One of cultural studies’ preoccupations—and really, this goes without saying—is the audience. Works as early as Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) emphasized the value of asking what readers do with what they read (or listeners with what they hear, or viewers with what they see), rather than presuming to deduce their reactions from the texts themselves. From Hoggart to the CCCS to encoding/decoding to the Nationwide project to textual poaching to acafandom to spreadability—the through-line is clear.

In this context, I want to ask a pointed question about aesthetics. I have been teaching a graduate seminar this semester on production culture and aesthetics, a topic that was inspired in part by Shawn VanCour’s excellent Antenna post on the aesthetic turn in media studies. He argues for “the value of a specifically production-oriented approach,” and although I agree, I was more struck by his description of how the media effects researchers from radio’s early years were asking questions about aesthetics. They were concerned with media’s experiential dimensions, and thus they brought “aesthetics” back to its Greek roots (it derives from αἰσθάνομαι, which refers to perception or experience).

Indeed, this question of experience is not new. Aristotle posed it in his Poetics, where he was concerned with tragedy’s ability to lead an audience to a point of catharsis. Rudolf Arnheim posed it in his book on radio, where he asked about the psychology of the listener, whom he assumed to be passive. David Bordwell posed it in the first section of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, where he proposed that people watching a film make and test a series of hypotheses as a way to make sense of its plot and structure. This list is far from complete—in fact, it’s really just a reflection of the syllabus from my media aesthetics seminar.

But there is at least one aspect of this experiential dimension that cultural studies scholars have largely neglected. It seems to me (and I’m hedging for a reason) that part of our experience of a media object exists prior to and outside of language. Let’s call it a “gut reaction,” but let’s take that metaphor at face value—it’s a moment when our body registers a response that we can’t quite capture in words. Language here does both too little and too much—too little in that we don’t have words to describe what we feel in our gut (at least not completely), and too much in that the words we do have always mean more than we intend. (When we use a word, we must account for how the people we are responding to used it, just as that they accounted for its prior uses. The effect is additive: words accumulate meaning in ways beyond any individual’s control.) We must translate from our gut to our mind (that is, from raw experience to an account that’s mediated by language) and we lose something in the translation.

So why do I hedge above? Why “it seems to me”? Even my assertion that we experience media this way is subject to the double bind of language, its simultaneous deficiency and excess. This is an idea we can intuit, but—it seems to me—we can’t describe it without denaturing the experience itself. So what is the analytical value of this intuition? Are there ways to observe this experience directly or indirectly? What insight can it provide into the broader range of phenomena related to audiences? What insight can it provide into the moment of production VanCour highlights? Finally, what does cultural studies stand to gain from examining the aesthetic experience of the media?

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I’d like to invite other Antenna contributors to continue this discussion. I’ve contacted a handful of potential contributors already, but I want to extend the invitation more broadly. If you are interested, please feel free to email me (conway dot kyle at gmail dot com) or the editors. You needn’t respond to the questions I’ve posed here, although I’d love to hear others’ thoughts. I’m eager to encourage as rich and wide-ranging a discussion as possible.

So when the larger issue turned out to be the toxicity of the word acafandom? I was not thrilled. Even before the workshop, I realized that not all was well (or at least that all was not as I had anticipated). Encouraging all four participants to write and exchange provocations (which you can read here), I was faced with Jonathan’s Gray’s call to abolish the term acafan altogether. More unsettling to me, the workshop quickly turned to the term and its apparent toxicity. I joked that I did not want to have created the workshop that killed the term acafandom, and this joke (while getting the largest laugh I’ve ever received at a conference) quickly found an afterlife on twitter, where fellow scholars seconded and thirded the motion to kill acafandom.  And for those not present, this wasn’t a hostile crowd. In fact, many if not most of the audience were friends and fellow fan studies scholars–acafans, I would have even said.

So what has happened to this term, coined only a decade ago, that has since been used to assert a complicated subject position that a) rejects the pretense of objective outside observation and b) acknowledges the role of affect in academic work? In particular, my definition may be broader than many: I take a wide definition both of the academic and the fan side, i.e., acafan includes academics studying fannish objects or cultures and fan can define a wide variety of audience engagements.

I understand and in many ways share the concerns and ambivalences of my fellow workshop participants. I’ve addressed those concerns at greater length at my blog. But in shorter form (well, slightly shorter form) here I want to assert not only the value of the word acafan but the reason we cannot afford to just walk away from the word. I do not think we should throw out a term simply because it has become complicated. In fact, I want to suggest that its loaded nature is one of the key reasons we should continue to engage the term, to probe its internal contradictions and the discomforts those contradictions trigger.

But mostly, I don’t feel we really have the option to walk away from the word. Acafan, taken any which you want, means a merger of fan and academic. If we step away from it we’re disavowing the reality and responsibility of our dual (or multiple) subjectivities as scholars and participants in media culture. I don’t believe that acafandom should be a subdiscipline—but I do believe it is a state of engagement with media and media studies, one that’s necessarily unstable and messy and that requires that we engage in a constant self-reflexive conversation with our object of study. As I argue more fully at my blog, the acafan position is to me inherently feminist. This does not mean that it’s focused on issues of gender only, but rather that acafandom necessarily merges the professional and the personal in ways that remain taboo. The word acafan describes a position that crosses boundaries but unites self-reflexive scholars willing to engage with affect. Letting go of the word acafandom means potentially isolating ourselves as scholars and reinscribing the need to hide from the norms of so-called “objective” academia. Holding on to the term gives us a connective web through which we can hopefully access larger insights found in the messy overlap between objective and subjective knowledge.