It’s only proper that the title of this essay should be little more than a miscellany of semiotic detritus to claw oneself out of. Uncomfortable but fitting. A probing digit (already unconsciously digging) encounters in its path mostly sediment, perhaps a few stone tablets, and bones. Thoroughly useless, but perhaps a paleontological chimera or two could be fashioned from them, and then you might be getting somewhere. A posthumously fractured fibula, sharp enough to take an eye out with less serendipitous alignment, scrapes your cheek just enough to draw blood and just enough to remember. It belonged to Ernst Jünger, a man whose erstwhile politics are too complicated and too irrelevant to get into in a predicament like this one, but when he wasn’t being complicated and irrelevant, he made a habit of writing about freedom. He dissected it in novels like Eumeswil and essays like the forest passage, which you haven’t read and don’t care about. Importantly, this was a freedom conceived of from the inside, not the outside. It was the sort of freedom you have: Trapped beneath fossils, yes, but free to dig. Free to put up resistance.
The man whose Ilium now constitutes your makeshift shovel called this type of figure an anarch. Not an anarchist, mind you. That breed was to him least free of all; nothing more than the shadow of oppressive power. Its rebellious counterpart and thus utterly dependent. The anarch, he said, was to the anarchist what the monarch is to the monarchist, that which some girl in a café would have called a radical singularity. To be an anarch is to live as though one were already free. As though there was no cage. If you hadn’t committed to not thinking about the man’s politics a few minutes ago, you’d interject that this seems like something which would take an extraordinary amount of privilege to do, and you’d be right, but instead of dunking on a dead philosopher, you keep digging upward.
By all right, it should be impossible for your eyes to acclimate to the prehistoric darkness, but you could swear that there’s some text engraved into the dirt-ward bone. Half weathered away, but still barely legible, it reads: “Property of Gustav Landauer”. This one really was an anarchist, you faintly recall. A peculiar shadow of the Kaiserreich, and Jewish to boot, making him painfully aware of the fact that he very much wasn’t free already. Landauer had coined the term anarch long before Jünger, and he had coined it to mean something completely different from the disaffected sovereign individual, something that never caught on. Seeing the symbol collect dust, your calciferous guide had stolen and repurposed it, made it his own oh-so-long ago, the way you are repurposing the hip-bone now. Though, you’re the type to wonder how true that really is. Can one own a word? Can one even own a bone? Hard to think of it as Jünger’s, much less Landauer’s, when you’re the one using it. Information wants to be free, right? That’s what they always say, the optimistic Tartuffes. It probably never will be, not externally, but knowledge does constitute a domain where you really can be an anarch. Where you always have been an anarch. You have lived life as though information was already free. The fossil record is yours to use.
When Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, some light was allowed to break through the cracks within creative despotism, and with Derrida’s oft-mistranslated “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (There is no outside-text), the floodgates were fully opened and thought turned into a scramble not to drown. Though the author no longer held claim over their work’s interpretation, others maintained their ill-gotten grasp over its distribution, and while information might not want to be free, the pirates who set sail to democratize it absolutely do. Many like you have gotten good at stealing all they need from the maelstrom of human consciousness: Books, films, songs, articles. The aristocratic douches behind history’s great private collections cannot hold a candle to your ownerless treasure, but you have only gotten good at stealing because you were aware that you were doing it. Opposition was a factor, you its shadow. The pirates were putting up resistance because they had to, unlike the anarch who resists regardless on principle. Perhaps the specter of Derrida does still haunt over you. In fact, as Jünger’s iliac crest punctures a galleon’s deck from below, you realize that the specters of all these artists have not loosened their grasp.
“There is no outside-text”. everything you could bring into a work was already there as dormant potentiality. Art is far more than its creator. It comprises every experience and every interpretation anyone might have with/of it, shrinking the artist’s own intention, their own painfully masturbatory reading down to an infinitesimal conceptom. When Landauer forged “anarch”, all the implication Jünger would see in it was already there. Semiotically buried in the text. Just not in Landauer. And Ernst, genuinely filling the anarch’s boots, as he rarely did in his complicated and irrelevant life, stole it. He stole it despite the fact that it didn’t need to be stolen. Stole it as a matter of course. You think you will stop referring to the hip bone as Jünger’s and start calling it your own. After all, you’re not using it for the things he used it for. You also think you’re going to steal the ocean. Steal it from the ghosts. Not because you have to, but because you don’t.
This has all been said aloud to the man who pulled you up by the arm when you broke through the floor of his ship. Unintentionally. In loneliness one loses track of these sorts of habits, you apologize, but that’s not what he’s curious about. The friend introduces himself as Helmsman, and he had been wondering about that plan of yours since long before you told him about it.
When that Frenchman killed all authors, he says, he did something unintentionally quite devastating, because corpses are hard to steal from. When we plunder a man’s collection and take his priceless artefacts, they become our artefacts. Fully, without question. But when we wrench the bones of a dinosaur or the treasures of a pharaoh from the ground and put them in our museum, they remain the dinosaur’s fossil. They remain the Pharaoh’s gemstones. This ocean of media, born of so many minds and mouths and hands, haunted by such multitudes; Helmsman seeks to figure out what it would mean to actually make it his, the way you did with the ilium.
To find truly democratized art, to find the anarchs in our midst, one has to turn toward fandom. Not to its surface, that festering heap of idol-worship and blind deference for some imagined authorial vision, but deeper than that, far into the seedy underbelly – some island you are now heading toward. One has to scour fanfics, ask difficult questions like “does Jean-Luc Picard ever use the bathroom?” and worse yet: one has to pick an answer. Helmsman had grown up in these circles of broader discussion, any work sifting through to him already as a collage composed by dedicated legions. The first time he ever encountered a despot, a person who claimed a world was theirs, that they decided the truth of it, the only emotion he could muster was confusion. That is how accustomed he had grown to the collective’s workings. “no” he had said. “That doesn’t seem right”. And in doing so he had stolen the world wholesale.
The creative-authority obsessed boot-lickers of artistic discourse tend to present themselves as the reasonable ones, he warns, opposing the “postmodern” lunacy of folks like you who would point at a bone and claim it’s a shovel. They will look at “there is no outside-text” and maybe they won’t even fully reject it as one possible approach, but rather they will say something along the lines of “okay, sure, that’s an interesting idea, but there clearly is a core-text, right? In this tv-show, there are things which are genuinely happening on screen and then there’s stuff you read into it. The reading-into is valid, but it’s different. You agree with that right? Obviously!” They’ll hold the shoe-leather right up to your mouth and expect you to take a sycophantic little lick, to leave your pirating ways behind you and step ashore, maybe even pay for one of those streaming services. In saying something that might appear on the surface quite reasonable though, they are being very silly indeed. Helmsman doesn’t get to why before you step onto the archipelago. He wants to demonstrate instead.
Not too long ago someone had erected a statue of Spock in the town square, the whole thing covered in a fractal of tiny mirrors, but somehow you can recognize him anyway. The plaque on its pedestal reads “in honor of no one in particular”. “It’s an important cultural touchstone for us”, Helmsman proclaims from behind you. “Slash-fic is direct cultural fallout of Star-trek, but it isn’t cultural fallout of Gene Roddenberry. Landauer and the anarch. See, this thing was marble once, differently engraved before we spruced it up. Such an upgrade, you couldn’t even imagine.” You ask whom they stole it from, but Helmsman shakes his head and says that they didn’t. They won it in a bet.
Apparently there once was a loyalist who claimed he needed naught but the core text and Helmsman had challenged him on the matter with the statue as price. Rules were agreed to; the loyalist was free to choose what official works were and were not canon. So much seemed only fair, seeing how Helmsman was already free in all too many other ways. The debate began and it did so with a question: “what actually happens in star-trek?”. The answer, if one went by core-text really isn’t even humanly comprehensible, though the loyalist was slow to see this. It is a series of unconnected shots, starring characters who just popped into reality one day and who somehow only exist during dramatic interactions. In addition, they also do not think. They merely speak and walk and act. This vision is absurd of course. When one talks about star trek, one is referring to an auto-completed star trek which exists in the viewer’s mind. With all media, we assume that it takes place in a fully fleshed out world of which we only see a small part. Books ask us to imagine most of the locations they visit upon from very few cues, simply because explaining every bit of brickwork would be boring, though we do not therefore doubt its existence. We imagine that the characters in star trek do think, and that that is how they arrive on the things they end up saying, but this is in a very real sense fan-fiction. It imagines a text which to the loyalist isn’t there. Captain Picard using the toilet is fanon, not canon.
Those loyalists self-aware enough to recognize this, though the statue’s former owner did not count himself among them, engage in a different sort of game: they don’t truly want you to lick the author’s boot at all, they want you to lick theirs. They want you to buy into their personal auto-completed version, pretending like it is somehow more real than anyone else’s, possibly tracing out the contours of an argument involving “verisimilitude”: we are to expect that all the things we don’t see are mundane, otherwise they would be shown to us. Picard using the bathroom is therefore the implicitly canonical choice, but this runs into three issues:
First of all, our lives predispose us to expecting different things and therefore to perceive different conditions as verisimilar. Helmsman points at Spock. Mirrors. You look at him and see yourself and the world around you. Distorted, but indisputably.
Secondly mundanity is unlikely in some instances. If a story portrays a thoroughly idiosyncratic character, then the audience’s natural assumption is that they came to be this person through events which are not mundane. Why else are we so obsessed with origin stories?
And thirdly: The loyalist just granted all low stakes domestic-life fanfic the same degree of validity as the idea that Jean-Luc Picard pees occasionally.
When we talk about a work we already speak about an untold number of fanfictions, simply ones we mostly haven’t written, because we are thinking of a lived-in world by the nature of human cognition. All of those fics are part of star trek as much as anything Gene Roddenberry has ever written. More in fact, because while he may have distorted the mirror, may have sparked this universe in our minds, he is responsible for only a sliver of the things within it.
The story has given you an idea even before he ends it, right at the start, where the loyalist picks his rules. You turn to Helmsman: “If you want to steal the ocean, I’m afraid you won’t be able to”. The words obviously sting, but he tries his best to hide it: “I suppose I’ve gotten rather too old”, the man sighs, but you shake your head and ask him to follow you back to the pier. Had the loyalist chosen different starting-media, the same would apply. Had he chosen less of it. Arbitrarily less. If one even just hears of Spock or reads a fic never having engaged with the official material, a world would still be internally constructed around him. One could be a Trekkie without ever having seen official media. One’s Spock would still slot into the public consciousness of “Spock”.
Relatedly one is creating their own world from the first contact onward, and may diverge from the despot not just on unspoken matters. After the first book in a series all of history already exists in the mind of the reader, if the author later disagrees, you can simply continue writing for them. The right way. The verisimilar way. And everyone else can do the same. “AU” as a term distracts from the fact that the canon is merely a universe like any other, often not even the one which is most thoroughly explored in writing. Not canon at all, but part of a canon in the musical sense. Canon of x.
Maybe the point is dawning on Helmsman, but you can’t quite tell, so you keep going. “Any additional point of contact distorts the mirror differently, every day shifts your reflection, but it fundamentally doesn’t matter. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Jünger and the anarch.” He cannot steal the ocean because he already has. You direct Helmsman’s attention towards the water. “What do you see?”
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