Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Recent theorisations of fandom show a tendency towards the sequestration of fan activity and experience as if occurring outside, or at least comfortably on sabbatical from, commodity relationships. This is an old theme. John Fiske's claims for semiotic democracy and Henry Jenkins's celebration of the anarchic pleasures of textual poaching both tended, despite their internal differences of emphasis, to place fandom outside of the commodification process that is central to capitalist relations of cultural production. Matt Hills, one of the "new wave" of fan theorists drawn upon in the text under review still strives to address the dialectic of value as a formative process in fandom. Fandom is a product of "subjective processes" such as the fan's personal attribution of significance – wherein reside use-values - and objective processes related to the formation of exchange value. If it is the case that through niche marketing and segmentation, fans values and authenticities are sold back to them, nonetheless fandom is a zone of non-competitive affective play sustaining, for example, cult geographies which fan attachments are to a non-commodified space or, at the very least, to a space which has been indirectly or unintentionally commodified (Hills, p112 and p151). This characterisation retains a space for a grounded analysis of the interplay of the collective and individual dimensions of fandom. One of the problems with Fans: the Mirror of Consumption is that such analysis tends to be ruled out as a matter of definition. To appreciate this let me note some of the key features of Sandvoss' arguments.
Repository Citation
King, Barry. "On Cornel Sandvoss's Fans: the Mirror of Consumption." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 3, 2008, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss3/10