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The vacant throne: authority and authorial absence
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The vacant throne: authority and authorial absence
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Content
Copyright 2015 Thomas E. Winningham III
THE VACANT THRONE:
AUTHORITY AND AUTHORIAL ABSENCE
by
Thomas E. Winningham III
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2015
ii
Le Roi tombe, le Roi meurt.
Il se relève.
Le Roi se relève, vive le Roi!
Eugene Ionesco, Le Roi se meurt.
iii
For Jessica
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a great debt to a great number of people, and it is an honor to have this opportunity to
thank them. I first want to thank the chair of my dissertation committee, David Rollo, for guiding
me toward and then through medieval literature, for his tireless support and encouragement, and
for reading these chapters from their embarrassing first-draft stages onward. You have done
more than anyone to shape this project, and I could not have developed this transhistorical view
of authorship without your guidance. I would also like to thank the other members of my
dissertation committee. Alice Gambrell, thank you for directing me through media studies and
digital culture, and for your particular attention to the first half of this project. Joseph A. Dane,
thank you for the wealth of information you so generously shared in two Chaucer seminars, your
teaching mentorship in the Thematic Option program, and for a very delicious homemade
gnocchi. And Adam Gilbert, thank you for asking pointed questions on my relation to
medievalism, which will shape this project going forward. Thank you as well to those who have
served on the field and qualification examination committees. John Carlos Rowe and Judith
Bennett, your insights and feedback at the critical, early stages of developing this dissertation
helped make it what it is.
Thanks to my cohort for their friendship and emotional support. And thanks to my
colleagues in the English department, particularly Alex Young, Rob Rabiee, Amanda Bloom,
Amanda Weldy Boyd, Lisa Locascio, Josh Bernstein, Elizabeth Cantwell, Katherine Zimolzak,
Meghan Davis Mercer, and Jessica Piazza. It was a pleasure getting to know all of you, and I am
honored to have been a part of your lives and weddings and Tuna Thursdays in Little Tokyo.
For practical assistance and support during my time at USC, I would like to thank
Janalynn Bliss and Flora Ruiz. I could not have navigated graduate school without you both. I
would also like to thank Jack Blum, John Holland, Lettie Littlejohn, and Barbara Leaks in the
v
USC Writing Program, as well as Rich Edinger and Penny Von Helmolt in the Thematic Option
program. And of course, thanks to my students past and present. Most of you were as
understanding around my deadlines as I was around yours, and it was a privilege to have such
great discussions and to see your enthusiasm and joie de vivre.
I should also like to thank the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts,
and Sciences, as well as the USC English Department, for the two years of fellowship support
and the summer research grant that aided in the process of writing this dissertation. Thanks also
to Whiskey Pete’s for their hospitality during the later stages of writing and revision.
Last, but of course not least, a heartfelt thank you to family and friends for staying with
me on this long path. Janet Winningham, thank you for instilling in me a love of reading and
learning. Thomas E. Winningham Jr., thanks for teaching me that sometimes a book is even
better when you make up your own words. Ruth Winningham, thank you for your boundless
love and encouragement. And in memory of Thomas E. Winningham Sr., I wish I could thank
you one more time in person, Pops. Jessica Wackwitz, you arrived right as things were getting
hectic and deadlines loomed, and you pulled me through. You are a blessing and I love you. Kari
Weaver, thank you for always believing in me, and for long walks around Iowa City past and
present. Meghan Sweet, thank you for your many skills and talents, inside the classroom and out.
Your dedication is inspiring. TJ Slayton, thank you for keeping it real. Emilie Karsenty, merci
beacoup pour notre temps ensemble et pour tes encouragements, ma chere aime. Lilly, thanks
for a welcoming place to read and work, a shoulder to lean on, and for all the pep talks over the
years. Erin Sullivan, thank you for saving me again and again; I wouldn’t have made it to
graduate school without you. And finally, thank you Beckett and Jake, for making Echo Park a
lot less lonely.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
We Are Legion
Chapter 1
Between “The Sum of All Human Knowledge” and
Some Human Knowledge: Wikipedia is All That is the Case
Chapter 2
The Twilight of Resistance in Serenity Valley: Fifty Shades of Grey,
Firefly, and Radically Absent Authority
Chapter 3
“As Writ Myn Auctour”: (Un)Faithful Translation,
Transparency, and the Appearance of Authorship
Chapter 4
More Is Always Better: Excess, Continuation, and Community
Conclusion
Three Minutes to Midnight
References
ii
iii
iv
1
23
61
108
142
175
191
1
INTRODUCTION
WE ARE LEGION
1
In the corporate sector, an often unacknowledged truism holds that one of the best ways to
produce the worst product is to first form a committee. Meat grinders and sausages spring to
mind: unique ideas and individual voices disappear, ground down into the compromises of
group-think and mechanically churned out. And so the current, nearly messianic faith in the
social and political potential of collaboration within digital networks—the collective intelligence
of the swarm—is curious, if not downright paradoxical. Yet if the post-dot-com bubble hype is to
be believed, and if we take the new media pundits like Kevin Kelly and Jeff Jarvis at their word,
an all-inclusive, worldwide committee meeting is precisely what the Internet delivered—and
contrary to expectations, it is the best solution to any given problem. Need an encyclopedia?
Collaborate on Wikipedia. Need a best-selling romance trilogy? Comb through the fanfiction
archive. Need to overthrow a repressive State regime? Mobilize on Twitter. The Internet, in this
view, is the great equalizer both in terms of cultural production and social organization. Cultural
gatekeeping mechanisms are sidestepped or abolished entirely, as we become producers as well as
consumers of media content; hierarchies are flattened and social organization becomes a
collaborative, open, participatory non-organization. Popular market titles along the lines of
Tapscott and Williams’ Wikinomics, Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, and Shirky’s Here Comes
Everybody generally cheer on this digital revolution, and promise that our liberation from cultural,
corporate, and government tyranny lies in networked participation.
This brand of enthusiasm for technological development is not difficult to see throughout
history. The telegraph, the radio, film, and television are but a few examples of media that were
1
One of several unofficial slogans of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.
2
met with the utopian vision of a better, more connected, and more informed society.
2
Given this
recurring pattern—uncritical celebration, followed by disappointed backlash, followed by a
synthesis of the two—there is also a fair share skepticism, and not all skeptics may be so easily
dismissed as luddites or cranks along the lines of Nicholas Carr, author of books such as The
Shallows and Is Google Making Us Stupid?.
3
For the cyberutopianists,
4
though, the unprecedented scale of interconnectivity elevates
the hive mind above the lowest-common denominator of the boardroom meeting; scale is also
the element that makes digital technology intrinsically different than previous technological
advancements. With the speed and interconnectivity of communication technologies, as well as
the number of participants reaching a critical mass, the infrastructure is in place for this new
form of collective organization. And examples of productive knowledge communities abound,
from Wikipedia, to open source software,
5
on to certain fan discussion groups based on popular
television series, but they do also have often-overlooked limitations. Henry Jenkins details one of
these communities in his book Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: a group devoted to David Lynch’s short-
lived television series Twin Peaks. The first criticism that could be raised is that the knowledge this
2
See Zuckerman 27-30; Gitelman 1-22; Thorburn and Jenkins 1-16; Uricchio 23-38 in
Thorburn and Jenkins.
3
For example, see Astra Taylor’s excellent critique of the tendency of digital technology
reproducing social inequality in The People’s Platform.
4
This, granted, is a contested term: “‘Cyberutopianism’ is an uncomfortable label because it
combines two ideas worthy of careful consideration into a single, indefensible package. The belief
that connecting people through the Internet leads inexorably to global understanding and world
peace is not worth defending” (Zuckerman 30). But the cyberutopianists would naturally say that
is not the belief they are defending; see Rheingold:
When I examine the potential of new technologies, I have tried to avoid the
dangers of ‘the rhetoric of the technological sublime,’ in which the miraculous
properties of new tools are extolled to the exclusion of critical examination of their
shadow sides… Cooperative effort sounds nice, and at its best, it is the foundation
of the finest creations of human civilizations, but it can also be nasty if the people
who cooperate share pernicious goals. (Smart Mobs xxi)
5
On open source, see Tkacz 25-33.
3
group produces is trivial. Learning who killed the fictional Laura Palmer is not going to change
the world.
6
But aside from the very real pleasure that participants take in these activities, play is
an important part of learning, and through play these groups are learning, together, how to
function as a collective intelligence. And as more communities learn to function effectively the
potential for other kinds of knowledge production, like open source software and encyclopedia
articles, increases. Participation in these groups is by necessity strictly voluntary, though, and
therefore they can be unpredictable. This is either a criticism, from the point of view of
productivity, or one of their strengths, from the point of view of decentralized authority. As the
group’s goals align with individual interest, that individual is motivated to participate; if for one
reason or another those interests no longer align, that individual drops out. And so while
individuals within the group have the autonomy to participate at their discretion, a loss of even
fringe members is a loss of diversity for the whole.
As Wikipedia and open source software continue to hold a central place in the culture of
digital collaboration, the network continues to be a model for imagining a non-hierarchical,
horizontal social organization through several, simultaneous conflations. What we are really
talking about when we talk about online participation is writing: we participate through the
production of digital, usually textual, content. And this de-centering of literary, textual authority
slides into the social and political, and the political in turn redefines individual subjectivity. And
through these conflations, centralized authority, in any form, appears to be a thing of the past. As
Katherine Hayles writes in Electronic Literature:
Much as the novel both gave voice to and helped to create the liberal humanist
subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so contemporary electronic
6
On the Twin Peaks discussion forum, alt.tv.twinpeaks, see Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers 115-33.
4
literature is both reflecting and enacting a new kind of subjectivity characterized
by distributed cognition, networked agency that includes human and non-human
actors, and fluid boundaries dispersed over actual and virtual locations. (37)
Whether we define what Hayles describes as collective intelligence, a knowledge space (Levy),
participatory culture (Jenkins), or the multitude (Hardt and Negri), our dominant metaphor for
networked participation still seems to be the bee hive or swarm.
7
Collaboration and collective intelligence imply a lossless kind of accumulation, one where
each member of the network adds to the general store of knowledge (or cultural/textual artifacts)
without disagreement or marginalization. In the absence of a centralized elite, the autonomous
worker bees are free to do their own thing, and their individual efforts eventually produce
common goods for the benefit of everyone. For example, here is Kevin Kelly, co-founder of
Wired magazine, describing in Out of Control the process by which a bee swarm decides on a
location for a new hive:
When a swarm pours itself out through the front slot of the hive, the queen bee
can only follow. The queen’s daughters manage the election of where and when
the swarm should settle. A half-dozen anonymous workers scout ahead to check
possible hive locations in hollow trees or wall cavities. They report back to the
resting swarm by dancing on its contracting surface. During the report, the more
theatrically a scout dances, the better the site she is championing. Deputy bees
then check out the competing sites according to the intensity of the dances, and
7
Terminology is not necessarily innocent here, as Jenkins points out:
Levy contrasts his ideal of “collective intelligence” with the dystopian image of the
“hive mind,” where individual voices are suppressed. Far from demanding
conformity, the new knowledge culture is enlivened by multiple ways of knowing.
(Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers 140)
5
will concur with the scout by joining in the scout’s twirling. This induces more
followers to check out the lead prospects and join the ruckus when they return by
leaping into the performance of their choice. (7)
For Kelly, the lack of unilateral commands from the queen equates to a lack of any authority
whatsoever: the swarm is egalitarian, or at the very least meritocratic, and the best site for the
new hive is chosen by consensus. Yet if this is the determinate metaphor for visualizing
networked participation, it is worth pausing long enough to take it seriously.
The swarm is not anarchic, first and foremost, because the swarm begins with a common
goal. Through whatever imperative of biology or instinct, the bees agree from the outset that
they are all looking for a location to build a new hive—and only for a location to build a new
hive. If one of the scouts decided she’d rather fly around looking for a person to sting, another
felt like staying home in the hive they already have, and another was sidetracked by a particularly
tempting can of soda in someone’s hand, this system would not work at all. Secondly, while no
centralized force influences the final location, there is in fact a hierarchy in play, albeit a
decentralized one. As Kelly himself points out, the hierarchy begins with the “half-dozen
anonymous workers” who initially scout ahead for the first round of possible locations—and so
the swarm’s options are already limited. This is further winnowed by the deputy bees, who follow
up on the most enthusiastic of the scouts. So what at first seemed to be a nearly infinite range of
possibilities turns out to be quite a small set of choices, which are proposed to the swarm by
delegated authorities. In terms of governance, while this might have meritocratic elements, it is
fundamentally an oligarchy.
And while Hayles rightly used the word “distributed” to describe her idealized network,
in a strange twist of unintentional accuracy, “decentralized” is by far the more prevalent term for
the collective organization of the Internet. A distributed network is truly peer-to-peer:
6
connections between nodes are spread equally throughout. In a decentralized network, on the
other hand, connections between nodes are routed through hubs. So we are correct to think of
the Internet as decentralized, since it is in fact constructed this way, but “decentralized” does not
mean a completely horizontal organization in the way the term is most often meant. In the
swarm scenario, for example, the deputy bees would be analogous to the decentralized hubs, and
the scouts would be the more numerous smaller hubs, and so on down to the individual worker
bees. And this common misperception of the word’s meaning, like the uncritical use of the swarm
metaphor, reflects the knee-jerk conception of the Internet as a non-hierarchical space.
Similarly, collaborative production is not the same as collective production, and so we
should be careful to distinguish between the two. In Kelly’s description of the swarm,
collaboration is notably absent, as the scouts do not return from their initial expedition and
huddle together, discussing the comparative merits of the locations they’ve found. Instead, each
scout dances according to how excited she—and she alone—is about her find, and only “by
compounding emphasis, the favorite sites get more visitors, thus increasing further visitors” (Kelly
7). The slippage between “collaborative” and “collective” elides over the very real differences in
the operation of the two forms, and in thinking about networked participation as collaborative
we lose the ability to critique the very real problems of collective action. Nathaniel Tkacz, in his
critique of what he calls “the politics of openness,” points out the structural similarities of the
decentralized, winner-take-all of the swarm and the logic of neoliberalism:
Collaboration is an attempt to mobilize the optimal outcome of competition with
none of the negative side effects. Collaboration imagines a market with no losers;
it is competition perfected at the level of distributed outcomes. (179)
But there are in fact losers. Again, take the example of the bees: what of those scouts whose
dances do not attract the eventual attention of the entire swarm? We are unlikely to think of this
7
as a loss, nor of those bees’ individual labor as wasted, because they are bees and presumably
don’t feel themselves to be marginalized or exploited. But if we take this seriously as a model for
human social organization, then we have an awful lot of scouts laboring in vain. And
furthermore, with respect to the rhetorics of the “open” for Tkacz and “collaboration” for me,
the terms themselves paper over the very real complications of the phenomena they supposedly
describe, thereby foreclosing investigation and discussion. So while there may in fact be instances
of real-time collaboration online, collective authorship is the more accurate description, for both
the swarm and digital textual production.
THE DEATH OF THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
The primary form of authority online is textual: it is at root literary authority. Textual production
in a digital environment, then, is well worth theorizing, and that production begins on one
version or another of a word processor. In Writing Space, Jay Bolter suggests that “the word
processor is an attempt to harness the computer in service of the older technology of print, and
the word processor’s presentation of text is nostalgic, in that it looks back to the aesthetic criteria
of the printing press” (66). The presentation of text on the Internet, too, is also very much
modeled on older media. Pictures, captions, and advertisements alongside blocks of text are the
aesthetic of newspapers and magazines. So published online text, as well as the word processor,
can be seen as nostalgic in this regard. But “the conceptual space of a printed book is one in
which writing is stable, monumental, and controlled exclusively by the author,” while “the
conceptual space of electronic writing, on the other hand, is characterized by fluidity and an
8
interactive relationship between writer and reader” (Bolter 11).
8
Since a person can now read,
compose, and publish text on the same device, with little difference in the way the resultant text
looks, in other words, the theoretical distinction between consumption and production has
broken down.
9
This theoretical distinction, however, between the authority of the author and the
authority of the reader, has broken down before. Roland Barthes’ seminal essay “The Death of
the Author” has at this point become an accepted truism.
10
According to Barthes, the author is:
A modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle
Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the
Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly
put, the “human person.” (142-3)
Emerging, in other words, as an individual authorizing the text and, in the end, being the final
explanation of that text. And so, “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to
furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 147). In removing the author from
the locus of textual authority, Barthes proposes a kind of evolutionary move forward to what he
calls the “modern scriptor,” and we can hear the echo of moving past the “prestige of the
individual” in Hayles’ post-liberal humanist, distributed subject. The scriptor no longer functions
as an imposed limit, but instead acts as a continuation, and continuator, of a text that for Barthes
can only ever be pure language. And continuation thereby opens a space for an ongoing textual
8
Two main problems with Bolter’s formulation stand out. First, the printed page of a book is in
no way “controlled exclusively by the author,” unless you include editors, copyeditors, designers,
and typesetters to be all part of one authorial construct. Second, many websites, such as Tumblr
and Twitter and the like, are indeed interactive; but aside from the comment section, how
interactive does the average Salon.com or New York Times online article feel?
9
See also Fisher 188-9.
10
And before Barthes, the New Critics wrested textual authority away from the author with the
intentional fallacy.
9
reception and production. With the shift from author to scriptor also comes a shift, for Barthes,
from the unified, singular Work to the text:
A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into
mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where
this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said,
the author. (Barthes 148)
This should be quite empowering for the average reader, I would imagine, as it opens a dialogue
between her and the printed book. Interpretation is already this type of dialogue, of course, and
since readers are never absolutely passive recipients, even the private mental and emotional
reader responses are a form of interpretive dialogue. Still, it is nice to culturally acknowledge the
reader’s agency.
Barthes’ scriptor is thoroughly enmeshed in this same multiplicity as the reader, and in a
sense they are on an equal footing. No more the master of language than the reader, the scriptor
is coextensive with the act of writing:
The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped
with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book
as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is
eternally written here and now” (145, emphasis in original).
This laid much of the theoretical foundation upon which thinking about collaborative digital
production, as well as fan studies, was implicitly built, which we will see in Chapters 1 and 2,
respectively. Barthes’ vague technological determinism—even as his thinking lacks a specific
technological object—further reinforces the feeling that he speaks to our digital moment:
Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as
according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his
10
thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must
emphasize this delay and indefinitely “polish” his form. For him [the scriptor], on
the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of
inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at
least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into
question all origins. (Barthes 146)
Applying the distinction of author and scriptor to the print/digital divide is merely an exercise in
changing a few terms. The author of a printed text may indefinitely worry over form and style,
polish sentences, and develop an authority of literary merit before the text is fixed and
immutable; the scriptor’s writing, by contrast, is fluid and immediate, and immediately
distributed, akin to Andrew Sullivan’s description of blogging.
11
The published text (the hand) is
no longer delayed, nor denied to any single writer (voice), and Barthes’ “law of necessity” is here
reversed: rather than delay, the new technological necessity demands constant writing and
publishing, continual inscription within an ever-expanding field of equally legitimate inscriptions.
And within this field, any single text “is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’
meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes 146).
On the surface, based on this one essay, digital writing would seem to enact
poststructuralist literary theory’s tenets of textual instability, anti-authoritarian equality, and
11
See Sullivan, particularly:
[The blog] allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or
small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy
review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond
even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and
unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to
continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print
journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.
11
discursive play. The other seminal poststructuralist essay on authorship, though, goes a step
further toward describing the re-emergence of authority in decentralized networks. Michel
Foucault’s “What is an Author?” locates the author as a function of discourse, a proper noun
around which texts are organized.
12
If the author is dead, for Foucault it is not authority-as-such
but rather the relation between the text and the biographical specificity of the individual writer
that has passed. The authority granted to certain texts, then, is a cultural—collective—construct:
Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a “realistic” dimension as we speak of
an individual’s “profundity” or “creative” power, his intentions or the original
inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual,
which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author),
are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling
texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the
continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. (Foucault 127)
Instead of the proliferation of individual readers and scriptors that we see in Barthes, Foucault
reintroduces the social aspect of collectively-generated authority in a discursive network.
Personality may be effaced, but certain texts, or statements, are evaluated, elevated above others,
and categorized by broad cultural consensus.
13
Ultimately, Foucault explains why the author
12
Foucault’s essay does not mention Barthes specifically, yet though it often goes unremarked,
Seán Burke reminds us that “What is an Author?” appeared a year after Barthes’ “The Death of
the Author” Foucault’s title, therefore, subtly suggests a corrective to Barthes by attempting to
define what Barthes claimed was already dead (Burke 15-7, 89-92); Burke, Authorship xxiv-xxv).
See also Hadjiafxendi and Mackay 3-5; Greene 205-7. Foucault does go on to obliquely address
mortality and authority, see for example: “I am not certain that the consequences derived from
the disappearance or death of the author have been fully explored or that the importance of this
event has been appreciated” (117).
13
Or by coercion and institutional inertia, depending on your point of view, in the case of canon
formation.
12
function persists, even if he does not precisely address how this occurs with specific authors
and/or texts within the web of discourse.
One problem with Barthes’ move from author to scriptor is that it replaces one authority
with another, whether we take the new authority to be the scriptor, or the language itself that
speaks through the scriptor, or a new authority of the reader. The author is deposed, but
authority persists. And this creates an interesting double-bind for the revolutionary collective,
which Peter Starr refers to in Logics of Failed Revolt as the logic of structural repetition (1-3). As
with the author and reader, textual meaning may be assigned by either the author or the
interpretation of the reader, but the structure of making textual meaning remains. And we will
also see structural repetition play out in Chapter 1, as the “anyone can edit” swarm mentality of
Wikipedia was quickly organized into the familiar form of a rigid bureaucracy. Structural
repetition, actually Starr’s second of three logics of revolutionary failure, is bound up with his
first:
According to the first, or what I call the “logic of specular doubling,”
revolutionary action is doomed to repetition because revolutionaries invariably
construct themselves as mirror images of their rivals. (2)
You will find this everywhere once you start looking for it, but we will see it particularly in
Chapter 2, in both the fanfiction community and the discussion of Firefly. Specular doubling is
also at work in the structural similarities between various positions across the political spectrum,
which we will see use the same revolutionary rhetorics of participation, collaboration, and
transparency. Starr’s final logic of failure takes advantage of the previous two:
Complementing these logics of structural repetition and specular doubling, one
often finds various “logics of recuperation,” whereby specified forms of
13
revolutionary action are said to reinforce, and thus be co-opted by, established
structures of power. (3)
Recuperation will be particularly apparent in Chapter 2’s discussion of fanfiction, as some fan
writers attempt to transition from fan writing to professional writing. Not only is much unpaid
fan labor expropriated for the profit of a few individuals and the publishing industry, but fan
writing as a subversive, potentially revolutionary activity is recuperated by the very same media
industries that fan writing resists.
I take the re-emergence of authority in decentralized, apparently non-hierarchical
networks as a given, as a starting point for the discussion of online social organization and
collective textual authorship. Furthermore, the terminology of collaboration, and the
misunderstanding of the difference between decentralized and distributed networks, obscure the
various forms of authority that persist in what is supposed to be an egalitarian, democratic space
for all.
14
I call this re-emergence of authority in collective textual production and social
organizations “radically-absent authorship.” An absent authority is a void, a power vacuum; a
radically-absent authority is a placeholder. This is authoritarian, by definition, but the power is
not exerted directly. Instead, responsibility for authority is deflected onto an absent authorial
Other, an Other that is often constructed by those claiming to be subjected to it. Radically-
absent authority functions along similar lines as Bruno Latour’s figure of the mouthpiece, as
Nathaniel Tkacz applies the concept to open networks:
Just as ad-hocracy is a mode of organizing that wants to avoid the very question of
organization, the figure of the mouthpiece is a type of leadership that wants to
deny the question of leadership. In open projects the figure of the mouthpiece,
14
In this regard, I am following Tkacz in his analysis of the ways “open” preempts discussion of
the multiple foreclosures inherent to the open society. See Tkacz, passim.
14
and its concomitant denial of the agency of the speaker, has become a common
argumentative technique. (159)
The important distinction to make is that the mouthpiece “is a passive medium, an intermediary,
passing on statements whose force is derived from elsewhere” (Tkacz 158). In this formulation,
there is presumably an actual authority residing elsewhere, speaking through the mouthpiece.
The radically-absent author, by contrast, has agency and makes statements while denying that
they are doing so. The authority deferred to is a fiction constructed, consciously or not, to give
the appearance of a lack of agency, and to mask the authorial interventions of the speaker, writer,
etc. Thus the radically-absent author maintains the illusion of a non-hierarchical, participatory
space. I want to distinguish between these terms, then, to emphasize the illusory, constructed
nature of the authorial Other. And this, too, has a history. The decentralized, often anonymous
authority that we see online may very well be a radical break from that of print, but this new
authority is hardly without precedent.
THE ALL-IN-ONE DEVICE
Investigating authorship and authority in what we might call the “post-print” era naturally invites
connections with textual production and transmission pre-print, as contemporary transformative
works and remix practices suggest analogies to what we generally consider the “manuscript
culture” of medieval literature. The lack of editorial gatekeeping mechanisms and the ability to
publish instantly online, along with the ease of altering and sharing digital text, create
technological conditions that have finally caught up with handwriting, and digital writing thus
15
shares similarities with medieval manuscript production and distribution, and tentative
comparisons between the digital and the medieval are already being made.
15
On the practical side, not only has the theoretical distinction between digital and print
existed previously, but in the excitement over the transition from printed book to digital space we
often lose sight of earlier modes of textual production. That is, as Bolter rightly points out, in a
digital environment text is consumed and produced on the same device, leading to a blurring of
the difference between the two. Before print, however, text was also consumed and produced on
the same device: the physical manuscript page. As Matthew Fisher explains in Scribal Authorship:
“An obvious analogy to the plurality of textual intervention in manuscripts is the digital realm,
where crowd-sourcing and wikis shaped by participating communities are reimagining many
models of textual production” (189). Fisher is not as sanguine about the individual’s control over
production as Bolter, and claims scribes actually controlled their texts more closely than we do
today:
We may write blogs, comment on the articles and blogs of others, and engage in
vigorous discussions on Twitter, but the mechanics of transmission, of how our
words get from our fingers to our screens to still other screens, are not part of
writing. In being excluded from that step, we are excluded from engaging a text
with the responsibilities and opportunities that every medieval scribe confronted.
(189)
The real question, then, is how medieval writers and scribes negotiated the textual instability
inherent to their modes of production. And, considering that “every medieval scribe confronted”
these issues on a daily basis, while we are still in the relative infancy of digital writing, an analysis
15
See Fisher 1, 7, 188-91; Tether, “Mise en Page, Mise en Écran.”
16
of the collective and unstable authorship of manuscript production and transmission can teach us
much about our contemporary situation.
Over time, scribes have been seen as fallible copyists, first readers, compilers, editors, and
proto-critics. Increasingly, they are being seen as competent actors in their own right, and Fisher
affords them full authorial status in certain circumstances. The interaction between writers and
scribes, then, is a kind of collective process existing through time. And scribes may have
collaborated more directly than previously thought, as Tricia Kelly George’s 2014 PhD
dissertation, “The Auchinleck Manuscript: A Study in Manuscript Production, Scribal
Innovation, and Literary Value in the Early 14th Century,” suggests the six scribes at work on
the Auchinleck manuscript (National Library of Scotland Advocates MS. 19.2.1) were divided
into senior and junior teams, with the senior team overseeing the work of the junior scribes in a
nascent bureaucracy. While I want to avoid a strict technological determinism, the theoretical
similarities of manuscript and digital production are at times striking. I also remain skeptical of
drawing direct, one-to-one comparisons between medieval and digital practices that respond to
textual instability. Yet these two periods can, and should, be put into dialogue, as various
combinations of similar practices speak to one another. Collective authorship in Wikipedia, for
example, can be read against Chaucer’s professed deferral to ancient textual sources. And the
medieval genre of the continuation finds correlates in both fanfiction’s tendency toward
continuation and the disavowal of individual authority.
The following chapters present a long view of decentralized authority and textual
instability. These do impose limits on authors, yet no matter how open or democratic a space,
authority does re-emerge, and both contemporary and medieval writers deploy various strategies
for maintaining a modicum of control over their work. This is the kind of step by step argument
where each step needs to be taken first, and so the following chapters can themselves be read as a
17
collective project. The opening sections of Chapter 1 set down much of the theoretical
foundation the rest will be built upon, but with that exception each chapter addresses its own
textual objects and social fields. The transhistorical dialogue is thus purposefully left to the
thematic and theoretical resonances between chapters.
OVERVIEW
Wikipedia requires no introduction: the online encyclopedia that, famously, anyone can edit. As
such, it is a stand-out contemporary example of collective textual production and decentralized
social organization. Since anyone can edit or contribute to an article at any time, with very few
exceptions, the resulting collaboration is basically an author-less text. The Wikipedia community
therefore thrives on the rhetoric of open access, participation, and free creative self-expression. A
closer look, though, reveals the persistence of hierarchical, and often blatantly hostile, structures
of authority which tend toward reinforcing the same social divisions we see offline. Yet to
maintain the rhetoric of open participation and editorial equality, Wikipedia contributors stand
behind the conventions of Neutral Point of View and “Notability,” which are themselves terms of
art that naturalize a privileged, mostly male and usually white, perspective, without confronting
their own role in producing and perpetuating those authoritarian perspectives.
The easy criticism is that Wikipedia has developed an extensive bureaucratic machinery,
and is therefore not a truly open, collective project. It is not, in other words, a digital swarm in
action. Chapter 1 rejects this view, for the reasons outlined in the discussion of a bee swarm
above. Without direction, stated aims, and mechanisms for conflict resolution, Wikipedia would
not exist as it does. The real criticism is that anarchic projects cannot function, in the sense of
functioning to achieve common goals, and the faith in a digitally-enabled anarchic non-
organization that is somehow also productive is misguided. Wikipedia’s overall project, its stated
18
aim to be an objectively verifiable encyclopedia, sets in place a structure that forecloses other
possibilities. Individual contributors are able to exert authority over others within this structure,
while at the same time denying they are doing so. By marshalling the relevant rule or guideline,
or by defining the meanings of objective and verifiable, contributors are able to make subjective
decisions without appearing to be authoritative agents.
While Wikipedia’s stated goal is clearly defined as an “objective” and verifiable
encyclopedia, fan communities and fanfiction writers eschew goals and rejoice in individuality
and play, opening creative spaces for appropriating texts in personally meaningful ways. In
Chapter 2, however, we will see that even here boundaries are delimited around acceptable
practices vis-à-vis the community. Fan writers’ sense of themselves as amateurs, in opposition to
the fan objects’ authors, simultaneously places fan writers in an equal, non-hierarchical
relationship with each other, and clears a space for them to write in the first place. Individual
egos and claims of authority, when they do appear, thus threaten fandom on its most
fundamental level, and the runaway success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy is in this case just
such a breakdown in Twilight fans’ communal rejection of authorship. Before Erika Leonard
became E.L. James, and before “Master of the Universe” became Fifty Shades of Grey, there was a
massively popular fic based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (Twific) called “Wide Awake.” The
writer, AngstGoddess003 (AG), considered fic writing a collective, mutually-supportive
enterprise. A kind of authority accrues around certain fans, as some fics become more popular
than others, but AG resisted the idea of individual credit of authorship. Writers provide fics, and
readers provide comments and feedback, and neither form of labor is more valuable than the
other. E.L. James saw things differently, wanting to be an author with readers, and set herself
apart from the community. The move to pull “Master of the Universe” from the Internet and
19
publish it as Fifty Shades of Grey for personal profit was thus deeply divisive and, many considered,
exploitative.
The Twilight fandom’s negotiation of individual autonomy and commercial profit are
mirrored in the neoliberal, libertarian ethos underpinning Joss Whedon’s sci-fi television series
Firefly, and so Chapter 2 juxtaposes these to reveal the invisible forces that fill the power vacuums
left by otherwise heroic rebellions against authority. The real-world events surrounding the
production and cancellation of the show unwittingly reflects Firefly’s plot, and the relationships
between characters, and so a textual analysis of Firefly illustrates the operations of power and
resistance within the fan community. These function quite differently than in Twific, where
Stephenie Meyer, and Twilight itself, was reduced to an erotic prompt. In contrast, Whedon
serves as a much more stable and present authority figure, and Firefly fanfic becomes much more
about developing and expanding Whedon’s vision.
The second half of the project turns to the medieval, and specifically to Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde and The Book of Margery Kempe in Chapter 3. Here we find that asserting one’s own
authority via feigned deference to another—which we often see online—is not new at all, as
Chaucer’s narrator posits a fictitious Latin source for the Greek story of Troilus, claiming
absolute fidelity to that Latin text but doing so only in such a paradoxical and self-contradictory
manner as to emphasize the inevitability of error. The nature of these errors render visible what
the narrator claims is a transparent process of translation and, by extension, the error-prone act
of scribal copying. Textual criticism relies on these errors in multiple variant manuscripts to
reconstruct a probable, “authoritative” version of a text, and at the same time it idealizes scribes
as windows through which an originary manuscript can be seen. As previously mentioned,
though, scribes are now understood more as competent actors in their own right, equally capable
of correcting obvious errors in their exemplar, or even making authorial/editorial interventions
20
on their own. So while the scribe can be “transparent” in the sense of allowing us to see through
his work to the text of the author before him, interventions in the manuscript can also be
“transparent” in the sense of invisible, and Chaucer’s intentional translation “errors” call
attention to these reasoned scribal alterations.
The opening frame of The Book of Margery Kempe similarly dramatizes the process of scribal
production, with two scribes standing between the reader and Margery Kempe’s voice; the
scribes here both witnesses verifying her authority and barring direct access to her original
dictation. The illiterate Margery dictates her story to a first scribe, who produces a manuscript
that is in no recognizable language and then dies. She takes this manuscript to a second scribe, a
priest, and through several supernatural interventions he is finally able to read the first scribe’s
manuscript. The second scribe’s narration of The Book of Margery Kempe’s production, as well as the
consistent use of the third-person for Margery in her own book, thus opens an ideological gap
which foregrounds Margery’s alienation from her narrative. The Book of Margery Kempe becomes,
in effect, a translation, and a relationship not between Margery and the text but between the
second scribe and his exemplar. And while this blocks us from ever knowing what Margery
actually said, the book’s opening frame ensures that we are aware that we are encountering
Margery in translation.
Chapter 4 moves on to the medieval practice of continuation, the most famous example
being the Roman de la Rose, written by Guillaume de Lorris and continued after his death by Jean
de Meun. We first consider, however, the four continuations of Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du
Graal and, in Thomas Hinton’s words, the “clerkly continuity” developed through the scenes of
authorial self-naming. The continuations take the Graal as their starting point, and circle around
the characters of Perceval and Gauvain, and the quest narrative, with varying degrees of fidelity.
Chrétien’s authority is not questioned, even as continuators feel free to depart from his text, as
21
the first continuation in particular virtually ignores the main characters. Yet using Chrétien’s
Graal as a pretext for writing allows the later writers to be part of a collective enterprise of textual
production, even as they amend and contradict one another.
Of the more than 200 extant manuscripts of the Rose only one bears no trace of Jean’s
addition, and we know this is not merely a fragment of the longer work only because Jean pauses
about 6,500 lines into his continuation to explicitly name himself and Guillaume as the writers of
the Rose, going so far as to directly quote the earlier closing lines of Guillaume’s work. Jean’s
scene of authorial attribution displaces both writers, though, so that neither can occupy the
narrative first-person of the poem, rendering them both as the scribes of a pre-existing Roman de la
Rose, and leaving open the potential for an infinite number of future continuators. A single scribe,
Guy de Mori, took advantage of this possibility, naming himself alongside Guillaume and Jean,
which speaks as much to the desire to amend a text as it does to the number of scribes who
avoided the temptation.
Guy also made unique, and drastic, textual interventions. He had no problem adding to
the text, reordering it, or making abridgements. At the same time, he provided an extensive
system of marginalia, explained in a prologue, that would allow future scribes to construct their
own version, or reconstruct Jean’s version. Guy is thus either corrupting an early and probably
very “good” copy of the Rose—his exemplar—or it is a not unreasonable supplement to the text,
and which of these sounds correct says a lot about the contemporary perception of authorship. I
contend that the latter is neither innocent nor entirely benign, as every textual intervention is a
usurpation of the author’s control, yet one that is prefigured by many medieval authors
themselves, including Jean.
Jean does not simply open a space for future writers to participate in the production of
the Rose; he provokes and authorizes future interpretations of the Rose as well, thereby extending
22
textual participation and the pleasures of interpretation to all future readers. Jean suggests,
through the mouthpiece of the personified Reason, that these future interpretations will be
wrong, but equally wrong, and we therefore will be equal participants in the ongoing pleasure of
interpretation. And in the absence of a central authority with privileged access to some
transcendent truth, this awareness of one’s position within a community of conflicting authorities
existing over time is one we would do well to remember. Especially as neoliberal rhetorics of
individual freedom, particularly from government, and open participation leave us subjugated to
less visible and often more powerful forms of control. And as such, to twist Kevin Spacey’s line in
The Usual Suspects, the greatest trick the Author ever pulled was convincing the world that he
didn’t exist.
23
CHAPTER 1
BETWEEN “THE SUM OF ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE” AND
SOME HUMAN KNOWLEDGE:
WIKIPEDIA IS ALL THAT IS THE CASE
1
Sketching the theoretical underpinnings of authorship in digital space, even in the broadest of
brushstrokes, inevitably leads to a complex tangle of social and political questions. Any given
assertion, it seems, rests on an unstable framework of assumptions about what authorship is, who
counts as an author (or a capitalized Author), and what kinds of authority the author wields over
textual production and reception. Potential answers generate more problems than they solve,
exposing further ungrounded assumptions. Nevertheless the temptation remains to speak of
digital authorship, online collaboration, and Web 2.0 in broad, static terms, as though the
Internet is a stable, monolithic entity, and simultaneously to speak of it as a continual revolution.
The title of Andrew Lih’s 2009 book is an illustrative example: The Wikipedia Revolution: How a
Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. Lih’s book itself is quite nuanced, but this
attention-grabbing title cuts to the heart of the popular-market explosion in Web 2.0 cultural
analysis. The kind of collective, collaborative writing Wikipedia enables is indeed impressive, but
in terms of authorship can it be considered revolutionary, or is it more an evolution and
expansion of earlier forms of textual production? Are these nobodies the founding entrepreneurs,
Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales and Larry Sanger, rising sui-generis outside of the Silicon Valley
1
I first encountered this riff on Jimmy Wales’ famous promise of “the sum of all human
knowledge” in Jason Scott’s blog, Ascii. The second half of the title is of course a play on the
opening line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus.
24
corporate structure, or are they the semi-anonymous contributors who collectively produce
Wikipedia?
2
And by what criteria is Wikipedia the greatest encyclopedia?
Putting this much pressure on a title is no doubt unfair, but the example demonstrates a
rhetorical tendency to elide over deeply-rooted problems with the Internet, crowd-sourcing, and
the Web 2.0 business model—itself a troubled term—and to favor instead a kind of messianic,
technological utopianism. But even here we run into definitional problems, as the nature of the
utopia we are supposedly forming remains unclear: on the one hand it appears to be a
communitarian, socialist sort of revolution, while on the other it seems to be the ultimate
realization of neoliberal forms of capitalism. And even the distinction between the two tends to
disappear, as they are both subsumed under the unquestioned assumption that collaboration and
participation are synonymous with a progressive democracy, as questions of textual authority
slide into political and social authority. The terms of this collaborative revolution are as varied as
those attempting to theorize it, from Eric Raymond’s vision of a “cathedral” vs. a “bazaar” (in
favor of the bazaar), Pierre Levy’s “knowledge space,” Kevin Kelly’s “swarm,” Henry Jenkins’
“participatory cultures,” and on to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude,” among
others.
3
What they share in common, though, are varying degrees of faith in the ability of
collaborative, supposedly non-hierarchical, digital networks to rearrange social and political
organization.
This rearrangement is also generally thought to be necessarily progressive. Nathaniel
Tkacz connects the interest in collaboration and participation with the current emphasis on
“openness” and transparency—open access, open source, “open” or transparent government,
2
In the acknowledgements, Lih tells us that “nobodies” is an affectionate term for the
Wikipedians—the contributors—themselves.
3
For a similar overview of terms, see Tkacz 6-7.
25
etc. (26-7). For Tkacz, “open” serves as a buzzword that is nearly equivalent to democracy, and
“open” glosses over as many complications as the terms “collaboration” and “participation”
themselves. Tkacz sees these as unconsciously founded on Enlightenment (and Habermasean)
ideals of discourse, in which rational individuals debating rationally will arrive at a correct, just
consensus benefitting everyone. The trouble with openness, and with the digital revolution
generally, is that while it may in fact be more democratic than other forms of connectivity,
democracy itself is not necessarily progressive. Democracy is such a sacred term that it often goes
unquestioned, but it is merely a structure for determining governance—it is not itself the content
of government—and it is ultimately value-neutral. One person, one vote, and the majority
consensus rules; if 51 out of 100 citizens decide on a nuclear war, to regressively tax the poor, or
to follow Jonathan Swift’s advice on eating Irish babies, then that is the governing content of the
democratic system.
4
This chapter approaches these questions of authority from the perspective of
collaboration, participation, and democracy, through the lens of Wikipedia as a test case of
online authorship. This choice should by now be an obvious one. Whether you believe Wikipedia
is the “world’s greatest encyclopedia” or the death-knell of high school and undergraduate
education, the fact remains that it is surprisingly good—certainly better than anyone could have
predicted before its implementation—and that it functions at all merits its consideration as a
knowledge community. And it thus becomes an example of online communal organization,
insofar as contributors communicate—or fail to communicate—with each other over the course
of collectively-authoring articles, and so Wikipedia serves as a kind of living laboratory of digital
authority and virtual social space. How that society actually functions, though, will occupy the
4
Structurally protecting the views of minority positions, ironically, can lead to minority rather
than majority rule. The U.S. Senate under President Barack Obama is a prime example.
26
second part of the chapter. That is, how articles are produced, by whom, and how the
community interacts and reacts to various forms of external and internal authority, and the
implications of digital authorship for democratic participation in non-hierarchical, networked
relationships. First, we will turn to the revolutionary, utopian rhetoric as it has developed around
the idea of online collaboration, and the ways that (relatively) recent technological advances have
so readily bridged discussions of textual and political authority.
THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of “multitude” is exemplary in terms of the
technological utopianism underlying theories of online organization. Developed most forcefully
in their 2004 book, Multitude, and continued in the 2009 Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri ground
the concept of multitude as an organizational force in the shift from industrial, Fordist
production to what we now think of as the knowledge economy of immaterial labor (i.e.
development of ideas, technologies, and culture as products). For Hardt and Negri, this shift is
responsible for a larger cultural shift away from hierarchical social and economic structures:
Immaterial labor tends to transform the organization of production from the
linear relationships of the assembly line to the innumerable and indeterminate
relationships of distributed networks. Information, communication, and
cooperation become the norms of production, and the network becomes its
dominant form of organization. (Multitude 113)
As the workday expands beyond the bounds of the 9-5 office to encompass nearly all hours of the
day, since the mental tasks required for immaterial labor can be performed anywhere and
anytime, the corporate system responds by giving workers more autonomy to work on their own
27
schedule.
5
Relations between employers and employees also become more tenuous, as, in Hardt
and Negri’s view, the worker’s creative abilities empower her; as opposed to the assembly-line
worker, the argument goes, the knowledge worker cannot be immediately or easily replaced.
Creative employees become increasingly: “flexible because workers have to adapt to different
tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no
contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment” (Multitude, emphasis in original). For Hardt
and Negri these tenuous conditions are positives, because:
exploitation under the hegemony of immaterial labor is no longer primarily the
expropriation of value measured by individual or collective labor time but rather
the capture of value that is produced by cooperative labor and that becomes
increasingly common through its circulation in social networks” (Multitude 113).
Cooperative labor continually produces this “common,” as immaterial products circulate
through both corporate and personal spheres (and both simultaneously, as in the Facebook news
feed, for example), and this network social organization “has become hegemonic in qualitative terms
and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself” (Multitude 109, emphasis in
original). And with this new network-hegemony in place, the stage is set for the multitude to
develop.
Multitude is best described as a non-organizing principle. It is networked, non-
hierarchical, and autonomous. It “is not unified but remains plural and multiple,” and “although
it remains multiple, is not fragmented, anarchical, or incoherent [because it] is able to act in
common and thus rule itself” (Multitude 100). Through the force of repetition more than
argument, they insist that acting “in common” and ruling itself will not unify the plurality of the
5
Though this “autonomy” is similar to the old academic joke: the best part of academia is that
you can work any 80 hours of the week you want.
28
multitude, as a stable unity would be only another form of hierarchy. Bruce Robbins’ review of
Hardt and Negri’s trilogy—Empire, Multitude, and specifically Commonwealth—is scathing, and
describes the multitude thus:
Hardt and Negri don’t actually believe in organization. That is, they don’t think
it’s a good thing: “traditional organizational forms based on unity, central
leadership, and hierarchy are neither desirable nor effective.” But since these are
the only forms of organization that can count as organization (an organization
without unity or leadership is one hand clapping), what they’re really saying is that
they recognize the multitude only when it is not organized, when it is an anarchic
array of singularities. If they see the multitude, they do not see organization. If
they see organization, they do not see the multitude. (Robbins)
But singularities are precisely the organizational unit—that is, the autonomous individual
unfettered of an organization—that Hardt and Negri build the multitude on: “This is a
molecular conception of the law and the production of norms that is based, in our terms, on a
constant, free, and open interaction among singularities, which through their communication
produces common norms” (Multitude 204). Hardt and Negri take pains to distinguish these
“common norms” and their conception of “the common” itself from any traditional (or realistic)
from of consensus or public interest. Ultimately, they draw a distinction between the “individual”
and a “singularity”: “Whereas the individual dissolves in the unity of a community, singularities
are not diminished but express themselves freely in the common” (Multitude 204). There is
another term for this kind of “common” produced by individualism and autonomous action,
though, and that term is of course “the market.”
Like free-market ideologues, “Hardt and Negri are quite clear that scarcity is not their
thing, not a cutting-edge issue” (Robbins). With their immaterial conception of ideas, images,
29
and other ephemeral products of the knowledge economy, they believe in what is called, in
contemporary parlance, “sustainable growth”—the benevolent goal, we’re often told, of global
capitalism. They achieve this by changing what we mean by production:
This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the
social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships,
and so forth. This form of the common does not lend itself to the logic of scarcity.
(Commonwealth 139)
For Hardt and Negri, production is thus freed from the physical constraints of the environment,
natural resources, and human costs of labor.
6
And freed from “the logic of scarcity,” the
multitude need not worry about coherent organization, since with infinite supply and infinite
output, a useful “common” should eventually emerge from the collection of singularities acting of
their own accord. Singularities working without any governance, however, is either anarchy or
the libertarian fantasy of a free-market, where individuals acting in their own self-interest vote
with their dollar and determine what form the common will take. The real problem with the
concept of multitude, and the celebration of collaborative immaterial labor generally, is that it
structurally mirrors corporate capitalism. Hardt and Negri frame mobility and precariousness in
positive terms, and decry any kind of State apparatus that would interfere with the flexibility and
freedom of the immaterial labor force, while failing to mention the tenuous and exploited
6
Robbins is quick to point out that Hardt and Negri’s boundless immateriality built on digital
and network technologies ignores the very real “matter of bandwidth and server space”
(Robbins), which are not limitless, and we could add any number of additional issues related to
the production of digital components, their transport to market, monetary costs and availability
to various segments of the population, etc.
30
realities of contingent labor.
7
And Robbins goes on to point out that the responsiveness and self-
accountability Hardt and Negri locate in the multitude is in fact nearly identical to the kinds of
“corporate governance” advocated on the right side of the political spectrum. And the question
then becomes how these two divergent political and economic views can be advocated from both
the Right and the (ostensible) Left. As Tkacz asks in relation to openness:
What to make of a concept championed by all walks of political life? When
conservative liberals, libertarians, liberal democrats, postautonomous Marxists,
and left-leaning activists all claim the open as their own and all agree that
openness is the way forward? (32)
Indeed, openness, and multitude, appear all-too-accommodating. And the problems for a
concept thus based on the figure of autonomous, diverse, and self-organizing individuals are both
economic and political.
In economic terms, the freedom of Hardt and Negri’s multitude follows the capitalist
logic of individual (consumer) choice, where, Slavoj Žižek claims, plurality is simply another
opportunity for niche markets (Organs 163-6). Then, the connected, network condition that
produces the multitude is a product of both corporate and government infrastructure. Žižek goes
on to argue that the concept of the multitude cannot ultimately be anti-capitalist because the
multitude itself relies too heavily on capitalist modes of production for its very existence (Organs
7
Which, to be fair, have gained (relatively) widespread attention after the publication of
Commonwealth. And Nathaniel Tkacz devotes only a parenthetical to this line of critique, in
relation to Toffler’s “Associative Man,” but the similarities to Hardt and Negri are apparent:
It’s worth mentioning here that the shadow figures of Toffler’s upwardly mobile,
specialist and professional Associative Man are today the multitudes of precarious
workers, who may or may not be skilled, are more likely to be women, and whose
“mobility” and “flexibility” are a source of exploitation, uncertainty, and
hardship. (97)
31
171). The physical architecture of the Internet that is owned, operated, and surveilled by various
governments and private industries, and the patent and copyright enforcement that sustain
technological development, are all combined with “modalities in which information itself is
offered and sold on the market as ‘intellectual property,’ as another commodity” (Organs 172-3).
8
Thus, again in economic and class terms, the knowledge economy, developed and sustained by
capitalist interests, creates a criterion of division that reorders, rather than replaces, the divisions
of industrial capitalism: “the dominated class is no longer the working class but the class of
consumerists (‘consumtariat’), those condemned to consume the information prepared and
manipulated by the netocratic
9
elite” (Organs 172). Without at least the minimal support “from
within netocracy, the ‘consumtariat’ alone can only articulate its protest in violent, negative
actions lacking any positive, future-oriented program” (Organs 173). And so, Žižek continues:
The key point is that there is no “neutral” netocracy: there is either a procapitalist
netocracy, itself part of late capitalism, or the postcapitalist netocracy, part of a
different mode of production. To complicate things further, this postcapitalist
perspective is, in itself, ambiguous: it can mean a more open “democratic” system
or the emergence of a new hierarchy, a kind of informational/biogenetic
neofeudalism. (Organs 173)
Žižek concedes that the multitude, as Hardt and Negri conceive it, could potentially be an agent
of revolutionary action, as a force of resistance, for implementing the revolt itself, but for Žižek it
cannot stand as the new structure of a postcapitalist society. Which brings us back to the
8
Open Source is a possible exception, though far from an unproblematic one: see Tkacz,
particularly 14-38.
9
Žižek borrows the term “netocracy” from Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist’s book of that
title, as well as their term “consumtariat.”
32
incommensurability of the multitude with democracy itself, and how even “a more open
‘democratic’ system” cannot avoid reproducing exclusions.
In the abstract, democracy means an equal voice for all, and this is what Hardt and Negri
seem to want: “Certainly global democracy will have to mean something different than what
democracy meant in the national context throughout the modern era” (Multitude 232);
“democracy today is confronted by a leap of scale, from the nation-state to the entire globe, and
thus unmoored from its traditional modern meanings and practices” (Multitude 236); “one
approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude, then, is as an open-source society,
that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we all can work collaboratively to solve its
bugs and create new, better social programs” (Multitude 340). Yet this presupposes an agreed-
upon “better”—as well as an agreement on the necessity of social programs in the first place—
and a collective determination to work toward achieving these better programs. At the very least
some agreement, even at the most basic level of a minimal consensus or compromise, is crucial
for this collective work to function. Once this agreement is reached, however, the plurality and
fragmentation of the multitude dissolves; the “singularities” become a group, the group exercises
its collective will, and that action excludes any “singularities” who disagree.
From Chantal Mouffe’s perspective, theorized in The Democratic Paradox, this inevitable
disagreement is a necessary, structural element of her progressive vision for democracy. That is to
say, in her words, “consensus in a liberal-democratic society is—and always will be—the
expression of a hegemony and the crystallization of power relations” (Mouffe 49). Hardt and
Negri’s multitude is here impossible, of course, as any organized action represents a hierarchy of
power. And therefore, she is “convinced, contrary to the claims of third way theorists, that the
blurring of the frontiers between left and right, far from being an advance in a democratic
direction, is jeopardizing the future of democracy” (Mouffe 7). Mouffe thus develops what she
33
terms “agonistic democracy,” as opposed to antagonistic or deliberative democracy.
10
This
left/right divide, for Mouffe, provides the grounds for the agonistic, productive encounters that
allow pluralism to thrive: “far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its
very condition of existence. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and
legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing authoritarian order” (Mouffe
103). She continues, here contrasting her agonistic approach against the deliberative-democracy
model:
This is why a perspective like “agonistic pluralism,” which reveals the impossibility
of establishing a consensus without exclusion, is of fundamental importance for
democratic politics. By warning us against the illusion that a fully achieved
democracy could ever be instantiated, it forces us to keep the democratic
contestation alive. To make room for dissent and to foster the institutions in which
it can be manifested is vital for a pluralistic democracy, and one should abandon
the very idea that there could ever be a time in which it would cease to be
necessary because the society is now “well-ordered.” (Mouffe 105)
Society will certainly never be “well-ordered,” but Mouffe locks-in conflicts that are not
necessarily productive, equitable, or in good faith. She privileges the left/right distinction as an
important agonistic encounter, even while it has nearly reached a deadlock in the U.S., and at
the same time the left/right distinction elides the identity-based struggles that she insists are the
foundation of a resistance to hegemony. Mouffe continues:
Once it is acknowledged that this type of agonistic confrontation is what is specific
to a pluralist democracy, we can understand why such a democracy requires the
10
For further discussion of Mouffe’s response to the deliberative democracy of Rawls and
Habermas, see Mouffe 83-93.
34
creation of collective identities around clearly differentiated positions as well as the
possibility to choose between real alternatives. This is precisely the function of the
left/right distinction. The left/right opposition is the way in which legitimate
conflict is given form and institutionalized. (Mouffe 117)
This sanitizes dissent, and presents a genteel version of what we already have: institutional
authority and (occasionally violent) protest. Furthermore, far from simply the left/right politics of
the two-party system, the dissenting voice(s) that she celebrates are, and will very likely continue
to be, the same marginalized and oppressed groups that are still struggling for equal recognition
now.
The proposed need for a plurality of identifications is in line with Mouffe’s earlier
collaboration with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in which the Marxist focus on
class identity also guarantees an authoritarian regime:
The very expansion of the democratic potential of the mass movement gives rise
in a strictly classist conception, to an increasingly authoritarian practice in
politics… The possibility of this authoritarian turn was, in some way, present from
the beginnings of Marxist orthodoxy; that is to say, from the moment in which a
limited actor—the working class—was raised to the level of “universal class.”
(Hegemony 56-7)
That one subject position—class identity—assumes primacy over all others, Laclau and Mouffe
argue, is in effect authoritarian, though Žižek maintains that “in the mantra of ‘class, gender,
race,’ ‘class’ sticks out, never properly thematized” (Organs 175).
11
That is, for Laclau and Mouffe
no one subject can/should occupy a central position in democracy, whereas for Žižek class will
11
For a detailed elaboration of Žižek’s position on the universality of class, see Butler, Laclau,
and Žižek 90-135.
35
always be the universal medium through which all other subjective identities can be articulated
(Organs 175).
12
The inability to take up the cause of a “universal” actor means the multitude will never
produce a democratic social apparatus, according to Žižek, because in spite of Hardt and Negri’s
claims to the contrary the multitude is caught in the binary of “us” and “them” (Organs 176). So
long as there is a “them” against which the multitude may make its competing demands, the
multitude functions as a coherent force of resistance.
13
The multitude sets aside internal
differences, in other words, to rally against an even more onerous Other; yet it is not capable of
producing a positive, democratic governing force. Without the rejected Other to structure the
competing internal divisions of the multitude, an authoritarian leader will emerge from within:
“Multitude in power” thus necessarily actualizes itself in the guise of an
authoritarian leader whose charisma can serve as the “empty signifier” able to
contain the multitude of interests… such a structure can function only as the
12
See also David Harvey’s response to Commonwealth:
Inspiring though this model of revolution may be in many ways, there are a host
of problems with it. To begin with, Hardt and Negri dismiss Slavoj Žižek's
contention that there is something far more foundational about class than there is
about all the other forms of identity in relation to the perpetuation of capitalism,
and in this I think Žižek is right. No matter how important race, gender, and
sexual identity may have been in the history of capitalism's development, and no
matter how important the struggles waged in their name, it is possible to envisage
the perpetuation of capitalism without them - something that is impossible in the
case of class. (Artforum)
13
Žižek offers the example of Venezuela:
There was a similar constellation in the last years of the decaying Really-Existing
Socialism: the nonantagonistic coexistence, within the oppositional field, of a
multitude of ideologicopolitical tendencies, from liberal human rights groups to
“liberal” business-oriented groups, conservative religious groups and leftist
workers’ demands. This multitude functioned well as long as it was in the
opposition to a “them,” the Party hegemony. (Organs 176)
Various political positions united under the banner of opposition, but these could in no way
agree on a positive program of governance.
36
ethicopoetic shadowy double of the existing positive state power structure. (Organs
177)
One of the most obvious examples is Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Leaving aside
Obama’s personal charisma, “hope” and “change” are also empty signifiers in Laclau’s sense—
meaningless placeholders awaiting a content imposed upon them by diverse parties.
14
Democrats
from the far-left to the center all had “hope” for “change,” but a libertarian Republican could
have run this same campaign equally well—they were hoping for change, too, after all. The
empty signifier works precisely because it does not articulate a positive content.
One way of thinking about the “democratic paradox” is to consider democracy as a
structure in which all of the elements are formally absent:
In a democratic order, sovereignty lies in the People—but what is the People if
not, precisely, the collection of the subjects of power? […] Because the People
cannot immediately rule themselves, the place of Power must always remain an
empty place; any person occupying it can do so only temporarily, as a kind of
surrogate, a substitute for the real-impossible sovereign—“nobody can rule
innocently,” as Saint-Just puts it. (Sublime Object 165, emphasis in original)
As the governing body, the People are not subjects; as subjects, the People are not the governing
body. The ruler, who temporarily embodies Power, occupies the structurally empty place of the
sovereign and is (supposedly) only the medium through which the will of the People speaks. This
leaves temporary, shifting hierarchies that cloak themselves in the guise of equality, as the
responsibility for authority reflects back on itself: the People obey Power; Power obeys (i.e. is the
14
“The semantic role of these terms is not to express any positive content but, as we have seen, to
function as the names of a fullness which is constitutively absent” (Laclau 96). For Laclau’s
argument developing his concept of empty signifiers, see Laclau 93-8, 129-35.
37
will of) the People. And yet, not only does the People—as a category subjected to Power—not
exist, it is also never completely unified; there is always an excluded, dissenting remainder.
Consensus and unification are reached, such as they are, through empty signifiers around which
disparate, mutually-exclusive viewpoints can coalesce, and these empty signifiers are the key to
understanding how terms like “open,” “collaborative,” and “participatory” can satisfy multiple
ideological positions.
In a digital network, however, the People come much closer to ruling themselves without
a surrogate, and so the place of Power need not necessarily remain an empty place. That is,
individual actors are capable of taking direct action that affects their online environment, without
resorting to governing representatives. And indeed, this is exactly the democratic promise of the
digital revolution that led us to believe in a newer, fairer social organization in the first place. The
question, then, becomes how individuals assert authority within a network, while maintaining the
spirit (or at least illusion) of democratic participation. I contend that the structure of participation
in online networks is what I call radically-absent authority. This is to say that individuals assert
their own authority over the rest of the network through a gesture of denying their own authority
by constructing an absent authorial Other. This invented authority figure then serves as an alibi
for the individual, who appears only to obey or resist, and the constructed hierarchy places the
entire network in a horizontal relationship—the “us” in opposition to the supposed “them.” The
problem of agency is thus sidestepped, and the contradictory forces of the multitude remain
united in resistance against the absent authority. To illustrate, we will now turn to the semi-self-
organization of Wikipedia contributors.
38
MOP RULE
Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” which is true with very few
exceptions, and so, outside of those studying Wikipedia, it is generally assumed to be a shining
example of non-hierarchical collaboration at work. In practice, Wikipedia certainly has its share
of problems in terms of a vast gender disparity, as well as disproportionate coverage of subject
areas, and these problems tend to reflect the biases and interests of the self-selecting subset of the
population willing to devote the time to contribute to Wikipedia. My intention here is not to
cover the spectrum of issues within Wikipedia, many of which have been well-documented
elsewhere, but rather to investigate how hierarchies re-emerge within the non-hierarchical
“anyone can edit” structure of Wikipedia, and how those hierarchies are negotiated by the
Wikipedia community.
15
First and foremost, while Wikipedia may be open to anyone with computer and Internet
access, it is not unstructured. From the outset in 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger made
several key policy decisions that set the course of what Wikipedia would become. The three
original, non-negotiable terms of Wikipedia are: Wikipedia articles are written from a neutral
point of view (NPOV); information should be verifiable through outside sources; articles should
not contain original research or opinions. These three inter-related policies now, as of 2015, fall
under the NPOV “pillar” of the “Five Pillars,” which are the “fundamental principles of
Wikipedia” (Wikipedia: Five Pillars). The other four pillars are: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia;
Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute; editors should treat each other
with respect and civility; Wikipedia has no firm rules. Nathaniel Tkacz points out that “it is
deeply unfashionable to claim that Wikipedia has relatively stable and highly authoritative
15
On the gender disparity, see the excellent work of the late Adrianne Wadewitz; Potter. On the
coverage of various subject areas, see Royal and Kapila.
39
rules… it rubs uneasily against the laissez-faire ‘anyone can edit’ principle’ and totally
contradicts” this last of the Five Pillars (98).
16
Nevertheless, Alex Bruns observes, the core policies
“should not be misunderstood as an anachronism amid the open and flexible environment of
produsage itself—indeed, the core principles of Wikipedia crucially serve to define the
fundamental purpose of the project itself, and ensure its continued feasibility” (Bruns 113).
17
Without direction and definable goals, the community would have no criteria upon which to
judge their efforts.
Wales and Sanger also made two crucial technical decisions: there would be only one live
version of an article at a time, and all iterations of a page would be archived and viewable, and
users would not be able to delete. The first meant there would be no competing versions of an
article, but instead a single, neutral article, and contributors would have to work from, and
achieve consensus on, that version. The second meant that no matter how a contributor edited
an article, the article could never be “broken,” as it could always be reverted to its last iteration
(Lih 6-7).
In addition to core policies, Wikipedia also developed a set of internal cultural guidelines
that fostered participation. For instance, readers and contributors were encouraged to “be bold.”
In Larry Sanger’s words, “Wikis don’t work if people aren’t bold. You’ve got to get out there and
make those changes, correct that grammar, add those facts, make that language precise…
Amazingly, it all works out. It does require some amount of politeness, but it works” (quoted in
16
See also Wikipedia’s own stance on this last pillar:
Our dictum, “ignore all rules” feels good the first time you use it, and we should
never blame newbies for over-indulging. But even philosophers drunk on wisdom
need designated drivers (or people to clean up the mess they leave behind).
Appreciate its value, but be sure you appreciate the importance of our other
policies. Policy is often smarter than you think (Wikipedia: Advice).
17
See also Tkacz 47-50; Good Faith Collaboration 45-72.
40
Lih 91). The call to be bold then led to “SOFIXIT,” shorthand for “so fix it yourself” instead of
either waiting for someone else to make a correction or asking that someone else make a
correction. These two necessitated other community norms, though. As Lih asks, “but what
happens when people take SOFIXIT too much to heart? Wikipedia invites people to ‘Be bold,’
but what happens when people are too bold, and start to clash?” (115). To minimize the impact
of these inevitable clashes, a part of the civility pillar is to “assume good faith” in other
contributors
18
As the community of editors continued to expand, though, things that had worked
well for a small group of dedicated contributors did not necessarily scale well. Early on, the
majority of contributors belonged to one of or both the Wiki-l and Wikien-l listservs, and could
therefore reliably be counted on to have at least a working familiarity with Wikipedia objectives
and guidelines (Lih 94-5). However, “assume good faith” became even more important when this
was no longer the case.
Jared Lanier’s seminal 2006 essay, “Digital Maoism,” is the starting-point for much
criticism of Wikipedia’s political possibilities. Lanier’s thesis can be summarized as “the hive
mind is for the most part stupid and boring” (Lanier). That is, the hive erases personality and
individuality, and mixes a plurality of voices into one Wikipedia-fied voice. For Lanier, “The
beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to
believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and
18
As a result of “be bold” and “SOFIXIT,” another phrase commonly seen is “Please do not bite
the newcomers.” In other words, Wikipedia threw their doors open to the Internet at large, and
in Wikipedia’s early days this meant inviting people who were unaccustomed to working online
or interacting with online communities. Often they had difficulty even believing that the Edit
button really worked, that anyone could edit a page—leading to one of Wikipedia’s most common
edits: “the innocent ‘Does this work?’ test vandal” (Lih 176). So how then does one both
encourage these newcomers to make edits and indoctrinate them into the community and its
norms? By Assuming Good Faith in new contributors and calmly welcoming them to the
community. See also Bruns 25.
41
making ourselves into idiots.” And it is a mistake to believe that the Internet itself has something
to say, or has a predetermined agency of its own outside or beyond the people who design and
use it. Lanier’s most pointed critique is of the reverence surrounding Wikipedia, and the
assumption that Wikipedia represents a model for open and collaborative politics:
No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used;
how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger
pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a
resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have
influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the
most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or
meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from
the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. (Lanier)
“Digital Maoism,” as one would expect, generated a great deal of discussion, and the responses of
Clay Shirky, Kevin Kelly, and a few other prominent media critics were appended to Lanier’s
essay in Edge. Among the lengthy responses, Jimmy Wales’ reply to Lanier’s assertion of a core
belief in the all-wise collective is short and to the point:
My response is quite simple: this alleged “core belief” is not one which is held by
me, nor as far as I know, by any important or prominent Wikipedians. Nor do we
have any particular faith in collectives or collectivism as a mode of writing.
Authoring at Wikipedia, as everywhere, is done by individuals exercising the
judgment of their own minds. (Wales)
But if not a collective, what are these individuals who exercise their judgment and agency?
Elsewhere, Wales responds to his status as figurehead, as well as the conviction held by many
42
Wikipedians that Wikipedia is a pseudo-authoritarian regime, with Jimbo Wales as the
“Benevolent Dictator.” Here, Wales describes the governing structure of Wikipedia thus:
Wikipedia is not an anarchy, though it has anarchistic features. Wikipedia is not a
democracy, though it has democratic features. Wikipedia is not an aristocracy,
though it has aristocratic features. Wikipedia is not a monarchy, though it has
monarchical features. (Wikimedia)
If asked point-blank how Wikipedia is governed, though, this is the equivalent of answering Yes.
Similarly, Joseph Reagle sees this governing structure of Wikipedia, and other collaborative
virtual settings, as one of “emergent leadership.”
Emergent leadership does combine Wales’ disparate political forces, in that leaders rise
from within the non-hierarchical community, usually through meritocracy but occasionally
through sheer charisma.
19
This clustering of emergent leaders balances “the common, and
seemingly paradoxical, juxtaposition of the autocratic status accorded to leaders and the larger
egalitarian ethos of the community” (“In Good Faith” 141). Reagle sees Wales as just such an
emergent leader, aided by his playing the good cop to Sanger’s bad cop in the early days of
Wikipedia’s formation.
20
Reagle ultimately assesses Wales’ leadership as a combination of
autocratic, consultative, and delegated managerial styles (“In Good Faith” 157). Reagle sees this
as the adaptive and flexible position required for coordinating a large group of semi-autonomous
individuals, yet it can also be seen as a kind of non-position, which allows Wales to assert
authority while avoiding the appearance of doing so.
As part of Wikipedia’s collaborative model, all contributors are formally equal: a
Wikipedian with 10,000 edits has no more editorial authority than an anonymous contributor
19
See “In Good Faith” 137-47.
20
See “In Good Faith” 145-7.
43
making her first edit. Jimmy Wales himself, again formally, has no more authority over content
than anyone else. The logistics of the expanding community, though, quickly required the
institution of certain bureaucratic and administrative mechanisms to continue functioning. An
early step was to designate certain trusted contributors as administrators, granting them special
privileges over other contributors—though still not privileges over content.
21
These extra
privileges for Admins, also known as sysops (system operators), included locking down pages that
were controversial or frequently subject to vandalism, yet those in power insisted this was all pro-
forma and unimportant to the broader Wikipedia community. Jimmy Wales sent a message to
the Wikien-l listserv to this effect:
I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.
I think perhaps I’ll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of
people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of
“authority” around the position. It’s merely a technical matter the powers given to
sysops are not given out to everyone.
I don’t like that there’s the apparent feeling here that being granted sysop
status is a really special thing. (Wales, quoted in Lih 94).
It is worth pausing for a moment to note the tone and implication of this message. Jimmy Wales,
the co-founder of Wikipedia who universally goes by the nickname “Jimbo,” asserts that being
named an administrator of Wikipedia is “*not a big deal*,” and that he wants to “dispel the aura
of ‘authority’ around the position.” But what is conferring both title and exclusive privilege in a
“semi-willy-nilly” fashion if not the very definition of tyrannical authority? And it is clearly not a
merely “technical matter” or else these same powers would be available to everyone. So it is only
21
See Lih 90-5; Tkacz 45, 92-3.
44
not a big deal if you are one of the chosen, as it is easy to downplay power when you are the one
in power.
The last sentence stands out as well, and it is not too much of a leap to imagine a
stomping foot to go along with the “I don’t like that there’s this apparent feeling here,” as though
the community is refusing to conform to Jimbo’s will. Nevertheless, “prior to 2003, admin
requests were made on the group electronic mailing list, and were usually granted right away”
(Lih 95). The relative unimportance of administrator privileges was further reinforced by the
Advice to New Administrators page, where the role is playfully referred to as a “Wikipedia
Janitor.” There, admins are encouraged to “wield the mop and bucket with equanimity” (quoted
in Lih 185). Many in the community, however, felt the process—and the role of administrator
itself—was inherently alienating. Since admins had the power to lock down pages, as well as the
ability to block individual users beginning in 2003, contributors felt that admins wielded a “big
stick” rather than a mop and bucket, even when dealing with matters that were properly editorial
(Lih 128). By 2007, the process of granting administrator status had also changed; what had been
the semi-willy-nilly favor of Jimbo Wales was now “a completely different scene… requiring
more than 1,000 edits and at least three months of experience,” after which “a candidate can
then expect a fusillade of questions, ranging from copyright policy, to libel, to how to react in
hypothetical situations” (Lih 185). And since this questioning was open to anyone in the
Wikipedia community, “the inquisition becomes a pile of pet peeves and litmus tests by a small
band of gatekeepers” (Lih 185).
22
Here we see that not only are structured policies necessary to
focus the community on a common goal (an encyclopedia), but also that as the community grows
22
The Afterword to The Wikipedia Revolution was crowd-sourced to Wikipedians, and the section
on Administrators echoes this concern—that is, the general feeling as of 2009 was still that the
process to become an admin is grueling and broken, and being an admin is a *very* big deal.
45
a tiered structure of users is required to administer those policies. It thus appears that the non-
hierarchical, networked collaboration theorized earlier may actually perform better with a small
group focused on a single task: the opposite of a multitude working autonomously, each toward
their own interests. Additionally, power consolidates itself; once a hierarchy is introduced into the
network, it becomes increasingly difficult for those outside the central power structure to make it
past the “small band of gatekeepers” and join the upper ranks.
As editorial and content disagreements continued to mount among the expanding
community, another level of administration was introduced in 2004: the Arbitration Committee
(ArbCom).
23
The vast majority of day-to-day Wikipedia activity functioned through the
collaboration and revision of its contributors, but articles on deeply divisive topics led to
intractable arguments and what came to be known as edit (or revert) wars. The “revert” feature is
especially useful in cases of vandalism, and by clicking “revert” the most recent changes are
dismissed and the article page is immediately returned to its previous iteration. When editors
approach a topic from positions of intractable difference, though, revert becomes a way to shout
over one another. Lih gives the example of the article for the city of Gdansk, also known as
Danzig, in modern day Poland, which was the subject of “perhaps the most famous ‘edit war’ in
Wikipedia history” (Lih 123), and Tkacz uses the example of the article on the prophet
23
See Lih 183-6, particularly:
Creating the ArbCom in 2004 was another step forward, but there were other
signs that other parts of the community ‘consensus’ were not scaling with growth.
As Wikipedia became more popular, it was less of a village where you knew
everyone on the street, and more of a faceless impersonal metropolis that was
unfortunately driving the adoption of hard, cold, binding policies, something
frowned upon in the classic wiki culture. (184)
For Lih (and Bruns) the ArbCom is a “step forward” from the perspective of a collaborative,
finished product, though as Lih points out, rules are not generally considered favorable to “wiki
culture” (or the idealized realization of the multitude).
46
Muhammad.
24
These edit wars are thus the expression of an editorial impasse, as debate and
conversation end and each side simply asserts their version of the article by annulling the other
side’s version, and the page flips back and forth indefinitely. The ArbCom was designed as a
mediating body that would break the deadlock, but the committee was quickly overwhelmed by
the workload, and so by November of 2004 a three-revert rule (3RR) was put into place. The
3RR policy is an automatic, temporary lockout for any contributor who makes three reverts to a
single article within a 24-hour period. The idea was to provide a cooling-off period for the parties
involved in a dispute, though it could also be seen as an infantilizing time-out. It was also a step
toward equalizing the terrain between contributors and administrators, since many in the
community felt that the admins’ lockout authority gave unfair power to the admins in editorial
disputes (Lih 128). If all parties are subject to the same lockout restrictions, however, there is at
least some parity.
At the same time, 3RR institutionalized and automated an ethic of productivity and
stability at the expense of genuine consensus, and so it itself was not free from controversy. At
one point Wales himself weighed in, and wrote that he was “personally endorsing and promoting
this proposal [for 3RR]” (quoted in Lih 127). Giving his reasons for supporting 3RR, Wales
continued:
I think that revert warring has become an absurd drain on us, and it has not
worked for it to be a mere guideline of politeness, nor has it proved effective for
the [arbitration committee] to consider every single case of this. Violation of the
24
Tkacz’s analysis of discursive frames and François Lyotard’s “differend” statements is an
excellent model of how Wikipedia contributors fail to reach consensus, see Tkacz 70-87. My
interest here is less on the failure of consensus than the resulting policies set in place.
47
3RR is widely considered to be a problem in the community, even by those who
are the worst violators. (quoted in Lih 127)
One can again here the disappointment in Wales’ tone, as certain members of the community
have become “an absurd drain” on the rest of “us.” Rhetorically, the 3RR violators here are the
rejected excess, the Other that structures the “us;” meanwhile the rest of “us” are reasonable and
dedicated Wikipedians, capable of reaching a rational consensus without formal policies in place.
It is also easy enough to see that Wales is asserting his inherent authority as a co-founder and
figurehead of Wikipedia by “personally endorsing” the 3RR proposal. The subtle flip-side of his
personal authority, though, is that he also appropriates the voice of the contributors; he matter-
of-factly states that revert warring “is widely considered to be a problem,” thereby reducing his
personal endorsement to an echo of the communal will. In Tkacz’s formulation, Wales is
speaking as a “mouthpiece”: “the figure of the ‘mouthpiece’ does not speak on the basis of his or
her own and therefore centralized authority; he or she simply reports the outcome of many
voices in play” (179). This is of course not necessarily the case; the mouthpiece may or may not
be accurately reporting the outcome of multiple voices, but to conform with the expectations of
decentralized leadership, it is “only possible to speak with force if one [can] first demonstrate that
this force did not originate with the individual” (Tkacz 179).
25
This is of course, again, because
collaboration is thought to be democratic and “the democratic character of a society can only be
given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself or himself the representation
of the totality and claim to have the ‘master’ of the foundation” (Mouffe 100). And since the
individual is by definition the most limited of social actors, he or she must couch authority in
25
For further elaboration on Latour’s categories of mouthpiece, spokesperson, and dissident that
Tkacz draws on in relation to Wikipedia, see Tkacz 157-60.
48
terms of the will of the group as a whole, and the role of “mouthpiece” is thus one form that
radically-absent authority can take.
NEGATIVE POINT OF VIEW
Another form that radically-absent authority takes is the pillars and policies of Wikipedia,
Neutral Point of View being not the least of these. Tkacz considers NPOV in relation to debates
between individual contributors over the right to enforce their own conception of what is
“neutral,” but I would like to pursue a slightly different tack.
26
As a set of principles, Wikipedia’s
Five Pillars, guidelines, and social norms serve to frame, in Tkacz’s sense, and direct all
appropriate activity on Wikipedia. For example, “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” (the first pillar)
that is “written from a neutral point of view” (the second pillar). Presented as a simple state of
affairs, both of these draw on an unstable set of assumptions upon which a diverse community
may or may not agree. A truly self-organizing multitude would, by definition, operate without
guidelines; the multitude would work autonomously and an encyclopedia would result, among
the many other things produced by this multitude. And indeed, once the “logic of scarcity” is
jettisoned, an encyclopedia would almost certainly appear, eventually, but here we are dealing
more with infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters than with a social body. Yet not all those who
contribute to Wikipedia accept Wikipedia’s basic premises, and here we see another aspect of
democracy at work. That is, “democracy is, by definition, not ‘global’; it has to be based on values
or truths that one cannot select ‘democratically.’ In democracy one can fight for truth but not
decide what is truth” (Organs 175).
27
Wikipedia’s “democracy” is based on the values of the Five
26
On NPOV, see Tkacz 104-10. On Tkacz’s concept of frames in relation to NPOV, see Tkacz
70-7.
27
On this nature of democratic truth as it directly pertains to Wikipedia, see Tkacz 65, 108-10.
49
Pillars, and good-faith conflicts arising out of differences over perspective or the nature of NPOV
are already framed within the truth of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. But this does not account
for the “global” remainder outside that frame, and so we should pause here to address vandalism
and trolling, as opposed to disputes arising out of good-faith collaboration.
Studies of Wikipedia authorship have thus far focused on consensus-building and
collaboration in good faith, and vandalism has been brushed aside as a mere nuisance—the
background noise that must be filtered out to see the signal of legitimate editorial disputes.
28
Far
from background noise, though, vandalism is common on Wikipedia. So common, in fact, that it
is compared to an eternal game of whack-a-mole, and vandalism-fighting is given its own
editorial award.
29
But here definitions are slippery; since Wikipedia has defined itself and its
proper community through its own policies and guidelines, as well as its own hierarchy of arbiters
and administrators, any alteration of content that falls outside the Five Pillars is by definition an
act of vandalism. And this preemptively marks other possibilities for communal engagement as
illegitimate. For example, moments after the announcement of David Foster Wallace’s suicide in
2008, his Wikipedia entry was changed from its usual article format to a single word, in a large
font and all capital letters: “WHY?” (Wikipedia: Wallace).
30
Given that previous iterations of a
page are never lost on Wikipedia, and the article was restored within minutes, would we consider
28
Exceptions are Shachaf and Hara; Buckels et.al.
29
The RickK vandal-fighting barnstar is named in honor of one of Wikipedia’s premier vandal-
warriors, who ultimately became a casualty of the 3RR lockout policy. A tireless editor, RickK
eventually found himself reverting a vandal and locked-out due to 3RR. His account was
restored within minutes, as he was a well-known member in good standing and obviously
engaged with a vandal. Even so, RickK took the lockout as a personal affront and lack of respect,
and later that day posted a resignation letter to his user:talk page. For further details, see Lih 185-
88.
30
I claim this could be a cathartic, emotional outburst. The only other edit on Wikipedia made
from this IP address (74.59.252.170), however, was clearly vandalism on the article for
“Elfwood,” an online gallery and community for sci-fi and fantasy art (Wikipedia: Elfwood). So it
is difficult to ascertain the actual motivation behind “WHY?”
50
this an act of vandalism or a legitimate expression of grief? Within the framework of an
encyclopedia, of course, “WHY?” is meaningless; within the larger context of the online
circulation of cultural information and news, though, “WHY?” takes on a different tone. It may
very well have represented the feelings of any number of people who just learned of David Foster
Wallace’s death.
Another example from the David Foster Wallace page, in this case not the public-facing
article but the talk page, is regarding the discussion of a parody of Wallace’s work, and whether
or not that parody should be mentioned and linked in the Wikipedia entry. An anonymous
contributor writes: “About this mentioning of a parody of an article by Wallace, why not?,” and
after justifying the parody’s relevance to Wallace, concludes “Anyways, so I'm sticking the parody
back, if only because Wallace himself, a notorious footnotizer, would maybe want it” (Wikipedia:
Wallace Parody). Similarly on the Infinite Jest talk page, an anonymous contributor started a
comment thread titled “Let’s make the Entry for Infinite Jest use a bunch of endnotes and
footnotes!” (Wikipedia: Infinite Jest, capitalization in original). He or she then writes:
Wouldn't it be cool to try and replicate Dave’s penchant for notes by deploying
them in the wiki entry?!?! What do you guys think? Dave was a pretty modest
dude, but I bet he would dig it if we did it!
Another anonymous contributor responds:
Although I do think that would be cool, I'm not sure if it belongs on wikipedia. I'm
afraid it would come across as an in-joke or shout-out or something equally
unencyclopedic.
Not only do these contributors propose bending NPOV in homage to David Foster Wallace, but
the “wouldn’t it be cool” suggests other avenues that Wikipedia could have taken as a collective
project, and one that at least two members of the community would have liked to have seen. In
51
other words, from a decentralized standpoint there is no reason the David Foster Wallace related
pages could not have reflected Wallace-fan engagement. Only the non-negotiable policies and
other procedures directed contributors to conform to Wale’s and Sanger’s central mission, and
shaped what Wikipedia has become.
Trolling, too, is difficult to explain away when considered from a decentralized-network
standpoint. Trolling is so prevalent online, so omnipresent, that it takes only a slight shift in
perspective to see the Internet as a place of and for trolls, and everyone else as the intruders.
Rather than the natural and productive potential of the Internet, our meager attempts at e-
commerce, marketing, pornography, and occasional knowledge production are interfering with
their trolling. So on a purely democratic basis, trolling cannot be deemed illegitimate, and
through this lens Wikipedia appears more as a highly-structured anomaly in an entropic system
than the inevitable product of online collaboration. With respect to trolling on Wikipedia
specifically, Jason Scott, an Internet historian, archivist, and vocal Wikipedia critic, points out
that Wikipedia’s consistently high search ranking provides an enormous stage for trolls and
vandals. Scott likens Wikipedia to a giant, online, multiplayer role-playing game, and identifies a
particular class of trolls whom he compares to World of Warcraft players (“Great Failure”).
Wikipedia provides a stage and an audience, has its own internal awards (“barnstars”
31
), its own
“levels” through which to advance (editor, administrator, ArbCom, etc.), and each of these levels
requires an increasing degree of trust and prestige within the community and provides specific
challenges to overcome.
32
The structure designed in part to keep vandalism out of Wikipedia
provides the motivation for vandals to get in. And since the “rules” of Wikipedia can be altered
31
These are badge emblems that appear on a contributor’s Editor page; they include things like
“The Barnstar of Diligence,” “The Tireless Contributor Barnstar,” and the previously mentioned
“RickK Anti-Vandalism Barnstar” (Wikipedia: Barnstars).
32
See the earlier discussion of new administrator requirements, pp. 42-5.
52
almost as easily as the articles themselves, Scott believes there are trolls actively working to
infiltrate and disrupt Wikipedia from the inside, if for no other reason than because they can. In
his typically abrasive style, Scott explains:
People will spend 80 hours a week playing World of Warcraft—there’s no
difference between that and playing Wikipedia 80 hours a week. It’s not a waste of
time to these people. Classic Penny Arcade theory: a normal person, plus
anonymity, plus large audience, equals flaming fuckwad.
33
(“Great Failure”)
Again, the problem is one of perspective, as from one standpoint this is a failure of Wikipedia’s
potential. That is, trolls are a threat to Wikipedia’s project and “an absurd drain,” ruining things
for everyone, yet from another point of view these trolls are the project itself. In a non-
hierarchical, open, semi-anonymous network it is not possible to say collaboration would be
fantastic except for this group of trolls and vandals, because those trolls are inherently part of the
network. You cannot get rid of the trolls without losing the non-hierarchical, open network itself.
As a devoted archivist and historian, Scott takes particular issue with Wikipedia’s deletion
practices.
34
In terms of Wikipedia incentives, deleting articles has come to be rewarded equally
with creating them, and so nominating articles for deletion is an easy, nearly effortless, way to
score social points within the community. Deletion is such an issue, in fact, that it has divided the
Wikipedians into opposing camps: Inclusionists and Deletionists. The Inclusionists rally around
the idea that “Wikipedia is not paper,” correlating with Hardt and Negri’s rejection of the “logic
of scarcity,” and they therefore feel Wikipedia can, and should, therefore accommodate any and
all articles that meet general standards of quality. The Deletionists, on the other hand, often refer
33
Penny Arcade is a long-running webcomic focusing on video games and gaming culture. One of
its most well-known contributions is the “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory,” which Scott
outlines (Penny Arcade).
34
On deletion, see Tkacz 50-61; Carr, “Questioning Wikipedia” 197-9.
53
to “notability” as a criterion for inclusion in Wikipedia.
35
While it is true that deletion is a power
reserved for relatively few in the Wikipedia hierarchy, anyone can nominate an article for
deletion on the Articles for Deletion (AfD) page. In “The Great Failure of Wikipedia,” Scott
directs his audience to see for themselves what goes on behind the scenes on the AfD page.
Nathaniel Tkacz does exactly this, and considers the case of the Wikipedia Art article, a kind of
metatextual performance-art piece that attempted to self-reference itself into existence. Tkacz’s
analysis focuses on the resulting discussion of objectivity, verifiability, and notability. Specifically
of interest to Tkacz is the mode of debate:
While there are, at least in the middle of the debate, equal voices in favor of
keeping Wikipedia Art, the mode of argumentation is notably different. The
excerpts show how “Deleters” regularly refer to policies and guidelines and how
they tend to be highly dismissive of the article/artwork. For their part, the
“Keepers” rarely refer to established polices or guidelines to support their claims.
Their argumentative mode is far more deconstructive and explorative, often
challenging or attempting to redefine existing rules. (59)
Ultimately, though there was significant disagreement over Wikipedia Art, the article was labeled
for “speedy deletion”
36
and removed. Discussion ended with “Speedily deleted. No indication
that the content may meet our criteria for inclusion” (quoted in Tkacz 61). It is hardly
groundbreaking to note that communities define themselves via exclusion, yet here we see
35
The word “notability” does not explicitly appear in the Five Pillars, though the concept is
included in the first Pillar, “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.” In listing what Wikipedia is not, the
text of this first Pillar includes a “vanity press,” which hyperlinks to the “Wikipedia:Notability”
page (Wikipedia: Five Pillars).
36
See Tkacz: “‘Wikipedia:Critera for speedy deletion.’ The page provides a list of criteria for
when it is acceptable for Wikipedia administrators to ‘bypass deletion discussion and immediately
delete Wikipedia pages or Media’” (53).
54
broader discussions of what defines Wikipedia foreclosed as well. The Deletionists successfully
controlled the frame of discussion, naturalizing their view of Wikipedia as a particular kind of
project. And consensus may or may not in fact be reached before administrators declare the
discussion finished and move ahead with their own agenda. What is interesting in terms of
radically-absent authority, though, is that individuals do not claim the right to reject an article;
instead, they point to the article not meeting standards, which means the individual implicitly
asserts the right to determine what these standards mean. Policies and guidelines are an alibi, an
external authority with a supposed pre-determined meaning and authority of their own, and in
appealing to this constructed authorial Other the individual administrator creates the illusion of
acting only as an agent of this external authority.
The Five Pillars and other Wikipedia policies create a structure for exclusion, and
Wikipedia is then defined as much by what it is not as by what it is. The argument that
Wikipedia is not paper, and can thereby expand to include any number of articles on any topic,
falls apart due to Wikipedia’s consistently-high Google page rank. There are no dark corners in
which to hide an article, since that article will likely be the first search result, and so exclusion is
vital for maintaining Wikipedia’s identity as an encyclopedia. For Scott, this means that “you
stop being a content creator and start being a content defender on Wikipedia” (“Mythapedia”).
And this represents a rather striking inversion of the collective, collaborative process. Since the
labor is performed for free, it matters little to the organization as a whole, but this kind of
policing of Wikipedia’s boundaries is wildly inefficient. Not only is energy wasted in arguing over
the deletion of an article, but consider the wasted labor of the Wikipedian(s) who worked on the
ultimately deleted article—they might spend months on an article, and the product of their effort
simply vanishes because someone else deemed it worthless (“Mythapedia”). Notability feels like
an important criterion for inclusion, as it’s doubtful many people would care to read an article
55
detailing the history of my childhood home, say, or the park district intramural hockey team I
played on for five weeks in 1995. Examples like these are clearly notable only to those directly
involved, but when we also consider the extent of information available on Wikipedia for adult
film actresses or the comprehensive coverage of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the idea of notability
appears much more subjective.
37
Frustration mounts, too, when we realize that it’s not a central
authority-figure who nominates an article for deletion, not necessarily an expert in the article’s
subject, or even an otherwise interested party. Scott imagines a contributor’s reaction to their
article being up for deletion:
And once again you say who the fuck are you? And the answer is you’re just
somebody. You’re just some random guy on the street. The most frustrating part
about Wikipedia is that when you want to make a change, somebody who wants
to undo that change is just some guy. (“Mythapedia”)
Some guy passes by, happens to notice your article out of the more than four million articles on
Wikipedia, and just like that your contribution evaporates and you are excluded from the
community.
One last note on policy before moving on: Verifiability might appear to be the most
straightforward of Wikipedia’s guidelines, but it too is has problems. Scott cites the example of
the article on Carmine DeSapio, one of the most famous and glaring errors in Wikipedia.
38
DeSapio was the last head of the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City, and Scott
points out that the first 100 Google search results for “Carmine DeSapio” are some version of the
Wikipedia article on him. The problem is that the Wikipedia article was incorrectly transcribed
from a New York Times obituary, and thus the Wikipedia entry contains factual errors. Wikipedia
37
See Wikipedia: Pornographic Actresses; Wikipedia: Buffy; Wikipedia: Buffy Episodes.
38
See also Lih 189.
56
content is distributed under a free license, and it therefore spreads easily across the Internet; the
New York Times obituary, on the other hand, is locked down behind a pay-wall and so does not
circulate much at all (“Great Failure”). According to Scott, this shows that once errors are
introduced they are very difficult to eradicate, because Wikipedia is often assumed to be
accurate. Scott’s concern is the gap between what we unquestioningly expect from Wikipedia
and what Wikipedia actually delivers. For Scott, “pretty good” is not good enough for a website
that consistently ranks as the top hit in Google.
39
In Scott’s words, accuracy would not be such an
issue if Wikipedia were called “Jimbo’s Big Bag of Trivia,” but Wales himself set the bar by
promising, again and again, that Wikipedia’s stated goal is to provide “the sum of all human
knowledge” to everyone, for free. Under those circumstances, Scott continues, you can’t have it
both ways: you cannot say Wikipedia is “the sum of all human knowledge” and at the same time
deflect criticism by saying it works well enough, considering how it is produced (“Great Failure”).
Factual errors aside, the DeSapio example exposes a structural flaw in the principle of
Verifiability. That is, the article links to the Times obituary but the content itself is unavailable
without a paid subscription to the Times. The citation is thus an empty gesture, a show of citation
that cannot ultimately confirm the veracity of the article’s content, and Verifiability itself
becomes another absent authority, a meaningless cover for the contributor that amounts to “trust
me.”
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
In “DistriWiki: A Proposal,” Scott suggests a distributed, mirrored Wikipedia architecture in the
wake of a pornography scandal. The scandal was not so much that there are pornographic
39
By 2006, the Wikipedia entry is the first Google search result for “most proper and non-proper
nouns” (“Mythapedia”).
57
images on Wikipedia, but that after national news coverage Jimmy Wales went through and
deleted images almost at random, including major artworks and medical illustrations. Because
Wales bypassed the deletion process, there were then multiple calls from the Wikipedia
community for Wales to give up his administrator privileges and to serve as figurehead in name
only. Scott’s proposed solution is a completely decentralized and autonomous network of
Wikipedia servers, and these privately-hosted mirrors would comply with or ignore updates from
the central Wikipedia as they see fit:
Imagine a world where the main Wikipedia would issue a deletion out to servers
around the world, and some would follow it, and some would not? A set of rules
on the mirrors, like “do not automatically delete any article that is more than 100
days old” or “do not delete this subset of articles under any condition.”
Imagine a world where these little Wikipedia mirrors have their own
subsets of Wikipedia space that are different than Wikipedia, where thoughts
other than the grey goo consensus of Wikipedia rules the day; where a separate
“article space” exists there, which can be shared on other Wikipedias at will—
democene
40
space, muppet space, all the crap that Wikia
41
offers in a commercial
setting, except now being done by various vendors and non-profits, and not reliant
on a single point of political failure.” (“DistriWiki”)
This alternate vision of Wikipedia maximizes autonomy at the expense of a collaborative,
coherent project. And at the logical extreme “lies a world of a million kingdoms, each populated
by a single (happy) king or queen” (Tkacz 136). Scott’s mirrored Wikipedia servers are a radical
40
Democene is a subculture of audio-visual computer programmers, and has been systematically
excluded from Wikipedia. See the discussion forum thread “Wikipedia’s War on Democene.”
41
Wikia is a commercial spinoff project led by Jimmy Wales, offering a Wikipedia-style
experience for content related to media, entertainment, and video games.
58
example of forking, the splitting a digital project into multiple projects that develop in their own
directions after the split.
For Tkacz, the freedom to fork is constitutive of the collaborative process itself. It is a kind
of lossless exit, whereby parties are free to leave a project, taking the source code with them, and
continue the project on their own terms. The reason this doesn’t happen, according to Tkacz, is
that the potential of a fork actually works to “guarantee the legitimacy of the governing
mechanisms of all open projects” (134). That is, the reason these splits don’t occur is precisely
because they are possible. The threat of a fork provides a “safety net” function, and “seemingly
ensures that there are no great injustices, that everyone involved in a project must, in the last
instance, support how things are done” (Tkacz 134). On the one hand, the leadership will
compromise to avoid alienating a subset of the group to the point of leaving. And yet on the
other hand, the existence of this “‘final option’ or ‘last resort’ of the disgruntled, the
marginalized, or the otherwise unhappy” ensures that the fork will not come about (Tkacz 133).
42
The logic here is that if the state of affairs becomes intolerable it is possible to leave, but because
it is possible to leave things must not be that bad. Much like other sanctioned forms of dissent in
modern democracies, such as free speech and the right to protest, the freedom from overt
repression encourages belief in the theoretical potential for improvement within the system itself,
and so the community will tolerate more perceived injustice than if there were no “last resort.”
43
Similarly, Reagle demonstrates that the Wikipedians deploy irony and sarcasm as another
safety net or pressure-relief for anxieties surrounding authority and emergent hierarchies. The
42
For further discussion of forking, see Tkacz 126-49. On the Spanish Fork, the one instance of a
fork in Wikipedia, see Lih 136-8; Tkacz 144-7.
43
In practical terms, as Tkacz points out, a Wikipedia fork is virtually impossible at this point
and so the threat remains a theoretical one, which nevertheless does not diminish its function as a
safety net (Tkacz 148).
59
acronyms TINC (There Is No Cabal
44
) and TMTP (The Most Trusted Party) being two such
examples, and the term Benevolent Dictator being another. Jimmy Wales has repeatedly
disavowed the role of Benevolent Dictator, yet it remains in common use. Reagle argues that
ironically referring to Wales as a dictator relieves the very real anxieties that Wales holds too
much power over the community (“In Good Faith” 152, 156), though of course “benevolent” can
also be used ironically. Finally, there is Wikipediareview.com, a discussion forum devoted to
Wikipedia. These discussions are almost exclusively negative, and the participants are often
banned or temporarily blocked Wikipedians. More than a hotbed of malcontents, though,
Wikipediareview provides a supplemental space for grievances outside the established Wikipedia
hierarchy, and at the same time reifies Wikipedia’s project by collecting the rejected surplus of
users outside of democratic consensus.
Far from being egalitarian, networked collaboration is thus a site of clustered micro-
authoritarianism, made possible by exclusion and control over the definitions of supposedly
objective and pre-determined policies: “The authority of the user lies instead in his or her ability
to act in unison with the project’s framing statements and in the ability to mobilize the relevant
rule or guideline whenever that user’s contributions are challenged” (Tkacz 121). Radically-
absent authority channels the illusion of a universal, communal will, and the radically-absent
author situates himself within the non-hierarchical network through appeals to this constructed
authorial Other. And these empty signifiers, or framing statements in Tkacz’s terms, cover the
exercise of authority with a veneer of objectivity and communal agreement. The intention here is
not to label Wikipedia as a hierarchical bureaucracy (it obviously is), and therefore as a failed
example of digital collaboration; rather the point is that digital collaboration could not be
44
The joke relies on a historical knowledge of USENET, upon which Wikipedia’s code and
community are loosely based, and which did develop a cabal-style shadow leadership.
60
otherwise and still function according to its own aims. The founding principles, the Five Pillars,
are essential to directing the collective work of the community, and the rejection of dissenting
viewpoints and alternate possibilities is equally constitutive of the democratic process as such.
61
CHAPTER 2
THE TWILIGHT OF RESISTANCE IN SERENITY VALLEY:
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, FIREFLY, AND RADICALLY ABSENT AUTHORITY
As a discipline, fan studies has been a growing part of media studies for nearly 25 years, since the
near-contemporaneous publication of Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women and Henry
Jenkins’ Textual Poachers. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington provide a
convenient historical overview of fan studies’ academic trajectory in the introduction to their
anthology Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, outlining what they see as the three
waves of academic engagement with fans. Broadly, the first wave was the “fandom is beautiful”
phase, which constructed fan communities as a privileged Other: “As is common in the early
stages of identity politics, early fan studies did not so much deconstruct the binary structure in
which the fan had been placed as they tried to differently value the fan’s place in said binary”
(Gray 3). Fandom was lauded as a valuable, universally emancipatory space, and as such it was
raised to a worthwhile object of academic study. The second wave, then, reacted against the
utopian first wave, and took a more critical approach to fan communities:
[The second wave] highlighted the replication of social and cultural hierarchies
within fan- and subcultures… Scholars [were] still concerned with questions of
power, inequality, and discrimination, but rather than seeing fandom as a tool of
empowerment they suggest the interpretive communities of fandom (as well as
individual acts of fan consumption) are embedded in the existing economic, social,
and cultural status quo. (Gray 6)
The third, current wave represents a conceptual shift away from fandoms as isolated groups and,
according to Gray et. al., sees fandom as so interwoven into the broader culture around it that
meaningful distinctions collapse. Thus fandom stands as a theoretical model for cultural
62
engagement broadly, and through explanations of fan behavior “third wave work aims to capture
fundamental insights into modern life” (Gray 9).
Yet even as fan practices increasingly become the model for cultural investment writ
large, fan studies itself seems to be continually trying to gain traction, stuck in a perpetual state of
emergence along the academic periphery. For one, a sense of shame stubbornly clings to both the
cultural objects of fandoms and fandom itself as an object of study, as though studying the CW
network’s Supernatural and the show’s fans is not quite academic enough.
1
And while the
celebratory, “fandom is beautiful” phase has passed, when fan communities or fan works are
critiqued, they are done so in vaguely apologetic terms. Much of this is a problem of perspective
and the self-positioning of the “aca-fan,” to use Jenkins’ term, as both in- and outside of fandom
as well as determinedly occupying the borderlands of academia, which perpetuates a false
dichotomy between fans and fannish practices, on the one hand, and academics on the other.
Nevertheless, almost as a point of pride, fan studies scholars insist on their semi-exclusion from
academia.
The problem of perspective is a persistent one. The imperial-ethnographer approach
taken by Bacon-Smith, that of an observer reporting and analyzing fan practices from the
outside, is rightfully rejected as unable to accurately express the fan experience and as denying
fans their own subjective representation. The opposite approach, though, is equally problematic.
To say that only dedicated fans can access the fan experience, or accurately theorize the
implications of fannish practices, is simply untrue, and would be akin to saying only those of Irish
descent can properly study Ulysses.
1
To use Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen’s example in Fandom at the Crossroads: Celebration,
Shame, and Fan/Producer Relationships.
63
Between these extremes, the remaining position available to the aca-fan is somewhere
along the margins of both academia and fandom, but if fan studies exists only on the academic
periphery then what is at the center? The question uncovers two, simultaneous, mutually-
exclusive crises of legitimization. For fandom to be a proper object of academic inquiry it must be
validated as more than meaningless cultural detritus, and thereby raised to the level of other
liberal arts disciplines. At the same time, for fannish practices to be subversive they must remain
outside the institutional legitimization of those same academic disciplines. One of the greatest
threats to fan studies, then, is not continued marginalization, but rather acceptance, as flattening
the cultural and academic hierarchies would rob fannish behavior of its transgressive nature.
Thus, as Mark Duffett explains:
By self-consciously maintaining that the aca-fan is in some way an academically
unconventional “scandalous” category, researchers have retained an increasingly
obsolete frame of interpretation that accuses academia of disregarding fandom
and assuming a superior position. (Duffett 269)
This scandalous category, of course, is integral to the position of the discipline itself. A fan object
is thus not like those other rigid, stuffy, institutionally-authorized objects, but at the same time
also not like the majority of mass-produced, commercialized trash, and between these poles the
aca-fan’s position is always defined through opposition to an ever-changing Other.
This kind of legitimization crisis is far from unique in the academy, particularly in the
humanities, but I raise the issue here for two reasons. First, as ethnographic self-identification is
still de rigueur for fan scholars, I wish to make the point that I do not self-identify as a fan. And
second, as we make the transition from Wikipedia in the last chapter to fan objects and
64
communities in this chapter, it is important to carefully de-emphasize several definitional
distinctions between fannish and other practices.
2
The main texts under consideration in this chapter are Fifty Shades of Grey and Firefly. As is
by now well known, Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
3
began as a Twilight fanfiction (Twific)
entitled Master of the Universe (MOTU) on fanfiction.net and elsewhere, posted under the screen
name Snowqueens Icedragon, and has since become a major studio motion picture. Firefly is a
television series produced by Joss Whedon, which ran for a single season on the Fox network
beginning in September 2002, and later adapted as the film Serenity, also written and directed by
Whedon. Given the nature of this chapter and the problems of self-positioning already discussed,
it is necessary here to note that I am not a Twilight fan, I have no engagement with the Twific
community, and I am not a fan of Fifty Shades of Grey in any of its incarnations. With respect to
Firefly and Serenity, I certainly enjoy both and watch them often, but I am not active in the Firefly
fandom, known as the Browncoats. The following discussion should thus be considered as an
outsider perspective, though I make every attempt to avoid appropriating or misrepresenting the
respective fandoms in the service of this analysis.
As for the differences between Wikipedia and fandoms, or fanfiction (fic), there are surely
some who would privilege Wikipedia as a site of knowledge production, situated as it is within the
encyclopedic tradition of the enlightenment. My purpose in linking the two is not to reinforce
lingering hierarchies or value judgments, but rather to explore two online communities, each
2
One significant argument against the Aca-Fan as the only legitimate point of view comes in
chapter 10 of Mark Duffett’s Understanding Fandom, where he claims:
there is now a crucial role for researchers who do not proclaim their own fandom.
By devoting their careers to the study of fan phenomena, such scholars suggest,
through their actions and ethics, that a wider foundation of support exists for the
importance of their object; much more so than if fans only studied their own
communities. (275, emphasis in original)
3
The pen name of Erika Leonard.
65
founded on drastically different premises of participation. The Wikipedians, as we saw, govern
themselves through various deployments of the Five Pillars, while fandoms, on the other hand,
take a much less overtly structured approach based on free self-expression. And fan labor, in the
form of fic and fan activism, produce their own very real value, both in emotional and economic
terms—and this commodifiability has serious implications for group dynamics and online
authority.
COMPLETED WORK IS JUST 1
ST
DRAFT TO BE POLISHED BY THE PROS
4
This quotation, taken from a business prospectus accidentally left online at fanlib.com and
serving as section subtitle, is a microcosm of the relationship between fic and corporate media
interests. Fannish engagement with media products serves the media industry’s interests, but only
if fans engage with the product in sanctioned ways. In 2007, FanLib intended to market itself as a
space for fic writers to publish transformative works based on a variety of media franchises, but
their actual strategy reveals how little they understood the fan community, and fic writers in
particular. Whereas fans may very well view their work as “completed,” FanLib appealed to
those holding copyrights on the primary media texts upon which the fics were based, and assured
their corporate partners that these fics could become the “polished” products of, essentially, a
viral marketing campaign. This strategy attempts to monetize the freely-performed labor of fans
as well as to impose an editorial vision on the product of that labor. The prospectus continues in
the same vein: “All FanLib action takes place in a highly customizable environment that you
control”; “As with a coloring book, players must stay within the lines”; “Moderated ‘scene
missions’ keep the story under your control” (quoted in Convergence 178). In FanLib’s imagination
4
Fanlib.com business prospectus, quoted in Convergence 178.
66
at least, media industries want nothing less than total control over every aspect of their products,
including audience reception and transformative works derived from those products.
Fan participation is tolerated—even encouraged—so long as it colors “within the lines,”
producing work that can be authorized by and recuperated for the industry, effectively making
fic writers the marketing department’s farm team. In an excellent blog post on the FanLib fiasco,
Jenkins summarizes the situation thus:
Fans were going to take all the risks; the company was going to make all the
profits, all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the
“best” fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives. (Taken at
face value, the company was trying to “cherry pick” the top writers from the
amateur realm. At worst, they were imposing their own aesthetic judgments on
the community without any real regard for existing norms and hierarchies.)
(“Transforming”)
In addition to worries over outside authorization and aesthetic judgments, fans were also
concerned about becoming visible to media companies, as those “companies [could] construct a
zone of tolerance over certain forms of fan activities, [and could] use them to police more
aggressively those fan activities that they find offensive or potentially damaging to their brand”
(“Transforming”). One fan writer, screen name “astolat,” countered with a list of suggestions for
what a fan-based archive should look like. Along with being supported by donations rather than
advertisements, the site should allow “ANYTHING—het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult—
with a registration process for reading adult-based stories where once you register, you don’t
have to keep clicking through warnings every time you want to read” (quoted in “Transforming,”
capitalization in original). It is safe to say most media brands would take exception to astolat’s
insistence on the anything-goes, adult nature of permissible fic. Still, other suggestions show a
67
distinct interest in specific kinds of authority, first and foremost “giving explicit credit to the
original creators while clearly disclaiming any official status” (quoted in “Transforming”).
Two of astolat’s other criteria for a fan-based site concern the community in isolation,
without regard to entities outside the fandom. For astolat, the site should allow “the poster to
control her stories (ie, upload, delete, edit, tagging)” and allow “users to leave comments with the
poster able to delete and ban particular users/IPs but not edit comment content (ie lj style)”
(quoted in “Transforming,” capitalization and punctuation in original). The kind of control
astolat advocates is not very different from the media industry’s desired control over works and
audience reception. If comment threads are considered a supplement of the text, these comments
are a form of continuation and transformative of the fic itself. Astolat wants the poster, the fic
writer, to have the authority to police the reception of their work via deleting comments or
banning users from commenting in the first place. And the subtext here is that the fandom
cannot be trusted to remain uniformly positive and supportive. The result is an impulse toward
control over one’s work and its reception which, in astolat’s terms, begins to look similar to the
kind of editorial oversight FanLib promised their corporate customers.
The immediate response to FanLib accidentally disclosing their business plans was
remarkable: “Fans quickly and effectively rallied in opposition to FanLib, using their own
channels of communication—especially LiveJournal—to inflict damage on the brand”
(Convergence 181).
5
Nevertheless, the “protestors did not destroy FanLib’s profitability” and “by
late 2007, the company had attracted more than 10,000 contributors. Some of these contributors
were ‘newbies’ drawn into fandom by the company’s promotional efforts, and others were
estranged from the established community” (Convergence 183). Community is key, as “fan culture
5
It should be noted in passing that this is illustrative of a larger problem for the autonomy of the
fan community, as their means of protest—LiveJournal—is itself another media company.
68
stresses the ways that this material emerges from a social network of fans who have their own
aesthetics, politics, and genre expectations” (“Transforming”). The community will not tolerate
aesthetics or genre expectations being imposed on it from a board of male executives, but at the
same time it will rigorously police its own established norms. Deleting comments,
banning/blocking users from commenting, and ostracizing individuals are all expressions of
conflicting egos and the inevitable friction between personalities.
IN A PARTICIPATORY CULTURE, THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY TAKES ON SOME
RESPONSIBILITY FOR HELPING NEWBIES FIND THEIR WAY
6
The Internet did not invent fan culture, but one thing that can be attributed to the Internet is an
influx of a large number of newbies into existing fan communities. As technology continues
lowering the barriers to access, “fandom’s expanded scope can leave fans feeling alienated from
the expanding numbers of strangers entering their community. This rapid expansion outraces
any effort to socialize new members” (Fans 142). Socialization is a vaguely threatening term, as
though the newbies’ participation is welcomed, but only within the established community’s
rules, and this re-enacts FanLib’s same coloring-within-the-lines mechanisms of control that the
community took such issue with previously, the only difference being where the lines are drawn.
With no official central authority, it can be difficult to maintain mutually accepted practices as
the newbies begin to outnumber the established community members, and this plays out in
various conflicts over fannish behaviors:
For example, fandom has long maintained an ethical norm against producing
erotica about real people rather than fictional characters. As newer fans have
6
Convergence 187.
69
discovered fan fiction online, they have not always known or accepted this
prohibition, and so there is a growing body of fan erotica dealing with celebrities.
(Fans 142)
And while “such stories become a dividing point” within the community, the rhetoric of free self-
expression precludes enforcing these established ethical norms, with the result that the newer fans
“have asserted their rights to redefine fandom on their own terms” (Fans 142). This effectively
shifts the balance of the established center and the periphery as the community, as a whole,
renegotiates its ethical boundaries. Socialization, it seems, can work both ways.
The opposite of enforced socialization into the accepted values of an established group
can also happen just as easily: the community can bend the communal norms in overt gestures of
inclusion. One example is the case of Heather Lawver, who at the age of thirteen began an
online fictional newspaper based on the Daily Prophet of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which
quickly attracted worldwide attention. In addition to gender and other identifications, “given the
global nature of The Daily Prophet community, nationality was also at stake. Rowling’s
acknowledgment in subsequent books that Hogwarts interacted with schools around the world
gave students from many countries a ‘ticket’ into the fantasy” (Convergence 183). How fan writers
used that ticket, however, did not always conform to the settings and characters laid out in
Rowling’s novels. And so communal norms of behavior are one thing, agreement on what
constitutes a fanfic set in a recognizable world is another. Sandvoss describes the boundaries of a
fan object as:
A field of gravity, which may or may not have an urtext in its epicenter, but which in
any case corresponds with the fundamental meaning structure through which all
these [fan] texts are read. The fan text is thus constituted through a multiplicity of
70
textual elements; it is by definition intertextual and formed between and across
texts at the point of production. (Fandom 23, emphasis in original)
The urtext, the fan object, delimits a range of possibilities within which a fic could make sense.
Yet Jenkins points to an instance where a fic writer rewrites the character of Sirius Black as born
and raised in India, and educated in Thailand—which clearly does not conform to the character
in Rowling’s books. This fic was generally accepted, though, and as Jenkins explains “it helps that
the community is working hard to be inclusive and accepts fantasies that may not comfortably
match the world described in the novels” (Convergence 183). In other words, rather than insisting
that the outsider give up his national self-identity and conform to the world of Harry Potter as it
stands, the fandom accepted this one fan’s participation as legitimate even as it drastically
rewrote a central character. And here we see that the primary fan objects define a set of
possibilities that can very well be ignored when they suit the purposes of the fandom community.
Still, it is a conscious decision on the part of the group to set aside consistency with the Harry
Potter universe in favor of including this marginalized fan.
The Harry Potter example is an uplifting one, but may also be the exception that proves the
rule. The canonical world of the primary fan object remains a sandbox within which fic writers
are able to play, and granting this authority to the primary text ensures the horizontal, non-
hierarchical relationship of the fandom. If any one fan, or core group within the fandom, gained
primacy and was able to defined the limits of the fantasy space themselves, the community would
collapse. So the responsibility for the “world described in the novels” is in a sense already
outsourced to the professionals in the interest of group cohesion. With the authority of the
canonical fan objects thus off-loaded, fic writers are free to subvert and play within the
boundaries delimited by the canon. One of the reasons FanLib caused so much outrage was
because it appealed to individual authority: “Many [of FanLib’s 10,000 contributors] understood
71
fanfiction as an individualized rather than community based activity” (Convergence 183). The
attempt to be an individual writer, competing with other individual writers for the chance to be
cherry picked and authorized from above, made forming a group identity as a fandom
impossible.
IF YOU'RE PUBLISHING ONLINE FOR FREE, WHY ARE YOU ERECTING THE SAME
HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES I SEE IN THE PUBLISHING WORLD?
7
Judging solely on content, it can actually be quite difficult to distinguish between some fan
writing and more traditionally authorized, professional writing. The main determinate would
have to hinge on some sense of fan writing as openly derivative of another work, but even here
there is no shortage of examples of genre novels set within canonical universes—authorized Star
Wars and Star Trek novels being only two of the most obvious (and most heavily-policed brands).
Notions of writing quality and acceptable, non-pornographic content may come to mind, though
it would be impossible to build a determinate definition on these. So outside of a legal framework
of attributable copyright, existing within a commodifiable market, there is little basis for
differentiating an Author from a fan writer. But the authority to speak is clearly not reducible to
copyright, nor is literary authorship-as-such within a community of circulating texts reducible to
a logic of corporate profit. Yet hierarchies of fame and notoriety do emerge within fan
communities, particularly in the two megafandoms: Harry Potter and Twilight. So within fanfic, is
Authorship ultimately a popularity contest?
The case of Fifty Shades of Grey—originally Master of the Universe (MOTU)—is an interesting
and complex one. In “When Fifty Was Fic,” Anne Jamison convincingly demonstrates that
7
Anne Jamison, Fifty Shades of Pop Culture Theory.
72
MOTU is derivative not only of Twilight, but of other Twific genre elements as well, becoming in
a sense a “greatest hits” compilation of other Twific devices. Jamison explains that one of the
reasons she chose to teach MOTU in her fanfic course at the University of Utah:
was that it was so multiply derivative: The ‘Office’ genre. ‘Mogul’ Edward. The
BDSM fic. The more-assertive Bella (submissive Bellas were always depicted as
more assertive than Meyer’s original characterization). The dial-a-
childhoodtrauma game. ‘Master of the Universe’ read like a pastiche of all these
established moves. (Fifty Writers 317, emphasis in original).
8
Jamison’s claim is that, as such a compilation produced within an existing network of derivative
texts, MOTU is more interesting than Fifty Shades of Grey as a stand-alone work, since MOTU is
“like watching genres develop at warp speed” (Fifty Writers 317). I have no doubt that Jamison’s
reasoning made MOTU perfect for her course, and a great document for theorizing fanfic, but
this unfortunately doesn’t quite explain MOTU’s immense popularity among a broader fan
audience
9
. MOTU had plenty of vocal detractors, so we cannot say a wide readership granted
James any particular authority within the fandom. Yet at the same time, MOTU was widely read
and extremely popular with readers—another problem of scale. Readers, in this context, do not
necessarily equate to devoted members of the fan community. But an audience is a prerequisite
for commodifying fanfic.
8
In this sense, Twific, perhaps more than other fanfic, resembles Otaku in that characters,
standard scenarios, and settings serve as a set of elements which the Twific writer selects and
compiles at will. On Otaku, see Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals.
9
One possibility is that fans are reading MOTU because it blends the genre elements they
enjoyed in earlier Twifics. MOTU is simply more of what they already enjoyed, and in a fanfic
community—where “more is always better”—there would be no reason to dismiss MOTU for
being derivative, as one could imagine happening in a more traditional publishing/reviewing
model. Being derivative is the whole point.
73
In terms of the gift economy in which fanfic operates, MOTU is less the work of someone
writing to express themselves (in the therapeutic language that pervades discussions of fanfic),
than it is someone writing to gain—not for, but to gain—an audience that can be packaged,
commoditized, and sold to a publisher. This is where individual personalities come into play,
unfortunately, and I obviously cannot speak to E.L. James’ motives. But from the available
evidence, it appears that she is deeply invested in the twin validations of wealth and fame.
10
Rather than investing herself in the community, James sees the community as an investment in
her future as an author, and her readers are the Other against which she can be defined as an
author.
The Twific community as a whole takes the opposite approach: it is not the community of
readers that makes individual writing possible, but Stephenie Meyers. She is the author of the
Twilight series, obviously, but she is also the authority against which the Twific community can
coalesce. And Twific is interesting in this regard, insofar as it is highly original, yet the fan writers
insist on the derivative nature of their work. Character names and, for the most part, traits are
retained, while Meyer’s supernatural vampire elements are jettisoned (Jamison 178). A great deal
of Twific is thus Alternate Universe (AU) or All Human,
11
and therefore suggests a degree of
flexibility with respect to the Twilight canon, a series of books that many fans see as, frankly, not
all that great and against which fan writers assert themselves (Jamison 179). For these writers,
“the Twilight saga stopped functioning as a source per se and began functioning as one massive
10
The textual evidence of Fifty Shades of Grey supports this, as the markers of wealth are described
by make and model. Christian Grey does not have a sleek, black car, for example; he has an Audi
A8. See The New Yorker review of the film version of Fifty Shades: “where the money shots should
be, we get shots of what money can provide” (Lane).
11
Jameson cites an MSNBC story, which paraphrases AngstGoddess003, in characterizing the
All Human subset of Twific: “the most controversial, which usually consists of original fiction
with ‘Twilight’ names attached bearing little resemblance to the original works” (Jamison 178).
74
erotic romance prompt. A template” (Jamison 181). Yet at the same time, they downplay their
own efforts even more. As Jamison points out:
the story of the Twilight fandom is a story of mostly nonradical women who came
together in a radical and original, creative, self-sustaining global community. In a
stunning bit of irony, their collective power as I witnessed it was fueled in part by
their own belief that they were a community of derivative, amateurish hacks who
could lay legitimate claim to nothing. Twilight fans were inspired by a book that
they maybe loved, but that many also saw as being derivative and amateur-ish
itself. If their original source wasn’t original, for God’s sakes, they weren’t—which
spared them from having to worry about it. (180)
It is the last clause that we should emphasize: these fan writers are able write in the first place
because they were “spared from having to worry” about their own authority.
The most-popular Twific before MOTU was the 900-page “Wide Awake” by
AngstGoddess003 (AG).
12
Jamison describes it as “a phenomenon in and of itself”; it spawned “its
own fan communities—and its own hate communities,” and directly inspired E.L. James to begin
MOTU (Jamison 183-4). “Wide Awake” gained enough attention outside the Twific community
to be featured in an article on Today (Ventre).
13
And yet AG appears in quotations as the pillar of
humble self-deprecation with respect to her writing. In the Today interview, she describes
fanfiction as “kind of like training wheels,” especially since “Wide Awake” was her first attempt
at writing (Ventre). It’s in her online chat exchanges with E.L. James, though, that she best
12
AngstGoddess003 is the full username. Jamison drops the “003” and usually refers to her as
AngstGoddess. I have chosen to abbreviate to “AG,” for convenience as well as because that is
how she refers to herself on her LiveJournal and elsewhere.
13
Jamison describes the article as an MSNBC feature, which I have not been able to find. I am
referencing, and quoting from, an article on the Today website, by Michael Ventre, who is listed
in the byline as an MSNBC contributor.
75
articulates her feelings on both her own writing and fanfiction generally.
14
James asks AG if she
would say no to a publisher requesting to publish “Wide Awake.” AG replies “I would say fuck
no,” explaining that she wouldn’t want “to succeed based on something so silly” (Jamison 244).
James is completely taken aback, particularly considering how deeply “Wide Awake” affected
her. But when pressed, AG sticks to her conviction: “writing twilight smut is a little silly… at least
i consider it silly for myself. but that’s okay, because most hobbies are a little silly” (Jamison 245,
capitalization and ellipses in original). Jamison elaborates:
part of what we see in AngstGoddess’ response is the sense—deeply ingrained in
many fic writers—that it’s somehow wrong to take fanfiction seriously. (Jamison
245)
But it’s precisely not taking it seriously that clears the space for these fic writers to write. They
emerge as writers producing their own work by deflecting authority onto Stephenie Meyer,
whom many of them see as a bit of a hack.
15
The comparison works favorably for the fan writers:
if Meyer can do it, so can they.
The Twific community maintains its non-hierarchical structure through this deflection of
authority onto Meyer, and through the self-assessment of their work as smut, as a silly hobby. For
this deflection to work, though, individual egos must be effaced, and this is why there are so
many deeply emotional conflicts surrounding Big Name Fans (BNFs) and the potential for
financial profit. One fic writer, Lauren Billings, describes the process of becoming a BNF:
14
These exchanges became public only after James pulled MOTU from fan sites to publish it as
Fifty Shades, and they are also central to the conflicting positions between James and AG that will
be discussed shortly. In the interest of a thematically-coherent analysis, we will jump around a bit
chronologically, with the linear progression hopefully becoming clear as we move along.
15
I’m certain there’s a subset of writers for whom no explanation is necessary. Sitting down to
write can be a paralyzing experience, especially if one is setting out with the intention of writing
the next Great American Novel, for instance. Writing “smut” as a silly hobby, by contrast, could
be quite liberating—though certainly no less creative or meaningful in terms of the final product.
76
There’s something fascinating about the way a community decides what stories to
promote. There isn’t any editor or a team of editors reading a book and choosing
to put it out there. Instead, it’s a collection of people—mostly women—who pick
up a fic and decide they love it. (Jamison 196)
Paradoxically, since popularity here is coming from a large “collection of people” rather a single
editor choosing a text, and as such represents a fairly significant communal validation, it is
nevertheless expected that popular fic writers nevertheless wear their popularity lightly. And if
they don’t, if they develop “what Cindy Aleo calls the ‘whale in the toilet bowl’ phenomenon,”
the vitriolic backlash from the community can be severe (Jamison 197).
Such was the case with James and MOTU, and the exchange between AG and James
shows the extent to which the two differed on their relationship to the Twific fandom, both on a
personal level and in terms of profiting from the fandom at large. Jamison summarizes:
the conflict between these two figures illustrates diametrically opposed views of
fanfiction and also underscores what may be the biggest lesson the Twilight
fandom teaches us about authorship: authorial intent has nothing to do with the
effect stories may have. AngstGoddess would no more have helped Snowqueens
Icedragon introduce massive profit into fanfiction
16
than Stephenie Meyer would
have helped her launch an erotica empire. (Jamison 241)
AG clearly sees herself as a part of a community of (mostly) women, and sees fanfiction as a
“silly” pastime. Nevertheless, regardless of how amateurish or silly she maintains her work is, she
16
Jamison is referring to the fact that James herself credits AG’s “Wide Awake” with inspiring
her to write MOTU. AG could not know that her massively popular fic would give rise to an
equally popular one, and one which would ultimately be pulled down for publication. “And yet,”
Jamison rightly points out, “here we are” (Jamison 241). And “unlike E.L. James or Stephenie
Meyer, not only will AngstGoddess never see any share of the millions her work helped create,
she believes it would be ethically repugnant for her to do so” (Jamison 241).
77
recognizes that very real labor takes place in both her own writing process and in the comments
and feedback she (and other fic writers) give and receive. To this point, AG tells James:
a reader means just as much as an author. we’re offering something. readers offer
feedback, and authors offer free literature…it’s all equal in that sense no one is
entitled. (Jamison 245, capitalization and ellipses in original)
James, on the other hand, “saw herself as an author with readers” (Jamison 244). In James’
words, “I have to say I do not feel as passionately as you [AngstGoddess] do about the fandom”
(Jamison 248). When AG suggests that James “Show [her readers] theres [sic] a person behind
the penname and not just some lad sitting on a perch,” James replies “I like my perch” (Jamison
244). The “perch” of authorship, as one above and apart from the community, is in many ways
tied directly to financial gain. As James explains:
I have [written MOTU] as a sort of exercise.. to see if I could … and I think I
have proven to myself that I can… I now want to capitalize on it..” (Jamison 249,
ellipses in original)
But whereas AG referred to fanfiction as “training wheels” for her own writing process, for James
“writing was, from the beginning, a for-profit enterprise… Her readers had proven her own
marketability—the Twilight fandom had become, in effect, a test market” (Jamison 249).
Like falling back on copyright, it would here be all too easy to explain authorship or
authority based on who financially profits from a text. And while the issue of profiting from the
fandom is deeply divisive, the point here is not about the economic gain itself, but instead about
the individual’s relationship with the fandom community. James is able to construct herself as an
author against the backdrop of the fandom as readers, in contrast to the fandom as mutually-
constructive writers. AG, by contrast, considers her labor as a writer on an equal footing with her
readers’ labor in comments, feedback, and their own fics that are added to the community
78
stockpile. So while James, “by her own account found the whole thing a bit scary and preferred
to hold herself a bit apart,” the conflict “has to do with ascribing credit—and eventually profit—
to individuals for creative work that takes place in a collective culture of circulating texts and
people” (Jamison 156). And these conflicts “serve as proxy controversies for working out complex
but more abstract arguments about the nature of authorship, textual boundaries, individual v.
community ownership, and responsibility” (Jamison 156). These issues are only growing more
contentious, as fandoms prove to be profitable marketplaces and give more fan writers the
opportunity to become published writers. But this introduces a degree of suspicion that may well
destroy communal ties; how can a fan participate in the community if she never knows when her
labor is financially serving someone else? And yet this communal breakdown is a natural
extension of the neoliberal logics of individual autonomy and collaboration as competition.
NO MATTER HOW LONG THE ARM OF THE ALLIANCE MAY GET,
WE’LL JUST GET US A LITTLE FURTHER
17
Joss Whedon’s television series have tended to attract dedicated fan followings, from the wildly
successful Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff series Angel on to the less widely-known Dollhouse.
But no Whedonverse fandom has done as much, with as little, as the “Browncoats”—the fans of
Whedon’s short-lived series Firefly. Originally airing on the Fox network beginning in September
of 2002, the show in many ways seemed doomed from the start: Fox chose not to air the two-
hour pilot episode first, which would have introduced the series’ characters and backstory, but
instead threw viewers into a genre-blending sci-fi space western without context, and last-minute
scheduling changes during the season’s run made it nearly impossible for the audience to follow
17
“Out of Gas.”
79
the show from week to week. In December of 2002, before the season’s complete run, Fox
cancelled the show, ultimately airing eleven of the fourteen filmed episodes. Even with this
botched and limited airing, though, the show attracted a devoted fan base, and “it was the fans,
mainly through online activities, who convinced the powers-that-be that a DVD release would be
profitable” (Investigating 2). The growing Browncoat community continued their campaign to
bring the show back, and while the series itself was never picked up again, the DVD’s impressive
sales figures were then a major support for their cause, leading ultimately to the 2005 film
adaptation Serenity. This history may be interesting in its own right, as this is the first time a
cancelled TV series was optioned as a major-studio motion picture, but this is also a more
complex issue than eager fans desperate for any scrap of new material a studio will give them.
The details are already well-documented elsewhere,
18
but will soon become relevant to the
discussion of the political ideologies underlying both Firefly and the Browncoat community.
As much as Firefly is a show about loyalty, betrayal seems inevitable, and the number and
variety of stabs in the back are staggering, the most glaring and metatextual of course being how
the Fox network itself managed the series. In a truly remarkable and unwitting coincidence, Fox’s
cancellation of the show mirrored Firefly’s backstory of failed resistance, allowing fans to identify
themselves directly with the show’s main characters, as well as the actors who played them and
Whedon himself,
19
and to coalesce into a passionately unified group against Fox. At the same
18
See Done the Impossible and “The Browncoats Are Coming! Firefly, Serenity, and Fan Activism” in
Investigating Firefly.
19
In the DVD commentary, Alan Tudyk explains how he stole a prop from the set after filming
what should have been the last day of shooting on the bridge—the red button that would call the
shuttles back to Serenity at the end of “Out of Gas”—and gave the button to Whedon. Whedon
was shopping Firefly around to other studios after Fox cancelled it, and Tudyk included a note
with the button, quoting Tudyk’s line from “Out of Gas”: “When your miracle gets here, press
this to bring us home.” In this way, the actors demonstrate that they, too, made the Fox/Alliance
connection. And the “We’re Not Working For Fox Party” thrown at Tudyk’s house after the
80
time, the analyses of the show that have so far appeared in print show a trend toward a neoliberal
politics directly at odds with this same collectivity, and the collective action of the fans. This
section, then, aims to explore this apparent contradiction: how does an ideology of self-interest
actually strengthen social ties, and create a community? In addressing this question, we’ll turn
first to a close-read of the show itself, before considering both the critical responses and the
community’s engagement with the Hollywood powers-that-be. And before this chapter appears
to be arbitrarily yoking together two disparate topics, joined in only the loosest sense by the
presence of fans, a brief explanation of the connection between the two will be helpful.
The previous section considered a situation where an individual put her own financial
interests ahead of the community, or perhaps rather never considered herself part of a fan
community/gift economy in the first place, and as a consequence she needed to pull her work out
of circulation in order to publish and profit from it. We then saw the rift this caused within the
Twific fandom. Firefly presents an inverse scenario: one of the main components of fan
engagement was not fanfic, but the DVD of the absent series itself. Unlike Twilight, a four-book,
complete saga that seemingly left fans unsatisfied by character traits and plot elements in the
original, Firefly never had the chance to be “complete” in this sense. On one hand, of course, it is
complete—the fourteen filmed episodes and the film are all we have—but the richness of the
world Firefly creates, coupled with the limited content, creates the illusion and expectation of
show wrapped suggests Fox, again like the Alliance, wasn’t the most pleasant bureaucracy to
work under (“The Message”). Or, in Whedon’s words, “The troubles we had with the network,
which were constant, only brought us together, only made us feel more like a unit, a platoon or a
family” (Official Companion vol. Two 13).
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more.
20
And while there is no shortage of Firefly fanfic, the original object circulated first, as the
DVD was the only way to introduce new fans to the show.
In terms of the general idea of a fan gift economy, the documentary Done the Impossible
presents a number of fans claiming they gave the Firefly DVD to friends and relatives as gifts at
almost every opportunity. And while there would be no way to verify how many DVDs
circulated as gifts or through borrowing and lending, recruiting new fans nevertheless required a
financial investment—someone’s money had to pay for the DVD. This is where the series’ short
run and the “completeness” of the object have a real impact: had the show aired for several more
seasons, it could have picked up fans along the way. But without canon material freely available
on TV, the absent fan object has to be purchased. This is not quite the same as James and the
“pull to publish” fanfic phenomenon, but they do both illustrate how limits can be, and are, used
to create markets for financial gain. Thus the Browncoats have been immersed and implicated in
a capitalist economy from the start—which, we shall see, follows the neoliberal logic underlying
the show.
21
20
There are actually several reasons for this. First, successful contemporary television series can
be expected to run at least five or six seasons, which was Joss Whedon’s intention. Second,
Whedon did not write a narratively complete first season. He planted elements, in the pilot
episode onward, to which he wanted to return in later seasons. This is in contrast to Friday Night
Lights, for one example, where the first season feels like a whole, completed entity and could stand
alone if the series weren’t picked up for a second season. So while it can be argued that there’s
always an excess or remainder to any textual object, in Firefly’s case the unfinished nature of the
work is more concretely manifest.
21
An interesting case here is that of “Jane’s Hat.” On one of the later episodes that was not aired,
but is on the DVD, “The Message,” Jane receives an orange and red knit hat from his mother.
The hat is not necessarily ugly in and of itself, but it is absolutely incongruous with his character.
Homemade versions of this hat began to appear for sale on fan sites as well as Etsy and other
craft sites, and became one of the dominant markers of the Browncoat community, until Fox
began sending cease and desist orders. And while we can never know how many of these hats
were given away, it seems clear that they were predominately sold—an interesting counterpoint
to the fanfic community, in which various labors are exchanged directly instead of sold.
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Individual liberty is an overt concern in Firefly. The plot centers around a small cast of
characters on the fringe of society, and their attempts at earning a living outside of the legal
structures imposed by an ostensibly nefarious government drive the show’s narrative. As such,
the show offers one vision of resistance to power, and the interpersonal realities of decentralized
authority. That is, characters categorically reject the government’s right to dictate how they live,
yet at the same time more or less willingly submit to the authority of the show’s main character,
Mal, and accept him as a leader. These contradictory politics are then mirrored by the real-world
social dynamics of the Firefly fandom and the response to the show’s cancellation. An analysis of
Firefly as a textual object will thus illustrate the problems of interpersonal authority discussed
earlier, as well as the paradoxes inherent in freedom as a political position.
Firefly is most accurately described as a Space-Western. A sci-fi drama set in the distant
future aboard a spaceship, the main premise is that the known universe consists of a central core
of technologically-advanced planets living together under the political banner of the “Alliance,”
and surrounded by the “outer planets” left for the most part to their own devices, in conditions of
vastly unequal technological development. These outer planets, while technically subject to
Alliance control, are simply too numerous and too distant to police effectively—they are terra-
formed and then a group is dropped on the planet with a few resources and left to develop as
they can. This settler colonialism nicely sidesteps the problem of indigenous peoples, as Firefly is
one of the few sci-fi series with no alien life in the universe, and provides limitless potential
variety for the show, as Whedon could draw on disparate genre elements and both historical and
futuristic contexts at will. The predominance of the Western genre, as well as anachronisms like
cattle ranchers riding actual horses and firing lever-action rifles, explicitly ties Firefly to the 19
th
century American West and the mythology of the frontier—a kind of every-man-for-himself legal
grey area, beyond the control of “civilized” State power.
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That the two-hour pilot episode did not originally air until the very end of the series’ run
is one of Fox’s main failures, in terms of giving the show an opportunity to find an audience. In
place of the two-hour pilot episode, “Serenity,” Fox chose to air “The Train Job” first, which was
hastily written as a substitute pilot. Nevertheless, though it never aired, for our purposes an
analysis of “Serenity” will be most fruitful as a stand-in for the main political/ideological issues
raised by the series as a whole.
“Serenity” opens with a scene of failure. Our main character, Malcolm (Mal) Reynolds
(Nathan Fillon), at this point a sergeant in a rebel army, and his comrade-in-arms Zoe (Gina
Torres), are seen fighting against vastly superior numbers of Alliance forces in what we will
eventually learn is the Battle of Serenity Valley. Though outnumbered, Mal is certain that when
their air support arrives they will be victorious, and we see him give a rousing speech to this
effect, as well as perform various feats of heroism in combat. Until, that is, Zoe receives word
over their communications system that the air support is not in fact coming, that the rest of the
rebel army is in retreat, and that Mal’s troops are ordered to surrender. On the DVD
commentary, Whedon tells us that this is the moment Mal “loses everything” (“Serenity”).
22
The
costumes—particularly the Alliance uniforms—and weaponry in the opening scene evoke WWII,
but elsewhere throughout the show the referent is the American West. The predominate frontier
metaphor has led several critics to draw comparisons between Firefly’s rebellion and the
American Civil War, which could be read as problematic since it would put our heroes on the
side of the Confederate, slave-owning South. What the rebellion most effectively demonstrates,
22
The most obvious symbol is his loss of faith—during the battle Mal kisses a cross worn around
his neck, speaks of God and refers to the air support as their “angels,” yet shortly thereafter in the
pilot episode his interactions with the preacher, Shepherd Book, make it clear Mal is now quite
firmly against religion. Yet this is shorthand for “faith” in the larger sense, faith that he can make
a difference, faith that people will remain loyal in the face of adversity, and so on.
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though, is that the rebels are not revolutionaries. Mal is not interested in changing the system—
he just wants out of it. Serenity’s crew, and Mal especially, wants the freedom to live by their own
rules, rather than being forced to conform to the Alliance’s version of enlightened civilization. In
the opening words of the film Serenity, “people don’t like to be meddled with… we’re in their
homes, and in their heads, and we haven’t the right” (Investigating 155, ellipses in original). But
while Firefly is very good at portraying this as a heroic rejection of government power and as an
assertion of individual freedom, the show is less self-conscious about the kinds of authority this
rejection leaves Mal and his crew under.
The scene following Mal’s surrender is labeled “6 Years Later,” and we find ourselves
now in the show’s present-day. Our first introduction to the crew of Serenity comes during an
illegal salvage operation: they are plundering a wrecked Alliance vessel for the cargo aboard.
When another Alliance ship passes by and spots them, we see two things. First, our heroes have
gone from recognized combatants to thieves; second, we see that the Alliance is in its own way
rather incompetent. During Serenity’s escape, they launch a fake distress signal—what looks like
a rusted 55-gallon drum with a hand-drawn sign reading “Cry Baby”—and while we as viewers
have no idea how complex the technology involved is, the commander of the Alliance vessel falls
for what looks like an amateurish ruse and appears, at least to us, to be a fool.
23
Having escaped the Alliance, we then see the kinds of forces that Mal and the crew are
subjected to when they attempt to deliver the salvaged goods to a character named Badger (Mark
23
Though to be fair, the choice to give up apprehending small-time crooks, and instead lend aid
to what they believe is a ship full of people in distress is a noble one. Yet another of the seeds
planted in the pilot suggesting the Alliance is not overtly evil, but instead bureaucratic.
85
Sheppard), a local crime lord on the planet Persephone.
24
The exchange between Mal and
Badger is intense, and not only due to this being a negotiation over stolen goods between two
parties outside the law. Class differences, in fact, are the primary factor in Badger’s animosity
towards Mal. Badger doesn’t like Mal, he tells him, because “you think you’re better than me”
(“Serenity”). Badger feels that he is, if not respected, at least a powerful and important
businessman on Persephone, and he adjusts his tie to illustrate the point. While comical to us—
Badger is just wearing a T-shirt under a sport coat, the tie hanging loosely around his neck with
no collar to support it—he’s nevertheless dressed better than most characters we see on
Persephone, and he clearly is an important figure in his criminal enterprise; he’s the leader, in
fact.
25
Whatever we may think about the character-dynamics in this scene, it is clear that Mal is
at Badger’s mercy: Mal holds a cargo that he himself can do nothing with, and Badger is the one
with the money to buy. So when Badger says “you guys are nothing,” he has a point (“Serenity”).
Whedon tells us in the episode commentary that “that didn’t sit well with the studios, I don’t
think,” because Fox didn’t want the show to focus on a group of nobodies (“Serenity”). To the
studio, this was a sign of weakness unsuitable to the protagonists of a television series, but to a
contemporary audience this is exactly the situation of helplessness and economic uncertainty that
many viewers will identify with.
If we are outside the purview of an oppressive government system, then, where are we
left? At first glance, Persephone is the Wild West, where to a degree might makes right, and yet
both Badger and Mal continuously insist on their roles as businessmen—Mal as seller and Badger
24
Persephone of course being the Greek queen of the underworld, representative here of the
criminal underworld, and this planet appears again several times, in essence becoming a
touchstone location of the series.
25
This is undercut in a later episode, “Shindig,” when we’re again on Persephone and Badger is
shown in relief against the planet’s aristocracy.
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as buyer. When Badger does ultimately refuse to buy, Mal and the crew are left twisting in the
wind. A scene between Mal and Zoe explains the precariousness, even desperation, of their
situation, as Mal reminds her they need money both to keep the ship running as well as to pay
the crew. Thus they turn to Patience (Bonnie Bartlett), another shady character with whom
they’ve previously done some sort of business, as a last-ditch attempt to unload cargo in exchange
for money, as she is the only person with the means to pay. But unlike Badger, with whom the
relationship is threatening under a gloss of civility, Patience is introduced as having a history of
overt violence. Her having shot Mal during their last encounter becomes a running joke in the
conversation with the crew, and so now we really are in the territory of a lawless frontier, where
even commodity exchanges are decided by force rather than market rules. And violence is
eventually what happens, though having expected and prepared for a double-cross, the crew is
able to ambush the ambushers. During the exchange, we learn that the cargo in question—what
we took to be precious metals of some sort, as we earlier saw gold colored bars inside the crates—
is actually food, in the form of concentrated energy bars equaling several weeks’ worth of
sustenance. According to Whedon in the episode commentary, this was an important plot move
for him because “We’re used to seeing guys fight over money, but what people really need is
more basic stuff” (“Serenity”). Indeed, this is true on both counts, we are used to seeing guys fight
over money, and people do need more basic stuff. But at the same time, in this scene the “guys”
are still fighting over money—just not in the form of a direct exchange of money commodities.
Mal is still in a position where he has a commodity that he needs to exchange for currency, and
whether that commodity is gold bars that he cannot use as currency directly, or food that he
cannot use as currency directly, makes almost no difference. What the revelation does tell us,
rather, is that the “more basic stuff” that people need is difficult to come by on the outer planets,
so much so that black markets are necessary to provide for the essentials of life.
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In the episode’s final scene, Mal is sitting at the controls on Serenity’s bridge talking with
Simon (Sean Maher), a doctor and Serenity’s newest passenger. Simon asks why Mal is smiling,
and is flabbergasted when Mal responds that it’s because this was a good day. Simon recounts a
hilarious list of everything that went wrong, but Mal says only that “We’re still flying”
(“Serenity”). “That’s not much,” Simon counters, indeed correctly, to which Mal replies with the
episode’s closing line, “It’s enough” (“Serenity”). In other words, in this universe bare subsistence
and survival are not only all we can hope for, but all that we need, and this is the tenuousness of
Serenity’s freedom.
I DON’T CARE, I’M STILL FREE
YOU CAN’T TAKE THE SKY FROM ME
26
Firefly is without doubt a show overtly about “freedom,” and seemingly about a very particular
kind of freedom from government. Even the Whedonesque phrase used by the Alliance
authorities during an arrest—“you are bound by law”—suggests that there is something
inherently restricting in the idea of “law” itself. So it is perhaps no surprise that Firefly is
championed, or appropriated, by those of a far-right, libertarian perspective. In “Freedom in an
Unfree World,” P. Gardner Goldsmith’s essay in the anthology Serenity Found: More Unauthorized
Essays On Joss Whedon’s Firefly Universe, he tells us:
I am a libertarian, and due to my work, I come into contact with many members
of the expanding ‘Free State Project’… [who] all seem to have one characteristic
in common: they cherish the television series Firefly and its main character,
Malcolm Reynolds. (Found 55)
26
“Ballad of Serenity”
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While we’ll have to take Goldsmith at his word here, the presence of not one but two self-
professed libertarians, Goldsmith and Orson Scott Card,
27
in the anthology is at least a striking
coincidence, if not an outright pattern. “The compelling question,” Goldsmith asks, “is why”
these libertarians are fans of the show, and his essay is an attempt at an answer (Found 55,
emphasis in original). Goldsmith’s essay outlines both how it appears that Malcolm Reynolds
“can be appropriately identified as a libertarian archetype” if one insists on seeing him that way,
as well as the problems and contradictions inherent in using Firefly’s universe as a political model
(Found 56).
After a very brief introduction to the libertarian ethos of individuals leaving one other
alone, Goldsmith makes the natural comparison between the Alliance and U.S. government, and
continually blames the Alliance for the ills of the outer planets:
In the ‘verse of Whedon’s creation, commerce is monitored, manipulated, and
tapped by the government, making it very difficult for peace-loving, honest people
to survive. (Found 58)
Yet we’ve already seen how the Alliance is an empire whose reach has exceeded its grasp, and
the commerce that we’ve seen is in no way “monitored, manipulated, [or] tapped by the
government.” The opposite is true, actually, which is what set our protagonists on their course
for a violent encounter with Patience. The outer planets are unregulated and left to their own
devices, as Goldsmith would have it, which is precisely what creates the power-vacuum filled by
the series’ main villains—warlords and mafia-esque “businessmen” like Badger, and the more
nefarious and cruel Niska (Michael Fairman).
27
Card’s essay is not relevant to this discussion, as it is two-thirds complaint against Star Wars and
a valorization of the “real” sci-fi in print form, as opposed to sci-fi in film, and the final third is a
patronizing affirmation of Whedon’s status as a “real” sci-fi writer—as a guy who “had actually
read a book” (Found 11).
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Goldsmith’s analysis is not simply a willful misreading of the show or classic libertarian
hypocrisy—blaming the absent Alliance for the results of the Alliance’s absence—but instead a
projection of an authorial Other, against which the constraints under which Mal et. al. live can
appear as freedom. Goldsmith goes on to valorize Mal’s code of honor, as it sets him apart as a
“true” libertarian:
As libertarians know, even in a world devoid of government laws, in order to do
business properly, one does have to be a man of honor, and this is how Mal
distinguishes himself from people like the desultory Badger and even more
unsavory characters. (Found 59, emphasis in original)
Yet two problems arise here. First, what is the difference between an internal limit on choice
imposed by honor and an external limit imposed by law? If people must act according to certain
codes “to do business properly,” the end result will be the same observable actions as if they had
acted according to law. Second, the absence of laws is precisely what allows for people “like the
desultory Badger and even more unsavory characters” to act as they do in the first place. In other
words, the very framework that libertarians advocate creates the conditions for exploitation and
oppression. The conditions are the same, only with the authority of powerful, and criminal,
individuals being substituted for the authority of codified, bureaucratic government. The absence
of State authority only clears a space for other forms of authority. And as Goldsmith
unconsciously demonstrates, the absent State authority is in fact made present, in the form of
blame for the result of its absence. Anti-government sentiment then drives those who might
benefit most from State intervention, and regulation of the free market in particular, further
away from State aid.
And we have seen this before, of course, in the Twific community. Honor, or mutually
agreed upon norms of commoditized transactions between individuals, only go as far as the
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individuals who voluntarily follow them. Whereas Twific operated well as a gift economy, in
which the labor of writing fanfic was exchanged for the labor of reading and writing comments,
and members enjoyed the social benefits of belonging to a community, it takes only one
individual to disagree with these terms and exploit her audience for personal gain and turn her
readers into customers.
Freedom, too, is itself a deceptively oversimplified idea in the libertarian reading of Firefly.
Mal gives perhaps the most cogent definition in one of the first flashbacks in the episode “Out of
Gas.” In this episode, a small but essential part in Serenity’s engine breaks, leaving the crew
adrift and running out of breathable air—facing certain death, in other words—and the episode
follows Mal through three narrative threads. There is the present-tense of the episode, a
flashback thread running from the last several hours up to the breaking of the engine, and cuts to
deep flashback scenes showing us how each of the crew members first came aboard Serenity. In
the first of these, we see Mal bringing Zoe onto the ship for the first time—we know they have a
history together predating this scene, and here he is trying to sell her on the idea of a life in space.
On seeing Serenity for the first time—at this point in endearingly bad shape and not running—
her first question is “You paid money for this, Sir? On purpose?” (“Out of Gas”). The joke being
of course that the ship is such a wreck that Mal is a fool for buying this bucket of problems. But
he did pay money for it, and so everything that follows must be considered in those terms. Mal
replies:
Try to see past what she is, onto what she can be… Freedom… live like people…
small crew, them as feel the need to be free. Take jobs as they come—and we’ll
never be under the heel of nobody ever again. No matter how long the arm of the
Alliance may get, we’ll just get us a little further. (“Out of Gas”)
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Leaving aside the fact that they are “under the heel” of plenty of people throughout the series, if
this is the definition of freedom, then freedom is only available to those with the means to buy a
spaceship and the “small crew” willing or able to secure a position aboard. So it’s all fine and well
for us, as viewers, to identify with the plight of Serenity’s crew and yearn for their kind of up-
from-the-bootstraps, self-reliant individualism, but we must keep in mind that this is against the
backdrop of enormous populations who continue to be oppressed and exploited.
YOU’RE ON MY CREW. WHY’RE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS?
28
If we have one small, tightly knit, closed group aligned against the rest of the ‘verse, what then
are their interpersonal relationships? That is to say, the Alliance is the rejected Other against
which the crew unites, but authority scales down to the level of individuals. For Serenity’s crew
members to remain a cohesive community founded on a principle of liberty, various deflections
of authority are necessary. While Serenity’s crew is basically a collection of smugglers,
mercenaries, and fugitives, they are, with few exceptions, fiercely loyal to each other. Mal in
particular, time and again, puts the safety and well-being of his crew—and often a single member
in distress at the expense of the entire crew—above all else. So while the chain of command
aboard Serenity is patently—and explicitly—authoritarian, with Mal as the dictator, Firefly gets
away with presenting this as naturalized for several reasons. The first is of course the naval
metaphor. Not only has space-based sci-fi been filtered through a nautical lens since at least Star
Trek, but in Firefly Mal and the crew further reinforce the connection with references to Serenity
as a “boat.” Moreover, Mal’s and Zoe’s history in the rebel army makes their current
arrangement an extension of the past that they’ve lost (Zoe is the only crewmember to address
28
“Safe.”
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Mal as “sir”). Zoe’s marriage to Wash (Alan Tudyk), the pilot, then gives the entire crew a
familial feel, which includes a kind of paternal connection between Mal and Kaylee (Jewel
Staite), the ship’s mechanic. So in these ways Firefly elides the authoritarian structure on board
the ship, even as Mal continually reasserts his authority and reminds the crew of his position as
Captain.
29
There is also a self-reflexive quality to Mal’s authority, of course, as he assumes the
power to dictate orders, but at the same time feels he is acting in the best interests of the entire
crew.
30
He is constrained by them as much as they are by him, though his leadership presumes
that he has privileged access to some higher truth of what is best for everyone.
At heart, though, economics play a central role in bringing these characters together.
Aside from Mal’s occasional references to paying the crew, offhandedly dropped into
conversations usually meant to illustrate the entire crew’s dire financial circumstances, economics
are the ultimate connection between the characters. In the pilot episode, Shepherd Book (Ron
Glass), and Simon and River Tam (Summer Glau) are paying passengers. When Kaylee first
meets Book, a preacher, on Persephone, he’s walking past Serenity with a suitcase in hand, and
while Kaylee’s approach is effectively a kind of seduction, enticing him to choose Serenity for his
travels, she immediately raises the issue of money. “You can pay, can’t you?” she asks, and so
while the end of the pilot episode has Inara (Morena Baccarin) asserting that Shepherd is exactly
where he should be, as though through divine providence, a lack of money would have derailed
this Divine Will from the very start. The passengers’ relationship with the rest of the cast
becomes more complex as the series goes on, when Mal decides—on his own, it’s worth noting—
29
An alternate reading would be because Mal continually has to remind the crew of his position as
Captain—here the comical, barely-in-control figure having to insist he’s in charge.
30
The Hegelian implications of Mal’s position as Captain are clear, as his role is contingent upon
the crew accepting their own positions as paid subordinates. My point is slightly different: Mal
believes his leadership is in service of the unified interests of the entire group.
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they have become part of the crew, and thereby have earned the unquestioning loyalty and
protection of Serenity’s full crew and resources. Even within the original members, though, two
standouts lay bare the underlying economic ties aboard Serenity: Jane (Adam Baldwin) and
Inara.
Simply put, Jane is a mercenary. He’s the hired muscle aboard the ship, and the least
loyal of the crew. He only betrays the crew explicitly in one episode, but from “Serenity” onward
the threat of betrayal lurks beneath the surface. Of course, as a plot device this serves to ratchet-
up tension among the ensemble cast, and Whedon deftly humanizes Jane, giving him apparently
real feelings for at least Kaylee to ensure he’s still read as a part of the crew—perhaps a
troublesome part, but an integral one nonetheless. Toward the end of “Serenity,” after a federal
agent presumably attempted to bribe Jane, Mal asks straight out “Why didn’t you turn on me,
Jane?” And Jane casually replies “The money wasn’t good enough” (“Serenity”). At this point, a
true despot would probably kill Jane outright, or at the very least sever ties and leave him at their
next stop.
31
Instead, Mal simply asks, seemingly sincerely, “What happens when it is [enough
money]?” (“Serenity”). The exchange then is quite open-ended, as Jane does not expressly say
that he’ll choose money over the crew—he simply says “That’ll be in an interesting day,” which
of course is genius from a plot/suspense standpoint (“Serenity”). The implication is clear enough,
though, that we (at the very least Jane) are in an economy where there is a price for betrayal. We
don’t know what “enough” means in this case, and it very well may not be simply a higher offer
as there is a real human cost to turning on friends, but loyalty is nevertheless for sale.
31
Which is exactly what happens later in the series, in the episode “Ariel” when Jane attempts to
turn over Simon and River to the Alliance in exchange for the reward money. In response, Mal
knocks Jane unconscious and leaves him in the open airlock, to be sucked out of the ship and
killed when Serenity exits the planet’s atmosphere. Only when Jane accepts his impending death,
and asks Mal to make up a reason so the crew doesn’t learn of his betrayal, does Mal let him
back in.
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Toward the end of the series, in the flashback/backstory episode “Out of Gas,” we see
that this is exactly how Jane joined the crew in the first place. Mal and Zoe are being held at
gunpoint, having been tracked down by Jane and two other men for some unexplained reason.
When it becomes apparent that Jane is the one who did the tracking, his skill makes him
attractive to Mal, who then begins questioning Jane’s current pay and benefits. Mal asks about
Jane’s cut of his current group’s profits, as well as his sleeping quarters—Jane admits having to
share a bunk. “You move on over to this side,” Mal tells him, and “we’ll see to it you get your fair
share” (“Out of Gas”). Having thus convinced Jane that he’s being exploited, and offering better
pay and working conditions, Jane turns on his group, shooting his boss in the leg and holding the
other member at gunpoint. The scene ends with Jane asking about the size of the sleeping
quarters being offered aboard Serenity. Obviously designed for both comedic effect as well as
backstory to explain how Jane came aboard Serenity, this nevertheless shows that Mal is
willing—in fact eager—to take on a person with a proven history of prioritizing personal gain
over loyalty.
Inara stands apart from the rest of Serenity’s crew, and is much closer to an independent
contractor. She is a prostitute, but set in a world where prostitutes are formally trained in
comportment, music, art, and so on, and known as Companions. Companions are highly—
highly—respected citizens of the Alliance, and operate within a Guild structure.
32
Inara rents one
of Serenity’s two shuttles (the detachable, smaller vessels common to spaceship-based sci-fi), and
on those terms it belongs to her so long as she pays the rent. Mal is much more of a landlord than
a Captain, then, in relation to her. The unspoken love interest between the two is one of the
32
This is in contrast to the sex workers in the episode “Heart of Gold,” where they are working
in a brothel and not sanctioned by the Guild. Even Inara, who constantly defends her profession
against Mal’s snide attacks, calls them “whores.” There is more to it than this, but at a very basic
level this reflects a divisive split between union and non-union laborers.
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main interpersonal plots of the series, but again in economic terms, theirs is a mutually-beneficial
business arrangement. Serenity benefits through income, in the form of rent, and the
respectability that comes with having a Companion on board,
33
while Inara (who left her place in
a Guild House somewhere within the central Alliance planets for unexplained reasons) benefits
from the mobility that Serenity provides and, as part of the deal, Mal’s catering to her travel
needs and schedule as much as possible. Interestingly, we learn, again in “Out of Gas,” that
Inara supported Unification, and her politics are thus diametrically opposed to Mal’s. This is one
of the subtler hints that “the Alliance is not an evil empire” (Serenity).
34
The one relationship seemingly outside this economic logic is between Simon and his
sister, River. River’s backstory is clearly elucidated in both the film Serenity and the pilot episode,
“Serenity”: her character is a genius and possible telepath, and recruited for an Alliance-run
academy where, once enrolled, she underwent a vicious experimentation and mind-control
regimen amounting to torture.
35
When Simon discovered that she was in distress, he spent his
33
The status of Companions relative to the rest of society cannot be overstated.
34
To be fair, this line is spoken by an Operative (assassin) of the Alliance, but Whedon himself
expressed ambiguity toward the perception of the Alliance as a police state.
35
Serenity is much more clearly oriented toward a simplified reading of the Alliance as an
oppressive State regime. Firefly, on the other hand, is more ambiguous. Early in the pilot,
“Serenity,” we see the ground being laid for the Blue Sun Corporation as a plot element, which is
meant to be the equivalent of today’s multinational corporation. Due to the show’s cancellation,
the role of the private corporation in relation to the government body of the Alliance did not
have a chance to unfold, but the role of Serenity’s Operative was fulfilled in Firefly by the blue-
gloved men, who pursue River. Whedon expressed his original intention was:
that there would be these guys everywhere. Blue Sun [Corporation, the employer
of the Blue-Gloved Men] was going to be a big thing, part of the whole Miranda
thing, but the movie just didn’t have room for that. (Companion vol. One, bracketed
text in original)
It is telling that the Evil Corporate Empire is shifted to an Evil Government Empire for the sake
of simplicity and readability. We are used to quickly reading and interpreting resistance to
governmental authority, but not as accustomed to understanding freedom or resistance in
relation to multinational corporate structures. For the film to make sense, oppression is efficiently
embodied by the State.
96
entire family fortune infiltrating the Alliance and effecting her rescue, leaving them fugitives, and
this escape then leads them to Serenity. In describing River during the pilot episode, Simon tells
the crew that River “wasn’t just gifted, she was a gift,” which in the context of fan communities
raises interesting questions about what it means to be a commodity in a gift economy
(“Serenity”). Simon’s actions are explained as those of a selfless, devoted sibling, though we can
certainly read an ethics beyond that. Slash fic writers, who use sex as a symbolic stand-in for
emotional connections, both those explicitly portrayed on screen and unconsciously emerging
through the show, so commonly pair Simon and River that within Firefly fic the acronym CSI
regularly appears—standing for Crazy Space Incest.
What Firefly, like any ensemble-driven show, ultimately offers is a range of identifications
and possible desires for the viewer. Firefly fanfic plays this out, with the slashers predominantly
pairing Mal/Jane or Mal/Simon,
36
the heterosexual fics pairing Mal/Inara, Mal/Zoe,
Mal/Kaylee, Jane/Kaylee, and Simon/Kaylee, and Inara/Kaylee appears regularly as well.
These interconnecting fields of desire naturalize and render the economic ties more palatable.
37
More significantly, the “heroic” fight for survival itself is naturalized, and the message is that
“we”—the small, tightly-bound group—are up against everyone else. Clearly, as the basis for an
emancipatory politics of freedom and self-determination, this model does not scale well. The
reason it strikes such an appealing chord, though, is that we can identify with the crew as a small
band of “nobodies.” As noted earlier:
one of the objections to Firefly that the Fox network reportedly had was that the
‘nobodies’ who ‘get squished by policy’ are the focus of the show [but] for many of
36
Mal/Wash hurt/comfort slash was practically written into the episode “War Stories.”
37
As Hannah Arendt remarks, “Making a strenuous effort to love, where there is no alternative
but obedience, is more productive of good results than simple and undisguised servility (237)”
(quoted in Robbins).
97
Whedon’s many admirers, it is the fact that he uses these nobodies as the lens that
is most interesting. (Investigating 98)
Feeling on the outside, impoverished, and squished by policy is a relatable experience for many
viewers. Watching Serenity’s crew survive and thrive, such as they do, in their own quest for
freedom and self-determination offers the pleasure of identification and a welcome wish-
fulfillment.
I THINK IT’S SAD TO SPEND SO MUCH
ENERGY ON SOMETHING YOU CAN’T OWN
38
Whedon’s relationship with his fans is somewhat ambiguous, and his relation to the Browncoats’
campaign to save Firefly is particularly so. At early film screenings of Serenity, he paraphrased
Mal’s lines in the pilot episode: “They tried to kill us. They did kill us. And here we are. We’ve
done the impossible, and that makes us mighty” (quoted in Investigating 245, emphasis in original).
Yet while Whedon may have been fighting, along with the fans, against the studio system as an
exploitative, short-sighted, incompetent regime, Whedon:
was also a participant in it, for he has on occasion tried to calm fans’ ire for big
entertainment by reminding them that Serenity would not exist without Universal’s
support even as he sounds his “they-tried-to-kill-us” battle cry. (Investigating 248)
From a fan perspective, this is the classic double-gesture of the marginalized: total resistance
against, and complicity with, the system in place. Within this paradoxical position vis-à-vis his
corporate bosses, his own role as part of the studio system, and the fans, Whedon is known for
being relatively tolerant of, if not outright encouraging, fanfiction of his shows. One of the
38
Stephenie Meyer, quoted in Genet.
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clearest articulations of this came on a Reddit “ask me anything” thread on April 10
th
, 2012. One
question read:
You've been said to encourage fanfiction. How do you feel about scholarship
about your work and the fact that academics tend to delve quite deeply into it,
perhaps to the point of publishing interpretations you did not intend?
Whedon replied “All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't
your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you” (“I am Joss Whedon – AMA”). This
attitude is not unique to Whedon, as many writers, at least publicly, tolerate fanfiction.
39
The acknowledgment and acceptance of fanfiction positions Whedon as “one of us,” and
fanfic set in the Whedonverse becomes a communal project, a means of building a shared vision:
In the case of Firefly/Serenity, this vision was transformed from Whedon’s vision of
the Firefly universe to a shared belief in the series after its cancellation and then to
a shared ownership of its big-screen incarnation through official recognition of the
role played by fans in making the film possible. (Investigating 237)
39
The internet-backlash against authors opposed to fanfiction is both swift and fierce, and so
from a PR standpoint, tolerance is the easiest option. Opposition based on monetary rather than
moral or creative grounds is a line of argument more accepted by the internet-community at
large, though. Charlie Stross wrote on his professional blog:
I do not mind you writing fanfic using my characters and sharing it with your
friends unless you do so in a manner that fucks with my ability to earn
a living. (Stross, bold in original)
Orson Scott Card, whom I mention because of his libertarian leaning, holds a similar view:
I will sue, because if I do NOT act vigorously to protect my copyright, I will lose
that copyright ... So fan fiction, while flattering, is also an attack on my means of
livelihood. (quoted in Grossman, ellipses in original)
This is misguided, as “the scenario Card describes, in which an author's rights are diminished
because he or she doesn't actively defend them, is associated more with trademark than with
copyright” (Grossman), but it is also poignant that the Libertarian here falls back on government
enforcement of trademarks and copyrights to regulate, and make possible, the free market. That
aside, fanfic writers are for the most part not trying to interfere with copyright holders’ profits.
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In “Can’t Stop the Signal: The Resurrection/Regeneration of Serenity,” Stacey Abbot also points
out that “this ownership… was reinforced by [fans’] own identification with the series’
Browncoats” and ultimately “became part of the fans’ positioning of themselves as fighting an
‘unwinnable’ fight against the network who canceled the series” (Investigating 237). Abbot goes on
to then make the comparison of Serenity’s main plotline—revealing an Alliance secret to the ‘verse
at large—to Whedon’s “work with the fans to spread the word about Firefly” (Investigating 237).
This is reductive, and trivializes Serenity’s message of speaking truth to power, but it’s interesting
that Abbot claims this “vindicates the Browncoats—on and off screen—for their persistence in
fighting a seemingly ‘unwinnable’ war” (Investigating 237-8). This unwinnable war is fought for
more Firefly content, but if the fight is lost on the current ground, why not change the terrain? In
other words, when Twilight fans found themselves disappointed with the series they ignored it,
rewrote it, and left it behind. As we saw earlier, “the Twilight saga stopped functioning as a
source per se and began functioning as one massive erotic romance prompt” (Jamison 181). So
why haven’t the Browncoats done the same?
The short answer is that the “shared ownership” is of Joss’s vision, not the fans’. Yes,
there is plenty Firefly fic with alternate, nonconventional pairings and sexual encounters between
the crew, but the body of fanfic by and large is set on a timeline in relation to the series and
Serenity—affectionately referred to as the Big Damn Movie (BDM)—and the fans’ interest appears
to be in building a “more complete” Firefly canon. In Firefly fic, the Alternate Universe is one in
which Wash didn’t die at the end of Serenity; this is not to downplay the originality and creativity
evident in Firefly fic, but filling in the gaps and rewriting episodes from different characters’ points
of view shows a level of fidelity to Whedon’s authorial intent simply not seen in Twific. Two
things are happening here, one of which being unavoidably subjective and elitist. First, as
opposed to Twilight, Firefly and Serenity are well-written, and distinctively Whedon’s from the
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cinematography and overall mood down to the dialogue, granting his work an authority lacking
in Meyer’s. Second, as we have seen, there is no reason to “rebel” against Whedon because fans
are metaphorically united with him against Fox—we are all in this together, fighting the
unwinnable war and making do the best we can with what we have, which fits so well with the
Firefly narrative that it looks intentionally planned.
There is a fine but important distinction between these two forms of “originality,” hinging
on what exactly it is that these forms repeat. As Slavoj Žižek explains in Organs Without Bodies:
Far from being opposed to the emergence of the New… something truly New can
only emerge through repetition. What repetition repeats is not the way the past
“effectively was” but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past
actualization. (11, emphasis in original)
An infinite virtual field of possibility exists, which is betrayed by the actualization of a historical
event, or in textual terms, a virtual potential of scenes, plots, variations of dialogue, that could have
existed in near infinite variety, which were then actualized as the historical text itself. What fanfic
does is attempt to reclaim some of this virtual potential—which still exists in the imagination of
the fans—that was lost in the actualization of the fan object.
In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself, that is, it
retroactively changes not the actual past—we are not in science fiction—but the
balance between actuality and virtuality in the past. (Organs 11)
Using Kant as his example of repetition, Žižek explains:
There are two modes to repeat [Kant]. Either one sticks to his letter and further
elaborates or changes his system… or one tries to regain the creative impulse that
Kant himself betrayed in the actualization of his system (i.e., to connect to what
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was already “in Kant more than Kant himself,” more than his explicit system, its
excessive core). (Organs 11)
Here it should be clear how we can substitute the “sandbox” of the fan object for a philosophical
system, as both create a horizon of possible articulations belonging within that system, outside of
which is the domain of something else entirely. Thus:
There are, accordingly, two modes of betraying the past. The true betrayal is an
ethico-theoretical act of the highest fidelity: one has to betray the letter of Kant to
remain faithful to (and repeat) the “spirit” of his thought. It is precisely when one
remains faithful to the letter of Kant that one really betrays the core of his
thought, the creative impulse underlying it. (Organs 11)
Žižek concludes by way of universalizing his example, at least in terms of philosophical thinkers,
but in the context of fanfic we should here take “author” to mean exactly that:
It is not only that one can remain really faithful to an author by way of betraying
him (the actual letter of his thought); at a more radical level, the inverse statement
holds even more, namely, one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating
him, by way of remaining faithful to the core of his thought. If one does not repeat
an author (in the authentic Kierkegaardian sense of the term), but merely
“criticizes” him, moves elsewhere, turns him around, and so forth, this effectively
means that one unknowingly remains within his horizon, his conceptual field.
(Organs 11-12)
In other words, Firefly fanfic that develops, critiques, and “moves elsewhere” is, in
contradiction to the ideological underpinnings of anti-authoritarian self-determination, quite
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subservient to Whedon’s authorial vision.
40
But if Browncoat fic writers have an illusion of
independence, what about Twific? We have seen how fic writers off-loaded the symbolic role of
the author onto Stephenie Meyer—“which spared them from having to worry about it”—and
their self-proclaimed status as derivative freed them to “to regain the creative impulse,” and
repeat not the Twilight saga but the authorial gesture behind it (Jamison 180, Organs 11). And it is
in this sense that AG’s “Wide Awake” is more Twilight than Twilight itself.
41
Meyer herself appears less tolerant of fanfic based on her work than Whedon, yet more
encouraging to fic writers generally, if perhaps in a misguided fashion. She has said:
Fan-fiction has become kind of a mixed thing for me. Like in the beginning I
hadn't heard of it and there were some that were...I couldn't read the ones that
had the characters IN character. It freaked me out. (Genet, capitalization and
ellipses in original)
Meyer claims not to have read a lot of fic, and says she has not read the Fifty Shades trilogy
specifically, because it’s too “smutty.”
42
When it comes to fic writers, though, she seems to want
them to succeed in a traditional publishing context, outside of the fic community. As Meyer
herself said of fic writers: “It makes me frustrated. I'm like...go write your own story. Put them
out there and get them published. That's what you should be doing. You should be working on
your own book right now” (quoted in Genet, ellipses in original). This aligns with AG’s analogy
of fic as the “training wheels” of writing, but it also reflects E.L. James’ rejection of the fic
40
If Joss Whedon were Malcolm Reynolds, the Browncoat community would be the crew. Sure,
everybody’s fighting for “freedom” from the Alliance, but nobody’s “free” to fight against Mal.
41
All “Wide Awake” citations refer to the PDF file available on AG’s LiveJournal.
42
“When I ask Meyer whether she's read Fifty Shades, she quickly, emphatically, says no. She
doesn't wish James ill at all, she says, but ‘it's so not my genre. Erotica is not something I read. I
don't even read traditional romance.’ Why not? ‘It's too smutty. There's a reason my books have
a lot of innocence. That's the sort of world I live in’” (Cochrane).
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community and their values. While Meyer may wish fic writers the best, she simply cannot
understand a worldview that does not privilege individual ownership and profit at the expense of
all else.
And regardless of Meyer’s intentions, it is difficult to accept the stratospheric levels of
condescension in something like her conclusion:
As long as the writers of [fic], move on from it. I think it’s sad to spend so much
energy on something you can’t own. And that makes me a little bit sad because all
these talented kids should be, ya know, get your story out from under the bed and
get it out there. (Meyer, quoted in Genet)
First of all, many, if not most, of these writers are not “kids,” so Meyer already infantilizes the fan
community and the communal project of fic. She then further misunderstands fic as a passing
phase that one necessarily should “move on from.” And when Meyer says “get your story out
from under the bed and get it out there,” where does she think fanfiction exists? The real crux,
though, is the idea that ownership, based on copyright, is the only legitimate means of
expression; why else work “on something you can’t own”? And as it is beyond obvious that fic is
already “out there,” published online and reaching significant audiences, Meyer clearly sees the
only venue for “sharing” stories as an institutionally-authorized, copyrighted one where stories
exist as commodities.
The contradiction here is that while Meyer is wildly accomplished in her own terms (as is
E.L. James), and universally acknowledged by the Twific community for creating the characters
and holding all copyrights, at the same time Meyer is a failed-authority. Financially successful,
without doubt, but her writing is widely considered to be terrible and her characters are little
more than proper-noun templates for Twific writers:
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Twilight's critics have certainly been excoriating… and there has been brutal
criticism of their literary merits. (Stephen King famously said Meyer ‘can't write a
darn. She's not very good.’). (Cochrane)
While she did create Twilight, the fanfic attests that the complete saga in all of it’s 2,720 pages got
itself wrong for many readers. Contrast this with “Wide Awake.” the AU fanfic clocking in at just
over 900 pages written by AG. On February 20
th
of 2011, AG posted to her LiveJournal
regarding a fanfic writing contest, Fanfic my Fanfic, for which the organizers had asked for AG’s
permission to allow “Wide Awake” to be fic’ed as part of the contest.
AG’s LiveJournal post takes us from her initial reaction (“Fucking hell, bring it on, that
sounds awesome, right?”) to her reservations (“everyone will be all, ‘Oh look at AG who thinks
she's so ~important that people should make fanfics of her fanfics, LOLLLL.’”), then to the main
problem and reason for her post. With four days left before the contest deadline, the organizers
contacted her to say “Hi Sam. We haven't gotten any WA entries… feedback indicates people are afraid to
write for it” (Fanfic My Fanfic, emphasis in original).
43
AG tells us “I never rec or push my own
fics, never advertise contests I'm nominated for or contests I participate in, and am generally the
first person to steer you elsewhere.” But the lack of “Wide Awake” entries leads her to question
herself: “Did I overcompensate with my wankphobia and not promote it enough?” And thus, she
took to her LiveJournal “to offer a plea. PLEASE write for the Fanfic My Fanfic [FMF] contest,
and if you don't want to write WA, that's totally fine, there are four other amazing stories”
43
Posted to the FMF site:
We've heard that one thing holding people back from writing for this contest is
concern about offending the authors”; “Of course comparisons to the original will
be made, so anyone brave enough to put themselves out there despite that fact,
deserves our respect. You are more than welcome to like or not like the entries
you read, but as you can tell by the lack of entries we received for several of the
fics, very few people had the balls to even try.
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(capitalization in original). At the end of the day, of the eleven entries four were fics of “Wide
Awake.” One was selected first-place in a three-way tie by the contest judges, another was chosen
as one of two winners of the popular vote, and yet another tied for third place (fanficmyfanfic).
Clearly, people were busy fic’ing “Wide Awake” between February 20
th
and the extended
deadline of March 3
rd
for it eventually to be so heavily represented among the entries. And
though this is an admittedly miniscule sample, the salient question is why people were “afraid to
write for it” to begin with? And how did AG’s blessing turn the tables so thoroughly?
AG accumulated a great deal of authority in the community by writing, commenting, and
donating her professional skills in graphic design and web development to members of the
community. And moreover, she downplayed her own popularity. She never recommended or
promoted her own fics, but instead pushed readers toward other fics. That “Wide Awake”
resonated with so many readers surely played a part in AG’s popularity, but the FMF contest
shows other community members affording her a deference not shown to other authors. That fic
writers would hesitate to touch “Wide Awake,” when they obviously have no problem doing the
same with Meyer’s work, places AG on a completely different level than other BNFs, and from
Meyer herself. AG did not repeat Twilight, she repeated the authorial gesture behind Twilight, and
in so doing created something New. Compare this with the other massively popular Twific that
we’ve seen, MOTU/Fifty Shades of Grey, which recycled and recombined established Twific genre
elements. And while AG is the only one of the three here who is left out of the millions of dollars
in revenue for her work, that is one of the costs of fighting for a community, a community she
eventually left over the wankfest of BNFs.
44
44
Post-50 Shades of Grey, AG and a handful of other Twific writers devoted themselves to exposing
hypocrisy and over-inflated egos within the Twific community, via several Twitter accounts and
a Tumblr blog. Within the community, “wank” is the term used to denote this kind of drama
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Given the unstable and inherently public nature of digital writing, and the current
enthusiasm for the remixing and rewriting of popular culture artifacts, authority over a textual
object requires a certain amount of deference from readers. One must first produce an object
that no one else wants to change, which is so subjective a criterion that it defies definition. More
than that, though, one must also remain self-aware of the limits to authority and be generous
toward the community of readers. We have seen Meyer fail in this respect, as Twilight was
effectively jettisoned by the Twific community in all but the most formal sense. AG, by contrast,
had to make an explicit plea for others to fic her fanfic. On the one hand, this is a testament to
“Wide Awake” itself, as it resonated with readers who saw no reason to alter it. But this is not
simply a matter of another subjective criterion like literary merit. Instead, we should consider
AG’s relationship to both the community and her own work. Consider her copyright disclaimer:
Twilight and its characters belong to Stephenie Meyer, kay? No copyright
infringement is intended with the writing and distribution of this story. BUT...
Credit is awesome, you know? Like... baked goods. Like even if I baked you
cookies from a recipe that’s not mine, you still say, “Hey, dude, look! AG made us
cookies from Stephenie Meyer’s recipe!” Then you omnomnom them, and I’m all
smiley happy, because you gave me credit for the baking of the cookies. It’s totally
like that. Except I don’t make cookies. I make FanFiction. (“Wide Awake” 2,
ellipses in original)
There is a sense of both individual agency and a debt to the continuity of textual production
here. Meyer is credited with the “recipe,” but within that framework individual agents are free to
surrounding BNFs, individual egos, and community exploitation. AG particularly devoted herself
to attacking fic writers who were determined to secure book contracts and profit from other fans.
In this regard, her efforts prior to leaving the Twific community were truly heroic, in the face of
what appears to be an inevitable slide toward commercialization.
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bake their own cookies. AG professes a level of fidelity to Stephenie Meyer, though, that simply
does not exist in her fic, and this kind of humility—real or performative—is a key component of
AG’s authority.
Whedon’s permissiveness toward, and encouragement of, fanfiction of his work is part
and parcel of this same attitude. Browncoat fic writers are much more influenced, or limited, by
Whedon’s vision of the Firefly narrative than Twific writers are bound by Meyer’s work. Alternate
Universe Firefly fic is basically limited to a narrative in which Wash didn’t die at the end of
Serenity, and so Browncoat fans are not leaving the horizon of Whedon’s show to the same extent
that Twific writers leave canon material behind. And so the Browncoats are involved in a much
more collective project, extending and developing the canon originally set down by Whedon.
As we turn to medieval literature and manuscript production, the focus should remain on
textual instability and decentralized, communal authority. Without drawing one-to-one
comparisons, we will nevertheless see a similar critical self-awareness of the limits to textual
authority. Even as individual authority is exerted by the writers we will discuss, they understand
themselves as existing within a continuum of production that plays out over time. They are, in
other words, part of a communal project of textual production, and this project is subject to
error, revision, appropriation, and continuation. It is, in short, an authority subjected to the
willing consent of a community of producers.
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CHAPTER 3
“AS WRIT MYN AUCTOUR”: (UN)FAITHFUL TRANSLATION,
TRANSPARENCY, AND THE APPEARANCE OF AUTHORSHIP
1
The impact of unstable technologies of textual production and distribution on authorship is the
main concern running through these chapters. Of course it can be, and has been, argued that no
means of production is as stable as we would like to assume, including print. So the modern,
copyrighted book and the Author are more figures of our collective imagination, against which
digital, as well as manuscript, production appear radically unstable by contrast. Still, we are
seeing tentative connections made between digital culture and medieval manuscript culture with
increasing frequency, and not without reason. This is also neither unexpected nor entirely new,
considering the relativist turn in academia. The New Philology of the late 1970s and early 1980s,
like other humanities disciplines, attempted to incorporate and account for the end of grand,
master narratives and the fashionable relativism of postmodern theory. Stephen Nichols
summarizes the previous state of affairs thus: “The high calling of philology sought a fixed text as
transparent as possible, one that would provide the vehicle for scholarly endeavor but, once the
work of editing accomplished, not the focus of inquiry. It required, in short, a printed text”
(Nichols 3). And the idea of this stable, printed text is exactly what postmodernism sought to
dismantle.
In a textual critical tradition founded on author intentionality and stable notions of the
text, there is a single, best copy—either real or imagined—closest to what the author wrote, and
it is the editor’s task to produce an edition matching to this idealized version. Manuscript
variance is both an obstacle to reconstructing this lost authorial original and the means by which
1
“As writ myn auctour called Lollius” (Troilus 478).
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that assumed text is constructed. Introducing the New Philology special issue of Speculum, Nichols
explains how it is “manuscript culture that the ‘new’ philology sets out to explore in a
postmodern return to the origins of medieval studies” (7), and in that manuscript culture “one
recognizes the manuscript matrix as a place of radical contingencies” (8). This postmodern
return, then, “reminds us that, as medievalists, we need to embrace the consequences of that
diversity, not simply to live with it, but to situate it squarely within our methodology” (Nichols 9).
In the New Philological view, manuscript variants are in a non-hierarchic relation with each
other, stemming from Paul Zumthor’s idea of mouvance, rather than in a schema reaching back to
a real or imagined original. Philology thus recognized the problem of positing an absent authorial
urtext to fix the meaning of variant manuscripts, even as it replaced that fixed meaning with a
privileged idea of variance itself.
Lee Patterson is the lone dissenting voice in the Speculum special issue, and he accuses the
New Philologists of looking to the past only to assert the priority of their chosen field of study: “In
fact, of course, these critics are not interested in historical change at all. What they want to
establish is the modernity of their enterprise, the claim that in their chosen texts they descry the
present condition in its initial, essential form” (“On the Margin” 99). This danger persists today,
as the false dichotomy of manuscript and print cultures returns to fashion (if it ever left), and the
postmodern values of contingency and play slide into forms of textual poaching, remix, and
similar terms. And it may be that in looking for connections between the digital and the medieval
we conveniently find just such coincidental circumstances of production that we set out to find.
At the risk of reading an over-arching analogy onto medieval authorship, as though
medieval authorship were a uniform thing in the first place, I contend that medieval writers’
treatment of previous texts and ancient authorities can illuminate the relationship between
writers themselves and their future scribes, which in turn is a model for understanding medieval
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writers’ sense of themselves as authors. I suggest that the frequent references to old books and
Latin sources were less about disavowing authority than they were about increasing one’s own
authority through association. At the same time, as we will soon see with Chaucer, references to
ancient Latin sources could be handled in such an obviously slipshod manner as to highlight the
near-inevitability of errors in textual transmission. Simply put, I agree that scribes altered the
texts they copied, inadvertently or intentionally, and yet I absolutely do not intend to completely
sever the connection between exemplar and copy. As much fun as Nichols’ “radical
contingencies” can be, we must remember that professional scribes were employed not to
produce idiosyncratic, unique texts, and while some variance is inevitable, it is critical not to
swing too far toward either the imagined authorial urtext or the indeterminate variance of
individual manuscripts. Matthew Fisher summarizes a middle ground between these two
extremes in Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England:
The divide maintained between author and scribe is not new, and the frustration
of authors with their scribes is both historical and conventional. Authors must, at
some level, trust scribes to copy their texts. Mistakes might be made, but
expectations dictate that scribes for the most part would not encode texts into
private alphabets or made-up languages. Yet the implied contract of textual
replications was not always honored. Malicious, or more commonly, ignorant
transformations tend to dominate discussions of the work of scribes. But medieval
scribes were also in a position to emend and correct the texts they copied, and to
save authors from their own errors. (20)
Scribes were, in short, professionals. And yet prior to rare-book libraries and special
collections and the travel grants of modern academia, a single manuscript copy would very
probably be the only one available to a medieval reader. How would this reader know the copy
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on his desk was authoritative, rather than a conglomerate of scribal alterations? And conversely,
aside from the occasional prayer or complaint directed at scribes, how could a writer negotiate
the loss of control over a text once it entered circulation? Here medieval writing—like all
writing—is vaguely collective, but collective in this context means multiple hands in the
production of a text over time: individuals writing and rewriting their predecessors. The danger is
that this is an authorship of the last man, the last hand on the manuscript, regardless of the
named author. The scribe’s work is subsumed under the author’s, and yet it may very well be
that his work is unauthorized. And the second half of this dissertation will thus consider the ways
in which medieval writers addressed their own position relative to this temporal chain of
production. Taking Chaucer and The Book of Margery Kempe as examples, I argue in this chapter
that medieval writers constructed their literary predecessors in a double-gesture of disavowing
their own authority, on the one hand, and on the other increasing that authority by
appropriation. As “scribes” translating from Latin, in the case of Chaucer, and from gibberish, in
the case of Margery Kempe, these two writers emphasized the process of textual transmission
and in so doing forced the reader to confront the ultimate impossibility of attributing the text to a
single author, while simultaneously asserting their share of authority.
SCRIBES AS ________
2
To assume a unified academic view of medieval scribes, against which we may rehabilitate them
as possible stand-ins for the author, would be a mistake, for in fact the scribe has already been
rehabilitated several times over—each according to the prevailing academic trends of the time.
2
Adapted from the title of Chapter 10 in Who’s Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb?, “Scribes as Critics.”
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In the case of Chaucer alone, scribes have been claimed to be his first readers,
3
first editors,
4
first
critics,
5
and even the first to compete with Chaucer himself for authorial status.
6
And none of
these, according to Joseph A. Dane, follow the view of “classical textual criticism,” in which
“scribes are mere obstacles; they are studied only to determine the nature of the thing that stands
between an author and editor” (Dane 196). Scribes in this view are a series of errors obscuring an
originary authorial intention. And while we will discuss the nature of these possible errors in
detail in the next section, for now it is enough to note that the idea of textual error—and the
attendant problem of determining what constitutes an error—is complicated in the best of
circumstances, and even more so, for example, prior to the normalization of spelling.
Bernard Cerquiglini claimed “medieval writing does not produce variants; it is variance”
(quoted in Nichols 1). Yet efforts to read this variance in productive ways tend—consciously or
not—toward projecting the present moment’s privileged critical worldview back onto the
medieval. Dane’s Who’s Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? provides a roundup and critique of the
scholarship attempting this sort of rehabilitation of both the figure of the scribe and one named
scribe of Chaucer’s in particular. In the body of work Dane considers, ranging from 1971 to
1994, scribes are theorized as editors and critics. Dane rejects classical textual criticism’s
complete dismissal of scribes as obstacles, as medievalists are, and well should be, concerned with
the scribe’s involvement in textual production—but the nature of that concern is the issue. In the
New Medievalism and New Philology:
3
See Lee Patterson, “Ambiguity and Interpretation.”
4
See B.A. Windeatt ed., Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’ 36-43 ; Dane 206-
10.
5
See B.A. Windeatt, “The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics.”
6
See Tim William Machan, “Scribal Role, Authorial Intention, and Chaucer’s ‘Boece’.”
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on the one hand, scribes are rescued from their early modern detractors, real and
imagined. But on the other hand, they are rescued only at the cost of becoming
proto-critics… Whereas the earlier detractors of scribes acknowledged, with some
annoyance, the power of scribes to alter the nature of literature, here, their
activity is infantilized: rather than professional scribes, they are amateur critics.
(Dane 196)
It is tempting to recreate the scribe-as-critic conversation here, though the result would be only a
poor shadow of Dane’s chapter. He concludes:
The argument that Chaucer’s early scribes, publishers, and collectors can be seen
as early literary critics is one that rewrites ordinary histories of literary criticism…
[it is an] attempt of modern academic literary criticism to historicize its own
modern decisions and directions, and the projection of itself onto its historical
objects. The new respect for early scribes, seems to be a variant of the respect
literary criticism demands for its own activities. (Dane 212-3)
The most recent iteration of the “scribe-as” argument is Matthew Fisher’s scribe-as-author, and
it remains to be seen if he and I are guilty of projecting our own privileged categories onto the
past. One thing Fisher absolutely does not do, though, is infantilize scribes as inferior critics or
amateur authors. Quite the opposite, actually, as Fisher convincingly argues that scribes were not
only competent, but capable of making informed, reasonable interventions and corrections.
In Scribal Authorship, Fisher “rejects the axiomatic division of scribes and authors” (1), both
by expanding the conception of authorship beyond Bonaventure’s categories of scriptor, compilator,
commentator, auctor that form the basis of A.J. Minnis’s Medieval Theory of Authorship, and by arguing
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that scribes can and did fulfill the role generally considered to be that of an author.
7
This two-
pronged approach, claiming that categories of scribe and author are not useful distinctions, and
that scribes were also authors, while self-contradictory on the surface is necessary to describe the
theoretical messiness inherent in scribal practices. For Fisher, regardless of how “authorship is
defined, scribes are too often considered to be the purely mechanical means through which
textual transmission was accomplished” (6). Not only is writing itself a physical act “of putting
pen to paper” (1), but specifically for Fisher’s argument “history writing… relies upon
intertextual transfer, upon generations of texts and narratives being copied, altered, and situated
in new texts” (2). History writing, then, is built on what Fischer calls “derivative textuality,”
where “composition cannot be neatly or trivially divided from quotation and translation” (7).
Searching for a contemporary analogue, Fisher likens medieval historiography to the
“copy-and-paste or post-and-comment dialogic textualities of the digital world” (7). Here, “the
web has rendered the creation of text such a ubiquitous phenomenon that the currently-preferred
term for those who create it, ‘content creator,’ works to accommodate the heterogeneity of
multimedia content” (1), and I would include the collaborative logic of Wikipedia as well as the
remix and continuation practices of fanfiction. Yet even with the overlapping authorships of
digital and transformative works, Fisher proposes that “the gap between composition and
inscription was, in some ways, narrower in the Middle Ages” (1). So, faced with these apparent
similarities, we may be uncritically reading our own technological moment onto the past, but it
could also be that as digital writing and publication technologies catch up with handwriting, they
7
Fisher points out that “Bonaventure’s careful distinctions are very pointedly a self-referential
description” of his Commentaries on the Four Books of Sentences (72). This schema, Fisher continues,
“has become too broadly applied, and widely misused and misunderstood,” concluding that it
“does not offer a general definition of medieval authorship or how it was understood” at the time
(72).
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may render visible the complexities of manuscript production and transmission in ways previous
generations of scholars were not in a position to see.
Fisher goes on to claim that “derivative textuality and vernacular historiography fit poorly
with theories of medieval authorship that have largely been shaped by Latin and theological texts
or the great vernacular poetry of the late fourteenth century” (7). For Fisher, there is a
fundamental difference between history writing and these other forms, which he believes have so
far shaped the conception of medieval authorship, though we can accept his idea of “derivative
textuality” without necessarily accepting this distinction. That is to say, while Fisher wants to
carefully delineate “scribal authorship” within the context of history writing, I suggest a broader
application of his evidence is possible. Specifically, I claim in this chapter that the figure of the
scribe—as a literary convention and as a rhetorical device—is the precondition for the
emergence of the medieval author.
Whereas the second half of Scribal Authorship deals with the role of scribes in two particular
manuscripts, the first half lays the groundwork for a reconsideration of what medieval writers
expected of scribes, which of course also raises the question of what we expect from scribes. Fisher
here is at great pains to point out that scribes were not incompetent, were not deficient Xerox
machines mindlessly copying their exemplars, and therefore much more than a set of errors or
intrusions between the reader and the author. Moreover, for those hoping for unencumbered,
transparent access to what the medieval author wrote, the kinds of errors that can be corrected
and the kinds that cannot, pose a serious problem—and not only to modern editors: “As
portrayed in medieval poems that touch on writing and copying, the threat to medieval
authorship was not only the inescapable issue of scribal textual corruption, but the danger of
reasoned interventions—scribal intervention and scribal authorship” (Fisher 15). The trouble
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with these reasoned interventions—or errors, depending on point of view—is that they can be
more “transparent” than other alterations.
One view of the “transparent,” error-free text would be one where the scribe’s work is
akin to a window through which we can see the author’s original words directly. And this may
indeed be what medieval writers hoped for, as accusations of scribal incompetence and mistakes
are so common as to be a literary convention. The most famous of these complaints (today) is
Chaucer’s poem, titled in the Riverside edition “Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne
Scriveyn.”
8
In his reading, Fisher makes a distinction between the errors that can be corrected
and those that cannot:
Adam Scriveyn’s miswritings, miscopyings, and mistranscriptions, as lamentable
as they may be, are the kinds of errors that can be rubbed or scraped… the errors
and variations he is accused of perpetrating upon Chaucer’s text are precisely the
scribal variants that can be corrected” (Fisher 31, emphasis in original). As
opposed to these mechanical errors, which can be seen—and immediately seen to
be errors—the “threat of ‘new writing’ is not that it introduces scribal error, but
rather that it can obscure, overwrite, or even eclipse the authorial. (Fisher 31)
That is, a seemingly error-free manuscript may in fact contain scribal omissions, additions,
corrections, or anything at all really. And so, Fisher argues, Chaucer’s complaint emphasizes one
kind of error only to raise the prospect of the other, and so “underlying the verses to Adam are
concerns about the transformations that cannot be corrected” (Ibid.). Rehabilitating the scribe, as
Fisher does, not as an author or critic or editor, but simply as a competent professional, raises
many more theoretical and historical difficulties than earlier interventions. Simply put:
8
There is some question as to the origin of this title; Alexandra Gillespie claims it was added by
John Shirley (276).
117
the danger posed by scribes was only rarely their incompetence: mechanical errors
and errors of grammatical inanity can always be corrected, either physically or by
other scribes, or mentally by the reader. The true threat of scribes was their
competence, not only to provide textual corrections, but precisely their ability to
make the “improvements” snidely condemned by modern editors. (Fisher 58)
These reasoned interventions are dangerous exactly because they are reasonable, and so the
reader (editor, critic, etc.) passes over them without a second thought. And this, then, is the
problem of perfect transparency to which we will now turn.
THE TRANSPARENT AND THE VISIBLE
Transparency is a tricky word, as it is clouded in contemporary political and cultural jargon.
Generally as used today, it refers to a bureaucratic process, and almost universally implies this
process is not, at present, transparent. Hidden and probably nefarious forces, the reasoning goes,
have rigged the system in such ways as to render the process unfair, unaccountable, and
inefficient for the financial and political benefit of those administering the process itself. In this
sense, transparency is assumed to be an unqualified good; if the public could see through the red
tape and watch the inner-workings of governments and other administrations, cronyism and
corruption would solve themselves, dissolving in the light of day. And this may well be true. I
certainly will not argue against scrutinizing administrative processes of any kind, nor against
holding power to account. Nevertheless, to be painfully literal for a moment, transparency of the
process itself isn’t at all what we mean when we’re calling for increased transparency, and is in
reality the opposite of what we want.
Transparent simply means that which can be seen through, so the transparent object itself
is not what we see; we see instead whatever is on the other side of that object. A transparent
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process is thus an invisible one, which suits authoritarianism just fine, and we’ve now reached the
limit of jargon’s usefulness as an empty signifier. This is to say the public and the bureaucratic
administration both can advocate transparency, while meaning completely different things:
visible through, on the one hand, and invisible on the other. The political ramifications of these
mutually-exclusive definitions are not directly interchangeable with scribal textual production, of
course, though I do hope to suggest a resonance between the two.
Obvious mechanical and spelling errors are most importantly visible, and in a sense they
are apparent rather than transparent, yet we can still see through them to what is likely correct.
Similarly, manuscript variants may be compared and, for all the headaches of textual criticism,
traced to a probable original; even if that original is a hypothetical projection of the editor, at the
very least the variants raise a suspicion that something is amiss. A completely transparent scribal
change on the other hand, with the scribe as an invisible window between reader and text, would
go unnoticed. This is the point Fisher makes with respect to Adam Scriveyn: Chaucer complains
of easily-fixable errors to raise the specter of “errors” that are no less fixable, as any scribe is able
to make changes, but less visible if visible at all. This is the far more threatening form of
transparency; error-free manuscripts without variants present an illusion of the scribe as a non-
entity, and thus pass off his corrections, additions, omissions, and errors as the author’s. And
paradoxically this is the kind of transparency expected—after all, no one wants misspellings,
illegible words, or variant manuscripts to sort through. Even digital environments, where all
known variants can be hyperlinked and quickly compared, and textual changes can be archived
in the manner of Wikipedia’s history pages, yield neither more readable nor more authoritative
texts.
While no solution as such likely exists, variation and error may be preferable, if not ideal,
and visible errors might, if caught early enough by the right person, actually increase authority.
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In the first chapter of Error and the Academic Self, Seth Lerer makes an interesting case for the errata
sheets of early printed books being “the loci of authority and action that make academic life both
a performance and a defense” (17). That is to say a rhetorical move that both apologizes for error
and simultaneously reaffirms the authority of the book through the performance of admitting and
correcting error. And this act of self-correction, in its humbleness, “serve[s] to establish the
authorial authority through the acknowledgment of error” (Lerer 19). In other words, while
appearing to place the author on an equal footing with the reader, by pre-empting the reader’s
opportunity to catch mistakes the errata sheet actually deflects potential criticism. The other edge
of that particular double-edged sword, though, is that “there is nothing like the admission of some
errors to provoke us to believe that the work is full of errors” (Lerer 18, emphasis in original).
With apparent errors in a text, Lerer suggests that the reader is on edge, primed to look for more
errors.
Errata sheets, according to Lerer, also indicate “the need for the writer to oversee the
publication of his work” (23). But if this is necessary for the writer to maintain (and construct) his
authority through the self-correction of errors, what could the writer do before print—“recalling
that almost all manuscripts postdate the life of the author by decades or even centuries” (Nichols
8)? In contrast to the printed book, Lerer notes:
Chaucer developed what may well be called a poetics of correction in his thematic
attentions to the scribal culture of his day. All his work, he fears, is ‘subject to
correction,’ not just because it may be erroneous in fact or doctrine but because it
has been mangled by the hands of others. (19)
Instead “of the author/translator as something of a self-correcting, and thus self-confessing,
creature,” the author before print appears to be something of a self-lamenting creature in Lerer’s
view (Lerer 30). Because Chaucer cannot review a “stable” production of his work, thereby
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amending it with an authorized errata sheet, he is “subject to correction” by others. As we have
already seen, though, mangling by the hands of others is the least of Chaucer’s concerns.
Given that in 2006 Linne R. Mooney possibly identified Chaucer’s scribe Adam as one
Adam Pinkhurst, “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” may be more pointed
than scholars had previously considered, especially if indeed Pinkhurst was working under
Chaucer’s direction as Mooney believes.
9
Regardless, “Adam Scriveyn” is already more than an
abstract complaint of scribal variation or of one individual’s carelessness.
10
It is addressed to
“Adam,” but also specifically regards two of Chaucer’s works in particular that it might,
sometime in the future, befall Adam to copy: “if euer it the byfalle / Boece or Troylus / for to
wryten nuwe.” (Gillespie 271).
11
Fisher here reminds us that “writing new” can be both the
mechanical act of copying, as in writing a new copy, as well as a creative act, as in rewriting
(Fisher 31). These forms of “new” writing are particularly poignant in this case, as they are
“precisely the kinds of writing that produced the two texts to which the verses refer. Boece and
Troilus are both, in the broadest sense, translations” (Gillespie 271). Chaucer’s “new writing” in
Boece and Troilus become analogous to the “new writing” of Adam’s potential copying, and
9
Mooney makes a great point in reading “Adam” in the middle ground between joke and true
reprimand:
In ‘Adam Scriveyn’ Chaucer could not have been writing entirely in jest, or there
would be no call for such a poem; on the other hand, if he were really exasperated
by Adam’s rate of errors, he would have never employed his services again: he
would not just have written a poem about his carelessness. (Mooney 103)
10
As Gillespie points out:
the discovery of “the name of a scribe employed by Chaucer” does not put these
readings “to rest,” as Mooney says it does in her Speculum article. Figural
resonances and intricate patterns of diction and device are not so easily dismissed
(this is the only point Mooney makes with which I disagree). That this poem might
be about Adam Pinkhurst does not stop it also being about the first Adam, or
clericus Adam as he appears in Latin antifeminist poems of the period, writing about
his own fall. (278, emphasis in original)
11
Gillespie presents the text of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, which Fisher reprints in
Scribal Authorship for his reading.
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copying itself becomes a kind of translation—from one hand to another, from one context to
another, and the possible changes, inadvertent or not, that may find their way into the copied
manuscript become themselves translations of Chaucer’s texts.
12
Chaucer’s “new writing” that constitutes his translations of Boece and Troilus, “relies upon
imagination and invention, revision and redaction, and other complex transformations that
cannot be carefully delimited or contained” (Fisher 31). Chaucer, in other words, is making many
of the same reasoned interventions that scribes make in their exemplars when correcting,
amending, or adding to the work of previous scribes. Fisher concludes by saying:
Chaucer uses those errors that can be corrected as the occasion to assert his
particular vision of authorship, and thus the relationship between author and text.
In doing so, he redefines the discourse of authorship to exclude scribal variation.
Variation is admitted and deplored, but Chaucer moves to preclude the other,
more dangerous end of the spectrum of scribal practices—those scribal
interventions that were not accidental, but rather intentional. (33)
Alexandra Gillespie, in “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam,” sees Chaucer’s anticipation of
scribal variation rather differently. Instead of precluding variation, Chaucer preemptively
authorizes it:
Chaucer has foreseen the production of each imperfect copy of his literary
creation. He has written about this in Adam Scriveyn. That makes each copy—both
copying as an event, and the book in the reader’s hand—a glimpse of the
12
See Fisher:
The debates about the nature of translation are, of course, extensive, but the
concern with what is borne or carried over (the Latin etymological roots of
‘translation,’ trans + latio) applies not only to meaning, but to the physical
translation of text from one codex to another—that is, copying. (37)
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foreknown, of an originary moment, of the maker himself. (Gillespie 274,
emphasis in original)
Given the religious overtones of “Adam,” Gillespie suggests “‘My makyng’ is therefore
condemned, like all human endeavor, to the poem’s postlapsarian themes. It can only ever be
‘more truwe’ and never ‘truwe’: Chaucer’s is just an imperfect copy of some other original
‘makyng’” (279).
13
Yet we need not read this through a theological lens to make sense of it in the
context of medieval authorship, translation, and scribal copying.
I contend that the connections between “Adam Scriveyn” and Troilus are not limited to
the mention of Troilus in “Adam,” nor to the mutual concern of scribal copying in “Adam” and
the “famous lines from the end of Book Five of Troilus and Criseyde [which] similarly suggest what
is at stake in scribal writing as a potential site of authorship and invention” (Fisher 32). Chaucer’s
narrator in Troilus is doing much more than “dramatiz[ing] the difficulties of situating a new
Troy story amidst the many old Troy stories” (Fisher 31). He is, in fact, as Fisher suggests but
never connects directly, inserting himself into the narrative to dramatize the process of
translating another author’s text and, by extension, dramatizing the work of scribes—and he is
doing so, I claim, by introducing obvious errors. Chaucer anticipates and prefigures the
inevitable errors of scribes, situating his “makyng” as “just an imperfect copy of some other
original ‘makyng,’” by drawing attention to the fact that texts “can only ever be ‘more truwe’ and
never ‘truwe’,” thereby confronting the reader with varying degrees of authority.
13
An alternate reading, which I would reject, is Chaucer as the Author-God, and his “makyng”
thus being “truwe” in itself, with Adam—and other scribes—left only to produce imperfect
copies.
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MYN AUCTOUR CALLED LOL-LIUS
In 1917, George Lyman Kittredge claimed to know beyond any doubt whatsoever that Chaucer
believed an ancient Roman writer named Lollius had existed, and had written a great work
about Troy: “Chaucer found the name somewhere; he did not manufacture it. This point should
never be forgotten” (Kittredge 49). And the hunt for who Chaucer may have believed this Lollius
was persists to this day. Kittredge’s evidence for Chaucer’s certainty is based on Lollius being the
only nonexistent historical writer in House of Fame, and is debatable at best, yet even as he had no
doubt in Chaucer’s belief that Lollius was a real historical person, Kittredge made a distinction
between the Lollius of House of Fame and the Lollius of Troilus and Criseyde (49-50). Kittredge
claimed the latter, the attribution of Troilus’s source to Lollius, was an intentional error, possibly a
joke among Chaucer’s inner circle of peers (58-60).
No modern edition of Troilus and Criseyde can fail to account, however minimally, for
Chaucer’s mention of Lollius as his source, yet no one suspects Chaucer mistook Boccaccio’s
Italian Il Filostrato from which he worked for an ancient Latin text by Lollius, or even mistook Il
Filostrato itself for a translation of an ancient Latin text.
14
On the one hand, this is simply a matter
of convention, of cloaking Troilus and Criseyde in the authority of antiquity. On the other hand, we
should still ask why “Lollius,” why a fictitious Latin source?
15
And the question becomes more
complicated when we consider the nature of Chaucer’s translation and his narrator’s assertions
about his translation. It is an understatement to say I am by no means the first to point out that
Chaucer’s narrator foregrounds the process of translation, nor the first to notice that the narrator
14
Chaucer’s Troilus is a very loose translation of Boccaccio’s Italian Il Filostrato (“the love struck”),
composed c. 1338, which narrates the story of Troilus and Criseyde. There is no mention of a
Lollius in Boccaccio’s poem. See Barney xi; Chaucer 472; Windeatt xvii.
15
Kittredge, convinced that Chaucer believed Lollius to be a real historical person, claimed the
name Lollius was conveniently at hand. And the Latin source would lend authority to Chaucer’s
work (49-50).
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of Troilus makes erroneous claims regarding the translation of his source. My reading of Troilus,
however, is not itself based on Chaucer’s translation of Il Filostrato so much as the narrator’s
contradictory attitude toward the process of translation.
The first and most obvious question to ask when considering the narrator of Troilus,
taking him at his word, is what exactly he is doing in the text at all. That is, a completely faithful,
transparent translation would contain only that which is in the source, without any
metacommentary on the translation process. Since we’re told the source text is a Latin one, it is
itself necessarily a translation of a Greek story, but it should go without saying the commentary is
not that of Lollius. And while we know Chaucer is working primarily from a near-contemporary
Italian text, the narrator tells us his source is this ancient Latin one, so according to him the
translation is from Latin directly into the English text before us, leaving no possibility for an
intermediary. In other words, the narrator is not working from an Italian translation of an earlier
Latin text but that imagined earlier text itself, so there would be no translator-persona in between
the Troilus narrator and Lollius. Yet the persona of a translator, rather than a transparent
translation, is precisely what we see in Troilus.
Chaucer’s narrator first presents himself as one unlearned and inexperienced in the ways
of love, and addresses himself to the gods of love and the muses, hoping they will help him in
narrating this story about which he has no firsthand experience. This is the narrator’s first
deflection of authority, and one might ask why he consults the gods rather than his source text,
but the apostrophe to the gods could theoretically be a translation of the hypothetical source.
The (imagined) older text from which the narrator works first appears in lines 132-3, regarding
Criseyde and the possibility of her having children: “But wheither that she children hadde or
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noon, / I rede it naught, therfore I late it goon” (Troilus 475).
16
And we naturally ask who is
speaking here. Is this Chaucer’s narrator/translator, who is relying on the old books where he
“rede it naught,” or is this instead his author, who we will learn shortly is called Lollius? It is
more likely the former, yet either way we’re faced with a question raised only to admit the
impossibility of answering it. The narrator signals an unreliability, a gap in the transmission of
information through time and through the account of (literary) history, and forces the reader to
confront the fact that our narrator is missing parts of the story.
17
This intrusion—which a
transparent text would pass over—draws attention to itself via unknowability and error; had the
narrator said nothing at all about the possibility of children, we would have no reason to ask the
question ourselves.
18
Most critics who’ve looked at the narrator/translator of Troilus focus on the closing lines
in Book Five, where the narrator dedicates the poem to Gower and Strode, and speaks of the
16
All references to Troilus and Criseyde are to the Riverside Chaucer.
17
The narrator raises a similar concern when he says “as olde bokes tellen us, … / or ellis olde
bookes lye” (Chaucer 579). Why uphold old books as the foundation of authority and credibility,
only to undercut that credibility with the suspicion they might—or even could—be lying?
18
C. David Benson claims this “incites us to wonder what [Troilus’] heroine is thinking and
feeling while preventing us from certain knowledge,” which could well summarize the narrator’s
project as a whole (“Opaque Text” 20). Carolyn Dinshaw claims the opposite: “we see in the
narrator’s treatment of Criseyde throughout the narrative a tendency to fill in the blanks where
she is concerned, a nervousness that tends to foreclose the pleasure that those seductive gaps
might afford” (61). Sheila Delany, meanwhile, suggests the narrative is a deliberate act of
alienation:
E. Talbot Donaldson’s phrase ‘deliberate mystification’ best summarizes
Chaucer’s narrative stance in the Troilus: a device whereby the Narrator’s
questions or assertions force us to challenge what we would otherwise have taken
for granted or accepted as a normal convention of romance. (Delany 38)
Ultimately, she concludes:
these stylistic features are confusing on the surface and intended to be so; my
argument is that they illuminate by confusion, thus leading deeper than the
surface. Through pun, ambiguity and the rest, the familiar becomes unfamiliar,
the reliable phrase, feeling or concept becomes unreliable, the inconspicuous word
becomes conspicuous, and a conventional idea is made to yield unconventional
associations. (Delany 41)
126
potential for scribal error. And while we will also look closely at that passage, particularly as it
relates to “Adam Scriveyn,” one of the keys to my reading is actually the next authorial
interruption, in lines 392-9:
And of his song naught only the sentence,
As writ myn auctour called Lollius,
But pleinly, save our tonges difference,
I dar wel seyn, in al, that Troilus
Seyde in his song, loo, every word right thus
As I shal seyn; and whoso list it here,
Loo, next this vers he may it fynden here. (Troilus 478)
Multiple things are happening in these lines. First, of course, is the misattribution to an “auctour
called Lollius.”
19
More interestingly, the narrator asserts the absolute fidelity of his translation.
He promises to render Troilus’s song “pleinly, save oure tonges difference,” which is borderline
nonsensical. It is impossible that Troilus sang “every word right thus” considering the various
languages involved, since we are reading an English translation of a supposedly Latin text about
the Greek-speaking Troilus. The insistence on fidelity is thus not only false, but obviously so. And
again as with Criseyde’s children (or lack thereof), the narrator raises the issue only to draw
attention to the contradiction. Finally and most problematically is the nature of the song itself, as
the narrator tells us that Lollius did not write out Troilus’s song verbatim, but gave only a
summary: “only the sentence / As writ myn auctour called Lollius.” As Carolyn Dinshaw
concisely summarizes, the narrator:
19
This is one of two mentions of the name Lollius. The other is “The whiche cote, as telleth
Lollius, / Deiphebe it hadde rent fro Diomede / The same day” (Troilus 582).
127
is more than absolutely faithful: the narrator gives the particular words of a song of
which his auctour gives only the ‘sentence.’ Where did the words of Troilus’s song
come from? The narrator suggests that he can know exactly what Troilus said
without a source: Lollius is cited but at the same time seems to be unnecessary,
superfluous. (59, emphasis in original)
20
The narrator made up the song, in other words. Which means this narrator is, after all, capable
of “writing nuwe” on his own, and further contradicts his claims elsewhere of an inability to
know what he cannot find in his sources.
His later rhetorical question thus rings especially hollow. We are told that “myn autour”
mentioned written correspondence between Troilus and Criseyde, which for the sake of space
Lollius declined to write out; the narrator then asks, “How sholde I thanne a lyne of it endite?”
(Troilus 520). How indeed. He “sholde,” or at least could, write it the same way he wrote the
entirety of Troilus’s song earlier.
21
Yet the double-gesture of authorial confidence and deference
continues:
But sooth is, though I kan nat tellen al,
As kan myn auctour, of his excellence,
Yet have I seyd, and God toforn, and shal
20
Dinshaw’s reading is one where the narrator is progressively seduced by the text, and in spite
of his early protestations of inexperience in love he comes to identify with the lovers:
The narrator’s claim of historically faithful, word-for-word translation here works
as a cover for his deeper involvement, his deeper substitution: it masks his
identification with the lover of the woman, Criseyde. (59-60)
I agree that his professed faithful translation covers his “deeper involvement,” but I maintain that
the involvement is authorial/scribal rather than erotic or a psychological identification with
Troilus.
21
The narrator is equally capable of summarizing parts of his source: “And what she thoughte
somwhat shal I write, / As to myn auctour listeth for t’endite” (Troilus 499).
128
In every thyng, al holly his sentence. (Troilus 531)
22
This humility at first appears to be of the standard variety: the ancient auctour wrote so well and
so much better than we can now in our own inferior late 14
th
century, and so the narrator cannot
hope to do justice to the excellence of the original Latin. But this is going to hinge on what he
means by “al.” He is either translating “al holly his sentence,” that is, wholly preserving the
meaning of the original, while rendering it in verse that is inferior due to his lack of literary talent
or the nature of the English language. Or he “kan nat tellen al” by nature of being unable to
copy the entire narrative of his source. The latter hardly makes sense, yet both possibilities
contradict his earlier insistence that every word was “right thus,” and leave us instead with only
an approximation or equivalence in meaning.
23
Many of the narrator’s deflections are aimed at disavowal, and even as the internal
contradictions show otherwise, the narrator claims no stake in the authorship of Troilus and wants
neither credit nor blame for it. For example, the proem to Book Two:
Wherfore I nyl have neither thank ne blame
Of al this werk, but prey yow mekely,
Disblameth me if any word be lame,
For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I. (Troilus 489)
We have seen how this is patently false in terms of translation, but if we think of the narrator here
as a scribe—which he himself seems to invite—then “for as myn auctour seyde, so sey I” is
22
Elsewhere the narrator makes this point again: “But syn I have bigonne, / Myn auctour shal I
folwen, if I konne” (Troilus 489).
23
Note also that the narrator encourages the reader to fact-check him: “But trewely, how longe it
was bytwene / That she forsok hym for this Diomede, / There is non auctour telleth is, I wene. /
Take every man now to his bokes heede, / He shal no terme fynden, out of drede” (Troilus 574).
The invitation to consult the narrator’s source is yet another way the reader is invited to see the
alterations he makes in this translation.
129
exactly right.
24
Or almost exactly right. Even leaving aside the problems of translation from one
language to another, we have seen that scribes—as competent professionals—could and did
make alterations and corrections, in addition to mistakes, while copying their exemplars, and by
his own admissions elsewhere the narrator is himself just such a scribe.
Following his auctour’s lead is not the only way the narrator disavows his authority, as he
also claims ignorance in matters of love, but it is nevertheless interesting to read this deflection of
authority in terms of scribal production as well. Here, the narrator appeals to future readers who
may know more of love than he does:
For myne wordes, heere and every part,
I speke hem alle under correccioun
Of yow that felyng han in loves art.
And putte it al in youre discrecioun
To encresse or maken dymynucioun
Of my langage, and that I yow biseche. (Troilus 531)
25
Not only does the narrator shift from speaking of the past and the impossibilities of fully knowing
or rendering history readable in the present, to the future state of his text, but he invites precisely
those forms of scribal intervention that are most threatening to authorship. In this passage as well
as in “every part” of Troilus, he insists he speaks “all under correccioun,” and while on the one
hand we could read this as mere conventional humility, this appeal mirrors the narrator’s
“correccioun” of his source, and the ways he uses his “discrecioun to encresse or maken
24
On Chaucer’s self-positioning as a scribe, specifically with respect to his Retraction, see
Partridge.
25
In the closing lines the narrator asks for Gower and Strode to correct him, and much attention
has been paid to that address. Yet here the narrator makes it clear that all of Troilus should be
corrected, and by anyone, not just Gower and Strode.
130
dymynucioun” of that text.
26
The problems for authorship are manifold. Adding to another’s text
as the narrator does, while insisting fidelity to the original, subsumes the narrator under the
authority of the source and attributes his words to Lollius, yet at least Lollius’s words survive.
Conversely, “maken dymynucioun”—omitting portions of the original—is a much more radical
act of erasing the author: “Like reduplication, omission can be a purely mechanical error. But it
also always threatens to be meaningful in a way that duplication is not… Omission can be
accidental, but it can also be editorial, reflecting a motivated and intended intervention” (Fisher
33). Line skip is a visible omission, but others are not; passages, chapters, entire texts can be
omitted through the choice to copy them or not, and what could be more transparent than a text
we never see?
In effect the narrator of Troilus becomes one scribe among many in a chain of textual
transmission through time.
27
Even as such though this narrator is uncharacteristically fastidious,
if oblique, in signaling his alterations and additions, and these non-transparent—i.e. visible—
intrusions into the narrative remind us of the impasse between the copy in our hands and its
exemplar, while at the same time maintaining that impasse. Authority is deflected both backward
and forward through time, paradoxically making the present scribe a transparent, structural
void.
28
In Alexandra Gillespie’s sense, this is actually a version of Chaucer’s preemptive
authorization of future alterations—the narrator foresees, welcomes, and ultimately insists on the
necessity of corrections, additions, and omissions, and thus pulls any and all of these under the
26
“That text” here being both Il Filostrato, as Chaucer vastly added to his source, and the
narrator’s treatment of the imagined Latin text of Lollius.
27
The narrator directly compares himself to a scribe in the proem to Book Three: “Now, lady
bryght, for thi benignite, / At reverence of hem that serven the, / Whos clerc I am, so techeth
me devyse / Som joye of that is felt in thi servyse” (Troilus 514). The implication is that through
service as a scribe, the narrator will feel some “joye” of the subject he is copying.
28
Paradoxical, given that the “present” scribe is the only one who presently has a hand in the
text’s creation.
131
umbrella of his authority. This is certainly a far cry from what we generally consider the
“authorship” of a literary work, but it is also an ingenious way to stay relevant through time. Just
as the narrator alters his source, he expects the next scribe to alter and correct his text, and
rather than the received wisdom that medieval texts could never live up to the “old books” of
antiquity, here we have a vision of textual improvement—or if not “improvement,” then at least
updating. This is partly a function of the natural evolution of language, an effect the narrator
explicitly addresses:
Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is
chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and
straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men do now. (Troilus 489, delineation in original)
Far from privileging the past, the narrator admits its strangeness and, ultimately, its inaccessibility
while simultaneously acknowledging a continuity of feeling and perception that places the present
on equal footing. The past may seem strange to us, the narrator says, but they loved the same as
we do and their speech, though it seems incomprehensible now, was as natural to them as ours is
to us. Of course, this is also an admission that, as time continues to pass, the narrator’s own
language will come to be strange—as indeed it has—which is why the progress of “absent”
scribes correcting and updating remains as integral a part of textual transmission as modern
editions and translations are today.
In this spirit of accepting correction and the competence of the scribes and potential
future authors, we should see the closing lines of Troilus as a complex assertion of individual
132
authority in the face of an ultimately collective process. Generally considered to be a lament
similar to that of “Adam Scriveyn,” in the closing dedication in Troilus the narrator “fears the
mismetering and misspelling of his poetry by scribes of different dialect regions or different levels
of ability” (Lerer 19). But in light of the earlier meditation on the mutability of language and the
narrator’s invitation to correct the text, his prayer takes on a much different tone:
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I god that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge;
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (Troilus 584)
These fears are the inevitable consequence of sending a work out into the world. The narrator,
having finished his text, says to it “Go, litel bok, go” (Troilus 584), and with it thus sent away he
leaves it at the mercy of future scribes and readers, who will alter it as he did Lollius’s—or as
Chaucer did Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. The real question in these lines, given the “gret diversite /
In Englissh and in writyng,” is what it would even mean to “myswrite” Troilus. If a future
“miswriting” makes it possible for Troilus to “be understonde,” then is it really miswriting? And
what about a text, like Margery Kempe’s, that cannot be understood at all?
UNDER CORRECTION
The Book of Margery Kempe is Margery Kempe’s book only in a complex definition of authorship.
As A.C. Spearing outlines:
it was not written by Margery Kempe herself (she was illiterate), but by a priest on
the basis of her dictation, and only after complications of the kind that she seems
133
to have attracted throughout her life—including in this case one scribe forgetting
his native language and another [the priest] having his eyesight selectively blurred
by the devil. (625)
And Margery herself “figures in the book not as an ‘I’ but as ‘this creature’” (Kempe 625).
Ostensibly a hagiographic autobiography of Margery’s conversion and direct experience of
divine revelation, as well as a narrative of her pilgrimages and varying degrees of martyrdom (if
that is the term we should use for it), the book itself begins with an extended narration of its own
production. We are told that twenty years after Margery’s experiences that form the content of
her story, she was directed by God to write her book. Being illiterate herself,
29
Margery enlists a
scribe to write out her story as she dictates it to him. Arguments have been made that this first
29
It is unclear what “illiterate” means here, whether it signifies a complete inability to read or
write in any form at all, or illiterate in the sense of unlearned in Latin. This distinction seems to
be first noted by Danielle Cunniff Plumer in her unpublished dissertation, where she also
responds to two separate debates over the possible fictitiousness of the scribes or Margery herself:
However, efforts to reduce the scribe to a polite fiction seem questionable in light
of the fact that the Book clearly implies that Margery, and perhaps Kempe herself,
was illiterate. Margery was certainly illiteratus, unlearned in Latin, for when a
steward speaks to her in Latin in chapter 47, Margery responds “Spekyth
Englysch, yf yow lyketh, for I vndyrstonde not what ye sey.” (80)
Lynn Staley takes the opposite approach:
However, her emphasis upon her illiteracy may also indicate her sure
understanding of the conventions of spiritual writings by or about women.
In such writings the scribe was an essential component of the authority of
the life itself. In this sense, it is less important to ascertain whether Kempe was
actually illiterate and therefore dictated her book to a scribe than to seek to
understand what function the scribe serves in her book. Since Kempe stresses the
amount of time she spent with her scribe, it is likely she exerted a good deal of
control over the text itself: either she wrote it herself and created a fictional scribe,
or she had it read back to her and was aware of exactly what was in the text. (33)
Staley’s logic is less than airtight: because Margery spent so much time with the scribe, the scribe
a) never existed; b) certainly read the text back to her. And while the final “either” is only the
most begrudging of acknowledgments that the Book is quite explicit about Margery’s “illiteracy,”
whatever we take that to mean, the move to understand the function of the scribe in the Book is a
valid one.
134
scribe was one of Margery’s sons,
30
but regardless we do know for certain, according to the text,
that he worked with Margery for a month at the longest and produced no more than a draft of
Book I. We are also told the manuscript he produced was completely illegible,
31
a direct violation
of the trust Matthew Fisher called our attention to earlier, that authors could rely on scribes not
to transcribe texts into private languages or made-up codes. This first scribe then dies,
conveniently for the narrative, and Margery takes his manuscript to a second scribe, also
conveniently a priest, who cannot read it. The priest takes the manuscript to yet another scribe,
who confirms that it is in fact unreadable, before taking it home and setting it aside for four years,
“notwythstandyng the creatur cryed often on hym therfor” (Kempe 48).
32
The obvious question to ask, if indeed Margery “cryed often” to the priest about his work
on her book during the four years he had it in his possession, is why work from the first
manuscript at all? One could suggest that the natural discrepancies, degradations, and
imperfections of memory might make the first manuscript a valuable base, but while this sounds
reasonable, Margery had already waited twenty years before enlisting a scribe in the first place.
So the difference between twenty and twenty-four years seems negligible. And the writers among
us will almost certainly feel that revising from a draft is less daunting than starting anew, but
given the state of the first draft surely it would have been easier for the priest simply to take fresh
dictation from Margery directly. Instead, Margery prays for him and, “trustyng in hire prayers,”
the priest “began to redyn this booke, and it was mych mor esy, as hym thowt, than it was
30
See John C. Hirsh, for example: “Indeed, the text seems to have been so badly written that we
need to explain how it came to be written that way at all, and her son’s amateurishness and
illness seem logical answers” (146).
31
The nature of the illegibility is unclear. The handwriting was abysmal, but the second scribe
also asserts that it was written in neither recognizable English nor German, so the literacy of the
first scribe may also be at issue.
32
Unless otherwise noted, all references to Margery Kempe are to The Book of Margery Kempe, edited
by Barry Windeatt.
135
beforntym” (Kempe 49). Through the power of Margery’s prayers, the priest is now able to read
the manuscript back to her, with Margery helping where any difficulties arise.
From a narrative standpoint this makes perfect sense: the irony of Margery praying for a
priest cannot be lost on anyone, and it is her prayers that grant him the ability to read the badly
written first manuscript. As though that were not enough of a testament to her holiness, the
priest’s eyesight then fails, but only while trying to copy the text, and Margery’s prayers again
allow him to continue working. The scribe thus serves as a witness to the Divine sanction of
Margery’s narrative and, ultimately, her life as a holy woman.
33
Margery’s illiteracy ensures the
text cannot originate with her, and therefore her book must be validated by a witness who
endorses it at least insofar as to write it down.
34
The priest then further validates her narrative
both in copying it and through his experience of her pseudo-miraculous prayers, which in their
turn suggest the presence of a Divine Will and God’s own endorsement of her text. Even so, even
after these various attestations to Margery’s authority as a holy woman, the priest again narrates
the text’s production (Kempe 50-51). The priest first writes this account, which repeats nearly
verbatim what we have seen already:
And than yet it was wretyn fyrst be a man whech cowd neithyr wel wryten
Englysch ne Duch, so it was unable for to be red but ony be specyal grace… And
so at the last a preste was sor mevyd for to wrytin this tretys, and he cowd not wel
redyn it of a iiii yere togedyr. And sythen be the request of this creatur, and
compellyng of his owyn consciens, he asayd agayn for to rede it, and it was mech
mor esy than it was afortyme. (Kempe 51)
33
See Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions 33-8.
34
See again 133fn28, regarding Margery’s illiteracy.
136
We are told the above was written first, but it appears as the second of the two proem
introductions. At the end of the first proem the priest, again speaking of the difficulties with his
sight being cured, writes:
Whan he cam ageyn to hys booke, he myth se as wel, hym thowt, as evyr he dede
befor, be day-lyth and be candel-lygth bothe. And for this cause, whan he had
wretyn a quayr, he addyd a leef therto, and than wrot he this proym, to expressyn
mor openly than doth the next folwyng, whech was wretyn er than this. (50)
He wants to “expressyn mor openly” than what he had written already, and yet goes to the
trouble of tipping in an additional leaf to write out the second, clarifying proem and place it first
in the book. Over and above the narrative requirements of witnessing Margery’s holiness, we
have two nearly identical histories of the production of the text, and this repetition is an excessive
gesture calling attention to the priest himself and his work as scribe.
For those who accept the possible intervention of the Divine, all this may very well bear
repeating, and neither Margery’s illiteracy nor the first manuscript would pose any problems.
Quite the opposite, actually, as the text’s authority is verified through the miraculous
circumstances of its creation. For those who remain skeptical, The Book of Margery Kempe raises the
prospect of the first manuscript only to remind us that the book in front of us is a translation of
an earlier text, the content of which we cannot access. Rather than a window onto the exemplar
and ultimately Margery’s voice, the priest is a blockage, an impasse we cannot see beyond. By
contrast, the first scribe’s manuscript seems closer to Margery’s own account:
Thys boke is not wretyn in ordyr, every thyng aftyr other as it wer don, but lych as
the mater cam to the creatur in mend whan it schuld be wretyn, for it was so long
er it was wretyn that sche had forgetyn the tyme and the ordyr whan thyngs
befellyn. (Kempe 49)
137
It would appear, then, that the first scribe took down Margery’s stream-of-consciousness
recollections as she dictated them to him, and if we were looking for Margery’s voice that would
be the transparent manuscript. We can never know for certain, but it could easily be that the
original manuscript was also written in the first-person, if indeed the scribe was taking down what
she said exactly as she said it.
The assessment of the scribes’ role in the production of the Book could not be more
disparate. John C. Hirsch elevated the second scribe to the level of co-author,
35
while Lynn
Staley has gone so far as to hope—if not outright suggest—that the Book’s scribal frame is a
fiction constructed by Margery herself,
36
and others have assumed the scribe to be a neutral
medium through which Margery speaks.
37
As a matter of historical record, the actual
circumstances are interesting in their own right,
38
but in theoretical terms it matters little who
“authored” The Book of Margery Kempe, as the fact remains that the problems of authorship,
translation, and scribal copying are intentionally foregrounded within the narrative itself.
35
“Thus, although barring new manuscript discovery, our conclusions must remain tentative, it
may be confidently stated that the second scribe, no less than Margery, should be regarded as the
author of The Book of Margery Kempe” (Hirsch 150).
36
“I would like to be able to say that the scribe never existed, that Margery Kempe created him,
but I can say that in terms of the shape and function of the Book, its author needed a scribe, even
a succession of scribes as witnesses and mediators who could authorize the text” (Staley 36).
37
“R.M. Wilson assures us that ‘we are probably safe… in assuming that The Book of Margery
Kempe represents the kind of prose that Margery herself would have written had she not been
illiterate’ (105)” (Glenn 543). Though of course this is not a “safe” assumption at all.
38
What we do know for certain is that only one extant manuscript of the Book has so far been
found, which is British Library Additional MS 61812:
The text of the Book, written throughout in one hand on 124 leaves, was probably
written around 1450. It is thus a very early copy but is not the original dictated by
Margery Kempe, because the longer proem tells how the amanuensis added a
prefixed leaf (149-51), which is not the case in the extant manuscript. (Kempe xvi)
The scribe of this extant manuscript names himself at the conclusion of the text as “Salthows”
(Kempe xvi).
138
Independent of who the “author” is, the issue of authorship is raised only to point out its ultimate
undecidability.
Staley wants to imagine the scribe as a fiction because she wants to imagine Margery
Kempe as the literate writer of a fiction in which Margery is the third-person protagonist. And
while I don’t wish to ignore or downplay the gendered implications of a woman’s voice being
simultaneously authorized and silenced by a male scribe, I would still like to emphasize that the
repetition of the frame is more than what is necessary for the kind of authorization Staley
outlines. Through the insistence of the frame, The Book of Margery Kempe is not finally a
relationship of God speaking to Margery via the scribe, nor one of Margery herself and the text,
but instead the Book is a relationship between the scribe and his exemplar.
39
Writing the scribes
into the text is not in this case, as Staley claims, “a means of maintaining control,” even if we
assume as Staley does that the presence of the scribes is Margery’s decision (12).
40
I suggest that if
the narrative frame were limited even to the priest taking dictation from Margery, we would ask
39
This claim completely removes Margery from her own book, and the implication that the
female voice is thus retroactively silenced is not lost on me. The third-person narration, however,
prefigured this move. John A. Erskine claims Margery addresses herself in the third-person to
model her own history on the lives of saintly women available to her. With respect to the scribes,
Erskine questions the possible authorship of the Book, but stops short of taking a decisive stand
(80-1). Staley sees the third-person as further evidence of the scribe-as-witness:
Moreover, Kempe’s experience is described by an omniscient, third-person
narrator, presumably the scribe, whose ability to recount both God’s intimate
speeches to her as well as the experience of Kempe herself renders him a powerful
“witness” to her life. (35)
Though how readers would react to an “omniscient scribe” remains an open question.
40
Staley distinguishes between male and female writers’ employment of scribal tropes:
Though a writer like Chaucer employed scribal metaphors to signal his relative
powerlessness, thereby indicating the outlines of a carefully conceived and
concealed persona, women writers… exploited those same metaphors to signal
both their sense of authority and their awareness of the social constraints placed
upon it. (12)
Chaucer’s “relative powerlessness,” I claim, is also socially and technologically constructed—
both in relation to prior auctores and future scribes—and this “carefully conceived” persona is as
much about claiming authority as it is about deflecting.
139
far fewer questions: the presence of the priest-as-scribe would indeed validate Margery’s
authority, and the third-person narration could be explained as a literary convention employed
by him. Instead, the reader is barred from Margery’s voice and left with the voice of the scribe,
who makes his presence in the text felt with, among other things, his increasing exasperation over
her continual weeping.
41
And yet the scribe’s presence does authorize Margery’s Book, and Margery’s life, if not
Margery herself as an author. To say more than that, though, is to risk slipping into pure
speculation and conjecture: what kind of book would we have had the first manuscript been
legibly written? Most likely, a possibly first-person account of seemingly random events presented
all out of order, if we had any kind of book at all. Which is to say while such a disjointed, affective
style might resonate with us today, scribes were hardly in the habit of copying diaries, and given
the priest’s instinct to re-order the first manuscript and shape it into a chronological and
purposefully structured narrative, Margery’s Book may very well have been lost completely had
the priest not intervened in its composition. Which as we have seen, is precisely what competent
scribes were counted on to do: not only did they copy, “but medieval scribes were also in a
position to emend and correct the texts they copied, and to save authors from their own errors”
(Fisher 20). And while the text is thus “transmitted by a priest, and this mediation is unlikely to
have been transparent” (Wright 497), at the same time the priest’s mediation is transparent—
visibly signaled by the repetition of the narrative frame, and the priest’s authority over the text is
no more or no less than that of any other scribe working with an exemplar.
Margery’s original dictation to the first scribe was not an “error” to be corrected, but
neither was it the Book that survives in British Library Additional MS 61812. This is not to deny
41
For further examples of the distance between the scribe/priest, see Michael Wright, “What
They Said to Margery Kempe: Narrative Reliability in Her Book.”
140
Margery possession of her own story, but at the same time we need to move beyond the
fetishization of complete individual control, without falling back on the stale cliché of medieval
writers believing they were neither individuals nor authors. Lynn Staley’s rehabilitation of
Margery removes her from the narrative frame; Margery is a subversive, literate fiction writer in
Staley’s view because authority, for Staley, manifests itself through textual oversight—Margery
must have either invented the scribe or had the scribe read every word back to her for final
approval (33). The priest insists this was the case, that he did read the manuscript back to her,
only with the first, badly-written text. After which, “he gan to wryten in the yer of owr Lord
1436, on the day next aftyr Mary Maudelyn, aftyr the informacyon of this creatur” (Kempe 51).
“Aftyr the informacyon” provided by Margery can be read several ways, including as Staley does
with Margery’s direct involvement and oversight. But it could also be “aftyr the informacyon”
already written down in the first manuscript.
42
There are certainly distinctions between Chaucer’s brand of authorial deflection and
(un)faithful translation, and the collaborative processes available to Margery Kempe. And these
differing authorial strategies are no doubt gendered, though they share a common textual
concern for the physical act of their own production. Chaucer self-consciously constructs his
literary predecessors, and his own persona as an invisible link in the chain of textual transmission,
to assert his own authority through appeals to past and future writers. Thus he both
acknowledges and prefigures the inevitable changes his work will undergo, while at the same time
insisting on mutual recognition of this instability from the reader. Margery Kempe’s text is
42
The Book of Margery Kempe is structured chronologically, but while we know the first scribe
produced no more than Book I, “Thys boke is not wretyn in ordyr, every thyng aftyr other as it
wer don,” and so we cannot know if it contained a framework for the entirety of the Book, which
the priest then filled in (Kempe 49). Another possibility is that Book II is the second scribe’s
continuation of Book I, which would open up a range of authorial problems. We will consider
continuation in the next chapter.
141
subject to that same scribal instability, though as an illiterate mystic her authority cannot be
defined within or against a literary tradition. Instead, her scribe negates her voice and positions
her as an absence in her own book, and in doing so reifies the authority of her experience, rather
than her authority as a writer. But just as Margery could not have “authored” The Book of Margery
Kempe without the priest’s aid, neither could the priest have written the Book without Margery,
and his repeated narration of the composition process both renders his role visible and focuses
our attention on the mediation of Margery’s experience. She is, in other words, an absence that
nevertheless produces very real effects. Ultimately, these writers’ awareness of the limits to their
own authority in the face of unstable textual reproduction and variable future reception leads
them to embrace these limits, even as they struggle against them. And at the end of the day, as
we consider the social and technological conditions of our digital moment, they should remind us
we all stand under correction.
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CHAPTER 4
MORE IS ALWAYS BETTER: EXCESS, CONTINUATION,
AND COMMUNITY
In Chapter 3 we saw that Chaucer preemptively authorized alterations and additions to his
Troilus and Criseyde through invitations to future readers to correct or increase his language where
they see fit. Though of course these kinds of invitations to continue a text were not always
necessary, as Chaucer well knew. The Roman de la Rose is the most famous, and perhaps most
widely-read, medieval continuation, which Chaucer had translated. His Troilus, though, while a
translation from Italian was also, in its scope, its own kind of continuation. Thus part of Chapter
3’s argument was that Chaucer’s invitation to correct, amend, or add to his language, while on
the surface a preemptive authorial move, was in fact reactionary. He simply appeared to
authorize a possibility that may very well have happened regardless, and so he appropriated a
veil of authority by accepting and welcoming his own lack of control.
By Chaucer’s time, continuation was an established form, and this has led to many
conflicting ideas regarding the medieval concept of closure. Only recently, though, is
continuation beginning to be theorized as a genre in its own right. We will return to the specific
case of the Rose in detail later in this chapter, but first we will more broadly consider the nature of
continuation itself. Any such discussion will naturally, at heart, make presumptions about human
nature; are people, in their desires, feelings, and sense of self generally consistent across time and
cultural circumstances, or is history ultimately unknowable? My attempt here, as well as in the
previous chapter, is to take historical objects at their word as much as is possible. Personally, I do
lean toward believing people are generally consistent over time, though of course I have no
evidence for this. At the same time, this dissertation argues that technologies of textual
production and distribution create and shape a field of possible participation for both
143
professional and amateur writers. I want to remain extremely skeptical of drawing direct, one-to-
one comparisons between present and past, as well as to avoid a strict technological determinism,
but it is unavoidable that the manner of production will affect the final product.
1
This chapter
will therefore suggest connections between the medieval continuation and contemporary
fanfiction practices—particularly the “fill in the gaps” subgenre of fanfic—but will not treat that
connection directly. Instead, by mapping the theoretical implications of negative authority within
the continuation, we may then point toward a direction for future study in fanfiction authorship.
Perhaps coincidentally, the last five years have seen a rise in scholarly interest in the
continuations of Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal, also known as Perceval . Written probably
between 1180 and 1195 (Hinton 1), and believed to be left “unfinished, hanging mid-sentence,
probably owing to his death” (Tether 1), Chrétien’s Conte du Graal is first and foremost notable
among his romances for featuring a second protagonist in addition to the poem’s namesake.
Following Chrétien’s death, four separate continuations were written: “the first two
Continuations are thought to have appeared by around 1200; the Manessier Continuation is
dated between 1214 and 1227; and the Gerbert Continuation between 1225 and 1230” (Hinton
1).
2
For medieval audiences, the continuations were apparently as much a part of the Conte du
1
By way of explanation, a simple thought experiment might shed some light on this weak
technological determinism. When I finish reading The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s
posthumously published, unfinished novel, there is an appendix of notes and possible directions
that Wallace wanted to pursue, but there is very little I can do to “complete” the book. If I am a
scribe in the 13
th
century, say, and I come to the end of Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal and
find his last, unfinished sentence, there is a pen in my hand and blank space on the manuscript
page. There is nothing stopping me from continuing to write, and the product will appear
seamless.
2
I have chosen to capitalize, but not italicize, the continuations only when referring specifically
to the First, Second, Gerbert, or Manessier continuation individually. Tether both capitalizes and
italicizes when referring to them individually and collectively, e.g. “the Continuations.” I disagree
with her assessment of “continuations” as a title, and so it would appear that I am following
Hinton with respect to style. Unlike his formatting, however, mine is not “to emphasise my
144
Graal as Chrétien’s text itself, as they appear in eleven of fifteen surviving manuscripts (Tether
10). Yet until very recently they have been largely ignored by scholars. Leah Tether provides a
quick overview of the scholarship on the continuations prior to Matilda Buckner’s 2009 Chrétien
Continued, and this is limited to “only four published volumes and one unpublished dissertation”
(Tether 4). Three of these, including the dissertation, are in German; Guy Vial’s 1978 study of
Perceval and the First Continuation is in French, and only Corin F. Corley’s The Second Continuation
of the Old French Perceval: A Critical and Lexicographical Study is in English (Tether 4-5). Some of this
neglect, if that’s what we would call it, could be attributed to sheer volume: the four
continuations overwhelm Chrétien’s work, and add a total “in excess of 69,000 lines” (Tether 1).
3
Another reason could be that the single modernized edition of the continuations, that of William
Roach, remains incomplete.
4
More likely, scholars were simply uninterested, as one of the
continuations is anonymous, the other three are vaguely attributable at best, and all four are
derivative. Thus, by comparison with Chrétien, they hardly seemed worth the effort. Jean
Frappier’s analysis is emblematic here:
We know no more. At this point (v. 9234), death put an end to the work of the
great Chrétien de Troyes. This sudden interruption leaves us to grapple with our
uncertainties, for we cannot rely on his continuators to know the true intentions of
the great writer. (quoted in Hinton 2)
conception of the cycle as a unit whose constituent parts function together, rather than as
separable, individual works” (Hinton 1 fn1). In my view, it is modern scholarship that has
retroactively applied these names to the texts, and therefore they are not titles as such.
3
Leah Tether disregards the length or general difficulty of the continuations as a factor,
particularly as three of the four have been edited and modernized by William Roach in his
Continuations of the Old French “Perceval” of Chrétien de Troyes, a five-volume work appearing between
1949 and 1983.
4
The five volumes do not include the Manessier continuation, which has yet to be translated into
modern French. At the time of Tether’s writing, Roach’s daughter was thought to be at work on
completing Roach’s monumental edition (Tether 8 fn39).
145
But whatever the reason, the tide seems to have turned, and we “have reached a critical
mass, with a number of articles, books and doctoral theses on the subject appearing or soon to
appear” (Hinton 3). My interest here is the theorization of authorship as it pertains to
continuation, and the reasons for the increased attention to the Graal continuations, including the
move away from focusing on Chrétien as an individual author. That is, unlike the Vulgate Cycle,
which has been seen as a collection of texts circling a central myth, the Graal continuations are
gaining attention only within the past few years, and the Conte du Graal is being considered a
coherent entity along the lines of the Roman de la Rose—which has consistently been treated more
as a dual- or even co-authored whole than a continuation. Thus we will first turn to the process
of continuation and Chrétien’s Graal, before then investigating the implications of authorship in
the Rose.
THE CYCLE OF CONTINUATION
The three book-length studies of the Graal continuations that have appeared so far, in
chronological order, are Matilda Bruckner’s Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its
Verse Continuations, Thomas Hinton’s The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the
Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance, and Leah Tether’s The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval:
Content and Construction, Extension and Ending. While there is obviously an overarching concern with
continuation, each approaches the concept from a slightly different angle. Bruckner speaks of a
“poetics of continuation,” in Chrétien Continued and elsewhere, and develops an idea of “author
relays.” Hinton wants to re-read the continuations as a cycle and the entire corpus as a cyclic
whole, and Tether is trying to raise continuation itself to the level of genre. As each of these
appeared far enough apart that the later account for, if not exactly respond to, the earlier, we will
briefly consider them in turn.
146
Bruckner sets the stage for Chrétien Continued in a much earlier article, “The Poetics of
Continuation in Medieval French Romance,” where she believes “the Conte du Graal suggests that,
in the world of romance, we are necessarily located in medias res” (133). Here it is Chrétien’s
dual-protagonists that open up the Graal to continuation even before the unfinished last line, as
“Perceval and Gauvain become dual centers” (“Poetics” 141). And thus, “given this pattern of
doubling heroes, certain aspects of the first and second Continuations that have appeared
troubling to modern scholarship may be understood as an appropriate response to Chrétien’s
decentered romance” (“Poetics” 143). Building on the idea of decenteredness and the dual-
centered romance, in Chrétien Continued Bruckner develops a terminology of centrifugal and
centripetal narrative forces, spinning in circles either closer to or farther from Chrétien’s text
(Chrétien 15-7).
5
Romance continuation, then, “eschews the restrictions of either/or and claims
the non-Aristotelian logic of and/both through the process of juxtaposition and accumulation…
As suggested by the accumulation of continuations and different versions in manuscript
compilations, nothing once added may be left out in the quest for narrative fulfillment” (Chrétien
18-9). And yet, the whole remains to a degree under the umbrella of Chrétien’s authorship for
Bruckner:
The paradox of authorship that characterizes the entire structure formed by
Perceval and its verse continuations suggests that Chrétien is and is not the author
of those continuations; their authors are and are not individual continuators. In
5
For Bruckner, “Chrétien’s last, incomplete sentence, [is] an implicit invitation to continue his
suspended narrative,” and indeed this has a feeling of truth to it (Chrétien 14). Bruckner continues
to employ this idea of invitation, as though Chrétien himself were actively inviting future writers
to add to his work, rather than an accident of the timing of his death. And she also then applies
the term “invitation” to the continuations, “all of which invite the closure finally offered by
Manessier” (Chrétien 23). This is a small, possibly unconscious point in her argument, but it is
worth noting in contrast to the explicit invitation Chaucer will make some sixty-plus years later in
Troilus.
147
modern terms, we limit Chrétien’s authorship to the originating and unfinished
romance. But in terms of medieval practice, the complex set of connections
author(iz)ed by Chrétien in the Conte du Graal initiate patterns through which his
authority remains in play throughout the cycle… Remaining under his tutelage,
the continuators are tied individually and collectively to their common model, its
narrative material, as well as to its puzzles and problems. (Chrétien 33)
This is a lovely image, of the continuators “author(iz)ed” by Chrétien, and working under the
tutelage of the master, yet it is deeply problematic to consider the continuators under the direct
oversight of a dead writer, if not outright dismissive of their literary work. At the same time,
though, their work is tied to the framework of the grail quest, however loosely, and their work is
also authorized by association with Chrétien’s name. This is a point Bruckner takes up in depth,
and one to which we will return.
Hinton builds on Bruckner’s centrifugal/centripetal narrative, but for him the purpose is
to reframe the Conte du Graal as a cycle centered not around Chrétien’s text per se, but rather
around the larger project of telling the grail romance: “if we are able to abstract the scholarly
author-construction ‘Chrétien’ from our consideration of the medieval manuscript evidence, a
different picture of the development of medieval Arthurian literature begins to emerge, one in
which the Conte du Graal cycle as a textual unit plays a major role” (Hinton 14).
6
Hinton looks at
the “cyclification” process diachronically and synchronically; that is, the cycle obviously
accumulates material over time, and “the choices made by each continuator impact retroactively
on the inherited textual mass to which he is responding, so that Chrétien’s very authority as
6
Hinton states this with a calm authority, but this is actually a monumental “if.” If we remove
the “scholarly author-construction” we are not necessarily left with a textual unit divorced from
the authorial name “Chrétien.”
148
originator is partly a creation of the later texts” (Hinton 25). Responding to Bruckner’s idea that
the “originating romance functions as a ‘master text’ exerting continuing tutelage over the
expanding narrative” (Hinton 24), Hinton claims her model “obscures to a certain extent the way
in which each successive extension of the narrative produces a new ‘master text’ with or against
which the next author in the sequence will write” (Hinton 24-5). This is both true, on the one
hand, and an implied overstatement of the narrative coherence of continuations—broadly
construed—on the other.
Of these three critics, Tether is the most interested in using Chrétien’s Conte du Graal and
its continuations as case studies for a larger project, and that project is developing a model of
continuation as a genre.
7
She bases this on “the so-called Constance School,” who “regard genre
as something which is grounded in reader or audience reception, where genres effectively elicit a
kind of expectation in their audience as to the particular kind of text they will experience”
(Tether 2-3). Tether further bases her idea of genre on the work of Simon Gaunt, who
“extrapolates that this means that genres are not discrete, but rather more fluid, constructs which
evolve in response to a variety of factors, but which still convey such generic paradigms so as to
effect a reader response of intertextual recognition” (Tether 3). This idea of audience response is
finally then articulated with respect to the Conte du Graal and the continuations by Keith Busby,
who argues that genre is ultimately overdetermined by inclusion in a manuscript with other texts:
“Selection and ordering of texts within a manuscript can tell us whether certain texts were
7
In the service of this project, Tether appropriates and redefines the term “Ur-Text” “to refer to
Perceval, as while the Continuations are not rewritings of the original story in the same sense as
manuscript variants, they do all derive, ultimately, from Chrétien’s original narrative” (2 fn8).
We may recall from Chapter 2 that Cornel Sandvoss made this same move with respect to fan
objects, which function as:
a field of gravity, which may or may not have an urtext in its epicenter, but which in
any case corresponds with the fundamental meaning structure through which all
these texts are read. (23, italics in original)
149
regarded as of a kind” (Busby 148, quoted in Tether 3). The question this raises, of course, is
whether the Conte du Graal continuations “actually exhibit identifiable ‘generic distinctions’ from
other medieval texts which rewrite, or respond to, a pre-existing text” (Tether 4). And then a
second question is whether in this case her taxonomy of genre, sub-genre, sub-category, and
mode is a useful one.
8
There is no doubt her categorization is a necessary gesture, as the
competing terminologies of “interlace,” “cycle,” Tether’s own distinctive use of “Ur-Text,” and
other terms unnecessarily complicate the discussion of medieval continuation. Whether or not
her categories will gain traction in the ongoing critical conversation, though, remains an open
question.
Ultimately the one point of convergence for these three scholars, and the bedrock
foundation upon which any theorization of the Conte du Graal and its continuations must be
developed, is that the manuscript evidence clearly attests to the fact that medieval audiences
considered these texts to be inextricably connected. As such, audience—or at least scribal—
reception is crucial to understanding the desire to see the continuations as part of a whole. And
one distinctive feature of the continuations that cannot be ignored is their sheer excess; the
continuations dwarf Chrétien’s text, and while the unfinished state of the Conte du Graal serves as
pretense for completing Chrétien’s work, the continuations show a remarkable disregard for
narrative closure. Indeed, it might be said that by introducing Gauvain as a second protagonist,
Chrétien didn’t leave a narrative in need of closure so much as he constructed an open-ended
world that, by its nature, cannot be completed.
9
In this sense, then, I would say Chrétien
8
Indeed it may be. Tether is not strictly a medievalist, and her work, like mine, bridges the
distance between the medieval and the digital, where we have seen the popularity of
continuations, and the desire to continue texts, explode in recent years.
9
The dual-narrative architecture is not the only possible prompt for continuation, as we will later
see with the Roman de la Rose. There, with Amant as a single protagonist on a very specific quest
150
“invited” continuation, as any future narrative can be linked to the Conte du Graal, however
loosely, by virtue of a connection to the Arthurian court or the grail quest, regardless of the
individual characters involved. And we see this with the anonymous first continuation, which
dispenses with Perceval altogether, makes no attempt to “finish” the Conte du Graal, and yet has
remained an integral part of the manuscript tradition.
“CLERKLY CONTINUITY”
What is interesting about the scribal appropriation of the Arthurian quest is the desire it shows
for a kind of heroic participation in the textual production and tradition of Chrétien’s romance.
Hinton reads the scene of Gerbert’s self-naming as an analogue to Perceval:
the image of the writer Gerbert acknowledging the death of the master Chrétien
calls up once again the image of Perceval weeping over his mother’s tomb,
exorcising his debt to her before riding free from her influence... To the anxiety
over maternal influence displayed by Chrétien’s text and its hero, he opposes a
reassuring narrative of clerkly continuity, casting Chrétien as progenitor of the
cycle. (Hinton 128-9)
Thus, “Gerbert valorises the masculine authority of clerkly textuality over the maternal authority
insistently and provocatively placed by Chrétien in opposition to the values of Arthurian
chivalry” (Hinton 129). Granted, the image of Gerbert notifying the reader of Chrétien’s passing
may, or may not, immediately call to every reader’s mind Perceval weeping at his mother’s tomb,
for narrative satisfaction in Guillaume de Lorris’s text, we still see a similar excessive
participatory desire at play when Jean de Meun delays closure. Though it could be argued that
Jean’s focus on Bel Acueil splits the narrative and functions along the lines of the two narrative
strands in the Conte du Graal. In Foucaultian terms, Chrétien, but not Guillaume, is in this way
“transdiscursive”; that is, he has created “the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other
texts… [and] established an endless possibility of discourse” (Foucault 131).
151
but the “reassuring narrative of clerkly continuity” does have a feeling of truth in it, and Gerbert
aligns the clerkly and textual with Arthurian chivalry itself. How this continuity of writers is
achieved, though, is hardly a simple matter. Hinton later tells us “The moments in which the
different writers invoke their role in the cycle’s creation bear witness to a desire for their
contribution to be recognised as legitimately continuing the given textual past” (161). Though
this is not necessarily a desire for their contribution to be recognized as theirs; that is, the first
continuators remain anonymous.
10
Wachier de Denain, Gerbert, and Manessier, on the other
hand, do name themselves and appropriate varying amounts of the Conte du Graal as their own,
and this seems to signal a shift from participatory continuation to conclusion. Here Tether’s
categorical divisions may prove useful, but first we should consider the manner in which these
writers legitimize their contributions to the growing body of text.
Changes in authorship are rarely, if ever, marked at the moment they occur. Gerbert
names himself after he has added several hundred verses; in the second continuation Wauchier
de Denain waits even longer; Manessier does the same (Bruckner 60-2). In completing another
work attributed to Chrétien, Godefroi de Leigni informs the reader toward the end of Le Chevalier
de la Charrette that he has taken over and finished the work with Chrétien’s permission and under
his direction (Bruckner 33, 36, 42). Jean de Meun, too, delays his revelation of a change in
authorhip for several thousand lines. Jean quotes Guillaume’s final lines, which makes it possible
to go back and find the place where the Jean’s text begins, and the Conte du Graal and Rose
manuscripts themselves show varying degrees of concern over these changes in authorship.
Illustrations and rubrications sometimes, but not always, inform the reader that a new writer is
10
It is highly unlikely that only two individuals are responsible for the text of what are considered
the first two continuation. The first continuation alone exists in three separate forms—the short,
mixed, and long redactions—and so it is more likely that these are the work of multiple writers,
regardless of whether we choose to call them scribes, redactors, editors, compilers, etc.
152
taking over as it happens, but the important point here is that the writers themselves are doing
something quite different. Rather than announce the end of one writer’s text and the beginning
of another’s, the convention appears to be to simply continue seamlessly and then announce a
change in authorship retroactively. On a second read, or when a scribe is copying a manuscript,
the reader will know, if she remembers or bothers to look back, where the change occurs; on a
first read, however, this creates a kind of bait-and-switch.
11
So why delay one’s own introduction?
The prevailing assumption is that the delay creates continuity between the first text and
the continuation, thereby appropriating the authority of the original, as the reader has already
accepted the continuation’s validity for thousands of lines before learning of the authorial
changeover. Rather than going back to the end of the original and disavowing all that comes
after, the new author is retroactively recognized.
From the writers’ perspective, there appears to be a difference, unaccounted for in
current scholarship, between the anonymous and named continuators of the Conte du Graal.
Bruckner points out, with qualifications, that “it is generally accepted that anonymous constitutes
the degree zero of vernacular writers in the Middle Ages” (33).
12
Within the Conte du Graal
continuations, the first continuation remains anonymously authored and three writers name
themselves, and it appears that they are doing so for specific reasons. That is, the act of self-
naming appears to be contingent upon a desire to bring the entire narrative of the Graal cycle to a
conclusion. This is perhaps where we may most productively combine Bruckner’s “author relays”
11
At least with respect to Chrétien’s Conte du Graal and Le Chevalier de la Charrette, where the reader
believes she is reading a romance by Chrétien de Troyes. Obviously this would not necessarily be
the case with an “anonymous” text like the Rose, where the author remains unnamed until nearly
the end.
12
Her qualification: “though in certain generic contexts, this may be debatable: consider the
hundreds of troubadours and trouvères named in lyric manuscripts” (33-4). Even outside these
“certain generic contexts,” though, there are enough exceptions to say that anonymous is one
authorial mode among others, rather than the dominant one.
153
and Tether’s taxonomy of continuating sub-genres. Bruckner’s chapter title proposes “an image
of successive figures—having some yet to be determined relation to the author—who, like
runners, pass along the baton of the text. The shared text is thereby enabled to complete a
trajectory from start to finish, beginning to end” (32). As previously mentioned, I believe this
imposes too much common intentionality on the individual writers. That is, Chrétien passed the
baton by dying, rather than through any intention of beginning a collective cycle;
13
Manessier
barely acknowledges the previous writers, and clearly has no intention of passing the baton to
anyone else, as we will soon see. Yet the anonymous writers in the middle do seem to revel in the
“clerkly continuity” of shared composition.
14
The first continuation focuses on the Graal’s minor characters, a move set up by
Chrétien’s use of Perceval and Gauvain as dual-protagonists, but one clearly not designed to
bring the Graal narrative to a satisfying conclusion.
15
This is the most idiosyncratic of the
continuations, as it “dispenses with Perceval altogether, finding that the adventures of other
characters provide more scope for its project of narrative invention from scratch” (Hinton 141-2).
For Hinton, this “suggests a deliberate aim on the part of the First Continuator to demonstrate
the extent to which continuation can free itself from the strictures of narrative precedent in its
13
The baton image more perfectly fits Chrétien’s Le Chevalier de la Charrette, in which we are told
Chrétien handed off the text to Godefroi de Leigni. See Bruckner 33, 36-7.
14
The dark side of continuation, of course, is the blockbuster phenomenon. Major studio film
trilogies, now going a step further and dividing the final installment into multiple releases, are
also acts of continuation. Here the motive is not to build community, but rather profit by
delivering more of the same, more of what proved profitable in the past. Mass market genre
fiction series can be seen in this light, as well, churning out proven plotlines and familiar
characters. Which is not to say there is no pleasure in genre fiction, but it is a pleasure
recuperated by the publishing industry at the expense of anything, or anyone, new.
15
Tether classifies this as “prolongation,” which she defines as an extension that does not
advance the narrative—assuming that there is privileged narrative throughout the continuation.
For the clearest articulation of her taxonomy, see the table at the opening of her concluding
chapter, p. 191.
154
drive to generate additional material” (136). And this has been naturalized by the inclusion of the
first continuation throughout the manuscript tradition, but it is actually a radical, individual
move to “continue” the Graal narrative via an at best tangentially-related narrative. Yet the first
continuator(s) remain anonymous, so the deeply idiosyncratic choice of material is not a call for
personal recognition. The second continuation, attributed to Wauchier de Denain, brings the
narrative back to Chrétien’s main protagonists but does not pursue narrative resolution. And so
the anonymous contributions appear to privilege the amassed bulk of text over the individuals
involved in its production.
Gerbert and Manessier, by contrast, both name themselves in their respective
contributions and, to differing degrees, attempt to bring the narrative to a conclusion. This drive
toward completion is thus bound up with the individual author, as though a discreet textual
object should be linked to a named authority. As we have seen, Gerbert’s act of self-naming
recognizes Chrétien’s death as “the lack which justifies, even demands, the existence of an
authorial descendant” (Hinton 161). Yet while Gerbert’s text moves the narrative toward closure,
it does not offer an ultimate conclusion with respect to Perceval’s grail quest, which has been
taken to be the primary narrative thread.
16
Manessier, on the other hand, is determined to bring
the entire corpus of the Conte du Graal to a close, and in doing so he “seems inclined to enhance
his own status as author by covering over possible interventions between himself and Chrétien”
(Bruckner 58). And indeed, Manessier even declines to mention Chrétien himself by name in his
epilogue (Bruckner 54). As Hinton describes:
16
Perceval is seen as the main character by both modern and, apparently, medieval audiences,
though modern scholars are quick to point out that Chrétien devotes significantly more lines to
Gauvain.
155
Instead, he focuses attention on his patroness Jeanne de Flandres, in whose name,
he declares, he has completed his book, author and patron thus sharing
responsibility for the text. Chrétien’s prologue dedicates the text to Phillipe de
Flandres, Jeanne’s paternal great-uncle, whom he claims provided him with the
source book for the tale. Manessier’s epilogue mirrors the prologue in linking the
value of the text with that of the patron, whose qualities he extols at some length.
(129)
Manessier thus transfers the Conte’s authority from the writers producing it to the patrons
supporting it and “plays down any notion of agency on the part of the original writer” (Hinton
129). If Manessier’s gesture effaces the contributors between himself and Chrétien, it not only
places him on par with Chrétien but also creates an external authority that supersedes them
both.
17
Any “clerkly continuity” that has been established by Gerbert seems obliterated at first
blush, but in actuality the entire clerkly enterprise is collectively subordinated to the authorizing
patrons and the fictitious original source book. Thus:
Authors, continuators, redactors, interpolators, scribes, and compilers,
individually identified often enough to make us aware that we should not assume,
as Manessier’s epilogue seems to, the absence of different hands even where
anonymous writes silently [sic]: all these contributors work together to build
collective authorship. (Bruckner 59)
And this collective—not collaborative—authorship is made possible as much by acts of self-
naming as it is by subordinations and denials of individual authority.
17
Bruckner claims Manessier’s “omission [of Chrétien’s name] has the advantage of placing him
in Chrétien’s position, that of any commissioned writer needful of pleasing a patron. Better to
leave out the original, authorizing actor/auctor/autor and grab the borrowed prestige of count and
countess” (Bruckner 55, emphasis in original).
156
TO BE CONTINUED
The question of authorship in the Roman de la Rose is on the surface straightforward enough,
particularly in contrast to the accumulated mass of the Conte du Graal continuations: the Rose is a
poem written by Guillaume de Lorris circa 1230, and a second, much longer poem by Jean de
Meun which continues the first and presents the whole as a completed work. Or, more
eloquently, as noted by a 14
th
century scribe, since Guillaume’s poem “pleased so many people,
master Jean Chopinel of Meun decided to complete the book and continue its matter (Et pour que
la matiere embelissoit a plusors, il plot a maistre Jean Chopinel de Meun a parfaire le livre et a ensivre la matiere)”
(quoted in Heller-Roazen 1). As with Gerbert’s continuation of the Graal, here Guillaume’s death
necessitates the completion of his work. Simple enough, and yet these two contradictory goals of
completion and continuation at work in Jean’s portion of the Rose raise more problems than they
solve, especially in light of the complete absence of evidence that Guillaume considered his work
unfinished. For David Hult, “the Roman de la Rose presents a particularly complicated example of
a very common literary modality in the thirteenth century: the continuation” (69). One place
where this complication arises is in Jean’s manner of appropriation and continuation, and the
manner in which he identifies the dual-authorship of the whole text; for one, as opposed to the
Conte du Graal, the originating text is not associated with a well-known writer. For another thing,
while in both cases the continuation is much larger than the originating text, the Rose
continuation is the work of a single writer. The Rose is thus a much more individualized project
that nevertheless proved to be immensely popular, and raises similar questions of authority and
closure.
If patrons and a fictitious source text provide the external authorizing force for the Conte
du Graal and its continuations, the dream sequence similarly authorizes the Roman de la Rose.
Guillaume de Lorris’s text remains an anonymously authored narrative account of a dream, in
157
which the first-person Amant falls hopelessly in love with a rose in the Garden of Delight and
attempts to capture this rose. The completed state of Guillaume’s text has been up for debate
since the 13
th
century, but what we can say for certain is that within Guillaume’s portion of the
Rose, Amant is not successful in his quest for the rose. An anonymous continuator quickly solved
the problem in less than 70 lines and brought the quest to a conclusion, and this continuation
appears in eight manuscripts (Brook 389-90). By far the most satisfying “conclusion,” though,
based on the manuscript evidence, is Jean de Meun’s. Written sometime around 1270, Jean’s text
dwarfs Guillaume’s: Jean takes Guillaume’s dream of Amant and the rose as a prompt, a
jumping-off point for an encyclopedic endeavor of his own before finally bringing the quest for
the rose to its conclusion. Not only was the Roman de la Rose one of the most popular texts in
Medieval literature, but of the more than 200 extant manuscripts only one bears no trace of
Jean’s addition. Complicating matters further, Guillaume’s original is not independently
verifiable, as only one extant manuscript “bears no trace of Jean’s continuation” (Hult 21). And
since Guillaume does not name himself, it seems “extremely improbable that the name
‘Guillaume de Lorris’ was ever associated with the Roman de la Rose before Jean de Meun’s
continuation was attached to the poem” (Hult 20). Peter Haidu goes so far as to as to suggest the
name Guillaume de Lorris was an invention of Jean’s, and the text credited to Guillaume was an
earlier text of Jean’s own (216). This takes speculation perhaps a bit too far, but nevertheless
illustrates the difficulties raised by the encounter with an unknown name. Given the manuscript
evidence, however, we must consider the Rose as a whole, a collectively-authored continuation
that nevertheless was received as a single textual object.
Jean’s continuation follows the pattern we have already seen with the Graal continuations
and Le Chevalier de la Charrette; that is, Jean picks up the narrative left by Guillaume without
comment and continues for thousands of lines before announcing an earlier change in
158
authorship. Unlike these other continuations, though, this cannot be an attempt to appropriate
the authority of an earlier, more established writer like Chrétien, as Guillaume’s text was
anonymous. Instead, Jean retroactively identifies Guillaume as the writer of the first portion of
the Rose and credits him with beginning the narrative. Jean’s metatextual move in identifying
himself and Guillaume, however, displaces both writers from the narrating first-person of the
poem, leaving the first-person pronoun vacant, and at the same time establishing the empty first-
person pronoun as the authorizing force behind the Rose itself.
In one of the more in-depth discussions of the narrative first-person to date, Daniel
Heller-Roazen argues the Rose’s “I” represents a contingent literary subjectivity, one that
“coincides with that of the poetic text” itself (34). For Heller-Roazen, the Rose “distinguishes itself,
among medieval works, as a narrative recounted by an ‘I’ in which the first-person pronoun
functions as something other than the sign of a single, actual, and existing individual” (34).
Heller-Roazen sees a split in the first-person from the opening lines, where the narrator begins by
announcing the romance as an account of a dream, as the narrating subject is both the “I” of the
telling and the past “I” in the dream.
18
The transition between Guillaume’s text and Jean’s
continuation is more to the point here, and Heller-Roazen begins his analysis at the nearly
seamless suture between the two:
In the vast majority of the medieval manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose, the text of
Guillaume’s romance was clearly distinguished from that of Jean de Meun’s
continuation. Placed after a rubric marking the end of the first part of the
romance, the opening verses of the continuation would almost always have been
18
For more on the mise en abîme of the prologue, see Heller-Roazen 35-41. For the temporally
split subject, see Heller-Roazen 42-45.
159
immediately identifiable as the work of the poem’s second author, long before the
text itself announces the substitution of Guillaume by Jean. (Heller-Roazen 46)
19
Clearly this is a scribal response to an authorial non-intervention. The extremity of that response,
though, is of course up for debate. That “the vast majority” of the manuscripts mark the division
between writers shows that the distinction was a common concern of scribes at the time; but one
cannot know if this meant the scribes were deeply disturbed by Jean’s lack of demarcation at the
point of transition, if they considered it a matter of convenience for themselves and future
readers, or if it was simply an opportunity to add a decorative flourish to the manuscript.
In light of the textual demarcation of the manuscript rubrication, Heller-Roazen reads a
further split in the narrative “I” at the point of transition: “the words ‘l’ai je perdue,’ situated
after an interruption in the text of the romance and at the start of a continuation, can be read to
mark the loss of continuity of the poem itself” (47). But Heller-Roazen is reading the
“interruption” of the scribal rubrication as authorial; that is, as a conscious move on Jean’s part
rather than the scribes that came after him. Jean’s transition itself, however, is not such an
obvious rupture. Guillaume’s final lines read:
Ja mes n’iert rien qui me confort
se je pert vostre bienveillance,
car je n’ai mes aillors fiance. (4056-8)
(If I lose your good will, there will never be any comfort for me, since I have no
confidence elsewhere.) (88)
20
Then Jean’s first lines following Guillaume read:
19
For more on manuscript rubrication in this context, see Lori Walters, “Author Portraits and
Textual Demarcation in Manuscripts of the Romance of the Rose” 359.
20
Unless otherwise noted, all French citations to the Roman de la Rose refer to Langlois, and
English translations refer to The Romance of the Rose, translated by Charles Dahlberg.
160
Et si l’ai je perdue, espoir,
a poi que ne m’en desespoir. (Vv. 4059-60)
(And perhaps I have lost it; I am ready to despair of it.) (91)
Far from indicating a separation from Guillaume’s text, the conjunction binds the parts together,
and the continued focus on loss further reinforces the movement of Guillaume’s text into Jean’s.
As opposed to saying “but I have not lost your good will,” and immediately taking the narrative
in his own direction, Jean continues on the trajectory set forth by Guillaume before slowly
altering course. This is by no means to suggest Jean intends to hide the change in authorship
from readers; far from it, he explicitly quotes these lines in the later scene of self-naming. What I
do mean to point out, though, is that Jean wants to identify Guillaume and himself much later
than at the actual point of transition, and on his own terms.
And these terms turn out to be truly bizarre. Jean chooses to stage the scene of self-
naming in such a way that both actual writers are displaced from the act of narration. Unlike the
Conte du Graal, a third-person narrative variously authorized by a fictitious source text, patronage,
or the authority of Chrétien himself, as a first-person narrative the Rose authorizes itself through
fidelity to the asserted truth of the anonymous narrator’s dream:
Aucunes genz dient qu’en songes
n’a se fables non et mençonges;
mes l’en puet tex songes songier
qui ne sont mie mençongier. (1-4)
(Some say that there is nothing in dreams but fables and lies, but one may have
dreams which are not at all deceitful.) (31).
161
Instead of claiming the first-person narrator’s position for himself, Jean has Amors introduce
both Guillaume and himself (Jean) to the reader as separate from the narrator, Amant. By way of
introduction, Amors states:
Vez ci Guillaume de Lorriz,
…
E plus encor me deit servir,
Car, pour ma grace deservir,
Deit il commencier le romant
Ou seront mis tuit mi comant,
E jusque la le fournira
Ou il a Bel Acueil dira… (10526, 10547-52)
(Here is Guillaume de Lorris… He should serve me still more, for, to merit my
grace, he is to begin the romance in which all my commandments will be set
down, and he will finish it up to the point where he will say to Fair Welcoming…)
(187)
Amors directly quotes the last lines of Guillaume’s text, then says: “Ci se reposera Guillaume”
(“Here Guillaume shall rest”) (10561, 187). Continuing, Amors then introduces Jean:
Puis vendra Johans Chopinel
Au cueur joli, au cors inel,
Qui naistra seur Liere a Meün,
Qui a saoul e a jeün
Me swervira toute sa vie,
…
Cist avra le romanz si chier
162
Qu’il le vourdra tout parfenir,
Se tens e leus l’en peut venir,
Car, quant Guillaumes cessera,
Johans le continuera,
Emprès sa mort, que je ne mente,
Anz trespassez plus de quarante,
E dira pour la mescheance… (10565-69, 10584-91)
(Then will come Jean Chopinel with gay heart and lively body. He will be born at
Meung-sur-Loire; he will serve me his whole life… He will be so fond of the
romance that he will want to finish it right to the end, if time and place can be
found. For when Guillaume shall cease, more than forty years after his death—
may I not lie—Jean will continue it…) (187-8)
Amors then directly quotes the opening lines of Jean’s portion of the Rose, and repeats several
times over that Jean is not present, as he has yet to be born. Service to Amors, and love of the
romance now being told—itself a service to Amors—are thus ostensibly the motivating forces
behind carrying the Roman de la Rose to its conclusion.
Heller-Roazen is here exactly right in his assessment of the first-person pronoun:
[Which] is at once identified and unidentified, rendered definite and indefinite in
its simultaneous reference to at least three figures: a dead poet, “Guillaume de
Lorriz”; a poet to come, “Jehan de Meun”; and, finally, a poetic figure situated
beyond life, death, and survival, in a singular space of the simultaneous
recollection and anticipation of the absent, cited, romant. (54, emphasis in original)
According to Amors, it is temporally impossible for either of the named writers to be responsible
for the text in front of the reader. Guillaume is dead long before this point in the narrative, and
163
as we are repeatedly told, Jean has yet to be born. Jean is credited with recording the narrative
from his first lines through to the end of the romance, but he is barred from occupying the first-
person pronoun; Jean is not yet born at this point when Amors introduces Guillaume and
prophesizes Jean’s birth to this still-anonymous narrator. Thus the text of the Rose in front of the
reader, “paradoxically, is at once before and beyond itself. Preceding itself in the form of
prophecy and succeeding itself in the form of citation” (Heller-Roazen 52). Which leaves it not
only differentiated from itself, as Heller-Roazen points out, but it also authorizes itself
independent of any individual writer.
Now, as interesting as these theoretical complexities are in their own right, it is necessary
to remember that the Roman de la Rose does not, in fact, actually authorize itself; nor does it in
actuality exist outside or before itself. The Rose simply is the extant manuscripts. Yet Jean,
through the mouthpiece of Amors, presents it as such. Jean constructs the narrator’s dream and
the Roman de la Rose as external to the process of writing, thereby making the act of original
composition an impossibility, even as he himself is in the process of radically appropriating
Guillaume’s earlier text. But while this negative authorial gesture allows Jean to shape the Rose as
he wishes, it comes at a price. Heller-Roazen ultimately determines that:
the “I” shows itself here as the fundamental persona of the poem, in the original
Latin meaning of the word. It is that which lends a face and a form to what has
none, that which, n a continuous play of metanomasia, naming and unnaming, gives
heteronyms and pseudonyms to what is anonymous. It is that through which the
speaker of the poem, in sounding the voices of the many figures of the Roman de la
Rose, articulates his infinite noncoincidence with himself. (53, emphasis in original)
And I agree that the first-person pronoun, and thereby the Rose itself, functions as an alibi for the
individual writer, but it is not exactly the case that the “I” is a mask that anyone can wear. Again,
164
in Heller-Roazen’s words, the subject is “always the placeholder for another subject” (Heller-
Roazen 54). That is to say, the “I” is always someone other than the person writing (or
continuing) the Roman de la Rose. Writing, continuing, editing, rubricating, etc. are authorized by
the supposed truth of the dream narrative, but the twist is that the content of that supposed truth
is itself objectively unverifiable. Anyone who loves the Rose enough can claim to know the truth of
Amors.
Future alterations are also authorized, as David Hult points out, by Jean’s precedent,
including that of one scribe named Gui de Mori. This “precedent, established by Jean and
elaborated by Gui, prepares the way for a potentially infinite chain of future continuator/editors
who will successively renew the fiction and replace the previous controlling subjects” (Hult 49).
Gui extensively reworked the Rose in two manuscripts based on his own interpretations,
21
and yet
he, too, claims he is serving Amors and acting from a love for the Rose: “Gui’s final move, again
foreshadowed by Jean de Meun, consists of the total insertion of the author into the romance
fiction, the very fictionalization of his own persona” (Hult 49). In the scene of authorial self-
naming, Gui has Amors prophesy his own contribution along with Jean’s:
“uns autres vendra;” “Assés tenra bien mes conmans;” “Et vaura as amans
aprendre;” “Sour tous romans il amera/Ce roumans, et l’amendera.” (“Another
one will come;” “Quite well will he keep to my commandments;” “And he will
wish to teach lovers;” “Above all romances he will love this one and will improve
upon it.”) (quoted in Hult 48-9)
Gui continues, expressing his hopes for a literary reputation:
21
For an extensive discussion of Gui’s reading and reworking of Jean’s text in MS Tournai, Bibl.
de la Ville 101 (MS Tou) and the now-lost MS known as Ter, see Huot 85-129. For Gui’s changes
to Amors’ discourse specifically, see Huot 93-105.
165
On ora de lui mention
En l’an de l’incarnation
Mil et II
c
et quatrevins
Et dis, desci en sui devins.
Guis de Moiri avra a non,
Mais il n’ert pas de tel regnon
Com cis Jehans ne chil Guillaumes.
(One will hear talk of him in 1290 A.D. I know of this by divination. He will be
called Gui de Mori but he will not be of such renown as Jean or Guillaume.)
(quoted in Hult 49)
While this appears to be a disavowal of authority, following Amors’ commandments is a highly
subjective—and authoritative—act, as the individual writers have Amors conveniently command
whatever it is that they wish to do. And any textual intervention thus by necessity becomes an
improvement, as it more correctly conforms to Amors’ real meaning as determined by the writer.
Gui’s prologue announces his intentions in this respect:
Mais sauf ce ke ja empiree
Ne sera par moi ne quassee
L’ententions ne la mataire,
Tant i vaurai je dou mien faire
C’aucune cose en osterai,
Aucune cose i meterai,
Si en sera plus entendables
Et a oïr plus delitables.
166
(However, having taken care that the [work’s] intended meaning and subject
matter will neither be worsened nor destroyed by me, I will add so much of my
own composition to it, taking out some things and putting in others, that it will be
more accessible and more enjoyable to listen to.) (quoted in Hult 35, emphasis in
original)
As Hult explains, Gui’s “immediate purpose was to supplement (and not supplant) the Rose text as
a means of making it more accessible, and therefore more enjoyable, to future readers” (34-5).
22
Accessibility is perhaps not the right word, at least as we commonly consider it, as Gui’s editorial
strategy follows a supplemental logic of continuation in which excess and accumulation are
privileged over continuity and readability.
Hult convincingly argues that “Gui de Mori seems initially to have known the Rose poem
as the first part [Guillaume’s text], completed by the ‘anonymous conclusion,’ presumably as the
text is copied in B.N. f. fr. 12786” (39). Gui thus seems to have believed Guillaume’s text, along
with the anonymous conclusion, formed a completed poem before ever encountering Jean’s
continuation. In Hult’s view, Gui believed Guillaume’s Rose was complete, and furthermore
believed Jean also knew of Guillaume’s Rose, including the anonymous continuation, as
complete.
23
Again according to Hult, “Gui pursues his conviction of the integrity and completion
of Guillaume’s text to such an extent that he accuses Jean de Meun of the ‘crime’ of literary
dismemberment… [and] interprets Jean’s assertions of the incompleteness of the first Roman de la
22
It should be noted that this is itself highly subjective, as textual difficulty and inaccessibility
could easily be what is enjoyable about a text in the first place.
23
According to Gui:
“… oste le fin du Rommant maistre Guillaume, por ce qu’il se vantoit closement
que s’amie estoit à lui venue.” (“… he [Jean] eliminates the end of Master
Guillaume’s Romance, because of the fact that he was secretly boasting that his
amie had come over to him.”) (quoted in Hult 39-40)
167
Rose as a mere pretext, an excuse for his own continuation” (39-40). Gui’s assessment may seem
self-contradictory, if not outright hypocritical, given his own use of the text as pretext for editorial
interventions. A broader look at Gui’s supplementary strategy, however, will show that his
complaint is likely not that Jean continued Guillaume’s Rose, but instead only that Gui believed
Jean cut off the end of Guillaume’s text (the anonymous continuation). It is this idea of
intentionally leaving anything out that likely bothered Gui.
24
Gui’s work on the Rose is truly unique among medieval manuscripts. MS Tou, one of four
surviving manuscripts that contain Gui’s reworking of Jean’s text, “does not necessarily date from
Gui’s lifetime” (Huot 87), but does provide a clear example of Gui’s authorial/editorial strategy:
“What makes MS Tou unique is its system of marginal annotations, explained in the prologue”
(Huot 87). These intricate marginal annotations indicate where additions, deletions, and changes
have been made by Gui:
As a result of this system, the manuscript not only transmits a particular version of
the Rose, but also provides a map of the ongoing processes of interpolation,
abridgment, and restoration that characterize both the activity of remaniement
and the Rose manuscript tradition in general. The marginal signs allow each
24
We can already see this in Gui’s handling of the transition between Guillaume and Jean. Gui
presents Guillaume’s text along with the anonymous continuation, which he likely believed to be
Guillaume’s original ending, then introduces Jean:
A maistre Jehan me voel traire
de Meun, ki a autrement
Fait fin sur ce commencement,
Et voel chi escrire ses dis
Seclonc les singnes deseurdis.
(I wish to pass over to master Jean de Meun, who constructed another sort of
ending upon this beginning, and here I wish to write down his sayings according
to the above-mentioned signs.) (quoted in Hult 40)
168
reader or copyist to construct his or her own version of the Rose: interpolations can
be kept or omitted, deletions can be left out or taken back. (Huot 87)
Following Jean, Gui does open the text to an infinite number of future authors, scribes, and
continuators to add themselves to the history of the text at the scene of self-naming. More than
that, though, Gui’s project creates a repository of material that can be developed, altered, or
abridged according to the sensibilities of any individual writer. Fidelity to the Rose itself remains
the authorizing force, at least theoretically, though in practice the ultimate control over the text
rests with whoever happens to be the last person in the chain of transmission. Huot makes a case
for Gui’s status as an author of the Rose, somewhat along the lines of Gui’s claim for his own
authority—an author, though not of such stature as Guillaume and Jean (Huot 89- 93). Hult,
along similar lines, considers Gui as emblematic of a bridge between authors and scribes (51-3).
He simultaneously “sought to impose a clearer, more linear structure on Jean’s frequently—and
brilliantly—digressive text” (Huot 89), and at the same time marks his additions and deletions so
that Jean’s original could be restored.
25
Gui thus imposes his individual interpretation onto the
Rose, and preserves both the original as well as the textual history of its production and
subsequent alteration.
THE END
In the context of the Roman de la Rose and the Conte du Graal continuations, we can legitimately ask
what constitutes a finished text and a satisfying conclusion. In both cases the driving narrative
force is a quest: Perceval’s quest for the grail; Amant’s quest to capture the rose. And in both
25
An exception is re-ordering: Gui “moves whole blocks of text to new locations, a type of
alteration not identified by any marginal sign” (Huot 89).
169
cases the quest was left unfinished by the first writer.
26
Also in both cases, the continuations are
far in excess of what was required for a successful conclusion to the quest narrative.
27
Enjoyment
is one way to conceptualize this excess, and specifically I would like to borrow David Rollo’s term
“deferred pleasure,”
28
as both a deferral of the pleasure found in narrative resolution and the
textual pleasure of the deferral itself, and it gets to the heart of Jean’s encyclopedically digressive
continuation. This is most clearly articulated through the mouthpiece of Reason, and primarily
at issue is the nature of figurative language itself; Jean’s two interrelated arguments first elevate
the vernacular to the level of Latin, then conceive of an interpretive pleasure in figurative
language that is unavailable in more straightforward, direct writing.
Amant’s delicacy with respect to Reason’s use of the word “coilles” (balls) in reference to
the fable of Saturn’s castration is, as Rollo and others have pointed out, a problem of confusing
the linguistic signifier with the sign (as well as a confusion of figural language, as we shall see in a
moment). Rollo convincingly demonstrates that Jean places himself at the center of an ideological
shift in the status of both fiction and vernacular language, and that Amant’s first encounter with
Reason is a debate over linguistic signification.
29
In the Rose, “speech becomes an emphatic
26
David Hult’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecies claims that Guillaume’s text was, in fact, complete on its
own terms, and it is true that not all goals need to be achieved for a narrative to conclude. That
Amant does not attain the rose is not, to my mind, proof that Guillaume’s text is unfinished,
though the fact that Amant does not wake up and close the dream frame is. The manuscript
evidence, too, testifies to Jean’s continuation being an integral part of the Rose.
27
While wildly anachronistic, there is a Derridean archival quality to the medieval continuation,
as the mere existence of an archive always anticipates the next entry and is therefore, by
definition, never complete. In this sense, there is always another character to develop, always
another point of view from which the narrative can be told, always a gap that can be filled.
28
Enjoyment is perhaps too freighted a word, as it is occasionally used as the English translation
of Lacan’s jouissance, though the obsessively repetitive quality of jouissance applies as well. Rollo has
used “deferred pleasure” as the title of a course taught at the University of Southern California in
2008.
29
Reason is the first character to converse with Amant after Jean assumes authorship, so this
debate sets the stage for all that follows in Jean’s continuation. See also, Rollo 175.
170
concern of the characters and their author [Jean], and this speech achieves such importance
because, to use Amant’s expression, it is couched ‘not in Latin, but in French’ (‘non en latin, mes
en françois; [5810])” (Rollo 168). The repeated emphasis on the French language in the
conversation between Amant and Reason constructs an argument “that French can rival Latin in
its semiotic potential and sonorous versatility” (Rollo 177).
30
Thus, as Reason goes on to claim,
the words she has been using, which Amant finds inappropriate for a woman, and “all of which
Reason cites as singularly pleasing, are beautiful particulars of French, and not of Latin or any
other language” (Rollo 180).
Tangentially, as Reason elevates the potential of the vernacular, she also advances an
argument for the value of fiction:
“Bien l’entendras, se bien repetes
les integumanz aus poetes.
La verras une grant partie
des secrez de philosophie
ou mout te vodras deliter,
et si porras mout profiter:
en delitant profiteras,
en profitant deliteras;
car en leur geus et en leur fables
gisent deliz mout profitables
souz cui leur pensees covrirent,
quant le voir des fables vestirent.”
30
For further elaboration on Reason’s linguistic argument, and Amant’s repeated references to
the French language, see Rollo 177-80.
171
“This you will well understand if you carefully think back over the integuments of
poets. There you will see a large part of the secrets of philosophy, from which you
will want to take great pleasure and be able to gain great profit. From pleasure
you will profit and from profit gain pleasure. Beneficial delights lie in the
diversions and fables of poets and beneath them they cower their thoughts when
the clothe the truth in fables.” (7137-48, quoted in Rollo 180-1).
Not only does this truth in the diversions of fables recall Guillaume’s opening lines, in which he
asserts that not all dreams lie, but it also stakes a claim to the pleasure of interpretation: “Reason
conceives of the poetic integument as more than simply a veil that my be lifted to reveal the
hidden contours of truth. She presents it as a source of deliz” (Rollo 181, italics in original). Rollo
goes on to point out that deliz is a loaded word in Reason’s vocabulary, as it also appears in her
earlier speech on the kinds of sexual pleasures Amant should avoid. That Reason here
encourages Amant to enjoy this same deliz in poetic fables shows that Reason—and by extension,
Jean—relocates pleasure from the site of the body to the realm of mental activity, and specifically
the literary realm of interpretation. Rollo’s close-reading thoroughly documents this relocation,
revealing Bel Acueil to be the personified locus of this sexualized interpretive pleasure. For
interpretation to be possible in the first place, though, language must signify on multiple levels,
which Reason asserts is the case when she chooses to speak of “coillons” figuratively at one time
and literally at another (Rollo 192).
In the post-lapsarian, post-Babelic position that Reason, Amant, and we find ourselves,
we have lost any idealized direct connection between words and the things they signify, and this
gap between signifier and signified is in fact what makes figurative language—and thus the act
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(and necessity) of interpretation possible.
31
And yet one of the consolations for the loss of Edenic
fullness is the pleasure of art, “the chaste principle of intellectual gratification that Reason
associates with the act of reading” (Rollo 194).
32
But reading obviously requires a text to read,
and interpretation requires a text that signifies on both a literal and at least one additional,
figurative, level. With the Rose, Jean thereby provides some of the few benefits to be enjoyed after
the Fall: namely, narrative desire and interpretive pleasure. And while I see this as altruistic, it is
also more than a little self-congratulatory:
Jean places himself into a glorious tradition of post-lapsarian artistry. Jean and
Ovid are of course, love poets and, in the Rose itself, Amors associates them with
one another for being so, naming both, alongside Guillaume, in the tradition of
literary accomplishment that extends from the classical past to the present.
Produced of the verbal arts within a continuum of glorious creativity, the very text
we read is a consequence of and reaction to the fall Genius narrates.
33
(Rollo 195)
Yet while he places himself within this tradition and associates himself with a broader community
of artists, he also creates a community of future readers bound by their desire to read and
interpret the Rose. As Rollo points out, one of the pleasures of the Rose is “that of the reader, who
follows Amant’s narrative to its closure and submits it to interpretation” (200).
Jean ensures that the reader will feel compelled to perform this interpretation as well, as
he promises to “clarify what troubles you when you hear me expound the dream” (quoted in
31
See also Rollo, 184-188; Brownlee and Huot, 9; Hult “Language and Dismemberment”
32
See also Rollo, 198-9.
33
Furthermore, Rollo continues, the Rose itself:
is also an instance of writing that, according to Reason, at times does not yield its
immediate sense: the very fact that ‘coilles,’ when first mentioned, are not to be
taken literally locates meaning elsewhere. In this way the romance also
participates in the parabolic discourse from which, Reason states, hidden
significance is to be retrieved and the deliz of interpretation gained. (195)
173
Rollo, 200).
34
Jean thus raises the expectation that a clarification will be required, and that the
reader will finally understand only after “you hear me gloss the text” (quoted in Rollo, 200).
35
Yet
this is an empty promise, as “there exists no independent gloss through which Jean clarifies the
import of the romance in the way he here suggests,” and so the reader “will await understanding
only to be frustrated by the author’s resistant lack of cooperation” (Rollo 200-1). Interpretation,
therefore, falls squarely on the reader, and through the indeterminate gender/sexuality of Bel
Acueil, Jean guarantees that interpretation of the Rose will remain open-ended:
For Bel Acueil represents a textuality that is not necessarily bound to the
requirements of speculative thought and that can, if required, function as an
insubordinate medium for nothing more and nothing less than deliz. While the
revelation of truth can potentially stand as the profitable end of any act of
interpretation, in the Rose Jean subordinates the pleasure of univocal significance
to the delight of attempting to locate its presence and of recognizing, if necessary,
the impossibility of doing so. (Rollo 213)
This impossibility of univocal significance is itself a form of continuation, and one that
perpetuates the pleasures of the text. So while Jean does (eventually) bring Amant’s quest to pluck
the rose to a conclusion—delivering the narrative satisfaction we’ve long awaited—he has also
provided a great deal of text in, according to Reason, this singularly beautiful language for us to
enjoy, and the further enjoyment of attempting to determine the significance of what we’ve read.
Toward the end of his analysis, Rollo suggests we are almost necessarily doomed to
incorrectly interpreting the multivalent and ambivalent figure of Bel Acueil, and also the Rose
34
“Et se vos i trovez riens trouble, / g’esclarcirai ce qui vos trouble / quant le songe m’orrez
espondre” (quoted in Rollo 200).
35
“quant le texte m’orrez gloser” (quoted in Rollo 200).
174
itself as a result. But furthermore, Rollo suggests, this failure need not be an obstacle to the
enjoyment the Rose offers. Quite the opposite, actually, as the indeterminacy that forecloses a
final, correct truth of the text democratizes Jean’s readers,
36
opens a space for future scribal
rubrication and glosses, and, as we saw with Jean’s scene of self-naming, suggests a theoretically-
infinite chain of future continuators, all of whom may participate in the textual pleasure of the
Rose. Continuation, in this sense, has an additional benefit over writing “new” or “original”
works: instead of readers fragmenting into small groups, it allows a community of writers and
readers to coalesce around a single, expanding text. The semi-anonymous, collective authorship
of continuation—including rubrication—is one way of joining and reinforcing the “clerkly
continuity” of the literary community. Jean’s continuation is thus exceedingly helpful in this
regard; while we can read the gesture of associating himself with Ovid and a classical literary
tradition as elitist or authoritarian, he at the same time abdicates the position of the narrative
first-person, thereby making the Rose itself the umbrella under which the community of readers,
writers, and scribes operate.
36
See Rollo, 217-8. Particularly:
Under these circumstances, any author of a reading of the Rose (including the
present study and all that precede it) that is deemed deficient stands figuratively to
undergo the punishment Jean has Genius advocate. Since such deficiency is
inevitable, all critics of the Rose, their differences of interpretation (and, perhaps,
personal animosities) notwithstanding, are brought together in the fellowship
afforded by the shared condition of being metaphorically ‘escoilliez’ [castrated].
(218, translation mine)
On castration in Jean de Meun, see also Bloch 137-41.
175
CONCLUSION
THREE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor, a symbol of humankind’s likelihood of immanent self-
annihilation, with midnight signifying total destruction. Created in 1947 by the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board, several members of which worked on the
Manhattan Project, the clock has been adjusted only twenty-two times since its inception. The
safest humanity has been in the nuclear age, according to the Science and Security Board, was at
the end of the Cold War in 1991, when they set the clock to 11:43pm. Our most dangerous
moment was in 1952, after the first U.S. test of a hydrogen bomb, with the clock set to 11:58pm.
On January 22
nd
, 2015, the Science and Security Board moved the clock forward from 11:55pm
to 11:57pm, to reflect the overwhelming threats of climate change, ongoing uncertainty
regarding the global state of nuclear weapons, and several other technological and biomedical
concerns.
1
There can be no doubt that we live in precarious times and that we, collectively,
appear to be moving in the wrong direction.
We face numerous struggles worth fighting: for racial justice; against the gender disparity;
for LGBTQ acceptance; against income inequality and for workers’ rights; against carbon
emissions and climate change; and the list goes on and on. These are collective projects for
liberation from oppressive and exploitative social structures, yet as collective projects they are
undermined by the rhetorics of freedom, open participation, and choice, which we have seen so
easily signify unqualified goods for so many positions along the political spectrum. Freedom from
outside influence and the oppression of others sounds great all around, of course, from the anti-
government libertarian right to the anarchist left. Whether it be freedom from State intrusion
1
For more detail on the Doomsday Clock, see “Overview”; “Timeline”; and Alter.
176
and the tyranny of the masses—the Randian perspective—or freedom from close-minded,
provincial zealots and their oppressive social norms—the identity politics perspective—or the
freedom from capitalist exploitation—the Marxist perspective—these empty signifiers can
accommodate extreme, and extremely contradictory, political objectives. Yet this is an apparent
freedom only, and as we saw particularly in Chapter 2, freedom from one force often leaves us
vulnerable to more pervasive and insidious forms of control. In other words, those in power are
able to mobilize the rhetoric of freedom and choice, secure the support of the very same people
whom they exploit, and thus further consolidate power at the expense of their own supporters.
The rhetoric of freedom and individual liberty, and that of non-hierarchical open participation,
also privilege the individual at the expense of group formation, and so undermine the organized
mobilization of people required for effective collective projects.
And perhaps most problematically, we need not necessarily assign blame to malicious
individuals for the system nevertheless to drag humanity to the grave. Certainly, there are
powerful, selfish people content to serve their own interests without concern for the
consequences, but even for those with good intentions the system encourages an authorial game
of hot potato. The citizenry blames politicians for not representing its interests, while the
politician blames the citizenry for forcing him to take a hard-line, unproductive stance in
opposition to the other major political party. The corporate executive blames his short-sighted
business strategy on the shareholders, who demand ever-increasing quarterly profits, whereas the
shareholders blame the executive’s strategy for tanking the company’s long-term viability. And all
the while the radical Left sits in a corner, feeling betrayed, because the system rolls on
unimpeded.
The preceding chapters outlined a mode of authority based on the ostensible absence of
authority, and the radically-absent author serves two main functions. The first is that it effaces
177
the assertiveness of the individual, and thereby aligns with the values of equal, open participation
and non-hierarchical social organization. The second function, of course, is that it allows an
individual within that decentralized network to passive-aggressively assert authority without
seeming to disrupt the communal values of equality, such as we saw in Wikipedia. Since
radically-absent authority is not anti-authoritarian, and is value-neutral, anyone can occupy the
empty authorial space and deflect blame for their actions onto the system of their choice—as
with the examples of politicians and executives. Thus this form of authority is not naturally
progressive or egalitarian, but rather a form of leadership that can be put into the service of
various political agendas, for various purposes.
Given the very real problems of authoritarian tendencies, inequality, and the sometimes
purposefully deceptive language surrounding both, it is not enough merely to point out the
problem, or to outline the structure of self-effacing, absent authority. We must go a step further,
and explain why and how it is that radically-absent authority has once again become a societal
norm, and how it might be used in the service of progressive, rather than oppressive, causes. And
this goes to the heart of the 2013 skirmish between Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek, regarding
the necessary aims of theory. This has been described as a conflict between Anglo-Saxon and
Continental philosophy, and without doubt personalities also come into play, but at root the
argument is over the value of empirical knowledge and its potential to effect social change.
In an interview, Chomsky accused Žižek, as an exemplary stand-in for Continental
theorists broadly, of empty, nonsensical posturing. Chomsky’s main criticism is that theorists
make abstract claims in over-blown language that cannot be empirically verified:
… I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and
pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no
theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in
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the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you
mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically
testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can
explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. (Chomsky, quoted in Springer)
Žižek responded first by saying that Chomsky has been empirically wrong many times over, and
the back and forth quickly turns to the specifics of historical events that are not relevant here.
Žižek’s more pertinent critique is that it is not enough to know the problems of the world
empirically. As Michael Burgess explains on the Partially Examined Life blog:
This tension lies at the heart of post-Enlightenment philosophy and could be said
to define the trenches between the Analytic and Continental schools: the former
values formalization, empirical demonstration, and metaphysics a hair’s breath
from physics (to preserve the possibility of science…); the latter “human” modes of
reasoning (from the formal to the literary), analysis of the empirical, metaphysics a
hair’s breadth from consciousness (to deprive science omniscience and make
consciousness its pedestal). (Burgess)
Burgess favors Žižek in this equation, and he goes on to explain Žižek’s mode of analysis:
Žižek’s position, common to the continental tradition, is that there is no
“collection of facts” free from ideology: a politicization of Kant’s categories.
Žižek is not aiming to make empirical predictions, his aim is analysis of the very
machinery which selects and performs the empirical predictions. (Burgess)
In Žižek’s own words, on the Verso Books blog, he explains the necessary movement beyond
simply exposing the facts of a given situation:
This, of course, in no way implies that the disclosure and analysis of facts are not
important: one should bring out to light all the details of their atrocious brutality,
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of ruthless economic exploitation, etc.—a job done quite well by Chomsky
himself. However, in order to explain how people often remain within their
ideology even when they are forced to admit facts, one has to supplement
investigation and disclosure of facts by the analysis of ideology which not only
makes people blind to the full horror of facts but also enables them to participate
in activities which generate these atrocious facts while maintaining the appearance
of human dignity. (“Some Bewildered Clarifications”)
In a sense, regardless of political affiliation we all “know” that something is wrong, our
world is going to hell, and there is quite likely a “them” behind the scenes keeping the full truth
from us. And so Chomsky’s underlying conviction is misguided: that if we can simply expose the
truth of the corrupt government or the malicious corporation, then we can channel the sheer
outrage of the populace and force change by protest and other democratic means. Žižek believes
this conviction is naïve, not because of a misplaced faith in the inherent goodness of humanity,
but because of ideology, and specifically the postmodern ideology of an ironic, critical self-
awareness that lies outside of ideology. We are not stupid, after all, and we can see through the
cracks in the system:
My underlying thesis is here that no effective ideology simply lies: an ideology is
never a simple mystification obfuscating the hidden reality of domination and
exploitation; the atrocious reality obfuscated and mystified by an ideology has to
register, to leave traces, in the explicit ideological text itself, in the guise of its
inconsistencies, gaps, etc. (“Some Bewildered Clarifications”)
That is, awareness can no longer be the ultimate solution because we are all already aware of the
problems; the hidden realities show through the inconsistencies and gaps in the ideological
framework. Take for example the Edward Snowden leaks, which revealed the extent of the
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National Security Agency’s surveillance of online activity. The most heartbreaking part of his
story was that, at the end of the day, these revelations were not terribly shocking. Snowden was
only confirming what we, in a vague sense, already knew: our online activity is being watched.
You would have had to be living under a rock, as the saying goes, not to have realized your
online activity was being monitored and monetized. The extent of this surveillance and the
agencies involved were somewhat of a surprise, but the fact of surveillance was not. Quite the
opposite, actually, as it was practically expected. And yet we, as a society, have done little of
substance to effect change. We willingly continue to trade our privacy for small services like
Facebook and Twitter and Gmail, all the while maintaining an ironic, self-aware posture of
knowing: of course they record our activity, but our willing participation somehow neutralizes the
threat to our privacy and democracy. And that is the ideological trap of believing ourselves
outside of ideology
The opening two proems of The Book of Margery Kempe expose these same ideological gaps,
in this case in textual production, as well as Margery’s alienation from her book, as they narrate
the various translations required to bring her book to fruition. Margery first dictates her story, in
no particular order, to a scribe who may or may not be one of her sons. This transcription is so
poorly written as to appear to be in no known language at all, and is unreadable. Upon this
scribe’s death, Margery takes the manuscript to a second scribe. After a period of several years
and many difficulties with the manuscript, this scribe is finally able to render the text into
English, he tells us, through divine intervention. And so while the second scribe testifies to the
veracity of the narrative, we are also at least minimally aware of the multiple obstacles between
Margery’s voice and the text in which she appears as the third-person “this creatur.” We are, in
other words, cut off from any originary authorial verification, and left to take the second scribe at
his word. At a minimum, he re-ordered Margery’s disjointed narrative into what he believed to
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be a chronological account. But while we know that he made changes, we nevertheless cannot
know the extent to which he changed, or authored, her book.
These scribal frames, as well as the insistence on Margery’s illiteracy, may well have been
necessary to authorize both her text and her status as an authentic female mystic. But again, “no
effective ideology simply lies: an ideology is never a simple mystification obfuscating the hidden
reality of domination and exploitation” (“Some Bewildered Clarifications”). The religious, and
male, authorization of The Book of Margery Kempe itself leaves traces of the inaccessible reality
behind it, “in the guise of its inconsistencies, gaps, etc.” (“Some Bewildered Clarifications”). In
one sense it is helpful to remind ourselves of The Book of Margery Kempe’s narration of its own
production, and how Margery herself is excluded. Yet in another sense, this reminder is
superfluous: it critiques neither religion nor patriarchy, as the origin-narrative already
demonstrates the exclusions of those ideologies quite explicitly. Awareness of these limits to
authority and textual stability is a necessary first step, but the real critique lies elsewhere, in the
work of interpretation. And this kind of interpretation, grasping at an ultimately unattainable
truth, is the kind Jeun de Meun invites in the Roman de la Rose.
Simple awareness can thus no longer be an ultimate answer to social injustice. But what
kind of interpretation is then the proper aim of theory? For Žižek, the first step toward a way out
of the postmodern, ironic, non-ideological trap could well be belief: we must believe in the system
more than the system believes in itself.
2
And what we are talking about, then, is faith—not faith
2
Perhaps the most explicit of Žižek’s examples in this respect is his analysis of the main
characters of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. In the documentary film The Pervert’s Guide to
Ideology, Žižek explains that the stance of ironic detachment of Joker (Matthew Modine) toward
the Marine Corps, which on the surface signals Joker’s resistance to the brainwashing of boot
camp, is itself what allows him to function and to perform the expected duties of a soldier.
Leonard (Vincent D’Onofrio), on the other hand, fully embraces the Corps ideology, leading to
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in the current authority figures who govern us, but rather faith in the fact that authority persists,
that it will continue to emerge despite the best efforts at equality, and that this is not necessarily a
bad thing. Totalitarianism would be a fine political system, after all, if you could somehow be
guaranteed to always have the right dictator: the one who embodies your own political beliefs,
acts in what you think is everyone’s best interests, etc. Decentralized, democratic networks
appear to be an egalitarian solution, but they are also a vehicle for micro-authoritarian structures
in which we are left with a choice merely between one subjugation or another, as with the
choices left to Firefly’s crew.
We also saw this re-emergence of authority in Chapter 1, as Wikipedians mobilized the
Five Pillars and Wikipedia policies to support their editorial decisions. Even assuming good faith,
these decisions are subjective assertions of individual authority. The Wikipedian assumes the
right to determine the meaning of a policy, and he or she claims to represent Wikipedia’s proper
mission. These and a host of other matters of opinion are channeled through the radically-absent
author and presented as objective fact. Wikipedia’s bureaucracy attests to the necessity of
diffusing authority and agency through formal structures, but this can also tend toward
consolidating power while giving the appearance of impartiality. The available responses are
perfect alignment of individual will with the totality of the project—the mouthpiece approach—
or to leave the project. For Nathaniel Tkacz, this means forking, though he admits Wikipedia is
well beyond the scale of a realistically forkable entity. So in many cases leaving means leaving
with nothing, and for the Wikipedian this is an unfortunate and frustrating waste of her time and
exploitation of labor. In other areas, though, leaving is simply not an option: we can’t exactly fork
out of the climate crisis, for example.
his eventual suicide. The ironic distance of never fully believing what the drill instructors tell you,
of being not quite immersed in the ideology, is itself part of the ideological structure.
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NO SINGLE RAINDROP BELIEVES IT IS TO BLAME FOR THE FLOOD
3
Unlike the critical knowledge of broader repressive structures, the micro-level awareness of the
self in relation to a network of others is an element sorely lacking in much of today’s digital
environment. Take for example the very recent, and so-far limited instances of fanfic writers
adding stipulations to their author’s notes that their fic not be used in academic contexts.
4
It is
worth pausing to consider the implications of this sort of statement. In very general terms, the fan
position is one that considers all textual objects to be fair game. Regardless of the original
author’s wishes, or even an expressly-stated disapproval of fic based on their work, textual objects
can be fic’ed in any manner fans desire. Fic writing, in this view, is a creative, subversive, and
liberating act of self-expression that cannot be bound by copyright or other outside limitations
imposed on fans. Various fan communities may oppose certain practices, such as the ethical
disagreements over real-person slash fic, but there is always another community, another fan
board, another small corner of the Internet for a personal outlet. And indeed, locked, members-
only communities should be able to expect a degree of privacy. Yet the semi-insular, semi-
exclusionary nature of fandoms, existing in a shadow-space and escaping the notice of those not
looking specifically for them, can create sometimes unrealistic expectations of a closed group. But
3
Despair, Inc. Demotivational Posters. www.despair.com/irresponsibility.html
4
These are in response to a minimal-credit course, organized by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.
The students, who self-identified as fans, developed a fanfiction class in which they read,
discussed, and then publicly commented on the fics they discussed in class. Though the students
identified as fans, they overwhelmingly did not follow the fandom etiquette of positive, supportive
comments. For an overview of the situation by one fic writer whose fic was used in the class, see
Waldorph. For an example of fan outrage, see Ivy Blossom. And for Anne Jamison’s reply, see
her 23 Feb. 2015 Tumblr post, ““Since I and My Class Have Been Cited on a Thread.” I first
learned of the stipulations added to authors’ notes via @travelingheidi on Twitter, in
conversation with Anne Jamison, among others:
@ValerieSprague some ficcers have started doing author’s notes that a fic isn’t to
be used in academia @bookdal @prof_anne @metakate. (travelingheidi)
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as part of the Internet, public fanfic forums are exactly that: public. And as such, fic writers are
engaged in a public activity, with all of the obligations and impositions inherent to a social space.
But the fic writer who asks that their work not be used for specific purposes in specific
contexts effectively attempts to impose a limit on the possible reception and repurposing of his or
her text. The obvious criticism to raise is that of hypocrisy, but this is not so much conscious
hypocrisy as it is the logical end of the neoliberal cult of individual autonomy outside of, or
above, broader social repercussions, and a case of one’s prerogative coming at the expense of
another’s. These writers claim a right they explicitly deny to the authors of fan objects, and in so
doing they enact the anti-revolutionary logic of structural repetition that we saw in the
introductory chapter: simply substituting one authority for another. And this is nearly the
opposite of AngstGoddess’s response to the fic my fanfic contest, as well as the recipe analogy in
her own author’s note.
AG seems instead to understand herself within an ongoing continuum of mutually-
supportive production, and this much more closely aligns with the medieval writers we have seen.
Chaucer’s tactic is similar, though a bit more tongue-in-cheek: he explicitly cites his source, and
gives all credit (and blame) to the “recipe” he follows. As we saw in Chapter 3, he emphasizes the
unseen elements hidden within a process of textual production that is presumed to be
transparent. Chaucer’s translating “errors” may be visible only to those directly familiar with his
actual source, Boccaccio, but the narrator’s blatant inconsistencies within Troilus itself assert
Chaucer’s control over the text in front of him, while simultaneously drawing attention to the
limits imposed on his own textual authority by future scribes and translators. He is, in other
words, consciously inserting the same ideological gaps and inconsistencies that we saw in the
framing narrative of The Book of Margery Kempe. Chaucer’s numerous invitations to amend his
language, and correct any inaccuracies in his treatment of love, places him in a continuous
185
relation to a temporal chain of scribes, readers, translators, and critics, where he understands
himself as being subject to future correction.
Gui de Mori, following Jean de Meun’s example, takes a similar editorial approach to the
Roman de la Rose, as he expands the possibilities of continuation and radically-divergent textuality.
Like his insertion of himself into the scene of authorial naming, Gui’s all-inclusive strategy is
theoretically infinite,
5
which is impossible in practice. Yet his approach is an example of the
critically self-aware absent author. He assumes the authority to make specific, and often radical
interventions into the Rose, but he also provides an extensive key to these interventions. If the
next scribe, editor, or reader doesn’t like Gui’s choices, then they are free to undo them. But
without something like Gui’s rubrics, we can never know what wasn’t copied. We can see Gui’s
name added to the Rose, but we can never know what names have been removed from
manuscripts. Gui’s position, judging by his self-naming and his handling of the Anonymous
Continuation, could be seen as analogous to AngstGoddess’s idea of the text as a recipe: here is a
recipe for cookies that I find to be delicious. If you want a little less flour, or chocolate chips
instead of raisins, well, you’re the one baking the cookies. Even while acknowledging differences,
we can still be united by our love for cookies, and thank goodness for this recipe.
THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
For continuation to work, centered as it is around a shared textual object, “a community must
have some set of shared standards or expectations as to what excellence or authority or
correctness might be” (Fisher 73). Any collective project, as we have seen, requires this kind of
5
An infinite text is neither actually possible nor desirable. Information overload and fatigue are
serious problems, and managing and organizing overwhelming amounts of data has become an
end in itself.
186
shared direction. From the Five Pillars that shape Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, to the
communal understanding of fan objects and the acceptable manipulations of them, these norms
direct the group. The authority of the community norms is decentralized, granted, but
nonetheless present. Still, “excellence or authority or correctness” need not be taken as the
universalizing standards they might at first appear to be, and here I suggest Kwame Anthony
Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism may be a productive response to the frictions of
decentralized authority.
Appiah’s cosmopolitanism is essentially a philosophy of cross-cultural ethics within
globalization.
6
His concern is that as cultures with established values increasingly come into
contact, we must interact with mutual respect without falling into the non-interventionist trap of
total cultural relativism. Of course, culture clashes have been a problem since the first humans
encountered a different tribe of humans, and Appiah recognizes this, but the history of
colonialism and now global capitalism put us into direct, and often immediate, contact with
people whose values are vastly different from our own. Appiah argues that we must strike a
balance that respects difference, while maintaining a responsibility to intervene under certain
circumstances. One example Appiah gives, based on his bi-racial British and Ghanaian heritage,
is the difference between patrilineal and matrilineal societies. In Ghana, Appiah explains, the
most important adult male in a child’s life is not the father, but instead the child’s eldest maternal
uncle. That man is thus responsible for the child’s upbringing, education, and so on. In the face
of this radical difference between patrilineal and matrilineal family structures, there is a certain
brand of universalism that says one of these two systems must be correct, while conversely the
cultural relativist would say simply there is no basis for determination. The cosmopolitan, on the
6
For a concise and accessible overview, see Appiah’s segment in the documentary film Examined
Life.
187
other hand, says that in spite of our differences we can agree that raising our children, clothing
them, educating them and so forth is an important value, and so as long as these systems both
function and accomplish that task, then both are fine (47-9). Cosmopolitans, in other words, look
for points of agreement as well as respect difference, with the ultimate goal of agreeing upon a
good recipe to follow.
Of course, cross-cultural examples assume two stable cultures to begin with, without
accounting for internal differences within each—a point Appiah acknowledges with a separate
example.
7
But the concept of cosmopolitanism is scalable, and the decentralized authority of
interconnected communities is precisely such a scalable example of interpersonal contact. The
question is how far up or down we should scale the necessity for agreement. Certainly, we cannot
look for a single set of values, norms, or even aesthetic textual judgments. But at the same time
we cannot scale down to the neoliberal individual subject, either, where collaboration takes on
the quality of competition, if there is even any basis for agreement at all.
Rubrication, glosses, and interpretations, as we saw in Chapter 4, are at root various
forms of continuation. They are supplements predicated on a preceding text, and as such are
collective, inter-related projects existing over time. And this requires certain agreements: which
texts are worthy of continuing; what constitutes a legitimate continuation; etc. The Conte du Graal
continuators appeared to use the common thread of the grail quest as an opportunity, according
to Thomas Hinton, to create and sustain a “clerkly continuity.” In his continuation of
Guillaume’s Rose, Jean extends the possibility of this continuity beyond those of a strictly literary
or textual vocation, and offers this continuity to all of his readers. Jean’s repeated promises of a
clarifying gloss or explanation of his complex, wildly digressive text, which he never delivers, set
7
See Appiah, particularly 45-7.
188
up an expectation that an explanation is coming. More importantly, these unfulfilled promises
raise the expectation that an interpretive explanation is necessary in the first place. That is, Jean
suggests that the Rose cannot stand on its own without such an interpretive gloss. And in the
absence of such an explanation, even though Jean eventually brings Amant’s quest for the rose to
a narrative conclusion, the Rose remains forever incomplete. The task of completion is left to us,
his readers, who will do the interpretive work required to finish the text.
Jean provokes this interpretive continuation, authorizes it, and at the same time ensures
that an all-encompassing explanation can never be reached. The hermaphroditic indeterminacy
of Bel Acueil, as well as the frankly bizarre final scene of consummation when Amant plucks the
rose, perpetually resist any single reading. Jean thus guarantees that a search for a univocal
meaning will be not only fruitless, but detrimental, as David Rollo demonstrated through
Reason’s warning against incorrect interpretation and Bel Acueil’s ultimate sexual
indeterminacy: “We become hermaphroditic readers, moreover, who enjoy being so. For it is his
very duality that makes Bel Acueil an object of interpretive fascination” (212). A univocal
significance is impossible, yet the deliz, the pseudo-sexual pleasure of interpretation that frustrated
expectation affords, is made available to all.
Jean’s disavowal of the narrative first-person places him in the interpretive trenches with
us, as one more great lover of this poem awaiting the promised clarification that never comes. Of
course he is still the person writing these lines, but he creates an egalitarian community around
the Rose, and specifically an interpretive community jointly invested in understanding the hidden
meaning of this dream narrative, where anyone can occupy the place of authorship. Only in this
case, the equality of the community comes in the form of every member being equally wrong.
And embracing this symbolic castration, in the Lacanian sense, leads us toward David Foster
Wallace’s nearly unattainable definition of a Democratic Spirit:
189
A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate
conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American
knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes
to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent
intellectual integrity—you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at
your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.
(72)
This is to say, basically, that the proper acceptance of our castrated selves is democratic: no one
possesses the phallus, and those who believe themselves to possess it are the most alienated from
it. Yet while appreciating the vast differences of opinion and the uncertain complexities of life is a
worthy aim in itself, we must still collectively move forward. Even as we might critique the myth
of progress, the future consequences of our (in)actions will nevertheless be imposed upon us.
Jean’s may in a way be one of the more populist projects of the medieval texts we have
considered, as he extends the critical work of interpretation to all of his readers and brings them
into a community of shared love for the Rose. At the same time, his also feels like the most
academic of the continuations we’ve addressed. Partially a function of the explicit invitation to
interpret, this is also due to the very nature of Jean’s digressively encyclopedic text. Veille’s cross-
dressing instructions to Bel Acueil, to give one example, certainly reinforce Bel Acueil’s
indeterminate gender, but they also provide real-world cosmetic advice at a time when access to
any kind of textual information is limited. And this encyclopedic tendency to collect, to contain
multitudes of information in one place, is itself a form of rewriting and continuation, re-
circulating and redistributing the previously known. Rather than thinking about this recirculation
as an unoriginal form of copying, we should consider it in the context of collective knowledge
production.
190
The encyclopedic impulse is one of mutually-agreed upon value, and of collectively
determining our standards of excellence, authority, and correctness (Fisher 73). Coupled with a
cosmopolitan ethic of respect for differences, we can neither scale up to the level of a single
universal nor down to the single individual. And radically-absent authorship, at the end of the
day, is about establishing and maintaining community, and negotiating the social tensions which
communities entail. We cannot fall under the illusion of an absolutely open, non-hierarchical
network of completely equal participation. But those of us joined by the mutual rejection of
authority can operate as the scribes of that rejected authority:
The anxieties of authors, however, and our own preference for “better” texts have
obscured the self-confidence of scribes. Chaucer could write his Retractions, and
assert his authorship of his texts while performatively rejecting the responsibility
for, and moral implications of, his “worldly endytinges.” Scribes, however, cannot
write retractions. Scribes cannot disentangle themselves from the worldly, physical
forms of the texts in their hands. For a relatively brief period this unity was the site
of exploration and experimentation rather than liability. (Fisher 190)
I suggest the time for exploration and experimentation has returned, and this requires a return
also of “the self-confidence of scribes”—that is, of us. At the same time, of course, community
entails obligations to one another, and limitations on our own agency. Without a critical self-
awareness of these obligations, limitations, and the workings of power in networked participation,
though, experimentation will become a liability. And, lest we forget, our real and textual
communities exist through time as well: there will be future communities interpreting, judging,
and correcting us until the clock strikes midnight.
191
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
The Vacant Throne sets out to explore the persistence of authority within unstable, collective modes of textual production and distribution. The first two chapters consider authorship and collaboration in online, digital environments, specifically in Wikipedia and fanfiction communities, and sets out to explain tensions between the individual and the community. The reappearance of authority, in what at first seems to be a kind of disseminated authorship, is developed into what I call “radically‐absent authority.” This is not anti‐authoritarian, but rather a theory of how non‐hierarchical groups construct and then off‐load the responsibility for their own authority onto an absent Other. ❧ Investigating authorship and authority in what we might call the “post‐print” era naturally invites connections with the pre‐print medieval period, as contemporary transformative works and remix practices suggest analogies to what is generally considered the “manuscript culture” of medieval literature. And the second half of The Vacant Throne turns to the medieval, and focuses on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of Margery Kempe, the continuations of Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, and the Roman de la Rose. ❧ Wikipedia is a space where, in principle, anyone can edit or contribute to a text at any time, with the resultant collaboration being basically an Author‐less text. Wikipedia contributors stand behind the conventions of Neutral Point of View and “Notability,” which are themselves terms of art that naturalize a privileged, mostly male and usually white, perspective, without confronting their own role in producing and perpetuating those authoritarian perspectives. While Wikipedia’s stated goal is clearly defined as an “objective” and verifiable encyclopedia, fan communities and fanfiction writers eschew goals and rejoice in individuality and play, opening creative spaces for appropriating texts in personally meaningful ways. Fan writers’ sense of themselves as amateurs, in opposition to the fan objects’ Authors, simultaneously places them in an equal, non‐hierarchical relationship with one other, and at the same time clears a space for them to write in the first place. Individual egos and claims of authority, when they do appear, thus threaten fandom on its most fundamental level, and the runaway success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy is in this case just such a breakdown in Twilight fans’ communal rejection of authorship. The Twilight fandom’s negotiation of individual autonomy and commercial profit are mirrored in the neoliberal, libertarian ethos underpinning Joss Whedon’s sci‐fi television series Firefly, and so Chapter Two juxtaposes these to reveal the invisible forces that fill the power vacuums left by otherwise heroic rebellions against authority. ❧ Chapter Three focuses on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Book of Margery Kempe. Here we find that asserting one’s own authority via feigned deference to another—which we often see online—is not new at all, as Chaucer’s narrator posits a fictitious Latin source for the Greek story of Troilus, claiming absolute fidelity to that Latin text but doing so only in such a paradoxical and self‐contradictory manner as to emphasize the inevitability of error. The nature of these errors render visible what the narrator claims is a transparent process of translation and, by extension, the error‐prone act of scribal copying. Textual criticism relies on these errors in multiple variant manuscripts to reconstruct a probable, “authoritative” version of a text, and at the same time it idealizes scribes as windows through which an originary manuscript could be seen. More and more, though, scribes are understood as competent actors in their own right, equally capable of correcting obvious errors in their exemplar, or even making authorial/editorial interventions on their own. So while the scribe can be “transparent” in the sense of allowing us to see through his work to the text of the Author before him, interventions in the manuscript can also be “transparent” in the sense of invisible, and Chaucer’s intentional translation “errors” call attention to these reasoned scribal alterations. The opening frame of The Book of Margery Kempe similarly dramatizes the process of scribal production, with two scribes standing between the reader and Margery Kempe’s voice
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Winningham, Thomas E., III
(author)
Core Title
The vacant throne: authority and authorial absence
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
04/20/2015
Defense Date
03/24/2015
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
authorship,Chaucer,continuation,digital collaboration,fan studies,fanfiction,Guy de Mori,Jean de Meun,Margery Kempe,medieval,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,Roman de la rose,Wikipedia
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Rollo, David (
committee chair
), Dane, Joseph A. (
committee member
), Gambrell, Alice (
committee member
), Gilbert, Adam Knight (
committee member
)
Creator Email
t.e.winningham@gmail.com,twinning@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-552969
Unique identifier
UC11297868
Identifier
etd-Winningham-3288.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-552969 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Winningham-3288.pdf
Dmrecord
552969
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Winningham, Thomas E., III
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
authorship
Chaucer
continuation
digital collaboration
fan studies
fanfiction
Guy de Mori
Jean de Meun
Margery Kempe
new media
Roman de la rose
Wikipedia