Lurkers at the Threshold
The following is the introduction to my undergraduate thesis: Lurkers at the Threshold: Fan Communities of H.P. Lovecraft, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in American Civilization at Brown University.
The aeons and the worlds are my sport,
and I watch with calm and amused aloofness
the anticks of the planets and the mutations of the universes.
– H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft is the most well known twentieth century writer from Rhode Island. Lovecraft bridged the gap between Poe’s style of horror and contemporary science fiction and fantasy and, subsequently, held a particular place in the evolution of weird and supernatural fiction. Lovecraft’s literary creations, the Necronomicon and the Cthulhu mythos, inspired a tradition in weird fiction writing that has continued to the modern day. In addition to weird writers, Lovecraft caught the attention of a number of social groups, including goths, science fiction geeks, and scholars. The different ways these groups engaged with Lovecraft created a space for this thesis to look at how both fans and scholars used Lovecraft. Lovecraft inspired fan art, music, role-playing games, and a plush toy line. Also, scholarly interest in the weird author doubled the Lovecraft collection at Brown University’s John Hay Library and created the journal, Lovecraft Studies. Lovecraft’s appeal to such disparate groups makes him a great case study for audience reception and production.
In 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born to Winfield Scott and Sarah Phillips Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island. Lovecraft spent most of his life in Providence, except for a three-year stint in Brooklyn, New York, when he was briefly married to Sonia Greene. Lovecraft had a peculiar upbringing raised by his mother and his two aunts, and was sick most of his childhood. Confined to his house, Lovecraft turned to reading and writing. He began reading authors that would influence his work throughout his life, Coleridge, Hawthorne, Lord Dunsany, and Poe. He wrote short stories that mimicked the authors he read.[1] Additionally, Lovecraft expressed an interest in science and journalism. He created and published two journals in his youth, The Scientific Gazette and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, which steered him towards a career in amateur journalism.[2]
In 1914, Lovecraft joined the United Amateur Press Association.[3] His involvement with the UAPA connected him with a number of other writers with whom he corresponded until his death. Lovecraft’s letters are still available at Brown University’s John Hay Library, which holds more than a thousand of them. A few years later, in 1917, Lovecraft started publishing his writing in pulp magazines like The United Amateur, Home Brew, Weird Tales, and Astounding Stories.[4] Lovecraft’s fiction did not appear in true book form until after his death. Interestingly, Lovecraft fans and fan-scholars published their Lovecraft-inspired fiction and critical analyses in the similar form of pulp magazines in zines, like Crypt of Cthulhu and Lovecraft Studies.
Lovecraft fans and scholars have produced enough work devoted to or inspired by Lovecraft to create a substantive community of interest. In his book, A Study in the Fantastic, Maurice Levy explained, “to enter Lovecraft’s fantastic universe is to be brutally dislodged from the familiar, dispossessed of all criteria or systems of reference, violently thrown into an abnormal space amid beings of which the least one can say is that they transgress the common order. The monster plays no negligible role in this basic bewilderment; it surprises, it frightens, it shocks.”[5] Lovecraft’s fictive world has drawn a wide range of devotees, enticed by Lovecraft’s proficiency in exploding the fantastic into the mundane. Fans drew upon Lovecraft’s most popular literary creations, the Necronomicon and the Cthulhu mythos and wrote mythos-inspired fiction, wrote songs about Lovecraft and his stories, sold plush toys of Lovecraft’s gods, and published their own creations on the Internet.
The Necronomicon was a fictional book of occult lore that figured largely in a number of Lovecraft’s stories. From its introduction, there was interest expressed about the content and location of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft responded by writing a history of the Necronomicon. He revealed very little content of the Necronomicon, and focused on the provenance of the book and the locations of all extant copies. Lovecraft’s fans have responded in a number of different ways to Lovecraft’s history. Some Lovecraft fans searched for a copy of the real Necronomicon, others published spoofs, and a few investigated all available material on the book to provide a critical analysis.
The mythos, sometimes called the “Cthulhu mythos,” referred to a set of elements in Lovecraft’s fiction that figured predominantly in his work. The elements included gods (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth), books of occult lore (Necronomicon), and fictional New England towns (Arkham, Kingsport). Lovecraft used these elements to produce cohesion in his work. Lovecraft’s creations did not remain exclusive to his fiction but appeared in the works of Lovecraft’s contemporaries, like Clark Ashton Smith, and continued to inspire a great number of authors to this day. Mythos-inspired fiction appeared in zines, books, and role-playing games. The issue with the mythos is that Lovecraft never referred to these literary elements as the “Cthulhu mythos.” August Derleth, one of Lovecraft’s young protégés, coined the name “Cthulhu mythos” after Lovecraft’s death and popularized the mythic aspect of Lovecraft’s work. Although fans debated Derleth’s interpretation of the mythos, if Derleth had not pushed the mythos so incessantly, Lovecraft may not have been known today. The Necronomicon and the mythos attracted people to Lovecraft and eventually initiated discussion and debate within the Lovecraft community.
In researching Lovecraft fans, the Internet provided a wealth of material on audience reception and production. Fans and scholars published biographies, bibliographies, fictional works, and critical analyses of Lovecraft on the Web. Since the Internet was so important to the community, for primary research data on fans I posted a questionnaire on the Web, using the Center for History and New Media’s Survey Builder tool. I advertised the questionnaire in several places: in forum-based communities, journal-based communities in LiveJournalä, and newsgroups. In hindsight I realized I should have asked the respondents where they saw the survey. The questionnaire elicited demographic and subjective data. The respondents were required to provide an age, gender, occupation and zip code. My initial hypothesis about modern-day Lovecraft fans as predominantly goths was reflected in the subjective questions which asked the respondents about the Goth scene and their involvement, their knowledge and interest in H.P. Lovecraft, and if they thought there was a connection between H.P. Lovecraft and the Goth scene. The survey responses changed the thesis that follows though by revealing that goths were not the only Lovecraft fans, sci fi geeks and fantasy gamers also shared an affinity for Lovecraft.
The first Lovecraft story I read was The Lurker at the Threshold. I realized only after starting my thesis that the book was not written by Lovecraft, but inspired by Lovecraft. August Derleth used notes and outlines left by Lovecraft to create this story. It’s compelling that my introduction to Lovecraft was through a fan-produced text rather than an original Lovecraft work. This study hopes to understand why fans are attracted to Lovecraft and how that translates into how fans used Lovecraft. Moreover, the study considers the dynamics of the Lovecraft community and why there is a distinctive line drawn between the Lovecraft fan and Lovecraft scholar.
[1] S.T. Joshi, “A Dreamer and a Visionary,” (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 25.
[2] Joshi, 41.
[3] Joshi, 77.
[4] S.T. Joshi, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Life of a Gentleman of Providence,” 13 April 2004 < http://hplovecraft.com/life/biograph.htm>.
[5] Maurice Levy, Lovecraft, A Study in the Fantastic (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 55.
We Need Venus
A Comparison of Advertising in Science Fiction and Contemporary Criticism:
“Nobody should play with lives the way we do unless he’s motivated by the highest ideals,” states Mitchell Courtenay, the protagonist of the science fiction novel, The Space Merchants. Is Mitchell Courtenay the president or a religious leader? No. He is the leading advertising man at Fowler Schocken Associates in Frederick Pohl’s The Space Merchants. Pohl stages the concerns of consumerism by illustrating the lengths to which advertising moguls will go to exert power over lowly consumers, and the mental, economic, and physical exploitation involved. In Courtenay’s milieu, marketing is the omnipotent and rational economic catalyst and lives are governed by consumption. How does Pohl’s conception of consumption in the future compare to contemporary criticism of “the market?” In this essay, The Space Merchants will be considered in terms of both its implications for the future and its relationship to Michael Schudson’s Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion and Ellen Seiter’s Sold Separately.
The Space Merchants
The world constructed by Pohl is divided between two competing advertising firms, Fowler Schocken Associates and Taunton Associates. Generalizations about the two companies may be first ascertained by their names- Fowler Schocken [FSA] opts to shock while Taunton taunts. The greatest accomplishment of FSA is their Starrzelius Verily account and Indiastries. With Indiastries, FSA was able to transform the Indian subcontinent into a single manufacturing complex. Fowler Schocken tells his ad men, “Like Alexander, we weep for new worlds to conquer … [Venus] is a whole planet to sell.” [6 Pohl] Accordingly, FSA’s next project is Venus. Mitch Courtenay, the protagonist, is in charge.
When Courtenay is demoted to consumer status he realizes the cycle of consumption he helped create. “Think about smoking, think about Starrs, light a Starr. Light a Starr, think about Popsie, get a squirt. Get a squirt, think about Crunchies, buy a box. Buy a box, think about smoking, light a Starr.” The influence of advertising is multiplicitous and all encompassing. Consumers can enjoy a twenty-minute trance in a hypnoteleset that is riddled with commercials. Subliminal messaging is legal. When one travels, one only has to look out the window and catch an ad for Coffiest or Starrs cigarettes. Most food also contains an alkaloid or another habit-forming agent. Three weeks after drinking a cup of Coffiest daily the ad man has a consumer for life. Courtenay had never known any consumers and he conceived his stint as a consumer at Chlorella plantations as beneficial. When he left the plantations he would be closer to the consumers than any other ad man in the profession.
Advertising for the Venus project is centered on the idea that the environment increases male potency. Courtenay informs the reader that the basic drive of the human race is sex. Sex sells. And “there is no doubt that linking a sales message to one of the great prime motivations of the human spirit does more than sell goods; it strengthens the motivation, helps it come to the surface, provides it with focus. And thus we are assured of the steady annual increment of consumers so essential to expansion.” [75 Pohl] In addition, Pohl’s ad men do not rely on reason. According to Courtenay, we cannot trust reason and it was thrown out of the profession a long time ago. The closest predilection to reason is Taunton’s frequent usage of the stem medical pitch in his advertising, which is reminiscent of Reevesian approaches to ad making.
Advertising: Its Dubious Impact?
Marcus Felson suggests that “consumption today may do more to mask social standing than to express it.” [158 as quoted by Schudson]. In Pohl’s vision, consumption is the compass of an otherwise directionless mass of consumers. The nature of consumption changed in the twentieth century not from the changes in the life of an individual or family but from the amalgamation of those lifestyle changes with the mass market and large-scale consumer goods industries. [161 Schudson] In The Space Merchants, consumer goods industries define the lives of individuals. We no longer experience goods, but are led to a specific way of experiencing through the goods. Advertising uses consumer goods as a mode of social control.
Schudson asks what difference does culture make? He provides the analogy of the consumer/individual being caught in a web of cultural significance where the thread that binds is advertising. Moreover, the author of Captains of Consciousness, Stuart Ewen describes advertising as a “cultural apparatus aimed at defusing and neutralizing potential unrest.” [175 as quoted by Schudson] We are bound to our consumer culture by advertising and also forced to assimilate to certain aesthetic, narrative, visual, verbal, and ideological codes. Schudson explains that “advertising might be said to lead people to a belief in something. Advertising may make people believe they are inadequate without Product X and that Product X will satisfactorily manage their inadequacies … goods [handle] all sorts of ills, medical or social or political.” [224 Schudson]
Compared to Pohl, Schudson argues that advertising is only a mere piece of the major economic enterprise. “Advertising is propaganda and everyone knows it.” [4 Schudson] The difference then is that consumers exercise some free will while the consumers that populate Pohl’ s world are coerced by their consumer culture.
The phrase “consumer culture” is brought to an entirely new level in Pohl’s piece. It is hard to imagine anything worse than how Schudson describes consumer culture. It is a “society in which human values have been grotesquely distorted so that commodities become more important than people or… commodities become not ends in themselves but overvalued means for acquiring acceptable ends like love and friendship.” [7 Schudson] To make that even more applicable to Pohl, we could add that it is also a means for acquiring citizenship and assimilation.
Consumption beyond economics
In Sold Separately, Ellen Seiter realizes the importance of considering the ideologies of race, gender, ethnicity and class when examining American consumer culture. However, Pohl does not address issues of race, gender, or ethnicity. Life in PohI’s world is strictly delineated in economic terms-consumer or citizen. Seiter feels it is tragic product of our industrialized mass-market economy is that people are no longer individualized but defined only as consumers and markets. Seiter notices that people daily have to negotiate the link created between commodities and social status. Seiter goes on to explain how US popular culture is flexible and lends itself easily to different interpretations by different groups. However, Seiter feels that is not enough. “The language of consumer culture should stand to incorporate more inflections and learn to speak more dialects.” [230 Seiter] In the future, Pohl does not predict a need for a multilingual advertising industry. The way Pohl sees advertising going, there will be one strict advertising language that every consumer and citizen must adhere to-or they will have breached the commercial code of living and be tried not for their criminal, but commercial act.
Seiter discusses Marchand’s Parable of the Captivated Child and its mediation of psychological manipulation and authoritarian coercion. Possibly for Pohl, Marchand could develop another parable- the Parable of the Captivated Masses. Through manipulation, coercion, and the centralization of power into one entity-the advertising industry-consumers will be at the ad man’s beck and call. She also explores Marchand’s theory of advertising as social tableaux. Advertisements are vehicles for people to define their relationships to each other and to the large social structure.
In The Space Merchants, there no longer exists any conflicting feeling towards consumption or its hedonistic and emulative aspects that have marked 20th century criticism of advertising. This is possible only because consumers are not thought of as citizens, they are automatons existing to be manipulated by the ad agencies as the Merriam Webster dictionary defines, [the consumer is] a machine or control mechanism designed to follow automatically a predetermined sequence of operations or respond to encoded instructions.
Advertising present and future implications?
Contemporary advertising and Pohl’s future contention of advertising have much in common. Advertisers continue to depend on sampling, area testing, and customer research. Furthermore, advertising is still considered an art in the future. The greatest expression of that art today and in the future is persuading consumers without letting them know that are being duped. Advertising usurps all modes of artistic and creative expression in Pohl’s world, including poetry. He likens advertising to poetry for its ability to move and influence people. Consequently, Raymond Williams in his essay “The Magic System” argues that advertising is the “official art of modern capitalist society.” [273 as quote in Schudson] If advertising is art, than art is propaganda. As propaganda it should function in simplified ways so that it can effectively address the masses; it should picture not life as we know it but life as we wish it to be; and help in the assimilation to each new commercial creation. [215 Schudson]
In The Space Merchants, every part of life is commodified. Although Pohl does not address the race, ethnicity, or gender he does briefly mention religion. He considers using a religious movement to inspire thousands to leave Earth and go live as Jack O’Shea describes as sardines in a hot tin can. The idea is tabled though because religion is a Taunton account. Obviously this alludes to a socialist system where all facets of life are controlled the economic base/government. Not directly related to Pohl’s comprehension of religion’s function in the future, is the present day connection made between advertising and religion. As quoted in Schudson, Christopher Lasch contends that advertising is the new religion. Advertising “addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure.” [11 Schudson] Lasch’s concern then is the possibility and subsequent actualization of a consumer using economic goods to find meaning in life.
It is in the conclusion of the novel that Pohl attempts to articulate the consequences of socialism [not as a solution to capitalism] by alluding how marketing practices lead toward moral decay, materialism, and the reprisal of social castes. When Courtenay returns from Chlorella plantations and the Consie [conservationist] movement he conferences with Fowler Schocken. Schocken denies that Courtenay was ever George
Groby [the name and SSN he assumed as a consumer] and believes that Courtenay took a holiday from reality. Courtenay tells Schocken such “frightful” things as “The interests of producers and consumers are not identical; Most of the world is unhappy; Workmen don’t automatically find the job they do best; Entrepreneurs don’t play a hard, fair game by the rules.”
Since the establishment of the American mass market, advertising has changed from being more product-driven to more market-driven. Schudson, Seiter, and Pohl all acknowledge that advertising is a particularly extraordinary cultural power. Even though Pohl’s role is partly satirical, he warns against the advancement of technology and the lack of government intervention as tools for the empowerment of the advertising industry. After Schocken and Courtenay speak, Schocken is assassinated. As a result Courtenay is named the president of FSA. Fortunately, on account of Chlorella and the Consies, Mitch learned to “despise everything for which it stood.” [l43 Pohl] Courtenay does not get a chance to change the rest of the world, he is sent on the rocket to Venus-never to return. Despite all efforts neither Courtenay nor the Consies can change the vicious cycle of consumption and manipulation. Schudson, Seiter, and Pohl all warn the readers of their texts about the potentially disastrous effects of an advertising-ridden and ideologically singular society. The future looks grim, and we ought to be cautious or we may need Venus.
Appendix:
Mitchell Courtenay [George Groby]- protagonist, ad man at Fowler Schocken Associates. Matt Runstead, who also works for FS sets up Courtenay’s fake death and has him sent to Chlorella plantations. Courtenay undergoes a transformation when demoted to consumer level, and comes to abhor the life he helped build through advertising and is seen as a Consie supporter and marketing heretic.
Consies, or Conservationists- considered by mainstream society as radical and lunatic fringe of malcontents who engage in industrial terrorism. They believe the world has been depleted and polluted by competitive marketing practices. In addition, the world is overpopulated and they want to colonize Venus. Matt Runstead, Kathy [Courtenay's wife], and Jack O’Shea [passenger of the Venus rocket] are all Consies.
Chlorella plantations-Courtenay as George Groby is exiled to this plantation in Little America. He works as a skimmer [pushing away fat residue] from Chicken Little. Chicken Little provides protein-all natural sources of nutrition have been depleted.
Venus project- Fowler Schocken Associates project to colonize Venus.
Couching Television: Psychoanalysis and “Dottie Gets Spanked”
In her essay, “Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television,” Sandy Flitterman-Lewis attempts to apply Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis to the study of television given the success of its application to the study of cinema. She takes into account the inherent differences between cinema and television, and makes an effort to fill in those gaps by postulating how television can produce the illusion of realism that accomplishes. Working with the example of the made-for-TV short film, Dottie Gets Spanked, this essay will consider Freud’s theory [including Jacques Lacan's re-conception], its application to television and the problems intrinsic in such an application, specifically, ( viewer positioning and viewer pleasure.
Psychoanalysis
What theory is more pervasive than Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, insofar as its scope has expanded beyond the deconstruction of social beings that of social institutions? Fittingly, Flitterman-Lewis argues that a psychoanalytic approach to television provides a “definition and description of a new type of social subject-part viewer, part consumer.” [204] But who is this social subject? According to Freud, an individual’s subjectivity is split between the conscious and the unconscious. The subject is dominated by the need to repress the tendencies categorized under the rubric of the pleasure principle, and is pressured to displace those basic desires with a representation of a fully socialized persona. The desires driven by the pleasure principle are then relegated to the fissures of the unconscious. Those desires may be manifested in dreams and delight in such positioning as voyeur or scopophiliac [both positions replicated in film]. Thus the most important point to gather from Freud in our examination of television is the “work of the unconscious, the production of fantasy, and the erotic component of desire present in all our activities.” [206]
Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, elaborated on Freud’s theory by synthesizing psychoanalysis with semiotics. In Lacan’s mirror stage theory, he concentrates on the formation of identity, the process of becoming or realizing oneself as a subject. He argues that the mirror stage is-central to the subject’s identification, and thus developed subjectivity. In the mirror stage, subject first realizes the primordial desire for wholeness. On account of the nature of signification and subjectivity, along with the self-recognition that is found in the mirror stage, there is also a series of losses and meconnaissances, or misrecognitions. The misrecognitions, part of ego verification, may be liable for such feelings as desire and need, and the resulting states of repression and manifestation. In addition to Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, the way Lacan sees identity formation can be used to explain how the film Dottie Gets Spanked forms the protagonist Stevie’s identity.
Dottie Gets Spanked
It is through the mirrors of television and the program ”The Dottie Show” that dsires are both manifested and repressed. It is the function of looking that constructs Stevie’s subjectivity and informs any subsequent mimicry of Dottie. Stevie emulates the character of Dottie. He is engrossed by the image of Dottie. He draws her while watching and remains “glued” to the television set when the show is on. His mimicry of Dottie is also illustrated in wearing saddle shoes, traditionally a style reserved for girls, and a red coat which is reminiscent of the red wig Dottie wears and the emotions associated with the color red [loud, outgoing]. The function of looking also explains Stevie’s infatuation with spanking. He knows Sharon gets spanked; he witnesses a boy getting spanked in the playground, and he sees Dottie, the root of his desires, being spanked. This brings us back to Freud’s contention of eroticism in all facets of a subject’s life.
The influence of the various mirrors is found in Stevie’ s dreams; the differences in his behavior in the waking and physic worlds, influence his mental development. In his dreams, Stevie reclaims a sense of superiority; he is the king in his personal kingdom. Clearly this is a defense of the ego, a hysterical repression of Stevie’s condition of experience. In reality, he is passive and subordinate; in his dreams, he is aggressive and dominant. He even dominates the one that he mimics, Dottie. The lure or allure of superiority and domination is made evident in the dream at the climax of the film. In the dream he kills someone and must be punished. The punishment is to be spanked by the strongest man in the world, but the real question is if spanking is really a punishment or wish fulfillment. Stevie awakens terrified which could be reasoned through the notion of meconnaissance. The split subject cannot handle such fulfillment of desire, he mistakenly recognizes this fulfilled desire as bad thus he must repress it. Stevie demonstrates this repression by physically burying the manifestation of what he desires that he had drawn in “real” time – the picture of Dottie getting spanked. He was also reprimanded by his father for drawing such a picture and consequently discouraged and ashamed. However he is very careful and methodical as he prepares the picture to be buried and then buries it shallowly in the dirt. This means it can be unearthed one day literally or figuratively as Stevie matures and develops his identity more fully.
The Psychoanalytic Approach to Television
Before applying psychoanalysis to television it is necessary to compare the approach as used in studying cinema. There are many technological and resulting psychological differences between cinema and television that affect the treatment of the theory when applied to television. A number of differences relate to viewer positioning, spatially and figuratively. The film milieu is dark and “cocoon like.” These conditions simulate the perfect environment for regression to the Imaginary and dream state. The TV produces a multitude of varying modes of reception, though commonly in a domestic space. Secondly, film captures the spectator’s gaze, while TV only expects a spectator’s glance. The spatial difference between viewer and image is equally important. In film, there is nothing between the spectator and the projected image. This circumstance allows the spectator a primary identification with the camera, and a sense of “pure perception and mastery.”[1] Television cannot engage the spectator’s primary identification and thus cannot simulate a “regression,” on account of the distracted nature of the domestic space. Furthermore, Flitterman-Lewis interprets our subjectivity as “structured by the oscillation between the desire for plenitude [Imaginary] and the recognition of difference, lack, and jhv..Lconventional relations.”[2] Our attraction to cinema is obvious then, since cinema offers the spectator a unified diegesis that sutures over difference. Compared to cinema, television is fragmented, dispersed, and does not suture over difference. Television’s form is as Jane Feuer contends, a dialectic between segmentation and flow.”
Can television produce the illusion of realism as easily as cinema does? Flitterman-Lewis bases her argument largely on TV’s “liveness.” She reads the effect of perpetual presentness and immediacy as producing an illusory feeling. “Whatever the format, television’s immediate presence invokes the illusion of a reality presented directly and expressly for the viewer” [219]. It can be concluded that TV substitutes liveness for cinema’s solicitation of the dream state and presentness for regression. The primary Identification is modified to support the glance, and offers partial identifications. The voyeuristic pleasure usually elicited from primary Identification is not constrained to a single object, but the spectator is in a position to pick and choose indefinitely. To compensate for the lack of suturing over difference, TV offers a “fascination in fragments.” [217] Working with fragments a diverse visual rhythm is orchestrated in which, according to Mimi White, the blending of fictive and real creates a totalizing world that binds diverse material into one continuous whole [220]. The blurring/blending of the fictive and real, Flitterman-Lewis, centralto TV’s conjunction of fantasy, desire, and belief.
Conclusion
Dottie Gets Spanked lends itself easily to psychoanalytic deconstruction. The entire narrative can be considered Freudian-the “abnormal” sexual development of Stevie, his fixation on Dottie, and obsession with spanking. The employment of dream sequences indicts this Freudian-informed text. A quote by Freud even appears in one of the dream sequences. The rapid continuous shots in the climatic dream sequence embodies what Flitterman-Lewis explains as “identification involves the ability of the subject of fantasy to occupy a variety of roles-continually sliding, doubling, and exchanging numerous fictive positions.” [237]
However, the psychoanalytic approach can only go so far in our understanding of television and viewer positioning and pleasure. The choice of Dottie Gets Spanked as an example is problematic. Can Freud be completely divorced from our conception of the film? No. There are other ways to tackle Stevie and DOS, such as the cultural studies approach. Cultural studies asks why the viewer is watching and in what context? Stevie could be watching The Dottie Show because it’s a program that’s on after school and many of the peple he wishes to’ be friends with watch the program. His mother approves of his watching of the program and enjoys and rewards his docile behavior. Moreover, Stevie is portrayed as a future artist and he may have found his “muse.” Flitterman-Lewis writes, “when we speak, our anxious, intended meanings always bear the traces of what we have repressed.” [210] Surely this is true, but from a purely psychoanalytic standpoint it is lacking. In examining viewer positioning and pleasur~it isl also important to look at the viewing context-division of labor, family power dynamics, ~/ reception dynamics and social patterns of taste.
[1] Paraphrase from handout “Psychoanalytic theories of film and television spectatorship”
[2] Paraphrase from handout “Psychoanalytic theories of film and television spectatorship”
Cult Programming and Fandom
In semiotic theory, meaning can operate on two separate levels-a syntagmatic one or a paradigmatic one. A syntagmatic text is linear and follows an axis of contiguity; while a paradigmatic text expresses a relationship of selectivity and follows axis of substitution. Television scholars have observed that narrative interest in television programs as shifts from a syntagmatic to a paradigmatic axis. This significant realignment to a paradigmatic discourse opens up audience reception, chiefly, with the possibility of substitution or more specifically, different readings of a text by focusing less on the plot or suspense of the program, and more on the relationships between plots, characters, and/or settings. Therefore, television programs operating paradigmatically may be held accountable for the production of varying viewer identifications and interpretations.
Symptomatic of television codes and conventions, is the possibility of potentially being able to produce resistant readings. Audiences resist the hegemonic constructions of reality made by the mass media and construct their own, sometimes oppositional meanings for media texts. It is important to point as well to the constructed-ness of reality on television. Representations can never directly reflect experience; the only “real” aspect of television is television itself. The existence of non-dominant readings of a text are maintained by the idea that the line between television reality and “real” reality is blurry, as Robert Allen suggests in his essay, “Audience-oriented Criticism and Television,” we are co-producers of the television text. Fiske further corroborates with Allen, arguing that audiences are “active producers of meaning.” We are allowed the space to bring into our interpretations of a specific text our own experiences. The viewer is no longer a spectator as in film but a participant. Even so, Allen asks “What are the limits of what readers/viewers can do with texts?” [133] In this essay, an exploration of the limits of the reader in television will be supported chiefly by an analysis of the program, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Generally speaking, many TV texts have spawned a growth of communities that have a specific allegiance to their program, for example, those that watched Dynasty or Friends. Furthermore, a distinct kind of community developed with programs in the science fiction or fantastic genre that appear to be diametrically opposed to a community of Friends [pun intended]. Examples of these communities are Star Trekkers [not Trekkies, they feel it is a derogatory terminology], Xenites, and Buffy buffs. Additionally, and if not inherently, Star Trek, Xena, and Buffy are all examples of cult television. Cult television necessarily implies the existence of a cult following, or “fandom.” Fandom is itself an interesting world. One could only imagine of kingdom
of fans cavorting and following their objects of pleasure. Developing the concept of fandom further in his essay, “Star Trek: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching,” Henry Jenkins describes “fandom” as a “vehicle for marginalized sub-cultural groups [women, the young, gay] to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations.” [450) It is this appropriation of media texts that then allows sub-cultural groups to re-read and transform the text to serve their interests.
Seriality is essential to the popularity and multiplicity of meanings at both the textual and cultural level. Fans invest in the programs they watch, and the [most often] weekly broadcast is an object of anticipation and the exploitation of “repetition and difference, fragmentation and textual excess helps to catalyze intense and dynamic viewing practice” [Jones 11].The fact that viewers do not foresee a program as ending, but continuing on and on invites the viewer to speculate.
Both Xena and Buffy work with a textual “ricketiness.” [Umberto Eco as quoted in Jones 13] The “ricketiness” refers to the intertextuality and self-reflexivity used in the program that ruptures the TV text, and allows for a “dynamic text-reader relationship.” [13] Thus, the product is subtext. Michel de Certeau perceives these “readings as …a type of cultural bricolage through which readers fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprint, salvaging bits and pieces of found material in making sense of their own social experience.” [as quoted in Jenkins449] In Xena, the possible romantic relationship between the characters Xena and her sidekick Gabrielle for many seasons was subtextually recognized. Every once in a while producers of the program would throw a bone at those subtextual readers to sustain their viewing. Xena and Gabrielle once kissed each other, but it was when Xena’s and Gabrielle’s souls had been switched with two other men, so that on screen we saw a man and woman kissing, but with the knowledge of the body switching the viewer knew that it was Xena and Gabrielle. Finally, towards the end of the program the producers were fully aware of their large gay following, in maintext terms toyed with the notion of Xena and Gabrielle being lovers, and largely became a parody of itself.
In her essay, “Vampires, Postmodemity, and Postfeminism,” Susan Owen characterizes Buffy as a “humorous assault on the shortcomings of liberal reform and the inherent flaws of American civil society; the series is most challenging to mainstream culture when it manipulates irony and fragmentation as modes of critiques.” [30] Buffy tries to rupture the action genre with a female controlling the narratives and literally delivering the punches, physically, and linguistically. However, the masculinist and hegemonic structure of TV construes this assertion as threatening. The maintext adds several components in order to make this acceptable, and possibly subvert the postmodern feminist message. Buffy is placed outside gender norms and hierarchies because she is the master of her environment. The text resorts to using a “combination of hyperfemininity and [employs] more [culturally coded] masculine/active desires ultimately produces an uneasy sexuality.” [Luckett 105] Buffy has remarkable strength, but conforms to certain beauty ideals and fashion to compensate for loss of femininity. Even the name Buffy, which is reminiscent of a “valley girl,” works to undermine Buffy’s forceful nature and intelligence. Buffy’s friends, Willow and Xander are “les femmes,” and work in the text to offset Buffy’s “butch” performance. [Owen 26]. Although particular anxieties arise over the assertion of feminine strength, many subcultural groups have found outlets for their own readings in Buffy.
Owen considers Buffy to “offer transgressive possibilities for re-imagining gendered relations and modernist American ideologies, however, the series [also] reifies mainstream commitments to heteronormative relationships, American commodity culture, and a predominantly Anglo perspective.” [25] But are these relationships heteronormative? The relationships depicted on Buffy involve a sort of acceptance of difference or otherness. Buffy has relationships with two vampires; Willow, a relationship with a werewolf, Oz. Even though the text functions by naturalizing monstrosity, it is questionable whether it effectively represents heteronormative relationships. The relationships open up differences, but there is something intrinsically “Other” about them that are not normative. Reading Buffy as a queer text, it could suggest alternative notions of gender and sexuality. Oz’s changes are related more to femininity; he has to be locked up at certain times during the month, suggestive of a female’s menstrual cycle. It is evident that women have the upper hand on Buffy, and this power is further reinforced by the blurred distinctions between normal and abnormal male sexuality, and the fact that every man is potentially a monster. Operating to a lesser degree at the contextual level was the introduction of a lesbian relationship in seasons four through six. A new character was introduced, Tara, who would meet Willow at a Wicca meeting. A relationship was first actualized subtextually. The Scooby Gang [as they affectionately call themselves] would allude to Willow doing spells, and those other “Wiccan things.” As a sidebar, all of the relationships that have been mentioned have ended tragically. Angel dies [only to eventually be resurrected and reintroduced with his own spinoff], Oz runs away, and Tara is killed. How does that implicate these relationships? The attempts made by the TV text to act “outside the box” are curtailed still by the masculinist hegemony of the TV system.
Nonetheless, Buffy works implicitly in a white, middle-class, heterosexual space, but appropriates other cultural and ethnic identifications, which are used to mark the program as multicultural, and conceal as Byers puts it, “within even the most progressive programming can lurk hegemonic structures that reinscribe both the sanctity of the white, straight, middle-class status quo and the devaluation of difference.” [731] Moreover, the text works to rectify the problem of portraying a heroine, and the signification of a female body as tough, resilient and strong. Thus, there is a constant struggle between the dominant reading and the resistant/oppositional reading that cannot be rectified solely in the development of a community of Trekkies, Xenites, or Buffy buffs. Robert Allen’s question remains unanswered, “What are the limits of what readers/viewers can do with texts?”
A popular characteristic of fandom is fan fiction which became very popular after the initial airing of Star Trek. Fan fiction operates on many different levels; writers can either strictly adhere to the codes of the television program or stray from those strict codes or produce a fiction that may only include the characters but in a different setting or context. Jenkins contends that “fan writers suggest the need to redefine the politics of reading, to view textual property not as exclusive domain of textual producers but as open to repossession by textual consumers.” [469]
With the expansion of the internet as a community builder, and not just not an information engine, fandom laid its claim on the World Wide Web. Newsgroups and message boards were created to foster the exchange of interests, information, and ideas about such cult programs as Buffy. Some newsgroups or message boards would have specific interests, like that of “The Kitten, The Witches, and the Bad Wardrobe” which focused solely on the relationship of Willow and Tara. These communication outlets not only allow users to discuss the program and create fan fiction, but to provide support and discuss issues outside of the television diegesis or those alluded to within the diegesis, such as social issues of racism, sexism, and heterosexism. The agency of viewers as textual consumers in the fandom, boils down to the interest of each (sub)community. There are Buffy groups that focus solely on Willow and Tara as the Kitten Board does, and others that focus on the masking of social issues within the diegesis, that have purported that Willow’s addiction to magic is synonymous to an addiction to drugs. If television invites the viewer to be a participant in the production and reception of the text, then it’s appropriate for the varying degrees of interpretation and resistant readings. And if it adds to the success of the program, what do the television companies have to complain about?
Selected Works Cited:
Jones, Sara Gwenlian. “Starring Lucy Lawless?” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. Vol. 14, No.1, April 2000.
Jenkins III, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Television: The Critical Review. 5th edition. Oxford UP, 1994.
Luckett, Moya. “Girl Watchers.” in The Revolution wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict. Eds. Spigel, Curtin. New York:Routledge, 1997.
Owen, Susan. “Vampires, Postmodernity, and Postfeminism.” in Journal of Popular Film and Television.
Sacred Bodies
Rights on passage
Arnold van Gennep, a Belgian anthropologist considers”…life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and rest, and then begin acting again, but in a different way.” The changes in our life cycle such as birth, puberty and marriage are marked by what he coined as “rites of passage.” Rites of passage highlight and validate changes in a person’s status. Van Gennep observes that virtually all human societies use ceremonial rites to mark significant transitions in social status of individuals. Rites of passage are essential to the rejuvenation of society. He believes that they preserve social stability by easing the transition of individuals into their new statuses. On a very basic level, rites of passage are social acknowledgements of aging and as individuals are born and they age their positions in society change. Rites are also a means of creating emotional bonds that maintain social order. They reinforce social statuses, norms, and values. Deconstructing the rites of a culture could give insight into the cultural and social dynamics of the society
“In societies emphasizing technology, where life is based on individual achievement and is less dependent on communal cooperation for prosperity, such rites have become increasingly inconsequential to mainstream social life.” [Wall] There is an absence of strong family and community bonds and the effects of industrialization and urbanization have affected the presence of rites o fpassage. In western culture, our lives are dictated by time and as a consequence most ritual observances have been shortened. In the case of birth, marriage, or death, these rites have become commodities or points of sale. Another reason why there is a social downsizing of rites and rituals is the ideology of scientific rationalism. Lastly, rights of passage are stratified by the hierarchies of race and class and should additionally be taken into consideration in terms of what is accessible to certain race/ethnic identities and classes.
There is no culture that doesn’t adorn their bodies in some sense of the word either through painting, piercing, tattooing or scarring. The only difference is what the body modification means to the society and to the individual. Body modification and art is a way to signal place in society, mark a special event, or celebrate a transition or rite of passage in life. Body art is a visual language that carries specific cultural meanings. My own experiences in body modification allude to my individual creativity, my inner perceptions of my body and my need to re-claim it. I believe that by modifying my body, I have developed a better self-awareness and self-symbiosis. My piercings are marks of my identity, how I choose to define myself and how I choose to define beauty and the body. Eric Sprague, also known as The Lizard Man feels that “the modifications I make to my body can mean many things but most importantly, and at the most basic level, they demonstrate the ongoing realization of my living according to a basic principle which I have consciously chosen: Know Thyself. Should there be a final accounting of the positive and negative consequences of these physical changes, regardless of the balance, it could only pale in comparison with the sense of well being that comes from seeking, recognizing, and following one’s desires.” Body art and modification is important as a rite of passage and as a celebration of diversity, of beauty, of the body and of re-claiming the body.
Cyborgs as body politics
As we enter the 21′t century, the boundary between human and machine is growing increasingly blurry. The notion of technology encroaching upon our personal space and burrowing underneath our skin makes most shudder. Furthermore, Donna Haraway, author of “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” challenges the latter notion and poses the question, “why should our bodies end at the skin or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”
Haraway assesses that we are “living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system-from all work to all play, a deadly game.” [161] She includes a list of binaries that illustrate the “informatics of domination” visible in society, that include such binaries as representation/simulation, organism/biotic component and mind/artificial intelligence. A common ideology among American socialists and feminists that Haraway notes is that they see mind and body and animal and machine as binaries. She believes that this perception is unwise because the human body is being reshaped by technology. She suggests that cyborg imagery could be used effectively to deconstruct the dualisms we use to explain are bodies and tools to ourselves.
Haraway presents four images of a cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism functioning in communication and control systems, a hybrid of machine and organism, part of the present social reality and part of the future. The first two definitions are the most important; they support how cyborgs effectively blur the boundaries between machine and human, inorganic and organi. As a hybrid a cyborg incorporates both organic and inorganic materials and may in some facets have elements that are classically thought of as alive. In the past, machines were not self-moving, self-designing or autonomous. However, compared to today, machines are becoming increasingly the embodiment of live-ness as Haraway states, “our machines are [becoming] disturbingly lively.” [152]
We are already cyborgs, whether we know it or not, Haraway proclaims. As she explains the cyborg “is our ontology, it gives us our politics.” She argues that cyborg politics have been linked to oppressive mythologies: scientific progress; racist, male-dominated capitalism; the exploitation of nature to serve the needs of culture. However, this doesn’t have to remain the case. Indeed, Haraway writes that her Manifesto is an argument for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”
In assuming cyborg politics and imagery a profusion of spaces and identities opens up and a permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politics appears, further blurring the boundaries between the status ofmen and women, human and machine, and individual and community and exposing new discourses to negotiate our bodies.
I used to be a pain slut
I was a freshman in high school, when I was first introduced to the world of piercing. Inside the tattoo parlor, I was directed to a red plastic stool I peeled my shirt up to my bust as instructed by the professional. I leaned back on the stool as he clamped the skin on the top ofmy bellybutton. I inhaled fitfully while he plunged the needle through my skin instantaneously causing a ripple of adrenalin to surge through my body. He used the needle to put on the sixteen-gauge ring and twisted on a small graphite ball that would hold the ring together.
I decided to get my nipples pierced that following May. It was more of an impulsive move on my part, but as I reflect on the situation, I realized there were deeper mental, physical and emotional ramifications to my actions as it came to mark an important period of my life. I was fifteen and like most other females in early adolescence, I felt very awkward in my body as I came to terms with the physiological changes occurring. I felt ashamed, which I partly blame on the unofficial socially mandated measurements of what a young girl should be. I strengthened my fragile self by arming my exterior in fishnets and combat boots. I thought if I wore a certain type of clothing I would be perceived as intimidating, as being a strong person rather than a still young girl coming to terms with her sexual maturation. I was with three other girlfriends when I got my nipples pierced. As in the first instance, two other girls also acquired piercings. Piercing almost assumed a sort of social ritual status.
We entered the shop and I approached the man at the counter and told him I wanted my nipples pierced. He looked me up and down, observing the stark red lipstick on my lips and my steel toe combat boots and asked, are you eighteen? “Of course,” I quipped and I was led into the back room. On account of the nipple not having much tissue they decided to use fourteen gauge rings. I sat up on the examining table and took off all my layers of clothing on top as requested. I did not feel awkward as the professional marked with dye the entrance and exit for the needle and clamped both nipples. I inhaled, and while exhaling, I experienced a set of successive shudders as the needle was pushed through and the rings applied. I nodded absentmindedly as I was told about the aftercare and almost in an ecstatic state I left the store. Having my nipples pierced helped me understand and accept my body more. I grew increasingly more comfortable as the days, weeks, and months proceeded. I felt free, sexually liberated. I saw getting my nipples pierced as claiming them for myself. My breasts were part of my physiology and they had a biological imperative. By claiming ownership over these highly sexualized parts I constituted my own sexuality. I was setting my own roles. I was trying to define myself as a sexual person, not a sexual object. I refused to be objectified in this male-dominated patriarchal society. I claimed my body for me, a self-identified sexually mature female.
My junior year I got my nose pierced. On this occasion, my mother was present. It
was important that my parents accepted my getting pierced and recognized how important it was to me to be pierced. To be able to mark significant events or periods in my life permanently and for them to understand was incredible. This piercing experience was similar to the others. The professional dyed the area where we thrust the needle through. As soon as the needle pierced the skin, I began to cry. The tears weren’t associated with intense pain, it was just an involuntary reaction being so close to the sinuses and tear duct. It was such a remarkable experience, I never felt so connected and disconnected to my body.
This November along with several other dorm-mates from Brown University, I got my lip pierced. Fakir Musafar instructed the professional who pierced me, Jef Saunders. Part of Musafar’s philosophy is that “body piercing is MORE than indiscriminate ‘hole poking’ MORE than casual adornment of the body. It’s a special kind of MAGIC: intense, personal, intimate, sexual, spiritual and Transformative.” Jef understands how powerful the experience of getting pierced can be. This appealed to me because piercing is, as I have already stated, my way of marking specific periods in my life cycle. Getting pierced is a positive experience and has turned out to be an important ritual for me. I experienced the most pain getting my lip pierced but it was a different sort of pain. It wasn’t the horribly uncomfortable pain that you experience when you break your arm or the pain that makes you cry out in agony. It is a transcendent pain, an analgesic experience. The pain is secondary to the intensity and euphoric nature of the experience.
Sacred bodies
Haraway examines the role of technoculture in the present and future and confirms the existence of a demonology in technology. She argues that society should both adopt and reject technoculture. In many ways the ideology of technoculture has bleed into the realm of body modification. The binaries of human/machine, organic/inorganic, nature/technology, could easily be applied in body modification discourse. Pieces of metal, wood, and jewels are being integrated into the body. The inorganic is being incorporated into the organic, reminiscent of Haraway’s idea of the cyborg.
The sooner we accept our identities as cyborgs and that the body is not sacred because it consists only of natural/organic parts, the more near ideologies of gender equity or even the abolition of the construct of gender will occur. Haraway concludes that due to monsters “[defining] the limits of community in Western imaginations,” it is made clear that soon there will be acceptance of the idea that “we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.” The less clear the lines between human and machine are, the more open both politics of identity and body will be open to oppositional consciousness, and oppositional ideologies [of alternate rites of passage including body modification] that are thus far still considered subversive.
Resources:
Erchak:, Gerald M. The Anthropology ofSe!fand Behavior. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 1998.
Nelson, Pamela. Reviving Rites of’Passage in America. The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1995. http://www.balchinstitute.org Imuseum/rites lrites.html
Wall, Theresa. Bo4J Modification and Contemporary American Rites ofPassage. http://hamp.hampshire.edu/-tawF95/ ropintro.html
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991.