Is Bowie our Kierkegaard? : A theory of Agency in Fandom

ABSTRACT

Are fans just followers? Many psychological theories about the star-fan bond position it as a kind of pathology and so undercut fan agency. Conversely, Identity theorists often posit the fan as hacker: though this grants fans considerable agency it arguably does not describe all fan bonds nor agency itself. Before supplementing these theories with an existential account of fan agency, I suggest that any useful account should accomplish a series of tasks. First it should contribute to explaining the allure of a star, the needs of a fan, and the uses to which the star is put in the fan's life. It should also help distinguish the unity and variety among a star's works while also helping reveal larger 'stages' in the star's career. Arguably it should help us make distinctions among the types of stars, fandoms, and artistic genres.

I use the polyphonic stardom of David Bowie to illustrate how celebrity serves different ‘navigational functions’ for fans (Mendes & Perrott, 2019). From his early work (marked by strategies for increasing existential possibility) to his last two albums and his video for Blackstar (2015) (where he dragged necessity into the light), Bowie utilized many of Soren Kierkegaard's existential strategies. Like Kierkegaard's, Bowie's stardom is carefully designed to not be a singular signpost allowing all fans to reach one destination through imitation but instead increases fan agency while letting different fans steer towards different self-narrating goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Bowie
• Blackstar
• celebrity
• Kierkegaard
• necessity
• existentialism
• psychomachia

Acknowledgments

This essay is dedicated to the memory of the remarkable and remarkably-generous Bernard Williams. Sincere thanks to both Lisa Perrott and Ana Cristina Mendes for their focused editing and generous help clarifying this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A useful overview of these psychiatric approaches is provided by Sansone and Sansone (2014).

2. Identity theorists grant fans agency, sometimes by conceiving of the fan as hacker, but this arguably does not fit many fans and is also just an assumption, rather than an account, of fan agency. Consider how Cinque & Redmond (2016) movingly document how refugee fans used David Bowie’s stardom as a means of identity construction without, however, offering a theory of agency itself.

3. The terms are discussed in The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard 2013) in many passages such as ‘possibility and necessity are equally essential to becoming’ (p. 148).

4. Judith Butler’s model of agency is to me somewhat harder to discern: it seems influenced by Foucault who denies human agency.

5. For an analysis of the social background as a nexus of shared social necessity, consider Plan C’s trenchant analysis ‘We Are All Very Anxious’ at https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/.

6. Das Man is usually translated as ‘The they’ or ‘The One’, in the sense of the phrase ‘One simply does not do such things’. Heidegger opposed Das Man to Dasein, to authentic existence, and noted that ‘The “they” prescribes one’s state-of-mind, and determines what and how one “sees”’ (1962, p. 213). Das Man weighs you down with an accepted, inherited sense of self, and disguises this as your own necessity – when it reigns, no other way seems open. We might describe it as ‘Surplus Necessity’, to relate it to Marcuse’s concept of ‘Surplus Repression’ (Marcuse 1955, p. 37) and to emphasize how it falsely presents itself in the social realm as having the same unquestionable reality as the basic necessities that Marx detailed.

7. ‘David Bowie: Blackstar review – a spellbinding break with his past’ by Alexis Petradis in

The Guardian, January 7 January 2015. See https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/07/david-bowie-blackstar-review-a-spellbinding-break-with-his-past, accessed June 5June 2018.

8. Praised in its time as highly inventive, in 2004 Rolling Stone magazine ranked SFF as the 76th greatest song of all time. See also Stevens, 2002 for some interesting insights into the song.

9. These associations have been reinforced by the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another surrealist science fiction Dantean psychomachia which, like ‘Blackstar’, used memory and allegory to stage a surreal existential drama about handing over one’s soul to an authority figure in order to escape the pain of existence.

10. In http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-inside-story-of-david-bowies-stunning-new-album-blackstar-20151123?page=2.

11. For other examples see D’Adamo 2018.

12. See D’Adamo 2015 for an extended analysis of ‘Young Americans’.

13. Bowie’s co-star was cast for her resemblance to Coco, who had refused Bowie’s request to be in the video. See https://www.tonyoursler.space/putting-video-to-david-bowies-music-a-conversation-with-artist-tony-oursler-by-juan-jose-santos/ Others have pointed out that the phrase ‘Song of Norway’ on his T-shirt refers to Hermione Farthingale, another lost love of Bowie’s who left him in 1969 to be in a film entitled Song of Norway. See https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/david-bowie-has-gone-from-new-to-old-and-what-a-beautiful-thing-it-is-8443239.html. While using the machinery of empathy like this is a very common technique for other stars, its use is essentially missing in Bowie’s work from his song ‘Kooks’ (1971) until this video.

14. See D’Adamo 2015 for an account of Bowie’s own view of the collapse of the ethical and communal possibilities of folk, rock and pop.

15. Again, see his interview on The Dick Cavett Show, December 4December 1974.

16. His interview on the Dick Cavett Show on December 4December 1974 is an exemplary case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=k2yLbxW4k-w, accessed June 8June 2018.

17. See also Flannery 2017 to consider the underlying reason for the meta-machia structures of the star biopics I’m Not There and Velvet Goldmine.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amedeo D’Adamo

Amedeo D’Adamo The founding Dean and then President of the Los Angeles Film School, Amedeo D’Adamo was also the director of the E.U.-funded screenwriting program Puglia Experience (2008–2011). His theoretical work concerns the ways nationalism, racism and forms of idealism are encoded in culture. His book Empathetic Space On Screen: Crafting Powerful Place and Setting (2018, Palgrave) examines how character and alienation are expressed in narrative space through production design, cinematography and music as well as the social implications resulting from those craft practices. A filmmaker, his features have been to festivals such as Rome, Miami, Austin, Torino and others.