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.

Comments

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

The original post did not touch on RPF at all. Indeed, as I read it, reallize it wasn't coming out of a "fandom" place at all and I'm not quite sure how her post made it to metafandom.

the two major ways of viewing rpf: people who write it/negotiate it based on "canon" (here meaning what the celebrities say about themselves/present to the public) and people who write/negotiate based on a loose interpretation of what the celebrity says about themselves, picking and choosing and making up the details as they go along. // The first sort of fan/writers gets very invested in the persona projected by the celebrity because they are using it as on a day to day basis to negotiate their fannishness. The second sort tends to ignore whatever material comes along they dislike.

Well, two things: 1) There doesn't seem to be anything about these approaches which is unique to RPF; instead, they seem to describe different fanwriter approach to (the use of) canon in fanfiction in general, and 2) There seems to be less a qualitative difference--much less a diametric opposition!--between these two approaches than they seem to be points on a spectrum. A multi-dimensional spectrum at that; there are nuances here as AUs, OOC characters, crackfic, use of fanon, writing fics without knowing (all of) canon, slashing presumably heterosexual characters, etc. are all subtly different than each other. Yes, RPF canon-formation is more complex than in FPF (although Who fandom or comics fandoms may well come close), and what counts as canon may be negotiated among fen to a greater deal than with FPF, etc., but both the manifold positions on how to utilize canon seems to be no more or less diverse in one type of fanfiction than the other. And I have no clue how my own RPF writing (or that of my favorite RPF fics to read) fall within these continua.

And I'm not quite sure what you're claiming your two views to be equivalent with, either. I can see how some anti-RPF individuals might be said to hold the first view of RPF (and thus condemn us all as tinhats!) but in most of the RPF meta (and metafandom links quite a bit!) I've read the canonical response is to claim they don't actually understand what is going on in RPF.

Oh, your postmodernist views are showing under your skirt!

Guh?