Phish Phan Culture and Anti-Oedipus Politics

• In Event: The Monstrous Other: Exploring the Intersections of Youth Culture and Critical Pedagogy in a Monster-Making World

Abstract

This paper explores youth fan sub-culture(s) as sites of resistance to and subversion of “normalizing” forms of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1995), and thus potentially as sites for the radical democratic politicization of youthful discontent. Hip hop provides perhaps the most studied example of a youthful sub-culture that at least in some forms has been a force for a politicization of discontent, particularly in linking poor, inner-city youth to racial and class politics (Dimitriadis, 2009; Prier, in press). What about white middle class and working class youth—particularly males--who are relatively more privileged? What space does rock culture provide for politicizing their discontents in ways that are potentially counter-hegemonic? The evidence presented in this paper is from a discourse analysis of approximately 40 narratives written by fans of the jam rock band, Phish. The following narrative themes emerged as potentially counter-hegemonic: (1) opposition to “hegemonic masculinities” (Connell, 2005) organized around the objectification of women, competitiveness, and aggression; (2) resistance to a highly-commercialized construction of self in terms of style consciousness and desire for “products”; and (3) resistance to prescriptive and disciplinary performances of self and the corresponding affirmation of the self as improvisational and constructed within a community of equals (Blau, 2007). I argue, drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari (1983), that while Phish fan culture offers a counter-space of resistance that is potentially transformative, it is for the most part a “reactive” space, constructed in the mirror of the dominant culture and thus not really an alternative to it but rather part of its construction—as a space of “carnival,” (Bakhtin, 1941) in an otherwise routine and even alienating world. At the same time, carnival offers a space to turn everything on its head and contest all established truths. By turning a carnivalesque gaze back on the dominant culture, youth culture threatens to politicize the Oedipal rebellion against the “father” in ways that cannot be fully contained.

Author

• Dennis L. Carlson, Miami University - Oxford