Page 113 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

9 Enthusing

In Chapter 4, I outlined the spectacle/performance paradigm and in the rest of
this book so far, I have sought to show the general relevance of the spectacle/
performance paradigm for the analysis of ordinary life in advanced capitalist
societies. In a number of ways this book seeks to advance the agenda of two
earlier ones (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998; Savage et al. 2005) and I would
argue that it has done this, but some of the particulars of the arguments
require some further development. There are two broad reasons for this. First,
it is important to return to some of the specific arguments about audience
processes that led to the more general conclusions of this book as they offer
concrete evidence about social and cultural change. Second, since the original
formulation of the spectacle/performance paradigm much new work on fans
and audiences has been produced. Some of this has been integrated into the
discussion in Chapter 4, however, in this chapter I take this discussion forward
on a number of fronts. This discussion will intertwine evidence that has been
produced from empirical studies of audience processes and fan activity, as well
as drawing on the theoretical innovation that has taken place on the basis of
that substantial research.
Much current research has considered fandom in a range of ways. As
Audiences argued (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998), there is still some con-
fusion over different definitions of fandom and we proposed a typology to
overcome this. While some authors have used the typology and some have
criticized it, I still maintain its core utility (see Chapter 4). While we used the
idea of ‘enthusiasm’ to examine a particular point on the audience continuum,
I will, in much of this chapter, use the idea of enthusing to capture the idea of
some degree of investment in forms of culture be they directly media related or
not. This will enable me to compare evidence on similar processes across a
range of practices.
Another key aim of this chapter is to examine the place of what might be
called excessive or better extraordinary aspects of ordinary life. I do not want to
draw a hard line between ordinary and extraordinary forms of life and culture.
Rather, I argue that what might be thought to be extraordinary attachments
and forms of activity are part of ordinary life. This means that there is a fluidity
to the way in which we move from one form of attachment to another.