Re: Enclosures, I think you’re absolutely right that not being physical places changes things, and also right to call attention to medium (or, I would say, platform). The concerted effort to move fan activity onto Facebook and Twitter, where it can be seen and counted, both sets my Foucault sense tingling and is a way that shapes what fans can do, or what makes sense to fans to do, quite differently being “wild” in their own communities.

I also agree that privatizing fandom is one piece in a much larger structure of privatization, though I do feel like the other parts of it have already been described so well that my job is to fill in this missing piece regarding fandom!

And I definitely don’t think consent is the answer. But I do think it has to be the question.

That is, fans giving consent doesn’t make the structure not exploitative or not problematic, but asking whether they are puts the lie to the idea that this is freely chosen. That moment of recognition, of “Wait, nobody ever asked us!” is what I want, in the context of the “people can participate now and so everything is okay” discourse. Because that’s what I’m pushing back on, I have to start with the question of consent even if ultimately it can’t stop there.

Thank you for sending me this. I love your writing here and its great to see you play with the idea. So, following up on our exchange at SCMS, I’ll offer a few thoughts. I don’t work on fans, so I can’t pretend to know the nuances of Jenkins and Co., but I do think the idea of enclosing and re-enclosing the commons is an important one that links to a lot of other big ideas.

1) I love the idea of building out the enclosure because it immediately forces you to analyze what exactly the enclosure is made of, who’s in and who’s out, and why. But our productive spaces move with us now, right? The commons isn’t just a field you walk to, but something you carry in your pocket. When Deleuze talks about the move from societies of discipline to societies of control, he says the latter looks less like an enclosed prison or hospital and more like a sieve with variable mesh or a keycard that gives you access to different parts of the city, but whose privileges change constantly without your knowing. So it might be worth thinking about how we build our own enclosures, carry them with us, or otherwise have the conditions of cultural production become so mobile and flexible that all we can worry about is whether we’ve committed enough free labor to be more unique, more individual, more hip than the person next to us. The medium is key here, right? An iPhone or an Xbox or Facebook are much more enclosed, channelled spaces than a general purpose PC or a Usenet group, which could be used for lots of different things depending on the skills of the user population.

2) The increasing privatization and enclosure of public cultural commons parallels privatization and enclosure in other areas of formerly public life: political discourse, education, healthcare, prison, some aspects of childcare. With this line of critique–what the autonomist feminists call the social factory, the space where all acts of social reproduction are shaped towards exchange value, even if they’re not waged–we start to see how fan labor is of a kind with other kinds of labor. And I feel it’s helpful to recognize that what’s happening to fans shares some structural similarities with workfare recipients laboring amidst increasing surveillance of their lifestyle habits or with the push for open source academia that will supposedly save us in the face of diminishing state investment; not so that we can construct an exploitation pyramid and say one group is worse off then another, but to trace the social relations between groups that keeps this particular stage of capitalism going. Laborers of very different sorts–many of whom do not consider themselves ‘workers’, even though they’re contributing value–are being enclosed in value-producing, but stigmatizing spaces like those you describe.

Combining these two broad critiques (the individuation of control, and the breadth of the social factory) is I think what left me unsatisfied with your idea of fan consent at SCMS. Giving consent doesn’t make control go away, nor does it equalize the social relations between capitalist and worker. Marx wants us to go into (ugh I just said ‘Marx wants us…’) the hidden abode of production and see what work looks like precisely because the wage relationship (I do this work for this many dollars) looks like an exchange between consenting individuals on the outside, contrary to the actual relations in the factory. Consent is also an individualized metaphor that I think plays right into the work of the social factory, which is always about recruiting broad swathes of free or cheap labor through an appeal to individualized interests. What might community consent look like? Or might we pursue other avenues where we still get our pleasure but refuse to make it productive?

I hope we keep running into each other. This is an exciting project. Be well, and best of luck with everything!

-dan