And now I shall swing the makeshift club of social science at anime fandom yet again — taking a class in mass media theory is convenient that way — and talk about subjectivity. You might also read this as an attack vs. objectivity, but I don’t really think of it like that. No point in beating the deadest horse there is.
Today’s quotational magic comes from a 1980 article by the intriguingly-named Robert Zajonc:
- Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151-175.
Zajonc argues against an information-processing model that places cognition before affect (reason before feeling, in other words), positing that, regardless of whether affect literally, temporally precedes cognition, “affect is always present as a companion to thought, whereas the converse is not true for cognition” (154). That is, emotion and subjective judgment confound everything. While Zajonc is concerned mostly with decision-making and interaction, you might rightly assume that such a model (which, as far as I know, has more or less survived the thirty years since the article’s publication) has certain implications for the consumption of art — and for people who write about the consumption of art, i.e. you and I.
Quite often “I decided in favor of X” is no more than “I liked X.” Most of the time, information collected about alternatives serves us less for making a decision than for justifying it afterward. Dissonance is prevalent just because complete and thorough computation is not performed before the decision… (155)
It’s as if he peered into the future and saw the aniblogothing! Beneath oceans of vitriol lies the truth: ultimately we’re writing about how we choose what we like, and not about why what we like is better than what other people like.
But that’s a given, and not really worth going on about at length. What catches my attention here is the idea of dissonance. Certainly we’ve all struggled with shows we find meritorious but not fun, or vice versa. The terms I’ve been using lately are “impressive” and “enjoyable;” others have distinguished between “works one likes” and “works one enjoys” (recent bloggery by Ghostlightning and Digitalboy comes to mind). And this excites my interests in mechanisms and methods — how do we navigate the gulf between impressive and enjoyable? “Differently” would be the short answer, I suppose.
Once formed, an evaluation is not revoked. Experiments on the perseverance effect, the strong primacy effects in impression formation, and the fact that attitudes are virtually impervious to persuasion by communication all attest to the robust strength and permanence of affect. Affect often persists after a complete invalidation of its original cognitive basis… (157)
Hence, visceral enjoyment and nostalgia/love-remembering are serious business. I tend to rate those works I associate with a particular “moment” or “movement” in my fandom — Love Hina, Rozen Maiden, Last Exile, Elfen Lied, Haibane Renmei, Macross, even (dare I say it) Aria — higher than I might otherwise, even after repeated viewings. I suspect some of you might do the same.
When we evaluate an object or an event, we are describing not so much what is in the object or in the event, but something that is in ourselves. …Thus, affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment. (157)
We may think that, in our close-reading or sociohistorical interpretation of Pokemon, we’re uncovering the depth inherent to Pokemon. What we’re doing, really, is giving Pokemon depth. It’s worth remembering that textual depth comes from the reader’s depth of experience with the text. But now I’m just using Zajonc as yet more evidence in support of something I’ve been saying for a long time, so I’ll come at this a different way: why do we read anime blogs? I don’t know why you read anime blogs, but I don’t read them for their explications of art; I read them for their explications of their writers, as means by which to experience brief glimpses into how other people do anime, which is something that matters to me.
…[Liking] varies with the objective history of stimulus exposure. With recognition reduced nearly to the chance level, differential affective reaction to the stimuli is obtained as a consequence of mere repeated exposure. Random melodies presented five times were liked better than melodies never heard, even though the subjects could not discriminate the former from the latter for familiarity. (162-163)
This suggests something that makes a kind of sense, but that we don’t really think about: fandom is learned. If I sat my grandmother down in front of Gurren Lagann, she wouldn’t get it — and “getting it” here refers not to intellectual understanding, but to the simple ability to enjoy a thing. We don’t become anime fans overnight — or at least I didn’t. I’ve had to pass through a long series of gateway shows, starting with the Record of Lodoss War OVA, which I liked not because it was anime, but because it was high fantasy. I’d be interested to see how other bloggers evaluate their own acquisitions of fandom; some of that comes through in more nostalgic sorts of posts, but it isn’t always apparent when we look primarily forward.
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
r042
Ryan A
/ 22 April 2010fandom is learned
This is a sound conclusion. I recall ETERNAL posted about gateway experiences at the beginning of February, which I responded to in my own post, but I think he brushed the topic in a related way, although it was less apparently related to ghostlightning’s post. Feels like something definitely, yet simple lurks if someone can phrase it the right way.
Pontifus
/ 22 April 2010I always feel like an ass when other people have written about a similar topic recently, but I’ve missed it and thus failed to acknowledge it in my post. Especially considering that I don’t even do a blogroll here. Would you throw me some links to Eternal’s and your posts?
Yeah, sometimes things like this just seem intuitive. But it may be worth dragging them out into the open.
Ryan A
/ 1 May 2010Eternal’s post here: http://blog.ephemeraleternity.com/2010/02/06/the-impact-of-gateway-anime/
I found it related, but more in rooting how we learn fandom, I suppose.
digital boy
/ 22 April 2010>>>>>We may think that, in our close-reading or sociohistorical interpretation of Pokemon, we’re uncovering the depth inherent to Pokemon. What we’re doing, really, is giving Pokemon depth. It’s worth remembering that textual depth comes from the reader’s depth of experience with the text. <<<>>>>>>But now I’m just using Zajonc as yet more evidence in support of something I’ve been saying for a long time, so I’ll come at this a different way: why do we read anime blogs? I don’t know why you read anime blogs, but I don’t read them for their explications of art; I read them for their explications of their writers, as means by which to experience brief glimpses into how other people do anime, which is something that matters to me.<<<<<<<<<<<<<
STATEMENT OF THE FUCKING TIME.
digital boy
/ 22 April 2010oh shit my paragraph got cut out hold on.
digital boy
/ 22 April 2010After the pokemon quote it should have said
“Whoa fuck! This resonates with me because on my recent rewatch of early Pokemon eps, I was thinking about how much better the show is than people give it credit for. However, I was only able to see that because I’ve seen the show a million times in the past 10 years and never stopped loving it. The best part about bloggign is, I can use my experience to teach you a new way of looking at the show!
Pontifus
/ 22 April 2010Haha, awesome — I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on Pokemon. Honestly, I never really watched it back in the day; I was all about the games, but I could never get into the show. It didn’t help that it aired at like 8 in the morning, which wasn’t exactly a convenient time when I needed to go to school, so at no point did I ever catch any of the episodes in sequential order.
Yeah, I like being able to figure out why other people like things I don’t like, even if it isn’t necessarily going to make me like those shows instantly. For example, I’ve noticed that you’re one of those hardcore Eureka Seven fans, and while I just could not get through E7 when I attempted it a year ago, people like you, Ghostlightning, and lelangir keep me from dropping the thing wholesale and forgetting about it. Obviously there’s something there to like — I just wasn’t ready, and maybe I never will be “ready” in that sense, but at least I know it may be worth attempting the show again at some point.
relentlessflame
/ 22 April 2010Holy crap — this is *exactly* what I’ve been trying to somehow explain for years and years now. The implications of all this are incredibly profound, and I believe could fundamentally change the nature of public discourse about anime (and many other topics).
Opinions are formed at the cross-roads of values, experiences, preferences, emotions, and observations. It always tells us a lot more about the one opining than whatever he or she is opining about. So I totally agree that, in order to properly navigate and interpret the blogosphere, you *must* see posts about anime as reflections/explications of the writer and not of the show itself, because that’s what it is anyway. Some people try to mask this inherent subjectivity through bold, objective-sounding language, but really only deceive themselves in the process, and rob themselves of an opportunity to reflect and understand more about what makes them and other people “tick”. Rather than attacking and vilifying those who have differing tastes, we have an opportunity here to really understand each other. And that, to me, is what it’s all about.
Anyway, I guess I need to pick up this book; great stuff.
Pontifus
/ 22 April 2010I’ve been saying this for a long time, too; as an English major, I really took to poststructuralism, reader-response, and otherwise crazy theoretical schools that place power in the hands of the reader, so to speak. I’m excited to discover that that’s a sound approach even according to more sciency disciplines.
If you have access to a university library, you can do a search for Robert Zajonc in whichever social science journal databases they subscribe to. And if you don’t, it should be easy to get access, if you feel like it, as long as there’s a university library within driving distance.
Regarding your second paragraph — yes.
ghostlightning
/ 23 April 2010Yes, this. I agree, and have only this to add:
It’s easy to make villains of reviewers who (most of the time) unknowingly canter on the dead horse of objectivity, and perhaps just as easy for those who use dark arts to ride the undead horse of objectivity. The reason I’m interested in is the supposed embedded egoism in saying that one’s take on a subject is the truth and the only truth. One is ‘right’ and people who subject the experience in their own context are ‘wrong.’
(‘are you even watching the same show?’ etc etc)
But it is just as egoistical to spill all this ink about a show, when what we are really interested in getting others interested in is us. We are entreating others to subscribe (yes, by that I also mean to agree) to our reading, to our experience of the subject work.
What I’m getting at here is that there is nothing inherently objectionable to egoism. Both kinds of writers–whatever horse they ride, are egoists. I can’t imagine (perhaps my own limitation) why anyone would write in any public sphere anyway.
Pontifus
/ 23 April 2010I have to agree with you here. This kind of writing — maybe all writing — is necessarily selfish in that we can’t sit down and write about someone else’s experience. “Selfish” is the word I use, anyway, though maybe “egoism” is a better (less negatively loaded?) way of putting it. At any rate I don’t really hold it against anyone (nor against myself). And you won’t see me call anyone out for saying “x is good” instead of “I like x” — until “x is good” becomes “x is good and you’re wrong (and dumb),” anyway, in which case it’s less about objectivity vs. subjectivity or egoism vs. whatever than it is about causing rifts in a fandom that has a hard enough time getting along as it is.
I can tell you that I write publicly for the community aspect, i.e. you all are my online anime fandom community of choice, in lieu of some forum or chat community. Which makes me wonder whether the back-and-forth nature of blogging renders this kind of writing somewhat less egotistic than it might otherwise be. That is, I wonder how form affects content in this case.
ghostlightning
/ 26 April 2010Took me some time to think about this.
Community based writing gets a bad rap and gets called circle-jerking. To me this kind of reasoning stems from (unreflected-on) liberal humanist values that blog posts MUST BE FOR ALL TIME, FOR ALL PEOPLE. I exaggerate, but not by much.
Judau Ashta this is nuts.
One almost always wants a wider readership, but we take what we get and write for them. I was talking with digiboy yesterday how for each variation of subject matter we write about, we lose some of our readers — think of it this way: I don’t think I have a Macross fandom readership. I’m sure there are a few, but nothing substantial.
Many of my readers are casual fans or even newfags. The harder fans won’t find value whenever I suddenly write about Utena, or gasp, K-ON!
So when we get ambitious about a post, who do we end up writing for? Here’s a list I compiled: http://ghostlightning.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/the-virtuous-rivalry-300th-post-2/
Pontifus
/ 26 April 2010Excellent; I’m always flattered when one of my glorious rivals considers me a rival, too! If I made a list, it would look something like yours, though of course in place of my blog there would be WRL.
I wonder if the traditional liberal humanist essayist assumptions are breaking down in the various blogospheres. They may well not be, but it seems to me that they should insofar as, like you’re saying, blogging is almost necessarily a very practical way of writing. There’s no way of writing for everyone on the internet, and bloggers seem to “get” that intuitively and write rather pointedly. Do you think there’s a conflict between lingering ideals of the essay and the kinds of practical concerns bloggers have to negotiate?
ghostlightning
/ 27 April 2010There is conflict, if my view makes sense:
Blogging is a liberation from the closed communities of forums. This may only apply to anime fandom though, but no matter. If I post only in a forum, I formally limit my audience. I really write for a specific group of people. I write in an echo chamber, as some writers treat anime blogging derisively.
I don’t think forum members are criticized this way so why should bloggers be?
I think critics of the sphere want to think that there is a hive mind among those they do not like. It uncomplicates things for them and makes it easy to make generalizations.
It’s one thing to say that I don’t really write for the likes of X, that I am unconcerned about their approval. It’s another thing to say that you’re doing it wrong because you do what I wouldn’t.
As far as the general essay, I think it still needs a specific audience: casual viewers who watch dubbed releases? Casuals who got into anime in the ’90s? Post-Pokemon carry-overs? Contemporary fansub followers? I think this is all worth considering. One will find that you can’t take much for granted. The idea of ‘For all time’ is even more suspect since we have to establish works that have cross-generational appeal from past decades. How can essays presume the same about themselves?
Pontifus
/ 28 April 2010I think the “echo chamber” criticism comes from the tendency of bloggers to repeat what they hear on major news/information sources. But I imagine that this is far truer of news and political blogs than of anime blogs, or blogs that deal with cultural artifacts generally; anime blogs that do the sorts of things you might see on ANN are practically nonexistent, as far as I know. Most of us probably don’t think of ourselves as renegade journalists at any rate.
So, yes, I’d agree that the echo chamber/hive mind criticism isn’t really suitable. As far as hive-mindedness is concerned, I don’t suppose we’re more prone to acting that way than any other fans. We form our little clubs, but they’re very mutable, in my experience.
Then again, maybe it’s those clubs that give the illusion, to some, of bloggers who write for everyone. It’s a matter of mistaking one’s club for “everyone.” Though I don’t know that this is a mistake that most bloggers make. It doesn’t take long to figure out that you have a limited audience, and if you try to write for everyone, you may not please anyone.
ubiquitial
/ 24 April 2010I saw the name Zajonc and decided not to read this article. I love your blog, but I don’t feel like thinking too much on a Friday night.
ubiquitial
/ 24 April 2010Fuck, I read it anyways. Good post.
Pontifus
/ 25 April 2010Haha, have you come across Zajonc before? I’m entirely new to that kind of thing. Or do you just know well enough by now what happens when I start dropping names?