Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large ...

a history not from primary materials, but from retellings, which are generated by a
interpretive community that reflects not only the influences of a corporate media
producer, but, significantly, the influence of the universe’s fandom. The scale and the
ephemerality of such fiction networks lend a particular critical and representational
weight to these interpretive communities, which are, due to the inception of Internet
technologies, increasingly coherent, concrete, and embodied in documents and artifacts.
PROPRIETORSHIP
At the same time, a fiction network is not an uncomplicatedly communal form; it
is a proprietary thing, presupposing a capitalist context and a concept of regulated
intellectual property which circumscribes the textual system in question. This ontology
of commerce and ownership – the fiction network’s dual status as public imaginary form
and private property – casts it in opposition to our generally-held understandings of
folklore or the creative products of folk culture. Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World
situates the carnival, the symbolic world of folk humor, as a space of escape and play:
“one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and
from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges,
norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World 10). Bakhtin’s very specific
understanding of folk humor is echoed in other critics’ more generalized
conceptualizations of “folk culture” as a non-hierarchical space of communal expression,
a somewhat Edenic space that preexists our current capitalist existence. This
conceptualization, arguably, is overly binary, and many critics have successfully
interrogated it. Nicholas Daly argues convincingly that “the Hobson’s choice of
Frankfurt School pessimism or ‘folk’ optimism has been superseded by a very different
26