More Thesis Thoughts
Mar. 16th, 2006 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiI read Kendall Walton's Mimesis As Make-Believe over Christmas break, but it was simply too large to connect my thoughts on fandom. Here's a more manageable secondary souce (Feeling in Imagination" by Richard Moran) I am now reading as I consider the nature of satire (why isn't Nineteen Eighty-Four triumphant?):
The implication here is that while I could perhaps desire Eliza Dushku or Iyari Limon or Michelle Trachtenberg, I only "quasi-desire" or "fictionally desire" Faith or Kennedy or Dawn as a move in a game. I could desire Dawn Summers in the way that I could desire Iyari Limon (but don't, since I've never met her), but such desire would probably not be completely healthy. This strikes me as correct (although I have doubts about Watson's schema as a whole). Fictional desire isn't the same thing as normal desire. If Faith or Kennedy or Dawn were to walk in my door right now, what would my reaction be? "Sorry, I have girlfriend"? Possibly I'd say that to Kennedy, but I'd probably be turned off by Faith's anti-intellectualism. I'd be repulsed by my Watcher!Dawn's monstrous nature iff she were a real person. But even though I have no real desire at this moment for anyone but my girlfriend, I enjoy immensely playing the game as if I did. To put it in Watson's terms, I desire my fictional desiring.
This sort of desire, then, is constituted within a fictional "game" with a TV series as a prop. In light of this, my turn as a het male to femslash makes perfect sense. Since the desire I (pretend to) feel for a fictional character is constituted wholly in the context of a fictional game, it is never truly mine. It is just as easy to hand it off to another fictional character (who already resides in the world of the object of fictional desire). Since I identify most strongly with the female characters (for whatever reason) I pick a female as my avatar, and thus femslash.
It is also important to remember that I am not the only player in this fictional game (or games). Watson describes multiplayer fictional games extending from children's makebelieve to the more sophisticated sort of make believe that occurs when actors play characters in front of a present audience. But the type of community play that we've instituted in ou fanfiction circles is, I think, very special.After all, it is ultimately you guys who make the game so much fun to play.
That said, I'm not 100% certain about the usefulness of these conceptual categories. If someone is reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
secretary_fic one-handed, what sense does it really make to call the desire which they are feeling merely "fictional"? Is that really only a "quasi-desire"? And what about when we use real people (for whatever value of "real") as props in our fictional games. I don't see anything wrong with that, but I can just see a man explaining to his wife, on being caught checking out a much younger woman: "I was only pretending to desire her!"*
*But this distinction strikes me as quite reasonable, however much the wife might not accept it. I can enjoy pretending to desire characters both real and fictional to whom I am not actually sexually attracted, after all, for whatever reason (too young, too old, wrong gender, unattractive, whatever). And my fictional desire may be of a nature (incest, chan, noncon, BDSM, whatever) not applicable to my actual desire. Or so I tell myself.
[T]o be afraid you must think you are in danger, and yet you seem to be stricken with fear. [. . . O]ne is experiencing what [Watson] calls quasi-fear, pretending really to be afraid, as part of a game of make-believe in which the movie or story is a prop.
The implication here is that while I could perhaps desire Eliza Dushku or Iyari Limon or Michelle Trachtenberg, I only "quasi-desire" or "fictionally desire" Faith or Kennedy or Dawn as a move in a game. I could desire Dawn Summers in the way that I could desire Iyari Limon (but don't, since I've never met her), but such desire would probably not be completely healthy. This strikes me as correct (although I have doubts about Watson's schema as a whole). Fictional desire isn't the same thing as normal desire. If Faith or Kennedy or Dawn were to walk in my door right now, what would my reaction be? "Sorry, I have girlfriend"? Possibly I'd say that to Kennedy, but I'd probably be turned off by Faith's anti-intellectualism. I'd be repulsed by my Watcher!Dawn's monstrous nature iff she were a real person. But even though I have no real desire at this moment for anyone but my girlfriend, I enjoy immensely playing the game as if I did. To put it in Watson's terms, I desire my fictional desiring.
This sort of desire, then, is constituted within a fictional "game" with a TV series as a prop. In light of this, my turn as a het male to femslash makes perfect sense. Since the desire I (pretend to) feel for a fictional character is constituted wholly in the context of a fictional game, it is never truly mine. It is just as easy to hand it off to another fictional character (who already resides in the world of the object of fictional desire). Since I identify most strongly with the female characters (for whatever reason) I pick a female as my avatar, and thus femslash.
It is also important to remember that I am not the only player in this fictional game (or games). Watson describes multiplayer fictional games extending from children's makebelieve to the more sophisticated sort of make believe that occurs when actors play characters in front of a present audience. But the type of community play that we've instituted in ou fanfiction circles is, I think, very special.After all, it is ultimately you guys who make the game so much fun to play.
That said, I'm not 100% certain about the usefulness of these conceptual categories. If someone is reading
secretary_fic one-handed, what sense does it really make to call the desire which they are feeling merely "fictional"? Is that really only a "quasi-desire"? And what about when we use real people (for whatever value of "real") as props in our fictional games. I don't see anything wrong with that, but I can just see a man explaining to his wife, on being caught checking out a much younger woman: "I was only pretending to desire her!"**But this distinction strikes me as quite reasonable, however much the wife might not accept it. I can enjoy pretending to desire characters both real and fictional to whom I am not actually sexually attracted, after all, for whatever reason (too young, too old, wrong gender, unattractive, whatever). And my fictional desire may be of a nature (incest, chan, noncon, BDSM, whatever) not applicable to my actual desire. Or so I tell myself.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-18 04:29 pm (UTC)But the... the point of desire for me is not its satiation but the desire itself. I guess I think of the actual scenario around which my desire is focused as less important or significant as my desiring of it.
Certainly. We desire desire. But this is so counterintuitive and weird!
Hmm! I wonder if I feel fannish desire or not. In some ways fandom is for me the natural culmination of a lifetime of storytelling about the people I desire or love, while right at this moment I feel curiously detached from my fannish loves. (This might just be my mood. Ask me again in six months and I suspect I'll have changed my tune! Heck, ask me when I've stopped engaging in HPdom and started engaging in the Buffyverse again!
Wel, you certainly help to bring out the fannish love in others and help us to engage in fannish desire (whatever it is) so I do hope you feel the love again. (Then again, I'm pulling back to due to the thesis. But that's sort of balanced out because I have a shiny new fandom love: Veronica Mars.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 01:42 am (UTC)Meta-emotions! Desiring desire, enjoying desire... but also enjoying sadness, or anger. (We can also have negative reactions to negative emotions, of course, but I think the positive emotions are more interesting to contemplate.) We can do these things! There is some "higher" level process that can examine and evaluate emotions and then can itself feel a certain way about them.
(I think an analogy can be drawn to physical desire... in some ways arousal is just desire-for-orgasm, but that doesn't mean arousal itself isn't pleasurable.
Yay, VMars!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 03:05 am (UTC)Hmm, yes about desire for orgasm. But that desire is real--we can enjoy the act of desiring, but we (I have no idea who "we" are here) also want the orgasm. But some of these other cases don't seem to be on that pattern.
And yes, yay VMars indeed!