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

[trobadora]

On one of the forums I frequent, I have a Nietzsche quote in my sig that says:

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so.

[shusu.livejournal.com]

*cruises in*

This is very interesting. It's worth noting that much of how things used to work is that those with the most power are able to control their own signifiers. That this can and does still translate to tangible rewards or consequences, and that they put manpower, money, and resources behind controlling that image.

I am not sure where today's culture is now. Probably some gray area. But it's worth mentioning, I think, because when someone says "displacement" they might be saying that your signifier is displacing the identity the actual person is trying to project. I dunno. Just a thought.

[ethrosdemon.livejournal.com]

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 think here what you have, often, is that people lose perspective and think through interacting w/ someone that they know them. This is not true, but the skewed perspective is not limited to the internet. You see it in real world interactions where people misinterpret the level to which they know another person, assume intimate status and close associate when these things do not exist.

I didn't read the OP, just your pull quotes, but I (totally baselessly!) assume that the cognitive dissonance here is probably from 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.

The first group come to believe that it's *real* and therefore they aren't dealing with constructs, they're dealing with facts. So from the outset any argument between the two camps has failed to define terms and any discussion will always be unresolved.

Oh, your postmodernist views are showing under your skirt! I have the same sort of epistemological views of others myself, so I sympathize.

Ok, on the last pull quote, my take on this this: there are people I know through work that have fanfiction written about them. To me, I cannot read this fanfiction not because I object to it IN ANY WAY because these people are real or immediate to me. I cannot read it because I think the people in question are douches and the fanfiction is ALL WRONG OMG. However, I think that in the case of the OP, she is expressing the sort of sentiment I see in the people who are extremely invested in their rpf characters and their projected images. Those people tend to have a certain construct of ownership of the character where the celebrity and their images have become internalized to them. So when the celebrity then interacts with them, their fantasies of ownership have been validated to a degree and they then claim a certain kind of friendship status which is more valuable to them than fannish status (thus negating an ability to write fic about them).

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Some intriguing connections with some ideas I've had all along (and a post I've been meaning to post, so I will probably link and go look! there! He said it good!!!).

I've always disliked how people want to privilege face/face interactions over internet interactions as more real, or, as you say, something that means we "know" people more (nope, heck, a good part of my family knows zip about me, and probably would freak out like hell if they did know the zip they don't know). I run into that all the time in teaching: people who claim that simply by being in the class and seeing the faces of students, they just know better education is being done (I never did).

I think it might be useful to discuss differences between "normal" and "celebrity" status: if one knows a person as a normal part of daily life, then it's hard to understand the celebrity persona (I was reading some discussion of Stephen Colbert the other day, and was thinking that).

But it's all personas: the idea that there's some core true self that can be meaningfully understood by others (let alone oneself), eh, nope, don't believe it and have never seen any proof.

People you think you know can surprise the hell out of you any day (like my father did when he ran off with that graduate student my first year in college!)!

And I totally don't believe that anything in the media about actors/celebrities is in any way "real" -- it may be a factoid (i.e. outside veritication that they were in X place at Y time doing Z), but it's all a postmodern fiction.

[dkompare.livejournal.com]

Well. Hmm. I... Hmm.

OK. I wish I had more time to process this than I do at the moment (in between bites of lunch and a trek to the library), but let me contribute a couple thoughts.

I'm really, really torn by this. I totally grok the postmodern perspective on this, and particularly your critique of authenticity. I guess where I'd differ is that while authenticity is absolutely, 100% a construct/projection of the self/beholder/etc., I'd argue that the concept is more contingent than "fictional." That is, cultural value and interpretation (including one's construction of themselves and the people that they "know" or think they "know") is not a free-for-all of signifiers bouncing around in some atomic blizzard of meaning/lessness. Sorry, it's just not.

Context matters. Societies, from the most basic interaction of two individuals/beings in whatever corporeal state, to the functioning of the human race, only work because at some point we (individually, collectively; it varies) decide that those other beings matter, that we believe in them somehow, i.e., that they are "real". Again, I get the postmodern take (note the quotation marks on "real"!). What I mean by "real" is a willing acceptance of the argument that things actually exist, and exist in a physical, social world (I almost only said "social," but talked myself into "physical" in light of climate change, peak oil, economic downturns, etc. We can't pomo ourselves out of all that when it all hits the fan, and we're living AU crack!fic where we scavenge for bits of wood, potable water, and the odd small mammal to cook.).

Now, this "real" may not exactly be (and probably isn't) anyone else's "real." And that's OK. Heath Ledger's suicide shouldn't matter the same to everyone. But I believed that "Heath Ledger" was "real," at some point past the celebrity shell. Not "authentic" as in teh Heath, but "real," as in someone who once was a sentient social being bouncing around for the last 28 years.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if it's all fiction and signifiers anyway, then WTF does anything matter? Yes, we project fantasies onto ourselves and other people all the time (psst...you're soaking in it). Yes, we can never really "know" people, even those we're closest to. Yes, we'll all die alone, dust to dust, yada. Yes, but.

Along the way, I hope we can forge (doubled meaning intentional; gods, I feel like it's 1991 again, and I'm writing a "clever" bit of pomo textual analysis for my grad seminar) relationships that matter to us, and that, in those relationships, we can accept contingent, inauthentic yet deeply meaningful connections to an always-already (de)constructed "real," rather than see everything as merely "text."

Slight side note: it's been very interesting for me (as a media scholar) to observe how much the "aca" in "acafen" has tended to come from literary studies and (sorry) high cultural theory. I was trained in bits and pieces of these (including the usual range of French Guys (both dead and alive), but also in historiography and critical cultural studies, so I come from a slightly different parapet in the great Ivory Towers.

[raveninthewind.livejournal.com]

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

It doesn't seem false to me if you think that what Bear is talking about is projecting a false/non-true/idealized image on to a stranger. Because I can't do that to people I know. I might have more emotions attached to them, more expectations based on how real our friendship is, but the image I have for them is very much rooted in what I observe, hear, and get from them in terms of factual, interactive, tangible interaction. I do think you can get to know someone online, but I also think it's easier to do that in person.

And this isn't negating the whole "we all have personas we present to the world that are in large and small ways deceptions". Even though I do believe that's true, if I live next door to you or work with you, I have way more realistic view of who you are than someone I've only read about or seen in a photo.

[rez-lo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. Plus I got to this: 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 and thought, HI! I'm an instantiation of that construct that you as a Famous Person have designated "the fan." Not that this is constitutive of your own status and identification as Famous Person just some guy on the net whom I pay to write, or anything.

Once the Famous Person goes away, The Fan becomes... what? Just some guy on the net who pays me to write? We call this a customer, usually, don't we? Or am I misunderstanding the political economy here?

[beccaelizabeth]

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.

Life is a text; the processes we implement to interpret it are, on some level, literary analysis.

*nods along happily*

having seen how people react to this idea in class I suspect for some people this idea kicks over one of the things they thought was solid about the world, a bit of a Matrix moment. They do not like it one bit. I, however, felt relieved that someone else noticed.

I have a further theory based on the idea Neurotypicals take some sort of template and tweak it to fit new people and starting with similar templates end up playing the same game and thinking they 'know' each other. But autistic spectrum people start from scratch every time and try and patch together a person from data, which actually takes a lot more data than it seems, especially for people that don't have a pilot episode to tell you all the stuff they consider important. And the resulting pictures can end up very very different from each other. Not playing same game, end up with much confusion. But that theory needs a whole lot more work and, you know, facts to go in it.