- “Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time shamelessly exploited.” (Terranova 2000, 37)
We are all big fans of something. At some point in our lives, we have all loved a team, a singer, a movie, a book to some excruciating degree that the text imprints itself on the psyche. Fandom studies, stemming from cultural studies and media studies, takes a multivalent look at just that imprinting experience, tracking the viewer’s reaction and interaction with cultural phenomena, including literature, games, sport, music, fashion, television, and even politics. A highly interdisciplinary area of study, one of its core tenets is that fans are not merely passive consumers; rather, they are highly savvy prosumers (productive consumers, so says Fuchs).[1] They create websites to house extratextual works (fanfic, fan videos, etc.) and commentary, moderate and contribute to forums, edit wikis, exchange information and links, guide fellow fans with search, comment on stories, review and screen-cap episodes, translate, tag, compile newsletters, animate .gif sets, create user icons, edit zines (the list can truly go on and on.) These activities are information work and “communication power,”[2] albeit labor-power freely and joyously volunteered.
Such practices are guided by loyalty, commitment, and active or passive promotion to/for the particular media objects. When we frame labor as active, participatory, elected, compulsive, dare I say it, something we do out of of love, things get thorny. Such affective labor does operate on a labor theory of value, but not necessarily as Marx saw it. The value of fannish labor is not precisely the worth of labor-power (i.e. the amount of time spent doing communication work like the examples above), nor is it explicitly based on the use-value or exchange-value to be extracted by the capitalist. Fandom is an excellent example of a gift economy, a circular, overlapping network of affinities in which individual agents freely produce, trade, receive, and reciprocate tasks and creative works.
How can we look at fandom as communitarian, arising from anti-capitalist urges? Simultaneously, how is it shackled to commodity fetishism? Isn’t its existence and maintenance reliant upon digital labor, a feature of capital commodifying leisure time? Does this digital labor necessarily create goods and products, or does it instead result in laborers trained in the craft of world-making? I shall use Terranova’s insights on the digital gift economy, Marx’s formulation of labor as life-activity, and the freedom inherent in Fuchs’ “playbour” to ping-pong between fan labor’s positive and negative dynamics, unearthing their dialectic intertwinement. I close with a few ways LIS professionals and memory institutions can highlight the identities of fans as both cultural producers and amateur digital archivists.
Marx foresaw that his definitions of capitalist labor would mutate: “…the mode of production and the means of production are continually transformed, revolutionised, how the division of labour is necessarily followed by greater division of labour…”[3] The gift economy woven into our often-always-online lives is evidence of such a shift of traditional Marxist labor-power. Tiziana Terranova’s piece “Free Labor” is vital for working through the complications of fannish labor, especially since in 2020, fandom predominantly originates from and spends time in/on the Internet. Terranova finds overemphasis on autonomy in Barbrook’s optimistic formulations of the gift economy. While the gift economy is increasingly important to late capitalism as a whole, it cannot upset or overturn capitalism “from the inside.” Terranova states: “The Internet is always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy.”[4] I see fandom in much the same way.
Media and performance scholar Abigail de Kosnick positions fandom as somewhat oppositional to capitalism: “Fans generally conceive of their activities as ‘resistive’ to consumerism, [therefore refusing] to consider that their works might constitute promotional materials or ancillary products that increase the value of the objects of fandom and therefore might be deserving of compensation.”[5] On the one hand, fandom is a means of approaching consumption of the arts which involves obstinately remaining in a performance frame when it is no longer there. Acts of reenacting, reusing, and preserving the once-purchased commodity through obsession, conscious re-remembering, and re-contextualization into an auxiliary paratext eschews the dangerous refrain of “single-use item.” Yet, as de Kosnick hints, perhaps contributing to a fandom’s gift economy out of love and/or membership in a cherished community is too insular: being blindly invested in a passionate community means fans might not notice how commodity capitalism benefits off of their unseen labor.
Marx’s formulation of labor as life-activity is particularly interesting and can be interpreted in the two opposing lenses we have engaged with thus far.[6] Consider the term “diehard”, which is defined as “strongly or fanatically determined or devoted;” there are countless examples of devotees of a given sports team, musical artist, television show, or film who would consider it an object, experience, or world they are involved with for their entire life. Such love means labor given to fandom does not feel like work. Yet, neoliberal capitalism preys on emotive pull towards work to reproduce it.
Relatedly, it is impossible to ignore that fandom ecosystems require capitalist consumerism, and in tandem, capitalism needs fandom’s labor-power. If you have found yourself a fan of an active musical act or currently “on-air” television show, even waiting for new material is labor-power. While the process of waiting and anticipating can be a way to build community amongst the fandom, this waiting to consume is part of capital’s choreography.[7] As Terranova puts it: “the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cyber cultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital.”[8] The matter is further complicated by the fact that many fans and fandoms now utilize social media (especially Tumblr and Twitter) to share information, exchange fan graphics, and a whole host of other “new forms of creativity, sociality, and participation.”[9] The high visibility of social media interactions invites exploitation. Privileging the capitalist’s survival (but not the laborers’) remains intact — it is becoming more commonplace for media monoliths to assume, prepare, and extract fans’ hype to use in marketing campaigns. Examples include HBO’s multi-platform transmedia storytelling campaign before the release of Game of Thrones, corporate ownership of fan conventions, or brands partnering with makeup companies in advance of a film’s release, like 2011’s Wonder Woman x Mac Cosmetics, or 2015’s Star Wars x CoverGirl. Industry doesn’t prey only on positive behavioral surplus: even fan outrage (e.g. men upset by the all-female cast of 2014’s Ghostbusters re-boot) can be used so as to become “a viable market focus down the road.”[10]
I’d like to turn back from the overwhelming glare of industry commodifying affective fannish labor and return to what possibilities fan labor affords its laborers. Christian Fuchs’ deliberate convergence between play and labor (“playbour”) offers a useful handle: “Play is a free activity without duration and permanence; labour is an unfree activity with duration and permanence. Play labour has the semblance of freedom but is unfree in that it creates wealth and profits that are controlled by others.”[11] I agree with the former statement, but not the latter. A cursory glance at two genres of fannish texts — erotic fanfiction and video game playthroughs — suggests that the ultimate products (if they exist at all) are not items to be sold or purchased; their takeaways are to be accepted and experienced. Fanfiction, generally, and smut, in particular, asks that both writer and reader drop preconceptions of their present reality and imagine somewhere and/with someone else. While many video game playthroughs act as instructional manuals, some few are invitations: less this is how you win the game and more this is how you can win the game. The practiced labor of choosing and building a different/better/not-this world is a muscle our society would do well to exercise. Imagination and love may just be the way out; as Charlie Ledbetter puts it: “Escapism is not a departure from reality. Rather, escape de-centers the hegemony of oppressive systems that announce themselves as real and creates space to imagine alternatives.”[12]
So, in closing, where can we go from here? How can LIS professionals and memory institutions fit in? As for industry co-optation, for starters, all digital workers (both in the “free” moments of clacking and clicking towards play, growth, and investigation, and during the plodding tedium of doing the email job) need to practice resistance while we stare at the screens, and discipline in building face-to-face communities. But at a perhaps more innocent level, library and information studies scholars can illuminate the labor behind the work of media connoisseurs like fans through acquisition and exhibition. Certain fan archives can be found in university libraries (e.g. Sandy Hereld Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M University, digital fanzine archives at the University of Iowa, the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, which owes an incredible debt to personal collections by Deadheads) but current curation of these items suggest that the fanmade works are the subjects to be valorized, instead of the identities and labor of their makers. Could this be done by a library or archive creating an emulation to a born-digital archive? Secondarily, archival workers may be exactly the individuals to work with fandom communities to move their archives off proprietary platforms and/or create robust cataloging and description systems to enhance resource discovery and knowledge exchange. “Digital technologies are not innately archival, but must be made to serve archival purposes by the constant efforts of archivists.”[13] Trained archivists collaborating with passionate amateur archivists (fans) could hold the potential to revolutionize how we all continually remake and preserve Internet locales. If a collaborative project between archivists and fan-archivists were to take shape, it would need to be tailored precisely to the needs and wishes of fans, so as to retain the fans’ agency over their own community archival spaces. Most crucial to fandom communities and their archival habitats is that they remain in flux, they remain welcoming, and they are a place done together.[14]
[1] Christian Fuchs, Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 19.
[3] Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” in The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: WW Norton, 1978), 213.
[4] Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 51.
[5] Abigail De Kosnick, “Fandom as Free Labor,” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Fantasy, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012), 105.
[6] Marx, 204.
[7] Matt Hills, “Always-on Fandom, Waiting and Bingeing: Psychoanalysis as an Engagement with Fans’ ‘Infra-Ordinary’ Experiences,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, eds. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 18.
[8] Terranova, 51.
[9] Fuchs, 265.
[10] Derek Johnson, “Fantagonism, Franchising, and Industry Management of Fan Privilege,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, eds. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 402.
[11] Fuchs, 270.
[12] Charlie Ledbetter, “The Dysphoric Body Politic, or Seizing the Means of Imagination.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 34, (2020):[1.3]. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1751.
[13] Abigail De Kosnick, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, MIT Press 2016), 30.
[14] 함께 하는 공간
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