Under the circumstances it seems only appropriate this document be considered public property. I have pillaged several writers, especially Anthony Giddens, N. Katherine Hayles, and Michael Clifford. Their copyrights rest with them, but whatever of this article is original to me is freely placed in the public domain. Needless to say, this last includes errors and poor argument of which the above-mentioned are not guilty.

I.

Identity is a maelstrom in this, the rump of Modernity - or the post-modern era, depending on whom you believe. "Modernity," writes Anthony Giddens, "institutionalises the principle of radical doubt and insists that all knowledge take the form of hypotheses." This is true of self-identity perhaps more than anything else. The touchstones of identity in previous eras are no longer secure: Church, State, Family, Place (social and physical), Tradition; all have changed and been subject to genealogical examination and exposure. A major project of the last decades of the 20th Century was one of revelation. By now, each fresh unveiling (political scandal or social home-truth) is greeted with much puffing of cheeks and weary, saturated outrage or perplexity. Solidity becomes nebulous, and the rocks on which the church of the self is constructed turn out to be contingent relations, structures of ideas rather than real, immutable things - the term 'real' itself is problematic.

According to Horkheimer and Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment', the blasted landscapes of our ontology and epistemology are owed to the great attempt to finalise them: the Enlightenment Project. Reason was to strip away the superstitions of the past, and leave a bright, shining present of rational human behaviour - which would include such self-evidently reasonable institutions as Family and State. Needless to say, these proved far from immune to Reason's razor - as too did Reason. It turned out that they, too, were myths; structures of contingent relations creating, not embodying, the status quo. With their demise, however, the mainstays of self-location were lost, and whereas previous instances of such collapse had given way to alternative myths, dressed up as discovered or revealed truth, here the narrative ended. The process of self-examination reveals not only the created nature of the world around us, but also of the analytical tool itself, still functional, but with no especial claim to truth, and not able to reveal what does not yet exist - a new way of being in the world. Conscious that we are what we make ourselves, we have now to decide what we will make. But rather than being defined by our relationships with structure, in the way that Erich Fromm indicates in 'The Sane Society' - "he experiences himself, not as a man…but as that abstraction, alienated from his real nature, which fulfils a certain function in the social system" - we must first seek identity, and draw from this the structures which will sustain our inhabiting of it, and allow us whatever flexibility we may require. The failure to do this, where idea and ideology precede our identity as humans, gives rise to Terror, as in the Leninist and the Thatcherite experiments, where a notional good is the banner under which practical horrors are given their head. Created truth is a great freedom, but it's not without an element of danger. So both as individuals and as a society, we need, or feel the need, for an answer to the question "who am I?"

II.

"A creative involvement with others and with the object-world is almost certainly a fundamental component of psychological satisfaction and the discovery of 'moral meaning'…Where individuals cannot live creatively…chronic melancholy or schizophrenic tendencies are likely to result." Giddens again, writing in 'Modernity and Self-Identity'; creativity is more than a way to make money and avoid wearing a tie. This echoes Marx and (oddly) Ayn Rand, who saw creativity as crucial to (and in Marx' case, at least, definitive of) human identity: we make, we work, we create. Marx thus pre-empted the somewhat stuffy anthropologist Kenneth P. Oakley, who wrote in 1949 that the defining characteristic of humans is that we are tool-makers.

The perception of fictional writing prevalent in discussions here and elsewhere seems to be of an art- or culture-commodity, the product of a bourgeois, or at least privileged group selecting the writing profession as an alternative to the law or the bank. That the profession allows a large degree of self-expression, and the chance to enjoy one's own creativity is an additional perk. Writers supply a demand for fictional goods, and in the process synthesise from pre-existing material (in the world or in other fictional products) narratives and texts. These texts, being once disseminated, are naturally public property, but are protected by the structures of privilege in the form of copyright law and traditional assignments of authorship. The writer is thus cast as a threefold oppressor and usurper of communal property, in the first place because s/he belongs to privilege, in the second because s/he appropriates the life around to make fiction and rashly calls this authorship, and in the third because s/he seeks to protect the product of this theft through the law. The writer thus constructed is a class enemy and an instrument of intellectual, creative, and political oppression. No matter how subversive you try to be, no matter what the content of your work, your engagement with the system makes you suspect at best. A milder version makes no comment about the writer, but maintains that once a text is publicly exhibited or published, it is naturally communal.

Fanfic has been represented as existing in this space; as rejecting traditional notions of ownership and using this natural resource to power divergent discourses. Alternatively, its creators are unconscious of this position, but are to be supported because of it. Lastly, of course, they can be seen as in practical violation of copyright, although as long as fanfic stories remain marginalised, there is little chance of any action. The key point is the proposition that ownership ceases with publication, and thereafter, so long as no profit is sought by the fanfic creator (although this is perhaps a placatory gesture, rather than an integral part of the argument), it is unreasonable to object to anyone making use of what was once your fictional universe.

But it hurts. Simple as that. Which is weird.

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?

Then, too, there are characters I have no qualms about. Mason Rock, for example, was intended as a collaborative venture. Granted, I'd expect a cut if someone wrote the blockbuster movie, but that's just my desire to own an Aston Martin; no creative angst there. In writing for film, I inevitably collaborate, not always with other writers, but with directors, producers, and development execs. These folks, of course, are often involved from the beginning. There's never going to be a moment when a film is yours alone, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something (François Truffaut, take a bow). But with the Throat City stories (two very short, high-density stories I wrote for Interzone in '97 and '98) and with the very few other prose fictions I've written where someone, somewhere, has wanted to participate (and it does happen, even to me), I've reacted with something approaching horror. Why? Perhaps because Mason and many of my film characters are cyphers, templates awaiting animation by actors or other writers. The characters in Throat City are not. For them (and perhaps this is why it's so hard) I was 'method writing', in the sense that I tried to be each of them in turn. The former kind of writing is plot and idea driven. The latter is character and identity-driven. The characters in Throat City are not cyphers. They are my alternative selves.

III.

Under the stress of dislocation, the focus of selfhood is drawn inward. The body is an obvious redoubt - but it is far from secure. The body in the early 21st century is surveilled; penetrated (by communications, as in DeLillo's "White Noise"); besieged by disease and carcinogens; defined by conflicting representations of attractiveness and health; and ultimately will be (or has been) cloned. It is not sufficient to locate oneself in one's body, nor would such a location provide anything resembling an equitable basis for societal relationships. There remains only the immanent 'I' or 'me' - incommensurable, fluid, existing only in the split second of the present, and by current standards quite possibly functionally insane - or an act of self-creation. To approach identity we must gain access to the noösphere which our world turns out to have been all along. The tool-maker requires a prosthesis which can extend the body not across the world, but into the space of ideas. One such technology of the mind is art, replicating the traditional stance of "holding the mirror up to nature" in a new relationship where mirror and nature are mutually and simultaneously created.

Henry James in 1937 described novel writing in terms of a 'house of fiction' with many windows. The writer is depicted as an embodied observer, significantly, in terms of this discussion, equipped with field glasses - a further metaphorical prosthesis. He has stepped into the realm of ideas. This sense of actually entering a noetic place becomes more acute with the arrival of cyberpunk and William Gibson. From Hayles' 'How We Became Posthuman': "consciousness moves through the screen to become pov, leaving behind the body as an unoccupied shell…if a pov is annihilated, the character disappears with it, ceasing to exist as a consciousness in and out of cyberspace. The effect is not primarily metafictional, however, but is in a literal sense metaphysical, above and beyond physicality." In both Gibson's work and that of those who followed him, notably Ken MacLeod, and in the more recent Hollywood film, 'The Matrix', it is possible to for an experienced or gifted explorer to enter this realm without physical technological assistance - Cypher, the Judas character in the film, meets with a System Agent in the Matrix apparently without ever jacking in - he is watching the eerie, monochrome data slide past on the screens of the observation room, but is at the same projected into a restaurant for a steak. He has internalised the interface, or produced it from his own mind. So, too, does Moh Kohn in MacLeod's 'Star Fraction', and the possibility arises again in Gibson's 'Neuromancer': "Get just wasted enough…and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data…you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh…"

To create fiction is likewise to create 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. It is neither uniquely this, nor unique in this - but this component becomes more important when, as now, identity is problematised. In other words, Foucault is entirely correct in saying that the text creates the author, on the most literal level - we are made of discourses, and we make further discourses to examine ourselves, tentative, yet of themselves also artefacts which go to make the world. But although these texts do indeed have a presence distinct from the writer, they also continue to be part of the writer's prosthetic fictional body. Identity, once invested, is not mysteriously withdrawn when the text is published. It cannot be. On the contrary, part of the prosthesis' function is to be publicly exposed and tested; but once the immanent identity, the 'I' which precedes self-abstraction, has been condensed and verbalised in this way, it is inextricably bound in the text, all the more so because it has been viewed. At this level of societal and personal organisation, the idea of fictional writing as part of the individual producing it is not a comparison; it is literal truth. We are all composed of discourse, text, relation. Once observed in place, the prosthesis is multiply engaged with the world, though it is, like the trapped alien/god in Grant Morrison's 'Invisibles', bound in a universe which, whilst giving it perceptible shape, can accommodate barely a cross-section. The medium of words is utterly inadequate to the task of expressing a human identity entire. There is simply too much information. What is left unsaid in the text, what is hinted at, may be as crucial as what is clearly expressed.

IV.

This inaccuracy, of course, is part of the appeal and power of good creative writing (also, no doubt, of visual art, music, and so on). It is what requires critical appraisal and in some cases inspires fan fiction - at the very least, good narrative will be mulled over, taken to heart, possibly continued in the head, either in sequel, prequel, or in missing spaces in the text. 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. The prosthesis is made in the rough shape of what would be the relational skeleton of a new world, and it may require these blank spaces - either because part of the mode of being the prosthesis represents requires mystery and discovery, or because they conceal unfinished ideation still resting in the original body of the author. Dragged into the light and probed, the prosthesis is stripped of one of its conditions for life. It becomes inert.

Fan fiction, in this picture, is not 'scribbling in the margins', but rather writing a new identity over an existing one. The fictional body is adopted and a new set of concerns is expressed through it - onto it - or the old identity is extrematised, as in slash fiction. This does not destroy the fictional body; it allows it to survive in recognisable but distinct form, challenging not only the prosthetic identity, but also the original. Two selves share one fictional body. A conception of self is reproduced as a conception of another. This is the horror of the (demi-)clone, the identical-yet-other, graphically envisioned in Alien: Resurrection, where Ripley finds herself confronted with an aware alien-human hybrid wearing her face, its body fused and useless. She destroys the room with a flamethrower. The flamethrower open to the writer of origin is copyright, and it is similarly heavy ordnance. Copyright is legislation rooted firmly in capitalist ideas of ownership, an attempt to protect the writer conceived under a system which recognises only property and profit. Engaging with the mechanisms of the current system to protect one notional new world from invasion by another is pointless - all minority identities are subsumed by the monolithic legal process, the writer of origin becomes a limb of the status quo s/he was challenging in the first place, and the creative act of the fanfic writer, which for all its problematic nature regarding the original writer is nonetheless equally a statement of identity, is criminalised and thus categorised conventionally.

Fanfic is sometimes advanced as a kind of creative Robin Hood, re-appropriating misgotten literary capital for the masses. Accepting for a moment the accuracy of this position, it has consequences for any identity prosthesis generated as fanfic; it will carry its underdog status no matter what. Further, it is an identity resting on an action which incidentally injures someone else, who never actively offended, and without whom this specific act of identity generation would be impossible: the writer of origin. To place the intimacy of the body fictive in the realm of the practical, consider an example: Jilly Cooper, who dates her entry into creative writing from the moment when she discovered she could never have children. Does the combination of possible injury and underdog heritage mean that fanfic-generated identities are inevitably compromised?

The analysis of society which aligns professional writers with the status quo is in any case hopelessly simplistic. It ignores completely the content of any writings - and these are often wildly antagonistic to an established regime - focusing instead on perceptions of class and structure which fail to grip on the wide variety of individuals who conceive of themselves or are conceived of as writers. Lastly, the position of the writer within the publishing and entertainment industry, even accepting the characterisation, is deeply equivocal. Writers are the annoying intermediary between the industry and the creative coalface. The hilarious confrontation between Orlock and Murnau in 'Shadow of the Vampire', in which Murnau furiously explains to Willem Dafoe's dubious blood-drinker that the writer really is a necessary part of the film process, however much they might both wish it otherwise, contains a succinct statement of the attitude of the majority of executives towards writers. From this side of the fence, the construction looks more like an attempt to provide a moral/economic backing for a position which is pleasurable and possibly even somewhat necessary, but ethically uncomfortable - hence the squeamishness about book-based fanfic and Real People Slash.

V.

So, the short answer: I mistrust criticism probably because it forms the other half of the operation of being in the world to the one which occupies my time and which admittedly holds my allegiance. And I feel an objection to fanfic because it appears to me to overwrite identity. There will be cases where this does not apply. I don't hate it, but I do feel the pressure of its creation. Perhaps 'open source' characters are a way forward, perhaps 'closed source' characters and worlds should be distributed free of charge on that understanding - an option I would happily take with Throat City, for example, which has in any case only earned me the princely sum of £60. But the notion that access is automatic needs serious examination. It has consequences which are far less benign than the demise of copyright. Consider it applied to the body physical, or to your home (whether you own it or whether it is assigned you by a socialist state). Access is not necessarily freedom. It can just as readily become the Panopticon.

Afterword:

This essay is not watertight. It is a sketch of a far more detailed analysis I will almost certainly never write, a discussion piece, not an academic torpedo. So I would suggest that it be read on the 'you break it, you buy it' basis: if you find a place where it doesn't work - and there are several - try at least as hard to put it back together as you do to take it apart.

Nick C.

This article is a response to: The Philosophy of Fanfiction.

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