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The Body Fictive

  
  

Page: (1)23

 
 
Tom Coates
09:12 / 22.08.01
As a response to the zine article on the Philosophy of Fan Fiction and the thread on the same topic, Nick has produced a new article for the zine: The Body Fictive.

quote: QUOTE I don't mean it offends my pride or my lefty self-perception, or that I suffer some kind of comedy hissy-fit at having my copyright violated or my characters brought to orgasm by Hitler's personal sex midgets (pace Warren Ellis). Nor even do I mean that I feel jealous, or that I don't think anyone can possibly do it as well as I can. I mean that I feel an injury, a gut-churning sensation like a blow. What the hell is that about? I ought to be able to grin and take my money (and the implied compliment, which is considerable) or call my lawyer and sue. But for some reason neither option is open to me. I have to engage in this process, a critical and theoretical process, which I mistrust instinctively. And why do I mistrust it?
 
 
dlotemp
09:12 / 22.08.01
I'm still digesting this piece, but let me compliment the author on putting together a great overview. I am completely blown away by the ideas in this article and plan to read as much of the original references as I can find. Thank you for putting this together.
 
 
reidcourchie
12:02 / 22.08.01
I'm not sure I understood it all but what I did get I liked a great deal.

On the general topic of fanfic isn't this just an old fashioned matter of consent?

Whilst ownership may be a term full of negative connatations of a horrible capitalist society but how many people would say take a friends book after said friend had refused to lend/give it to them?

The fact that fanfic is taking the fruits of someone's imagination, rather than a physical possession would, to me, seem to make the violation worse rather than less.

Or perhaps I'm over simplyfying the discussion.
 
 
Tom Coates
12:35 / 22.08.01
I think Nick's point is that the act of creation is an extension of self - that the created artefact is something like the development of some kind of extra mental limb - a personality dump. And that while other people interacting with it will not experience that original personality within the text, the creator experiences creation as a PART OF THEMSELVES. Thus the adaptation and change of that writing (in terms of fan-fiction) can be seen as an enslaving of the characters that have been the alternative selves of the author - a kind of invasive indirect attack on the selfhood of the author themselves.

The benefits of this theory is that it explains negative sensations when ones work is fanfic-ed, it explains the sense of a need for consent (if the text is an extension of the self of the author, then the author has rights over its mutilation or transformation, surely) and explains the sense that collaborative creation may result in a lesser investment in the text - thus illuminating the differences that people feel between writing fanfiction for already collaborative ventures (franchises / tv shows / movies / comic books) as opposed to novels etc.

I think it has a few odd problems, but I think it has that interesting combination of Barthes and Foucault's attitudes towards the author. Think of it this way - would Barthes' statement of authorial death be as exciting and revolutionary if it wasn't counter-intuitive. And although we can't rely on intuitiveness as a guide to truth, we can unpick our reactions to these statements and explain WHY we feel as shocked and liberated as we do. And from the information derived from that, a new theory may be borne...
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:57 / 22.08.01
Nick : excellent article. a pleasure to read.


Tom: I think Nick might actually be going further than you think, in the fact that in the article he postulates that it has become more apparent thatthe ground that identity used to be based on, namely meta-narratives and contructed truth (ideology), have fatal flaws. Identity can only be constructed through creative activity on the world. Writing as self-expression acquires a very literal meaning, for it is only through creative activity that identity is constructed. Media is not, as McLuhan put it, an extension of man, but part and parcel of man's very identity. IN this way, mucking about in someone's creation is akin to altering someone's memories without their permission.
 
 
Molly Shortcake
17:22 / 22.08.01
quote:IN this way, mucking about in someone's creation is akin to altering someone's memories without their permission.

Isn't this the foundation of all media?

The moment you consume something it 'belongs' to you and becomes 'memory', simply because, you have absolutely no choice in the matter.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
17:49 / 22.08.01
Is that a response to the article, or just a response to the proposition?
 
 
Molly Shortcake
18:50 / 22.08.01
The proposition. Haven't read the article thoroughly yet. Takes me a while to get into theory mode.
 
 
belbin
08:33 / 23.08.01
Nick> Very interesting article.
It works in as far as it explains WHY you feel violated when someone fanfics your stuff.

What interests me is how your 'fictive body' intersects with the discussions of BDSM that are currently a hot topic on the board.

Slashfic has a lot of BDSM content but your approach would indicate its form has BDSM qualities too - playful violation, reconfiguring of physical identity.

Now presumably a key notion here is consent. I'm not sure where I'm going with this - any suggestions?
 
 
reidcourchie
11:05 / 23.08.01
Surely if Nick feels his writing is an extension of himself then the violation is anything but playful?
 
 
Cat Chant
11:15 / 23.08.01
Nick, what an absolutely beautiful article. And I don't know whether it was intentional or not (probably, given your "public domain" statement at the beginning) but I loved the last line - try harder to put it together than to take it apart - and of course I loved it because it speaks to me of the kind of attitude to a text fanfiction (rather than traditional lit crit) takes. Very clever. Also tremendously hard, so apologies if I miss the point.

I've got a nice Marx quote for you, but I left the book at home (it would position 'original' writing as agriculture, fanfic as craftsmanship, and both as precapitalist modes of relation to the world - which is a bit dodgy given how far into capitalism we are, but I like it a bit better than the "evil machine authors/ valorous rebel fanfickers" model you allude to.) I'll try and post it another time.

Preliminary responses: I felt like you were cheating a little in the move from the very complex construction of the fictive body as prosthesis/assemblage to the last couple of paras where you seemed to be naturalizing the body as *your* body and relying on ideas of violation - which don't seem to work on an analogy with prosthesis/assemblage... I think I hazily want to talk about the relation of the reader/fanfic writer (assuming we can put these 2 as positions on a spectrum here) to the assemblage-prosthesis created by the original writer.

One question I'd like to ask you is: have you never had something pointed out to you by a reader which you hadn't noticed before, but which you agreed with once your attention was drawn to it? While writing is obviously a creative and *conscious* act of engagement with the world and a production/mirroring of your own implication with the world, surely it can't be entirely conscious - you can't be in control of all the threads in your fic? How does that connect up, for you, to the feeling of having your identity hijacked that you get from being fanficked? Is it (for example) okay because that's the Other Within whereas the fanfic writer is the Other Without?

Rambling now, but this is so interesting to me. Usually I can wriggle out of moral dilemmas like this by pointing to the way Blake's 7 *begs* to be fanficked - frankly, most fans know more about the characterization & universe continuity than some of the writers on the original show, and as you say the interaction with directors/actors/script editors already wrests (the late) Terry Nation's creation away from himself-only. But at the moment I'm using a character from a book by the lovely Diana Wynne Jones. She'd probably be very pissed off, and although with most of my heads on the last thing in the world I would want to do is piss off DWJ, with my fanwriter head on I come over all ruthless. Worse things happen at sea. I don't know why this happens and I'm not sure to what extent I want to justify it or defend it morally. I'm compromising by promising myself that this particular story is only going to circulate on a non-archived e-mail list (damage limitation).

This is about as far as I've got so far: there is *something there* in the texts I fic which makes them ficcable. There is something in Blake's 7 which sets up a desire to read stories about Blake & Avon getting married and having babies, even though I may not even be conscious of that desire until I read the story, and experience the bliss (hell, jouissance) of having my relation to the text, the world, my body and my desires rearranged by another. Hmmm - maybe we need a bit of Hegel or Lacan here: as I dimly remember (my home ISP is fucked up, which is why I haven't been here for so long and why I can't quote anyone properly), for both Hegel & Lacan, desire is always the desire of the other (this is from Hegel's master-slave dialectic). The flip side of your writerly engagement with the world - which is related, I think, to what Derrida calls autoaffection - is the circuit of desire which must pass through the Other: the third party in the writer-world assemblage.

I don't know where this is going, so I'll shut up and think about it. Meantime thanks again for a beautiful article, and the incitement to fic it
 
 
belbin
13:06 / 23.08.01
reidcourchie> Exactly, which is why I ended with the comment about consent. Key theme in BDSM is notion of trust between two parties. Which brings me to...

deva>
quote:I felt like you were cheating a little in the move from the very complex construction of the fictive body as prosthesis/assemblage to the last couple of paras where you seemed to be naturalizing the body as *your* body and relying on ideas of violation

By making a narrative public, one is (quite lidderally) chancing one's fictive arm. You are extending into a realm outside your control. Spotlighting this particular move, what does this feel like? Making the extremely personal public? Experiences from writers please....

Something is disturbing me about the violation metaphor that I can't put my finger on yet. More later...
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
13:23 / 23.08.01
Deva - last couple of paras are really just to throw open the floor. Although I do think automatic access as a notion is a disaster - but that's probably a related issue.

At the risk of repeating and interpreting myself, I think I was working on the notion that you make the body fictive from your self, at the same time as trying out selves with the body fictive (it becomes chicken and egg to say the least). So it's not that it's yours in a sense of ownership, but that it's you. The discrepancies between 'you' and 'your' in this context are probably pretty interesting if you're really into linguistics and so on...

This brings up the question of ownership of self again, and exactly what that means in a world of relations - but also ties to something Teela said in the copyright thread in the Head Shop - that genes can't be owned...does that mean that you cannot complain if someone clones you?

Going to try not to talk too much about this until more people respond, so I don't head anyone off from anything.

belbin: Umm...'Metaphor' isn't quite right. On the level where we and the world are composed of relations and ideas, this would be literally true. If it holds, of course.
 
 
belbin
15:33 / 23.08.01
Nick> okay, the violation is 'real'.

So a key notion here becomes one of 'consent'. Which is separate from ownership. What are the ethics of fanficking a dead author whose work may still be copyrighted?

Another point: you do discuss 'collaborative' art forms (films, tv, much commercial fiction). hasn't fanfic traditionally focused on these forms - and if so to what extent does this lessen the violation and reduce the moral force of your approach? i.e. for most people, stealing a valued possession from a friend is WRONG. taking a stapler from work is okay.
 
 
YNH
15:57 / 23.08.01
Actually, Nick, I was waiting for that, too. The article's got moxie. And, in my "optimism of the will" moments, I've argued plenty for existence only in communication.

belbin, despite hir brevity, made me wonder how you feel the moment of engagement, or rather the process of literary stripping. Allowing even a small group of people to read and comment on one's work can be painful, confusing, and numbing; regardless of the eventual nature of the comments, be they praise or criticism. It takes a layer of (perhaps) fictional clothing coupled with a reassurance that the reader might not get it all, or that one hasn't shown hir full self anyway.

It's very interesting to read your description of some writing acts, despite being purely "made up," as autobiographical exercises. I've ben thinking trhough these various threads about two cbu's I've created, how I engaged with them, and how I'd feel were they fanfic'd. Neither have had particularly wide distribution, nor have they earned me any money. But I've begun to empathise with your position if nothing else. The term "method writing" did it for me. The stuff I throw down in the Creation is a bit like creative burn-off. I think I understand the difference.

That said, what are you you doing when you expose the soulful, intimate zones of your body fictive to the public? I have a bunch of qualifiers, but, alas, they could derail the discussion, so I'll leave it there.

[As a final aside, I'll be happy to go into the Genetics bit of cultural ownership either elsewhere or later on in this discussion.]
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
16:55 / 23.08.01
YNH: I suppose that's why I'm cautious about letting anyone see material. It has to be able to take the knocks (and so do I) before it's allowed out alone.

I'm still thinking this stuff through. I started by trying to figure out why this area always shook me up and ended up rereading books from the loft and getting into rather more broad-ranging territory than I ever intended. And I suspect I managed a near miss.

You ask what I'm doing (what everyone's doing?) in exposing the body fictive to scrutiny. Not sure. Testing, yes. Also some kind of actualisation - witness this idea, this 'me'. Also, on a far more mundane level, sharing the fun of whatever it is you've produced.

Fun is an aspect of life which escapes examination too often when we think about serious things. A friend of mine spent New Year's Eve with the PLO a few years back. He takes a measured view of that mess, but he said the fun was almost enough to make him a convert to the cause, when all the speeches and wrongs couldn't have done it.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
10:00 / 24.08.01
First thought from reading the article:
the body fictive as your own "body" makes me want to extend that metaphor even further, as in: how would any of us know what we looked like unless a) other people told us or b) we looked in a mirror. Is the reader not the only mirror in which you can see yourself/work completely, and truly? (Perhaps a distorting mirror, but we'll leave that for the nonce. [Haus?])

Also I think the article is inevitably weakened by being an attempted rational examination - a rationalisation, even - of an irrational emotion felt by you at the prospect of being fic'd.

Hence the arguments you advance for distrusting criticism and fanfic boil down, essentially, to the idea that a text is an incomprehensible, wonderful machine, the inner workings of which even its creator is unaware of.

So you protest the deconstruction or modification of the wonderful machine (perhaps an organic metaphor would be better) to see how it works because, you argue, that's like taking a hamster apart to find out what powers it: you kill the thing dead. You slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs and oh dear, no more 24-carat omelettes.

And I'm not sure that analysis is necessarily bad and destructive. Which is what I gleaned from my reading: I'm willing to be corrected.

But I can't help sensing in your article the ghost of the author as divine madperson, or of the text as sacred object, and I don't think a lot of authors/texts (if any) qualify for this status. And the ones that do are surely robust enough to survive a little inquiry and investigation.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
05:55 / 25.08.01
From the article:

But the critical desire to pin down and explore the possible meanings and roots of a fiction of this kind, though natural in relation to its existence as text, and crucial (to a point) to the testing of an experimental identity, is also a danger to the project of establishing identity; the same scrutiny which reveals the genealogies, (lack of) legitimacy, and flaws of a prevailing orthodoxy is lethal to the experimental self, which does not have the reinforcement and support of an extant system based upon it.

Belbin said:

By making a narrative public, one is (quite lidderally) chancing one's fictive arm. You are extending into a realm outside your control. Spotlighting this particular move, what does this feel like? Making the extremely personal public? Experiences from writers please....

I like the article, Nick. Very crunchy. I’d go further than Deva in asking you to ‘back up’ your move from self as assemblage to body/self as violable. I don’t think you really stand in the ‘self/selves as assemblages’ position at all. Your interpretation of ‘assemblage’ reminds me of the Transformers: extend that mechanical arm out into the void. Click, whir. Record. Meanwhile the creating self, the thing that initiates extension of a ‘a living prosthesis to probe the realm of ideas, to try out a set of identity relations, and examine possible assemblages of the world and one's own place in it,’ still exists as a finite entity with a certain agency and the threat of being ‘violated’.

To continue the cyborg metaphor, I imagine the act of writing as a ‘prosthesis’ simultaneously extending into the ‘writer’, inwardly/internally, colonising the writer from inside like the liquid metal inside the bad Terminator in T2. The writer is never the same: s/he is always colonised by the act of writing. Writing itself is a violation of the boundaries of the self. Never necessarily a happy one, to be sure. Don’t your characters ever hassle you? As a writer I am always already out of control, radically deterritorialised, populated by aliens who talk to me in my sleep and ghost-control my bodily functions, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thus, the question of ownership of ‘my writing’ seems slightly churlish. Making this process ‘public’ is just undergoing deterritorialisation from arguably external and real sources such as readers, editors, publishers, critics.

I have a Deleuze/Guattari quote I’d like to insert here, but I have the same problem as Deva. I don’t think you can refer to ‘assemblages’ without acknowledging that no assemblage or assemblage-of-assemblages has a centre, or a command-base. Then again, I am being picky and theory-bitchy. I haven’t even gotten around to the (repetitive, it feels) point that where you’re coming from is a place where ‘the writer’ is a universal category, uncomplicated by the specificities of class or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or ‘the embarrassed et cetera’, as Judith Butler describes it. The right to feel ownership over a creation is already, I feel, a position of privilege and power which many creators are not at liberty to hold.
 
 
Tom Coates
06:37 / 25.08.01
I think my first issue with the prosthesis comment was that it had to be a prosthetic ONTO something, which immediately makes you wonder about the illusory, shifting nature of identity that the article is based upon. But I'm rereading at the moment so I don't want to get too involved at this stage.

quote:Also I think the article is inevitably weakened by being an attempted rational examination - a rationalisation, even - of an irrational emotion felt by you at the prospect of being fic'd.

Hence the arguments you advance for distrusting criticism and fanfic boil down, essentially, to the idea that a text is an incomprehensible, wonderful machine, the inner workings of which even its creator is unaware of.

Whisky said this (above) and I want to make a quick aside about this - it seems to me that a large amount of theory around this kind of area comes down precisely to sensation to the 'examination of irrational emotion' - although I would question the 'irrational' part. A thorough analysis of the rights and wrongs of fanfiction will necessarily depend upon the impact it has on the texts original creator (amongst other things) as well as the reasons why people feel compelled to do it. To label these things as 'irrational' from the outset seems to be cutting the conversation off at the pass.

And, in fact, one might argue that rather than being a rationalisation of an irrational sensation, articles like this are an attempt to UNDERSTAND the causes of a completely RATIONAL sensation. And that this process may illuminate the issue rather more substantially than by ignoring the 'intuitive' reaction. I only have to look at Freud for an example of a man who managed to draw structural conclusions about the existence of an unconscious directly from supposedly irrational impulses like anxiety, parapraxes, dreams and the like...
 
 
No star here laces
06:37 / 25.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Tom Coates:
A thorough analysis of the rights and wrongs of fanfiction will necessarily depend upon the impact it has on the texts original creator (amongst other things) as well as the reasons why people feel compelled to do it. To label these things as 'irrational' from the outset seems to be cutting the conversation off at the pass.

And, in fact, one might argue that rather than being a rationalisation of an irrational sensation, articles like this are an attempt to UNDERSTAND the causes of a completely RATIONAL sensation. And that this process may illuminate the issue rather more substantially than by ignoring the 'intuitive' reaction. I only have to look at Freud for an example of a man who managed to draw structural conclusions about the existence of an unconscious directly from supposedly irrational impulses like anxiety, parapraxes, dreams and the like...[/QB]

Not read the article yet (am about to) but would like to comment on this. Yes, it might very well be a rational response at root and there is no reason why Nick's gut feel about his creation and it's (ab)use by others might not relate directly to a moral argument why he is in the right. But, equally, there is no reason why this should be the case. So Whisky's argument, which I'd agree with, is that although Nick might be correct, if this is indeed the way his argument has been arrived at it is not a valid method of doing so.

For, in fact, exactly the same reasons that we should mistrust Freud. Freud's experimental method was introspection. He examined his own mind and then drew general conclusions about the functioning of the mind in general from this. this is a deeply flawed method owing to two logical disconnects. If one uses the mind to examine itself, one must admit of the possibility that there are some aspects of the working of the mind that it can never be aware of, just as we cannot see our own retinas without the intervention of some other device such as a camera. And secondly because to examine oneself and one's own reactions and to make of them a general point is to generalise from the particular, which obviously has no validity either.
 
 
Tom Coates
10:30 / 25.08.01
Your points are, if I'm right:

1) Examination of one's feelings as the basis for an argument must be suspect because you can't have the impartial perspective of viewing from outside or viewing the context.

2) Generalising from the particular (one person's feelings) to the general is dubious argumentative technique.

You are of course completely right on both accounts. Both of those statements are completely accurate.

I would question how much they specifically apply in these circumstances though.

Firstly I would like to say that I think foregrounding one's 'emotional' or 'gut' position is both fundamental in a sucessful discussion. Discussion which attempts to reach a resolution or advance a subject will always work more effectively if both parties are prepared to declare their immediate assumptions and the reasons for their first reactions. That's not to say they should necessarily form the BASIS of the discussion, of course.

Secondly, I'd like to say that while Nick's piece is clearly a working through of an individual's reactions - in terms of the sensation that he describes, I would imagine that this wasn't limited exclusively to him. One can't say for certain, of course, but if thirty or fifty or a thousand writers said that fanfiction based upon their work unsettled them or made them feel uncomfortable then that would surely become worth discussing. And yet we will inevitably only have their word for their sensations. There would be no external point of reckoning about this, nor any way of impartially assessing the reasons for it - or whether or not it was motivated by a desire to maintain property and the financial status quo. And yet it would still be worth exploring, surely?

What Nick has done is written an article explaining why he thinks that fanfiction makes him (and potentially other writers) feel uncomfortable. And what the sensation of 'violation' feels like to him. In the process of unpicking his feelings about the issue, he has extrapolated a model of the relationship between created work and selfhood. This model only has to be internally cohesive, plausible and convincing - it doesn't have to be RIGHT, because in a sense there is no way to determine whether or not it is right or not.

So I suppose, in a nutshell, my response to those two points would be:

1) The article is not examining Nick's feelings in order to support an argument - it is doing quite the opposite - it is constructing a model based precisely around EXPLAINING those feelings, or at least presenting a model that could explain where such a feeling derived from. Without mentioning the feelings, there would be no argument, but not because the argument is based on air, but because the 'argument' is a theoretical investigation of a personal sensation - much like (although at a much lesser scale of course) one might read an account of why someone felt that being raped was a violation would NECESSARILY be a personal account based around experiences and their reactions - reactions that would then probably clarify for that person, and (if agreed with by other victims) the population at large exactly how we conceived of our bodies as personal 'property' or 'territory'.

Without listening to and exploring personal testimony of this kind, would we be unable to refuse sex acts performed on our body, whether it repulsed us or not?

2) Generalising from the particular to the general is always a difficult way to structure an argument. But this isn't that kind of argument or that kind of structure - it's a statement of personal sensation - an attempt to EXPLAIN personal sensation - a sensation that may or may not be shared by other writers.

Again, imagine a situation in which a guest wouldn't leave your house. People's reaction to this might vary substantially, but outside of law, all the arguments concerning whether or not it is right or wrong to sit in someone's house without their consent eventually come down to a mass of individuals being uncomfortable with that person being in their home, which can ONLY SUBSEQUENTLY be theorised or DESCRIBED as a violation of personal space, as an extended piece of identity - indeed again as an identity prosthesis.

[AS AN ADDITIONAL ASIDE - it's interesting to conceive of other things that we might view as prostheses (extensions and repositories) to our identity - after body, home, photograph albums, information (private information in the public domain), car, property, creative work, family members, pets... OUR RELATIONSHIP TO EACH OF THESE is based around sensation and impulse, which is itself either mediated or created by culture/society/legality/thought and discussable on precisely those term. ]
 
 
Cavatina
07:09 / 26.08.01
I, too, enjoyed reading your article, Nick, and found it stimulating on a number of levels - yours is a big topic, especially as the concept of our position as individual subjects is so notoriously difficult in itself to describe.

A post-structuralist destabilizing or decentring of the self is not the same thing as doing away with the notion of the self.
So I'm not a little chary of descriptions of the act of writing/the writer as 'ghost-written' as you suggest, Rosa, in your statement

quote:As a writer I am always already out of control, radically deterritorialized, populated by aliens who talk to me in my sleep and ghost-control my bodily functions ...

How do you account for the individual subject/writer who resists power (in Foucault's sense of the term)? Doesn't the writer actively take up subject positions as an agent? The 'ghost-written' idea seems to me to be parallel with the old Renaissance-to the-middle-of-the-eighteenth-century notion of the genius-writer being subject to divine dictation.

And, Whisky, Nick, too, is a reader of his text; might not he be considered to be in a privileged relation to it because he alone knows the processes through which its creation has occurred?
 
 
No star here laces
14:47 / 26.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Cavatina:
And, Whisky, Nick, too, is a reader of his text; might not he be considered to be in a privileged relation to it because he alone knows the processes through which its creation has occurred?

I find this a worrying statement. What is there about the process of writing that needs to be approached in such a mystical manner? While, indeed, no one other than Nick may be precisely aware of what was going through his mind when he wrote the story this point is not so strong as it appears for two main reasons.

Firstly because, as has been pointed out above, although it is possible that an introspective examination of one's own motives may be correct, there is no reason to suppose that this is the case. Thus, in all probability, even Nick doesn't know the exact processes through which the creation occurred, putting him in much the same boat as the rest of us.

Secondly, and this follows on, the statement assumes absolutely no commonality and mutual understanding between human beings. Is it absolutely impossible for me to conceive of what may motivate someone else to do something? I would think not. And although a perfect grasp of Nick's motivations may be beyond me, as indeed it is of him, I might make an educated guess.

And indeed, as a piece of writing is a piece of communication, part of the skill in his writing might be that such motivations would be obvious to a reader of the text in some shape or form.

Of course, were I to take the opposite stance and say that it is not possible for me to ever comprehend anything of an author's motivation on reading their work, then presumably any communicative role for a piece of writing is futile as it is impossible for author and reader to understand one another. This would make writing purely an exercise in 'self-expression' (a conceit I personally loathe) and therefore akin to textual masturbation as it would only ever have meaning to the writer hirself...
 
 
Cavatina
07:57 / 27.08.01
Tyrone, I don't think that what I'm suggesting is 'mystical'. I shouldn't have used the word 'processes'- it was ill-chosen in the haste of posting.

I agree that Nick - or any writer - whatever hir intentions, probably doesn't know all that's gone on during the creation of a piece; s/he may well later come to see other or further meanings. And I don't want to espouse an 'expressivist' theory of the text, i.e. the text as a reflection of pre-existing feelings which are inaccessible to readers. So let me try to formulate more precisely what I'm getting at.

It is true, I think, that only the writer hirself can fully appreciate the *conditions* under which a piece has been created, and these material, bodily conditions are frequently emotionally charged, have a psychic interface. Texts carry a certain amount of 'baggage' for their producers.

Take, as an example, a writer who has suffered temporary or permanent blindness (Milton, Drusilla Modjeska) while writing. The writer utilizes rhetorical structures and imagery the meanings and intertextuality of which we can all potentially recognize. And on the basis of this, and whatever biographical and socio-historical details are available to us, we can, if we wish, hypothesize about the author's intention. However, we do not experience the writer's actual bodily pain and the perhaps laborious measures taken in order to produce the text and come to terms with hir disability. My point is that the text so produced will carry resonances/meanings for the writer-as-reader of hir work which are commensurate with hir real life experience at that particular point in time; resonances that may well make the writer's anger at any subsequent parody or violation of hir text (whatever its subject) by another readily understandable.

The possible existence of such resonances is, of course, not necessarily deemed by *others* to present a justifiable cause for refusing to intervene in hir text in some way.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
07:58 / 27.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Cavatina:
A post-structuralist destabilizing or decentring of the self is not the same thing as doing away with the notion of the self. So I'm not a little chary of descriptions of the act of writing/the writer as 'ghost-written' as you suggest, Rosa...

<snip>

How do you account for the individual subject/writer who resists power (in Foucault's sense of the term)? Doesn't the writer actively take up subject positions as an agent? The 'ghost-written' idea seems to me to be parallel with the old Renaissance-to the-middle-of-the-eighteenth-century notion of the genius-writer being subject to divine dictation.

Well, yeah, I would like to do away with the notion of the self, actually. The individual can resist power in a Foucauldian sense. But why is the individual only unitary? Is it necessary for one to resist by being a 'one' rather than a 'many', seething with contradictions and possible slippage out of control? How is it possible for a 'writer' to predict a possible resistance of the networks of power, and to control that? Isn't it always unpredictable anyhow? if you've read Foucault, surely you agree that being colonised always and already is his accepted model for anything, life, the subject, and that it's a matter of tactical 'shifting' to deploy that colonisation to a useful and/or politically viable result? Do I make sense? Finding one's 'feet' as an agent is only ever momentary.

I provided the ghosting reference as a way to undo (and unpack) Nick's assumption that the writer always has some kind of inherent control in the dynamic between herself and the world, or between herself and the 'fiction'. To me, that begins to stray dangerously into structuralist territory, or modernist territory, and a much as I know Nick is responding with his gut (which is important, of course it is) I want to point this out.

Anyhow I feel I've already scared myself away from a viable political position by repeating the phrase 'the writer' and 'the self' (without the scare quotes, which I believe I will resume) when I don't even believe in such a thing. I am indeed here 'alone', but populated with a variety of ghosts, movies, texts, voices, dreams/hallucinations. They aren't from 'on high', no, never; they're everyday, they're as real as you or me. They enable me to write, simply. They are me.

<insert more schizoanalytic rambling>
 
 
YNH
17:06 / 27.08.01
In other words, you're wearing "I" makeup?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
20:45 / 27.08.01
Whisky: quote:Is the reader not the only mirror in which you can see yourself/work completely, and truly?Possibly. I that may even strengthen my case. Although I doubt you can ever see yourself completely; but if the identity-creation project is over-written, there's even less chance, isn't there?

quote:Also I think the article is inevitably weakened by being an attempted rational examination - a rationalisation, even - of an irrational emotion felt by you at the prospect of being fic'd.That's rather circular. I don't think this is a rationalisation. I experienced something and explored it.

quote:the arguments you advance for distrusting criticism and fanfic boil down, essentially, to the idea that a text is an incomprehensible, wonderful machine, the inner workings of which even its creator is unaware ofUm. No, they don't. I don't don't suggest they're incomprehensible at all. I think there are areas which need to be unstated and undefined, but that isn't the same thing.

quote:But I can't help sensing in your article the ghost of the author as divine madperson, or of the text as sacred objectThat's not what I'm pitching. Writing (and art/creative action) of all kinds as vital and central human activity, yes, that's part of it, and perhaps that's what you see.

Rosa:

quote:I imagine the act of writing as a ‘prosthesis’ simultaneously extending into the ‘writer’, inwardly/internallyLike it. Two directions at once. Probably very true - and yes, my characters hassle me endlessly.

quote:Writing itself is a violation of the boundaries of the self. Doubtful. Not just because I'd prefer 'waiving' or 'extension', but because, as I said in the article, I believe it's exploration and creation of the self.

quote:As a writer I am always already out of control, radically deterritorialised, populated by aliens who talk to me in my sleep and ghost-control my bodily functions, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.How odd to dissociate yourself from your own work in this way, from the workings of your own mind. Your 'ghosts' are you. Reminds me slightly of the Marxian notion of alienation of the working class from the product of its labour. I don't make that separation. Can you sustain it?

quote:Thus, the question of ownership of ‘my writing’ seems slightly churlish. As I've already said, I think 'ownership' is the wrong way of looking at this. It's not about property, but identity. There's more on this in 'How We Became Posthuman' - pattern vs. presence and access vs. ownership. I don't know if I buy it, but it's relevant.

quote:I don’t think you can refer to ‘assemblages’ without acknowledging that no assemblage or assemblage-of-assemblages has a centre, or a command-base. Golly. New thread. Now we're getting into deep psych territory, and I think this one is an open question. I've yet to be convinced that there is no 'I'. Discources within the construction of the Academe seem to push for decentralised identity at the moment, but that may be as much a structural drift as a scientific position. Anyone?

quote:where you’re coming from is a place where ‘the writer’ is a universal category, uncomplicated by the specificities of class or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or ‘the embarrassed et cetera’, as Judith Butler describes it. The right to feel ownership over a creation is already, I feel, a position of privilege and power which many creators are not at liberty to hold.Again, ownership is not the best filter for this set of ideas. What I'm trying to do here is empower anyone who creates, to provide a basis for understanding the value of writing and other creative actions, and the urge to them, in a way which does not have to make reference to financial structures or property-based concepts. My construction re-establishes a link between creator and text. Surely that's good for everyone? This applies equally to fanfic and so on once it's done, remember - it's sort of the old saw in reverse - "I'd prefer you not say this, but I will fight to the death for your right to have said it."

Deva: coming back to you for a sec -

quote:I felt like you were cheating a little in the move from the very complex construction of the fictive body as prosthesis/assemblage to the last couple of paras where you seemed to be naturalizing the body as *your* body and relying on ideas of violation - which don't seem to work on an analogy with prosthesis/assemblage... Weeelll, the thing is, we humans have no physical mechanism for generating useful tool-objects out of our bodies, unlike, for example, spiders. So there isn't really a word for a natural extension of the body. At the same time, the work on cyborgism is about blurring the line between body and machine, and 'prosthesis' evokes that and McLuhan's notion of media as extensions of body and sense. The natural and fully-integrated Body Fictive/Prosthesis is fully a part of the self as much as it is a separated thing. And it's a definition or mirror of our relations, which is, at this level of examination, what we are.

quote:you can't be in control of all the threads in your fic?This sort of depends on how you construct the self, doesn't it? But no, I'm not in control of everything; there are emergent properties in text, of course. And sometimes, yes, someone else will see something you don't - that's part of the 'scrutiny' aspect in its positive form.

quote:How does that connect up, for you, to the feeling of having your identity hijacked that you get from being fanficked? Is it (for example) okay because that's the Other Within whereas the fanfic writer is the Other Without?Is there an other within? Or is the integration of the other within part of what this Body Fictive thing is about? When you use that 'Other' you're invoking a whole pile of things I'm not quite sure apply. I'll buy the 'other without' in the simple sense of another identity in your shell, but I'm not sure about the Other Without. More unpacking before I commit on that...

Thank you all for reading and replying. It's a fasincating journey, and let me reiterate that now more than ever I'm convinced I don't have the answers...
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
23:24 / 27.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Whisky Priestess:
Perhaps a distorting mirror, but we'll leave that for the nonce. [Haus?]

Laughed my virtual ass off at this. Are you calling Haus a nonce? Where's RRM when you need hir?

The notion that we have to construct the idea of self and an authorial voice (in your head or in the text) in such reductive pronoun-based terminology is, I think, a flawed one. If I'm right in supposing that Rosa is talking about the multiplicity of self as a conflation of voices, none of which can be construed as representing a unified 'self', then who's making the comment in the first place? Locating the 'self' as both 'I' and 'we' would seem paradoxical but appropriate. I'm not a theory bitch by any stretch of the imagination, though, so if I've based that on a misapprehension of the text of this thread, then please do clear it up for me.

Such backpedalling aside - I'd place the author of a text as divine madperson without a second thought, and, equally, the text as sacred object. There's nothing wrong with that - I'd argue that Rosa's vivid description of the both the effect of the cause, and the cause of the effect of her creativity on her 'self' is proof positive of the former. I can certainly identify (to use a word problematised by this particular discourse, because I like to play) that with my own experience of being a writer. And Nick's description in his article (which made me feel all fresh and daisy faced - cheers for that, haven't felt moved to post in this forum for ages) of his reaction to being fanficked when the work was 'of him' would certainly indicate, that, on some level, he located his text as the latter.

Equally, were someone to appreciate Nick's text to the point that (for example) Tolkien fans appreciate Lord Of The Rings, they would, in all likelihood, also locate it as 'sacred'. As an aside, does a film adaptation of a cult or popular novel fall into the same area as is under discussion here? Remember the online scagging of X-Men when they changed the costumes? The debate over whether Gilliam did a good enough job of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas? Does Gilliam's predilection for pasting his 'auteurial voice', style, whatever, over every project he undertakes place his adaptation into the realms of 'fanfic'? Or would he have to have significantly altered the text to do so? What about adaptations of Shakespeare (Luhrmann's Romeo And Juliet, for example)? Most still consider these plays to be sacred texts, despite occasional arguments over the voice of the author, or even who the author actually was.

Anyway. I think the author (whether he or she exists as a concept is arguable to everyone except the author hirself, I would think) has a right to feel indignant at the appropriation of materiel that they consider to be, at whatever level, theirs. And (at whatever level that actually is), I'd consider that they also have the right to consider that they hold a degree of moral ownership of a text that they have created, beyond whatever rights the legal system now in place provides for them. They can feel secure in that, troubled by it, whatever floats their boat. It's a fact that most, if not all, will feel it. That moment when a copy editor underscores part of your precious manuscript must hurt like a bastard. I'll probably want to take their eyes out with a blunt pencil when it happens to me.

But it happens, at every stage of creation. Unless you want to lock the damned thing (my choice of words, perhaps not yours!) in the bottom of a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory etc etc, you'll have to allow it to bear public scrutiny at some point, and the fact that the reader will write your text in hir own image is something completely outside of your control. There are people out there who will not understand what you write - or, maybe more accurately, will understand something different to that which you intended. Does the fact of the placing of this differing perception as reinterpretive text, also in a public forum - fanfic, slash, whatever - rather than keeping it as pub conversation material, make any difference? Going back to the violation concept - is the one rape, and the other, perhaps simply voyeurism?

Or do I just ask too many silly questions?
 
 
YNH
03:44 / 28.08.01
Nick, you've re-lost me. The act (present) of fanfic'ing your, ahem, cbu, is wrong - morally and legally. But the act (past) of having produced a fanfictual artifact is protected by the same argument? Is this some sort of odd "freedom of have spoken" coincident with a contra-indicated resriction of speech?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:37 / 28.08.01
At speed...

Jack: quote:The notion that we have to construct the idea of self and an authorial voice (in your head or in the text) in such reductive pronoun-based terminology is, I think, a flawed one. And not what I'm after. Pre-verbal, immanent sense of self, and exploration of created, relation-based self (which latter could easily be the multiple self you describe.)

quote:The act (present) of fanfic'ing your, ahem, cbu, is wrong - morally and legally. But the act (past) of having produced a fanfictual artifact is protected by the same argument? Is this some sort of odd "freedom of have spoken" coincident with a contra-indicated resriction of speech? In a sense. It's weird, but it sort of follows. I don't want you to inscribe your identity on my body, but once it's done, it's done. I refuse to use the capitalist system to punish and stigmatise it, because I regard our projects as the same, though in this case in competition - but also, as I suggested in the article, because that action would itself bind me to positions in relation to the world and my own creation which I don't want.
 
 
deletia
11:32 / 28.08.01
Quick response - one of the questions that has yet really to be addressed is to what extent the article should be considered as something with a claim to being "right" - ie a schematic of ideas by which behaviour should in general be affected - or simply "true" - an accurate examination of one man's feelings.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
11:56 / 28.08.01
I don't think Nick ever made out that he was rewriting the manual, so 'right' is probably not what he was after - 'true' sounds more appropriate (although the way you've described it, it sounds like the article was written in the style of Hemingway or something).

But is what he was after what we should be discussing? He's got an authorial voice in the article too, you know. Does it matter whether you interface with Nick at all in this thread? Or are we just being polite?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
13:18 / 28.08.01
Oh, no. 'Right' is indeed what I'm after, at least to a point. This is supposed to be generally applicable. And it is - the personal stuff does not govern the theory, although, obviously, my personal response was the startpoint.

I left the origin point behind, to be honest. I'm not all that interested in the fanfic debate so much as I am in the broader implications of what I'm suggesting. And they're very broad.

Haus, I think you may be barking up the wrong tree on this occasion - there's nothing prejudicial about the genesis of this article being a personal reaction; every thought, inevitably, is. But the reasoning is not specific to my situation or perception. I may be wrong, but I am not beached on my own point of view.
 
 
Tom Coates
14:20 / 28.08.01
It seems to me, like many of the best articles on subjects of appreciation, reaction or feeling, what Nick is attempting to do is move from experiential feeling, to exploration of that feeling to opening it up for debate, discussion and comparison between individuals. It is ahypothesis to fit apparent evidence, rather than argument developing from point to point. If an alternative hypothesis explains the things that Nick's theory explains, if Nick's theory isn't self-contradictory and if other people can 'verify' their experiential feelings as not restricted to him, then he is indeed making a fairly legitimate claim to 'right' or 'truth', in as such as those words operate as constructs we work with rather than referring to an extra-textual thing. Does that make sense?

Personally, don't agree with some of Nick's conclusions (still thinking through this), but completely have no trouble with the style of argument itself.

It occurs to me that one might like to think of these things in terms of GRAFTS ratther than prosthesis. Think of it this way - If I produce a text, I produce a body of information, of code almost, that individuals can react to and graft upon their own identity. Subsequent changes to that grafted material from outside feel like a betrayal - at the cheesiest level, we feel ourselves to be upset when a bad film adaptation is done of a favourite book. It seems plausible that some quality or element of the original book must have been internalised by us to experience such feeling so deeply. But just as chunks of a text can be grafted onto one's own identity by a reader, surely they can be viewed as chunks that are in the public domain but are OF or EXTENSIONS of the original author - who may or may not have grown or regrafted the work as a whole into themselves or as an extension of themselves. Seems plausible to me.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
14:32 / 28.08.01
You mean in a similar sense to the ongoing series of Books Of Magic, as opposed to Gaiman's four-issue original series? Of The Dreaming, as extended from Sandman?
 
  

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