The Arc of Truth

Watching Stargate with the commentary tracks on has led me to consider the nature of plotting narrative over a long serial text. The idea of an "arc" is of particular interest--why such mathematical a term? Should stories really be "plottable"? What would a graph of a series actually look like? What about the financial, production-controlled aspects of a serial narrative?
Given the right information, could a television writer use the desires and narrative conventions of fandom to better control an audience? Do we really want fans writing our canon stories (yes, I'm still angry at Russell T Davies. But Martin Gero, this is for you, too).

Pendulum

This isn't the story he wants to tell
he makes her fall, cloying sweetness gone,
he makes her fly, volition lost in plumbing depths
that plumb three years later, carrying her closer to Xeno's mark

He shapes the world with steep arcs
smooth sines dipping below to break the zero line
he threw her down to this cupped pit to ride the curve
to cushion the rough universe plotted hastily against blue grid squares.

Drabble

Or, Amy Tries to Cope with Torchwood: Children of Earth

He doesn’t try to fix it, for once. He stands there and lets time wash over him and space move around him. And still he is not still, but hurtling around the sun as the rest of us flip our daily coins: to be or not to be? And the odds are always the same, anyway, half and half, maybe a little less, if you’ve got a nickel with the thick raised head of what’s-his-name. He lets the coins drop without tossing his own or tripping over all the spare change rolling around. All the day you’ll have good luck.

RUSSELL!

The Rhetoric of Fan Studies: PCA/ACA 2009, Draft 1

The Popular and the Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan studies (v2.2) Comments welcome!

Popular and Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan Studies
Presented at PCA/ACA National Conference 2009
April 9, 2009
New Orleans, LA

I hid in the closet of fandom for years. My Master's degree was survived mainly by secretive late night forays into fic and vid and art and dubs--consuming fanworks to relax after Derrida. But why did I have to be so secretive? Fandom has always had some social stigma, perhaps best exemplified by the Simpson's character Comic Book Guy: a fat slob living at home, sad and lonely, too immersed in his fantasy worlds to attempt the performance of Normal that the rest of us partake in. Today I want to talk about that stigma, how it appears in academic conversations, and ways that we might legitimate the study of fandom(s) without resorting to "the popular" as our justification. Specifically, I want to suggest there are significant tensions in the language of fan studies: First, there is an unacknowledged dissonance in our language about fandom that stems from the difference between popularity and fanaticism. Second, there is a tension created by the language of popularity that categorizes fandom as somehow both “mass” and “unique,” both mainstream and eccentric. What results from these tensions is first a sense that a fandom is a legitimate object of study only for what it can show us about mass media, consumption, identity formation and the like. But in this assumption, the fans themselves and the products of fandom are still somewhat trivial (if not downright silly) and will disappear once the object of that fanaticism is no longer in the public eye.

Fandom is nothing new--and I'm even talking pre-Trek here, long before a person like Comic Book Guy could even exist and subsist within a society. Fiction in confluence with a middle class and industrial-print culture seems to create fandom as it grows, with the Pamela fandom of the 1740s as our earliest archived example. I’ll talk about the importance of archiving as legitimation later, but for now let us just say that fan studies might be said to be as old as the first critics of The Novel in general, those who spoke of silly little girls too busy reading to do their proper (house)work. In her book Consuming Pleasures Jennifer Pool Hayward examines fandom through the lens of serial production--and we might say that fandom is necessarily drawn to serial texts, if we were to make such broad generalizations. In tracing Dickens fandom, Hayward examines the pleasures of consuming a serial text, giving value to such a study by invoking a Marxist critique: Fandom in the past is important because it can show us cultural modes of production, movements of ideologies, and creation and maintenance of hegemony, particularly of the gendered sort.

My concern today is not with the studies of fans in the past, for many of these give value to the fandom by pointing to, not surprisingly, the permanence, artistry, and worthiness of the original text. Popularity and “mass“ audiences often characterize these fan works, which are not noted for their own intrinsic value as fan texts, but for what they can show us about the spirit of the age in which they were created. Aside, perhaps, from Joseph Andrews and his parody Shamela, no one I've met or read in "early" fan studies refers to a fan-writer by name or an exemplary fan-work by its title. By merging “popular” with “fanaticism,” we can study fandom as an interesting, but temporary phenomenon that emerges from the texts they reference. I wish to suggest that, at least in the digital era, fandom is not as dependent on the text it adores, but has created itself to be a nearly independent system of knowledge creating and knowledge sharing that can sustain itself across multiple, transient media events.

I am limiting my discussion to the fandom of the late 1990s through today because, true to our assumptions about the fickle nature of popularity, earlier fan works have been lost to us. The transience of fan works and fandom in general is part of what makes it a difficult object to study. The lack of an archive or a canon that can serve as what Latour and Woolgar call “immutable mobiles,“ those documents that serve as a foundation of knowledge for a community and serve as constitutional documents that create the community from nothingness gives us no common base from which to speak, doubtlessly causes some of the disjuncture we feel in fan studies. Further, when popular culture became an object of study, it became so within a Marxist-Foucauldian framework of ideological control. In this case, what is popular is what is hegemonic, and what is hegemonic tends to be without value in academia, unless it is to analyze the ways in which a text is hegemonic (and therefore uncritical, manipulative, and bad). Horkheimer and Adorno (as well as countless pop psychologists and after school specials) tell us that popular media are dumbing us down, working to institutionalize us by entertainment, and, in general, is for uneducated fools whose attention flits to whatever shiny object the producers flash at us. While we here at the PCA attempt to argue against that, some of that language and its values tend to seep into our language anyway, and we begin to assume that fandom is synonymous with consumption and all that is new.

This language appears, however rationalized, in many fandom studies. Cornel Sandvoss provides the most complete critique of such language in his introduction to Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: “The Balance between structure and agency is…crucial to the academic analysis of fandom….In [many] approaches fandom is interpreted as a consequence of mass culture needing to compensate for a lack of intimacy, community and identity” (2). Further, Sandvoss questions the definition of fandom as identity formation, and instead provides his own, which I borrow, for the most part, here: “I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (8). As his examples, Sandvoss points to Joli Jenson for her examination of the language used in common parlance and in some academic writings. In “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” Jenson reminds us of the psychological and medical explanations of fan-ish behavior--a pathology, an unfulfilled relationship, a Freudian error in the fan‘s upbringing (9). The scholarly accounts, however were few and far between when Jenson wrote in 1992, and the criticisms tend not to be from media scholars. Still, the language of pathology or deviance that Jenson cleverly pulls from multiple sources has remained in our language, even as fans came to describe themselves in the summer of 2007 as pirates (see post 4/15/08: The Symbolic and the Virtual Event, to be presented at NCA 2009).

Of course, Henry Jenkins remains our key scholar in fandom. In Textual Poachers and later in Convergence Culture, Jenkins emphasizes the unique aspect of certain fandoms, what Sandvoss calls an “assumed uniqueness” that characterizes most fan studies. Jenkins might be the first to treat online fan works as legitimate objects of study; he cites the URLs of specific works and larger communities with the same academic rigor that the rest of us give to Dickens and Shakespeare. Like many fan scholars, Jenkins emphasizes the subversivness of fandom without acknowledging the tension between fanaticism and subversion, between “mass” media and counter-culture.
Several volumes of fan studies have emerged in recent years, and like Jenkins, they remain enthusiastic about the potential scholarly work available to fandom scholars, but continue to use language that celebrates the ex-centricity of fandom, emphasizes the subversiveness of fan works, and mark fandom as Other. The introduction to Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own notes the connection of fandom to oral culture and domestic storytelling that skews fandom demographics toward the female gender. The book surveys and analyzes certain communities that the author notes are dominated by women and tries to explain the need for and the pleasure in such activities. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, the editors (including Sandvoss), dedicate the introductory chapter to “Why Study Fans?“ The editors try to summarize “three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades” to come up with their answers, which include the subversive nature of fandom, the economic power of fandom that has television producers salivating for our attention, fandom as a mirror for what Bourdieu calls “habitus,“ and, more currently, fandom as “a cultural practice tied to specific forms of social and economic organization” (8-9). Neither Bury nor the authors of Fandom are too concerned with the connection of fandom to “popularity;” instead, these studies mark fans as an object (and as such, necessarily Others the fans) to be studied for what we can learn about larger cultural movements or human nature in general.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Othering fans this way; fans themselves embrace this designation in their t-shirts, in their icons, in their posts that include some kind of self-disclosure. Whether we Other fans as subversive agents against mass culture or dismiss them as blind, adoring audiences, fans and fandom will and have survived in one form or another. In fact, “survival” of fandom may be one way we can begin to think of fan works as more than temporary manifestations of a fad. The connection of fandom to “popular” culture hinders us here--how can something be both popular and permanent?

The unstated criticism is that fan works, as non-legitimated narratives, exist only within a localized community and then only briefly. In the days of zines and snail mail fic and vid exchanges, few copies were made, and even fewer were available to outside readers. Without the backing of a publisher or producer, fan works tend to first shine brightly then fade from our consciousness. Without an (published) anthology to catalogue them, fanworks do not have a canon for academic study. Imagine trying to teach a class on fandom that focuses on the fan-produced texts themselves--what to include? The "textbook" as Bernadette Longo reminds us in Spurious Coin, is a legitimating tool in academia--a guide for what to teach, why to teach it, and what is teachable. Likewise, anthologies symbolically inscribe a field and guide scholars towards what is acceptable, even good, text. Despite the growing number of fan-scholars, scholar-fans, and scholars of fandom, we have no central, legitimated field. So where might we look, if we were to teach such a class or (God forbid?) create such a field?

First, we would probably find key authors in fandom--most likely those that write across many fandoms or those who are the most read. Perhaps the most celebrated fic (and some would argue, fic writer) in slash fandom comes from Speranza. “Written by the Victors” is, as one fan put it “what fanfic should be.” The 330K file is a long fic, coming in at several thousand words. More importantly, Speranza gives us a new genre that represents the core desires of fandom: to make the fandom world more present, more real, more encompassing, and to change that world as we see fit. “Victors” or the “VictorsVerse” tells a fairly standard Stargate: Atlantis story, an imagined universe where the crew on Atlantis officially split from Earth and form their own culture--a culture that allows for explorations into otherwise improbable romantic plots that facilitate slash relationships. In Victors, however, Speranza does not provide the standard narrative, but tells the story through quotes from books on the history of the Atlantis expedition. Of course, these books are not any more real than Atlantis itself, but Speranza’s authoritative academic voice makes these excerpts believable. An incident that would have perhaps been a chapter of a long fanfic is thus described through a quote from “Tina Eber,” author of the book The Atlantis Chronicles, Volume 2, page 37:

While we will never know for sure what happened on the evening of 17 January 5 A.T, we can make several educated guesses. It is probable, despite William Summerville's analysis in "The SGC's Real Target?" (Journal Of Political Diplomacy, OUP: 2010), that John Sheppard was the object of the attack. It is likely that Armitage planned to ambush or otherwise surprise Sheppard; Armitage's military record, as well as her preference for knives, shows a distinct predilection for stealth. It is also likely that McKay stumbled upon or otherwise interrupted her approach; it is unlikely that he would have sustained the degree of injury Royce witnessed if Sheppard had been in the fight. Royce's description accords with McKay having made a brave, if clumsy, grab for the knife while Sheppard's back was literally or metaphorically turned; it is not unreasonable to speculate that his injuries were sustained almost immediately as Armitage tried to ward him off. (“Victors” Book 3).

“Victors” has spawned a “VictorsVerse” that features both standard fan works and styles similar to what Speranza has done. What is important about this particular fic is the response it has elicited from the community: it has been bookmarked on Delicious by a thousand people, recommended in multiple fandoms, and, in general, recognized as one of the best scifi fics ever.
The fact that so many fans recognize Speranza (by her several online nicknames) as a key writer for the community is another way, I think, fandom can be seen as more permanent than other aspects of popular culture. Victors has captured the attention of the fan community as a whole--not just SGA fans. And any fan entering the SGA fandom will be recommended (recc’d) this story. "Victors," and other similar iconic fics, show the start of a canon for Stargate fandom and fandom as a whole.

Of course, the problem with fandom, even one as wide as the Stargate fandoms, is that it is tied to an original text, and once that original text disappears from the public eye, we would expect--assuming a close tie between the popular and the fanatic--the fandom to die as well. And in some ways this is true; enthusiasm for a given text dials down as new texts enter the media stream and our consumer consciousnesses.

Sandvoss’s definition of “sustained interaction” with a text only applies while the fandom is in vogue. In his definition both in the introduction and later in his book, fandom is still highly transient; it is the fan that remains the same. When interest dies, the fandom dies. But in many cases, most notably, the Buffyverse, Due South, and Star Trek, the original text is several years (if not decades) dead, while the fandom surges on. The ease of file bootlegging and DVD boxed sets allows for new fans to join, and many fans follow each other from one fandom to the next, creating relationships that extend beyond a single fandom. And jumping into an older fandom is easy, as I found out last summer when I consumed the whole of Due South in about a week. For example, using recommendation lists, newcomers can easily locate the most proliferous members and the most celebrated fan texts of that fandom. Major authors begin to emerge after a few minutes of research: Cassandra Clare, SuEric, Speranza, and Aristide, top may lists if quality writers

And most of their works in fact can be found with relative ease, thanks to an almost fevered effort to catalogue, categorize, and archive the fics of a fandom. Websites like the LiveJournal-hosted “dsficfinders” allows users to request help finding such works--all an inquiring fan has to do is describe what they remember about a favorite fic, and the community responds with suggestions within 24 hours--usually within an hour or two. Fans can even describe elements they want to read in a story, and the community will recommend the best version they know.

In Harry Potter fandom, Fictionalley features an overwhelming archive of fan works. Larger, multiple fandom sites such as fan fiction.net and mediaminer.org host thousands upon thousands of fic and art and poetry and snippets of conversation that would have, in the days of mimeographs and mailing lists, long been rotting in a landfill.

When LiveJournal purged several dozen communities in the summer of 2007, fans were outraged for the loss of years of conversations, “inscribed” proof of their lives and communities. The fics could be replaced (and they were, since many fans stored their favorites on separate thumb drives or email accounts), but the textual evidence, the immutable mobiles that made the fandom more than just a momentary enthusiasm, was gone. Using archives (and now, carefully backed-up archives) allows a fandom to subsist long after the object of its attention has faded from the public eye.

The inscription of fandom into texts and archives suggests that associating fan studies with popular culture may be, for now, a mistake. As “pop culture studies” grows, it will, probably, throw off some of the assumptions of transience and frivolity, and maybe even “mass.” Fandom is not, and cannot be both a part of mass media--that is, a part of the “mainstream” and part of the ex-centric, and it is time we stop looking at fandom as such. I’ve only begun to list here some of the processes that are now helping fandom become more permanent, more legitimate, and hopefully others can add those I am not aware of. Comments, like in fandom, are always welcome.

____________________________

Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005.
Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
“Introduction: Why Study Fans?” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Joli, Jensen. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” Representation in Scientific Practice. Eds Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 19-68. Reprinted at www.bruno-latour.fr. 9 April 2009. 4 April 2009.
Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Speranza. “Written By The Victors.” 2007. Accessed 9 April 2009. See also “VictorsVerse Art and Artifacts.” Accessed 9 April 2009.

"A Pirate's Life For Me": Narrative Theory and Online Fan Community

[Note 12/20/07: The final version of this paper will not be published here for various reasons--mainly because it sucked and I don't feel I'm saying anything we don't already know, either as fans or as scholars, that isn't expressed by the outline here. If you'd like to read the full version, email me for an electronic copy.]

Intro--the day fandom exploded. The event known as "Strikethrough07" can show us how narrative theories might be adapted to examine communal, asynchronous narratives online.

1. Narrative theory as appropriate for studying fan culture and fan text production. Bormann's Symbolic Convergence as a place to start. Fisher (and his respondants), particularly talking about the communal nature of all narrative. Ricoeur on temporality and (re)iteration. In literature: Peter Brooks (Formalism/Structuralism)--justify use of literature by pointing to a lack of other ways to analyze written communication that is neither literature nor tech writing.



2. Fandom--definitions (including overview of LiveJournal as platform), narrative nature of, and counter-hegemonic practices of. Citing Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and Camille Bacon-Smith's ethnographic studies of fandom.
   


3. : Strikethrough07 as told "objectively" by news organizations and technology news blogs.
   


4. The narratives of Strikethrough 07. Examples throughout.
   
   
   1. Creating leaders, heroes and villans--this was the first task: "Whose fault is this?" was the first thing most fans asked and began researching.
   
   
   2. Time passage/speed of mythos construction. A single narrative emerged as the dominant version more quickly due to hyperlinking and copy/paste abilities.
   
   
   3. Genre of narratives of Strikethrough is quite clearly that of a detective story. Peter Brooks says this is the most engaging and most basic plot of all--an unveilling, a revelation. Fans constructed their narratives around this most familiar emplottment--because fanfiction is often written like this? Because it is the easiest to write? Because it poses the writer as Revealer?
   
   
   4. Pirates as metaphor. Fans see fandom as a whole by unifying under the pirate metaphor. They also see themselves as counter cultural (and thus heroic). They also identify with one of the major fandoms at that time: Pirates of the Carribbean, drawing on the newly released movie for inspiration, working issues of capitalism, economic dominance and hegemony into their fanfictions (which are usually just about romance).
   
   
   5. Errors and Rumors. As fans retell stories of their Strikethrough experience and attempt to hash out exactly what happened, accusations are made, unfounded rumors told, mistakes get made. The concessions to these errors are minimal, with most fans saying that the details actually *don't* matter--just the sentiment behind the actions. Which is strange, given the point above.
      


5. Contributions to narrative theory
   1. Concession: The particularities of fandom must be considered: Already a strong community, already based in narrative.
   
   
   2. Burke's symbolic action actually worked: By symbolically "flaming" the organization causing grievances (LiveJournal) fans managed to change policy in their favor.
   
   
   3. Strikethrough as example of conflict resolution through narrative actually creating a communal identity from disparate sects (Harry Potter fans met with Sailor Moon fans, Smallville fans met with Pirates of the Carribean fans).
   
   
   4. Strikethrough as catharsis.
   
   
   5. Introduction of desire to catalogue and historicize events through posting narratives online.
   
   
   6. Fans are used to open-ended narratives, to filling in the gaps, so it's no surprise many of the narratives simply stop around the first week of September. References still abound, but the fanaticism has faded. What can this tell us about other community narratives and their longevity?
   
   
   7. The genre choice is interesting, as fans are continuously engaged in "revealing" the subtext of their favorite texts. This could be one of the differences between spoken narratives traded among face-to-face community members informally, and the more formal task of writing a narrative that others will voluntarily *find* then *read*--there must be some suspense built, the craftedness of the story is more important without other social cues.
   
   
   8. Visual narrative-- narratives online are permanent (unless LiveJournal deletes them). Not only are these permanent, but online interaction involves a visual component that may have been traditionally filled with gestural language. Unlike f2f communication, however, narratives online are hierarchically arranged by time: threads of a conversation appear as replies *below* the original comment, and subsequent comments on the same "level" of reply are indented the same amount.
      

Conclusion: Proposals for further study
Strikethrough was just one example, focusing on fandom. But online communities exist outside of fandom, and create narratives as a way of creating identity (Cite Howard Rheingold and Nancy Baym). Anecdotes are the main genre of online communication, but how many of these are narratives that actually help build community? Is there any way to predict which narratives will hold in a community, and which will be just another post?
Structuralism can tell us a lot about the types that survive: Those with strong senses of heroes and villans, those that feature a quest for information (which makes sense, given the medium of the Internet is traditionally used for information-seeking). Further studies might look at how often comments on narratives are themselves narratives, how many times a given narrative is linked to by multiple users.
Continued work on three-d avatars has revealed software engineer's attempts to duplicate f2f communication--how are narratives currently created in 3-d avatar environments, and to what extent do these look like "real" narratives, and to what extent do they seem more like bulletin board posts?

Meta-blog

Yep, it's a blog on blogging. From our COM 632 class, my discussion for this week:

Definition of blogging
The definition of "blogging" emerging from our readings this week seems pretty broad. Just as we found the idea of "community" to be too broad last week, and had some trouble sussing out what counted as "communal" in organizations, I think "blogging" will pose similar problems for us. Perhaps we should spend some time identifying what we, as a class, consider "blogging" to be, and suggest some names to help us keep the kinds of blogging straight, so we don't end up talking over each other? "The Business of Blogging" uses the phrase "stand-alone blogging" to refer to the diary-like texts produced by individuals and seen by only a few; I like this, but I think we need, at least for this class, to add some more differentiations. (Is that even a word?)

amylea 14:05, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Blogging as interaction?
The authors of "The Business of Blogging" are partially concerned whether blogging can "generate meaningful revenues" (36)--and while I understand that their purpose is quite different from our own, meaningful revenues are less important to me than meaningful dialogues. Is online interaction through blogs really "interaction"? The model of communication for blogging seems to be very similar to the top-down, manipulative rhetoric version that the blogging ideal seems to eschew. How much "interaction" is there really in blogs, at least the political blogs that generate a lot of money (since that was the article's focus)? How does that interaction affect revenues (meaningful or otherwise)?

Retrieved from Mindmeld COM 632

Who owns this blog?

The writers of Wired's article on "The Business of Blogging" have a legitimate concern when talking about who "owns" the "content" of corporate blogs. Of course, my Burkeian hyper-quotation in that sentence shows that I am concerned that their terms are indeed de-termining the scope of discussion terministically. We return to the Platonic problem: What is writing? What does a writer do? What is the writer producing? Is writing poesis and to what extent can "we" own thought-made-text? What is the "value" of thought/word/logos both within and without the capitalistic system?

Does Blogger.com (owned by Google) now own my words? Or just the machines on which they are stored and disseminated? In order for my blog to make any money, according to the Wired article, it must get at least one million hits per month. After Kari and Lou, and occasionally my father (when he remembers), maybe Dana and Kate, who reads my blog? No one, I assume, and that's just peachy with me. But fandom sites get thousands of hits from lurkers like me--and make LiveJournal and friends quite a bit of dough.

Who owns fandom, then? Strikethrough07 (see Mizbean's site) was an attempt to remind the bourgoisie that the big-wigs may own the means of production, but we still own our thoughts. The problem is that ownership is tied too much to monetary value (in the Marxist sense) for us to theorize owning thought.

The Dystopian Impulse in Blogging?
In Dan Gillmor's We the Media, he writes

Also possible, though I hope equally unlikely, is a world of information lockdown. The forces of central con­trol are not sitting quietly in the face of challenges to their authority.
In this scenario, we could witness an unholy alliance between the entertainment industry—what I call the “copyright cartel”—and government. Governments are very uneasy about the free flow of information, and allow it only to a point.

A good example of this is, of course, Strikethrough07 (see the fandomcounts page). While I would hardly want to promote pedophilia, I do want to promote free speech and a free internet. Of course, LiveJournal is a private company, driven by revenue, and can do whatever they want in order to please their customer base...but the groups that have begun and supported censorship in fandom aren't interested in just removing it from LiveJournal--they want to censor fandom as a whole. And they want to do it to promote "innocence" or "morality." And while I won't argue that the fics that got censored were particularly moral or amoral (because "smutfest" is just what it sounds like), most fans are respectful and clearly mark their work with appropriate warnings (which some of us then search by), this move by innocence_jihad is an attempt to control the flow of information. Let me introduce a logical fallacy for effect's sake: If they take down porn, they take down democracy.

Because most fans' LiveJournals aren't just smutfests; they're journals, they're blogs, they're information-sharing platforms. Orwell was the first to imply that language control, journalism control, is the beginning of totalitarianism, the beginning of U/dystopia. And the fact that we even recognize censorship as a problem is a sign that there is a dystopian consciousness in the zeitgeist. The blogging question again brings questions usually placed in the background to the fore.

So I'm doing my part to increase the volume, move toward a tipping point of common knowledge and Weltanschauung. I'm avoiding dystopia by blogging about blogging as dystopian consciousness.

Squee!

The Longest Post in the world: Armstrong Part 2

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Blogging Burke--scattered Essay of Doom Theory

It had to happen Sometime, so it might as well be Now: Reading All of Burke.
Yes, it is daunting, which is probably why we aren't doing it. Not all, that is. But most.
The thing about Burke is that he and I write and think alike, "strangely" recursive, reflexive, revising without erasing. Each concept reappearing in each book in a different form, a kaleidescope of the idea. It makes more sense to read Burke conceptually, not chronologically.
That, however, is difficult to do unless you already have read Burke chronologically. Which is why tonight I'm starting in on the First, Counter-Statement a title which reveals very little.
To help I have none other than Professor Dave Blakesley's book called "Elements of Dramatism." That title reveals very little; one might think it is simply an overview of Burke's Dramatism. But Blakesly recognizes (of course!) that in order to understand the system Burke finally ended up with (or, simply ended with due to old age?) requires knowing the steps Burke took to arrive at that hexad/pentad.
Every time I read "pentadic" I think it says "pedantic"
Reading "Elements" on the bus today, I realized some things.
When Burke talks about "imaginative works" as providing ways for writers to answer Big Life Questions that arise from the writer's (creator's?)current situation, he is talking about the representative anecdote (almost) described in the Grammar. The two ideas are inexorably linked: The representative anecdote is the result of the writings that are done in order to symbolically react to a situation. The situation is defined by the writer (the writer gets to frame it according to his/her past interpreations of OTHER representative anecdotes s/he's read) so as to provide an interpretation for other readers in similar situations. That interpretation is the representative anecdote, the "equipment for living" that literature provides.
Subjectivity, then, is not only the author's own self, but the interpretations that help him or her create new interpretations. At this point, if you're still reading my blog, you must know some Burke. Who gives a damn? Indeed.
Why worry about interpretations borne of interpretations? What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING in the corpus of Amylea-dom?
I've been working this "Essay of Doom" for a few months now, getting down thoughts, noting theories or criticism that may come in handy, etc. You may notice I have uncharacteristically avoided Burke. Instead, I've been recursively revisiting the same ideas through different frameworks, hoping to arrive at the answer to "Why is Fan Fiction so alluring?"
Perhaps I was not using the right word? "Alluring" is close. Others I've used: Attractive, interesting (ew!), engaging, popular, involved...I'm sure there are others. That's not the point. I was missing one, one which triggers giant neon signs and fake animated idea light bulbs over the heads of lit crit people:
Desire
Why is it desirable? Desire, as the Freudian mechanism (eros, blah blah, need fulfillment, blah blah), desire as the Derridian deferral of (of WHAT?) pleasure (or meaning), desire as the trace where we almost get to the meaning, we want pure communication of angels, we are so close to being linked, but...
we are denied. The desire multiplies from this denial/deferal. We want more.
Blakesly interprets Burke's "syllogistic progression/form" via examples of arguments we're used to, namely, mystery novels and academic thesis on top essays. In these forms, we are given several pieces of "prior knowledge" to consider (oooh, I'm working in Ed Psych stuff!) which make us desire some end to all these proofs. "Where are you going with this?" we ask our composition students. "How does X lead to Y?" We desire to reach that end, the completion of the argument, and consent consubstantiality with the writer in order to achieve that end, to be "gratified by the sequence." It's a familiar form, we know how (or at least that it ends. We join the author in following the clues to generate conclusions.
This is lovely, and I would have missed the real loveliness of it had Blakesly not given his last example: "Television soap operas rely on such a form [Syllogistic], but in their case, the progression is unresolved; they must keep going and going (and therein is their lure)" (57). The defered desire that both Derrida and Freud note as a key to human action comes from the form (can I say "genre" in this case?).
Let me take this to my own interests before I begin waxing tangental on the problematics of genre and Burke. Mother often tells me that anime is no different from soap operas. I want to scoff, but know better; both are serial and seemingly unending. While most soap operas have yet to end, animes do. Manga do. And that's a big problem for all of us desire defering people.
Most of the popular anime in America, in fact, are already over in Japan. A big exception was, until recently, Inuyasha, and in that case, the manga continues. Because manga are more difficult for most of the US (those not living in cities, that is) to acquire, anime is the medium most popular for these serials. Anime is more difficult to continue, though, due to budget restrictions and TV ratings, and tend to end after a few seasons while the manga may or may not continue on afterward (an additional 100 chapters of Inuyasha have already been written past the "end" of the anime).
What do we do when we are given a conclusion? Particularly one that is not at all satisfying? Inuyasha ends with much of the plot unresolved, sexual tension still not released, and the bad guy still alive. If we wish to make Inuyasha a representative anecdote, to let it give us instructions for living, then our lives seem very bleak indeed--we are stuck in limbo with Inuyasha and the gang, unable to move beyond episode 167.
Fanfiction seems to do several things in light of this small section of Burkean prose, depending on the genre of the fic. One, the "continuation" fics (Media Miner genre label) allows us to move beyond the "end" of the series, or, in many cases, imagine that end. Two, as "interpretations of interpreations" that will help readers with their own interpretations, fanfics help writers symbolically mediate those confusing things in life, and work out--in fiction, symbollically--possible answers. Writers who make characters that seem particularly OOC are usually using the fic to answer questions via role playing: What if Inuyasha started feeling attracted to males? What if Kagome decided to stop being so forgiving? What if they weren't in Japan, but the US? These questions lead to some of the more improbable fan fics, but at the same time, are probably the most useful fics for us to analyze here; they are less of an explication of the original series than an explication of the "writer's situation."
Another possibility is that some are tired of defering the fulfillment of desire. In the Harry Potter fan universe, as well as Inuyasha, the "final battle" is a subject that is almost a genre of its own. (Note to self: All fan fiction is AU by necessity because we can never know where the author would have gone/is going (again, the terminal end metaphor!)) The end is written because the author takes the fulfillment into his/her own hands. Is there some sort of breaking point? Did anyone imagine the final Inuyasha battle before, say, episode 100? A critical mass of deferal?
If we want to think of other fan fiction actions ("Genre as social action"), the "original" category is interesting (again, an mm.org genre). In this genre, the stories are set in the middle of the series and seek to explore/exploit those moments the author has left open to interpretation. While PWP stands for "Plot? What Plot?" in so called "lemon" fics, in the "original" genre, there is often a TWT bent--"Time line? What Time Line?" The tongue in cheek manner with which the authors treat the adherance of their fic to the canon time line points to a different social action than simply fulfilling some desire within a conclusion: instead, there is further deferal of conclusions, but a satisfaction of questions about character. I'll have to read Counter-Statement, but I'm willing to bet Burke addresses this kind of symbolic action, where form satisfies something other than an end
Note: See ffn, mm.org and checkmated.com for stories that emerged just prior to and just after the release of Harry Potter VI. How do the authors situate themselves in this new situation?

A Nightmare on Essay Street, part 5.2

Rereading my July 20th post reminded me that Mediaminer.org has recently posted an email from a reader discussing the quality of fanfiction on that server. Mediaminer defended itself by replying: "We agree that, unlike what many smaller sites are starting to do, we do not disallow fiction based on its quality or lack thereof. That has been considered unfair to writers who are just starting out" (a 7-28-95 Homepage News post). The rest of Lady MacBeth's, one of mm.org's moderators, response points writers to their Beta/Pre-readers and Writing Help Forum as well as the FanFiction Author Review Guild. Lady MacBeth and company do not want to discourage younger writers, but, as moderators, also want their web site to have quality work. By posting this reader's "flame" of the website at the start page, the moderators are effectively directing the attention of anyone reading or writing on mm.org; the prominence of this message on the page cannot be ignored.
The rhetorical strategies behind the flame and the response could be analyzed here; but it is not the near admission of bad writing which caught my attention. Instead, it was a brief apostrophe in the last sentence of Lady MacBeth's reply: "The point of this Guild is not to give empty praise, which has lately become the meaning of 'review', but rather to give honest reviews - including critiqes - of submissions."
The second clause "which has lately become the meaning of 'review'" is the one that is of importance to my "study." The "bribes" I spoke of in the July 20 post are part of this problem: Writers refuse to write more until they are given reviews, and thus meaningless praise--even for somewhat bad writing--is dished out quickly. Other times, "celebrity" fan fic authors will receive praise because no one wants to be accused of "flaming" the well known writer. Some reviews for the more famous writers are pages long, exalting every description, and moving on to praise the personality traits of the writer him/herself.
These well known writers become well known by winning awards from various fan guilds or even the fic host itself. That is not to say these awards aren't merited--there are some truly talented writers in this genre--but that once the writer is recognized as being "one of the best" he or she is unlikely to receive constructive criticism. The reviews, as vast as they are, are not there to improve such writer's skills, but to become part of the strange entourage--a fan of a fan--forming a community with its own unique hierachies and seniorities, friendships and arch enemies, none of which seems to have much to do with either discussing good writing or the original text.
side noteOn checkmated.com (Harry Potter Fan Fiction) some of these relationships do extend into the writing; there are many more fics written by multiple authors, and readers continue or do "outtakes" of their favorite fics, with the permission of the original author. This style of communal writing reminds me of when we did writing exercises in elementary school, and one person would write one sentence, pass the paper down, the second person would continue that thought, pass the paper down, etc. By the end, the story was everyone's and no one's. And they usually made no sense. The importance of these communal "fan fic universes" is that they do make sense, and are expansive, excrutiatingly detailed to the point where the original text seems very far away, and that distance does not seem to matter one bit.

The Essay of Doom: Fanfiction Reviews--The Rhetorical Situation

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No Need for Poetry!

Eruption
On reading fanfiction and hearing fireworks

Someone's always trying to claim someone else. These declarations end with a slap and a little bit of blood on the mouth. This is how we beg for eternity, in chaining someone to us with a tooth or a nail. The moon is too full; it's going to overflow.
What better place, though, for the whitest of our fears to shine brightest once a month? If that tiny little door, the flimsy little membrane were to break in everyone, we might rend each other into little star-shaped pieces to hold on to and scatter from the balcony scenes. Would you join the fray if it were playing on your street? Could I ignore the bruises and the shards of glass under my feet? If we all go into heat, and set fires in the bonsai shrubs with the radiation from out skin, the city would erupt into desert, and the sun would be always setting. The moon is too full; it is spilling out milk.

Fragmenting the Hell out of Essay (IV)

      Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call this Essay version 3.5. or, rather, Somewhere else in the imagined outline than where I last left off. Oh well. I have ideas, and I am going to write them; organization is, afterall, the second step of Aristotle's 5 step model.
      I am reading Peter Elbow, a composition theory dude, and I run across his self-effacing remarks about not knowing whether he is exagerating a perceived conflict or not, a conflict between the act of writing and the act of reading. In some ways, he wants to see them on a continuum of meaning making, as people like Foucault and Stanley Fish do, to see the readers as makers of meaning, and thus "authors." On the other hand, Elbow is a writer, and like all writers, can't help but think of each text as his baby so keep your freakin interpretations out of my work! This, I think, is actually a good thing to hold in play; I can see the validity of each one. That "play" doesn't help me to do anything, though. So how is it handled?
      Let's turn to fanfiction again, as a place where people are, in fact, "Writing without Teachers" (the title of one of Elbow's first essays). They are, for the most part, not taking part in "academic" writing; there is no exchange value for their writing (that they have any control over). They are outside of many of the overt power relationships of the classroom (although, as Foucault says, we are always/already caught up in the webs of power and ideology, so there is no neutral writing space).
      Instead, there is a play between reader and writer which mimics some of the questions of domination we find in RL (Real Life). The review process on FFN and MediaMiner allows for readers to give suggestions and praise to the fanfic authors; this alone would not be of importance, except for the way that that feedback is often exemplary of the ideologies of power and truth in society at large. Who writes these feedbacks? How are they recieved? What does the author do with them? How do reviews affect the drafting process? How are these reviews like what we have learned to do in school? How might they affect the younger generation, who learn this type of feedback first, before learning the formulaic public school versions of "Peer Editing?" (And I do not mean to imply that these students will be at a disadvantage--they may, in fact, turn out to be better at responding to texts because they are used to being given the authority to speak on others' texts, where as some of my students still feel embarrassed or hesitant to (re)mark on their classmates' papers.)
      Elbow finds that as much as he wants to destroy the reading/writing binary, he can't help but feel that they are fundamentally opposed, that "readers and writers have competing interests over who gets to cntrol the text" (75). When we readers throw back to the idea that it is readers who construct the text (a reader response methodology), we can't deny that as writers, we are inherently frustrated when our work is misinterpreted. At the heart of this debate is "the question of what I 'said,' what meanings are 'in' my text" (76). Who "owns" the text determines who gives it meaning, value, and legitimacy.
      Elbow names the interaction between reader and writer as one of "disdain," approaching "mean and disrespectful." The reader wants to control the text, to remove the writer from the scene; the writer, already knowing s/he is absent in the mind of the reader comes to disdain the readers' misinterpretation and appropriation of her/his creation. This is when we may see the writer say, in the words of Elbow, " 'Readers are not my main audience. Sometimes the audience that I write for is me. For some pieces I don't even care whether readers always understand or appreciate everything I write [....] What do readers know?" (76). To me, this is a self-defense mechanism; always/already absent from his or her text, the author tries to regain control by making him/herself the audience; this, however, only serves to further the belief that the power is in the hands of the readers.
      These types of moves are common in fanfiction, but, as always with new media, the multiple authors, multiple texts, and fragmented composition of the texts create some interesting rhetorical moves and the creation of some strange writings meant to ease the shift from writer to reader. These, I think, are based on those common responses readers and writers have in classroom settings; the language of individual interpretation is learned early, and the ideologies of individualism are so tightly woven into American culture that self-expression through writing is a fairly common experience. It is when the writer can actually talk back, can use those responses to shape a continuing text that makes for an interesting study: What we would expect to be a typically (generically) monologic discourse is, through the implimentation and encouragement of peer review processes, becoming dialogic. And that dialogue between writer and reader is, as the genre expands, gains momentum, and establishes its own traditions, becoming an integral part of a text that is already complicated by problems of invention, authorship, and genre. And by "dialogic" I am not just refering to the way texts "enter into conversations with" other texts, or "respond to" other texts; I am refering to acutal dialogue between writer and reader about the writing process being inserted into the text itself, being refered to in various rhetorical moves that mimic other genres, but use these moves to create a further sense of fan community.
      What do these moves look like? What kind of feedback, and thus dialogue, is being created? How does it compare to what we do in a composition classroom? These are questions I want to consider in Return of the Fragmented Essay; I also would like to note to myself here that at some point I need to address (okay, figure out) my own standpoint on whether the peer review skills are "tools" that can be moved from context to context or whether the reframing in an academic setting means the skills must change, discourses must be silenced, fanfiction must be denigrated as non-legitimate texts...and how that affects peer reviewing in its two separate contexts.

Essay of DOOM, Part the Third

I've changed my mind about where this essay is going next. Some notes:
In discussing the "Text, Context, and Subtext" of the genre, I left a lot implied. What I was trying to say was that the con/text of fanfics includes fan knowledge of the originary text, and that the various texts and rhetorics surrounding the fanfics come from fan knowledge. I used Dragonball as an example of the types of knowledges fans bring to texts.
I also wanted to highlight the fact that many of these fanfics are--and I think I got distracted from my purpose in my paragraph about fanfiction.net--recast by the authors into a different genre. Genre distinctions on fanfiction.net and mediaminer.org are part of the search criteria that allows readers to narrow the results--a necessity for a site that features fanfics in the thousands for some series. While the specific genres are different for each site, some remain a constant: Action, Adventure, Humor, Drama, Angst (itself an interesting "new" genre), Romance, Mystery, Scifi, Fantasy, and Tragedy. Of the 1500 or so pages of fanfics for InuYasha, for example, more than 900 identify themselves as being "Romance," which isn't a surprise, considering that the anime and manga are both considered Romantic Comedy. Of the 1200 pages of Dragonball Z fanfics, however, 500 are identified as Romance--a rather large portion for a series known for its martial arts and long battle scenes against evil, nearly immortal monsters. It is perhaps a moot point to make to say that one of the jobs of the genre is to "fill in the gaps," as it were, the gaps left by the original creator. In action-based series, particularly those with well developed characters like DBZ, it is not surprising that authors turn to the characters' love lives for a point of extension.

now, back to the flow of things. Next I'm going to look at restrictions... Think of this next section as a giant insert that goes before the sentence I started in my last entry on "audience."

Restrictions and Constraints
Bitzer finds that rhetorical texts, while initiated by exigency, are constructed according to the various restrictions and constraints--both practical and contextual--placed on the text. I have already mentioned some of these restraints: in order to be published on a fanfic database website, a text must follow the terms of service of that site. Mediaminer.org's recent ban of CYOA or "Role-playing fanfics" is one such restriction; now all texts must be written in standard prose forms, and in the first or third person. Both Mediaminer and fanfiction.net reserve the right to remove texts that are "disrespectful of the English language" in that they use "chat language" or are vastly erroneous in spelling and grammar. Fanfiction.net reserves the right to remove material they deem to be above an "R" rating; because the authors select the rating themselves, this can be problematic. What constitutes "R" is arguable; in general, there are to be no "full blown 'lemons,'" although "lime" and "citrus" are allowed. Most fanfic users understand "lemons" to include graphic description of sexual intercourse, where as "lime" or "citrus" are respectively less graphic, constituting a continuum that allows users to restrict their own reading, or the reading of their children. "Lemonade," "limeade," "orange" and other derrivatives have been created to be even more specific, but the lemon/lime distinction holds the most sway for what constitutes a restricted text.
The creation of jargon and euphemisms to talk about such restrictions points to the existence of a discourse community and the concerns of that community. That such a wide selection of descriptive jargon has been created to aid users points to the users' knowledge of restriction, and their respect for it as a constituting element of their texts and community. While here I could expound on some of the other salient issues in the lemon/lime disctinction, including the constituting of a normalized sexuality, I will leave that for others to discuss. For a discussion of "slash" fiction (called so for the slash mark between gender pairings such as f/f, m/m, m/f and various other combinations) and its work, see Berg Nellis and Kelly Anne Colleen's forthcoming dissertation on the fan community of X files, "Making Sense of Television: Interpretive Community and 'The X-Files' Fan Forum. An Ethnographic Study."
Legal restrictions are also a necessary and defining element of fanfiction.

I'm going to stop here for a moment. It seems like a good place to stop. Plus, since the "apocalypse" hit Boston, I've been feeling lethargic, and the warm computer lab, the white noise of the heater above my head, the quiet chatter from the Writing Center, are all working together to make me want a nap. A lap around the building should clear my head.

Essay of the Damned, Part II

Gerald once said something about entering the "writing space" and being unable to leave, giving that as his excuse for keeping me and Andrea long after the Wit meetings were over, feeding us theory like candy, which was good, since we hadn't eaten.

I was talking with Emma tonight about this essay, and realized just how big the topic is. And suddenly, in a spontaneous overflow of dry academia, I saw my dissertation. The chapters aligned themselves, the bibliography became manifest. And I immediately became frightened.

On with the show.
      MediaMiner.org, on the other hand, is devoted almost entirely to anime fandom, although Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings also appear on the series list. In addition to hosting fanfics, Mediminer allows users to upload fan rendered drawings based on anime/manga ("fanart"), to review and rate a series, and to participate in Role Playing Games (PRGs), in which participants of the game take turns writing paragraphs or scenes from "their" character's point of view. The RPG section has grown recently, due to new restrictions placed on the genres and types of fanfics allowed in the searchable database. Second person stories and "Create your own Adventure" (CYOA) stories were moved to the RPG section in the Fall of 2004. Notices on the home page in red alert users to this new restriction, and points them to the RPG forums for further information.
The rhetorical situation: Audience, Restrictions, Exigency
      In noting the volume of texts being produced from the originary text, and the available means of publication, I am already beginning to frame the rhetorical situation of fanfics. Bitzer used the term "rhetorical situation" to identify the elements that shape a piece of rhetoric. While he was thinking primarily of the texts studied by speech communication departments, his framework is also helpful here. If we take seriously the injunction of Kenneth Burke and Jacques Derrida (Eek! I couldn't avoid mentioning him!) that spoken and written texts differ little and should not be placed in heirarchies of "rhetoric" and "literature" or "speech" and "writing," Bitzer's three areas composing the "rhetorical situation" becomes applicable.
      Bitzer identifies what he calls "Exigency," "Audience," and "Constraints or Restrictions" to compose his understanding of Aristotle's "kairos," which Bitzer translates as "situation." To understand how fanfics are composed--and thus to understand their arguments and overall purpose--I will attempt to describe the rhetorical situation of the genre. I have already begun this task in my framing of the object of study for this essay: in defining "fanfic" I necessarily had to limit my scope to those pertaining to anime, and to those that are available to read via a searchable database. In order to narrow even further, I have already mentioned which types of fanfic I am concerned with: those legitimated by fanfiction.net and Mediaminer.org. This framing is fairly arbitrary, except to say that these are the texts that I am most familiar with, and are the most easily accessible.
      In invoking Bitzer's framework, I will also begin to touch on the second part of my essay, an analysis of the rhetorical moves of three specific fanfics. This is probably avoidable, but because the domain of fanfics is itself transitory and contingent on multiple overlapping factors, it is difficult to isolate what is "Rhetorical move" from what is "constrained by situation." Because some of the boundaries can only be unblurred by taking into account authorial intention, I will avoid making distinctions between my modes of analysis in those areas where proof of intent would be needed to clarify the motive behind the resulting text.
Exigence
      Perhaps one of Bitzer's most difficult categories to extrapolate into the literary arena is Exigence. While the exigence of a Presidential Inaugural Speech or newspaper article is fairly obvious, the need-fulfilling purpose of not just fanfics but of poems, short stories and novels, is not quite as clear. In the materially published literary arena, one could cite "financial gain" as exigence, or "fame" or "need to inform audience of their own world," the first of these being perhaps the easiest to understand in Bitzer's terms. Burke uses the term "attitude" to describe the purpose of literature--that is, to move the audience toward a certain attitude. "The Waste Land," then, would have the exigency of showing readers that their time is a time like no other, that the world is in trouble. It is difficult to talk about exigency, however, when literature, in general, is produced and written over longer periods of time than speeches and news copy.
      What need does fanfiction fill? What recurring social situation (to use the language of modern genre theorists) does it respond to? It would be easier to study the exigency of the production of specific texts who have specific authors than to make a statement about the exigency of the genre as a whole. What immediately comes to mind are recent studies on "fandom" and the psychology of those who participate in fan-related activities. Instead of giving an overview of those theories here, I believe the important aspects can be summed up using Barry Brummett's understanding of Burke's "representative anecdote," that some texts are written as ways of mediating social tensions. That entire genres exist to both alleviate some of the tension from the author's life--that is, to play out the situation and imagine solutions--and to give readers a road map to follow in their own lives. Fanfics remove the responsibility of creating an entire world-the originary text has already established parameters--and instead allow the writer and reader to project onto pre-set characters problems which then play themselves out in the resulting story. Because the originary text is one the fan is highly familiar with, and, being "fiction" is always/already more stabilized and predictable than the real world, fanfics provide a sense of comfort as well as creation: While there are already some constraints on the author before she even begins to write, the author can (and often does) create a fairly complex story line, introducing new characters (often based on friends or family of the author) and new relationships between them. The resulting texts are heavily descriptive and highly imaginative, since the author often must invent a way to let him or herself into the text without ignoring or revising the original.
      This is just one instance of exigency in fanfics. The exigencies of fandom itself are far too complex for this essay. I would suggest (without any other proof than my own experience) that there is, at this point in American culture, a desire to be in more contact with the originary text, to enter more fully into the discourse so as to completely be in communication (see Plato's "Phaedrus"). I will, however, leave that observation for others to study.
Audience
      My opening anecdote about my own experience becoming an audience member provides some basis for analyzing the audience members.


And...I can't do any more. I need sleep! Now that I've set up the structure, this should be fun!

Essay: Stuff I'm thinking about...

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