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To Hell with the Canon: How Fanfiction is (Re)Thinking Authorial Intent, Textual Ownership, and the Postmodern Condition

Originally presented at the 2021 Ray Browne Conference, 5 March 2021

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A central trend that exists within fan community subcultures, particularly those whose media of interest is popular, influential, and controversial, is personal ownership. For as long as folks have consumed media, they have developed emotional and personal connections to the source material’s characters, stories, and themes. Those who feel empathy for the characters and stories of the texts, shows, or games they consume often ask themselves how they can further develop or sometimes improve upon what the author has created, and how they can contribute to the fan community they participate in in a meaningful fashion. One of the ways that these folks do so is through metatexts called fanfictions. These fan creations follow the poststructuralist traditions of scholars like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, suggesting that authorial intent is not the most important influence in a text’s purpose and legacy – it is ultimately up to the fans to develop their own experience.

The genealogy of fanfiction development is vast, but worth addressing briefly for context. Fanfictions, according to Merriam-Webster, are “stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans” and these stories are often marked by this sense of personal ownership and originality that stems from emotional connection – oftentimes created by a desire to see certain characters and plot elements become more developed. Fanfiction as a popular form of fan labor, fan community and subculture formation, and location for original writing based on others’ intellectual property is not a new phenomenon: Merriam-Webster also explains that its first recorded usage dates back to almost a century ago in 1939. There are examples of unauthorized stories written and distributed about works from the late 19th century like Sherlock Holmes, and scholars and consumers of popular culture alike are more than likely of how influential the fan subculture surrounding Star Trek has been in popularizing and validating fanfiction as an authentic form of fan engagement. However, fanfiction as an artform and a community culture have exploded with the advent of the World Wide Web and have developed into a widespread – and postmodern – form of expression within fan subcultures.

Archives where fan authors can post and distribute their fanfictions date back to the 1990s with Usenet forums. They developed in conjunction with already mainstream forms of community fan engagement like fanzines and snailmail public mailing lists, and eventually transitioned to more automated databases where these fan texts could be accessed via tags from a central location. One of the earliest and most influential websites came about in 1998, aptly named FanFiction.net. FF.net has also set the precedent in the creation of more modern archive sites like Archive of our Own, or AO3.org, and their influence is strong – both sites are considered the premiere places for one to publish and distribute their own creative metatexts based on other media.

Long before the advent of online fan communities and the phenomenon of fanfiction, scholars have been theorizing on the nature of textual authority and ownership in the vein of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction. One of the most prominent and influential essays that looks to analyze who makes meaning out of language and media is Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” originally published in 1967. In this essay, Barthes offers a response to the New Criticism theories of the time regarding the nature of text and how essential deconstruction is to it – like scholars following New Criticism ideas, he suggests that meaning is made of a text by the audience rather than the author, but relies more on deconstruction and the belief that language in modern texts is disjointed and blurred, and that ultimately the author’s purpose and biographical background have no baring on the meaning or value of a text.

The reading and analysis of a text, according to Barthes, is an active process that involves the intervention of the reader. Thanks to the nature of language in a poststructuralist era, the author is not able to present “new” or universal ideas that can be discovered or unearthed through reading – rather, they are the scriptor of the text, rearranging symbols and concepts that have existed all throughout history to be interpreted by the audience. Reading involves putting oneself into the text as they consume it and drawing one’s connections based on their own experiences and knowledge; in a way, they are the scriptor as well. As Barthes explains, “this connection [in textual meaning] occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins” (Barthes 142).

Barthes’ ideas have been influential in the field of poststructuralism, postmodernism and deconstruction, and the concept of authorial intent’s influence on a work’s reception – or lack thereof – has been noted upon by scholars like Foucault and Derrida. Barthes’ suggestion of the scriptor as the meaning-maker rather than the author as the God of a piece of text is still influential and relevant to this day, especially within fan communities and their metatexts. Fanfiction is an inherently postmodern and poststructuralist phenomenon – it allows fans to take a textual ownership of the source content around which they form communities and distances the author from the material they have written. It relies on notions that temporality and universality are irrelevant in understanding the texts they consume. The author and their intentions on the text’s meaning is no longer the past, present, and future of a text’s destination – there are people writing fanfictions long after the text that they form communities around have been concluded, and they are the destination of the text (Barthes 145). The source media that fan communities form themselves around are no longer a location for the author to express any specific idea or novel thought; rather the reader inhabits and controls the text as a space, through the community they join and their relationship they make with the canon of a text, when they make meaning out of it through interpretation and creative endeavors like fanfiction. The fans are the scriptors with the same level of validity as the dead author – in the same way that authors of a popular text rework and rely upon past symbols and language to craft a piece of media, fans rework the canon of popular shows, movies, books, video games, and so on to improve upon the source material, engage with a community, or write themselves into existence.

It is with this connection in mind that I make the following statement regarding the validity and authenticity of these metatexts: regardless of the aesthetic value of a fanfiction, how well the author has constructed the piece, or how thoroughly it understands the canon material, all fanfiction is valid. Regardless of what fans are writing about, be it a Vietnam War alternate universe fanfiction featuring a fan pairing from CW’s Supernatural, a fanfiction that speculates on the relationships of real celebrities and influential personalities, or a Harry Potter fanfiction that has been so universally panned for being the worst fanfiction that it remains in the public eye a decade after its publication, these members of diverse fan communities all have one thing in common: they keep the conversations about the source material in motion.

Poststructuralism suggests that the fragmented nature of language and symbol mean that the existence of the texts themselves, rather than what they try to communicate to us, is most important. Despite concerns of ethics, quality, and plausibility in these fanfictions, textual reception is far more important than authorial intent, as fans use them as a vehicle to keep the media they consume alive, evolving, and meaningful, even if those meanings are subjective. Phenomenon of fanfiction – good, bad, and ugly – highlights Barthes’ argument throughout “Death of the Author” and situates the new radical theories of post-era scholars as a useful means of unpacking and understanding the essence of fan communities and their craft. The labors of love that go into creating and maintaining these fanfictions show that, as Barthes said, “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination” (Barthes 148).

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References

Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. “The Death of the Author.” Essay. In Image, Music, Text, 142–48. London: Fontana, 1977.

Buechner, Maryanne Murray. Time Magazine. “Pop Fiction.” March 4, 2002. https://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001950,00.html

Flock, Elizabeth. PBS.org. “In long-lost play, the author of ‘Peter Pan’ spoofs ‘Sherlock Homes’ and the mystery genre.” August 10, 2017. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/long-lost-play-author-peter-pan-spoofs-sherlock-holmes-mystery-genre.

Herzing, Melissa Jean. “The Internet World of Fanfiction.” Master’s thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2005. https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/1046/

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, “fan fiction,”, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fan%20fiction.

[frankiekrutsch]

Music for Dead Malls: Vaporwave as Hauntology and Hegemony

Cowritten with Dylan Reid Miller, doctoral student at Bowling Green State University / Originally presented at the 2021 Popular Culture Association National Conference, 5 June 2021

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Vaporwave, an aesthetic subgenre of art, music, and Internet trends, developed in the early 2010’s in niche digital communities. Typically characterized by remixed and sampled music, nostalgia and popular culture, and consumer capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s, the vaporwave subgenre gained a somewhat mainstream following in virtual spaces during the mid-2010s, and has been recognized and satirized to this day. Vaporwave can be described as an aesthetic “uncanny valley,” thanks to its recall of specific sociocultural trends in non-specific temporal settings connected back to the era of Reganomics and before the onset of the war on terror. The presenters of this paper seek to analyze and explore the vaporwave movement through Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds’s applications of Derrida’s hauntological theory, and to argue the presence of vaporwave as a postmodern response to current American trends, late-stage capitalism, and the failed promises that the 1980s and 1990s gave us for the future.

In contemporary Western history, it is hard to imagine a musical genre that embodies the concept of hauntology better than vaporwave. The neologism, coined by Jacques Derrida in the 1993 book Spectres of Marx, was originally utilized in culture studies to identify the ability of the intangible past to “haunt” the present from an atemporal point of origin, and to recognize how the “always-already” present aspects of ontology impact the norms of culture that exist today - as Derrida himself explains, “Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (Spectres of Marx 46). The term has been applied widely across many aspects of culture, almost graduating from being a neologism, but its most important influence has been in the area of music. Hauntology as a term and as a theory has what Mark Fisher calls an “intrinsically sonic dimension” - not only is it a clever homophone, but it is “a question of hearing what is not here.” Hauntology as culture and music is a specter that can be heard, experienced, and more importantly, felt. The Internet born-and-raised microgenre of vaporwave, as a musical, aesthetic, and hauntological movement, understands the importance of feeling hegemony: its electronic stylings, the slowed-down and chopped samples of pop and lounge classics extending from the era of Reaganomics to the tech bubble burst of the 2000s, elicit in listeners the sensation of being lost in time and space somewhere during the height of 20th century - somewhere before the future died and the past reigned supreme. Vaporwave as hauntological music, in line with the theorizations of scholars like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, both critiques and glorifies the socioeconomic and cultural success and decline of the Western world through its sound. Presenting a sublime nostalgia for a past that never really was and a future that never will be, vaporwave is a postmodern representation of the “always-already” present ghost of the 80s and 90s, when our hegemonic structures gave off the strongest illusion of success. This ghost of possibility haunts us today, those same structures having now left millennials with around 5% of all wealth in the United States, and vaporwave now serves as an oasis for individuals lost in the desert of cultural failings and forgotten promises.

Commentary on hauntological music extends far before vaporwave’s rise to fame on the Internet. Mark Fisher in 2005, as k-punk, wrote a profound essay on the British post-punk band Joy Division’s musical and cultural significance within the 1970s, citing specifically their “depressive ontology” and their apparent lack of cause for this philosophical perspective. The band’s sound, eerie and rhythmic and vaguely distorted, resonated with contemporary and retrospective listeners because it extended beyond cultural discontent into depression and lack of purpose. The band, according to Fisher’s analysis, laid the groundwork for future hauntological music that expressed a familiar and melancholy nihilism toward the contemporary hegemonic norms that seem to have been present since the beginning of Western culture itself - “listening to the albums now is like putting on a comfortable and familiar set of clothes.” Simon Reynolds, in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, touches on similar issues: Reynolds elaborates on how UK based label Ghost Box used hauntological music to express “ideas of a lost utopianism: the post-welfare-state era of benevo­lent state planning and social engineering” (330) and to mourn specific aspects of British life in 1958-78 facilitated by a thriving public sector that had been lost with the rise of Thatcherism. For all its intrigue - the mysterious and countercultural traits of the sound, the resonance of the lyrics - hauntological music accomplishes one task over all others: it taps into our collective cultural memory, samples and distorts and remixes them, attempting to find a solace in the trepidation of our world and its values. “The rapid turnover of ephemeral images leads to a breakdown of any coherent sense of temporality.”

Reynolds also calls hauntological music a form of “memory work,” the Freudian term for processing grief. He brings it back to the concept of the spectral by pointing to the inherent supernaturalism of hearing the voice of a dead or forgotten person, and the doubling of that feeling when those sounds are sampled as they were in Ghost Box’s work, creating “a musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and seance” (Retromania 313). As temporality continues to break down and blend together, artists in America have likewise begun calling back to their own lost futures. The 1980s marked what Francis Fukuyama declared "The End of History," where the fall of the USSR established neoliberal capitalism as the single prevalent political and economic system on Earth. Unsurprisingly, this "End of History" also resulted in an end of the future; the cyclical nature of capitalism, unchallenged by any other sociopolitical formation, flattened “progress” into the consumption of incrementally different products as technology advanced forward. Art, too, entered a stagnant period - while art movements have always existed in the context of their predecessors, Reynolds argues that techno, which hit the American consciousness in the late 1980s, “was... the last time that music felt like it was really moving forward, the last blast of full-tilt, irony­ free futurism in mainstream pop” (393). So it makes sense that Vaporwave producers, concerned primarily with the phenomenology of their music, manipulate beats from before “End of History” and combine them with samples from the early digital age like the dial-up noise to create their temporally untethered songs, mourning the final years of when things could still feel truly new. As YouTuber Adam Neely points out, even the Vaporwave projects that are little more than a slowed down version of a song from the 1980s feel completely different through these changes, and this altered experience is at the core of understanding the genre’s appeal and cultural messaging.

While finding a single date of origin for the music of vaporwave has proven to be difficult for scholars and fans alike, many pinpoint the solidification of the “vaporwave aesthetic” as 2011 with the release of the seminal album Floral Shoppe. Ramona Xavier, under the pseudonym Macintosh Plus, thrust vaporwave into mainstream Internet spaces like Reddit with this ninth studio album; Floral Shoppe has been praised for the way it exemplifies the genre’s mainstays through sampling, remixing, and altering songs from the 1970s and 1980s like Diana Ross’ cover of “It’s Your Move” and various tracks from the soft rock band Pages. The fan-made music videos created to accompany Floral Shoppe were similarly spliced and remixed with imagery that reminds audiences of the late 20th century -  YouTube creator First Last designed a full-length visual album to complement Xavier’s work, featuring visuals that they say are pulled from “obscure 80s VHS rips,” “early CGI demo reels,” and “channels from 80s and 90s TV,” with the intent of creating a “retrofuturistic, faux-utopian, and borderline psychedelic vibe.” Xavier’s album and the fan videos created to go with it have been well received: auditorily and visually, they blend an indescribably ethereal quality of muted, relaxing mood music and visuals with the media and consumer trends that were considered “up-and-coming” in the 80s and 90s, simultaneously remaining sensual and melancholy and successfully eliciting “nostalgic and futuristic” sensations from listeners. They are able to return listeners to the contradictory era of both endless possibility and economic decline - even if they never experienced that era firsthand. In the years that followed, other electronic musicians considered essential to the vaporwave genre - including those like Saint Pepsi, luxury elite, Blank Banshee, and ECO VIRTUAL - would follow in Xavier’s footsteps by creating music that is easy to listen to, achingly familiar, and subversively melancholy in its subtle critique of the past and present.

Vaporwave embodies the goals, or lack thereof, of hauntological and postmodern music by addressing the failings of and nostalgia for late 20th-century consumer culture, as well as sociopolitical and economic trends that became relevant during the same time. Many who create vaporwave music, design music videos or album covers that complement the music aesthetically, or simply engage with the music and its subculture from the fringes were born either toward the end of the 90s or in the early 2000s (the “late-millennial” generation, as some have called it) and likely only have vague, fuzzy memories of what life was like during the era of their youth. The cultural memory that rests within this generation is innocent and spectral, almost Freudian in nature. The commercials that corporations began to direct at the newly-identified youth audiences of TV and Internet, the rise and fall of the vast shopping mall as the Mecca of capitalism’s triumph, the looming anxieties of Y2K, of neoliberalism, of contradictions within the free market and a growing “virtual” reality that came with the tech boom - all of these, when experienced and viewed through the eyes of a generation developing self-awareness and an understanding of the world around them, serve as a comforting albeit twisted foundation for nostalgia and familiarity. The stylings of vaporwave and its lack of origin within the latter half of the 20th century - where exactly do these analog-into-digital samples come from, how are they altered, where have I heard this tune before? - demonstrate the confusing and tumultuous nature of existing and growing during a paradigm shift in Western culture, and the need to find comfort in whatever recycled commodities and experiences one can muster in the present, while maintaining a cognitively-dissonant hope for the future of their culture. Disoriented, fragmented, atemporal, haunting and liminal - the memories and the art are one and the same.

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References:

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.

Neely, Adam. “Music Theory of VAPORWAVE,” YouTube video, 11:06, 24 October 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s.

Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber, 2011.