Tough Stan, Fan Stuff
Started this one a while ago.
It’s not good to keep things unfinished, here’s a lament and a cry :
What does it mean to be together
This might be one of the great obsessions running through this newsletter, how many ways can I ask the same question ?
What’s in a community ? Shared something, shared struggle, common investment, maybe. At least that’s what the word has somewhat come to mean.
Back in the day, the term community necessarily included a spatial dimension : your community, your group was people whose faces you knew, whose bodies you engaged with frequently enough that the term “social body” felt uncannily appropriate.
Now community has been blurred, it simply means “a group of people who share something”, regardless of distance and time, of mediation and work. The meaning has been changed from a set of specific material conditions to a constructed “We”.
Now what is fandom ?
We all know what a fan is, we just know it through different experiences and images, right?
In South India, especially Tamil Nadu, celebrity fans clubs have grown so powerful they rival ideological/religious movements in their influence on politics and society. They also provide aid, networking, and identity to their members.
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content warning: physical violence, seen from afar
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Fandom
If nowadays the figure of the fan blurs with that of the stan, its obsessive variant, we can at least agree there’s degrees to what a fan is and does.
Simply said, a fan is someone who has a relation to some Object, in a way that’s strong enough that the fan will, to some extent, shape their personal identity in relation to that Object. To be a fan is to be in relation to that thing but we most generally think of someone as a fan if they make that relation visible and obvious :
The person who has a hobby is not a fan unless they advertise that hobby and make it an obvious and visible part of their personality.
I don’t know how long it’s been this way, there must have been supporters clubs and firms back in the day, novelist groupies and so on but I wouldn’t presume it was as financialized and commonly advertised as it is now, who knows.
With products increasingly altering their means of dispersion to empathize personal connection (identity) to the audience in order to cultivate engagement (consumption) of the Object you can more easily see the contrast between different modes of engagement ; fandom, “standom”, obsession ; how all of these enclose one another, not like nesting dolls but rather like veins and arteries, bubbles, niches and so on.
They co-exist and feed one another, from the people who merely retweet the trailer of the latest WB movie, to those who have made moodboards of such and such characters, to those who’ve set-up their tents at their local comic-store to be sure to get the special edition “Bushfire Heroes” Firemen Funko Pop.
And obviously the more bizarre, self-indulgent and concerning the act is, the less people you’ll find doing it, there’s probably a xkcd comic for this (but i’m not wired into that type of humor and don’t know how to model a sliding scale equation so just assume i drew one here, thanks).
I’m saying that these are strange acts but maybe it’s just that these are far enough from the norm that they appear obsessive compared to everyday rituals we’ve become accustomed to in our respective contexts, i don’t know.
It takes a lot for the usual to get extra attention : Maybe it’s only called a fandom when it’s obvious.
Where does it start, why does it look like a cult
Looking to the stans, the fanatics, the militants of a fanbase means looking at the most vocal and most illegible of the crowd, those who’ve cloaked themselves in the signs and symbols of the Object they revere with the function of reassuring themselves and with the intent of signaling to the others in the know, it means looking at those who most energetically profess their allegiance and scream “there are dozens of us! dozens!” in their favored spaces.
When you look at these people you see a similar pattern. That of stratification and consolidation, aggregation.
The first step to a fandom is the existence of an Object, from which a Canon is derived. The Canon is a consensus the fans will share and repeat, through praises, interpretations, jokes. Now there’s as many interpretations of an Object as there are observers but something becomes/joins the Canon when it’s agreed upon and entrusted by enough to be enforced as a consensus.
Bear in mind I’m not a religions scholar and this is off the top of my head, if there are any people in this field I’d be glad to get schooled.
Anyways : a soccer team, an actor, an author, a book series, a tv show, a political figure, an influencer, a band, a prophet, an artist, a CEO, a party… These all become Objects in the eyes of their fans, things to be witnessed and grasped at, desired. Engaged either through mediation or on occasion. A fan is necessarily distinct from the Object they’re a fan of. If they were a part of that Object, they’d simply be a star.
This is where it gets murky.
The Object is what is praised but the Canon is where the prayer is written.
The Object is always over there but the Canon is in the hands of the fans, it’s what they handle to communicate to one another, a (re)collection of signals emitted that somehow tell the whole story that needs be known about the Object, it’s not the Object in itself but a synopsis, a record, a log, a lore. The fact is that the Object can never be held by the fans, it can only be observed and described and a general description and explanation of the Object will feed and allow its Canon to grow.
Canon
A Canon is experienced by the fans either as a dead text only revived by the audience in the act of reading/watching/hearing its Object, or through events that recur and are explained(canonized) during and afterwards by the audience. The Canon exists retrospectively, as a recollection of events, as an imposition of meaning onto what has happened, in that sense the Canon can’t be the Object, exactly.
Likewise, if the Object was truly a part of its source rather than generated by the fans out of signals of the source then it would be able to communicate perfectly its intent, its decisions. All the interpretations of fans would be under the control of this author, creator, source. This is rarely the case, there’s always room for doubt, misinterpretation, fanfic and so on. Ultimately Canon and Object are relational constructs that allow communication between fans and creators, to differing degrees. (This probably sounds confused and strange if you’re not already acquaintanced with witnessing this kind of behavior, bear with me i’ll try to make it clearer.)
You could say for example that the specificities inherent to a media will condition the way a Canon and Object, of that media, is formed ; the differences in how cinema is talked about compared to novels or to theatre, you could also point to the fact that the image a creator projects to their audience, the image of the alcoholic writer, that of the activist author, that of the recluse genius, that of the poetic witness that these are all part of the Object and impact the Canon and its construction. You could say that the Author is extension of the Work, if by Author you mean persona rather than person.
Now I can tell my descriptions of fandom so far may have seemed harsh or exaggerated to people who’d describe themselves as fans or as members of (a) fandom.
I can accept that I’m using some terms in a restrictive manner, but that’s because I’m trying to pin some things down, stop them from being too volatile conceptually. Ultimately these aren’t my words, you can always take them and go wild with it on your own, just let me make my maps.
For example, the logic of fandom i describe here is specifically that of a reverence to the Canon, where interpretation doesn’t emerge off of dialogue but in the telling and retelling of a Truth, repetitive signaling and communication, a collective litany of the same old story :
The soccer game as a recurring end of the world ritual for those used to see their team lose.
The concert that ends in the same song every-time, with a line-up that changes from time to time, echoed by rows of an informal choir.
The election where the same program is given a different face to repeat the same speeches and appeal to the same values and aesthetics. The experience of going door-to-door to talk about that program, maybe with the knowing bitterness that this is probably be fruitless this year too.
It’s the logic of the ritual, of the routine, of the event as a maintenance of some Canon. Something is done to bring balance to some system, some world.
Things have to go as usual for things to go as usual : Comfort (which is neither happiness nor pleasure, but release and tension cleaved together.)
Now obviously a Canon doesn’t need to be generated democratically to be embraced by the collective. All a consensus requires is trust. And trust can be engineered, or pressured into existence.
The distance and mediation that the Object entertains with the audience and the Canon is important here :
The idea of something betraying the hopes of its fandom or fanbase is common enough in pop culture : fans crying at the inaccuracy of such and such portayal or angry at a changed ending… but this connection to an Object and the apparent betrayal of a Canon has to do with more than just failure or deception.
The gap between the Object and the Canon, that’s to say between the signals emitted, received by the fans, and the log, the record they’ve been maintaining, this gap is a tension that can be productive, sometimes to the extreme.
This inductive nature of the recollection of what the Object has always been, this gap is too much. And if they’ve been enticed and attached to this Object on the basis of their identity as fans then it’ll feel like the Object has betrayed them. Or maybe it’s been replaced, maybe it never existed. Never meet your idols.
Betrayal
If you’d been a football fan or football player in 1968, you could’ve said that the essence of what french football is, was “betrayed” by its financialisation and its turning into a lucrative commercial spectacle where players are celebrities compared to earlier amateur athletes which you could find in groups composed of people from certain class-backgrounds related to their teams and localities in particular : laborer/working class associations and bourgeois clubs respectively.
Betrayal because the values that where associated to its Canon up to that era were very different from the current football industry where players and teams are exchanged as commodities between companies rather than simply people trying to play and make some name for themselves and be the pride of their club, of their city. Celebrity-athletes of a different caliber altogether. You could say it wasn’t really football fandom before, given that the distance between teams and their supporters was more like the distance between neighbors rather than one between audience and unreachable star.
Fame, personality, toys, merchandising, national and international bets have taken more and more importance over the years and the Canon of what football was has unravelled and been replaced in memories and practices (and price).
This sense of betrayal at the move of sport from spectacle/leisure to a market/commodity is real in a material sense: the control over the legal status of clubs and teams has been completely changed by the introduction of “big money” into the football milieux, international cups, national cups, cross-country tournaments, seasons, all of it molds the relation of people to each others, to their clubs, to their peers, not saying it was all flowers and and sunshine before, it’s still a sportculture and milieux built on a lot of machismo but at least gambling addiction wasn’t at this level back then. From then on you also get a dysjonction between Canon and Object.
Because the Object is not, anymore, in the hand of the “anti-finance players” or the fans, there’s no way they can have an Object reflecting their faith and expectations back to them. (I used an anti-financialisation exemple but you could also point to conservative fans being extremely racist to the composition of their team, given the fact that teams are no longer composed of people chosen by the team and the locality it comes out of but by an owner and a trainer.) The Object they entrusted has stopped being, swapped with something they can never hope to hold, orient, grasp.
In that sense, as long as it can maintain consistency with its Canon, the Object will be trusted, praised, revered. But that implies that this very Canon is, to some extent, known to the Object in question and that the Object tries to maintain that consistency.
If it doesn’t, then there’s more than a chance that the meaning of the Canon will ossify, as what is deemed the Truth of the Object seems to be betrayed by events, by people, by the reality of the Object itself.
When the canon shatters : a crisis of consensus leading to a crisis of hegemony, a moment when the main narrative has fallen to the side and been revealed as flawed and lacking, such a moment doesn’t simply leaves a gap but also an opportunity for the florishing of a thousand voices trying to make themselves heard, to find the others. Schisms in the fandom, differing notions of what is true, different interpretations and claims on premises, assuming these very premises are even agreed upon. It’s all a big mess.
Culture hates a void so we silently build our beliefs to fill it all up, and when the chasm happens our thoughts too daring to be spelled fall into place as if of their own accord.
For now I ask “what is a we”, later I ask “who is we”.
Ospare@substack.com /// Ospare@protonmail.com