Fandom is not nothing. I have been thinking about this in relation to Elizaveta Federmesser’s essay on the Row in Burn After Reading this April. Among the assertions that she makes in that essay are that intellectualizing has become the norm and that “no one will ever truly be basic again.” I love these assertions. One of the hilarious, to me, byproducts of intellectualizing becoming normal is the terror that I myself have become more stupid. I was so scared that this might be true that I hadn’t really allowed myself to consider it as a possibility until reading E.F.’s piece.
At the risk of creating a trend report, I want to write about the possibility that the two phenomena she is describing speak to the current rise in mainstream popularity of concepts of ‘embodiment.’ First, I want to make a statement that I believe will bring immense relief to anyone who has been viewing the issue through a lens that is in any way similar to the one which I have used: what is at issue in the act of intellectualization is the first suffix. Fortunately, ‘intellectualize’ is a verb. To do it is to facilitate transfiguration - and not only that, but to do so cheaply.
What does all of this have to do with fandom? Well, fandom is not psychosis, as so many have feared. Psychosis is psychosis. Fandom is a relationship that consists in cues, subtlety, and feedback, like other relationships. It is a twisted loop, that is to say, fans and stars create and recreate one another. Being a fan is being what a star wants you to be and asking/charging a star to be what you want them to be in return. In other words, it’s tricky.
To intellectualize is obviously the opposite of everything that I have just described. (What a relief!) Intellectuals don’t ask anything of anyone. They are too busy conceding (points, to be exact), and that is why their words sometimes feel empty. Precisely the same mechanism is at play in cases of excessive niceness or unwarranted devotion. If you give yourself away in social interactions, then you either lose the trust or the interest of the people with whom you are interacting. But (to return to the topic at hand) the important thing to understand here is that fandom is actually not concomitant with obsequiousness, and that intellectualization is not concomitant with rationale. In fact, colloquially, intellectualization almost suggests a lack of it, and colloquially is of course how I use terms. There is actually less obsequiousness, from my point of view, in taking things at face value. You may be thinking that that is not what fandom is. But it is exactly what fandom is, and I will prove it to you (by now, you know in which sense I mean ‘prove’).
Intellectualizing is refusing to take things at face value, and in particular your own impressions, which is to say yourself. Obsequiousness, viewed one way, is the same thing. Perhaps it is to take others at face value, in cases where to do so is to your own detriment. Fandom is taking your impressions at face value, even your impressions of coolness and mystique. It prioritizes impressions over constructed realities, I think, because it knows that all realities are constructed by ourselves and all others.
Fandom is taking yourself seriously. This is why fans never seem pretentious, while people who theorize on fandom often do. We excorciate fans sometimes by presuming that they do not live in the real world, but rather in fantasy-lands. But need I affirm that living in fantasy is the only way to be in the real world, given the bane of individuality - that, in fact, fantasies are always serious meditations on the real, which root us ever more firmly in the exact places where we still are?
Fandom is a way of practicing love safely, or, put another way, to practice ‘being in your body.’ Some will argue that fandom is not actually safe, and to that I would say that nothing else is either. Is it even necessary to state that being in your body is accompanied by numerous risks?
Fandom seems juvenile because it is - if to seem juvenile is merely to appear to be growing up. Intellectualism, on the other hand, really amounts to total avoidance. The reason why it can seem pretentious is that it does pretend. It pretends to be detached, it pretends to know the answer, and it pretends to have finished growing - but we know that it’s lying because the people who do it appear to be having fun.
15.8.25