Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2014 Politics of popular creativity and popular knowledge: on the case of adbusters and Harry Potter fans Stephanie Schreven Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Schreven, Stephanie, "Politics of popular creativity and popular knowledge: on the case of adbusters and Harry Potter fans" (2014). Dissertations - ALL. 95. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/95 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract My research looks at and investigates popular creativity and the politics involved in two different cases. I situate popular creativity and the politics involved in the context of cultural studies. My first case looks at advertisements that are placed under attack, or busted. I investigate the different politics of defamiliarization between two specific busted ads. The politics of defamiliarization create moving images based on the Freudian uncanny and Brechtian Verfremdung. My second case involves Harry Potter fans and fan fiction writing. Specifically, I investigate the politics of closure or stereotyping involved in a copyright dispute over the publication of the so-called Harry Potter Lexicon. Methodologically speaking, I am ‘on the case’. In being ‘on the case’, politics happen too, which concern the production of knowledge over equality. I situate equality in the context of Jacques Rancière’s understanding of it, alongside his understanding of people, politics, and what he refers to as police. In building my research cases, I offer a form of popular knowledge. POLITICS OF POPULAR CREATIVITY AND POPULAR KNOWLEDGE: ON THE CASE OF ADBUSTERS AND HARRY POTTER FANS Stephanie Schreven M.Sc. Erasmus University, 2000 M.A. Radboud University, 1996 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Science in the Graduate School of Syracuse University May 2014 Copyright 2014 Stephanie Schreven All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Jackie Orr for being there from the start and for hanging in there with me until the end. I would like to thank her for her support and commitment to my project, seeing it through. I would also like to thank her for her confidence, which somehow found its way to me. And I would like to thank her for being such a fierce and poetic intellectual force with gentle touches. I would like to thank my committee, Crystal Bartolovich, Peter Fleming, Claudia Klaver and Mark Rupert, for their intellectual engagement. I would especially like to thank Peter Fleming for his encouragement, insights, and humour. I would like to thank Mary Olszewski for being organized and keeping me organized and Vernon Greene for his generosity in keeping time. I would also like to thank Stelios for his support, patience and for giving up his study, which allowed me to do my thinking and writing in peace and quiet. Finally, I would like to thank our dogs Lola, Ziggy and Aliki for being able to always put a smile on my face. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Method & the politics of knowledge production: on the case of equality 47 Chapter 3. A case of ‘moving images’: the politics of adbusters and defamiliarization 93 Chapter 4. ‘Arresting words’: fans, the case of the missing detail, and its politics 165 Chapter 5. Conclusion 222 Bibliography 231 Vita 249 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIALS Image 1: The Obsession busted ad 163 Image 2: The Recession busted ad 164 vi Chapter 1 Introduction What happened after all this time? Or, the road to hell is paved with good intentions After all this time, my dissertation became an adventure, intellectually too. My dissertation became an adventure, notwithstanding the dissertation proposal, a map, and its theories to guide me, to tell me what to look out for and see. My dissertation became an adventure, risky, or the road to hell, which is paved with good intentions, to do what you set out to do. In- between the proposal and today, and in-between disciplines, I intended to stick to the map. An adventure is not to be overseen until the end, looking back. At the end, in hindsight, I start from the beginning to map the terrain on which my adventure took place, and which my method and research chapters open out into. Working backward, it is a terrain that I survey on the basis of, and from in-between the cases that make up my adventure, what connects them, and keeps them apart. In-between my research cases and what connects them, is popular creativity. Except that how it is practiced, by consumers who are not merely consuming, the form it takes, to what effect and the politics involved are different in both cases. In addition, different politics are also involved in how I make my research cases, the politics of knowledge production. Thus, what makes my research into an overall project is politics, as that which connects it, on a case-by-case basis, even though they are different across the chapters. My research became a project about politics, and because I make cases, methodologically speaking. My research became a project about methods too, firstly, because I lacked an existing socially scientific one, and had to find an alternative way of doing empirical research. And secondly, because after starting off doing my research, doing it otherwise, empirically, I had to find a name for what I was doing, my ‘method’, which I 1 thought of as puzzling and piecing knowledge together. In the literature, I came across the case-method. Empirically, my ‘case-method’ is unlike the social science case study, and also unlike other disciplinary uses of the case as a method. Not only because I lack a discipline, but also because other disciplinary uses do not quite capture what I am doing, in which I have not been trained. In doing what I do, I am indebted to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on what it means to be ‘on the case’. But because I lack training in my method, my research became a project too, to find grounds to allow for doing research without training in it, and speak up in the space of academia, and the social sciences specifically. The social sciences teach and train you in a method, and also reward you with the mark of qualification, a PhD, when you perform your method and hence research properly, a testimony to using tools skillfully. Lacking training in a method, know-how, in the next chapter, I identify myself as an intellectual or amateur instead, as understood by Edward Said. I identify myself as someone who takes the liberty to speak, in piecing knowledge together, and building her cases. In taking the liberty to speak, I presuppose my equality, as Jacques Rancière would say, whose thinking plays a significant role in my research. So far, that is how I see what happened after all this time and as far as I can tell from where I am situated, which is between disciplines, suspended, like a bridge. And my project is about interdisciplinarity too, because of the politics of knowledge production, the politics of doing research without a proper method initially and lacking training in it still. In other words, rather than just refer to my research and position as interdisciplinary, it means something in particular: in-between disciplines, suspended, equality happens. My research and what turned out to be my method, puzzling included, originate in detailed observations. Hence my adventure, and I find myself on the road to hell for ‘the devil lies in the detail’, as popular wisdom or folklore has it. I say my adventure, but by this time it is ours, like my interdisciplinarity, if you accept my invitation and join me on the road to hell. 2 Before we meet the devil however, I first sketch my research. My research is on consumers who do not do their duty and merely consume, among which so-called adbusters and Harry Potter fans. They are disorderly in practicing popular creativity, that is, by engaging creatively with mass cultural signs in which politics are involved. I then discuss the literatures into which my research and cases open out, in hindsight. I discuss the first set of literatures because my research is threaded through it. That is, these different literatures about consumer society and consumer capitalism make my cases relevant to wider scholarly concerns that resonate through my cases. These literatures also help me set the stage for my research, namely where they touch on modernization, doing things differently to advance social change. The second set of literatures I open my research out into is where I situate popular creativity and the politics involved, namely in the context of cultural studies. Before I summarize my research cases and arguments briefly, I discuss my method. At this point, in the introduction, I discuss my method not specifically as a case-method, of sorts, or the politics involved, which I do in the next chapter, but call attention to the epistemological underpinnings of what I am doing. I am what Avery Gordon (1997) refers to as a ‘situated investigator’ who builds her cases based on detailed observations, similar to the detective, and who offers ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway 1988). I am not like Sherlock Holmes, although I do like to account for the unexplained, what remains a mystery, puzzling.