Page 122 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Enthusing 113

Identity and subjectivity
Hills (2002) has argued that fan studies need to include significant attention to
what he terms the ‘affective play’ of fandom. He emphasizes the creativity and
emotional import of fandom to those who are engaged in the variety of fan
activities. While both of these aspects have been addressed in earlier work on
fans, especially by Grossberg (1992) in his account of affect, Hills argues that
Grossberg’s account is limited by its inattention to the playful aspects of fan-
dom and the fluidity of the boundaries of the self and society. Grossberg’s
account does not make fan activity sound like it is much fun. Hills argues that
the theory of affective play is transgressive in a number of ways, as it trans-
gresses boundaries between different disciplines, that between emotion and
affect, and that between affect and cognition (p. 93). Hills argues that a more
‘subjective’ cultural studies is required.
The way in which Hills approaches this is to develop the work of
Winnicott (see also Silverstone 1994 and Harrington and Bielby 1995), while,
however, drawing much from these previous deployments of Winnicott. The
basic idea is that TV acts as a transitional object and that attachments are
formed through this process. However, Hills argues that:
A distinction needs to be made between the transitional object-proper
(an actual physical object which the child both finds and creates, origin-
ally through fantasies of destruction) and the cultural field which is said
to displace the transitional object through the natural decathexis of the
object-proper. But in neither account is such a distinction drawn.
(Hills 2002: 106)
For Hills, then, a key issue is how the process of connection to a tran-
sitional object as a ‘private’ act in childhood is translated into cultural and
social aspects of later life. His example of this helps: ‘Or one might add, from
the private experience of playing with a Star Wars toy figure to a communal
pleasure in attending Star Wars conventions’ (p. 108). He thus deploys the idea
of the secondary transitional object to account for this process. The secondary
transitional object ‘has not altogether surrendered its affective charge and pri-
vate significance for the subject, despite having been recontextualised as an
intersubjective cultural experience’ (p. 109). In addition, ‘the secondary tran-
sitional object enters a cultural repertoire which “holds” the interest of the fan
and constitutes the subject’s symbolic project of self’ (p. 109). Thus, objects of
attention and significance may or may not be retained depending on condition
and context, but also in Hills’ argument because of the nature of the text itself.
Thus those that appeal to different age groups from the beginning are more
likely to be retained, such as Doctor Who. These texts also have a degree of
openness that allows them to do different things for a person at different points
of the life course depending on their shifting and developing interests. Thus, I
watched Doctor Who differently in the early 1960s, as a sometimes frightened
child, from how I watched as a teenager in the 1970s with friends, to how it
engages me now with my own sons and partner as someone with knowledge of
fan, audience, social and cultural theory (and the text has changed markedly
over that time as well). It still remains of some, albeit differential, importance.