On a bit more sleep, it strikes me that I was probably being incomprehensible, and I can't blame you at all for retreating into cat-kicking. Perhaps it would be more helpful if I were to back up and explain why it is that I'm resisting your formulation at all.
Here's the thing, or one of them: A good part of what I really love about the pieces of fanfic that I do love seems to be unrelated to what the vast majority of fandom is looking for and loves. (The vast majority, but not everyone, and naturally the people I spend the most time discussing this stuff with are the ones who aren't entirely aligned with that vast majority.) There is a fanfic majority aesthetic, one most of us know when we see. And there's certainly fanfic that's best identified by its clear positioning within a community's practice (discourse, whatever).
But there's also fanfic that doesn't fit easily within the majority aesthetic, and/or that doesn't strike me as being readily and intrinsically identifiable as the product of one aesthetic subculture and its practices. ("Readily identifiable," that is, in the sense that it would be obvious to a scholar from a future culture that this particular story belonged to the same aesthetic tradition as the one that gives rise to the Id Vortex concept.) Since I tend to prefer this not-really-conforming work, I have an obvious investment in not seeing it excluded from whatever definition we adopt -- and more of an investment in not having it treated as a kind of marginal afterthought.
Only that's the thing that leads to my issue, because once I start insisting that this other work that doesn't really fit within the dominant community aesthetic is just as much fanfic as the work that does, I have no basis on which to exclude a good deal of work that you're arguing for excluding -- at least, I have no basis if I want a definition that is purely text-based. And I do want that kind of definition, because it seems to me that once we start classifying things based on the circumstances of their creation, we're no longer evaluating them as individual works, but rather as expressions within a limited and walled-off tradition.
Which isn't to say I don't see value in the second kind of understanding and examination of any kind of work. I do: that kind of approach is both interesting for its own sake and important in understanding one set of meanings that a given set of works has. But the value of any given work is not solely its value within its originating subculture, and its only legitimate meaning isn't the meaning that subculture would generally ascribe to it. And that's particularly true in a world where none of us is a member of only one subculture, or practicing anything without being influenced by any number of other traditions and aesthetics.
Thus my conclusion that it makes more sense, and is more broadly useful, to try for a text-based rather than a community-based definition.
-- Mind you, I don't intend in saying any of this to try to make fan fiction seem more "legitimate" or respectable by trying to go out and claim mainstream works. (But then, I always flinch when I see people trying to justify it as practice for writing commercially publishable fiction, too.) I don't think fan fiction requires an apology or a special justification. Indeed, if I'd seen people bringing up mainstream fiction as apologetic, and fully registered it as such, I'd be snarling and kicking things too.
no subject
Date: 1 Jun 2010 08:02 pm (UTC)Here's the thing, or one of them: A good part of what I really love about the pieces of fanfic that I do love seems to be unrelated to what the vast majority of fandom is looking for and loves. (The vast majority, but not everyone, and naturally the people I spend the most time discussing this stuff with are the ones who aren't entirely aligned with that vast majority.) There is a fanfic majority aesthetic, one most of us know when we see. And there's certainly fanfic that's best identified by its clear positioning within a community's practice (discourse, whatever).
But there's also fanfic that doesn't fit easily within the majority aesthetic, and/or that doesn't strike me as being readily and intrinsically identifiable as the product of one aesthetic subculture and its practices. ("Readily identifiable," that is, in the sense that it would be obvious to a scholar from a future culture that this particular story belonged to the same aesthetic tradition as the one that gives rise to the Id Vortex concept.) Since I tend to prefer this not-really-conforming work, I have an obvious investment in not seeing it excluded from whatever definition we adopt -- and more of an investment in not having it treated as a kind of marginal afterthought.
Only that's the thing that leads to my issue, because once I start insisting that this other work that doesn't really fit within the dominant community aesthetic is just as much fanfic as the work that does, I have no basis on which to exclude a good deal of work that you're arguing for excluding -- at least, I have no basis if I want a definition that is purely text-based. And I do want that kind of definition, because it seems to me that once we start classifying things based on the circumstances of their creation, we're no longer evaluating them as individual works, but rather as expressions within a limited and walled-off tradition.
Which isn't to say I don't see value in the second kind of understanding and examination of any kind of work. I do: that kind of approach is both interesting for its own sake and important in understanding one set of meanings that a given set of works has. But the value of any given work is not solely its value within its originating subculture, and its only legitimate meaning isn't the meaning that subculture would generally ascribe to it. And that's particularly true in a world where none of us is a member of only one subculture, or practicing anything without being influenced by any number of other traditions and aesthetics.
Thus my conclusion that it makes more sense, and is more broadly useful, to try for a text-based rather than a community-based definition.
-- Mind you, I don't intend in saying any of this to try to make fan fiction seem more "legitimate" or respectable by trying to go out and claim mainstream works. (But then, I always flinch when I see people trying to justify it as practice for writing commercially publishable fiction, too.) I don't think fan fiction requires an apology or a special justification. Indeed, if I'd seen people bringing up mainstream fiction as apologetic, and fully registered it as such, I'd be snarling and kicking things too.