VLVL2 (2) "The Cultural Economy of Fandom"

[Paul Nightingale]

Prairie sighed. "Everybody was Jason that year. He's a classic now ..."

Fandom is defined in the chapters by Jensen, Fiske and Grossberg in Lisa
Lewis ed, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (1992).
The chapter by Ehrenreich et al, "Beatlemania: Girls Just want To Have
Fun", demonstrates that, whereas popular culture is indeed manufactured,
and fans are manipulated in the interests of profit, those fans can
still use the manufactured product (here the Beatles' tour of the US in
1964) to claim a space for the purposes of self-expression. Hence
critical discourse has shifted from the text (manufactured, marketed as
a commercial product) to the way fans appropriate it and use it to their
own ends.

>From John Fiske, "The Cultural Economy of Fandom":

Fandom is a common feature of popular culture in industrial societies
... [It] is typically associated with cultural forms that the dominant
value system denigrates - pop music, romance novels, comics, Hollywood
mass-appeal stars (sport, probably because of its appeal to masculinity,
is an exception). It is thus associated with the cultural tastes of
subordinated formations of the people, particularly with those
disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race.

[...]

Official [ie high] culture, like money, distinguishes between those who
possess it and those who do not. 'Investing' in education, in acquiring
certain cultural tastes and competences, with produce a social 'return'
in terms of better job prospects, of enhances social prestige and thus
of a higher socio-economic position. Cultural capital thus works
hand-in-hand with economic capital to produce social privilege and
distinction.

[...]

Official culture likes to see its texts (or commodities) as the
creations of special individuals or artists: such a reverence for the
artist and, therefore, the text, necessarily places its readers in a
subordinate relationship to them. Popular culture, however, is well
aware that its commodities are industrially produced and thus do not
have the status of a uniquely-crafted art-object. They are thus open to
the productive reworking, rewriting, completing and to participation in
the way that a completed art-object is not. It is not surprising then
that the dominant habitus, with its taste for official culture,
denigrates and misunderstands both the production and reception of
popular culture ... Because the industrial text is not an art-object to
be preserved, its ephemerality is not an issue ...