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Fanfiction and/as violence

  
 
Cat Chant
14:37 / 06.01.04
Offshoot of this thread, because it's long and old and I don't want to engage with all of it again, so it seems mean to make people wade through six pages. (If other mods/posters disagree I'm happy to move to delete this thread and put this post at the bottom of the 'philosophy of fanfic' thread.)

Here are my two touchstone quotes for thinking about fanfiction (as critique) and violence. First, Roland Barthes, in his essay "Brecht and Discourse" (in the volume The Rustle of Language): 'filling in the gaps' as a form of non-violent critique:

In his political texts, Brecht gives us a reading exercise: he reads us a Nazi speech (by Hess) and suggests the rules for a proper reading of this kind of text... The rules taught by Brecht aim at reestablishing the truth of a text: not its metaphysical (or philological) truth, but its historical truth: ...an action-truth, a truth produced and not asserted.
The exercise consists in saturating the mendacious text by intercalating between its sentences the critical complement which demystifies each one of them. "Legitimately proud of the spirit of sacrifice..." Hess pompously began, in the name of "Germany"; and Brecht softly completes: "Proud of the generosity of those possessors who have sacrificed a little of what the non-possessors had sacrificed to them..." and so forth. Each sentence is reversed because it is supplemented: the critique does not diminish, does not suppress, it adds.
... What is astonishing, at the endurable limit of the paradox, is that this refined practice, closely linked to an erotics of the text, is applied by Brecht to the reading of a hateful text. The destruction of monstrous discourse is here conducted acccording to an erotic technique... as if it were natural to take pleasure in the truth, as if one had the simple right, the immoral right to submit the bourgeois text to a critique itself formed by the reading techniques of a certain bourgeois past: and indeed where would the critique of bourgeois discourse come from if not from that discourse itself?

**

(I think "an immoral right" might be the best summary of what I feel fanfiction is.)

Second quote, from Walter Benjamin, "Karl Kraus" (in the volume One-Way Street):

In his polemics, too, mimesis plays a decisive role. He imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture... Indeed, the exposure of inauthenticity - more difficult than that of wickedness - is here performed behaviouristically... Admittedly, what emerges in just this connection is how closely the cruelty of the satirist is linked to the ambiguous modesty of the interpreter... To creep - so is termed, not without cause, the lowest kind of flattery; and Kraus creeps into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them. Has courtesy here become the camouflage of hate, hate the camouflage of courtesy?

[end quotes]

So - I don't know. I think there's a case to be made for fanfic as a - violent or non-violent, depending on whether you follow Barthes/Brecht or Benjamin/Kraus - form of responding to, healing, or critiquing the violences done in the original text. For example, slash is traditionally fuelled by the assumption on the part of canon authors/actors that same-sex desire as a phenomenon is to be effaced from the fictional universe, or is not to signify within the rules of narrative/signification of the canonical text. Hence, for example, Kirk/Spock is an act of repairing the homophobic violence in the protocols of reading that seeks to efface all the instances of visible desire and love between the two men and to insist they cannot possibly be queer. (Winters/Ivanova is a particularly good case here, btw, Mister Disco, which is what I meant by it being on the cusp between slash and gayfic: the erasure of any explicit sexual relationship between the two women is a particularly visible violence calling out to be repaired).
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:08 / 06.01.04
Winters/Ivanova is quite an interesting one, as we have it on good authority (for those who wish to assert the authority of the creative) that they are meant to be lovers, but any sense that they actually were lovers is left to the odd line here or there, which coyly implies that Winters and Ivanova were somehow involved. Ivanova herself, of course, is then herself "healed" by the redemptive power of Marcus Cole and his expanding pole.

It also brings into play this, from the previous thread:

I personally think (as I just said in another thread) that the unauthorized use of characters created (and owned) by a living writer in one's own stories is morally questionable at best. I dunno who owns culture, but I do know that unless I sell all rights to my work to someone else, I own my work. To imply otherwise invalidates the above argument, the crux of which is that Siegel and Shuster maybe *should* have owned their own work, and would have in a different publishing environment, but since they didn't, all moral bets are off. If DC can enlist people to write Superman fanfic, why can't anyone?

Because Babylon 5 doesn't occupy either of these spots. It has a motivating Genius (se here for some more stuff on the angelic creator. However, a series of exchanges has already taken place by the time it reaches the screen. In order to bring the vision to the screen, deals were made with people who did not have the idea but did have money, technology, contacts. Decisions such as, for example, how to deal with the sudden departure of the main character were imposed circumstantially, and others regarding, say, when the series should end became an issue not for the writer, or not for the writer only, who was not of course alone in taking on the writing duties. So, by the time it reached the consumer, and certainly by the time its conclusion reached the consumer, it was already a work in which many different people had added different things. As such, does the fact that J. Michael Straczinski originally read Lord of the Rings and thought how cool it would be if that all happened in space have any bearing on how somebody should consume the product, or is the whole process so intrinsically collaborative that, regardless of whose name is on the credits, active participation, including fanfic, is a rational and reasonable response, not least to repair or heal (the slash as surgical incision, the slash that cleaves, that is to say both splits and joins together) an apparently damaged or incomplete narrative.

For some reason I'm stuck in scifiville, but I'm thinking that Blake's 7 and Andromeda both show perspectives on the problem of the living author also. Is this ontopic, or am I vaguing out?
 
 
eddie thirteen
22:48 / 06.01.04
I'm totally vaguing out at this point, and basically have no idea how you guys stayed on this subject for six pages two years ago. But in terms of B5, I think that kinda points to the *other* side of my main issue with fanfic; which is to say, JMS could have just written voluminous Lord of the Rings fanfic, but instead chose to do something perhaps not entirely original, but more original than just writing Tolkien all over again. I mean...y'know...aren't you kind of glad he elected to create Babylon 5? One way to show that gratitude and influence is to write stories involving his characters, but another way would be to create your own. I've written fanfic, read a lot of fanfic, gotten to know a fair number of fanfic writers, and I can honestly say that I think all of them are more creatively content and just better when they write original work. Plus, they can sell their original work, which they can't do with their fanfic.

Anyway, someone who's a moderator, please, for my sake, if I post to any of these threads again, just...delete me. Please. Please!
 
 
Disco is My Class War
02:25 / 07.01.04
I don't have much time, but I wanted to register my agreement with the Walter Benjamin quote. I do think there is a violence in slash/fanfic -- a necessary violence. But Benjamin is not naive: he knows that violence is already in the text, everywhere in fact.

(Walter Benjamin is the reason I'm no longer an advocate of 'non-violence'....)

By the way, Deva, the article by Helen Razer on slash was in the paper the other day -- have you seen it yet?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:30 / 07.01.04
'Necessary violence'?

Hm.

The target is society's prejudice, and the writer is collateral damage?

I'm not sure I believe in 'necessary violence', narrative or otherwise. And a copyright holder might describe a legal action the same way.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:44 / 07.01.04
Just a couple of quick points, eddie thirteen:

One way to show that gratitude and influence is to write stories involving his characters, but another way would be to create your own.

Hmm. I'm sure there are some fanfic writers who write out of "gratitude and influence" for canon, but I'm not one of them: possibly because I come from an academic background, where ideas are sort of immediately open-source (as long as they're properly referenced), I think of reading (and writing fanfic) as qualitatively the same - forms of inhabiting patterns of thought set up by canon writers. I see the relationship as basically horizontal on that level, though obviously asymmetric in other ways, including but not limited to the legal aspects.

And just because I'd like to stop this thread going in this direction if possible:

I've ... gotten to know a fair number of fanfic writers, and I can honestly say that I think all of them are more creatively content and just better when they write original work. Plus, they can sell their original work, which they can't do with their fanfic.

Again, my outlook may be slightly skewed, because a higher proportion than usual in fandom at large of the fanfic writers I know well were pro writers - some fiction, some not - before they started writing fanfiction. (See also Joanna Russ, an established pro novelist years before she started writing K/S.) I wrote realfic - though didn't sell any - before I started writing fanfic, and it's not nearly as good, as interesting, as creative, as satisfying or as original as my fanfic. So I don't think it's possible to make a general point about realfic vs fanfic (especially since, as haus has pointed out, the distinction isn't always precise anyway: is Babylon 5 just one long LotR fanfic?)

Nick - hmm. I am having thoughts & will get back to you when they are in the form of human sentences.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:12 / 07.01.04
JMS could have just written voluminous Lord of the Rings fanfic, but instead chose to do something perhaps not entirely original, but more original than just writing Tolkien all over again. I mean...y'know...aren't you kind of glad he elected to create Babylon 5?

Well, no. Because writing Lord of the Rings fanfic is not necessarily writing Tolkein over again now, is it? That would be writing Lord of the Rings. And how about if we consider the possibility that, ultimately, Babylon 5 is not very good. In fact, it's awful. It's awfulness is matched only by its lack of originality; the man who glues a horn onto a horse has not, after all, created a unicorn. Likewise, Babylon 5 is the unlovely wormcast of one man's inability to think past putting Elves in spaceships.

How much better from the point of view of art if Straczinski had funnelled his efforts into a harmless pursuit with little chance of fame or monetary reward, and a supportive community in which he could have been feted or intelligently critiqued, rather than taking up the time of actors, make-up artists and Atari STs that could otherwise have been doing something more useful?

See what happened there? You're assuming that because you like the Lord of the Rings homage that is Babylon 5 and dislike the Lord of the Rings homages on fanfiction.net, that Babylon 5 is *better* than Lord of the Rings fanfiction, when in fact it may simply be more expensively packaged or more to your taste.

If people are happier and better writers when not writing fanfic, then they should probably not write fanfic. If they wish to sell their writing for money, they are better off hastily filing the serial numbers off their elves and sticking them in spaceships with oddly Elvish names in an oddly Elvish language, rather than leaving them in Lothlorien. But what if somebody has no desire to sell their work for money, and is a happier and better writer when writing fanfic? Is that a necessary violence, an unnecessary violence or an enlightened attempt to be true to a desire to write as well as one can, without consideration of financial reward?
 
 
Cat Chant
22:06 / 08.01.04
Nick in the other fanfic thread:

It's possible that, for the moment, it all comes down to the legitimacy of 'necessary violence'. As must be apparent from discussions in the Switchboard and elsewhere, I'm less and less enthusiastic about violence as a tool for achieveing anything other than counter-violence all the time.

Nick here:

The target is society's prejudice, and the writer is collateral damage?

(Just as a quick aside, I'm not interested in copyright at all. I mean, I am in my life, obviously, as it might have career repercussions about whether I can write the book I want to write, but I'm not interested in reforming copyright law in accordance with my theories of fanfic - partly because my understanding of such theories suggests that the law will always be an inadequate discourse for dealing with writing.)

Ahem. Just a brief point, which is that I think you might be misunderstanding the concept of 'necessary violence', Nick. The concept means not that violence is deemed necessary given a particular situation, in which case one could argue about its legitimacy, but that violence is a per se irreducible part of an activity or entity. For example - and I've been meaning to start a thread about this for a while - the existence of lesbian parenting does necessary violence to heterosexual parenting, which imagines itself uniquely privileged by virtue of its definition of "parenting" as reliant on two sex parents. Whether or not one agrees with lesbian parenting as a concept, the violence it does to het parents' self-conceptions is necessary, ie non-optional and irreducible. (As I think you know, Nick,** I think the 'violence' that fanfiction does to a text is already present in reading, and is therefore a "necessary violence" consequent upon the publication of a text.)

**and if you don't the fault is mine for not being clear enough.

So the reason I don't agree with your "collateral damage" statement is that I don't believe it's a good idea to let US military rhetoric define the terms in which we conceptualize violence. I also don't think the terms "society" and the "writer" - whose work is only legible within a horizon of communication laid down by the social sphere - and the terms "target" and "collateral" are readily distinguishable.

But if I read past the rhetoric and assume you're saying that the writer, as human individual, is not the site on which fanfiction is written - absolutely. Obviously. The writer as individual is a completely contingent element in the structure of fanfiction as (non-)violent response to a text.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
06:56 / 09.01.04
Deva - interested by your mention of the academic environment where ideas go straight into the public domain. What I object to - still- is not the use of ideas and situations or structures, but the co-opting of the characters and the world. To me, there's a distinction between working with the assumptions and general context, and remoulding the work. In academic writing, there probably isn't.

The trouble with 'necessary violence' as you present it is that it seems to presuppose that there cannot be reconcilliation. If 'necessary' doesn't mean 'necessary to achieve XYZ', but means 'inevitable from the identity of the protagonists', are we doomed to do violence to each other for ever? I don't see that lesbian parenting has to do violence to hetersexual parenting; I can see that it traumatises a bunch of hoary Evangelists and Surrey mothers who haven't given it a lot of thought ("Well, of course Ali and Sara raised David by themselves, but they're not lesbians!.... Oh? Are they? Gosh."), but outside of a theoretical position which is a rather fine codification of a rather fuzzy real world position, I'm not sure that it has any effect at all.

And I agree that it would be better to avoid military rhetoric. Hence my concern with "this is what we are, and this is what they are, and the result of our meeting is violence." I know that's not what you were trying to do, it just unsettles me.

As to violence being inherent in the reading, I think I'm out of my depth. As you know, I see a distinction between reading and writing, which is unfashionable.
 
 
YNH
18:07 / 09.01.04
As lesbian parenting is necessarily, irreducibly violent to heterosexual parenting, so the reading of fanfiction is necessarily violent to the published text.

You're not out of your depth. You're prolly just not parsing 'cause of yr fundamental distaste for violence.
 
 
Cat Chant
12:02 / 10.01.04
The trouble with 'necessary violence' as you present it is that it seems to presuppose that there cannot be reconciliation. If 'necessary' doesn't mean 'necessary to achieve XYZ', but means 'inevitable from the identity of the protagonists', are we doomed to do violence to each other for ever?

Yes. That's why it's called "necessary" - it's an irreducible element of social change, not an expedient instrument for social change - though I'd argue that the identity of the protagonists is not the basis of violence. I'm going to start another thread on violence and identity, though, because I've been meaning to do so for a while and it's obviously got much broader implications than fanfiction (narrowly defined) - though your Fictive Body article is as good a starting point as any, since what it makes clear to me is that it is impossible for humans to coexist in a plurality without infringing on, parasiting, risking doing violence to, appropriating, prosthetizing, each other's bodies, identities, etc. It seems to me that this is the only hope we have for change, as well: to reimagine coexistence in the full awareness that word-concepts-texts-values - elements of our identity as that identity is formed within a socius - cannot be strictly defined or confined within legal-philosophical systems of ownership and property/propriety. After all, even in a fairly simple 'biological' sense, your body is a radically open system, relying on organisms like bacteria wandering in and out through pores and other orifices even for necessary functions like digestion; it is also not entirely under your own control - for example, you can't decide what drugs to feed it when you're ill without submitting it to the medical-legal establishment. Using it to symbolize a site of self-contained, self-controlled identity doesn't really work for me, but it does work well as the basis for a reimagination of identity in a collective.

Anyway.

Violence of reading and the untenability of a strict distinction between writing and reading - this is Barthes again, from The Pleasure of the Text:

What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.

Cf from 'Writing Reading':

Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren't interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven't you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?

It is such reading, at once insolent in that it interrupts the text, and smitten in that it keeps returning to it and feeding on it, which I tried to describe [in his book 'S/Z']... Then what is S/Z? Simply a text, that text which we write in our head when we look up.

NB that in the first paragraph he calls what you do while you look up "reading" and in the second he calls it "writing". I don't think that there are any grounds on which this reading/writing can be essentially distinguished from fanfiction. There is a difference in terms of whether that reading/writing is then published/ made available outside the reader's head, but I'm not sure you can argue that publication is the only source of the violence necessary in fanfic, and that reading/writing is non-violent in itself.
 
 
Cat Chant
09:35 / 11.01.04
(Mod hat: if people want to go on discussing audience, profitability and 'worth' of fanfic, could we start a new thread or put it back in the 'philosophy of fanfic' thread, which has a broader remit?)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:17 / 11.01.04
(mod hat: Sorry, strand got mixed. I think that the best thing to do might be to to take the two most recent posts, which are pretty much pure value and sales, cut and post the content into the previous thread, which appears still to be vital, and then delete them from here to make the reading line clear. Sound good, everyone?)
 
 
eddie thirteen
18:43 / 11.01.04
(Okay! Apologies for thread rot. And, hey, I think I know everybody's name now. As you were.)
 
 
grant
20:07 / 12.01.04
I'm positive I've encountered reference to "necessary violence" in discussions of satire.

Does that ring bells with anyone else?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
21:41 / 12.01.04
grant: Definitely, although I'm feeling the same frustrating mix of confirmed recognition and lack of specific recall you're expressing. But it strikes me that both satire and fanfic (slash most specifically) can be ways of re-writing a text to say something other than what is originally perceived or intended to be said. Satire as a form of necessary violence can a response to reading a text and perceiving that there is some kind of violence (inevitably political) is being done by that text - that some kind of misrepresentation is being forced upon the world, and that this needs to be rectified by what could be seen as an act of violence against that text. Self-defence, in other words, or the defence of others.

The more I think about this, the more I want to kiss grant for invoking satire, because I can't think of a better analogy that helps debunk the position that the original author is the victim when fanfic or slash is written. Because the sense of injury that was described so memorably by Deep Trope over in the original thread so many years (years!) ago is surely present when an author encounters a particularly scathing satire of their work - does this mean that it should not have been written? The problem with the author-as-slash-victim position is of course that it doesn't really allow for the possibility that the author has committed violence themselves... Once you accept that possibility, the idea that satire or slash can redress a balance becomes viable. Although this would probably have to be considered on a case-by-case basis, I think there's a strong case for saying, say, that the imposition of a strict framework of heterosexuality onto certain science-fiction television franchises is a form of violence committed against the possibilities of character interaction within those shows, and that slash can redress this.

(It feels good to be writing about this kind of stuff again...)
 
 
eddie thirteen
22:56 / 12.01.04
On topic, and I really mean it. My question -- directed to anyone better-versed in literary theory than myself: Is the kind of fanfic discussed in this thread satire, or parody? When talking about the "violent" strain of some fanfic in the other thread, I used the terms interchangeably, but I have a feeling I was wrong to do so. I think that a broad send-up of an entire genre -- The Authority to superhero comics, for instance -- is a satire, whereas a story about Harry Potter and the Amazing Mystical Dildo is a parody, because it targets the tropes of a specific work.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
12:02 / 13.01.04
See, I don't agree that fanfic necessarily equates to satire. They may cross (in a 'Venn diagram' kind of way), but it's only an overlap. I think the difference is that satire is fundamentally defined as reaction to the idea presented here of institutional violence in the text - there is no satire that exists without the idea of 'necessary violence' (which I LOVELOVELOVE - that's just encapsulated so much of what I've been thinking in this area for some time, in one economical, sexy little buzzer. Dude).

My concept of slash is that the motivation for writing such revolves around far broader ideas than a narrow political construct in which the text is sited within a binary sexual relationship, male/male or female/female. My idea has always been that it's about status in dynamic relationships, and that this translates back to fanfic as a whole. I've posited that fanfic arises when the reader attempts to repair what is construed in the act of reading as a 'damaged' or 'failed' narrative or continuity - however, the fact of the damage can only be considered in the wider context of the fic writer, which is itself understood only in terms of a wider appreciation of that context by others.

I've just written myself into a corner, 'cause I've got to go back to work now, and so can't clarify what I mean by that in the way that I would like, but it touches on what Deva's described in the other thread, where even a traditional novel has touchstones within society which allow it to be understood - that we know what a novel is, what characters are, etc - and that fanfic's touchstones are just more limited in scope. So in terms of what I was trying to explain above - bad fanfic is not only defined by poor writing, but also by a singular viewpoint on what is 'damaged' in the text - one that no one else shares. An example might be Star Trek fanfic that posits that Kirk is Picard's father - very few will see this as a gap in canon that requires filling, or appreciate the logical and narrative convolution required to bring about such a twist. In the same way, slash that is not 'one true pairing' can be considered by some to be poor slash, regardless of the quality of the writing - it's just poorly conceived.

Feel free to hack that to bits if you like, I'll come back later and sweep it up.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
12:24 / 13.01.04
bad fanfic is not only defined by poor writing, but also by a singular viewpoint on what is 'damaged' in the text - one that no one else shares. An example might be Star Trek fanfic that posits that Kirk is Picard's father - very few will see this as a gap in canon that requires filling

But of course the thing about fanfiction is that it doesn't solely depend on the gap in canon. If you take something as big as Harry Potter fiction you can see ideas develop over a number of years, the characters are typecast, so let's say 80% of the time Pansy Parkinson is a whiny brat, she's really a character written by the fanfiction and not the canon. When someone feels that they need to give a reason for her whining they're responding to the fanfiction. The gap in the canon is so massive that it's been filled in, simply because the fiction concentrates on the relationships between a larger number of students but then the fanfiction writer feels the need to fill in a gap in the fanfiction (because some fanfiction becomes canon within fanfiction itself).

The appropriation of the character is violent, the basic construction of the character from one line in the canon is certainly violent but then I'd hazard a guess that Potterslash is a reaction, in general, to the violence of Rowling's basic idea of good and evil. I think that this applies- fundamentally defined as reaction to the idea presented here of institutional violence in the text.
 
 
Ex
14:28 / 13.01.04
The image of cutting and/or healing the source text brings in ideas about the motivation and justification of slash, which is what this (overlong) post considers: partly because slashers seem to have such mixed motivations and produce such variable stuff that I'm cautious about creating a blanket description about “why we slash” and “what slash does”.
I'll nick this to start:

I've posited that fanfic arises when the reader attempts to repair what is construed in the act of reading as a 'damaged' or 'failed' narrative or continuity

I originally read slash like this (prompted by Joanne Russ): a logical, healing extension of an obvious character relationship. It’s used as an explanation by a lot of slashers. It's supported by on-screen moments (or absences) that seem to suggest a relationship, and become celebrated in the fandom. Also, explanations that the source text was screened in the 1960s/a kid's series/made by a homophobic company - reasons why the original text was flawed. I feel a lot of "One True Pairing" stuff falls into this category.

Then I met the slashers who don't posit an overwhelming origin for their fic in the series. Like the writers who take on “dares” to slash very unlikely pairings, including pairings that have never had screentime together. When I started reading slash, they felt more damaging, less respectful, less supportable, less useful.

I realised after a while that I was recycling the idea that the text had a single, authentic meaning. And that Good Slashers were trying to ascertain that meaning, get close to it and record it lest it be lost in the swirling homophobic fog of posterity. Then the Bad Slashers were taking it too far, willfully buggering around with the text. While I consciously think that interpreting a text - whether by reading it, fanfic-ing it or lit. crit-ing it - is all fair game and a necessary part of interacting with a text, part of me wanted to hang onto the idea that slash didn't hurt the poor thing. That it used the text as a tool to do necessary violence to heteronormativity, but the text was still intact, in fact, stronger than before.
I even wondered if I was replicating a kind of “identity politics” versus “queer playfulness” in my judgement- it’s OK to make a character gay if they’re obviously gay and you’ve got good evidence (mustn’t libellous accuse someone of being not-straight, now). But just messing around the potential polymorphous perversity of a bunch of characters was Not On.

It’s easy to slip into a rhetoric of slash as crusading or applying pressure to heteronormativity. It’s fab and true and useful, but I think I tend to use it defensively, when the finer points of my deconstructive suavity have slid off their target and I fall back onto being righteous. I start thinking to myself - well, is slash justified if it leads to the inclusion of homoeroticism in mainstream texts? How soon? When we have a certain number of gay characters on TV, do I have to stop liking slash?
When all these are impossible, moralistic requirements, and not the bloody point. Of course slash can be about a protest, a corrective and a desire for change, but it’s also alright to slash even if it never “achieves” anything. (It feels as though I've got the debates about lesbian feminism going on, with me on both sides: "But slash is erotic because cultural jamming will save the world and bring about the Revolution." "That's nice. But after the Revolution, I'll still read fanfic." And then I get confused as to how much of an erotic act is pleasurable because it’s achieving something.)

So I'm not sure about the "necessary violence". While slash certainly does “necessary violence” in the current dominant understanding of a text/author/character, by using that description, do we reinforce it? Is there, in that, the prior acceptance of the idea of the integrity of the text/author/characters? So you're solidifying the mirage of the sealed text even as you justify taking it apart.

Ultimately, does it do violence to:
- the text/author/character (all of them often imagined as bodily entities, which is odd but tenacious as Deva points out - the text often imagined as the author’s “baby” which makes the whole thing five times as painful-sounding)?
- through the text, wielding it, to heteronormativity?
- the idea of the text/author itself, when it’s envisioned as a sealed system?

And which of them might slash perform/avoid?

Sorry about the length, and hope all your mice have scroll buttons.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
22:37 / 13.01.04
Look I know this is a simplistic way to put this but I've tried to blah blah evidence from text etc and I'm just shit so I'll be straight with you. I'm not understanding this idea of necessary violence at all, I've read the work by Benjamin and if you're really using the piece on Kraus I think it's a complete misinterpretation of a homage to one individual. Kraus is violent yes but I can't find a point when Benjamin condones that violence or states that it is necessary outside the realm of Kraus' specific type of violence. It's also clear by his later Critique that Benjamin sees violence as something very complex and I can't see necessary violence there either (it's a big old Kant reference, could he dig any further in to the realm of excrutiating law?). So though I don't have a problem with the idea of fanfiction as violent I believe two things, the first is a little divorced in that I believe Ex has a point and if fanfiction is violent then it all has to be violent (plausible because the act of subversion of the text could be violent) but also that the violence has to relate to fanfiction specifically in some sense. For instance strike action becomes violent but acceptable for very specific reasons and thus not only does all fanfiction have to be defined specifically as violent but it also has to have specific reasons to be acceptable. If I'm getting this wrong then please point me in the right direction, I don't want to seem petty, I'm simply rather confused.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
15:47 / 14.01.04
I'd also like to point out that motivations for writing slash can be wholly separate to those attributable to writing gen - specifically, in that a good proportion of those who write slash do so simply because they find it sexually exiting. A friend of mine who's been writing Episode One and Highlander slash (amongst others) for some time advises that the main reason that she does so is because "Het sex doesn't do much for me unless in very particular circumstances. Good written porn is hard to come by and extremely beneficial. There should be more of it. If I find two characters that I find attractive together and I can slash them... I will." (quoted with permission).

After canvassing a few other writers with an impromptu lil' quiz (thanks again to all who replied, if you're reading this - I should get out more online, you're a groovy bunch), it appears that, there's a relatively foreseeable split between the political and the apolitical, by which I mean that some are interested in the political ramifications of what they do and why they do it, while the other swing wildly the other way in finding it all tremendously irritating and/or amusing, and preferring not to be bothered with it. Almost all find writing slash utterly natural, with some seeming slightly perplexed at being asked why they do it.

The most interesting thing for me was that none of the people who replied were particularly bothered about sticking to the One True Pairing, the attitude mostly seeming to be presented as "if the writing's good enough, it'll convince me of any pairing" - which raises, for me, issues with some of Deva's points above. If you're deliberately slashing a relationship which doesn't appear to the reader to actually exist in the text, whether explicitly (they never share screen time) or implicitly (there's just no chemistry between them in the text), and you're doing it because it's challenging - because the relationship doesn't exist in the text - then where's the 'necessary violence' in doing so?

And then there's the question of providing a BDSM twist to a slashed relationship - how does that feed into the idea of necessary violence?

Not being argumentative, am interested...
 
 
Disco is My Class War
07:04 / 15.01.04
Ex said, very articulately,

"So I'm not sure about the 'necessary violence'. While slash certainly does “necessary violence” in the current dominant understanding of a text/author/character, by using that description, do we reinforce it? Is there, in that, the prior acceptance of the idea of the integrity of the text/author/characters? So you're solidifying the mirage of the sealed text even as you justify taking it apart."

I don't think so. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of One Way Street to hand (late Christamds present anyone?) but I think we need to delve into the Critique of Violence essay more.

Anyhow, I'll give my interpretation: violence is present in the text already. The point is precisely that it isn't whole, can never be whole. Any text is cobbled together from bits -- excised bits, sections that are edited out (ie material parts of a text that don't make it to the final cut, as sanctioned by the creator/s) and then the bits of story that happen 'offscreen', which we may fill in given the right cues or wrong cues or, maybe, no cues at all. People who write do violence to their own texts: 'violence', cutting, ripping is a way to create.

So whether you're slashing because it's hard to find good porn these days or you're slashing with a particular political purpose in mind really doesn't matter. Slashers 'reveal' the original and initiating violence of any text, all texts. I would argue that in particular circumstances, political violences are exposed as well (ie homophobia). But there are no guarantees, and it always depends on context. In this sense, the interpretation of 'necessary violence' is rather different. But that's just me.

And I think there will always be a place for slash, no matter how many gay characters we have on TV. What kind of gay characters do we get on telly? Bad ones. What kind of sex do they have? Bad sex, mostly. With the rare exception of Queer As Folk, which is probably just a little less bad -- but it's so surprising to find spanking and butt-fucking on television that one finds it pleasurable despite oneself. (I'm talking about the US version here: Aust. television stations still can't get their heads around the thought of a queer, sexually active 15 year old on our screens.) Now, what's missing from QAF are properly explicit Daddy/boy scenes, etc. Prime cuts for slashing.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
11:35 / 15.01.04
I don't buy that, Mister D, that whole 'the text can never be whole' schtick in the fourth paragraph of your post. Surely if you buy into an extreme version of reader/response theory, then you're looking at the text, the author and the reader as different components of a kind of metaphage... a recursive viral pattern constantly feeding upon itself and excreting new components. I don't see how you can claim the text is never whole in that case. It's as whole as it can possibly be - the whole just carries on expanding, kind of like creation as explosion rather than creation as collage.

And if, like me, you don't buy into that kind of reader/response theory (although it's a pretty idea, obviously), thne you're left with an apology - sorry, but the text exists. You can fiddle about being non-linear and attempting to observe the phenomenon of textual action/reaction through several dimensions as much as you like - but before the text there was no text, and after there is, and everything else is reaction tesselated with reaction.

Besides, you can't have your cake and eat it - either the author, and therefore the process of creation, is irrelevant in reader response theory or it isn't. Either the text exists 'as is', or it's the product of a creative process.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
12:12 / 15.01.04
sorry but all i can think of are additional questions..

Does slash/fanzine fiction assume that the author is not dead ? Can you have slash/fanzine texts in relation to a text that has no author, either an individual one or a collective one - for example a scientific paper or a software manual ?

Is the use Burroughs uses of Bayley's 'star virus' in 'The ticket that exploded' slash fiction - or is one of the criteria of slash fiction that it is inferior and derivative of the original text ? As with Kathy Acker's use of Dickens in Great Expectations ?
 
 
Cat Chant
13:08 / 15.01.04
is one of the criteria of slash fiction that it is inferior and derivative of the original text?

No.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:24 / 15.01.04
Well slash is only derivative if it's fanfiction and then it's only generally regarded as inferior if you're biased against people who use other people's work and think all fanfiction is inferior. I'm such a stickler for characterisation that I think it's often the case that fanfiction is inferior but sometimes a fanfiction writer will stretch the characters so far beyond the originals that they become for want of a different word, better.

Is the use Burroughs uses of Bayley's 'star virus' in 'The ticket that exploded' slash fiction - or is one of the criteria of slash fiction that it is inferior and derivative of the original text ? As with Kathy Acker's use of Dickens in Great Expectations ?

Firstly you're messing your terms up... you're talking fanfiction and not slash here. Slash involves specific male/male- not porn but pairing. I think that the work that you mention is probably very close to fanfiction because it uses the original work so closely but I'm not sure if it could be counted. Any fanfiction authors care to take that question and quickly define the distinction?
 
 
sdv (non-human)
16:55 / 15.01.04
OK that's clearer - are you then also saying that an 'author' is required for both genres ?
 
 
sdv (non-human)
17:26 / 15.01.04
Actually I realise that I may be making an assumption that fanfiction and slash are considered as 'genres' within this discussion. Rather than as texts/works that are derivative of some previous text, which is how I understand that you are considering them. The example I mentioned previously by Burroughs can be considered as belonging to the genre 'SF' or could be considered as part of the Burroughs canon or even as an example of contemporary literature. How would a piece of slash or fanfiction be allowed to leave the genre behind?

The other aspect that seems to fit within the thread is the work of Giorgo Agamben - where he discusses in Potentialities that "what was never written" in the communication, both linguistic and historical , is the fact that there is language and he demonstrates that this fact "is never written" in the exact sense that it can only enter into "writing" and the available texts in the form of a presupposition, but can be understood also as a potentiality. "To read what was never written" is then to bring into the foreground some "thing itself" within which anyhting may be expressed and even anything can be made expressible. It is in these terms that we driftwork our way back to the Benjamin of the 'Tragic Drama' around which time he wrote "For compared to the irrevocability of tradedy, which makes an ultimate reality of language and the linguistic order, every product animated by a feeling of sorrow must be called a game..." Isn't this language game the underlying rule of the genres being discussed here - perhaps one element is violence, but then not all tragedies require violence and aggression in 'violence'...
 
  
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