Media, Voice, Space and Power by Nick Couldry

Author:Nick Couldry [Couldry, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780429594557
Google: uPrADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-05T04:59:32+00:00

Concluding thoughts

The Sopranos tour carried many of the auratic expectations that a media location conventionally has, but it culminated, I have suggested, in a site of negative aura, a site whose different reality effaced any aura associated with the fiction and its process of production.

But this contradiction is, perhaps, not so foreign to the narrative offered by The Sopranos. For from its outset the series has been distinctive for a double narrative: the “public” story of the outer edges of a New York Italian mafia “family” in terminal decline, and the “private” story of Tony Soprano’s health and psychological problems and imperfectly managed family life. This doubleness is more than a narrative conceit since at various levels The Sopranos shows it at work in characters” lives, and the painful contradictions which flow from this. In this sense, and this has always been part of its attraction to me as a fan, The Sopranos addresses on a large scale some of the contradictions between “work” and “life” that are central issues in late modernity. That the Sopranos tour should have generated its own contradictions between “play” and “life” seemed, on reflection, somehow appropriate, whether or not those contradictions were intended by the tour’s organisers. What emerged was at the same time a contradiction, between different levels of narrative absorption, in my own experience as a fan.

Where do these recollections take us in terms of the choice from which this chapter started – the puzzle over the disciplinary space in which we should locate our academic accounts of what fans, ourselves included, do. In one way, they might seem to confirm Sandvoss’ argument that our psychological investments in narrative commodities are an essential part of how we are entrenched within capitalism’s order. A complication is that one attraction of The Sopranos’ narrative is its implicitly critical exploration of the linkages between exploitation, violence, and everyday comfort in contemporary society; but a Frankfurt School reading would have us ensnared within capitalism’s order, whether or not the narratives that are the objects of our passion are critical. A further complication is that, as visitors, our entanglement with the reality of a New Jersey strip joint was not shaped in any way by the specificities of our individual psychological investment in The Sopranos’ narrative; one might just as well say that it was shaped by the social pleasures afforded by The Sopranos as a complex, evolving narrative that provokes discussion based on the deep generic foundations of mafia narratives. On the other hand, I would happily acknowledge that, on this tour at least, issues of symbolic power (while present at some level throughout) were outweighed in terms of analytic interest by the spatial and narrative ambiguities into which the tour drew its participants.

The only safe conclusion, I suggest, is to acknowledge that fandom research needs a theoretical flexibility to match the phenomenological complexity of much fan experience. Instead of a “unified” model which privileges one framework of interpretation (psychological, sociological, economic, textual, spatial), we need

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