Joyrich references the insistence of this connection explicitly, writing that “current debates over the text and audience have made the intellectual’s relationship to television a point of contention, thus demanding that critics place themselves in regard to their objects of study” (RR 14). That is to say, despite my assessment above, certainly television studies has tentatively ventured further into the borderlands between critic and fan (along with so many others) than most other academic disciplines. Doty, for one, often articulates his own viewing position as a “feminine gay man” in his book (e.g. 43). The fact that TV studies even begins to wrestle with this precarious issue attests to the way television itself continually puts it forward. In Joyrich’s experience,
what had started off as two separate proceedings — on the one hand, an intellectual concern with critical and cultural theory, and on the other, my own television viewing — came to seem more and more intertwined. To some degree, this is symptomatic of the ‘nature’ of U.S. commercial television, whose commodified time flow and institutionalized textual structure (perpetual and continuous yet segmented and ‘interruptible’) encourage a spillage from TV to the texts of ‘daily life’ (RR 14)
While this statement outlines one manner in which the boundary transgressions of TV conspire to compromise the critic/fan boundary in TV studies as well, Amelie Hastie suggests that certain epistemological affinities between the logics at these multiple levels may also contribute to this effect — hence, we move back toward the figure of the detective.
In “The Epistemological Stakes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Hastie calls attention to the “inherent overlap between consumerist and epistemological economies present both in television itself and in television criticism” (29). She notes that Buffy explicitly thematizes the search for knowledge by including research, historical information, and “watching” as characteristic plot points. By absorbing this focus, fans “are trained in epistemological viewing practices” (19), indoctrinated into “a desire for and production of knowledge” (16) and a “historical consciousness” that works against “the ephemeral nature of television itself” (2) (e.g. its “liveness” or present tense, an effect of ongoing episodic series; its resistance to archivability). In this interpretation, “Viewing is thus a process in which one comes to know... this epistemological process is explicitly formed through a relation to television itself” (22). Show tie-ins (whether in the form of commercial merchandise or fan productions), then, capitalize on viewership’s coupling of desire and pleasure with the project of investigation to promote a realm of supplementary texts that drive and are driven by TV as a consumerist medium. At the same time, “This production of a knowing fan and an investment in knowledge — by both the series and its ancillary texts — naturally links Buffy to the work of the critic” (24). If, in the consumer logics of television itself, the desire to watch is linked with the desire to know, than it’s also true that “Television criticism depends upon consumption... the [academic] ‘I’ is also the ‘she’ who watches this series with some pleasure: the pleasure derived from the text itself, the pleasure derived from criticism” (25). In other words, Hastie’s analysis supplies an invaluable framework for my own by theorizing the practices of onscreen, audience, and intellectual detectives as congruent and interdependent, shaped by corresponding investments in epistemology and consumption as interlocking modes of engagement.
