Conceptual Analyses of Fanfiction, and Why They Don't Work

[alixtii]

So many of you, the ones who follow metafandom at least, will be familiar with the rough outline of the discussion: kradical--Keith R.A. DeCandido, the author of, among other things, the Serenity novelization (which I own but have yet to read)---made a post discussing the difference between fanfic and professional media tie-in fic in which he had the bad sense to call tie-ins "superior" (with the scare quotes) because they were a) legal and b) professionally edited. Discussion ensued, in which there was both much blowing what KRAD said wildly out of proportion and people who decided, much as they did during the SGA race discussion, that as long as the conversation was going on they might as well chime in. Which brings us to this post by liviapenn, who puts forth the challenge: "Let's make a list. Of awesome, legal, published fanfiction."

Now this post is wonderful just to see all the derivative works which have made their way into print, some which really boggle the mind, like Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So. But what I really find interesting are the places in the comments where fans question the criteria for inclusion into the list, by putting forth some defintion of their own of fanfic--their Theory of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, so to speak--and explaining how Professionally Published Work A doesn't fit into that definition of fanfic. What they're trying to do is put forth a conceptual analysis, the primary tool of "analytic philosophy," in which one attempts to sort out problematic cases. One of my professors from university (very much from the analytic tradition--he had a Ph.D. in math from Cambridge and one in Philosophy from the den of positivism known as M.I.T.) explained it like this: Everyone agrees that it is bad to boil babies and good to help old women across the street (although I must add that of course "everyone" agrees on no such thing), the trick is to tease out the essential qualities so as to address problematic cases and decide whether they fall under the concepts of "good" or "bad."

The goal is to "carve nature at the joints" which, of course, implicity assumes that nature (or at least language, as analytic philosophy has largely dumped metaphysics and epistemology in exchange for philosophy of language) has joints, that there's a clear cut place where something stops being fanfiction and starts being something else, even if no one else has managed to find it or quite agree on where it is.

The best way to point out that someone's analysis of goodness is faulty is to prove that it includes boiling babies or excludes helping old ladies across the street. (This is in contrast to, say, the deontological ethics of Kant, who would start with first principles and run with them irrespective of how ludicrous his conclusions ended up looking.) And with fanfiction, the best way to prove that a given Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not is faulty is to demonstrate that it excludes the latest McShep WIP.

The first Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not was provided in this thread, with the specific problematic case being Gregory Maguire's Wicked:

My problem, having read all of the Baum Oz books (and several but not all of his related fantasies), was twofold. I found inconsistencies in Maguire's borrowings -- I forget specifics now, but the subtleties of what he'd picked up and not picked up from the film and the first two Baum novels were decidedly odd. At the same time, I couldn't discern any sort of underlying, unifying thread in the book that used the Oz references for anything other than labeling. One could file off the serial numbers, publish the text of Wicked as an original work with original characters, and it would be the same story.

My counterexample would be Philip Jose Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz; that book I would indeed count as "Oz fanfic". I don't entirely agree with some of Farmer's creative choices, but it engaged the original stories in a way I don't think Wicked does.

[. . .]

Wicked, though -- reading it was a surreal experience. I remember stopping partway through, thinking to myself "something's funny here", and then specifically looking for some story element that would blow my theory and not finding it. I swear, it reads to me like a manuscript where the Oz serial numbers were filed on after he'd written the novel.

[. . .]

I'll note here that my comments are strictly limited to the novel; from the little I have seen and heard with respect to the stage musical, my sense is that the musical does engage with the Oz source material.

OTOH, I would be interested in reading any published comments Maguire may have made on the writing and publication of Wicked, and might revise my opinion based on such material.

Now to provide a functional definition of fanfic makes perfect sense to me (I don't agree with liviapenn when she accuses djonn of tying the definition of fanfic to issues of quality), but this definition seems particularly problematic. My problem with dividing fanfiction from "a manuscript where the [. . .] serial numbers were filed on" based on whether the work engages the source material isn't that I think the division is nonsensical, the way that I think a division between gen and het based on canonicity is nonsensical (although producing a workable account of what is and isn't "engaging with the source text" may well prove impossible). It's that it excludes a number of stories from being fanfic which aren't problematic cases--in this case, pretty much any PWP. Indeed, this type of story is so manifestly a part of fanfiction that we've coined a term for it: ATG, or "Any Two Guys/Girls." And the conclusion that these ATG PWP's aren't fanfic is a reductio ad absurdim which for me refutes djonn's entire Theory of What Fanfic Is and Isn't.

Another example can be found here, when azdak takes on the problematic case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead :

Whereas the driving impulse behind fanfic - and behind many of the works you cite, which definitely fall more squarely into the category - is love of the character(s) and/or the created world of the source text, Stoppard isn't interested in any of the Roz and Guil cast as characters. Actually, that's putting it terribly badly - he's precisely interested in them as characters, in their status as fictional beings, and in the relationship between fictional characters and actors, but he isn't interested in their internal lives at all. He isn't interested in Rosencrantz qua Rosencrantz (and one of his points is that Shaksespeare wasn't either, but unlike Shakespeare Stoppard isn't interested in Hamlet's internal life either.) Nor is he smitten by the world Hamlet inhabits, except insofar as Hamlet inhabits a theatre. Of course it's possible to come up with a broad definition of fanfic that encompasses any use of any character that also occurs outside the work in question, but then I think you run the risk of losing what is special about fanfic. It's not like one of Shakespeare's history plays and it's not like Nixon in China in ways that make it more interesting to me than the similarities do. The love, most frequently the shared love (because people do commit fanfic that never sees the light outside their underwear drawer), the obsessive love, is missing in the "derivative fic" definition.

First off, there's plenty of fanfiction which is written not out of an intense love for the source text, but out of a desire to play with it, to fix it, or just because one thought one could write it and put it down as such for yuletide. So azdak's Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not ignores the rich diversity of motives fanficcers might hold as they work their craft.

Secondly, the definition assumes that fanfic treats characters only as people and never as fictional characters. Some fics are more meta than others, but being a pretentious metafic doesn't make a fic not fanfic. Fic for Stoppard's play continues to treat Ros and Guil as fictional characters even as they slash them, because to remove that element would be to ignore sometime integral to the source text (one'd be writing Hamlet slash rather than Stoppard slash), but it's still fanfic. Most people on my flist are familiar with some of wisdomeagle's mind-blowing metafiction, and I've written a metafic or two myself.

Other Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not come off just as badly. Tying fanfic's status explicitly to copyright issue excludes not only the problematic cases but also half of yuletide as well. (OTOH, the Yuletide fics often don't rest as comfortably under our notions of fanfiction as other fics for 'thons might.) Notions of community can't unproblematically make a distinction between literary fiction and professional science fiction are also written in the context of a community (at times an overlapping one with fandom, at times not). cathexys' attempts to delineate a slash aesthetic haven't been as successful as she'd like.

I don't want to come off as claiming that Wicked or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead aren't problematic cases, or that it isn't problematic to lump Homer's The Oddessy and liz_marcs' Living History in the same category. liz_marcs' story is clearly and intuitively fanfiction in a way that Homer's isn't. But when the definition we construct to exclude Homer also ends up excluding Living History, that's a sign that the definition is fundamentally broken.

As a post-structuralist, I tend to view conceptual analyses as quaint holdovers from the days of Bertrand Russell, when it was thought that language could be made as wonderfully precise as mathematics. (It turns out mathematics ends up being as wonderfully imprecise as language.) But that isn't to deny that conceptual analyses can be great fun as logical puzzles, especially as one comes up with more and more convoluted examples to prove that under a given definition case A which intuitively falls on one side of the line in truth falls on the other. Indeed, that's why analytic philosophers are so much fun to spend time with--they always come up with the kookiest examples. (And then no one in the classroom laughs, and I'm looking around wondering if I was the only one in my Intro Phil class awake.)

Instead, I turn, as I did in the gen vs. ship debates, to the notion of genre, to the post-Wittgenstein idea that language is always-already fuzzy, and no matter how much you look you won't find uncomplicated joints in language or nature. In her defense, azdak recognizes (parenthetically) that what she puts forth may be if not "the defining quality" then "at least one of the central characteristics," but still she seems to think it to be defining enough to disqualify Stoppard's play without needing to refer to any of the other ways it is different from our core notion of what fanfiction is and does. In the end, all we have is partial truths and faulty definitions--and if you've ever looked inside a dictionary, you know that's all we ever have. Fanfiction is about engaging with the source text, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about treating characters as human beings, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about violating copyright, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about community, except when it's not. Fanfiction is written by women for women, except when it's not. Fanfiction is subversive, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about unleashing fantasies, except when it's not. Fanfiction "reads like fanfic" except when it doesn't. A fic that does many of these things will fit more comfortably under our intuitive notion of what fanfiction is then a fic which only does one of them. Some works are clearly fanfiction or clearly not fanfiction, being the fannish equivalent of baby-boiling, while some problematic cases rest in the grey areas between.

So keep on putting forth your Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, but expect me to be there, shooting holes in them, because that's my idea of a good time.

ETA: azdak continues the discussion with more on "Fanfic" as a fuzzy category.

Comments

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

okay, fun.

does someone with your point of view even try to define things? even when it's a given that they'll be fuzzy around the edges, do you try to do a definition? how does that work? or do you just notice that things have names and the names are very inexact and leave it at that? how do you ever arrive at any shared meaning, or do you?

(not being trained in any of these philosophies or critical schools, hopefully i'll understand the answer to the question? :) )

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I was born into the English language, so to speak, in the sense that I cannot remember a pre-linguistic self, a "me" which existed before things had names. As much as I can remember, things have always had names, and I used the names I already knew to get a rough idea of how new names were used, at least before I could see them in action and get used to them that way. Then I learned the names for things in other languages like French and Latin, names which sometimes worked the way the names I knew worked, but most of the time didn't.

I don't try to define things, but I'll try to do my best to explain my usage to someone who is unfamiliar with it, so then I can have a rough predictor of how I and others will use the term in the future.

Language works. Not always well, but it works. So that's sort of a starting point. The only problem is that it renders birth impossible or, to speak less gnomically, this viewpoint cannot make sense of language acquisition, it only understands language-using selves as things which appear ex nihilo (the whole schema is somewhat solipsistic).

Wittgenstein, the main theorist (if you could even apply that term to him!) upon whom I'm drawing here, produced many problematizations and questions but few answers. But he pretty much exploded the ideas that things could be clearly be defined for the remainder of 20th century philosophy.

Sometimes I notice that things have names and the names are very inexact and try to make new, exact(er) names, because it is fun to try.

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

okay, yeah, i get that -- no true universals; it's more like fractals, speaking metaphorically, where the closer you get, the fuzzier the edge gets and there's less and less way to tell where THERE starts and HERE ends... that's very clear and I've run into that before; probably even knew what to call it at one time! so thanks for that.

what about my shared meaning question? about that -- we just assume it works and lump along until we realize we're misunderstanding each other and call a time out to hash out a more precise blend of fuzziness? :).

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Ah, shared meaning. How many times did we hash that out in my Wittgenstein class? Actually, I'd be interested in hearing how other post-structuralists, particularly those coming primarily from a different perspective, would answer the question. You'd expect cathexys to be all about the shared meaning.

Practically, "assume it works and lump along until we realize we're misunderstanding each other and call a time out to hash out a more precise blend of fuzziness" sounds like it should work, and it reminds me (forgive me for totally going textbook on you, but I'm not sure of myself to do anything but retreat into my studies) of Wittgenstein's appropriation of St. Augustine's theory of language (insofar as he had one) at the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations: language is a tool we (learn as children to) use to get what we want, and when we don't get what we want we assume the tool is broken. Note this isn't really an account of shared meaning so much as a constant translation process between two foreign languages; any other sense is always-already alien to us.

It's precisely this solipsistic view of language that Wittgenstein goes on to dismantle in the Philosophical Investigations, to replace it with a notion of shared meaning. But I don't think I understand how it works--or even if it works--well enough to explain it. (Which is why they don't let undergraduates teach college, hee.)

Hmm. I once worked out Saussure for myself by doing a post called "Linguistics with Dawn and River" in which I played with images of fannish characters and thought baloons and speech balloons and tried to figure out the connection between thinking about vampires and talking about vampires. Maybe I should do the same thing with Wittgenstein.

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

no, go ahead and retreat into the formal language -- that's great by me as long as you're willing to connect the dots for me. I guess I'm just seeing how far a common sense approach to this issue will get one... I did take some philosophy as an undergraduate but that was a looooong time ago, and I read a lot... but anyway....

well, yes, as a practical matter... but we DO actually manage to communicate some higher level concepts, yes? beyond "pass the salt, please." And having never studied Wittgenstein.... see? I'm already lost. :). But that's okay; I'm used to it.

by "constant translation process" do you mean between "what I want on the inside" and "the clumsy words I use to convey my desires to the person with the salt?"

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

but we DO actually manage to communicate some higher level concepts, yes?

Maybe. We also blow a lot hot air. The (positivist) idea was originally that all of science could be understood as a complicated version of "pass the salt" and all of philosophy, religion, and art were basically hot air.

by "constant translation process" do you mean between "what I want on the inside" and "the clumsy words I use to convey my desires to the person with the salt?"

That's exactly what I mean. But it's not clear how we could represent even to ourselves what we want on the inside without those clumsy words--or at least clumsy concepts. So the idea that what we want on the inside could be understood to exist independently of the clumsy words we use to describe them fell out of favor. Instead, the idea is that we are already all enmeshed in shared language. What you need then is an error theory to describe how miscommunication takes place.

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

certainly it's fairly impossible to get inside a person's head and explain how we translate our thoughts into words; i can see how a behaviorist would not even try to presume to get in there and have a theory about that!

but without getting all metaphysical about communication and the nature of the inner life, certainly there is a lot of misunderstanding that goes on. lord knows we see it around here all the time -- I can't count how many times I've said, okay, then, back to definitions, do you mean X by this term we are both using?

i guess my idea of an error theory would be "not using the word in the same way." of course religious wars have been fought over exactly this kind of thing!

happy attempted communicating...:).

[azdak.livejournal.com]

The hardest part is figuring out how we have the thoughts in the first place! There's a certain amount of evidence as to the cognitive relationship between words and concepts(eg from aphasic patients who have coherent thoughts they want to express but constantly retrieve the wrong word from their mental lexicon - as you can imagine, it's enormously frustrating to want to say "Pass the salt" and to come out with "Bugger the fruit juice") and which areas of the brain are responsible for which parts of the process (damage in some areas makes people speak grammatically fluently but what they say is nonsense, damage to other areas buggers up the syntax but at least the individual words are correct). If you're interested at all in an empirical rather than a philosophical approach to language and the mind, I can't recommend Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct highly enough. It's totally accessible to the lay person, really well written and entertaining, very thought-provoking, and the science is spot on.

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

great rec; thank you. the whole field fascinates me, but of course i have no formal training at all, so i'm kind of in the audience clapping at the neat ideas, you know? but that can work...

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Well, ultimately the neat ideas only get us anywhere if they can be shared :-)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

i guess my idea of an error theory would be "not using the word in the same way." of course religious wars have been fought over exactly this kind of thing!

I don't think you need any complicated or deeply metaphysical philosophy of language to have this sort of error theory, though; descriptivist linguistics is perfectly capable, I think, of documenting the differences in usage between two linguistic communities as a purely empirical matter, without being caught up in issues of the possibility or lack thereof of shared meaning.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

So the idea that what we want on the inside could be understood to exist independently of the clumsy words we use to describe them fell out of favor.

It is, however, back now, at least in the field of linguistics, where such things as the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon suggest that concepts are also represented in the brain at a pre-verbal level, hence the frantic search to find that word that's on the tip of your tongue that expresses what you want to say.