Page 123 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

114 Cultural change and ordinary life

Hills also draws attention to these processes of life shifts in significance
of fan objects with his idea of autoethnography. While there is a danger of
collapsing into complete solipsism in using one’s own attachments to consider
fan biography, in my view there is value in such processes especially when
viewed in the light of the more social/cultural tracing of life shifts in the
work of Gauntlett and Hill (1999) as discussed in Chapter 7. Thus, while
Hills usefully applies these ideas to his own biography and shifting attach-
ments to media, this could also be done to some depth through the analysis of
media-centred life narrative accounts. This is an area that remains relatively
unexplored. Hills offers important ideas concerning the development of the self
and how investments can playfully shift over time. Ideas concerning identity
are also further considered by Sandvoss.
Key aspects of the general approach proposed by Sandvoss have already
been introduced via the discussion of the example of football. Thus, he argues
that media operate as an extension of the self. Fandom and audience processes
are therefore fundamentally narcissistic. Sandvoss arrives at this position
through the critique of other psychological and psychoanalytical approaches.
He suggests that three forms have been influential: Freudian, Kleinian and
those derived (as in Silverstone and Hills) from the work of Winnicott. For
Sandvoss, in broad terms all these approaches run into the problem of the
social dimensions of fandom and play. However, Freudian theories ‘neverthe-
less provide a useful starting point to explore fan fantasies constituted in the
field of tension between id and superego’ (2005: 94). While Klein’s work facili-
tates consideration of ‘processes of projection and introjection, whereby the
object of fandom becomes an extension of aspects of the fan’s self, as well
as vice versa’ (p. 94). The problem is that it can lead to a ‘pathologization of
fans’ (p. 94). The Winnicott-influenced work is important as it ‘underlines the
important function of fandom as a realm of negotiation between inner and
external realities, and thus as a source of both pleasure and security’, however,
it ‘needs to be counterbalanced by an analysis of the content and framing
of such play’ (p. 94). Thus, in many respects Sandvoss is building on the
approach represented by Hills.
In arguing for the way in which the self is narcissistically extended via
connections to the media, it is important to recognize that Sandvoss is not
simply asserting that the audience and the fans are self-centred in a narrow
way. As he suggests, the issues that this raises in the way in which this relation-
ship between self and other works can form the basis for action, critique and
change. Thus, deriving his discussion from the work of Marcuse, he argues that
this process can ‘bear on the potential to challenge forms of existing social
organization’ (p. 122). However, the extent to which this is the case depends in
his argument on the nature of texts.

Texts

It has long been a truism of studies of fandom that the texts are relatively open,
in the sense that texts are polysemic. They are open to a variety of interpret-
ations and can be reworked to form new texts and practices. The nature of
these texts and practices is one of the key surprises that affect outsiders to