Tags
doctor who, fans, literature, music, sherlock, TV
“I’m not a fan, I just enjoy his work” said a friend over lunch. For quite a while, that was my knee-jerk approach to the idea of “fanhood” as well: it’s either something other people do, or it’s a lapse in taste by a decent critic. Fans are voracious but undiscriminating, always happiest when an artist is trotting out the same stuff once again. They obsess over personality and get distracted by irrelevant details. Reading reviews, the “fan” often seems to be an invisible presence to be vilified or at most politely indulged. “Whilst the fans will enjoy it, this isn’t anything new…” is a common rhetorical move, used to establish the critic’s own credentials by separating them from the general herd.[1] Aside from unfairly excluding a group of people, the problem with this attitude is the way it drags in a whole system of assumptions which underlie a lot of writing on literature and TV.
To put these assumptions crudely: fans are interested in content and story, whilst critics appreciate form and structure. Fans wallow in the invented worlds of literature, whilst critics seek to connect them to reality. Fans see characters as real people, whilst critics read them as representations. Fans enjoy the spectacular, whilst critics relish subtlety. This broadly fits into a rather unpleasant Modernist account of art – there are the cultured and then there are the “masses”.[2] It also segues very comfortably into sexism, with “masculine” values of analysis, judgement and abstract thinking set against “feminine” traits of emotionalism, fickleness and triviality. Not every sentence which distinguishes critics from fans carries all of this baggage, but it’s waiting nearby ready to be claimed and loaded on.
This model is nonsense, of course. It doesn’t work on a personal level – did any critic start writing because they were attracted by the formal aspect of an art form, and thought it was undertheorised? Every half-decent critic knows what being a “fan” feels like, otherwise they’d never have amassed enough experience and information to start writing. What’s dismissed as an irrelevant detail today, only interesting to geeks and anoraks, may well turn out to be the basis for a new theory of the form. And it doesn’t work on a group level either – fans are just as capable as being analytical as the critics. It was fans (some of them, at least) who called out Sherlock for sexism and were happy to speculate on a female Doctor Who. Both of these involved an extremely “critical” approach to the works as they existed and the ability to imagine them otherwise. The idea that fans can be sidelined as passive recipients of culture, who gratefully accept what they’re given, just won’t survive an encounter with reality, in whichever dimension.
But however dubious this distinction between “fan” and “critical” attitudes is, it might not make sense to abandon it altogether. Certainly the sexism, the elitism and the general snobbery need to be extirpated in short order. But there are situations in which “the fans” feel the need to identify themselves as such. Reading Adam Robert Thomas’ piece on Mass Effect 3, I was struck by how many of the comments thanked him for articulating what the fans felt about this game, which the critics were refusing to understand. If every reviewer stopped using the word “fans” tomorrow, all our culture wouldn’t suddenly be open and equally accessible to everyone. Some people would still get tickets to previews, access to galleys, invitations to private showings and be paid to give their opinions. So do “the fans” need the distinction to define themselves just as much as the critics do, as a way of pushing back on the way culture is organised and distributed? And if they do, do those arrangements translate into a distinctive set of attitudes, ways of consuming culture and critical virtues which are specific to fan groups – or is does every fanzine aspire to being the next Rolling Stone/ London Review of Books/ Empire when it gets big enough?
This is the first in a series of posts I’m planning on fans, fandom and fan culture. I’m particularly interested to read your comments on these pieces, and they’ll affect the way the series develops. Future instalments include pieces by Lisa Stead on women’s cinema fan culture in the mid-century, by Laura Buttrick on gaming fandom, by Rhian Jones on fangirlism in music, and by Stavvers on whatever Stavvers feels like. I’m also planning to write one trying to locate the idea of fan fiction in a longer historical/literary context: how it connects with literary pastiche, Biblical Midrash or medieval romance. If you have any ideas about areas you’d like to see covered – and/or if you’d like to write a piece yourself, do please get in touch.
[1] Paul Prescott’s essay “Inheriting The Globe” sets out a parallel example of reviewers using another section of the audience to define themselves against – in this case tourists at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. P.G. Wodehouse also tackled the subject in “Fair Play For Audiences”, come to think of it.
[2] A distinction memorably exposed in John Carey’s “The Intellectuals and the Masses”, which makes links between the art philosophies of T.S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf et al, and the idea of exterminating the “masses” which haunted the twentieth century.
quiteirregular 
Would love to contribute something, although I’m not sure what just yet. Something on the transition phase from fan to critic perhaps? Really excited to read all this!
Glad to hear it’s piqued your interest! That sounds an excellent topic, I’d be interested in hearing more about it whenever you’d like to expand on it.
You pose some excellent questions here, some of which we also grappled with as we researched fandom, while immersed in fandom ourselves. The split identity of an ‘aca-fan’, emotional/sexual/intimate on one side and analytical/intellectual/distanced on the other, was an uncomfortable fence to straddle. The resulting book, ‘Fandom At The Crossroads’, tackles some of that negotiation, along with the important issue of shame — for both fans and academics. We’d love to contribute to this fascinating discussion — and would love to hear your thoughts on our own musings if you check out ‘Crossroads’.
Thanks very much – a piece on “shame” would be splendid. Did you define the two sides more in terms of practices and engagement with other consumers, or in terms of reception and engagement with the work?
A little of both actually 🙂 Looking forward to this discussion!
This sounds very cool – it’s been years since my brief flurry of interest in the subject, and I never got beyond the standard Jenkins, Hellekson, Busse (and the even older Pugh, Bacon-Smith stuff), which would have been before it all moved more to the participatory culture and transformative works areas. Will you be looking at the transmedia and convergence sort of thing Jenkins has been looking at more recently? It’ll be fascinating to read your (and your guest bloggers) take on the issues.
Btw, I’m interested by your use of ‘critics’ – are you looking predominantly at ‘critics’ in the sense of (professional?) reviewers, for want of a better word, or in the sense of critics within academia who engage in lit (/media) crit? I’m not an English Lit. scholar so I’m unsure if it’s a recognised term of art I’m missing!
I haven’t even got to the standard works yet, so I’d appreciate any suggestions as to reading list! My own interest in it is more in understanding it as a way of engaging with art which moves beyond Modernist conceptions of the closed art object and the individual viewer/ reader – I’d like to put it alongside, say, the increasing stress on theatre performance as a set of practices rather than a product, or Stanley Fish’s old notion of the horizons of expectation and how intepretative communities police what kinds of meaning are permissible and what are not. That latter idea is particularly attractive, since it joins up with my interest in the various ways canons are disputed and deployed.
As to critics, I’ve conflated the two for this particular essay. Possibly, ahem, because it offers an easier purchase to attack Modernism…but also because I suspect in Shakespeare and theatre criticism they overlap to a far greater extent than in other arts. (For various reasons, including the medium itself – the academic “review” of a production both criticizes and preserves the performance in a way that isn’t necessary for TV, and I assume their journals aren’t littered with series recaps!) I want to avoid getting too sucked into discussions of the critical modes of academe, partly because that generaly takes us further away from contact with the audience and the artist, but also because I think the assumption that a university literary scholar is a “critic” is waning seriously. I think our sense that the easiest description for a professor is “literary critic” is an increasingly hollowed-out relic of what Goss would call “the Man of Letters” – someone whose job it is to both explicate and elaborate texts for a specific public and also somehow to keep the artist honest. So when I bring in academic criticism, it’ll probably be mainly to point out how far the T.S. Eliot model of a “critic” has disappeared, much as Harold Bloom might regret that. And much as I love the London Review of Books, I think it’s a lone survivor. Glad you found the launch piece worth a look – I’ll be grateful for any steers you can give me along the way!
The part about paid or unpaid was interesting to me. Why do some people get paid for their views and some don’t?
I liken it to journalism, I suppose. Critics get paid to be objective, and fans expect them to use certain standards in evaluating a work so that they (the fans) can better judge whether they should consume that media based on what was said. It’s harder to trust a fan’s review of something because you’re not sure what their baseline is, whether you both agree on what certain words mean, and so on.
That said, as you made the comparison to male/female with objectivity/subjectivity, I think you can probably take another feminist view to this idea. That is that we shouldn’t value in that classist manner objectivity/male/critic over subjectivity/female/fan. It’s true that the critic gets paid for their objectivity, which would seem to say that their work is more valued, but money doesn’t have to equal value. I find many things that don’t have to do with money valuable about fan opinion that you can’t get with critical writing.