Conceptual Analyses of Fanfiction, and Why They Don't Work

[alixtii]

So many of you, the ones who follow metafandom at least, will be familiar with the rough outline of the discussion: kradical--Keith R.A. DeCandido, the author of, among other things, the Serenity novelization (which I own but have yet to read)---made a post discussing the difference between fanfic and professional media tie-in fic in which he had the bad sense to

Comments

[alixtii]

I was born into the English language, so to speak, in the sense that I cannot remember a pre-linguistic self, a "me" which existed before things had names. As much as I can remember, things have always had names, and I used the names I already knew to get a rough idea of how new names were used, at least before I could see them in action and get used to them that way. Then I learned the names for things in other languages like French and Latin, names which sometimes worked the way the names I knew worked, but most of the time didn't.

I don't try to define things, but I'll try to do my best to explain my usage to someone who is unfamiliar with it, so then I can have a rough predictor of how I and others will use the term in the future.

Language works. Not always well, but it works. So that's sort of a starting point. The only problem is that it renders birth impossible or, to speak less gnomically, this viewpoint cannot make sense of language acquisition, it only understands language-using selves as things which appear ex nihilo (the whole schema is somewhat solipsistic).

Wittgenstein, the main theorist (if you could even apply that term to him!) upon whom I'm drawing here, produced many problematizations and questions but few answers. But he pretty much exploded the ideas that things could be clearly be defined for the remainder of 20th century philosophy.

Sometimes I notice that things have names and the names are very inexact and try to make new, exact(er) names, because it is fun to try.

[alixtii]

Ah, shared meaning. How many times did we hash that out in my Wittgenstein class? Actually, I'd be interested in hearing how other post-structuralists, particularly those coming primarily from a different perspective, would answer the question. You'd expect cathexys to be all about the shared meaning.

Practically, "assume it works and lump along until we realize we're misunderstanding each other and call a time out to hash out a more precise blend of fuzziness" sounds like it should work, and it reminds me (forgive me for totally going textbook on you, but I'm not sure of myself to do anything but retreat into my studies) of Wittgenstein's appropriation of St. Augustine's theory of language (insofar as he had one) at the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations: language is a tool we (learn as children to) use to get what we want, and when we don't get what we want we assume the tool is broken. Note this isn't really an account of shared meaning so much as a constant translation process between two foreign languages; any other sense is always-already alien to us.

It's precisely this solipsistic view of language that Wittgenstein goes on to dismantle in the Philosophical Investigations, to replace it with a notion of shared meaning. But I don't think I understand how it works--or even if it works--well enough to explain it. (Which is why they don't let undergraduates teach college, hee.)

Hmm. I once worked out Saussure for myself by doing a post called "Linguistics with Dawn and River" in which I played with images of fannish characters and thought baloons and speech balloons and tried to figure out the connection between thinking about vampires and talking about vampires. Maybe I should do the same thing with Wittgenstein.

[alixtii]

but we DO actually manage to communicate some higher level concepts, yes?

Maybe. We also blow a lot hot air. The (positivist) idea was originally that all of science could be understood as a complicated version of "pass the salt" and all of philosophy, religion, and art were basically hot air.

by "constant translation process" do you mean between "what I want on the inside" and "the clumsy words I use to convey my desires to the person with the salt?"

That's exactly what I mean. But it's not clear how we could represent even to ourselves what we want on the inside without those clumsy words--or at least clumsy concepts. So the idea that what we want on the inside could be understood to exist independently of the clumsy words we use to describe them fell out of favor. Instead, the idea is that we are already all enmeshed in shared language. What you need then is an error theory to describe how miscommunication takes place.

[azdak]

The hardest part is figuring out how we have the thoughts in the first place! There's a certain amount of evidence as to the cognitive relationship between words and concepts(eg from aphasic patients who have coherent thoughts they want to express but constantly retrieve the wrong word from their mental lexicon - as you can imagine, it's enormously frustrating to want to say "Pass the salt" and to come out with "Bugger the fruit juice") and which areas of the brain are responsible for which parts of the process (damage in some areas makes people speak grammatically fluently but what they say is nonsense, damage to other areas buggers up the syntax but at least the individual words are correct). If you're interested at all in an empirical rather than a philosophical approach to language and the mind, I can't recommend Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct highly enough. It's totally accessible to the lay person, really well written and entertaining, very thought-provoking, and the science is spot on.

[azdak]

Well, ultimately the neat ideas only get us anywhere if they can be shared :-)

[alixtii]

i guess my idea of an error theory would be "not using the word in the same way." of course religious wars have been fought over exactly this kind of thing!

I don't think you need any complicated or deeply metaphysical philosophy of language to have this sort of error theory, though; descriptivist linguistics is perfectly capable, I think, of documenting the differences in usage between two linguistic communities as a purely empirical matter, without being caught up in issues of the possibility or lack thereof of shared meaning.

[azdak]

So the idea that what we want on the inside could be understood to exist independently of the clumsy words we use to describe them fell out of favor.

It is, however, back now, at least in the field of linguistics, where such things as the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon suggest that concepts are also represented in the brain at a pre-verbal level, hence the frantic search to find that word that's on the tip of your tongue that expresses what you want to say.