hmpf

This started as an innocent reply to this post in a discussion starting with this post, but it sort of grew into proper meta and got a bit long, so I'm posting it here:



( meta discussion about the legitimacy of paying serious attention to products of 'low' cultural value, which then turns into a discussion of reasons why I connect so strongly with said products )

Whew. Just finished – finally! - reading the first three chapters of that dratted 'Philosophie der symbolischen Formen' by Ernst Cassirer. There are no words to describe how glad I am I don't study philosphy... It took me almost two weeks to read those less than 40 pages! And I can't claim I understood a significant part of it, although I honestly tried. Hard. And, maybe I'm terminally dense, but it seems to me that Cassirer is saying the same thing over and over again. I can't help the impression that he is repeating the same point in different words for pages. There seems to be an element of repetition here. There is a certain redundancy to his argument. A certain repetitiveness seems to me to be a mark of this text. (You get the idea. ;-))

I still don't see what the text has to do with the subject of the course, either. Oh well, I guess after trying hard to make sense of it for over a week, I should just give up and try and forget about it now.

Heh. See, that was a sample of my Real Life. ;-)

On to the really important stuff. Two things have kept my mind busy these last few days (besides Cassirer and Spider-Man comics). Fandoms in Midlife Crisis, and the Intellectual Fan.

I already wrote a bit about the latter yesterday, after checking out some other weblogs. It's actually not the first time I've noticed this marked difference between my way of 'using' my objects of obsession and the way others deal with theirs. I've noticed it on messageboards and mailing lists, and I know many people personally whose approach on a certain show is intellectual. It is actually rather ironic that mine turns out to be so un-intellectual, because I am, in Real Life, more of an analytical than an emotional person. I am not unable to have 'Deep Thoughts' about the shows or books I love, I just usually don't *bother* because it doesn't give me as much pleasure to dissect something I love for meaning as it does to just sit back and enjoy it. Take Farscape, for example. Many fans out there on messageboards, in weblogs or on mailing lists do a remarkable job of interpretation and dissection on every single new episode. I could probably do that, too, but it doesn't come naturally to me; I don't feel the need to. Also, I often feel I simply don't have the time for that kind of discussion. Farscape *is* on my mind every day, that's what makes me a geek, a real fan, an obsessive if you like. However, it is on my mind almost exclusively in the form of what I call 'mind fic' – nascent fanfics that I play around with for a few days, then discard. There is of course a certain amount of analysis involved in 'writing' these mind fics, but the analysis is always very close to the story, it doesn't grow into an end in and of itself.

My impression is that there is a certain kind of fan that I would like to call the 'intellectual fan'. These fans are often the most active, and maybe they lay an even fiercer claim on the material of their obsession than the rest of us do. They dissect episodes and characters with a passion, and often with deeper insight than I suspect even the writers of the eps to have. They construct elaborate systems of explanation that are often idiosyncratic, often more or less at odds with what may have been intended by the writers themselves. By this process they make the show their own, or maybe you could say they construct a sort of shadow-show, similar, but divergent in meaning from the one that is actually televised. If this process has been going on for a while on mailing lists or messageboards, a pattern begins to form, and idiosyncratic interpretation begins to turn into fanon – it becomes an unoffically-official system of interpretation respected by a large part of fandom.

I think this may actually be a cause of the second phenomenon I wanted to discuss here, fandom 'midlife crisis'. I think it is mainly those fans, who have developed quite a definite idea of 'how the show should be', who bring about the characteristic kind of panic at the start of a new season, especially when the show has run for a few years and everyone begins to dread an (inevitable?) descent in quality. There is an element of self-fulfilling prophecy here – everyone is talking about how the show is declining, until it hardly even matters anymore whether the show really is declining, because everyone is dead set on believing it anyway. (Maybe a preemptive maneuvre: give up on something *before* it seriously starts disappointing you, so it won't hurt as much when the real disappointment comes...?) In my experience, some of the loudest doomsayers are usually those fan intellectuals I described above, and I think this may come from their tendency to construct this kind of complex, highly personal interpretation of the show – suddenly, there comes a point where the show does not fit the fan interpretation, the fan prediction anymore, and disappointment ensues. Hence, the disappointed fans claim a decline in quality, when in actuality it is often simply the impossibility of making canon match fanon that upsets them. That is what I call the fandom midlife crisis – the sudden realization that the future one has imagined for oneself (or for the show one loves) is probably not the one that will come about.

Of course, I'm generalizing intolerably here, and there often really is a decline in quality when fans complain about one. I am just trying to explain to myself why a fandom is often declaring the 'death' of a show prematurely. Of course, there are other factors that come into play here – lots of them. But this posting is already getting quite lengthy, so I'll just leave it at that and see what people have to say to it... ;-)

Oh, and to prevent any misunderstandings, I am not bashing 'fan intellectuals' here; absolutely I am not. I appreciate their contributions to fandom, they make reading messageboards etc. a treat, and sometimes I wish I had the intellectual energy and clearness of perception they so often demonstrate. More power to them.

And now for something completely different: a homework assignment:

Many claim that in the last few years, geek culture has been going mainstream, or rather, the mainstream has gone geek. Is this really true, and if so, does geek culture lose something (and what) because of its more widespread appeal? And, lastly, if it is indeed true that we are seeing the end of geekdom as a subculture, isn't is sad (and typical) that I only found this subculture when it was disappearing? ;-) Discuss.