Frank Kogan

My limited experience suggests that the kind of broader social context that gets called out a lot in what I'm calling "rockwrite" is more of an undercurrent in the fandom itself, which can write about itself plenty but doesn't exactly take the "text" to be the jumping off point to an analysis of its social world.

I'm not understanding what you mean when you say "write about itself" and "undercurrent" any more than I get what you meant upthread by an "implicitly posed question." I know how to use such terms on behalf of my own ideas, but I don't know what you would single out as an example of fandom, or any discourse, writing about itself; nor what you have in mind when you say a context is is an undercurrent, or how you think this makes something implicit — contexts are there no matter what, whether they're referred to in the prose or not, but this doesn't mean that questions about or awareness of those contexts are "implied" by someone's text. You still need to describe specific events so I can know what's on your mind.

But the events you use don't have to be from real life, and they don't have to be altogether typical. Sometimes you're better off writing them as fiction, writing hypotheticals, because that way you can simplify if need be to highlight what you most want us to attend to. And since you're making up the details, in a sense we're in your hands and so we're not distracted by our own knowledge of actual details of some real situation.

I'll give my own example here. Suppose Sam says to Chris, "Let's get together for lunch. Are you free Thursday?" Chris replies, "I'm pretty much swamped for the next couple of weeks. How about after that?" Sam says, "Actually, as I think about it, I'm swamped too and Thursday was overoptimistic. Let's say around the end of the month." Chris: "That sounds good."

Now, I would say that they're each implying that they'd like to see the other, though they're also implying that they have more immediate (though not necessarily more important) priorities. Neither of these implications may be true, but each is definitely implied. Even if Sam and Chris are lying — perhaps they're secret embezzlers who plan to see each other the next afternoon to plan their latest chicanery, and the whole conversation is a charade to mislead potential undercover agents — they've nonetheless implied that they want to see each other but have more immediate priorities.

I'd also say that this interchange reveals a hunk about Sam and Chris and their world. It may not reveal what they really want or need, but it tells me what they want to convey and the social forms they use to convey it. Of course, I myself know something about their world (we'll say it's contemporary America, and Sam and Chris are socially more or less like me). E.g., "lunch" isn't the same commitment as "dinner," the latter implying (again, not necessarily correctly) a stronger friendship.

Okay, we can ask questions of this interchange. For instance, "What sort of friendship will Sam and Chis end up having?" "What sort of friendship would Sam and Chris like to have?" "What sort of friendship should Sam and Chis have?" Is this the sort of thing you have in mind when you use the phrase "implicitly posed question"? If so, "implicitly" is the wrong word, since neither Sam nor Chris implied the question. In some ways, their current and subsequent behavior may "answer" such questions, but that doesn't mean that Sam and Chris are either asking them or implying them. I'm the one who's asking them. I'd say the questions are there to be asked, simply because the world has a future and we can try to predict it, and, barring a sudden calamity or unexpected events, Sam and Chris are likely to at least have the opportunity to interact in said future. (I take it that neither is expected to be sentenced to prison in the next day or so.)