Landscape Audiences

I've been immersed in the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted since school ended in June, planning for a new interdisciplinary course this fall. In conjunction with the National Park Service, furniture-maker Dale Broholm and I have been teaching an interdisciplinary curriculum at Rhode Island School of Design, called the Witness Tree Project, focused on fallen historic trees from national historic sites. Essentially, the students study the history and context of a "witness tree" in a seminar, and then use that research in a furniture studio to make objects out of the historic wood. We've already taught courses using trees from the Hampton National Historic Site in Maryland; the George Washington National Birthplace Monument in Virginia; and the Sagamore National Historic Site in New York. Next up is an historic elm from the Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts.

The relevance for this blog, where I think aloud about enthusiastic audiences, is the extent to which Olmsted understood landscape as a powerful means for creating very specific effects and experiences; the natural environment was always, for him, an intense performance that needed to unfold in myriad ways as people moved through space. Especially important was his ideal of "passages of scenery" in which people are drawn through passages that dramatically lead from one scene to another. As Olmsted wrote: "The chief end of a large park is an effect on the human organism by an action of what it presents to view, which action, like that of music, is of a kind that goes back of thought, and cannot be fully given  the form of words." (Boston: Parks and Parkways, 1882, in S. B. Sutton, ed., Civilizing American Cities, 1997: 259). This ideal is also the source for things like parkways (an Olmsted invention), which are intended to connect various natural space in the urban environment.

I've always thought of landscaping as rather static, a still-life of sorts, an attitude that Olmsted frequently and frustratingly encountered himself throughout his career. But understanding the intended dynamism of Olmsted's creations was a big clonk on the head for me. In my recent research, I've been thinking about antebellum working-class parades and the ways in which they moved through the spaces of cities; parades were powerful not only for being loud spectacles but also for crossing private/public and class boundaries, dynamically marking and re-marking territory. While movement through space was not political act for Olmsted, it was equally powerful aesthetic act. In fact, the success of any of Olmsted's designs were dependent on a certain willingness, on the part of park-goers, strollers, and leisure-seekers, to willingly give themselves over to Olmsted's manipulations, to the effect of an "action...that goes back of thought."

Nineteenth-century Americans keenly attended to their experience of landscape, staged or otherwise, much in the same way that they were fascinated by their experience of plays, concerts, shows, and other performances. They had to become enthusiasts in the true sense of the word, participating in a process of "taking in" a somewhat mysterious but invigorating force outside of oneself. Of course, urban amusements and nature parks were opposed in the view of moral reformers, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the reformers' view was not necessarily one shared by the middle-class public, many of whom (in diaries and letters) tended to enthuse about, and make connections between, their experiences of space. (Thus people would "take in" the scenery, as well as "take in" a play; the act of "promenading," too, was integrally linked to both pleasure gardens and commercial concerts). I can't quite prove it yet, but I believe the sensation of space was a primary allure of the Victorian era, and audiencing--whether in a new concert hall, exhibition building, or park--was very much a part of that allure.

Becoming a Fan of Mahler

Michael Tilson Thomas at Mahler's house in Maiernnig, Austria.

In Tramps Like Us, I wrote about the "becoming-a-fan" stories shared among Bruce Springsteen fans. They were essentially conversion narratives, articulating an intense realization of Springsteen's music. Fans reported that their discovery of Springsteen felt like a lasting dividing line in their lives, creating a transformative "before-and-after" that didn't exist previous to their conversion experiences.

I was reminded of such becoming-a-fan stories last night while watching Michael Tilson Thomas on public television hosting a documentary on composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler is an interesting figure in his own right, but what was most engaging about the program (part of the San Francisco Symphony's "Keeping Score" series) was Thomas's palpable enthusiasm for the man and his music. He just seemed so delighted to be talking about Mahler with you, the viewer, it was almost impossible not to get swept up in the whole thing. And unlike many documentaries on composers, which over-emphasize the otherworldly talent of an individual, this one actually opened with a string of becoming-a-fan stories from listeners: Thomas, Susan Graham, Frank Gehry, Patrick Stewart, and Yo-Yo Ma. (Thomas also did an interview last year in which he told his Mahler becoming-a-fan story, noting at the :50 mark that "I divide my life between before I heard that recording...and after).

Springsteen fans share their stories of becoming-a-fan to both confirm their membership in a wider community and to help others, just discovering Springsteen, to frame their experiences in understandable ways. It seemed to me that Thomas was doing something similar, except for a television audience. Thomas used his passion for Mahler as a basis for organizing the program's content; it helped to make Mahler's greatness not simply an abstraction but real, relatable, felt. By earnestly offering his life-changing discovery of Mahler, he made himself a little vulnerable--not the distant scholar or elitist expert but someone who was unexpectedly blown away by a recording when he was thirteen years old. Personally, I've never really connected with Mahler's music, but encountering Thomas's obvious love for it made me want to go back and listen again.

PBS's typical soft-spoken erudition isn't going to bring new audiences to Mahler, but Thomas's fandom just might.

Notes on Flower Enthusiasm

The love of flowers is a peculiar form of fandom. It is not about loyalty to a team, the power of aesthetic experience, or a feeling of intimate connection with a star, but it nevertheless involves desire, identity, and marked devotion, including rituals of cultivation, collecting, pilgrimage, and story-telling. Flower enthusiasm, especially, creates powerful social bonds; garden lovers, like sports and music fans, seek each other out to discuss their latest discoveries and insights, or to marvel at each other’s beds and plots; the American “garden club,” a phenomenon that started generally among women in the 1920s, is not all that different from the charitable organizations or concert societies forming around the same time. But flower culture has a world history that spans centuries. Historical evidence of this culture lies in seed catalogs, countless poems and books and magazine columns about flowers’ symbolism, and accounts of various “manias” for particular flowers, from the rose to the cactus. Flower-culture, like many instances of fan-like enthusiasm, has sometimes been the subject of mockery by outsiders but, for its followers, it provides a source of deep human feeling.

Floriculture
While gardeners love flowers' beauty, they more specifically love the process of nurturance, growth, and display. Flowers' dynamism is, in fact, often associated with people or nations and with human qualities and emotions, from Charlotte Elizabeth's "biographical garden" to preacher Henry Ward Beecher's invocation of flower-enthusiasm as an earthly leveler of all men.

From: Charlotte Elizabeth, Floral Biography (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1840).

Botany is doubtless a very delightful study; but a botanical treatise is one of the last things that I should be found engaged in. Truth shall be told: my love of flowers—for each particular petal—is such, that no thirst after scientific knowledge could every prevail with me to tear the beautiful objects in pieces. I love to see the bud bursting into maturity; I love to mark the deepening tints with which the beams of heaven paint the expanded flower; nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure, I love to watch that progress towards decay, so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship in man’s transient glory, which, even at its height, is but as “the flower of grass.”…But there is yet another, and somewhat fanciful view, that I delight to take of these fair things, my course has lain through a busy and a chequered path; I have been subjected to many changes of place, and have encountered a great variety of characters, who have passed before me like visions of the night, leaving but the remembrance of what they were. I have frequently in my lonely rambles among the flowers, assimilated one and another of them to those unforgotten individuals, until they became almost identified; and my garden bears a nomenclature which no eye but mine can decypher.

From: The London Quarterly and Holborn Review, vol. 24, p. 50, April 1865.

Floriculture adapts itself to a leading instinct of human nature. Much of the life of the florist is spent in making provision for the future. He sows his seeds in hope of a reward that is to be. Supposing him not only to cultivate flowers after the ordinary fashion, but to set himself to obtain new and improved varieties, this same instinct finds fresh scope and satisfaction. The reader must himself be a florist if he would understand with what enthusiasm the first blooms of seedling plants are watched by the expectant grower; how eagerly he notes such of them as seem to merit preservation; and what wholesome stimulus body and mind alike are apt to receive from the entire process of his occupation. Perhaps the adaptation of floriculture to satisfy certain instinctive cravings of our nature has quite as much to do with the all but universal passion for it as the love of flowers for their own sake.

From Henry Ward Beecher, Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers, and Farming (1874), 50.

Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir! One never wishes to be cured, nor should any one wish to cure him. The garden is infectious. Flowers are “catching,” or the love of them is. Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck through with floral zeal. Not bees are more sedulous in their researches into flowers than many a man is, and one finds, after the strife and heat and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more pure satisfaction in his garden than in al the other pursuits that promise so much of pleasure and yield so little. It is pleasant to find in men whose hard and loveless side you see in society, so much that is gentle and beauty-loving in private. Hard capitalists, sharp politicians, grinding business men, will often be found, at home, in full sympathy with the gentlest aspects of nature. One is surprised to find how rich and sweet these monsters often turn out to be! 

The Canon of Great Fans

Canons of great authors, artists, and composers have fallen out of favor in some humanities disciplines lately; judging some work as better than others, once the core work of criticism, has become a bit old-fashioned in the wake of post-structuralism. At least, how scholars understand the power of "good" art has changed. After the first wave of reception-theory in the 1970s, which pointed out the complexity, diversity, unpredictability, and even perversity of audiences as they received and "decoded" creative expression, the Arnoldian idea that a person would simply need to expose himself to works of genius in order to become educated or "cultured," or the modernist notion that structural complexity is a primary marker of artistic significance, needs to be understood with a degree of skepticism. "Canon formation," or how we evaluate the best works in a society, has turned out to involve more than just merit.

Our Great Authors, 1865

I don't really believe that we should abandon the idea of a canon in humanities scholarship, even as we expose its politics. Judgments about worth, after all, are vital for defining shared values and for democratic decision-making. And working through the process of judging is a key component of learning, and doing that through the evaluation of artistic works is useful. However, I do think that canonicity is often too narrowly-focused on authorship. Great works are almost always attributed to the great minds that conceived them. That's why musicologists or literary scholars still tend to develop expertise in particular authors deemed worthy of in-depth study (especially if they want a faculty appointment and/or tenure), or why textbook cultural histories continue to organize their narratives around moments of creative production, conveniently offering decontextualized lineages of creative influence, as if all great artists in history are really just part of one, big, family of geniuses.

It seems to me that if we are going to go through the effort of canonization, we ought to open up the process to all aspects of artistic culture. We can have a canon of great authors, as long as we also have canons of great bookbinders, concert promoters, instrument manufacturers, and audience members. Certainly, judgments could be made in those areas, too. In fact, I've been thinking a lot lately of whether it might be possible to create a canon of great fans, audience members who we might deem as having been the best and the brightest readers, listeners, and spectators of their times.

Some names immediately come to mind from the American nineteenth century (which where I've been spending most of my time for the past eight years). Walt Whitman, for instance, is good initial candidate.

As a young journalist and man-about-town, Whitman was an especially active participant in New York City’s rapidly growing number of theaters, lectures, exhibitions, and concerts in the 1840s. He was a regular at the Bowery Theater and loved the intense emotionalism of actors like Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Forrest. He was an enthusiastic follower of oratory, attending political rallies and abolitionist meetings at Broadway Tabernacle to study the fiery rhetoric of reformers; he especially was eager for lectures by Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher or temperance speaker John Gough. Perhaps most of all, Whitman was huge opera fan, following what he called his "musical passion." His status as a journalist put him on the “free-list” for concerts in the city, he heard most of the major virtuosos that passed through in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In Specimen Days, he recounts, for instance:

I heard, these years, well render'd, all the Italian and other operas in vogue, "Somnambula," "The Puritans," "Der Freischutz," "Huguenots," "Fille d'Regiment," "Faus," "Etoile du Nord," "Poliuto," and others. Verdi's "Ernani," "Rigoletto," and "Trovatore," with Donizetti's "Lucia" or "Favorita" or "Lucrezia," and Auber's "Massaniello," or Rossini's "William Tell" and "Gazza Ladra," were among my special enjoyments. I heard Alboni every time she sang in New York and vicinity--also Grisi, the tenor Mario, and the baritone Badiali, the finest in the world.

In addition to his obsessive attendance at the cultural events of the city, he had a consistent, almost unbridled excitement about those experiences--his ardent listening, participation, and spectatorship shaped many of the descriptive passages of urban life in Leaves of Grass and shone through his criticism, essays, and reminiscences. Such experiences were important enough for him to note at the end of his life, in "Good-Bye My Fancy" (Complete Prose Works, 511): 

Seems to me I ought to acknowledge my debt to actors, singers, public speakers, conventions, and the stage in New York, my youthful days, from 1835--say to '60 or '61--and to plays and operas generally....Seems to me now when I look back, the Italian contralto Alboni (she is living yet, in Paris, 1891, in good condition, good voice yet, considering) with the then prominent histrions Booth, Edwin Forrest, and Fanny Kemble and the Italian singer Bettini, have had the deepest and most lasting effect upon me. I should like well if Madame Alboni and the old composer Verdi (and Bettini the tenor, if he is living), could know how much noble pleasure and happiness they gave me then, and how deeply I always remember them and thank them to this day.

Of course, there are other great fans in history for whom we have evidence, some famous and some unknown, and I hope to highlight some of them in the coming months on this blog. (James Boswell ought to be here!) The larger point, here, is that thinking about a canon of fans, however reactionary, can re-orient our understanding of what's significant when we think about how art works in society and how we might account for its history. And that re-orientation is worth pursuing further.

Canned Enthusiasm

We tend to think of enthusiastic audiences as spontaneously reacting with fervor and admiration to performers, but of course enthusiasm can also be manufactured by clever entrepreneurs for the purposes of manipulation and profit. In the music world of the 19th century, for example, tricks of the ticket trade include “deadheading,” which created demand for a concert ticket by giving away most seats for an opening night to associates to create an irresistible “full house.” Other managers paid carriage drivers to line the curb outside their theaters, suggesting that people must be fascinated with something going on inside. Most deceptive were claqueurs, professional applauders, in the audience for 18th century Parisian opera. As a travel writer in Harper’s Monthly (February 1854: 310) explained,

After one has been led by the contagious force of example to join in a round of uproarious applause, with which some favorite actor or piquant speech has been greeted, and perhaps been simple enough to add a bouquet to the pile cast at the feet of a pretty actress, whose emotions of gratitude, too powerful for speech, can only be expressed by a well-studied pantomime, it is as killing to sentiment as frost to flowers, to hear a cynical Frenchman beside you, with a latent smile at your greenness just discernible on his otherwise polite features, coolly remark, “that cost fifty francs.” You turn to him and ask an explanation. Monsieur is always happy to enlighten strangers, even when the information conveys no compliment to his own institutions. In the first place, he tells you never to take a seat in the centre of the parquette, just under the chandelier. You wonder at this, as it is really the best place in the house to see the stage and audience, but after the explanation you avoid it as you would one of the plagues of Egypt. It is the locality of the “claqueurs.” Remark that group immediately under the chandelier, some fifty persons, they are called “Les Chevaliers du lustre.” See how periodically they applaud; how well they are drilled; a hundred hands clapping in perfect unison. They are like soldiers, and have their corporals and captains, who motions they follow with all the regularity that a flock of geese follows its leader.

In this context, true admiration was always relative to the false kind:

It is reasonable to suppose when a French audience has a mercenary band to execute gratis for them all the clapping, stamping, and shouting, they do not trouble themselves much with such fatiguing ceremonies. If they are so far carried out of their dignified contempt for the claqueurs as to join in applause, it must be by something decidedly good in their estimation.

Obsession Has a History

There are a number of books that I’d like to highlight on this blog which explore the historical and cultural understandings of behaviors that are associated with the phenomenon we call “fandom.” One example is Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History (U. of Chicago Pr., 2008). I first encountered Davis’s book after I had already done a year’s worth of research and reading on monomania, a medical “condition” of the 19th century, and also on enthusiasm, an associated and equally controversial behavior that goes back to Plato, Martin Luther, and the Earl of Shaftesbury. In that context, Davis recounted a familiar story of people in modern Western society attempting to control excessive non-rational behavior--what Philip Ennis has called the “institutionalization of ecstasy.”

Davis nicely summarizes some of the diverse ways that artists, philosophers, doctors, and others have thought about obsessive behavior since the 18th century, suggesting that, while it can certainly be debilitating, say, in the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, we nevertheless need to understand obsession as historical. That is, modern Western society has arrived at a set of medicalized understandings about obsession; the extent to which obsession is a “problem” has been rather dynamic over time, dependent on changing assumptions and values about normalcy. We need to think of obsession not simply as a universally biological disease, he writes, but—borrowing a term from David Morris—as a “disease entity,” a bio-cultural phenomenon.

Davis shows that what was described plainly as "madness" before the 18th century slowly became recalibrated as a condition of varying degree beginning in the mid-1700s. By the early 19th century, some people were understood to be more obsessive and compulsive than others; for some it was a matter of agony and paralysis, and for others it led to valuable kinds of expression and discovery. In particular, obsession seemed to connect madness and genius. Some thinkers allowed that the frequent exercise of the imagination distorted one’s mental equilibrium, but suggested that, in the case of great artists and writers, madness might be okay as long as that imbalance was temporary or isolated. (Not coincidentally, the mid-1700s was also a time when enlightenment philosophers were rescuing “enthusiasm” as a concept from its religious connotations of possession or zealotry and remaking it into a secular concept of avidity, a move that was not altogether successful—see Jon Mee’s work for a nuanced reading).

Most important for the new thinking about obsession was the advent of the idea of “partial insanity,” or “monomania,” to which Davis devotes three chapters. The diagnosis was formulated by French doctor Etienne Esquirol in 1810 to refer to “a disease of the sensibility,” where someone could function normally in most aspects of life while also suffering from a fixation characterized by “maniacal excitement.”  While Esquirol created the diagnosis for legal purposes, to explain “crimes of passion,” Davis explains that monomania nevertheless “opened the doors to a wide-ranging application of the idea of insanity to the general population.” In fact, the idea of monomania became a “mania” in the middle of the 19th century. It appeared widely in works of literature (the protagonist of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” suffers from monomania, as does Herman Melville’s Ahab in Moby Dick), as well as serving to describe the approach to writing of a number of authors, such as Emile Zola or Gustave Flaubert. It accounted, too, for various kinds of fixations, like bibliomania, and later, Sigmund Freud’s elucidation of “neurosis.” In all of this, Davis provocatively juxtaposes instances of mania in medicine, art, and human relationships to suggest the extent to which there was considerable public debate among doctors, artists, philosophers, writers, critics, and monomaniacs themselves about which kinds of mania were acceptable or valuable, and which were not.

The link between obsession and fandom is a strong one. However, as I have suggested I think there is actually a broader history of “maniacal excitement” than the one presented here; it would be useful to compare and contrast the history of obsession with the histories of enthusiasm, devotion, and fanaticism. Debates about ecstasy and attraction from art, religion, philosophy, and medicine operate in very different realms but also seem to be connected together in their concern for defining the personal, social, and, ultimately, political meanings of emotional connection. Most immediately, for me, Obsession: A History offers a helpful methodological framework for thinking about the emergence of cultural behavior. As he writes, “I’m trying retrospectively to see how a space opens in a cultural field. One could easily object that what I am doing is based on a fallacy of trying to find in the past structures for things that don’t yet exist….On the other hand, there is, I think I’ve shown, sufficient historical and archival evidence that a major shift occurs.” (51) Figuring out that apparent contradiction is one of the main problems of studying fandom’s history.

Teaching, Learning, and Enthusiasm

Albert Sands Southworth, Classroom in the Emerson School for Girls,  1850.

I have been on a brief “blog break” in order to better manage the start of the new spring semester. With the various demands of teaching and learning on my mind, I have been wondering about the ways in which education might be a field for fan-like behaviors. Obviously, this is move that stretches common definitions of “fandom," but perhaps it’s useful to ponder for that very reason.

What does teaching and learning have to do with the history of audiences and fandom? Well, one of things most teachers know is that, at some level, leading a classroom is always a performance. I don’t mean that it is simply entertaining--it can be, but teaching is more often ritualistic, which is another side to performance (see Richard Schechner for more on that kind of distinction). Instead, I mean that teaching involves “display enactment for the benefit of an audience.” In other words, teachers stage learning for students, who must attend to what’s happening.

In particular, I’ve been reading an early journal on teaching, The Massachusetts Teacher: A Journal of School and Home Education, from June 1851 (vol IV, no. 6). I actually found issues of this journal from the 1860s under the hay in my barn (a teacher used to live in my house, perhaps…); copies may more readily be found on Google Books. The June 1851 issue fascinatingly addresses pedagogy and student attention with the emotional language of enthusiasm that was simultaneously being used with reference to the world of arts performance. It is this kind of thing that makes me wonder whether “fandom” need be resolutely tied to 20th century media at all and whether fandom might be more accurately described in terms of a broader framework of enthusiastic audiencing. (Working that out is the whole point of this blog, of course!).

Here are two excerpts to consider from The Massachusetts Teacher:

MUTUAL EXERCISES.
It is a remark of an experienced teacher in another State, that no day should be allowed to pass without seeking to make the pulse of the whole school beat in unison. This remark seems founded in reason. No teacher can put it in practice without perceiving the force and propriety of it. Such exercises tend to create a general interest in the affairs of the school-room. They create a love for the school, for the fellow pupil, for the teacher. They appeal to the strong feeling of sympathy in our nature. It is natural for us to enter with interest into what we do in concert with the many. Be it a religious service, it is a common remark that a full meeting is a good one; be it a parade day, the sight of a great throng will animate most men, and kindle the flame of glowing interest in what would soon tire, if viewed only by a few; be it a mob even, the dictates of reason, and the voice of conscience, and the sense of right, frequently will all be hushed by the voice of the many, and the most timid will unresistingly follow “a multitude to do evil.” 

The teacher will wisely avail himself of this principle, and as often as he can, make the voice of the whole school rise in concert in the strains of music, in the mutual reading of the sacred word, or of some secular lesson, or in some exercise prepared expressly for this purpose. As already remarked, no day should be allowed to pass without some exercise of this kind. Some teachers are fond of a mutual exercise as one method of reaching reading; but this seems to be as much recommended by the show and sound as by its utility…No person, however, can doubt the propriety of this exercise occasionally, as a method of making the great arteries fo feeling in the school-room throb in unison…”  (139) 

THE TEACHER AN ENTHUSIAST.
The teacher can interest his classes only by becoming himself interested even to enthusiasm. A successful man in any calling must be an enthusiast. Nothing can supply the place of this in the school-room. The best methods and the most stimulating expedients will fail in the hands of an indifferent teacher. If the “Goddess of Dulness” presides over his brain, her drowsy influence will soon extend over his little kingdom—the school-room. 

Enthusiasm is quite as contagious as gaping. You see it flashing from the eye of the orator to the soul of his audience. You see it spread like electricity from the heart of a Bonaparte, and kindling every heart in his vast army. You may sometimes see its enkindling influences in the school-room. An enthusiastic man guided by truth will always interest. It is impossible to resist the charm of earnest enthusiasm. 

…We ever become heated by earnest pursuit. With what absorbing interest does the chemist pursue his processes of composition and decomposition, while the mere spectator or mechanical operator regards them with entire indifference. How completely engrossed does the mathematician become among his diagrams, formulas and abstractions. There are few subjects from which the mere looker-on would turn away with more indifference. It is a law of the whole creation, that action produces warmth. The head and the heart of the schoolmaster are not exceptions.  

The teacher should work in the daily preparation of his lessons. He cannot begin every recitation promptly and say and do just what he ought to say and do, without forethought. With it he will save time and do more finished work. But he will derive a greater advantage than this. His inventive powers will be aroused. Clearer explanations, new processes, and better illustrations will be discovered for every class. Let the teacher once begin to invent, and he is sure to be interested. Inventors are always enthusiasts. (174)

The Erotic Economy of Fandom

Cultural studies scholars have long recognized the defiant nature of fandom; in early fan studies, fans are always somehow negotiating hegemony, or poaching texts, or resisting the mainstream. While writing Tramps Like Us, I reacted warily to these characterizations. While creative re-use of texts and resistance to producers' intentions were certainly elements of music fan culture, defining fans' experiences in that way did not quite fully characterize the appeal of fandom for fans themselves, who talked mostly about strong feelings of connection, knowing, and transformation.

There is a complex relationship between fan practices and the context of late capitalism in which those practices have been made most meaningful. I still believe, as I stated in Tramps Like Us, that fandom is inextricably linked to the commodification of culture since the late 1700s. And in my new work, Listening and Longing, I spend much time describing public, commercial, musical entertainment and its appeal to early consumer/listeners. But I remain convinced that we need to remain open to ways of thinking about what fandom is, and why it matters, beyond mere oppositional politics (however sympathetic one might be with the goal of that approach). I think it's the only way to accurately work out the entirety of fandom's history and significance.

Fans love stars, works, styles, culture. How do we think about that love more fully? I have, in the past, written about the passion of fans in terms of religious discourse. Another way to think about it, perhaps, is the "commerce of the creative spirit" as explained in Lewis Hyde's The Gift. First published in 1983, it was released in a 25th anniversary edition in 2007. It's essentially a series of essays that probe the idea of gifting in non- or pre-capitalist cultures, using the knowledge built from that exercise to better understand the value of creativity in Western industrial-capitalism.

Hyde's book begins by setting up a dichotomy of an “economy of eros” against an “economy of logos” (vaguely reminiscent of Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), where “cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason is to enthusiasm.” Hyde then places artistic expression into this framework, arguing that artistic expression functions in the realm of eros and enthusiasm, having value not in the monetary power of contracted ownership but rather in the social bonds created by its ritual release and circulation. As he says,

The art that matters to us--which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience--that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with price...

Later, he explains:

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.

Hyde means to give courage to those who live and work at the margins of the market economy and outside of the framework of achievement (making money) that has characterized much of American capitalism. What I really like about the book in terms of fan studies is the way in which his articulation of the gift—as the establishment of a bond that powerfully endures by being passed on—touches on many of the ways that fans describe their love of cultural commodities. And, in the end, Hyde is open to thinking about gifting as multilateral. When he's thinking only about artists, he reductively opposes them (in ideology and condition) to capitalists; when he's thinking about consumers, he better recognizes how messy things can be and how, sometimes, despite one’s surroundings or the origins of the roles they inhabit, one’s emotions can imbue unexpected meaning to any action. As he says, “The conflict between freedom and the bonds that gifts establish is not absolute, of course. To begin with, gifts do not bring us attachment unless they move us.” Or: “Within certain limits, gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized.” In other words, people in a capitalist culture--especially in a capitalist culture—must work out, in each moment, the extent to which their actions will be erotic or rational. It seems to me that, at the experiential level, this is a useful way to think about the history of audience enthusiasm.

Varieties of American Enthusiasm

Like many editorials about avid behavior in the 19th century, the “The Absurdities of Enthusiasm” (The Galaxy, July 1873, 141-145) has a slightly mocking tone. Nevertheless, it is a bit more sympathetic than most: “Enthusiasm seems to me a kindling of the soul toward a favorite object or idea, to almost the entire controlling of our thoughts and purposes and emotions. By its very nature it is uncalculating and unselfish. In this, you can distinguish true from false enthusiasm. But this effervescence of the imagination often leads to mental intoxication, and the understanding reels and totters. Hence the element of absurdity. The enthusiasm of some souls is so grand that we are never tempted to smile at their eccentricities.”

After accounting for various European enthusiasms--for mathematics, alchemy, the Holy Land, South Seas speculation, tulips--the writer observes: “The Americans cannot boast of superior coolness. We had a Jenny Lind fever, and an excitement about Dickens which might be called an intermittent attack, for the “Notes” gave a chill between the spasms of wild admiration. We play croquet rainy nights aided by glimmering lanterns, and are ready for base-ball matches while a digital stump remains. We shake hands with our heroes until the poor member resembles a dropsical lobster; run the maddest kind of races on the Mississippi; and chew more tobacco and burst more engines than any other country. Then we had the “Moris Multicaulis” to an insane degree. (I prefer to appear learned, and so leave this a mystery to many). And not many years ago we had the hen fever. The papers were full of the excitement. The largest kind of eggs were laid—on editors’ tables—and extraordinary prices were paid for the fashionable fowls. Mr. Burnham, the gentleman who raised the excitement, assures us that in the summer of 1850 dozens of full-grown men, enthusiastic hen-fanciers, came to his house for Cochin China eggs at one dollar each, and on being informed that there were none at present, would sit down and wait three of four or six hours for the hens to lay them a few. ‘Who’s dead?’ the stranger would query, seeing the rows of vehicles standing in long lines by his fence.”

Conclusion: “Enthusiasm is a good thing. If you have it, be thankful. You will need it all before you get through life.”