The Discreet Charm of Swiftology

Introduction Should celebrities be more aware of their influence on people? Should they conduct an impeccable life insofar they are role models? Should they actively engage in politics? I find those questions annoying, even though the power dynamic of any celebrity/audience relationship matters. Still, the normative undertone of those formulations repels me. Who are they, superstars, to tell ordinary mortals what to do? And who are we, common folks, to impose our expectations upon famous individuals? Interestingly, I usually find a similar tension when discussing these themes within academic circles. Psychologists, sociologists and literary critics deploy their hypotheses, interpretations, and suggestions with a subtle normative taste behind the attitude of “a lucid and vigilant thinker” (Felski). I want to reprise the question: who are we, social scientists, to indicate what people—either common or famous—ought to think, feel and do? In this piece, I want to tackle this tension by examining a particular case: namely, how Swifties understand and respond to Taylor Swift’s ambiguous political profile. To avoid adding more prescriptions to the already moralistic discussion, I shall abstain from doing a political analysis. Rather, I will stress the affective implications of such ambiguity, which usually amounts to some identitarian confusion among social scientists and fans. Perhaps the way we study Swifties reveals more about ourselves than about them. Since my training has been in psychology and the history of science, my interest is not to take at face value what fan studies’ scholars could say about Swifties. I am more intrigued by how sociological theories have proposed diverse conceptualisations of mass phenomena over time and how fan studies could benefit from a tighter engagement with affect studies. It is possible that over-stressing the political behaviour of celebrities and audiences has turned us blind to the essence of fandom: specialised aesthetic enjoyment. In this sense, ‘Swiftology’ should not be understood as a ‘proper method’ or even as the ‘application’ of a theoretical framework to Swift’s persona or Swifties, but rather as the explicit articulation of how the latter take an active interest in exploring and reshaping the array of meanings and affects surrounding the former. Swiftmania Despite the fact that Taylor Swift as a cultural phenomenon is ubiquitous, her political profile is quite vague. Her country music origins might hint at a stereotypical Southern lifestyle, but the feminist and LGBTQ+ lyrics of her later albums suggest otherwise (Donovan). The frequent topics of romantic breakups and revenge fantasies may indicate a childish character, but her massive success in public relations, awards, and finances reveals an accomplished businesswoman (Théberge). Swift was firstly apolitical, which elicited commentaries about her being a passive banner for white Americanism. Her recurrent victimhood stance amid celebrity feuds has also been denounced as a sign of a lack of political awareness (Cullen). In recent years she has started to slowly display sympathy to the Democrat Party at domestic elections. Still, left-wing journalists have argued that her activism is merely performative, since she remains silent about crucial issues such as the ecological crisis and the Israel-Palestinian conflict (Medford). We can either pity Swift for being under such strict scrutiny or delight ourselves in pointing out her contradictions (Franssen). Anyhow, I wonder if this vagueness is an indicator of something else worth exploring. Counter-intuitively, Swift’s political ambiguity does not harm her popularity, but quite the opposite! As Jamieson Webster puts it, Swifties “get the whole thing … , you get to be the outcast, and you get to be the bitch, and you get to be the winner, and you get to be the loser”. Swift seems to successfully craft a wide spectrum of emotionally-charged experiences in each record, in which her imperfections resonate with her fandom’s humanity. Unlike previous female popstars, Swift’s persona is built upon an ongoing reconstruction of her own self (Canavan and McCamley). And this is precisely what Swifties enjoy the most. This fandom—which amounts to 53 per cent of adults in the USA (Blancaflor and Briggs)—is highly loyal and interactive. Not only do Swifties fiercely defend her, but they also share a net of symbols, themes, inside jokes, easter eggs, and deep-cut knowledge of her music catalogue (Ledbetter). Certainly, there are other groups more cohesive and politically active—i.e., Potterheads or K-pop fans. Still, what I find unique about Swifties is the way they engage with her icon’s equivocality and make something out of it (Driessen). Shifts in Social Theory Let us take a brief detour to the history of sociology to understand the multiple ways that mass phenomena have been portrayed. Albeit Auguste Comte is commonly regarded as the father of sociology; his writings have fallen into oblivion. Karl Marx, on the contrary, produced a body of work that is still discussed today. His grave contains the famous phrase: “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” (Marx and Engels, 199). He argued that social scientists should explore the material foundations of any society and strive for the dialectical progress of class struggle. The proletariat is said to be alienated by bourgeois ideology, which legitimised the worker’s precarious life by appealing to State law and economic theories. In this sense, social analysis ought to be aimed to awaken the masses so they could regain the profit of their labour, expropriate the means of production, and take down capitalist governments. In short, social scientists should demystify the apparently natural order and participate in the emancipation of the oppressed. These ideas are pretty much still alive in the works of post-structuralist philosophers such as Foucault or Derrida. However, this perspective was challenged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gustave Le Bon published his seminal The Crowd, where he explicitly stated that masses operated according an “inferior reasoning” (54) when compared to individual judgement. Furthermore, the lack of discernment was seen as a prerequisite to any gathering, rather than being the harmful effect of alienation. Le Bon influenced Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. The former described the leader-mass relationship as analogous to hypnosis, while the latter stressed the paranoid nature of political governance. In any case, the moral of this new conceptualisation is clear: people are unfit to rule themselves, therefore a ruling group will always be necessary. Fascism in Europe seemed to verify this idea, and the eventual decay of the Soviet Union was regarded as the failure of Marxism. According to this point of view, instead of trying to liberate the masses, social scientists should try to help them to elect a non-dictatorial leader who could be held accountable by democratic institutions. Something along these lines can be found in the conjoint work of Nussbaum and Sen. But social theory changed again recently. Neoliberalism has put individual agency at the forefront and has questioned the determinism of social factors. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous remark ‘there is no such thing as society’ gave way to heated debates about the ontological status of ‘Society’. Disenchanted with Marx’s emphasis on economy and Freud’s psychological approach, sociologists began to appeal to ecology, searching for a more tangible understanding of the individual’s exchange with its surroundings. G. Evelyn Hutchinson and E.O. Wilson studied how organisms compete for available resources within a quasi-closed habitat. It is a common trope in philosophy, following Nietzsche’s critique of Darwinism as an unwarranted form of Malthusianism, to stress the alliance between Neoliberalism and Social Darwinism (Midgley). Certainly, this later shift in sociology risks reinforcing the inequities of capitalism. However, when one gets a closer look to Hutchinson’s and Wilson’s writings, one does not find an apology for the survival of the fittest, but rather a detailed analysis of the coordinated effort of distinct species to maintain the habitat’s balance. Although the concept of niche aroused confusion at first, sociobiology is becoming one of the leading paradigms in contemporary social sciences. Fortunately, ecology is not the handmaid of economy, so sociologist can retain their ‘critical edge’ and still reconsider their dated epistemological assumptions (Charbonnier). Thus, current social theory ceased to worry about shapeless masses and started exploring circumscribed niches (Langton). Without this theoretical shift fandom studies probably could not have emerged as a research field. First, niche theory restores rationality to small communities but confines their agency to their respective milieux. If various individuals coming from different niches were to mingle, their specific expertise would be blurred. Second, fan studies are more interested in the inner politics of fandom—debates in the blogosphere, coordination for assisting live events, bracelet exchange, gatekeeping, etc.—than the activism related to external issues. For instance, it is fairly insignificant to study whether or not fans are registered voters if one fails to understand the democratic behaviour deployed among themselves (Nisbett and Schartel Dunn). Third, and most importantly, the focus on local interactions has made fandom studies more sensible to the role of nonhumans and affect in the constant weaving of the social fabric (Chin). To consume merchandise, music or concert souvenirs is not merely an economic gesture, since it entails a complex array of emotions that could lead to the “enchantment of modern life”, to borrow Jane Bennett’s expression. As a consequence of the previous points, many scholars in the field have left behind the old pretensions of being legislators of society and have openly admitted their own fandom (Cappa). Swiftie Sociology Must Swift’s vagueness be regarded as problematic or might it be turned into a topic of inquiry? Remarkably, Swifties seem to deal with nuances and paradoxes better than social scientists. While Arnold is perplexed by a “conundrum at the heart of Swift’s world … between the gender-related content of her songs and her onstage persona” (32), and Zafina and Sinha declare suspicion about the devices through which Swift “maintains such a close parasocial relationship with her fans” (12), a quick overview to online communities—for instance, the r/TaylorSwift subreddit community—reveals that fans assimilate these contradictions quite easily. Is it not a core problem of feminism, the conciliation of femininity and the empowering of women, anyway? And is it not an essential feature of digital media, the collision of manufactured artifices and the exposure of authenticity? It would be misleading to vindicate Swift by appealing to her fallible humanity or to suggest that Swifties cannot see those incongruities due to their lack of political awareness. Actually, when scholars frame the discussion in these terms, they are evoking dated social theories. Why should we, after all, expect fans to scrutinise celebrities with the kind of suspicion we have cultivated in academia? Moreover, despite the truism that celebrities influence people’s behaviour, fans do not need the assistance of sociology to tell the difference between inspiring and detrimental leaders. For instance, there is a conspiracy theory about Swift being the reincarnation of former satanist Zeena LaVey. It is uncanny that besides this wild fantasy there are many journalists and social scientists believing that Swift is a wolf dressed as sheep, fooling her fans. In the venomous words of Latour, “at this point, critical sociology becomes indistinguishable from conspiracy theory, that is, a hybrid of the two most extreme forms of scepticism and gullibility” (49). To embrace niche theory amounts to entering the ‘Taylor-verse’ to explore how Swift’s ambiguity is turned into a productive tension through the collaborative effort of fans deciphering easter hidden meanings, proposing novel interpretations, and reshaping established thematic threads. By definition, a social niche is more than the summary of the behaviour of individuals, since it entails the proliferation of self-organising rules and resources (Saltz et al.). Notably, some fan studies researchers have already taken this direction, providing thick descriptions of their dwelling in online fora, semiotic analysis of Swift’s video-clips, and conducting in-depth interviews with long-time Swifties. First, Chittenden explored the early records of Swift and noted a curious transition between a juvenile desire to grow up and a prospective memory of events that have not yet taken place. This “nostalgic in reverse” (192) is pivotal for the identification of many Swifties, who use Taylor’s confessional lyrics as surrogate for their own expectations about romance, jobs, and adult friendships. Second, McGrath examined the mythologies evoked by folklore and evermore, twin-sister records produced during the COVID pandemic. The tropes of the solitary artist retreating to a “misty wilderness”, returning to “vintage, analogous craft-work”, and evoking the “Arcadian contact with nature” are not only index of the lock-down experience, but signals the pervasive presence of southern goth themes and escapism longings all over the Taylor-verse (77). Third, Morris pointed out to the interactive role of the ‘girl bedroom’, both as a space frequently referenced in lyrics and as a canvas where Swifties experiment with rabbit holes of fan-art and easter eggs. Here nostalgia is present in the form of “isolated individuality”, yet it also offers the possibility of the “reinvention of gender and sexuality” for fans (82). This is, perhaps, the discreet charm of Swiftology. Political vagueness is not a sign of inconsistency or brain-washing, but the necessary condition for an aesthetic milieu to meld the past, present, and future, allowing fans to remember and reinvent themselves. Yes, we could insist on the old-fashioned sociological analysis and argue (rightly so, besides) that the Taylor-verse is filled with backwardness symbols and reactionary rhetoric, akin to both the current landscape of Neoliberalism and the mythical origins of rural America. But I find far more interesting how Swifties have developed a peculiar taste for nostalgia, a form of socialisation that transgresses conventional classifications, and intricate memory rituals—i.e., karaoke parties, amateur tier-listing, etc. As I hope to have shown, fan studies can benefit immensely from sociobiology and affect studies. The issue at stake is not to celebrate or condemn Swift and her followers, but to redirect the glow emanating from their highly specific milieu to illuminate our global matters of concerns—such as the anxiety surrounding global warming, the hyper-vigilance reinforced by digital technology, or the emergence of new committed communities in the twentieth-first century. To use ethnomethodology’s lingo, we should ask ourselves if we believe that sociology is the monopoly of social science, or if social theory can be a collective enterprise; if Swifties must play the role of the ‘cultural dope’—the cliché existing solely in the sociologist imagination—or if we can grant them innovative agency. In short, should we sociologise the Swifties or could we become Swiftised sociologists? References Arnold, Gina. “I Don’t Give a Damn about Your Bad Reputation: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé Knowles, and Performance.” Contemporary Music Review 40.1 (2021): 27–40. . Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2001. Blancaflor, Saleah, and Ellyn Briggs. “A Demographic Deep Dive into the Taylor Swift Fandom.” Morning Consult Pro, 14 Mar. 2023. . Canavan, Brendan, and Claire McCamley. “The Passing of the Postmodern in Pop? Epochal Consumption and Marketing from Madonna, through Gaga, to Taylor.” Journal of Business Research 107 (2020): 222–30. . 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