Constructs, Celebrities, and Real People

[alixtii]

I came across a thoughtful metafandomed post here, on celebrities, constructs, and real people, that has me thinking. matociquala says:

The reason that works, of course, is because the celebrities (loosely so termed) that one knows on the internet are suddenly real people. They're not constructs anymore. Jonathan Coulton isn't a construct to me, the way Bono (to use the example quoted above) is. Jonathan Coulton is some guy on the internets, whose work I really like. Tom Smith (filkertom) used to be a construct to me: I only knew his work through recordings, and I was a big fan. And yanno, then I met him online and at Penguicon, and now he's just some super-talented guy I know, who is also funny. Wil Wheaton is the classic example of this: I keep forgetting he's also a talented actor, because I think of him as one of the best bloggers on my daily information rounds.

And you know what? I like that. I don't want to be a construct. I want to be some guy you know on the internets who tells stories.

But I have to admit that I don't see how the two can be mutually exclusive, how a guy one knows on the internet telling stories isn't always-already a construct too. I mean, ladyphoenixmage is my best friend, and I've known her at least since I was twelve. But I don't have knowledge of who she is, what she likes and dislikes, beamed into my head. (I sort of wish I did; it would make buying a Christmas present a lot easier.) Instead, I know things about her the same way I know things about Summer Glau; sense-data impresses itself upon my consciousness, and my mind tries to create a meaningful pattern out of that data. It constructs a friend-function, just like I construct an author-function when I read a literary text. And sometimes (frequently!) my construction of the friend-function proves to be inadequate; a new piece of canon comes along (i.e. she says or does something I don't expect) and I have re-construct the function to fit it. Yes, I'm saying that my interactions with my best friend are basically RPF canon.

matociquala  goes on to say that:

But fame, the kind of fame that separates famous people from the hoi polloi, as it were, is a funny thing. Not only does it turn the famous person into a construct, it turns them into a slate that the fan can project all sorts of things into. How often have you gotten disappointed at a celebrity because her political views weren't what you thought they should be? I know I have. And damn, you know. Why do I think I get to do that? I don't pay Claudia Black to have her politics match mine. I pay her to kick ass in tight pants. Let's be honest here.

I don't feel like I completely get the argument here, especially the part about politics. (I get to be disappointed in someone who holds views I think are damaging to the world society. Politics aren't like aesthetics; the claims are normative, and some people are wrong.) But I'm more interested in the way that being turned "into a slate that the fan can project all sorts of things into" is presented. Because it seems to me like it is being presented as a bad thing. Which is interesting not only because it assumes that we have a choice, that we can approach a human being other than in that that way, but also that if we have a choice, then the other way (whatever it would be) would be superior. And . . . I'm not sure what the logic is there.

I've most often seen this type of "Viewing people as constructs is bad" claim in RPF arguments, since the entire point of RPF is to treat the real person as a floating signifier and see how one can manipulate that. And I've seen the attitude that treating a real person like this is disrespectful or damaging or just plain wrong. Indeed this seems to be the subtext between most if not all anti-RPF arguments. "How would you feel if someone did it to you?"

And I don't get it. Life is a text; the processes we implement to interpret it are, on some level, literary analysis. We get to respond to it in the form of fanfiction as much as we do any other text, to create genderswap incest slavefic AUs.

I've had conversations with people who held views like this. Most often, they ended up retreating into metaphysics, into some notion of having "real knowledge" which couldn't be explained in terms of cognitive processes, as if being able to touch someone (these people tended to have a dim view of the reality of online relationships) or exchange words with them provided some mystical insight into who that person "really was." Which is hogwash. I don't have any access to who somebody "really is" any more than I have access to the Platonic form of justice sitting in its Platonic heaven. Rather, I have my experiences of my interactions with them, experiences for which I am grateful (since I tend to like most people I know).

I mean, I like Summer Glau. And one of the reasons I like Summer Glau is because I've watched interviews she's made on YouTube and listened to commentaries she's made and thus I know she's adorable. Before that, she was merely the actress who played River and I was actually attracted to River but not to Summer, because Summer wasn't River and I wasn't yet invested in Summer as Summer. She was, in a strange way, a floating signified; I knew there was a woman named Summer Glau existing in the world out there who played River, but I didn't have enough signifiers to manipulate in order to construct a Summer-function. And now I manipulate that Summer-function gleefully, imagining and re-imagining (say) her relationship with Joss Whedon, even though I know my Summer-function is a fictional character, a floating signifier, with tenuous connection to the "real" Summer, whoever or whatever she may be. (Maybe she's a robot! Or an alien!) 

But that's the thing: that's this weird psychological trick of displacement and transference, where you take somebody you don't know and you attach all this emotion to them. And it's harder to do that with somebody who's just this guy you know on the internets than somebody who is a princess in a tower.

I'm having a hard time making sense of this claim at all. It just seems demonstrably false; of course I have a lot more emotion invested in ladyphoenixmage than I do in Summer Glau, and it seems weird to argue that I wouldn't or that I couldn't or that I shouldn't.