Are we humiliated or ennobled by our desires?

I’ve been dancing around this problem, I think, ever since I wrote that what Armitage’s portrayals of desire make me feel is not a desire to be desired so much as a desire to desire — when I see him wanting, I want not to be wanted, but rather, I want to want with the intensity that he appears to want. For me Armitagemania is partially about the legitimation of my desire, and, quite frankly, the freedom to desire what I desire as opposed to what others think I should, and to say that I desire it. To say: I want this, and not that.

In light of that conclusion, I’ve been trying to think about why we assume there’s something necessarily or potentially humiliating about intense fandom and what it does to us — our display of admiration or, let’s admit it, desire, for Richard Armitage or someone like him. Why would I be assumed to be humiliated if someone from my real life who doesn’t already know about this blog discovered it? Why am I not supposed to publish anything that would humiliate me?

In the humiliation column: fandom is tempestuous, it makes us feel as if we are out of control, it causes (some of) us to behave (or fear behaving, or fear that others will behave) as if we are out of control, and, I suppose, it’s like unrequited love. It involves an imbalance that — when seen from the outside — makes the lover look ridiculous and has the potential to embarrass the beloved. I don’t want to minimize here the potential negative outcomes of unrequited love, though that’s not the subject of this post specifically. I do want to point out, however, that most of its significant positive outcomes accrue to the benefit of the lover. In that sense, it seems to me, the threat of humiliation is a tool for disciplining the would-be lover, for keeping her love within certain socially-agreed-upon bounds. This component of humiliation is ultimately viewer-steered. In such a circumstance, one assumes, I am embarrassed not necessarily because of what I feel — I enjoy what I feel! — but I am embarrassed that other people see me feeling it and, due to their differing frame of reference for evaluating my feelings or behaviors, judge me because of it. It seems to me that humiliation is a kind of meta-embarrassment, just as rage is a kind of meta-anger; it occurs as a reaction to an emotion — how I feel about feeling something. Humiliation that I might feel as a consequence of writing this blog is thus an effect that occurs when I legitimate for myself a particular kind of response to someone else’s reactions to what I write.

I think, for most of us, the list of items that potentially fill the “ennoblement” column is rather small, and this is part of why some of us are embarrassed. A lot of people legitimate their fandom in terms of a coping mechanism or escapism, and while I don’t want to delegitimate that as a reason for fangirling, as it certainly applies to me, too, it doesn’t quite meet my best definition of ennoblement. In the ennoblement column, we could put feelings of community we derive from participating in a fandom, I think, or aesthetic appreciation for a particular talent, or the resulting creativity, a factor that has been important to a number of fans I’ve interviewed, or — and this is decisive for me — euphoria. I wouldn’t be writing here if I weren’t given a feeling of euphoria by this entire experience. I experience euphoria in response to watching Richard Armitage, and I relive that euphoria by writing about him, and the flow that I experience while writing extends both to other writing experiences I have and other segments of my life. I thus tend to read this particular desire as ennobling me, in that the kind of feelings I experience make me better, more effective, more human and humane, more whole. And I seek to continue that experience because it continues to promise those possibilities. Fandom offers me a path to feeling something I had lost the capacity to feel otherwise at the time when it appeared. It allows me to want to want, and to see that desire influence me positively.

Fandom thus occupies a weird position between humiliation and ennoblement, especially with regard to one’s rationally calculated potential for embarrassment. If one were so unbelievably embarrassed by the strength of what one were feeling, I assume, or afraid that it could redound to one’s disadvantage, one wouldn’t admit to feeling anything at all. No fan has to come clean. No one forces us to expose ourselves to humiliation at the hands of people who don’t understand. Instead, in fandom, we determine our own responses to things with which we are confronted — and which we choose to confront.

In this light, I found myself thinking about a quote that was making its way around facebook this week. Banksy is a well-known pseudonymous graffiti maker, widely acknowledged both as an artist and as a cultural critic.

I’m particularly interested in the first, third, and fourth paragraphs here as a recommended strategy for dealing with the things that we are being confronted with as fans. (Not so much the second, although it would have a lot to say to people like fanvidders.) Aside from discussing one major source of opinions about how one “should” react to anything one encounters in the world, it incorporates the commodification aspect of all of what we are doing into the discussion. What we “should” or “shouldn’t” do in any particular fan setting, a primary component of determining whether other people feel justified in subjecting us to humiliation and we feel forced to accept it, is not something that the people who see us as humiliated determine all on their own. Of course, in fandom we are both manipulated and courted in our role as consumers. But we are also laughed at in public because we fall prey to such manipulation and courting. In that sense, the extent to which someone on the outside of fandom might decide to attempt to subject a fan to humiliation is a technique that gets us, as fans, both coming and going. We are supposed to love things that are marketed to us as lovable according to whatever standard, but we are also not supposed to love them too much, or in the “wrong” way, because that kind of love would be “humiliating.” Advertisers sell us things, and then, when we buy or get attached to what they sell, they organize mechanisms for laughing at us for the consumption of onlookers who are just as manipulated as we are. They sell us and our compatriots not only the potential source of our embarrassment, but also the effect of our meta-embarrassment, and profit on both counts.

In essence, one problem Banksy’s statement points out is that it’s not really possible these days simply to use the most obvious means of resistance, which is to opt out of a world that makes a commodity out of our reactions both for the sake of selling something and then for the sake of selling our reactions to that something for the entertainment of others. As soon as we consume Mr. Armitage on screen, and react to it — and our reaction is the source of advertising money that keeps Mr. Armitage on screen — we become the potential source of ridicule, precisely because our behavior generates the ridicule that keeps the money flowing. He (or others like him) would not be there in the first place, were we not also putting ourselves out there for potential ridicule. In some sense our potential humiliation is thus a necessary consequence of the success of his career, a commodity for sale that we provide for free.

I think a lot of arguments about a second possible choice as a response to avoid this problem from the fan side would essentially tell us to hide our reactions — the sort of emotional equivalent of refusing to put ourselves on display for reality tv. Don’t risk humiliation by doing anything people will judge you for. It’s hard to see how we could do that and still be able to consume what he’s doing; it would negate advertising revenue — and the list of things to be avoided would be mighty long. But even if it were possible, in our world, as soon as we start communicating in any way about what we love, as soon as we move outside ourselves to find community or to experience euphoria in a shared setting, we are on that screen already. If we refuse to communicate because some things we feel or want to say are too humiliating, we will effectively be silenced before we even start. Yes, we will not be humiliated for the sake of producing a spectacle; in the words of Kipling, we will not see our honest words “twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.” But we will also say nothing of meaning. On some level, misunderstanding is the price of communication; we just live in an age in which misunderstanding is also a commodity for the consumption of the masses — a point demonstrated amply every day in the U.S. political press. And in an ironic media world, the mere fact of love for anything at all displayed in any way at all — is a potential source of ridicule.

So where do these considerations fit into my life as a fan? How can I navigate between the axes of humiliation and ennoblement in a situation in which ennoblement is commodified as culture for sale to generate advertising and humiliation is commodified as something like reality tv to do the same? I don’t know, completely. I don’t have an answer. I may be humiliated. Maybe I already am humiliated. But I do know that staying silent because I fear humiliation is no longer an acceptable alternative, if it ever was. And I do know that the only way to sanity as an adult for me is to decide what my experiences mean for myself. I am the one who decides if my love for anything, my reactions to it, the euphoria I experience, is pure or not. Asking permission, or allowing a needed permission to determine my responses to matters and what I say about them is, in Banksy’s words, is like “asking someone to keep the rock someone just threw at your head.”

I may have no chance of understanding or controlling what’s going on around me. But, humiliated or not, commodified or not, I am damn well going to maintain control over understanding — and speaking about — what’s going on in my own soul. I am going to do what I have to to maintain the possibility of sustaining a kind of euphoria that allows me to feel love for myself and the world around me. To come back to the beginning: in writing, I am legitimating my desire to desire. If my priorities are in order, my desire, in the end, should be more ennobling than anyone’s ridicule is humiliating.

~ by Servetus on April 16, 2012.