One of the key points I find myself coming back to repeatedly is the importance of letting fandoms have their independence — providing enough information, goodies, and attention to nurture it, but letting it belong always to the fans who create it. When fandom is a subsidiary of the production company it sets everything up for power struggles, for self-censorship, for legal-enforcement dilemmas, for feelings of accountability and betrayal that are beyond the bounds of duty on both sides. Fans need their own spaces to do their own things.This is something like the party line in fan studies these days. More surprising is how this formulation gets reversed:
Fandoms can’t operate as though they belong to and are supervised by artists and producers. By the same token, artists can’t operate under continuous supervision (even internally imposed) of the most active fans any more than I, as a teacher, can forget about the students who aren’t as into my classes or the content of what I know and believe needs teaching and just teach what they want to hear to the ones who love me most. I’d be negligent and odds are my classes wouldn’t be as good. The fans who get into fandom may be more important than other fans in terms of the promotion, spearheading, and enthusiasm they provide. They may provide the most trenchant critiques and hence are usually worth listening to. But they are still a small segment of the audience, and producers need to think audience as much as they think fandoms. But even more than that — producers and artists need to operate first and foremost under the guidance and supervision of their own muses. It’s their creative process, just as fandom is ours.There are two points of interest here. The first is the suggestion that artistic productions will somehow deteriorate over time if the producers are overly concerned with the needs and desires of their biggest fans. It intuitively recaps the time-worn logic that fans don't always know what's best for the objects of which they are fans. But the statement also counter-intuitively reframes this in terms of a mass audience: producers can only recreate the magic of their television series (or whatever) if they try to appeal to the larger audience that they were initially targeting. This seems to reverse the logic that so many people assume (in an equally knee-jerk manner as my initial reaction to the quotation above) when they discuss mass audiences: this old logic asserts that appealing to the mass audience means appealing to the lowest common denominator, something that ultimately ruins the cultural object. (This latter is always couched in some equally ugly and elitist assumptions that anything bound within a commercial logic is necessarily invalid as art, an assumption that many scholars, including myself, have devoted their careers to debunking.)
And this reversal of the usual logic of the marketplace leads me to the next startling point about Baym's analysis: the pedagogical analogy that she draws to illustrate fan-industry relationships. The classroom image is an incredibly loaded one, as she seems to be drawing upon the image of pedagogy as medicine for a majority of students and as candy to a devoted few. This necessarily creates a kind of power dynamic in which the teacher is deciding what is "best" for students, using the validations and critiques of the best and the brightest as a kind of support for these choices as they turn against the resistant students. It's not a dynamic that I necessarily disagree with (it's something with which I have become all too familiar as an instructor in certain classes in the past): it's just an interesting dynamic to apply to fan-industry relationships. Where does one isolate the power in this kind of dynamic: certainly the instructor has the most power, and this is reinforced by the "good" students who encourage the teacher to push further into territory that may not be entirely comfortable for "resistant" students, who will then attempt to subvert the instructor's authority in various ways. What happens when we apply this model to fandom? To me it gives almost too much power to the producers, but it does chart an important distinction between the super-fans who clearly have a hand in how the object turns out and the casual viewers who get boned in the end.
Even more evocative to me than the power relationships is what happens when we take the analogy literally and suggest that cultural objects really are instructive in very real and powerful ways and that fans and casual viewers alike are merely students in the cultural classroom. Not a huge leap to suggest that culture teaches us particular attitudes, strategies for social living, and identities to perform: Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe have discussed this manner of "cultural pedagogy" in the introduction to their edited volume Kinderculture (a must-read for anyone interested in issues of cultural politics that are imparted to youths through mass culture). However, if we add these bizarre power dynamics into the mix, one is left with the impression (if we follow the example set in this analogy) that the "bad" students or casual viewers end up learning more in a cultural sense than those "good" students or rabid fans: they are challenged more by the culture surrounding them. And since, as many before me have said, there's no way outside of the game of culture, they learn better to adapt to the rules of the game. Does this suggest a paradox about power in culture: that those who seem most at the disadvantage in the ways of cultural politics are actually in the best position to resist?
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