the economics of baseball, fans invariably, obsessively return to questions of who's making how much, where free agents will go, and so on. The reason's simple to see: it's not much of a step from following batting averages and player trades, to following salary negotiations and free agent signings. This materialist interest in the inner workings of baseball is built into the pleasure of being a baseball fan. Indeed, baseball simulation games and Rotisserie leagues often include economic models as part of the gameplay, with drafts, trades, free agent signings, team budgets, the works. All this suggests the extent to which the supposed distraction of business may actually be part of the fun. But again, the shadow of the Kantian aesthetic hangs over this interest - it seems like a guilty pleasure to follow the business of baseball, when what's really supposed to matter is the game for the game's sake.

I want to move, now, to a more general discussion of fandom and cultural struggle. As many Cultural Studies theorists have recognized, to be a Yo La Tengo fan, or a Barry Bonds fan, or a My So-Called Life fan, or all three, is to choose sides in ongoing cultural conflicts.4 What's equally important to understand is how those conflicts are waged and followed by fans. Responding to the long-standing derision of mass culture consumers as "cultural dupes," most Cultural Studies analyses of fandom have understandably begun by insisting on the active, productive roles of fans. In Henry Jenkins' influential formulation, fans are "textual poachers" - bricoleurs who reappropriate hegemonic discourse for their own purposes. This model sees mass culture on one side, the people on the other, and "subversion" as the quintessential act of semiotic struggle.

But fandom isn't only about subversion and recontextualization - it's also about allegiance and loyalty. The model I'm suggesting here reconfigures the Gramscian paradigm, viewing the struggle not as mass culture versus the people, but as mass culture against itself - Roseanne taking on Home Improvement, Snoop Doggy Dogg battling Eric Clapton, with fans on either sides invested in the outcome, following the struggles in the Nielsen ratings and the Billboard charts. Or, recognizing mass culture's complexity and ability to accommodate plural perspectives, perhaps it's better to see each cultural artifact struggling against the field, fighting to stay on the air, to make the top ten, to have an impact.

This model, perhaps, is too top-down; it makes all the action happen in the cultural arena, and returns fans to the status as spectators. But I think it helps describe the way fans look to culture to represent them, in a consensual process similar to the way politicians are expected to represent those who voted for them, and sealed by the fan's voting with their pocketbooks. Of course, neither the cultural nor the electoral markets often do a very good job of responsibly representing their constituencies. But I think what I'm describing does help explain the very mediated process of cultural struggle as it occurs - and I think the materialist aesthetic I'm describing, with its detailed interest in the market processes in action, can help fans find the most effective, least exploitative representation.

Let me give a final example of fan behavior from my very favorite fanzine: Between the Lines, a monthly Debbie Gibson newsletter available now over the Internet. (Debbie Gibson, for those who don't remember, was a teenage pop star in the late 1980s.) I should point out that my own Debbie Gibson fandom is an intensely personal story, having to do with growing up in suburban New York with many of the same influences as my contemporary Gibson - Brill building pop, Billy Joel, show tunes; with first hearing "Only In My Dreams" on the car radio at a time when I really needed a good pop song; with encountering a group of friends in college who, at a turning point in my intellectual life, taught me not to be afraid to love what is often denigrated as "teenybopper pop." The personal nature of my relationship to Debbie Gibson's music should not be surprising; every issue of Between the Lines opens with a series of confessionals from Gibson fans, who want to talk about how they first came to care about her.

What I want to talk about here, though, is my favorite part of Between the Lines, "Debwatch," where the editors for seven years have kept readers up-to-date with the chart status of each current Gibson single. Of recent years, this has been a somewhat less rewarding affair, as Debbie's popularity has dwindled. But true fans keep the faith. Let me quote from "Debbie Gibson on the Billboard Charts," an article by Rob Polinsky from a 1993 issue. "Losin' Myself," the first single from her last album, Body, Mind, Soul, had just been released a few weeks before, and after looking good for a couple of weeks, it had lost its "bullet" on the charts - meaning its sales were starting to peter off. Polinsky writes:

[A]s you can tell, Deb does not have a bullet on any one of these charts this week. How can you make a song's point total improve? The only possible way is through sales and airplay. As a fan, all you can do is BUY BUY BUY and REQUEST REQUEST REQUEST. It's very important that you do this. For BMS you can pick up extra copies and give them to your pals. Or if you know someone who is interested and wants the album, but doesn't feel like going to get it, buy it for him or her and then tell that person to pay you back.

The author goes on to suggest more specific strategies for getting your friends to buy the album, for getting the single played on the radio, and so on. This sort of fan activism is the kind highlighted often by cultural studies scholars to emphasize the productive, engaged role of fans. The die-hards who succeeded in getting the original Star Trek brought back for a third season are one oft-cited case; the petition writers trying to keep My So-Called Life on the air would be a current example. I want to make a different point here, though. Whatever impact the hundred-odd recipients of Between the Lines had on Debbie Gibson's Billboard numbers was negligible; both the single and the album quickly dropped off the charts. This isn't surprising; I doubt many readers had much sense that they were personally making a difference in buying her record, any more than you expect your one vote to matter in a national election. What matters, instead, is the sense of engagement - the sense of Debbie's entry up there on the charts representing you, making what you care about visible - and audible, in this case, especially if it makes Casey Casem's Top 40.

I don't want to say, by the way, that the fact that the record flopped means that the experience was simply of failure - there's a certain bittersweet pleasure in remaining loyal to stars past their prime - like being a Chicago Cubs fan. But being a fan is also always about hope: as the Between the Lines Article concludes, quoting another Debbie Gibson song: "Anything is possible -- if you just put your mind to it!!!"5

Footnotes

1 . I should point out here that my paper leaves the definition of "fan" purposefully vague. I think of fandom as a continuum - almost everybody's a fan of something, to greater or lesser degree. Watching Seinfeld every week, for example, is enough in my book to make a viewer at least in some sense a Seinfeld "fan." And so, most mass culture consumers are likely to be "fans" to greater or lesser degrees of many different cultural products and genres. The mode of fandom I'm talking about here, of course, is only one form of fan practice, but I think it's something engaged to some extent by many if not most mass culture consumers at one time or another.

I should acknowledge that my sense of who gets to count as a "fan" differs somewhat from other cultural studies writers'. Henry Jenkins, for example, who writes about very specific, highly developed forms of fan practices (fiction writing, fanzine publishing, etc.), concludes Textual Poachers with the qualification that "fan culture differs in a qualitative way from the cultural experience of media consumption for the bulk of the population." (I, on the other hand, would describe "the bulk of the population" as fans of one thing or another.) This difference leads Jenkins to insist that "the fan audience is in no sense representative of the auidence at large, nor can we go from an understnading of a specfic subculture to an account of the active spectator" (Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (Routledge, 1992), p. 286).

Jenkins is writing about a very elaborate fan culture, and one with rigid rules of exclusion; science fiction fans often refer to outsiders as "mundanes," and an easy way to start an argument with a Star Trek fan is to refer to "Trekkies" rather than the preferreed "Trekkers." Most experiences of fandom, I'd argue, are much more open and fluid - in fact, beyond the "Trekker" community, there are many more folks who also consider themselves Star Trek fans, but aren't even aware of the expression, and are happy to call themselves "Trekkies." This is the kind of fan experience that's much harder to talk about. Jenkins ends his book with a call to ethnography, for a more detailed understanding of the experiences of actual fans. But it's obviously a lot easier to do an ethnography of a distinct, self-defined, deeply dedicated fan group, than to study the more ambivalent, mediated, nebulous, multitudinous practices of everyday consumer preference, loyalty, and identification.

This isn't a flaw in Jenkins' work; all any one study can attempt to do is to show one slice of consumer culture, and then attempt to relate it to the whole. (The alternative - the God's-eye persepctive of Bourdieu's Distinction - runs into problems of its own.) Jenkins' work pinpoints one spot along the range of fan practices, to demonstrate one way in which mass culture is consumed. I consider this paper as pinpointing a different spot, to show mass culture consumption from a different perspective which may perhaps reveal different things.

2. Or at least, we thought we knew why we liked their music. Or, more specifically, we knew all we wanted to know about why we liked their music. How we became Yo La Tengo fans - through whatever combination of agency and interpellation - and how Yo La Tengo's music and image produced their affects on us, are important questions in their own right. But I want to suspend those issues for the length of this paper, to ask the questions that follow.

3. Of course, there's more than one story to tell about the market. I doubt the collector's knowledge of the baseball card business extends to a knoweldge of the conditions of labor in baseball card factories. The sensibility I'm describing could certainly be described as a fetishization of the market - a crass glorification of the bottom line which reifies the complexities of capitalist exploitation into the laissez-faire myth of the "invisible hand." This was a critique made, for example, of the New York art market in the 1980s, as John Guillory recently noted. But I would argue that there was something "subversive" about the '80s art market. The legacy of Warhol was to lay bare the functioning of art as cultural capital, so that by the 1980s, collectors could no longer hide behind any other pretenses. Revealed as naked capital accumlation, the market inevitably had to crash.

In the long run, I'd argue, fetishizing the market is a definite improvement over disguising it. Once the market's visible to all, its contradictions aren't so easy to hide. For example, several recent studies have made baseball card collectors aware of the disparity in prices between cards for comparably talented black and white ballplayers - puncturing the myth that the market is color-blind.

4. Of course, how much "choice" is involved is a question in itself - exactly the kind Bourdieu's most useful in trying to answer.

5. One last qualification I should throw in is the degree to which the sensibility I'm describing is the result of a specific habitus. One thing I didn't even notice when originally wrote my introduction to this paper is that in the Yo La Tengo anecdote, I'm not just a fan, but a DJ; a member of the media, not just a consumer. To some extent, the sensibility I'm describing is a process of identifying with the producers of the culture industry; of following the Billboard charts as if one were a record executive. It wouldn't be surprising, then, if those apt to enjoy culture in this ways are those who were educated alongside this media elite - roughly speaking, the oft-invoked "professional-managerial class." This is the point where ethnographic research would be the most useful, to see to what extent the sensibility I'm describing is linked to class, education level, gender, generation, race, and other factors.

Posted by tedf at March 1, 2005 12:47 AM

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