on corporations, charity and the question of deserving
I haven't posted in response to a fandom debate in an extremely long time, and I feel nervous about posting this; but I was moved to write this during quiet moments in a busy day, and now I feel like I may as well share it. I haven't kept up with every debate so this may all already have been said better; I respect disagreement, appreciate that I may not be entirely right, and might not be able to respond to comments immediately...
FictionAlley, the Harry Potter fan fiction site, can't afford to run its servers; its organizers have decided to apply for a Pepsi Refresh grant to the tune of $25,000. This is, it seems obvious, a terrible idea. Fandom has, after all, an organization dedicated to solving just such problems, as well as a user base whose affluence and willingness to donate to fannish projects and charities never ceases to astound me; the narrative of "it's educational" that FA are using to justify their application may well be true, but it is far less convincing than the straightforward valuation of fanworks for themselves that FA could have tapped into if they turned to their own communities for help. For any number of reasons, corporate charity does not look to me like a good place to seek funding for fannish projects.
That said, however, I have some problems with the arguments that I've seen made against FA taking this decision. If a fan fiction archive is looking for funds and competing with a homeless shelter and an underfunded public school, do we complain that the fan fiction archive had the gall to think its provision of art and pleasure was important enough to be on that list, or do we look at the organization that has set up the false opposition, that is giving a small portion of its advertising budget to these causes and opening up a profoundly unfair voting system in order to do so under the illusion of democracy? I've been disappointed by the extent to which fans critical of this decision are buying into Pepsi's self-aggrandisement because they are giving a few crumbs to 'good causes' by forcing them to compete with one another as to who is the most deserving.
I'm moved to post this now because this latest fannish uproar coincides interestingly with my last post bemoaning the demise of the once-beautiful British public university system. The question of who gets money for what, and who deserves access to limited means, is of great importance to me as I watch the latest chapter in the steady collapse of free access to higher education in the UK, and of the public education system as a whole in the US. The landscape in which the defunding of public education, in particular the arts, takes place is one where more and more of the public services that were once provided by the state, as rights, are transferred into a voluntary sector funded largely by corporate capitalism. This is the logic of neoliberalism, where the market defines all possible goods. Foundations, corporations and individual donors fund what would once have been public projects: education, aid for homeless people, even healthcare. And in so doing, the boundaries between rights or services and projects for art, pleasure, and other purposes, which might also be looking for funding, get blurred.
Arguments about who 'deserves' money happen constantly with regard to state funds, of course -- the most famous case of that in the USA is the 1980s furore over NEA funding to queer artists. The question of which causes might be 'deserving' enough to apply to Pepsi for the funds they badly need brings that logic into a smaller and more pervasive scale. That the choice between so many desperately needed projects is put to the public in this way is, to my mind, disgusting. That the whole thing is an advertising stunt for Pepsi is obscene. But if you're committed to a project and you're trying to keep it alive, whether it's a fan fiction archive and community or a children's orchestra or, yes, even a soup kitchen, you look for the funds anywhere you can and anywhere you're remotely eligible.
I'm sensitive to this because I do, and believe in the value of, intellectual work that can certainly not stand up to the value of a soup kitchen or a children's orchestra. I analyze literature and media, and I write about queer sex. There's a social justice dimension to my work that is extremely important to me, but that aspect can't stand up to someone else's activist sociological account of an antipoverty campaign, for example. And sometimes I feel the lack of quantifiable value in my work very acutely; there's a part of me that does think the only ethical action I could take would be to give up this ridiculous cultural studies thing and devote my energies to making people's lives better on a truly concrete level, somewhere, somehow. Yet I am doing my work regardless and I do have the gall to apply for funding from any source I can find. In fact, as part of that work I seek to critique the hierarchy of values that says art and pleasure must always be subservient to matters of subsistence. I've always thought of fandom as a place where those kinds of hierarchies are heavily critiqued, where we know that pleasure and sexuality and artistic production matter, where we come down hard on those who complain that our time and money would be better spent on something more productive; where we know, relatedly, that what happens online is real and that the work we do for ourselves, for free, for fun, has its own kind of value.
Even though, let me reiterate, I think FictionAlley are doing a deeply foolish thing, I'm disappointed to see fans playing into the narratives that devalue fandom. The critique should be directed at the source of the false choices and at FictionAlley's underestimation of what organized fandom can (probably) do. To focus on who and what might be 'more deserving' is to allow Pepsi to define the terms of our social conscience. Does that really seem like a good idea?
*edited to fix a very silly mistake*
*edited again to add links to two great posts from my dwircle on this:
seperis on the way shame has been thrown around and
katekat putting it in the context of fandom studies.
*more editing!
melannen has background on the nature of FA that gives context to their decision.
Posted at Dreamwidth.
comments.
FictionAlley, the Harry Potter fan fiction site, can't afford to run its servers; its organizers have decided to apply for a Pepsi Refresh grant to the tune of $25,000. This is, it seems obvious, a terrible idea. Fandom has, after all, an organization dedicated to solving just such problems, as well as a user base whose affluence and willingness to donate to fannish projects and charities never ceases to astound me; the narrative of "it's educational" that FA are using to justify their application may well be true, but it is far less convincing than the straightforward valuation of fanworks for themselves that FA could have tapped into if they turned to their own communities for help. For any number of reasons, corporate charity does not look to me like a good place to seek funding for fannish projects.
That said, however, I have some problems with the arguments that I've seen made against FA taking this decision. If a fan fiction archive is looking for funds and competing with a homeless shelter and an underfunded public school, do we complain that the fan fiction archive had the gall to think its provision of art and pleasure was important enough to be on that list, or do we look at the organization that has set up the false opposition, that is giving a small portion of its advertising budget to these causes and opening up a profoundly unfair voting system in order to do so under the illusion of democracy? I've been disappointed by the extent to which fans critical of this decision are buying into Pepsi's self-aggrandisement because they are giving a few crumbs to 'good causes' by forcing them to compete with one another as to who is the most deserving.
I'm moved to post this now because this latest fannish uproar coincides interestingly with my last post bemoaning the demise of the once-beautiful British public university system. The question of who gets money for what, and who deserves access to limited means, is of great importance to me as I watch the latest chapter in the steady collapse of free access to higher education in the UK, and of the public education system as a whole in the US. The landscape in which the defunding of public education, in particular the arts, takes place is one where more and more of the public services that were once provided by the state, as rights, are transferred into a voluntary sector funded largely by corporate capitalism. This is the logic of neoliberalism, where the market defines all possible goods. Foundations, corporations and individual donors fund what would once have been public projects: education, aid for homeless people, even healthcare. And in so doing, the boundaries between rights or services and projects for art, pleasure, and other purposes, which might also be looking for funding, get blurred.
Arguments about who 'deserves' money happen constantly with regard to state funds, of course -- the most famous case of that in the USA is the 1980s furore over NEA funding to queer artists. The question of which causes might be 'deserving' enough to apply to Pepsi for the funds they badly need brings that logic into a smaller and more pervasive scale. That the choice between so many desperately needed projects is put to the public in this way is, to my mind, disgusting. That the whole thing is an advertising stunt for Pepsi is obscene. But if you're committed to a project and you're trying to keep it alive, whether it's a fan fiction archive and community or a children's orchestra or, yes, even a soup kitchen, you look for the funds anywhere you can and anywhere you're remotely eligible.
I'm sensitive to this because I do, and believe in the value of, intellectual work that can certainly not stand up to the value of a soup kitchen or a children's orchestra. I analyze literature and media, and I write about queer sex. There's a social justice dimension to my work that is extremely important to me, but that aspect can't stand up to someone else's activist sociological account of an antipoverty campaign, for example. And sometimes I feel the lack of quantifiable value in my work very acutely; there's a part of me that does think the only ethical action I could take would be to give up this ridiculous cultural studies thing and devote my energies to making people's lives better on a truly concrete level, somewhere, somehow. Yet I am doing my work regardless and I do have the gall to apply for funding from any source I can find. In fact, as part of that work I seek to critique the hierarchy of values that says art and pleasure must always be subservient to matters of subsistence. I've always thought of fandom as a place where those kinds of hierarchies are heavily critiqued, where we know that pleasure and sexuality and artistic production matter, where we come down hard on those who complain that our time and money would be better spent on something more productive; where we know, relatedly, that what happens online is real and that the work we do for ourselves, for free, for fun, has its own kind of value.
Even though, let me reiterate, I think FictionAlley are doing a deeply foolish thing, I'm disappointed to see fans playing into the narratives that devalue fandom. The critique should be directed at the source of the false choices and at FictionAlley's underestimation of what organized fandom can (probably) do. To focus on who and what might be 'more deserving' is to allow Pepsi to define the terms of our social conscience. Does that really seem like a good idea?
*edited to fix a very silly mistake*
*edited again to add links to two great posts from my dwircle on this:
seperis on the way shame has been thrown around and
katekat putting it in the context of fandom studies.
*more editing!
melannen has background on the nature of FA that gives context to their decision.
Posted at Dreamwidth.
comments.