Media Academics as Media Audiences
Media Academics as Media Audiences
Aesthetic Judgments in Media and Cultural Studies
In this chapter I want to argue that the dismissal of aesthetic considerations from much work in media/cultural studies—a foundational gesture aimed at distinguishing academics from both “naïve” consumers and “imposed” ideologies—does not, in fact, work to install critical rationality or desired neutrality (Barthes 2005). I will suggest that via its anti-aesthetics (see also Sandvoss, this volume) much cultural studies work has constructed cultural distinction for itself by implying that its scholars are exempt from the domains of fan culture and/or popular culture (Hills 2002, 2005b). However, such a fantasized exemption has not at all produced an escape from “popular aesthetics” (Bird 2003) but has instead recoded aesthetic judgments within the supposedly pristine spaces of academia.
If attempts to displace aesthetics produce only distorted shadows of the very problematic they seek to short-circuit, then might aesthetics not be returned more positively to circulation in cultural studies? As Hunter and Kaye have pointed out, scholars are usually “urged […] not to take aesthetic judgements for granted. We should understand them instead as […] exertions of social power” (1997: 3). But what would aesthetics look like if it were not treated merely as an ideological imposition?
By way of exploring this possibility, I will suggest that a rehabilitated aesthetics might emerge from the fact that media academics are themselves members of media audiences (Osborne 2000; Wright Wexman 1999), quite apart from the issue of whether or not they are also media fans. Curiously, debates in media/cultural studies have frequently returned to the question of whether the media academic who is also a media fan represents some kind of problematic or scandalous figure (Hills 2002; Michael 2000; White 2005). My concern is that this apparent destabilizing of scholar versus fan identity may have worked as a kind of academic-ideological feint. That is, for some it may operate to restore the illusion that academics who can announce their non-fandom are in the clear, as it were, their modernist, rational, scholarly selves safely set apart from their simultaneous identities as “ordinary” media consumers. However, going beyond fan audiences—but still learning from work in fan studies—we should perhaps really be asking not “what does it mean if an academic studying fans is also a fan?” but rather “what does it mean when an academic studying the media audience is also part of a media audience?” This latter question also includes those who may not directly or obviously be part of a media audience, since contemporary media are dispersed into everyday life and culture rather than being isolated to specific screens at specific times (Abercrombie & Longhurst 1998; Bird 2003).
Oddly, only scholar-fans have been interpreted as carrying some hybridized or logically regressive identity in relation to their academic status—i.e., they have been viewed in some quarters as “not proper academics”—whereas I want to argue here that this is in fact a special case of a more general problem. Academics, far more generally, are “not proper academics” either, if by this we mean that their scholarly selves cannot be cleanly separated out from their media-audience-based identities. Criticisms of specific scholar-fans, or even specific scholar-fan conferences, may arguably carry more weight (see Burr 2005), but all too often attacks on scholar-fandom have sought to attack this hybrid category per se for its supposed transgression of scholarly detachment, while exempting academia in general from any related critique or censure.
I will set out my argument here in three sections: (1) how the exclusion of aesthetics produces academic distinction; (2) how academic distinction recodes aesthetic judgment; and finally (3) how a general theory of hybridized academia—going beyond fandom—can restore the aesthetic.
How the Exclusion of Aesthetics Produces Academic Distinction
There can be little doubt that aesthetics has been powerfully detached from the academic study of popular culture. Analyzing this, Geraghty suggests “a number of reasons why making judgments about aesthetics has proved to be a difficult task in […] the broader areas of media and cultural studies” (2003: 27). These include
the impact of semiotics […] with its pseudo-scientific claims about objectivity; the impact of postmodernism with its emphasis on diversity, decentring and play; the need to establish popular culture […] as worthy of study that involved refusing the traditional modes of judgement; the impact of feminist work, with its demand that certain kinds of denigrated fictions should be taken seriously; the notion, coming rather differently from Foucault and Bourdieu, that to make aesthetic judgements was to impose the cultural norms of the powerful. (2003: 27–28)
Geraghty’s list takes in the role of different academic schools of thought such as feminism, structuralism (figured as “semiotics”), and poststructuralism (represented as postmodern “play”). And yet, some of Geraghty’s stated reasons have not been restricted to the operation of specific intellectual movements, or wider philosophies, and have instead formed parts of the general legitimation of academic study of the popular. Among these accounts of why aesthetics has found no place in media/cultural studies we might number “claims to objectivity”; the refusal of “traditional modes of judgment”; and the argument that making aesthetic judgments means imposing “cultural norms of the powerful.” These rationales for abandoning aesthetics can all be said to work in one way. They each discursively construct media/cultural studies academics as “set apart” from popular culture, and as “set above” its consumers and fans (Hills 2005b, chapters 6 & 7).
By laying claim to the nonaestheticized study of popular culture, scholars have sought to discursively distance themselves from what are viewed as normative practices of media consumerism. Consumers routinely assess what they like and dislike, fans passionately favor certain texts (Sandvoss 2005a), and anti-fans equally passionately detest others (Gray 2003), but almost magically set outside these domains of taste, academia is positioned as carrying its own distinctive “imagined subjectivity” (Hills 2002: 3). That is, the academic’s self-legitimating and claimed identity—split off from his or her identity as a media consumer—has typically been imaged and imagined as one of critical rationality, objectivity, and neutrality. As Barthes has written,
I define the Neutral as that which outplays […] the paradigm, or rather… everything that baffles the paradigm[….] The paradigm, what is that? It’s the opposition of two virtual terms from which […] I actualize one to produce meaning[….] Whence the idea of a structural creation that would defeat, annul, or contradict the implacable binarism of the paradigm by means of a third term. (2005: 6–7)
And media/cultural studies scholarship has, I am suggesting, adopted this kind of desired and desiring role as “tertium” (Barthes 2005: 7). Here, scholarly identity has formed a kind of third term that assumes an ability to “outplay the paradigm” of media consumer/producer, with the theorist adopting a performed role supposedly outside the identity of the “naïve” media consumer who proclaims their pop-cultural tastes, while also going beyond the identity of the ideology-imposing or ideology-circulating media producer. Neither imposing ideological strictures, nor being subjected to them, there stands the properly disciplined media/cultural studies exegete.
Aesthetic judgments are treated as something belonging outside media/cultural studies. They are enacted and carried out by others, often fans of pop-cultural texts. Though writers such as Bird (2003) and Miller (2003) have reached very different conclusions over the value and elitism, or lack thereof, of fans’ aesthetic judgments, they have nevertheless both advanced the notion that aesthetic criteria only exist properly and firmly outside media scholarship (Hills 2005a). Miller is especially scathing about fan practices of aesthetic judgment, which he depicts as an anathema to the anticanonical and anti-elitist ethics of cultural studies:
These forms of fandom are straight-forwardly dedicated to replicating a college of aficionadi, who by their knowledge of elevating texts are somehow superior to the rest of us. This […] replicates the very forms of quality discourse that were supposedly toppled by anti-canonical cultural studies. Instead, the best readers of the best texts are back, armed with their best interpretations. No thank you[….] Leave spotting trainspotters to trainspotters. (Miller 2003: 22)
However, such a rejection of aesthetics does not constitute the only possible academic strategy of distinction. For example, in “film studies, the decisions about which texts deserve a place in the canon have often been achieved through aesthetic judgements” (McKee 2001a: 4). In this context, the legitimation of academic study proceeds by appropriating rather than opposing aesthetic discourses, with film being positioned as worthy of study precisely because it can be viewed as “a particular sort of aesthetic experience” (Kuhn 2005: 401).
Outside of film studies, however, aesthetics has remained something of a dark art in media/cultural studies. Aesthetics can be studied, but aesthetic judgments must not corrupt the media/cultural scholar’s disciplinary reason and situated neutrality. Thomas J. Roberts carefully negotiates this terrain in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction:
What shall we say is the difference […] between a discipline and a fan club, however learned? This difference, at least, is worth noticing: a fan club says, “What we love, you should love too,” but a discipline says, “What we are discovering about what we love will be useful to you in your investigations of what you love.” (1990: 5–6)
At the very moment when Roberts entertains the possibility that studying culture may involve “loving” some cultural texts, he nevertheless converts this into a curious kind of impassioned neutrality. For Roberts, work in an academic discipline should never seek to convert or critique the tastes of others but should seek only to generalize from its understanding of how (beloved) cultural texts operate on their readers. Again, the “imagined subjectivity” of the scholar is rendered distinct from that of the fan club member, who supposedly believes his or her aesthetic judgments are the only right ones. By marked contrast, even where aesthetic judgments seem to move dangerously close to academic work, Roberts suggests that they can be sublimated and transformed into a more generalizable or objectively useful knowledge.
Although it is fandom that has repeatedly borne the brunt of cultural studies scholars’ need to bracket themselves off from the aesthetic judgments of media audiences, I want to go beyond the issue of fandom here, arguing that the anti-aesthetics of media/cultural studies simply cannot achieve its aim of securing academic distinction from media consumers and industries. This is so, because regardless of whether or not any given academic is a “fan” of what he or she is studying, the “cultural analyst is at once 1) a reader/interpreter and member of a community of recipients [of media messages…]; and 2) an analyst of the messages at another level, via a different theoretical problematic” (Osborne 2000: 116).
Purging aesthetics as a marker of what Osborne terms this “level 2” difference does not, unfortunately, do away with the fact that media/cultural studies academics remain “level 1” media and cultural consumers, with all that this might imply about their tastes, distastes, identities, and affective engagements with media culture. “Making a reading” at level 2—e.g., a disciplined structuralist/poststructuralist reading—is not ever fully coterminous with the analyst’s embodied “reading experience” of that same text (Pearce 1997: 215 & 220).
However, a focus on the intersections of fandom and academia in the wake of Jenkins’s (1992) seminal work has, I would say, succeeded in rendering relatively invisible the issue of academia’s far more wide-reaching complicities with popular and media culture. The general question of whether or not academic identities can be distanced from consumer identities has not been convincingly tackled, since this logical regression—the academic studying media consumers and industries who is placed within the object of study as a media consumer of such industries—has been neglected in favor of picking over the special rather than the general case, that of the scholar who is also a fan of the type she or he is analyzing. If this special case is marked as a category violation demanding attention, the general case whereby “scholars, like others, have […] interests at stake: we are not only critics but also consumers” (Wright Wexman 1999: 89) is left unmarked. As Wright Wexman has argued, “Critics customarily consider themselves disinterested observers [… although their activities lead…] to practical valuations of […] texts, [and] one can view current scholarly practices in the light of these valuations. Why are certain […] texts chosen for special attention?” (Wright Wexman 1999: 77).
This is the question I will now consider, arguing that the supposed removal of aesthetics from media/cultural studies has not, in fact, fully secured academics’ cultural distinctions from “ordinary” media consumers, but has instead worked to recode aesthetic judgments in a variety of ways. Focusing only on the situation of academics who are also fans has been a highly effective way of sustaining the academic-ideological illusion that, for everybody else studying media culture, it’s just “disinterested” and symbolically “set apart” business as usual.
How Academic Distinction Recodes Aesthetic Judgment
S. Elizabeth Bird has pointed out that the suspension of explicitly aesthetic judgments in media/cultural studies has been strongly linked to “the replacement of aesthetic standards by political and social ones” (2003: 118). The evaluation of texts has not, by any means, been taken off the scholarly agenda: far from it. Instead, alternative evaluative criteria have been set out, operating largely within what I’ve termed a “decisionist” approach to the cultural politics of media texts (Hills 2002: 182). Here, texts are routinely judged for their reactionary/progressive representations and meanings.
As if Derridean thought had never existed, this exercising of scholarly judgment assumes that clear lines can be drawn between the politically good and the politically bad text. Such an approach also assumes, of course, that Osborne’s “level 1” aesthetic responses to media texts can be wholly divorced from distinctively “level 2” theoretical problematics—i.e., that the political evaluation of texts can proceed without any reference to academics’ “ordinary” consumer tastes or distastes for certain media texts. “Decisionist” analyses of popular media may also attempt to invert Osborne’s “level 1” and “level 2” responses to texts, implying that a rigorous and rational political evaluation can actually underlie, at all times, scholars’ more personal “level 1” tastes and distastes.
In film studies, which I’ve already noted has been historically less fearful of aesthetic judgment, some Screen theory scholars went as far as explicitly collapsing together aesthetic and political evaluations. However, this generalizing compression of politics and aesthetics was soon subjected to critique for its reductiveness (see MacCabe 1981a, 1981b; McArthur 1981). Adornian and Frankfurt School approaches to aesthetics, which again construe the aesthetic primarily as a category of the political, would appear to be similarly problematic, since they too assume that aesthetics can be reduced to stable, fixed, and functional political codifications or judgments.
Seeking either to ground the aesthetic in the political or wholly to divorce the two modes of evaluation, “decisionist” approaches have hence sought to identify texts, and audiences, that “resist” dominant ideologies. Despite the fact that many media/cultural studies writers have long recognized the problems inherent in isolating out resistance (Abercrombie & Longhurst 1998; Jenkins 1992), the lure of being able to decisively sift out resistant or politically good texts has not passed away. In a review of my book Fan Cultures (2002) that claims that my own attack on decisionist narratives is decisionist itself, Christine Scodari argues that “resistance (or not) with respect to particular operations of power (including commodification)… might well [still] be determinable” (2003b: 182). In other words, scholarly machineries of political evaluation can continue onward, even if specific assumptions of active resistance and passive incorporation are inverted (Scodari 2003a: 125).
What I want to suggest here is that the foundational gesture of decisionist media/cultural studies—that aesthetic judgments can supposedly be grounded in, or displaced by, political evaluation—does not, in fact, evade the properly aesthetic: that which intersubjectively exceeds a priori pure reduction to, or pure separation from, the plane of political effectivity. Rather, aesthetic judgments are frequently recoded by media/cultural studies as strictly political ones. The aesthetic and the political are never as cleanly separable, nor as clearly interrelated, as decisionist strategies prefer to assert. Aesthetic judgments therefore remain surreptitiously and excessively in place, being masked behind or carried within supposedly purely political evaluations.
The recoding of aesthetic judgments results in a number of problems for media/cultural studies. The primary one can be described succinctly as the canon problem. By this, I mean that a severely limited range of media texts (and audiences) has been subjected to detailed academic study. Both scholar-fans and scholar-anti-fans or scholar-non-fans have contributed to this state of affairs.
Scholar-fans are those scholars who are also self-identified fans of what they study (Hills 2002: 11–15). By contrast, what we could call scholar-non-fans or scholar-anti-fans (following Gray 2003) are those who parade their disinterest in, or distaste for, specific media texts. Each faction of media/cultural studies academics has played a part in the “canon problem.” Scholar-fans have tended to study texts that they profess to love, and this has resulted in specific taste cultures being overrepresented academically, with certain texts being far more likely to be canonized in academic study: “there is a tendency to favour programs and genres that may be considered edgy, avant-garde, or attracting a ‘cult’ audience[….] I have rarely heard a [conference] presentation about successful ‘middle-of-the-road’ offerings—and never from scholars who identified as fans” (Bird 2003: 121).
Texts aimed at upscale audiences, favoring reflexive sophistication or postmodern playfulness with genre, or enacting a “cult” anticommercial and antimainstream ideology, are all thus more likely to meet with academic fervor and canonization. However, this limiting of academic attention is far from only being a result of celebratory scholar-fandom. It is also attributable to the critical work of scholar-anti-fans, who enact their distaste for certain forms of popular culture by dismissing, ignoring, or stereotyping them. As Jonathan Gray has said of anti-fans: “[they] construct an image of the text […] sufficiently enough that they can react […] against it[…. They routinely] engage in distant reading, responding to texts that have not been viewed” (2003: 71).
This would appear to be an accurate description of a range of critical theorists in media studies, who don’t actually seem to closely read the texts they are so quick to condemn. Alan McKee has written of this type of scholar,
I have noticed that many […] teaching Media Studies, strongly organize their viewing schedules around public service broadcasting at the expense of commercial programming. Of course, this is not in itself problematic—unless the academics in question then begin to speak as experts about all television. At this point, a refusal to actually watch the medium being discussed seems […] to be a little odd. (2003: 181)
There is indeed a kind of scholarly “distant reading” going on here, as academics write in a cursory, nondetailed, and dismissive manner about highly commercial or middle-brow TV shows (and other media) they feel an aesthetic distaste for. Bird argues that, as a result, academics’ aesthetic judgments are replayed not only through scholar-fan celebrations of favored texts but also through neo-Marxist, anti-fan, or non-fan critiques of disfavored texts:
[Critical] scholars do not care to define what is “wrong” with the middlebrow [and the commercial] in terms of taste or aesthetic judgement; they just ignore it. Yet inherent in that ignoring is a clear aesthetic judgement; these cultural forms indeed [are assumed to] constitute a vast wasteland, and people who consume them are probably not that capable of refined aesthetic judgement. (2003: 121–22)
The “canon problem” thus emerges out of two seemingly opposed currents of thought that, in actuality, work in concert to restrict which texts are studied in detail and canonized. Celebratory scholar-fans and critical scholar-anti-fans both demonstrate tendencies to marginalize the middlebrow and the commercial, favoring “cult” forms that symbolically enact a certain distance from “the mainstream,” as well as favoring public service TV, which enacts a not-unrelated anticommercial ideology. Though the binary of “cult” versus “mainstream” can clearly be deconstructed—and an increasing number of texts are both cultish and very much main-streamed (Brooker 2002; Gray 2006; Hills 2003, 2004)—I would argue that these cultural categories continue to be used within the sense-making practices of scholar-fans and scholar-anti-fans. In each case, “level 1” aesthetic judgments are recoded as “level 2” theoretical problematics, in a way that thus goes firmly beyond the issue of whether academics are also fans, to encompass the more general issue of how media academics are always-already media audiences. Moreover, they are audiences with specifiable aesthetic tastes that cannot simply be read off from their scholarly cultural politics.
The problem of restricted canonization (Hills 2004, 2005d) therefore devolves into two related forms of aesthetic judgment underpinning academic work: celebratory scholar-fandom and critical scholar-anti-fandom. In extreme instances of the latter, any attention to media fictions is wholly devalued in favor of “real” engagements with political issues (Philo and Miller 2001). Replaying a powerful cultural system of value that favors the factual over the fictional, and the supposedly real object over the aesthetic creation (Harrington & Bielby 1995: 135–36), such approaches install fatal blind spots within their analyses by neglecting to address how media fictions, as well as media reportage, can work to construct and circulate a variety of (de)politicized meanings about the world. Again, a type of aesthetic judgment is recoded in the somewhat infantilized and autoheroic writing of Philo and Miller (2001), albeit a judgment that refutes the aesthetic as being worthy of study tout court.
Meanwhile, the celebratory tones of certain scholar-fans have been picked apart in relation to a very much canonical object of study, the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Levine and Schneider have argued that many Buffy “scholars are […] projecting, and ‘acting out’ their fantasies in relation to the program. They love BtVS” (2003: 299). These writers go on to imply that scholar-fans have prioritized their fandom—their “level 1” aesthetic responses—over their scholarly identities:
BtVS is often entertaining, amusing, gripping—even exciting and titillating. But it is little more. Primarily, BtVS scholars are the ones who attempt to make the show out to be […] something more than this[….] If Joss Whedon is in fact a “genius,” this is not because he manages to do any of those things that BtVS scholars bizarrely claim he does by erecting their own fictions and fantasies about what is going on in various episodes. (2003: 297–98 & 299)
Scholar-fans such as David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox stand accused of “emotivism” (Friedman & Squire 1998: 14), where moral judgments over the goodness or not of an object proceed on the basis of one’s feelings in relation to that thing. In other words, these scholars allegedly let their enthusiasm for Buffy run away with them.
Buffy scholarship has provided rich pickings for those wanting to assess the impact of taste cultures on academia. In a study of the Slayage academic conference on Buffy the Vampire the Slayer—held in Nashville, May 2004, and affiliated with the online journal Slayage (McKee 2002: 69)—Vivien Burr gathered written responses from thirteen attendees, and supplemented these with her own participant observations. Burr’s findings resonate with the concerns of Levine and Schneider, suggesting that “level 1” fannish aesthetics may have potentially usurped academic “level 2” theoretical problematics:
Many delegates felt that fandom interfered with academic rigour on occasion. For example, Holly said, “I believe there was significant resistance in the audience to a reading of Buffy that was not laudatory”[….] Alan remarked that […] “the tone of [some questions…] and the ensuing discussion was more on a level of people’s personal opinions and tastes about this character or another.” (Burr 2005: 377–78)
To reiterate: these are not problems restricted to the intrusion of fannish aesthetics into academic work. They are more wide-ranging than this, moving far outside the matter of scholar-fan hybridity to take in the “anti-fandom” (Gray 2003) of critical media theorists who prefer to attack or ignore “commercial” forms of television/film, or even ignore media fictions altogether. Neither impassioned scholar-fans nor “disinterested” political-economy critics disclaiming their objectivity automatically have any monopoly on virtue. Aligning the academic self with one side of the reason/passion binary (Burr 2005: 380–81) does not ward off the problem of aesthetics in media/cultural studies. Instead, some (not all) scholar-fans and some (not all) scholar-anti-fans or scholar-non-fans have been structurally implicated in the recoding of aesthetic judgments, and hence in the “canon problem.”
But how can media academics’ status as media audiences be properly tackled, acknowledged, even utilized, without audience-based identities and tastes being seen as a “threat to academic identity?” (Burr 2005: 378). To consider this question means going beyond fandom, and conceding that the distinctive expulsion of aesthetics—resulting in its various scholar-fan and anti-fan recodings—is a general rather than a special problem in media/cultural studies.
How a General Theory of Hybridized Academia—Going Beyond Fandom—Can Restore the Aesthetic
As Geraghty has argued, media/cultural studies may benefit “from academics being more explicit about the evaluative judgements we inevitably make” (2003: 40). However, it is hardly the case that aesthetic judgments have been properly expelled from these areas of study. It is, perhaps, fairer to say that they have continued, either in the name of political evaluation or via the impassioned critical/celebratory analyses of scholar-anti-fans and scholar-fans. Despite this recoded continuation, aesthetic judgments have also partly been nominally ruled out of media/cultural studies as a result of the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1993). Bourdieu argues that aesthetic judgments are inseparable from the exercising of “cultural capital” and are thus linked to the cultural reproduction of systematic power inequalities (see Hills 2002; Williamson 2005). Debates concerned with more fully restoring aesthetic judgments to media and cultural studies have tended to revolve around whether it is necessary or desirable for scholars to uphold specific notions of quality media (Jacobs 2001; Thomas 2002), and in this ongoing discussion, the work of Bourdieu—and his argument that aesthetics are linked to macro-level cultural reproduction—has been somewhat suspended in favour of more micro-level textual analysis. Aesthetic judgments, it seems, steadfastly refuse to go away (see Bérubé 2005; Hills 2005b: 142–44).
One way to move forward would be to argue that film studies can provide a model for media/cultural studies. Opposition to aesthetics could be replaced by an appropriation of art discourses, with “television art” finally taking its place alongside long-established disciplinary discussions of film art. This is Turnbull’s (2005: 368–69) argument, as she ponders whether media studies might make a place for “ekphrasis,” the linguistic re-expression of a text’s aesthetic impact on the self. Though this seems promising, the question that remains is how ekphrasis would connect up with media/cultural studies’ theorizing. Is it the place of such theory to re-express subjective and aesthetic experiences, or should these experiences be remediated, worked over, or even modified through the reflexivity of theory? Turnbull seems to take media/cultural studies back to the collapsing together of politics and aesthetics that marred the Screen theory of MacCabe (1981a, 1981b), or to the prioritizing of subjective aesthetics over politics.
Another way forward would be not to ape film theory, but rather to pay attention to a path not taken in Barthes’s lectures on the neutral. Challenged as to whether his desire for the neutral is in some sense itself merely an ideological restatement of the “petit-bourgeois […] ideology of the balanced account” (2005: 79), Barthes responds,
I could, and it is, by the way, what I am doing, recognize that in me there are “petit-bourgeois” elements in my tastes, in my discourse are petit-bourgeois features (without going into the discussion of this cursed denomination here) [….] These features are not clandestine[….] However, that’s not the direction I will take to answer. I will say: the Neutral is connected with [petit-bourgeois-ideological] neither-norism and nevertheless is absolutely different from it. (2005: 79–80)
Barthes’s argument is that petit-bourgeois ideology is “social” and grants a “subject-position,” whereas his discourse is “existential” and suspends any subject-position (2005: 80). We could hardly wish for a more condensed statement of the ideology of the nonplaced, free-floating academic who is assumed to stand outside social affiliations and contexts, thereby representing a near mystical tertium.
And yet Barthes’s preceding and refuted acknowledgment is, I would say, actually a more promising answer to the question posed, even though it undermines the autoheroics of the allegedly acontextual academic always symbolically distanced from ideology. Barthes comes close to conceding that his discourse, even while it seeks to demystify and politically evaluate, is also permeated by the very ideology it opposes and unveils. This, I think, offers a better way forward for media/cultural studies: not a rise in aesthetic subjectivism, but instead a reflexive approach to scholars’ aesthetic judgments as hermeneutic constructions of self-identity (Bailey 2005; Sandvoss 2005a), and a recognition of how these may be both ideological and opposed to specific ideologies. The problem addressed by Barthes also captures a far wider difficulty, since all those working in the humanities and social sciences are, in a range of ways, caught up in versions of this binary: disciplinary knowledge versus cultural identity and experience. The literary scholar is an “ordinary” reader as well as a scholar; the political scientist is both a citizen and an academic; the sociologist is always part of a society, and so on. Disciplined scholarship may always require a series of Others from which it can disentangle its own supposed purity and specificity. However, such processes of Othering and their cultural exclusions can also be highlighted and challenged (Hills 2005b), and thus should not be assumed to be monolithically fixed, inevitable, or essential in their specifiable forms and contents.
Work in media/cultural studies may, then, benefit from shifting its legitimating discourses away from the anti-aesthetic, moving towards an acknowledgment that present-day scholarship can no longer be “set apart” from the culture and ideology it studies, but is rather “set in relation” with these contexts (Hills 2005b: 172–73). Though critical scholars have been happy to redescribe the worlds of media audiences, e.g., shifting audience “leisure” into the register of “labor” (Meehan 2000; Shimpach 2005), the possibility of redescribing scholarship’s own foundational self-descriptions has rarely been pursued. Recognizing that media academics are always-already media audiences, whether or not they are fans, would mean giving up the notion that media and cultural studies are enterprises outside the paradigm of consumer/producer, and outside the realms of aesthetic taste as well as ideology.
Will the entire edifice of media/cultural studies crumble away if we surrender the legitimating prop that academic work is essentially and purely different to the tastes/ideologies of everyday consumer and media-industry culture? I would say not: indeed, it may be easier for both critical scholar-anti-fans and celebratory scholar-fans to articulate exactly which cultural texts and media systems they are “for,” without the need to cloak and recode aesthetic judgments. It may also allow the “canon problem” to be openly addressed and creatively opened out, with a wider range of cultural tastes and identities—a wider range of “projects of self”—then being archived and canonized by scholarship.
For some, the cost will undoubtedly be too high. Ideology will only ever be elsewhere in their worldview. But this splitting of the cultural world into highly legible heroes and victims is really a very simple story, however many lengthy words it loves to use. Recognizing the generalized hybridity of contemporary media academics—academics who are also audiences and consumers of the type they write about—surely means letting go of an infantile fantasy of omnipotence in which scholars are imagined as the bearers of pure, anti-ideological thought. At the same time, it means going beyond viewing fan audiences as the problematic site of aesthetic judgments—hence concomitantly depicting scholar-fandom as a threatening hybridity—in order to safely reconjure notions of academic authenticity.