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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral CULTURAL CONVERGENCE TEXTUAL POACHERS REVISITED POACHERS AND CULTURE JAMMERS THE ECONOMICS OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES AND MEDIA CONSUMPTION THE APPROPRIATIVE AESTHETIC IN POPULAR CULTURE CONSEQUENCES OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE Notes de bas de page Auteur

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    The poachers and the stormtroopers: cultural convergence in the digital age

    Henry Jenkins

    p. 343-378

    Texte intégral CULTURAL CONVERGENCE TEXTUAL POACHERS REVISITED POACHERS AND CULTURE JAMMERS THE ECONOMICS OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES AND MEDIA CONSUMPTION THE APPROPRIATIVE AESTHETIC IN POPULAR CULTURE CONSEQUENCES OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1Let’s start with two recent stories, both involving Star Wars and the Internet, which illustrate some of the complexities of popular culture in the digital age.

    2In Spring 1998, a two page color-spread in Entertainment Weekly profiled aspiring digital filmmaker Kevin Rubio, whose 10 minute, $ 1,200 film, Troops, has attracted the interests of Hollywood insiders2. Troops spoofs Star Wars by offering a Cops-like profile of the stormtroopers who do the day-in, day-out work of policing Tatoone, settling domestic disputes, rounding up space hustlers, and trying to crush the Jedi Knights. In a sly wink towards Fargo, one of the stormtroopers speaks with a noticeable Minnesota accent. Rubio’s film made imaginative and resourceful use of computer graphics work as well as those found in most big budget productions. As a result, he is fielding offers, from companies like Dreamworks, to finance his first feature film. Star Wars producer George Lucas has announced his own enthusiasm for the short. Posted on the Web, Troops draws a phenomenal number of hits each day3.

    3In fall 1997, the Usenet discussion group devoted to Star Wars responded to increased traffic sparked by the re-release of the “digitally-enhanced” versions of the original films, creating a separate newsgroup where fans could post and critique original fiction set in the Star Wars universe. Such stories often involve rereading the Star Wars saga from the point of view of Darth Vader, the Emperor, the stormtroopers, and the other imperial forces. In a rare action, the Usenet hierarchy vetoed the plan, not even allowing it to be presented for a formal vote, claiming that it promoted “illegal activities”, i. e., that Net discussions of fan fiction encouraged the violation of Lucasfilm’s copyright. Interestingly, the same group had previously failed to block discussion groups devoted to the circulation of child pornography, information about making terrorist weapons, or the exchange of illegal drugs. Many believe that they made this decision based on a series of “cease and desist” letters issued by Lucasfilm attorneys aimed at shutting down Star Wars fan Web sites or blocking the circulation of fanzines. Through the years, Lucasfilm has been one of the most aggressive corporate groups in trying to halt fan cultural production4. As early as 1981, Lucasfilm had issued legal notices and warnings to fans who published zines containing sexually explicit stories, while implicitly giving permission to publish non-erotic stories about the characters: “Since all of the Star Wars Saga is PG Rated, any story those publishers print should also be PG. Lucasfilm does not produce any X-Rated Star Wars episodes, so why should we be placed in a light where people think we do?” Many fans felt that Lucasfilm was claiming the right to ideologically police their shared “fantasies”. Much of the writing of fan erotica was pushed underground by this policy, though it continued to circulate informally. By the late 1990s, Lucasfilm had adopted a stringent policy against all forms of fan fiction that might compete with their own professionally written Star Wars novels.

    4Let’s pause for a moment and consider what these two stories have in common. Both involve the circulation, via digital media, of original artworks that appropriate their core themes, images, and situations from Star Wars. In both cases, the same core idea is being explored. The creative artists are asking what Star Wars would look like from an Imperial perspective5. In both cases, this appropriation is unauthorized, even though, after the fact, Lucas chose to give his personal blessings to Troops. Rubio explained in personal e-mail to me, “Although my pocketbook and my morality tend to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, I would not try to make a profit off of this film out of respect for Mr. Lucas. Let’s face it, he’s the last guy on this earth that I want to piss off”. Fans similarly “respect” Lucas and have no desire to infringe upon his copyright.

    5Let’s consider how they differ. From a classical legal standpoint, Troops poses a greater direct threat to Lucasfilm’s interests6. It has high production values, which could easily be confused with official Star Wars materials. It is produced by a professional who seeks entry into the entertainment industry, who wants to profit from his appropriation of Lucasfilm’s intellectual property – at least indirectly if not directly. The Star Wars fan fiction, on the other hand, is clearly of an amateur quality and is explicitly marked as such. Few people would be likely to mistake it for anything Lucasfilm produced. Its circulation on the Net does not require any monetary exchange. Lucasfilm’s official rationale for shutting down the fan sites, after all, is that if they turn a blind eye to fan’s non-profit appropriations, they will lessen their ability to control the production and circulation of unauthorized commercially-produced materials. So why was a decision made to respond more aggressively to Star Wars fan fiction than to Troops?

    6This essay will explore a double standard in contemporary popular culture, one which complicates claims that the digital revolution is enabling grassroots cultural production and distribution. I will argue that the introduction of new communications media in the late twentieth century has built up expectations that we can participate actively in our culture and that reworking cultural materials has become a central part of the process of media consumption. On the other hand, the media industries have sought to structure our opportunities for interaction with media content in order to regulate the use of their intellectual property. The result is a cult media that selectively embraces aspects of fan culture, even as corporate lawyers seek to shut down fan Web sites and discussion lists. For some time, research into cult media has been criticized for not adequately exploring issues of political economy, often with the implication that if we looked at issues of media ownership and production, we would see that fandom was simply an outgrowth of the marketing process and therefore not at all resistant to corporate control of culture. As we examine the political economy of fandom, nothing so simple emerges: fans are sometimes desired consumers for cultural products and certain marketing strategies tend to court fan-ish responses. As I will suggest, many fan practices have been pulled toward the mainstream in the decade since I wrote Textual Poachers, leaving the books’emphasis on fandom’s marginalization a quaint record of a past era. At the same time, these same corporations adopt strategies of responding to fan culture (especially on the Web and the Net) that strip consumers of any rights to participate within their own culture; threatening letters and phone calls are often radicalizing to fans who simply wanted to express their affiliations with a particular cult media product. The problem lies in our polarized vocabulary of co-optation and resistance; neither term adequately describes the unstable and often mercurial relations between media corporations and fan culture, which can be both welcoming and hostile. The opening quote by Rosemary Coombes reminds us what’s at stake in conflicts over who controls our core myths and symbols. Coombes insists that cultural democracy depends on our rights to “fix” and “challenge” the meanings of shared cultural materials. Judged by that standard, the cultural consequences of the “digital revolution” remain uncertain at best. This subsequent discussion will, thus, be uncertain, speculative, perhaps even self-contradicting as it tries to describe trends in popular culture that are still taking their definitive shape and whose consequences will not become fully apparent for some time to come.

    CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

    7The trends I want to identify in this essay fall loosely under the heading of “cultural convergence”, a term I have coined to reflect the fact that the technological convergences being discussed in the information and entertainment industries actually build upon a complex series of cultural and social shifts that are redefining how we relate to media and popular culture. Anyone who wants to see what convergence looks like should visit my house and watch my adolescent son, sprawled on the living room rug, watching a baseball game on our big-screen television, listening to techno on his cd-player, and writing e-mail to his friends. At the moment, the technologies aren’t talking to each other. They’re on different sides of the room. But, it doesn’t really matter very much in cultural terms: consumers are already using different media and their contents in relation to each other. Sociologists are starting to refer to the “N Generation”, the Net “Generation”, or “Gen. Com”, children who have come of age relating to interactive technologies and digital media and who operate under the rather bold assumption that they can be active participants in shaping, creating, critiquing, and circulating popular culture7.

    8“Cultural convergence” describes new ways audiences are relating to media content, their increased skills at reading across different media, and their desires for a more participatory culture. If technological convergence ever amounts to anything more than a marketing gimmick, then it is going to be because we have become invested in the transformations media content undergoes as it circulates from one context into another. If we are going to be culturally invested in interactive television, it is because our culture has come to value our interactions with television and to perceive television content as a resource in our social interactions.

    9The media industries actively promote the fantasy of a more participatory culture, describing consumption through images of “empowerment”. The myth of the “digital revolution” has been a primary aspect of the marketing of personal computers, going back to the 1984 ad campaign that paved the way for the introduction of the Apple computer into the home. As Ted Friedman has argued, this campaign stressed the grassroots and emancipatory potential of the home computer as a contrast to previous stereotypes of the computer as a centralized and all-powerful technology for the office8. The Apple computer was represented as a liberating force that shattered the control of “big brother” and called into question the conformist logic of its competition. Macintosh continues to call on its consumer to “think different”, linking its consumer goods to an alternative cultural logic. Such advertising seems to promise us that our use of home computers will give us a new and more powerful relationship to corporate culture. The spread of Net access has been shaped by science fictional representations of cyberculture as a resistant subculture, the embrace of digital technology by such “alternative culture” figures as Timothy Leary and John Perry Barlow, and the political and cultural fantasies promoted by publications such as Mondo 2000 and Wired9. One can, of course, dismiss such images as the deceptions of corporate marketing, except they have also shaped how the on-line community perceives itself, how it thinks about its relationship to the technology, and the standards to which it is increasingly holding e-commerce accountable. There is a resistant political culture on the Web that is deeply suspicious of “big brother” and translates itself into campaigns against “spamming” (unsolicited advertising sent via e-mail) and monopolistic concentrations of wealth and power, and for Internet privacy and more democratic access to cultural resources. As writers like Jon Katz note, consumers of computers have a nasty habit of becoming “Netizens”.

    10However, while digital media attracts most of the attention these days, cultural convergence is larger than the “digital revolution”. Other technologies, such as the photocopier and the videotape recorder, have also fostered a more fluid or flexible relationship with popular culture. All of these technologies promise consumers greater control over the flow of entertainment and information into their lives.

    11We might break down the concept of cultural convergence into a series of basic operations consumers perform on television programs and other pop culture artifacts:

    12Archiving – The creation of a personal or shared library of materials for future reference and use. Videotape enables people to build extensive collections of episodes of their favorite series. This collecting impulse has allowed them to feel a much greater sense of mastery over media contents and has formed the basis for other cultural interactions.

    13Annotation – The creation of written commentary for the purpose of aiding your own access to the archived material or to help share meanings and interpretations with others. Annotations can be as crude as handwritten notes in a loose-leaf binder or as sophisticated as a digital database. Some fan video-makers have extraordinary memories that allow them to recall relevant shots from across a hundred or more episodes of a favorite series so they can draw upon them as resources in their own cultural production. The social basis of fandom, however, sparks a desire to record and share these annotations so more experienced fans can help neophiles get their bearings.

    14Emotional Investment – The creation of personal meanings and associations based on previously constructed content, “making it your own”. What motivates the process of collecting and annotating media content? I would argue that the impulse is driven by passion, by the recognition that there is something “special” in a particular work, that it helps to facilitate fantasies or convey meanings that are deeply personal to the consumer. We are moved to elaborate on these materials through a desire to share that intense emotional experience with others, to help them to see more clearly what we have located within the source material. Ironically, this process requires us to transform the source materials, to amplify features we see as especially significant or salient, while cutting away elements that displease us. In some cases, this cutting away process can be literal. Many Star Wars fans have told me they can’t wait to own The Phantom Menace on video so they can edit out all the Jar Jar Binks segments. In other cases, it can involve fast-forwarding through uninteresting bits or simply deciding that they are not central to our conception of the narrative. Emotional Investment, thus, depends both on mastery over and selective amnesia about the story content.

    15Appropriation and Transformation – The process of borrowing and reworking cultural materials as resources for the creation of new works. The practice of appropriation has become more and more widespread as the tools for copying and manipulating media images have become more accessible. An appropriate aesthetic dominates the late twentieth century. Consider just a few examples of Star Wars appropriations currently in circulation:

    • An editorial cartoon, Starr Wars, spoofs the classic film poster, with the sinister head of Ken Starr hovering over the background as a heroic Bill Clinton thrusts his cigar aloft and Monica Lewinsky in a gossamer gown (and exposed black thong undies) clings to his muscle bound body.
    • An advertisement for the new Austin Powers film mimics the trailers for Star Wars and then laughs at spectators who confused the two. The film’s slogan was “If you see only one movie this summer, see Star Wars. If you see two, see Austin Powers”.
    • A fan Web site publishes hundreds of stories set in the Sith Academy where Darth Maul learns “life lessons” such as how to drive aggressively or how to work in a fast food restaurant, often testing what he learns from an eternally hapless Obi-Wan Kenobi.
    • The short film, Lucas in Love, circulates through the board rooms of Hollywood, a spoof of the Academy-Award winning Shakespeare in Love, showing young George as a nerdy film school student who conceptualizes the Star Wars films after a bungled romance.
    • A gag in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut proposes the assassination of Jar Jar Binks, feeding upon mounting public ridicule that the character is a racist stereotype.
    • A television program, Thumb Wars, stages the original Star Wars story using only thumbs which have been painted to look like the various characters.
    • An amateur Web-movie, StarClerks depicts stormtroopers working in a convenience store and delivering lines from Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

    16Some of these examples originate in fan culture, some in commercial culture, but from the point of view of content, it matters very little. All of these media producers assume an audience that knows Star Wars well and will recognize subtle plays on its conventions or spoofing references to its characters. Many of them seek to pull Star War themes and characters into the realm of our everyday lives or to read them as part of the mythology of a hyper-mediated culture.

    17Recirculation – The transmission of appropriated materials to a broader audience. Here again, digital media enable new relations to media content. In the past, the lack of appropriate channels of distribution stifled grassroots cultural production. Amateur media producers had limited means of sharing what they created with a broader community. The Web, on the other hand, allows grassroots cultural producers a theoretically infinite public.

    18Participation – The core concept that individuals have a right to become actively involved in the creation and recirculation of cultural materials. The commercial logic of modern mass media presumes an audience composed of spectators and consumers. The cultural logic of fandom (and of cultural convergence more broadly defined) perceives a much more slippery line between consumption and production, reading and writing, imagining a world where the core narratives are available as resources for telling our own stories.

    19Virtual Community – The set of social relations which emerge through participation within a mediated environment. In the 1960s, Alvin Toffler had predicted that the increased mobility of American culture would result in a gradual decrease in the amount of emotional energy we invested in social relations, which would be perceived as transient and superficial10. Some are now arguing that Net-based communities respond to this process of estrangement and atomization, providing the basis for continued investments in social life without depending on our long-term commitment to any geographically defined community11. In short, the Web is grassroots without being local. This ideal of virtual community actually increases the centrality of popular culture because mass media content provides a shared framework for communication within communities that have few, if any, shared experiences or acquaintances. Our investment in fictional characters, in effect, gives us a common set of “relatives” or “friends” that become reference points within conversations. So, not surprisingly, a high percentage of on-line discussion groups center around film, television, popular music, comic books, and so on.

    20Fans have been early adapters of new media technologies and thus, their subculture has played an important role in defining the language, practices, ethics, and identity of on-line communities. Yet, these consumption practices extend beyond fandom. As these new technologies become more pervasive, these practices become more widespread. These new technologies demand a more participatory relationship to media content and, as a result, the media industries are being forced to create opportunities for participation. Yet, they are steadfastly resisting any concept of “shared authorship” because it threatens their perceived intellectual property rights. For the media industries, technological convergence is all about expanding their control over cultural materials, not granting more control to consumers, but they will only be able to exploit the new market possibilities of convergence by building strong “brand loyalties” and motivating consumers to explore these expanding fictional universes12.

    TEXTUAL POACHERS REVISITED

    21A decade ago, when I published my first work on fans as “textual poachers”, I was describing a subculture that was alien to a good percentage of the audience I was addressing13. I wrote:

    “From the perspective of dominant taste, fans appear to be frighteningly out of control, undisciplined and unrepentant, rogue readers. Rejecting aesthetic distance, fans enthusiastically embrace favored texts and attempt to integrate media representations into their own social experience. Unimpressed by institutional authority and expertise, the fans assert their own rights to form interpretations, to offer evaluations, and to construct cultural canons. Undaunted by traditional conceptions of literary and intellectual property, fans raid mass culture, claim its materials for their own use, reworking them as the basis for their own cultural creations and social interactions14”.

    22Non-fan readers had little basis for understanding this account of an active subculture that produces new artworks through appropriations from pre-existing media content. Fan culture had been pushed so far underground that it was only visible in distorted forms, through media stereotypes of crazed fans that needed to “get a life”. Few enjoyed direct access to its rich, varied, and politically challenging modes of subcultural production. Even would-be fans had trouble finding their way into the fold. Students who were studying the book had difficulty accessing fan materials and so often could not use it as the basis for their own projects.

    23Today, thanks to the Internet, fan sites are much more visible. One Web site, for example, provides regularly up-dated links to fan fiction Web sites for more than 153 films, books and television shows, ranging from Airwolf to Zorro15. The fandoms featured on this site involved not only science fiction or action adventure series but angsty teen-oriented melodramas such as My So-Called Life or Dawson’s Creek, sitcoms like Ellen and The Nanny, and even the works of canonical literary figures like Jane Austin and Alexander Dumas. Fan discussion lists are attracting many new fans into the community who would never have had access to fan fiction or other subcultural practices as long as fandom was predominantly an underground activity16. In some cases, these discussion lists bring together widely divergent interpretive communities that are interested in the same series but can’t agree on which characters are most interesting, what episodes most important, or what themes lie at the core of the program universe. These groups could remain unknown to each other as long as they were geographically dispersed, but cyberspace is forcing them to interact with each other, sometimes with flamboyant results. Fan traditions are discussed on the front page of the New York Times. Aspects of fan practice are influencing commercial media in a much more direct fashion and as we will see, popular culture is becoming more responsive to fan’s aesthetic and thematic preferences.

    24In the process, however, fandom is posing some core questions about intellectual property. The fan authors are losing some of the security from legal prosecution they maintained as long as their works were distributed as the American equivalent of smazdat, sold under the counter at cons or through networks of interpersonal connections. Anything that Netscape or the New York Times can find, can also be found by lawyers for Lucasfilm and Viacom. So, now, “cease and desist” letters from corporate attorneys are flying right and left, signaling the risks in appropriating and repurposing cultural materials to anyone who cares to notice.

    25In Australia, Viacom has been experimenting with a new strong-arm approach to fan culture17. A representative of the corporation called together leaders of fan clubs from across the country and laid down new guidelines for their activities. These guidelines prohibited the showing of series episodes at club meetings unless those episodes had previously been made commercially available in that market (and this policy has serious consequences for Australian fans because they often get series episodes a year or two after they air in the United States so the underground circulation and exhibition of video tapes allows them to actively participate in on-line discussion lists about the series). Similarly, these guidelines cracked down on the publication and distribution of fanzines, prohibited the use of Star Trek trademarked names in the publicity for the clubs and their conventions, and otherwise sought to push fan culture much further underground. Their ultimate goal was to destroy the informal infrastructure of fandom and to push fans toward participation in a corporate-controlled environment designed primarily for the marketing of spin-off products and not the fostering of a more participatory culture or an alternative social community. As the news of these actions spread through Net discussion groups and fan mailing lists, they had a “chilling effect” on fan activities worldwide. Given the declining commercial viability of the Star Trek franchise, this policy amounts to corporate suicide. Star Trek fandom was encouraged by producer Gene Roddenberry early in the series’existence and was central to keeping the program on the air, later getting it into syndication, and later still demonstrating the base of support for the film series and subsequent television spin-off series18. Having been drawn toward a more public stance by virtue of the extraordinary community building resources of the Net, fans were now left exposed to such legal bullying. There is a real danger that the underground infrastructure that supported their activities through the years will be completely dismantled. The Usenet reaction against Star Wars fan fiction follows the same logic – a push toward the centralization of fandom under corporate-controlled organizations and a backlash against the participatory culture described in Textual Poachers.

    26For those who have not read Textual Poachers, let me offer a fairly schematic and simplified summary of its account of cultural production. Historically, our culture evolved through a collective process of collaboration and elaboration. Folktales, legends, myths, and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that made them more meaningful to their own contexts. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept of intellectual property that assumes cultural value originates from the original contributions of individual authors. In practice, of course, any act of cultural creation builds on what has come before, borrowing genre conventions and cultural archetypes, if nothing else. The ability of corporations to control their “intellectual property” has had a devastating impact upon the production and circulation of cultural materials, meaning that the general population has come to see themselves primarily as consumers of – rather than participants within – their culture. The mass production of culture has largely displaced the old folk culture, but we have lost the possibility for cultural myths to accrue new meanings and associations over time, resulting in single authorized versions (or at best, corporate-controlled efforts to rewrite and ‘update’ the myths of our popular heroes). Our emotional and social investments in culture have not shifted, but new structures of ownership diminish our ability to participate in the creation and interpretation of that culture. Fans respond to this situation of an increasingly privatized culture by applying the traditional practices of a folk culture to mass culture, treating film or television as if it offered them raw materials for telling their own stories and resources for forging their own communities. Just as the American folk songs of the nineteenth century were often related to issues of work, the American folk culture of the twentieth century speaks to issues of leisure and consumption. Fan culture, thus, represents a participatory culture through which fans explore and question the ideologies of mass culture, speaking from a position sometimes inside and sometimes outside the cultural logic of commercial entertainment. The key difference between fan culture and traditional folk culture doesn’t have to do with fan actions but with corporate reactions. Robin Hood, Pecos Bill, John Henry, Coyote, and Br’er Rabbit belonged to the folk. Kirk and Spock, Scully and Mulder, Luke and Lea, or Xena and Gabrielle belong to corporations19.

    27Fan fiction repairs some of the damage caused by the privatization of culture, allowing these potentially rich cultural archetypes to speak to and for a much broader range of social and political visions than can be accommodated through mainstream television. Television does not tell all possible stories or address all possible audiences, even in an age of niche marketing. Fan fiction helps to broaden the potential interest in a series by pulling its content toward fantasies that are unlikely to gain widespread distribution, tailoring it to cultural niches under-represented within and under-served by the aired material. In theory, such efforts could increase the commercial value of media products by opening them to new audiences.

    28The Net – which emerged as a platform for collaboration within the scientific and engineering communities – provides the ideal basis for the kinds of multi-authored and collaborative fantasies that are the core of fan cultural production. Members of a Net community build on each others’ ideas and contributions, often literally incorporating other people’s words into their new text. Fans respond to the mass produced texts of film and television in this same collaborative fashion. Consider, for example, this statement made by a fan:

    “What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It’s like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer’s reality bouncing off another’s and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation… I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them a new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or cold-blooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation20”.

    29Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths. What is most striking about the quote above is that the right to participate actively in the culture is assumed to be “the freedom we have allowed ourselves”, not a privilege granted by a benevolent company.

    30The Web is altering the balance of power between media producers and media consumers, enabling grassroots cultural production to reach a broader readership. Often, amateur Web sites look as professional as – and are often more detailed and more accurate than – the commercially-produced sites. In such a world, the category of the audience, as a mass of passive consumers for pre-produced materials, may give way to the category of cultural participants, which would include both professionals and amateurs. Some companies, such as the on-line bookstore, Amazon. com, recognize the benefits of incorporating consumers as potentially valuable collaborators; Amazon. com’s associates program allows individuals to link their Web sites to the Amazon site and to receive financial returns for anyone who follows those links and makes a purchase. Amazon also encourages readers to post their own evaluations of books – positive or negative – to the official Web site, thus creating a sense of consumer ownership over the company and empowering the book-buying public to respond to the products being offered them. However, Hollywood has tended towards a more distrustful response to consumer participation, uncertain about the new digital economy, and thus eager to regulate as fully as possible the flow of its stories and images.

    31Fandom represents one of the important strands of a larger cultural movement that activists are calling “Do It Yourself” or “DIY” culture21. Theorists, such as R. U. Sirius, claim the “digital revolution” is fostering grassroots cultural production:

    Ultimately, anybody will be able to have their own multimedia broadcasting operation on the Web. Anytime, any day, we’ll be able to watch John and Midge down the street eating dinner or Lisa and Frank and Joe in the house on the corner having sex… A substantial minority of people are moving from self-identifying as consumers of media to producers of media. The Web is their playpen22.

    32Understood in this light, media fandom fits within a larger history of attempts to establish a more participatory media culture. The development of toy printing presses in the nineteenth century encouraged amateur publishing, especially among teens and young adults23. There is some anecdotal evidence that primitive pamphlets (the ancestors of today’s zines) were smuggled across the enemy lines during the Civil War to continue friendships and conversations that had originated through these amateur press associations. The amateur radio movement of the 1910s and 1920s envisioned a society where there were as many radio transmitters as there were receivers and fought a lengthy legal battle trying to survive in the wake of commercial broadcasting24. The “people’s radio” movement in the 1960s sought to broaden who had access to broadcasting by offering airtime to groups normally excluded from the commercial mainstream, including programming by and for women, racial minorities, prisoners, and gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. A similar movement explored the community building potential of local access cable as the basis for creating an alternative news and information network; this system was used most effectively to rally opposition to the Gulf War at a time when protests had little visibility on the mainstream news media25. The introduction of cheap photocopying and desk-top publishing sparked the so-called “zine revolution”26.

    33Producers of digital cinema, such as Kevin Rubio, are also part of this larger DIY movement. Marc Davis has coined the term, “Garage Cinema”, to describe a culture where many more groups will be able to produce and circulate their own media in the same spirit that “garage music” enabled the punk rock and grunge movements. As Davis writes:

    “Just as desktop publishing gave consumers the power of the printing press on their desks (but it took the Internet to make everyone a publisher since without it the distribution channel was lacking) and digital audio samplers gave birth to a whole new genre and population of music makers, computational video technology will enable these and new communities to make video a part of their daily communications… It is what scratch, slash, rap, home video, and ‘a TV, two VCRs, and a cable’will become… America’s Funniest Home Videos, the Rodney King videotape, and video karaoke bars. These are just foretastes of the much more fundamental cultural and technological shift the growth of Garage Cinema will bring about27”.

    34Davis’s reference here to America’s Funniest Home Videos (which airs home videos primarily in a context of mockery and ridicule) suggests the limitations of a model of participatory culture founded on the idea of empowering tools. Dominant media institutions are certainly able to absorb certain forms of audience participation more fully than other kinds. Technological shifts are paving the way for a more participatory media culture, but our ability to participate at the heart of our culture – rather than on its fringes – depends upon economic, political, and legal factors more than purely technological ones. As long as the conversation remains primarily on the level of technological innovation, a certain fatalism surrounds our discussion of the “digital revolution”. Most discussions of technological change offer us an either-or choice between a technophilic or a Luddite response, suggesting that the nature and direction of the changes are beyond our control, an “inevitable” biproduct of properties of the technology. Instead, we need room to debate the directions our culture is taking and what tools we need to achieve democratically defined goals. Will these new media technologies result in “fundamental cultural… shifts” or simply new strategies of marketing and commodification? If our focus remains on the hardware, it will be easy for these impulses for change to be turned into products that can be sold to us.

    POACHERS AND CULTURE JAMMERS

    35Surely, one of the first questions we want to ask is what it means to participate in our culture. One can identify two dominant responses to this question – the culture jammers’ position and the poachers’ position. The culture jammers’ position, on the surface, seems the most radical. It builds upon the long-standing assumptions within critical theory that the dominant media operate as institutions of control that dupe consumers into buying into a corrupt consumer economy and blind them to meaningful political alternatives. Culture jamming simply seems like a more playful flavor of the Frankfort School critique. Culture jammers define themselves as cultural outsiders who seek “liberation” from the intrusion of mass media into their lives. The culture jammers embrace a politics of disruption and destabilization, defacing billboards, developing “anti-commercials”, spoofing ads, all with the goal of encouraging us to opt out of media consumption. Their politics and tactics are so reactive (and ultimately puritanical) that they leave us little vision of what an alternative popular culture would look like.

    36The poachers’ position, on the other hand, starts with a core respect for consumer’s attachments to popular culture; its model is dialogic rather than disruptive; it assumes a collective right to participate within our culture and to meaningfully engage with the core myths of the modern era. Poachers see their cultural efforts as collaborations with rather than acts of resistance against the culture industry. Poachers, in short, start from the assumption that they have a right to be cultural insiders and thus resist attempts, whether by media producers or by cultural critics, to marginalize them. In short, culture jammers want to “jam” the dominant channels of communication, while poachers want to appropriate their contents for their own ends.

    37We can see the contrast between these two positions by looking at two 1998 films which have appropriated themes from grassroots media politics – The Truman Show and Pleasantville. We can chart the differences between the two films as follows:

    Image

    38The Truman Show adopts the culture jammer’s mass culture critique. Television viewers are depicted primarily as passive voyeurs, content to observe the unfolding of Truman’s life rather than making any meaningful efforts to change their own. The media producer is depicted as an all-powerful God-like entity orbiting the earth in a satellite, a master of emotional manipulation who can launch a flood of tears by simply pumping up the soundtrack and who can control public opinion as skillfully and as fully as he shapes the reality the film’s naive protagonist inhabits. The only rational response to such a world is to try to disrupt it, to try to smuggle subversive signs and messages onto the set, to try to organize guerilla movements to “free Truman” from his mediated cell and to liberate the audience from the power of these deceptive images. The film’s conclusion fuels a fantasy of escaping from mediated reality into a more “authentic” life. Nowhere does the film suggest that a newly conscious Truman might shape the contents of the media to his own ends or use his celebrity status to express an alternative political perspective. The film is ultimately nihilistic, because its depiction of the mass audience as media dupes leaves little or no prospect for collective democratic action. The Truman Show sees the media as a weapon of social control but not as a tool for cultural transformation.

    39Pleasantville received far less attention at the time of its release, but actually offers a more complex account of media politics, one more consistent with the poachers position. Its protagonist, Budd, has spent his entire life watching reruns of the same 1950s sitcom on cable television and has developed an extraordinary mastery of program-related trivia. A mysterious television repairman (played by rerun icon Don Knotts) quizzes him on his knowledge, before scheming to transmit Bud and his sister directly into the program universe. Bud’s knowledge of the previous episodes allows him to immediately assimilate himself into this black and white world, but it is impossible to enter into the fiction without altering its very fabric in subtle ways. Seeing the characters as “emotionally real” means that they possess depths and contradictions that remained invisible to viewers of a formulaic sitcom. As the story continues, these fans rewrite the series narratives, helping the characters find new emotional depths within themselves (the local soda clerk’s artistic aspirations and the mother’s unsatisfied sexual longings), questioning the series’ core ideological premises (like whether being “pleasant” is really the highest social good), and altering character relationships to open up new narrative possibilities. In an imaginative use of digital effects, each character transformation is registered as a shift from black and white to color. The unaltered characters become more and more extreme as they seek to protect their conventional lifestyles from the threat posed by the “coloreds”. One of the film’s most powerful moments comes when the father returns from the office and announces, as sitcom conventions dictate, “Hi, Honey. I’m home”. His wife has disserted him and he wanders pathetically around the house repeating the line over and over, uncertain why it does not generate the anticipated response. As more and more characters break free from their pre scripted behaviors, program conventions are encoded through rules and regulations passed at town meetings and are enforced through the power of police authorities. But, nothing can prevent the gradual process of change once fans and consumers gain the ability to intervene in the flow of the fictional narrative.

    40The two films can be read as offering alternative reactions to cultural convergence: will we be exploited by or empowered by the new media technologies being introduced into our lives? Will we seek to escape the grip of commercial exploitation (the culture jammers’ position) or will we choose to participate more actively within mass media and by doing so, transform its character (the poachers’ position)?

    THE ECONOMICS OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

    41If the cultural logic of fandom no longer feels outside the mainstream, perhaps it is because of a series of economic and technological shifts that have made the idea of interactive media and participatory culture more central to the marketing strategies of media industries and to the everyday lives of cultural consumers. As has been widely documented, a period of deregulation of the media industries has resulted in a dramatic consolidation of economic and cultural power into the hands of a small number of multinational media conglomerates. These new horizontally-integrated corporations (such as Viacom or Warner Brothers Communications Inc.) make production decisions on the basis of “synergies”. That is, they seek content that can move fluidly across various media. Initially, this practice meant the ability to construct ancillary markets for a successful film or television program. Increasingly, however, it becomes difficult to determine which markets are ancillary and which are core to the success of a media narrative. Marsha Kinder has proposed the term “entertainment supersystem” to refer to the series of intertextual references and promotions spawned by any successful product28. The industry increasingly refers to Star Trek or Star Wars as “franchises”, using a term that makes clear the commercial stakes in these transactions. This new “franchise” system actively encourages viewer to pursue their interests in media content across various transmission channels, to be alert to the potential for new experiences offered by film, television, comic books, computer games, Web sites, paperback novels, and other related materials. Increasingly, success in one media leads to success in a number of different media. The concept of technological convergence follows directly from this economic logic. Technological convergence is attractive to the media industries because it will open multiple entry points into the consumption process and at the same time, enable consumers to more quickly locate new manifestations of a popular narrative. One may be able to move swiftly from watching a television drama to ordering the soundtrack, purchasing videos, or buying products that have been effectively “placed” within the narrative universe. One technology currently being discussed would enable consumers to identify the various articles of clothing worn by characters worn in an episode from their favorite soap opera and order them on-line.

    42However, without discounting the importance of these economic and institutional factors in motivating the movement toward media convergence, one needs to also stress, as cultural scholars have for several decades now, that buying is one thing and consuming is something quite different. That is to say, the purchase of a particular product, while economically advantageous to the media industry, does not ensure the purchase of the ideological values or cultural mythology the industry seeks to sell along with that product. To say that fans are first and foremost consumers is not the same thing as to argue that they are simply an extension of the marketing apparatus.

    43We may see this distinction clearly if we think about action figures. From an economic perspective, action figures embody the market logic that seeks to commodify media content and sell it to consumers in a variety of different forms. In “The Shortcake Strategy”, Tom Englehardt depicts action figures and program-related toys as a corruption of the traditional relations between storytellers and their child audiences, as media producers sacrifice the integrity of their narratives in order to work in references to the latest media tie-in products29. From a cultural perspective, however, the action figures allow children to play with characters drawn from media narratives and to use them to tell a much broader array of stories. In doing so, children are certainly not bound to simply reproduce the original content (as any parent can tell you). Erica Rand’s description of children’s “queer” play with Barbie only gives a taste of the kinds of media manipulations that occur in children’s program-related play30. Through this process that starts at infancy, children develop a habit of participation and appropriation that will significantly fuel their adult relations to media content. The circulation of cultural content across multiple media thus expands the potential points for audience intervention.

    44Not surprisingly, the generation that has grown up with the ubiquitous presence of action figures has developed a whole school of digital cinema that centers around the animation of action figures as fictional characters. For example, Evan Richard Mather, a twenty-something landscape architect, has built an on-line following for his short digital films, such as Quinten Tarantino’s Star Wars or Kung-Fu Kenobi’s Big Adventure, which animate Kenner Star Wars action figures to both enact scenes from the original films and develop original narratives which draw heavily on quotations from other media sources. Kung Fu Kenobi’s Big Adventure, for example, exactly mimics the visual style and content of certain sequences from Pulp Fiction, borrows its music from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, spoofs the cliches of kung fu movies, and manages to throw in some pointed references to Citizen Kane and other classic movies. Mather uses Legos to construct sets and Photoshop to manipulate his materials to create more compelling visual effects. Mather’s films, though carefully scripted and storyboarded, have the free-wheeling spontaneity of the child’s play that no doubt inspired them.

    45This same nostalgia for childhood play has inspired several cult television series, such as MTV’s Celebrity Death Match which also uses action figures or their equivalents as raw materials. Nickelodeon’s Action League Now, for example, has a regular cast of characters consisting of mismatched dolls and mutilated action figures. In some cases, their faces have been melted or mangled through inappropriate play. One protagonist has no clothes. They come in various size scales, suggesting the collision of different narrative universes that characterizes children’s action figure play. Recurring gags involve the smashing of brittle characters or dogs gnawing on and mutilating the protagonists, situations all too common in domestic play. Such works suggest that a contemporary generation of professional and amateur filmmakers learned their core storytelling skills through their manipulation of media spin-off products.

    46The point of this argument is not to claim that children’s play with action figures is somehow ideologically subversive. It isn’t. Or at least it isn’t necessarily subversive. It can, in fact, be quite reactionary at times. Children use play to explore the materials of their culture, sometimes questioning and sometimes reinforcing adult norms and values. Nor is my claim that the ills of consumer capitalism vanish if we can demonstrate that media tie-in products have unintended cultural consequences. I only suggest that such toys are more than commodities, that they are having some impact on the ways our children think about and interact with media content, and that they are paving the way for a more participatory mode of media consumption. They are sparking certain forms of grassroots creativity and cultural production, which are in turn influencing the aesthetics of contemporary popular culture. The goal of the culture industry is not to deny such grassroots creativity but to reward it by manufacturing cultural products that build upon fan competencies and at the same time, to police it and to redirect it toward official organizations or structured forms of interactions that do not directly threaten their perceived intellectual property interests. In the next two sections, I will identify some of the technologies that are giving rise to the new appropriative aesthetic and then will consider how this aesthetic is influencing mainstream cultural production. In my conclusion, I will return to the larger implications of these practices and to the question of whether such technologies are paving the way for a more participatory style of popular culture.

    CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES AND MEDIA CONSUMPTION

    47If earlier I was critical of discussions of the “digital revolution” that seem to assume that retooling the hardware will ensure “profound cultural… shifts”, it should also be clear that the explosion of new media technologies does play a role in reshaping our understanding of what it means to consume media content. Changing the tools doesn’t insure that change will occur, but it does make change possible. New technologies enable new forms of appropriation and transformation, new forms of cultural production and distribution, and new opportunities for grassroots creativity. Consider some of the other technologies that are contributing to the current phase of cultural convergence:

    48Video and Computer Games remain the form of interactive fiction that has had the broadest impact on popular culture despite all the critical attention paid to hypertext. In recent years, the game industry has made more money than the Hollywood film industry and has reached into the lives of 90 percent of American boys and 30 percent of American girls. The game industry’s frequent reliance on content derived from other media has encouraged us to think of those fictional narratives as environments we can explore and interact with. The interactivity offered by such games remains crude and it is difficult, if not impossible, to use game technologies to construct stories that test the ideological limits of the films and television series that inspired them. Because the constructions of these fictional narratives are so impoverished, they often reduce the possibilities for meaningful interaction offered by the primary works upon which they are based31. However, playing such games does develop a habit of mind that links consumption with participation.

    49The Video-Cassette Recorder (VCR) has changed our relationship of the flow of images into our homes giving us access to a much broader array of media narratives than even the most diversified cable system could offer. The VCR also allows us to freeze or fast forward through the images, thus empowering us to scrutinize and mobilize them in ways never intended by their original producers. At one extreme, this potential gives rise to fan videomakers who construct new narratives from fragments that have been appropriated from commercial media texts and recontextualize them to suggest alternative meanings and associations. At the other extreme, television producers have been able to take for granted our potential access to earlier episodes and depend on the infrastructure of videotape libraries and Web site annotations to facilitate more complex story arcs and more elaborate appeals to program history. Programs like The X Files or Babylon 5 count on their cult audiences’ ability to revisit relevant moments in early episodes as a basis for fully understanding and appreciating subsequent plot developments.

    50The CD-Player has sparked new interest in record collecting and in turn, led to new configurations of popular music. For example, critics have ascribed the neo-swing revival to the increased availability of once obscure “roots” music recordings on CD. As record companies moved to exploit their backlog of musical properties, they placed a much wider array of popular music in circulation and thus sparked new audiences who experienced older musical forms as a novelty. Musicians and music fans were able to reconnect with the pre-Rock era Swing tradition and attempt to generate new styles of musical performance that reflect a post-punk consciousness32. As this movement emerged in San Francisco and elsewhere, Swing enthusiasts raided vintage clothing stores to buy wing-tip shoes, hand-painted ties, and zoot suits so they could dress appropriately for the emerging subcultural scene. In doing so, they were often mimicking and exaggerating styles of speech, dress, and dance which they had first encountered watching 1940s era movies on video or reading pulp hard-boiled detective novels. Groups like Squerell Nut Zippers, Royal Crown Revue, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Cherry Pickin’Papas are pushing once “square” forms of music onto MTV and onto the top 40 charts. The cultural influence of this movement has been spread both by its representation in Hollywood films, such as Swingers, and its appropriation as the background for a growing number of advertising campaigns. A subcultural movement which has appropriated its identity from the discard bin is now being reappropriated back into the mainstream as the culture industry becomes ever more responsive to niche tastes.

    51Digital sampling plays a central role in the aesthetic of many contemporary forms of popular music including techno and hip hop. Sampling foregrounds the ways that the appropriation and recontextualization of pre-existing content can become a means of personal and subcultural expression. People who are trained to listen to the subtle reworkings of sounds in a techno song will come to recognize the value of appropriation in other cultural spheres. The introduction of low-end technology has put the creative use of digital sampling into the hands of the general public. The line between commercial and subcultural appropriation seems particularly murky as far as popular music is concerned. As I was writing one of the earliest drafts of this essay, my son barged into the study and played for me a techno work that his friend from the local high school had mixed from various bits of dialogue from Star Trek: The Next Generation and then posted on the Web. Are we to understand this mix as another fan cultural production or as part of the semi-commercial realm of techno music? Does it matter whether the person making unauthorized use of these cultural materials is a high school student posting them on the Web or a commercial artist, like Puff Daddy, who has a major record contract? The technological toys available to these high school students enable them to reach a level of polish easily mistakable for the professional product, paving the way for big budget splash on a garage band budget.

    52Portable technologies (Cell phones, Walkman, Laptops) facilitate the integration of media into all aspects of our daily lives and create unusual juxtapositions of cultural materials that alter our perceptions of our environment. John Woo makes expressive use of these new technologies in Face/Off: a mobster places a pair of head-phones over the ears of a young boy to shelter him from the gunfire and hysteria that will soon engulf them; the boy curls up on the floor and listens to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, which Woo uses in his soundtrack to shift the tone of the subsequent shootout sequence. The suggestion is that our ability to construct our own soundtracks may reshape our reactions to the world around us. Avant-garde artists are already experimenting with ways that palm pilots or tourist headphones can be used to construct alternative forms of narrative experiences that exploit these ironic or defamiliarizing juxtapositions.

    53The Home Theatre (Big screen Television, Surround-Sound speakers) introduces the more intense visual and sonic style of contemporary cinema into domestic space. One can imagine several consequences of the push to upgrade the quality of our home entertainment systems to reflect improvements in projection and sound technologies: on the one hand, the home becomes a more fantastical space (as our living room is filled with the sounds and images of car chases or light saber battles) but at the same time, these larger-than-life fantasies are domesticated. We see them as more familiar, part of our everyday environment, and subject to our control.

    54The Photocopier originated as a tool of the workplace but has increasingly become a major resource for grassroots cultural production. Amateur publishing has always moved to exploit available technologies, whether the toy printing presses of the 19th century or the mimeograph machines of the 20th century, but the photocopier has made the reproduction of amateur publications fast, cheap, and reliable. Amateur publications of all kinds – from political tracts to fan fiction zines, from the punk rock scene to the sexual underground – have played a decisive role in creating a new counter public sphere. Much more work needs to be done to explore how the zine revolution paved the way for public interest in the creation of their own Web pages and how so-called Webzines, some of which have achieved commercial success, modeled themselves after earlier photocopied publications.

    55The Camcorder has broadened who has access to the tools of media production. The public debate that surrounded the Rodney King video represents only the most well-publicized example of how the camcorder is being used as a tool of media activism. The camcorder is also becoming a tool for personal expression. For the protagonist of television’s Dawson’s Creek, the camcorder represents the equivalent of a personal diary or notebook for recording and reworking his experiences and reflecting up his most intimate relationships. Dawson Leary stands in for a whole generation of high school students who have embraced the “video stylo”.

    56Digital Photography and the availability of related software, such as Photoshop, offer the visual equivalent of musical sampling, allowing the dramatic recontextualization of media content. Basic icons of our culture can be reworked or recombined at will, so that Rambo and Groucho Marx join FDR and Churchill at Yalta, Marilyn Monroe drapes her arms around Abraham Lincoln, Tomb Raider’s Laura Crofts is striped naked for Web erotica, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates is depicted as one of Star Trek’s Borg busy “assimilating” everything in the universe. Such tools are encouraging a revitalization of the long-standing aesthetic tradition of collage.

    57This list, of course, scarcely scratches the surface of contemporary media that are altering our relations to the materials and mythologies of popular culture. Individually and collectively, these technologies are teaching us new ways of interacting with media content and making the process of appropriation, transformation, and transmission of cultural material more broadly accessible. Fans have been and will continue to be early adaptors of these technologies. Their subcultural practices make them hungry for ways to engage more deeply with the characters and situations of popular films and television series; their grassroots community gives them a public that is eager to receive and evaluate their cultural productions. But, the Net and the Web are enabling people to form their own communities for cultural production and circulation, and as these various technologies become less and less expensive, they will allow more and more people to participate in such cultural exchanges.

    THE APPROPRIATIVE AESTHETIC IN POPULAR CULTURE

    58Another reason that the cultural logic of fandom seems less strange to people today is that core aspects of fan aesthetics and politics have been appropriated by the culture industries themselves. The principles of cultural convergence are perhaps most visible at present in the work of popular artists like Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Mike Judge, Matt Groenig, and Kevin Williamson, whose films and television series deal with the process of forming one’s own mythology using images borrowed from the mass media. One of the protagonists of Pulp Fiction, for example, decides at the end that he wants to “wander the earth” like Kane in television’s Kung Fu. Reservoir Dogs opens with a five minute discussion of the erotic connotations of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin”, defining the characters first and foremost through their relationships to popular culture. Characters in Chasing Amy engage in animated debates and speculations about the sexuality of the various teens in the Archie comics, while Dazed and Confused opens with the scene of high school students trying to recall as many different episodes of Gilligan’s Island as they can, before one of the women offers a devastating critique of how the series builds upon the iconography of male pornography.

    59Kevin Williamson and Wes Cravin’s Scream depicts a world where digital phones, camcorders and VCRs are second nature and where not being able to answer a trivia question can cost you your life. Scream depends upon the competencies of viewers who have seen countless previous slasher films before, operating like the cinematic equivalent of Babe Ruth pointing to where his next home run is going to fly. Williamson reveals the cliche, comments on it, discusses it, and then puts it to use and proves that it can still be damned effective even when we know it is coming. The protagonist of Williamson’s television series, Dawson’s Creek, has decorated his room with posters for Steven Spielberg films, routinely discusses and critiques classic and contemporary films with the other characters on the series, and draws inspiration from them for the creation of his own videos. Often, the episodes bear the titles of “brat pack” films and borrow narrative situations from the works of such 1980s “auteurs” as John Hughes.

    60These works depend on complex references and quotations from previous work. Consider a typical episode of The Simpsons. When Marge’s frustrations over being trapped in her housewife role causes her to start shedding big blue hairballs, she hires a nanny to give her some relief. The episode evolves into a scene by scene parody of Mary Poppins, though the magical umbrella-totting nanny, Sherry Bobbins, hastily denies any resemblence to the Disney character: “I am an original creation like Ricky Rouse and Monald Muck33”. The episode features a succession of spoofs of songs and situations from the original film rendered appropriate to the dysfunctional realm of the series. For example, Bobbins gives Bart and Lisa advice on how to clean their room, “If there’s a task that must be done, don’t turn your tail and run. Don’t pout. Don’t sob. Just do a half-assed job”. Yet, the appropriations of popular culture in this episode hardly stop there: Gerald Ford makes a special guest appearance on Krusty’s Kartoon Klassics (an series named as “KKK”); a young Charles Bronsin, in a black and white segment, appears on the Andy Griffith Show and to the horror of Barney Fife, proceeds to shoot Otis and “Fix” Emmit; Quentin Tarantino directs a special Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, “Reservoir Cats”, which does a brutal, dead-on spoof of the torture sequence from Reservoir Dogs and ends with the cartoon mouse decapitating an overly-talkative Tarantino. The comedy of The Simpsons consistently assumes our competency as experienced consumers of popular culture to read one media text against another.

    61Tarantino’s whole aesthetic seems to have emerged from his formative experiences working at a video store. In such an environment, older and newer films are more or less equally accessible; some movie is always playing on the monitor and providing a background for everyday interactions. The environment encourages a somewhat scrambled but aesthetically productive relationship to film history. Tarantino and his other contemporaries make films that attract the interests of other video store habitues much as earlier generations of filmmakers – the French New Wave or the American Movie Brats – made movies for other cineastes. This video store aesthetic mixes and matches elements from different genres, different artistic movements, different periods with absolute abandon. The cineastes tended to focus their homages onto a single filmmaker or genre, as in the case of the various appropriations and transformations of Hitchcock by such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Brian DePalma. Perhaps the ultimate example of this process of cinematic appropriation is Gus Van Sant’s much publicized attempt to remake Psycho, with shot by shot accuracy, using Hitchcock’s original shooting script and production schedule, but with a younger contemporary cast and filming in color rather than black and white. The video store filmmakers, on the other hand, draw on more eclectic sources, seeing quotation as both a means of characterization and as an underlying formal principle in their work. Tarantino’s tendency towards quotation runs riot in the famous Jack Flash restaurant sequence in Pulp Fiction, where all of the service personnel are impersonating iconic figures of the 1950s and the menu uses different comedy teams to designate different shake flavors. As the John Travolta character explains, “It’s like a wax museum with a pulse”, a phrase that might describe Tarantino’s whole approach to filmmaking. Even his casting decisions, such as the use of Medium Cool’s Robert Forrester and blaxploitation star Pam Greers in Jackie Brown, constitute quotations and appropriations from earlier film classics. The video store filmmakers change everything they touch but at the same time, the fact that they have evoked an earlier text means that it is drawn back into more active cultural circulation, where it may attract new fan interests. These films and programs provide the basis for subcultural appropriations, becoming the models for a “cool” new “fan boy” style that lives both inside and in opposition to the culture industries. Jackie Brown, for example, sparked blaxploitation film revivals all over the country so that slackers could study what they needed to know in order to make sense of Tarantino’s latest work.

    62As corporations are learning to exploit more fully the properties associated with cultural convergence, they are starting to profit from audience interests in the potential for archiving, retrieving, transforming, and rewriting materials of popular culture. The entertainment industry is shifting from exploiting the grassroots fan culture by putting Star Wars logos on everything to exploiting it by generating products that operate more fully within a fan aesthetic and more systematically reward the community’s cultural competencies. D. C. Comics’s Elseworlds series, for example, reflects a long-standing fan interest in rewriting the history of fictional characters and placing them in alternative generic contexts. As the publisher explains, “In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places – some that have existed, or might have existed. And others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The resulting stories make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow34”. The concept of “alternative universes” has been basic to fan fiction for decades, but now we are seeing commercially generated fan fiction, sometimes blurring the boundaries between different fictional texts. For example, Superman’s Metropolis creates a provocative blend of American comic book mythology and German expressionism, as Superman becomes the heart that binds together the head and the hands in this subtle reworking of Fritz Lang’s silent classic35. Leatherwing finds the Batman transformed into an eighteenth century pirate sailing the Spanish Main and doing battle with his arch rivals, The Laughing Man (The Joker) and Captana Felina (The Cat Woman36). In another story, Scar of the Bat, set in a film noir realm, the Batman joins forces with The Untouchable’s Elliot Ness, while Masques fuses the stories of the Batman and the Phantom of the Opera37. In each case, the visual style, the narrational voice, and concepts of the character are reworked to reflect these alternative generic traditions and in the process, readers develop a new conception of the original DC heroes. These comic books require a more sophisticated reader who does not read these stories literally, who understands that they represent a play with narrative possibilities and an alternative version of the familiar characters, and who knows enough about both superhero comics and those other aesthetic traditions to appreciate the creative tensions produced through their fusions38.

    CONSEQUENCES OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

    63From one perspective, cultural convergence results in a more complex and compelling popular culture. As a fan, I am finding myself more fascinated and better satisfied by the popular works available to me than ever before. I look upon texts ranging from the comic book Astrocity to the science fiction novels of Neil Stephenson, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dark City not as examples of postmodern “in-difference”, but as rich, multi-layered works that reward my own cultural competencies. Postmodernist theory has largely been a dead end for thinking about such cultural forms, since it has often confused the collapse of a “master narrative” (or in many of these cases, of a definitive version) with the “implosion” of all possible meaning. Also, Postmodernist critics often confuse pop art’s high culture disdain towards its kitsch inspirations with the more affectionate attitudes towards cultural materials adopted by the “video store” filmmakers or the fan community. Pop artists, such as Warhol, Lichenstein, or Haring, did draw on the surface gloss and sheen of popular culture for their inspiration, often with little or no understanding of the significance of the icons they had borrowed. Tarantino, Groenig, Williamson, and the other popular artists discussed above take on a very different stance. Their practices of quotation and appropriation are not simply plays with “surfaces” or “empty signifiers”. If their artworks are meaningful or pleasurable, it is because the borrowed elements carry meanings and associations with them from their previous histories of use and because they acquire new layers of meanings by being introduced into new contexts. The Elseworlds comics series, for example, does not erase the differences between Superman and Metropolis, but rather reminds us of the meaningful gap – and potentially defamiliarizing intersections – between these two cultural realms. Steve Darnall and Alex Ross’s graphic novel, U. S., depicts Uncle Sam as a drunk, disorderly, and disoriented old man, who wanders the street in badly stained clothing, mouthing random slogans drawn from various periods of American history. He has flashbacks of traumatic moments when his youthful democratic ideals had given way to corruption and aggression; he has imaginary encounters with the mythic embodiments of other national traditions, conducting conversations with Britania or the Russian bear. At points, the graphic novel seems to be composed of nothing but a collage of quoted lines and images, yet each of these lines and images are meaningful to anyone who knows their original contexts and collectively, the work makes a powerful statement about America’s current crisis of national identity, its fumbling attempts to redefine its mission in the post Cold War era. Such works do not require readers to “stop making sense”. Rather, they depend on the reader’s ability to make new meanings of familiar materials.

    64From another perspective, the result is a more powerful cultural industry which co-opts fan politics and defuses potential threats to corporate control over intellectual property. We should be attentive to what gets assimilated and what gets discarded as corporations market to subcultural communities. Consider, for example, the ways that Mystery Science Theater 3000 defuses many of the progressive elements Jeff Sconce identified in the more grassroots trash cinema movement39. Trash cinema fans posed direct challenges to dominant cultural hierarchies, celebrating works that failed to meet the aesthetic norms of the well-built Hollywood films and embracing their forgotten auteurs, such as Ed Woods, as examples of how the studio system crushed individual creativity and inventiveness. At the same time, the trash cinema movement, adopting camp practices from the queer community, directed its ironic gaze upon sexual and gender stereotypes running through the films and thus used its fascination with bad filmmaking to express a fundamental dissatisfaction with dominant cultural values and institutions. Mystery Science turns this on its head, reinforcing cultural hierarchies by treating old films as beneath contempt (regardless of their status as genre classics or as artistic failures) and often using misogynistic and homophobic jokes to appeal to a smart ass mentality totally alien to the original camp roots of this movement. Here, one can say that the culture industry has absorbed the appropriative aesthetic and even the rhetoric of audience resistance only to defuse it of any real radical force.

    65This paradoxical understanding of cultural appropriation is on display in Pixar’s Toy Story, a film that builds upon our nostalgic familiarity with postwar children’s culture. The core story centers on a key cultural shift – the moment of sputnik, when science fiction stories displaced westerns at the center of American popular culture – one that would not be familiar to anyone under the age of 40. For children, the film often sparks their first real interest in cowboy toys, since the western is a genre that has not been readily available to children for some years. The film ascribes new personalities to such familiar icons as Mr. Potato Head or plastic toy soldiers. When Mattel refused to allow them to use Barbie in the film, they simply created a thinly veiled substitute and leaked the story to the press. We all knew Bo Peep was supposed to be Barbie, even if the resemblance was only superficial. So, Toy Story is constructed out of parts appropriated from childhood culture and playfully juxtaposes characters from different generic traditions to suggest the flexibility and fluidity of young imaginations. Yet, consider how the film represents children who play with the toys in ways that run counter to their intended purpose. The boy next door, who mixes and matches parts of toys to create original characters, is treated as a ghoulish monster, while the spaceman falls into an identity crisis when a young girl dresses him in women’s clothing and sits him down as a participant in her tea party. If the film seems to acknowledge the cultural creativity of children’s play, it wants to police which forms of appropriations are acceptable and which go too far against the grain of the original. Pixar gets to play with all the toys any way it wants, while consumer manipulations of these same materials are somehow threatening. One gets the distinct impression that we aren’t playing by the same rules here!

    66The cultural industries are trying to spark commercial interests in interactive media, while regulating and restricting the forms of interactions people can have with their cultural materials. They want to tap into fandom as a powerful niche market, while denying fans the power to shape the popular culture being produced. As the Don Knotts character grumbles at the protagonist of Pleasantville, when the boy’s revision of the fictional universe threatens to unhinge the program’s entire mythology, “You think this is your own God Damn coloring book”.

    67Clearly, the producers aren’t prepared to turn over the crayons to the consumer. Contrary to R. U. Sirius’s claims, the Web may not yet be our “playpen”, not if the corporations won’t let us have access to the best toys. I think that’s what’s at stake when Hollywood seeks to incorporate Troops’s Kevin Rubio into its own ranks, while using its lawyers to shut down grassroots fan activities that can not be so readily assimilated. Rubio, as an employee of Dreamworks or whichever corporation ultimately secures his talents, will be a professional poacher, who can generate new forms of commercial media that reflect the popular audience’s more complex and participatory engagement with popular culture. But the Star Wars fans who wanted to post their stories on the internet remain outside the clubhouse, unable to either circulate their own stories or to have their ideas incorporated into official Lucasfilm product.

    68In such a climate, even the best popular culture still leaves its fans unsatisfied and as before, what fuels fan cultural productivity is the potent mix of fascination and frustration. If the programs did not fascinate fans, they would not be motivated to draw upon them as raw materials for their own cultural productions. If these programs did not frustrate fans, their desires would be satisfied by the original producers and there would be no cause to take up their own pens to build upon the program universe. Thus, despite the growing explicitness of Xena’s much touted lesbian subtext, the Web is full of original fan fiction that pushes the erotic relations between Gabrielle and Xena much further than the producers will ever go40.

    69The Web contains enormous potential for the creation of a more diverse and democratic popular culture – one that allows much broader opportunities for grassroots participation. We can point to many examples of the power of Net communities to work around the centralizing authority of traditional gatekeepers. This is what makes the digital revolution a cultural revolution. But, we should not allow the utopian promise of cyberspace to blind us to the real struggles that must be fought if we are going to secure a place for all of us to participate in popular culture. We are going to be watching increasingly bloody fights about intellectual property rights in digital media over the coming decade and those fights are going to determine – in part – the cultural logic that will structure the 21st century. The question of whether Star Wars fans can or can not post erotic stories about Hans and Luke may seem, at first glance, a relatively trivial matter, but its repercussions could be enormous. Those of us – as citizens and academics – who want to believe that the Net has a transformative potential in our culture, society, and politics; should be lending our voices to the fans who are on the front lines exploring how this media will be used in relation to the entrenched power of the culture industries.

    Notes de bas de page

    2 Wolk (Josh), “Troop Dreams”, Entertainment Weekly, March 20 1998, p. 8-9.

    3 http://www.theforce.net

    4 For a discussion of earlier attempts by Lucasfilm to shut down fan cultural production, see Jenkins (Henry), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York, Routledge, 1991.

    5 Rubio noted in an e-mail exchange with me that the only legal pressures he has felt around the production and circulation of Troops has centered around his appropriative use of the Cops theme song, “Bad Boys”, which the video uses without any alterations.

    6 For a useful summary of current copyright law as it applies to fan fiction and other forms of creative appropriations of intellectual property, see Tushnet (Rebecca), “Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law”, Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal, as circulated on the Web at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tushnet/shc/tushnet.html.

    7 For example, see Katz (Jon), Virtuous Reality, New York, Random House, 1997/Tapscott (Don), Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, New Yor, McGraw-Hill, 1997.

    8 Friedman (Ted), “Apple’s 1984: The Introduction of the Macintosh in the Cultural History of Personal Computers”, paper presented at MIT, January 1999.

    9 For an overview of this process, see Haywood (Philip), “Situating Cyberspace: The Popularization of Virtual Reality”, in Hayward (Philip) and Wollen (Tana) (dir.), Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, London, British Film Institute, 1993.

    10 Toffler (Alvin), Future Shock, New York, Bantam, 1970.

    11 Rhinegold (Howard), The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000.

    12 For an insider’s perspective on how this process works, one highly sympathetic to the interests of the media industries, see Wolf (Michael J.), The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives, New York, Times Books, 1999.

    13 I drew the colorful metaphor, “Poaching”, from Certeau (Michel de), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988. My use of this term fits within a whole tradition of writing about audience resistance to the co-opting power of mass culture. See, for example, Fiske (John), Television Culture, New York, Methuen, 1988. I have subsequently become increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of audience resistance, since it really doesn’t do justice to these fans’complex relationship to media culture. Despite the combative nature of my metaphor, poaching can not simply be reduced to resistance. Bick (Ilsa), “Boys in Space: Star Trek, Latency and the Neverending Story”, in Harrison (Taylor), Projansky (Sarah), Ono (Kent A.) and Helford (Elyce Rae) (dir.), Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek, New York, Westview, 1996, misunderstands the very nature of appropriation when she attempts to locate subtexts and themes within the Star Trek films and television program to demonstrate that fan cultural productions are not in fact creative or resistant. Bick writes, “Whether one is a poacher or not, surely it escapes no one’s notice that these fans… are being actively courted by an entertainment industry mindful of the consumer dollars in their bulging pockets”. Star Trek depends on what Bick calls a “master narrative”, which she falsely asserts has received scant attention from previous critics, and she asserts: “A careful analysis of this master narrative reveals that it actually fosters this plethora of Star Trek offshoots and supportive substrata, inclusive of fiction produced by the poachers. Regardless of the subject matter, these offshoots do not drastically deviate from this master text. As only one example, K/S homoerotica is not really new and radical: It is already present in the narratives and is in fact controlled by overarching corporate structures with their shrewd approach to fan culture”, (p. 190). The very nature of the concept of appropriation implies that the works fans create build on resources and references drawn from the original. Fans don’t necessarily see themselves as creating an oppositional culture; they see themselves as expanding on a cultural mythology they find intensely interesting and rewarding. In my original discussion of “ten ways to reread a television show” (in Poachers, p. 162-177), I go to some length to demonstrate how fans root their various appropriations to specific themes and features in the original programs. The works created by appropriation are thus cultural and ideological composites, which can never be fully separated from the pull of the original nor can they simply be reduced to a reproduction of corporate ideologies. Resistance emphasizes only one side of this dialectical relationship and perhaps pushes us towards the all-or-nothing logic underlying Bick’s account. Bick seems to assume that if she can demonstrate that Star Trek fan fiction is not wholly oppositional, then she can demonstrate that it is, in fact, wholly co-opted by Viacom. Such a view can only be supported by abstracting the issues from their context in real world legal and economic struggles between fans and media producers. If fanzines and fan Web sites are simply an extension of the logic of consumer culture, another apparatus for marketing the Star Trek franchise, then why are Viacom and its lawyers trying to shut them down? This essay is intended to suggest another way of thinking about the relationship between fans and the culture industry.

    14 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, op. cit., p. 18.

    15 Fan Fiction on the Net, http://members.aol.com:80/ksnicholas/fanfic/index.html.

    16 See, for example, Clerc (Susan J.), “DDEB, GATB, MPPB and Ratboy: The X Files Media Fandom, Online and Off”, in Lavery (David), Hague (Angela) and Cartwright (Maria) (dir.), “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X Files, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1996; Clerc (Susan),“‘ Estrogen Brigades’ and ‘ Big Tits’ Threads: Media Fandom On-line and Off”, in Cherny (Lynn) and Weise (Elizabeth Reba) (dir.), Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, San Francisco, Seal, 1996/Pearson (Roberta), “‘ It’s Always 1895’: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberpace” in Cartmell (Deborah), Hunter (I. Q.), Kaye (Heidi) and Whelehan (Imedla) (dir.), Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience, London, Pluto, 1997.

    17 For a detailed discussion of these developments (albeit one more sympathetic than I am to the corporate side of this dispute), see Jinman (Richard), “Star Wars”, The Australian Magazine, June 17 1995, p. 30-39.

    18 For a fuller discussion of the history of the producers’ relationship to Star Trek fandom, see Tulloch (John) and Jenkins (Henry), Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek London, Routledge, 1995.

    19 The fact that corporations control these characters may not necessarily mean that these grassroots appropriations are technically illegal. There has to date been no case law directly addressing the issue of fan appropriations. Rubio, in personal correspondence with me, asserted that his appropriations of Star Wars were protected because they fell under the legal definition of “parody”. A similar defense could be offered for many fan-produced works, even those that are not overtly comic, because parody represents a form of appropriation, intended to critically comment on the original. There are limits to a parody defense, but for the moment, the United States Supreme Court has been expanding its notion of parody at the same time that legislative and regulatory bodies are broadening the protection accorded copyright and trademark holders. The major problem, though, is not one of legal rights but of economic power. Few ordinary citizens have the money and resources to defend their fan appropriations against the legal might of a team of corporate attorneys. So, for the most part, they choose to capitulate rather than risk losing everything they have to joist with some media conglomerate.

    20 This is one of a number of statements by fans theorizing their own cultural practices contained in Green (Shoshanna), Jenkins (Cynthia), and Jenkins (Henry), “‘ The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking’: Selections from Terra Nostre Underground and Strange Bedfellows” in Harris (Cheryl) and Alexander (Alison) (dir.), Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity, New York, Hampton Press, 1998.

    21 For an overview of the DIY media movement, see Branwyn (Gareth), Jamming the Media: A Citizens Guide to Reclaiming the Tools of Communication, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1997. Branwyn’s book includes discussions of zines, digital sampling, shareware computing, Web publishing, cable access activism, and “media pranks and art hacks”. Branwyn explains: “As technology travels along its inevitable trajectory towards ‘ cheaper, faster, better’, it’s putting powerful communications technologies into the hands of greater numbers of people… A new form of media is growing up in cyberspace, a global do-it-yourself newsroom and cultural salon where individuals simultaneously create and consume news and information, blurring the distinction between publisher, reporter, and reader… The biggest bottleneck in do-it-yourself media production has always been promotion and distribution. Now, anyone with an Internet connection can reach a potentially huge audience at a reasonable cost. If you’ve got something to say, modest resources, and a healthy measure of pioneering grit, chances are you can find a media channel on which to broadcast”, (p. 14-15).

    22 Sirius (R. U.) as quoted in “Web (Vs) TV”, The Web, September 1997, p. 37.

    23 Petrik (Paula), “The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1970-1886” in West (Elliot) and Petrik (Paula) (dir.), Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950, Kansas City, University of Kansas Press, 1992.

    24 For background on the amateur radio movement, see Douglas (Susan), Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997/Hilmes (Michele), Radio Voices: American Radio, 1922-1952, Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1997/Streeter (Thomas), Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996.

    25 For an overview of “camcorder activism”, see Rushkoff (Douglas), Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, New York, Ballantine, 1996.

    26 Duncombe (Steve), Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, London, Verso, 1997.

    27 Davis (Marc), “Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology”, Communications of the ACM, February 1997, Volume 30, Number 2, p. 42-48.

    28 Kinder (Marsha), Playing With Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.

    29 Englehardt (Tom), “The Shortcake Strategy” in Gitlin (Todd) (ed.), Watching Television, New York, Pantheon, 1987.

    30 Rand (Erica), Barbie’s Queer Accessories, Durham, Duke University Press, 1995.

    31 Jenkins (Henry) and Murray (Janet), “Before the Holodeck: Translating Star Trek into Digital Media” in Smith (Greg) (ed.), On A Silver Platter: CD-Roms and the Promises of a New Technology, New York, New York University Press, 1999.

    32 For an overview of this whole movement, see Vale (V.), Swing! The New Retro Renaissance (San Francisco: V/Search, 1998). The book’s introduction explains: “When cultural stagnation makes it necessary to set about reordering society, pioneers step forth to provide inspiration based on links to past creative achievements. The end of the twentieth century is a period of great trepidation regarding the future. It makes profound sense to carefully review and evaluate the achievements of this past century, to make our choices, and integrate our selection toward the goal of living out the remainder of our lives as creatively and meaningfully as possible, with deep responsibility towards loved ones. Freed from the shackles of the time period in which they were created, all of our cultural can ‘ come together’ into a colorful mosaic that reflects more ‘ authentic’ values in which pleasure, freedom, spontaneity as well as deep ethics are united” (p. 5). This passage suggests the complex way in which appropriation can be understood both as appreciation of the past and as a creative act of building the basis for a future society, as well as suggesting the ways that music carries with it certain cultural values. It remains to be seen whether the neo-swing revival embraces the progressive politics reflected in songs like “Zoot Suit Riot” or the more conservative politics of the post-war generation whose cultural tastes they seek to imitate.

    33 As this gag suggests, many popular texts now openly joke about contemporary struggles over intellectual property. In “In the Spotlight”, one episode in Kurt Busick’s on-going Astro City comic book, a reporter goes to interview Loony Leo, a fading screen star. We discover that Leo, who is a cartoon lion, brought to life through the mad experiments of Professor Borzoi that allowed matter to be sustained on the basis of the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Leo became a real entity operating in our world because the audience has come to believe in him enough to transcend other physical laws of the universe. No sooner has the cartoon Leo found himself integrated into our world, then he faces legal challenges to his very existence from corporate attorneys who insisted that he constituted their intellectual property and who threatened him with indentured servitude. See BUSICK (Kurt), Astro City: Family Album, La Jolla, Ca, Homage Comics, 1998.

    34 Quote taken from the back cover of Harris (Jack C.) and Hampton (Bo), Batman: Castle of the Bat, New York, DC, 1994.

    35 Lofficier (Randy) and Lofficier (Jean-Marc), Superman’s Metropolis, New York, DC, 1998.

    36 Dixon (Chuck), “Leatherwing” in Superman/Batman: Alternative Histories, New York, DC, 1994.

    37 Collins (Max Allan) and Barreto (Eduardo), Batman: Scar of the Bat, New York, DC, 1996/Grell (Mike) and Khromov (Andre), Batman: Masque, New York, DC, 1997.

    38 Poole hayward (Jennifer), Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera, Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1997.

    39 Sconce (Jeff), “’Trashing’the Academy: taste excess and an emerging politics of cinematic style”, Screen, 1995, 36 (4): 371-393.

    40 Leonard (Andrew) “Who Owns Xena”, Salon, July 1997, http://www.salonmagazine.com/july97/21st/article970703.html.

    Auteur

    • Henry Jenkins
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    Nicolas Carrier

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    Les pratiques éducatives des nouvelles classes supérieures

    Philippe Gombert

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    Mutation culturelle et devenir des savoirs dans une société de l'oralité

    Geoffroy A. Dominique Botoyiyê

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    2 Wolk (Josh), “Troop Dreams”, Entertainment Weekly, March 20 1998, p. 8-9.

    3 http://www.theforce.net

    4 For a discussion of earlier attempts by Lucasfilm to shut down fan cultural production, see Jenkins (Henry), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York, Routledge, 1991.

    5 Rubio noted in an e-mail exchange with me that the only legal pressures he has felt around the production and circulation of Troops has centered around his appropriative use of the Cops theme song, “Bad Boys”, which the video uses without any alterations.

    6 For a useful summary of current copyright law as it applies to fan fiction and other forms of creative appropriations of intellectual property, see Tushnet (Rebecca), “Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law”, Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal, as circulated on the Web at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tushnet/shc/tushnet.html.

    7 For example, see Katz (Jon), Virtuous Reality, New York, Random House, 1997/Tapscott (Don), Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, New Yor, McGraw-Hill, 1997.

    8 Friedman (Ted), “Apple’s 1984: The Introduction of the Macintosh in the Cultural History of Personal Computers”, paper presented at MIT, January 1999.

    9 For an overview of this process, see Haywood (Philip), “Situating Cyberspace: The Popularization of Virtual Reality”, in Hayward (Philip) and Wollen (Tana) (dir.), Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, London, British Film Institute, 1993.

    10 Toffler (Alvin), Future Shock, New York, Bantam, 1970.

    11 Rhinegold (Howard), The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000.

    12 For an insider’s perspective on how this process works, one highly sympathetic to the interests of the media industries, see Wolf (Michael J.), The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives, New York, Times Books, 1999.

    13 I drew the colorful metaphor, “Poaching”, from Certeau (Michel de), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988. My use of this term fits within a whole tradition of writing about audience resistance to the co-opting power of mass culture. See, for example, Fiske (John), Television Culture, New York, Methuen, 1988. I have subsequently become increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of audience resistance, since it really doesn’t do justice to these fans’complex relationship to media culture. Despite the combative nature of my metaphor, poaching can not simply be reduced to resistance. Bick (Ilsa), “Boys in Space: Star Trek, Latency and the Neverending Story”, in Harrison (Taylor), Projansky (Sarah), Ono (Kent A.) and Helford (Elyce Rae) (dir.), Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek, New York, Westview, 1996, misunderstands the very nature of appropriation when she attempts to locate subtexts and themes within the Star Trek films and television program to demonstrate that fan cultural productions are not in fact creative or resistant. Bick writes, “Whether one is a poacher or not, surely it escapes no one’s notice that these fans… are being actively courted by an entertainment industry mindful of the consumer dollars in their bulging pockets”. Star Trek depends on what Bick calls a “master narrative”, which she falsely asserts has received scant attention from previous critics, and she asserts: “A careful analysis of this master narrative reveals that it actually fosters this plethora of Star Trek offshoots and supportive substrata, inclusive of fiction produced by the poachers. Regardless of the subject matter, these offshoots do not drastically deviate from this master text. As only one example, K/S homoerotica is not really new and radical: It is already present in the narratives and is in fact controlled by overarching corporate structures with their shrewd approach to fan culture”, (p. 190). The very nature of the concept of appropriation implies that the works fans create build on resources and references drawn from the original. Fans don’t necessarily see themselves as creating an oppositional culture; they see themselves as expanding on a cultural mythology they find intensely interesting and rewarding. In my original discussion of “ten ways to reread a television show” (in Poachers, p. 162-177), I go to some length to demonstrate how fans root their various appropriations to specific themes and features in the original programs. The works created by appropriation are thus cultural and ideological composites, which can never be fully separated from the pull of the original nor can they simply be reduced to a reproduction of corporate ideologies. Resistance emphasizes only one side of this dialectical relationship and perhaps pushes us towards the all-or-nothing logic underlying Bick’s account. Bick seems to assume that if she can demonstrate that Star Trek fan fiction is not wholly oppositional, then she can demonstrate that it is, in fact, wholly co-opted by Viacom. Such a view can only be supported by abstracting the issues from their context in real world legal and economic struggles between fans and media producers. If fanzines and fan Web sites are simply an extension of the logic of consumer culture, another apparatus for marketing the Star Trek franchise, then why are Viacom and its lawyers trying to shut them down? This essay is intended to suggest another way of thinking about the relationship between fans and the culture industry.

    14 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, op. cit., p. 18.

    15 Fan Fiction on the Net, http://members.aol.com:80/ksnicholas/fanfic/index.html.

    16 See, for example, Clerc (Susan J.), “DDEB, GATB, MPPB and Ratboy: The X Files Media Fandom, Online and Off”, in Lavery (David), Hague (Angela) and Cartwright (Maria) (dir.), “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X Files, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1996; Clerc (Susan),“‘ Estrogen Brigades’ and ‘ Big Tits’ Threads: Media Fandom On-line and Off”, in Cherny (Lynn) and Weise (Elizabeth Reba) (dir.), Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, San Francisco, Seal, 1996/Pearson (Roberta), “‘ It’s Always 1895’: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberpace” in Cartmell (Deborah), Hunter (I. Q.), Kaye (Heidi) and Whelehan (Imedla) (dir.), Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience, London, Pluto, 1997.

    17 For a detailed discussion of these developments (albeit one more sympathetic than I am to the corporate side of this dispute), see Jinman (Richard), “Star Wars”, The Australian Magazine, June 17 1995, p. 30-39.

    18 For a fuller discussion of the history of the producers’ relationship to Star Trek fandom, see Tulloch (John) and Jenkins (Henry), Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek London, Routledge, 1995.

    19 The fact that corporations control these characters may not necessarily mean that these grassroots appropriations are technically illegal. There has to date been no case law directly addressing the issue of fan appropriations. Rubio, in personal correspondence with me, asserted that his appropriations of Star Wars were protected because they fell under the legal definition of “parody”. A similar defense could be offered for many fan-produced works, even those that are not overtly comic, because parody represents a form of appropriation, intended to critically comment on the original. There are limits to a parody defense, but for the moment, the United States Supreme Court has been expanding its notion of parody at the same time that legislative and regulatory bodies are broadening the protection accorded copyright and trademark holders. The major problem, though, is not one of legal rights but of economic power. Few ordinary citizens have the money and resources to defend their fan appropriations against the legal might of a team of corporate attorneys. So, for the most part, they choose to capitulate rather than risk losing everything they have to joist with some media conglomerate.

    20 This is one of a number of statements by fans theorizing their own cultural practices contained in Green (Shoshanna), Jenkins (Cynthia), and Jenkins (Henry), “‘ The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking’: Selections from Terra Nostre Underground and Strange Bedfellows” in Harris (Cheryl) and Alexander (Alison) (dir.), Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity, New York, Hampton Press, 1998.

    21 For an overview of the DIY media movement, see Branwyn (Gareth), Jamming the Media: A Citizens Guide to Reclaiming the Tools of Communication, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1997. Branwyn’s book includes discussions of zines, digital sampling, shareware computing, Web publishing, cable access activism, and “media pranks and art hacks”. Branwyn explains: “As technology travels along its inevitable trajectory towards ‘ cheaper, faster, better’, it’s putting powerful communications technologies into the hands of greater numbers of people… A new form of media is growing up in cyberspace, a global do-it-yourself newsroom and cultural salon where individuals simultaneously create and consume news and information, blurring the distinction between publisher, reporter, and reader… The biggest bottleneck in do-it-yourself media production has always been promotion and distribution. Now, anyone with an Internet connection can reach a potentially huge audience at a reasonable cost. If you’ve got something to say, modest resources, and a healthy measure of pioneering grit, chances are you can find a media channel on which to broadcast”, (p. 14-15).

    22 Sirius (R. U.) as quoted in “Web (Vs) TV”, The Web, September 1997, p. 37.

    23 Petrik (Paula), “The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1970-1886” in West (Elliot) and Petrik (Paula) (dir.), Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950, Kansas City, University of Kansas Press, 1992.

    24 For background on the amateur radio movement, see Douglas (Susan), Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997/Hilmes (Michele), Radio Voices: American Radio, 1922-1952, Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1997/Streeter (Thomas), Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996.

    25 For an overview of “camcorder activism”, see Rushkoff (Douglas), Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, New York, Ballantine, 1996.

    26 Duncombe (Steve), Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, London, Verso, 1997.

    27 Davis (Marc), “Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology”, Communications of the ACM, February 1997, Volume 30, Number 2, p. 42-48.

    28 Kinder (Marsha), Playing With Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.

    29 Englehardt (Tom), “The Shortcake Strategy” in Gitlin (Todd) (ed.), Watching Television, New York, Pantheon, 1987.

    30 Rand (Erica), Barbie’s Queer Accessories, Durham, Duke University Press, 1995.

    31 Jenkins (Henry) and Murray (Janet), “Before the Holodeck: Translating Star Trek into Digital Media” in Smith (Greg) (ed.), On A Silver Platter: CD-Roms and the Promises of a New Technology, New York, New York University Press, 1999.

    32 For an overview of this whole movement, see Vale (V.), Swing! The New Retro Renaissance (San Francisco: V/Search, 1998). The book’s introduction explains: “When cultural stagnation makes it necessary to set about reordering society, pioneers step forth to provide inspiration based on links to past creative achievements. The end of the twentieth century is a period of great trepidation regarding the future. It makes profound sense to carefully review and evaluate the achievements of this past century, to make our choices, and integrate our selection toward the goal of living out the remainder of our lives as creatively and meaningfully as possible, with deep responsibility towards loved ones. Freed from the shackles of the time period in which they were created, all of our cultural can ‘ come together’ into a colorful mosaic that reflects more ‘ authentic’ values in which pleasure, freedom, spontaneity as well as deep ethics are united” (p. 5). This passage suggests the complex way in which appropriation can be understood both as appreciation of the past and as a creative act of building the basis for a future society, as well as suggesting the ways that music carries with it certain cultural values. It remains to be seen whether the neo-swing revival embraces the progressive politics reflected in songs like “Zoot Suit Riot” or the more conservative politics of the post-war generation whose cultural tastes they seek to imitate.

    33 As this gag suggests, many popular texts now openly joke about contemporary struggles over intellectual property. In “In the Spotlight”, one episode in Kurt Busick’s on-going Astro City comic book, a reporter goes to interview Loony Leo, a fading screen star. We discover that Leo, who is a cartoon lion, brought to life through the mad experiments of Professor Borzoi that allowed matter to be sustained on the basis of the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Leo became a real entity operating in our world because the audience has come to believe in him enough to transcend other physical laws of the universe. No sooner has the cartoon Leo found himself integrated into our world, then he faces legal challenges to his very existence from corporate attorneys who insisted that he constituted their intellectual property and who threatened him with indentured servitude. See BUSICK (Kurt), Astro City: Family Album, La Jolla, Ca, Homage Comics, 1998.

    34 Quote taken from the back cover of Harris (Jack C.) and Hampton (Bo), Batman: Castle of the Bat, New York, DC, 1994.

    35 Lofficier (Randy) and Lofficier (Jean-Marc), Superman’s Metropolis, New York, DC, 1998.

    36 Dixon (Chuck), “Leatherwing” in Superman/Batman: Alternative Histories, New York, DC, 1994.

    37 Collins (Max Allan) and Barreto (Eduardo), Batman: Scar of the Bat, New York, DC, 1996/Grell (Mike) and Khromov (Andre), Batman: Masque, New York, DC, 1997.

    38 Poole hayward (Jennifer), Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera, Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1997.

    39 Sconce (Jeff), “’Trashing’the Academy: taste excess and an emerging politics of cinematic style”, Screen, 1995, 36 (4): 371-393.

    40 Leonard (Andrew) “Who Owns Xena”, Salon, July 1997, http://www.salonmagazine.com/july97/21st/article970703.html.

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