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marydellSomething Tempest said in a discussion yesterday or the day before helped to crystallize something in my mind. This is often true of things Tempest says, but this time was different because she wasn't doing it on purpose. (note: if you haven't been keeping up with the Cultural Debate of Doom 2009, ummm, I don't think it's possible for me to bring you up to speed.![[info]](https://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
rydra_wong has cataloged everything important that hasn't been deleted or locked. And what ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kate_nepveu says over here is super important, fellow white people! Go read it! But most of what I'm going to say here is generic & future-facing.)
Tempest said, to a white woman, "you're in wounded animal mode." And someone (a man, initially) called her out on using "animal" to characterize an emotional woman. I didn't think it was a problem, from one woman to another, but she acknowledged that it was a problematic usage. At the time I thought "if someone had said that to her, it would be a hell of a lot more problematic." But not because "oh noes, the black woman would get all angry and shit," but because it would be genuinely *more wrong,* as in hurtful, for a white person to use that phrase in speaking to a black woman than it is for a black woman to use it in speaking to a white woman. What's this, linguistic moral relativism? Well, sorta kinda. Really, it's postmodernism. And that got me thinking about the competing textual methodologies underlying this awful fight...not just underlying it, but in part, causing it. And what, in turn, underlies them.
In college in the late 80's, I learned to read a through a new-criticical lens. To quote from Wikipedia: New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were self contained. They do not consider the reader's response, author's intention, or historical and cultural contexts. New Critics preform a close reading of the text, and believe the structure and meaning of the text should not be examined seperately. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices in a text.
In this way of reading text, words have actual & absolute meanings, with dictionaries as arbiter. You can't judge a text without reading all of it, twice or more, preferably. Whole arguments can hinge on a single word or object: I once wrote several pages analyzing the textual appearances of the potato that Bloom carries around in his pocket in Joyce's Ulysses, and was praised for wringing so much meaning from an apparently insignificant detail. Analysis that pulls in stuff outside the text is ok, as long as it pulls in predecessor texts that have clear hooks in the primary text under investigation. So, it's cool to read Ulysses in comparison with its antecedent in The Odyssey, because the primary text supports and invites that comparison.
This is a fun and compelling way of reading texts. It makes reading a deeply intimate encounter between the reader and the book. It's also a way that works most comfortably in a homogeneous environment, in which author, reader, and text all share the same vocabulary, culture, and symbology. In other words, it's a way of reading that depends on privilege to a large degree. A person crossing cultures has a harder time doing this kind of reading, because they won't be steeped in the foundational elements that make a new-crit textual analysis worthwhile. (As a kind of example, I offer the countless bad haiku that have been written by Americans who don't understand the foundational elements of the art, and think the syllable counts are all that matters.)
When I got to graduate school (starting in 1990 and bailing in '93), New Critical reading had suddenly gone out of vogue at my reasonably-hip university, which meant that it had gone out of vogue 10 years prior at really cutting-edge American institutions, and 20 years prior in France. What replaced it was (at my school) a mix of deconstructionism, marxist lit crit, and other stuff that falls under the umbrella of postmodernism.
Again from Wikipedia, in the entry for deconstructionism: Derrida's argument is that the nature of language is such that a language-user cannot neatly mean, what he or she intends to mean and that this can be demonstrated by showing how the use of certain words or certain passages in a text resist or contradict the meaning the author intends for the text as a whole.
And from the entry on "Death of the Author," this explication of Barthes's theory of authorship: The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience.
In the postmodern way of reading, the meaning of the text varies depending on who is reading it, the context in which it is presented, and everything in the culture that has created the reader's experience. There is arguably no such thing as a primary text.
This is a fun and compelling way of reading texts, because it allows the reader to analyze and respond to their own textual and cultural experiences, and essentially to assemble their own mental canon, instead of being tied to the traditional western one. In this way of reading, an image appearing in a text--a coin, for instance--isn't just the coin of the author's own tradition or intention; it's tied to every instance of coin imagery before or since; every ritual of coin usage, every form of commerce, and every economic system. Analyzing a text in that light is exciting, and informative, and becomes another piece in building an understanding of all of the things outside the text that need understanding. And it doesn't privilege readers who come from the same culture as the text; in fact, crossing cultures is a way for a reader to bring a fresh and useful perspective.
It also means that texts are fluid, and that images that bubble up from the author's subconscious may have a lot of suprising, utterly real antecedents in someone else's subconscious that will become part of a reading when that reader engages with the text.
To illustrate:
Two theatregoers go to see a production of Richard III. (In case you're not a Shakespeare person: this play is about an asshole king, doing asshole things to retain his power. I'm a Victorianist so I can go ahead and oversimplify Shakespeare like that, though proper Shakespeareans may wince). In this (hypothetical) production, Richard is played by a black actor. Everyone else is white.
New-crit: That was really good; the actors were excellent.
Po-Mo: I couldn't get past them making Richard black and everybody else white.
New-crit: What? He was great! You keep saying you want to see more black actors in theater.
Po-Mo: Yeah, but not as the evillist king ever, totally surrounded with white subjects & victims. I mean, what is that saying about black men and power? Why did that actor even agree to take the role? Jeez, I'm pissed.
New-crit: I think you're reading too much into this. It's Shakespeare. It's not about race. The fact that the actor happens to be black has nothing to do with it. He took the role because it's a great role.
Po-Mo: As soon as they cast that guy as Richard, that made it about race.
New-crit: I don't understand. It wouldn't matter to me if they cast a white guy as Othello. Don't you think it's kinda racist to even be noticing? I mean, what are they supposed to do, refuse to hire him because he's black?
Po-Mo: *head explodes*
The same two theatregoers go to see a production of Richard II. This is about a king having power taken away, and one famous production featured Fiona Shaw (a woman) in the role of the king. Let's say our viewers have been lucky enough to see that production.
Po-Mo: That was so cool! It really shone a new light on that play.
New-crit: It was certainly an interesting choice. A reversal of Shakepeare's time, when female roles were played by boys.
Po-Mo: It makes such a bold statement about female power!
New-crit: What? It's not about female power. She was playing a man. This kind of stunt casting is a way of making Shakespeare's words seem fresh; it helps the audience to approach them with greater interest, as if they've never heard them before.
Po-Mo: Yeah but by casting a woman in the role, they make it about gender. The play has really interesting and important stuff to say about female power, regardless of what it was about in Shakespeare's time.
New-crit: No it doesn't! It doesn't matter who's playing the role; that's just a presentation of the text.
Po-Mo: Of course it matters. The presentation *is* the text. Jeez, I thought you were a feminist!
New-crit: *head explodes*
Although I, as a white woman steeped in the western canon, enjoyed the new crit phase of my education a lot more than the postmodern phase (during which I found myself largely at sea), I agree much more with the PoMo way of looking at texts. Words don't exist in a vacuum and texts are, to a degree, fluid. The people hearing the words know things about their meanings that the person saying them may not know, or may not have thought about in depth. This doesn't mean people of color in this conversation are reading "from their gut" or "emotionally," it means that "the entire history of racial oppression" and "the mechanisms of silencing dissent" and "the legacy of western imperialism" and various other vast bodies of experiences and texts are part of their canons, and that knowledge informs their reading.
So, if you're white and you find yourself being accused of having said something racist, and you really don't think you did, PLEASE consider that the person on the other side may be interrogating the text from a different critical perspective--a well-developed, valid, academically-blessed perspective--and that to insist on a strict, dictionary-based, self-referential in-text interpretation of your words is to insist on an academic form of white privilege--one that isn't even in style any more. Worse, unless you're willing to frame your argument as a disagreement about interpretation, rather than an assessment of who understands how to read words and who doesn't, you're going to find yourself saying a lot of hurtful racist things, all the while insisting that you're not.
rydra_wong has cataloged everything important that hasn't been deleted or locked. And what kate_nepveu says over here is super important, fellow white people! Go read it! But most of what I'm going to say here is generic & future-facing.) Tempest said, to a white woman, "you're in wounded animal mode." And someone (a man, initially) called her out on using "animal" to characterize an emotional woman. I didn't think it was a problem, from one woman to another, but she acknowledged that it was a problematic usage. At the time I thought "if someone had said that to her, it would be a hell of a lot more problematic." But not because "oh noes, the black woman would get all angry and shit," but because it would be genuinely *more wrong,* as in hurtful, for a white person to use that phrase in speaking to a black woman than it is for a black woman to use it in speaking to a white woman. What's this, linguistic moral relativism? Well, sorta kinda. Really, it's postmodernism. And that got me thinking about the competing textual methodologies underlying this awful fight...not just underlying it, but in part, causing it. And what, in turn, underlies them.
In college in the late 80's, I learned to read a through a new-criticical lens. To quote from Wikipedia: New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were self contained. They do not consider the reader's response, author's intention, or historical and cultural contexts. New Critics preform a close reading of the text, and believe the structure and meaning of the text should not be examined seperately. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices in a text.
In this way of reading text, words have actual & absolute meanings, with dictionaries as arbiter. You can't judge a text without reading all of it, twice or more, preferably. Whole arguments can hinge on a single word or object: I once wrote several pages analyzing the textual appearances of the potato that Bloom carries around in his pocket in Joyce's Ulysses, and was praised for wringing so much meaning from an apparently insignificant detail. Analysis that pulls in stuff outside the text is ok, as long as it pulls in predecessor texts that have clear hooks in the primary text under investigation. So, it's cool to read Ulysses in comparison with its antecedent in The Odyssey, because the primary text supports and invites that comparison.
This is a fun and compelling way of reading texts. It makes reading a deeply intimate encounter between the reader and the book. It's also a way that works most comfortably in a homogeneous environment, in which author, reader, and text all share the same vocabulary, culture, and symbology. In other words, it's a way of reading that depends on privilege to a large degree. A person crossing cultures has a harder time doing this kind of reading, because they won't be steeped in the foundational elements that make a new-crit textual analysis worthwhile. (As a kind of example, I offer the countless bad haiku that have been written by Americans who don't understand the foundational elements of the art, and think the syllable counts are all that matters.)
When I got to graduate school (starting in 1990 and bailing in '93), New Critical reading had suddenly gone out of vogue at my reasonably-hip university, which meant that it had gone out of vogue 10 years prior at really cutting-edge American institutions, and 20 years prior in France. What replaced it was (at my school) a mix of deconstructionism, marxist lit crit, and other stuff that falls under the umbrella of postmodernism.
Again from Wikipedia, in the entry for deconstructionism: Derrida's argument is that the nature of language is such that a language-user cannot neatly mean, what he or she intends to mean and that this can be demonstrated by showing how the use of certain words or certain passages in a text resist or contradict the meaning the author intends for the text as a whole.
And from the entry on "Death of the Author," this explication of Barthes's theory of authorship: The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience.
In the postmodern way of reading, the meaning of the text varies depending on who is reading it, the context in which it is presented, and everything in the culture that has created the reader's experience. There is arguably no such thing as a primary text.
This is a fun and compelling way of reading texts, because it allows the reader to analyze and respond to their own textual and cultural experiences, and essentially to assemble their own mental canon, instead of being tied to the traditional western one. In this way of reading, an image appearing in a text--a coin, for instance--isn't just the coin of the author's own tradition or intention; it's tied to every instance of coin imagery before or since; every ritual of coin usage, every form of commerce, and every economic system. Analyzing a text in that light is exciting, and informative, and becomes another piece in building an understanding of all of the things outside the text that need understanding. And it doesn't privilege readers who come from the same culture as the text; in fact, crossing cultures is a way for a reader to bring a fresh and useful perspective.
It also means that texts are fluid, and that images that bubble up from the author's subconscious may have a lot of suprising, utterly real antecedents in someone else's subconscious that will become part of a reading when that reader engages with the text.
To illustrate:
Two theatregoers go to see a production of Richard III. (In case you're not a Shakespeare person: this play is about an asshole king, doing asshole things to retain his power. I'm a Victorianist so I can go ahead and oversimplify Shakespeare like that, though proper Shakespeareans may wince). In this (hypothetical) production, Richard is played by a black actor. Everyone else is white.
New-crit: That was really good; the actors were excellent.
Po-Mo: I couldn't get past them making Richard black and everybody else white.
New-crit: What? He was great! You keep saying you want to see more black actors in theater.
Po-Mo: Yeah, but not as the evillist king ever, totally surrounded with white subjects & victims. I mean, what is that saying about black men and power? Why did that actor even agree to take the role? Jeez, I'm pissed.
New-crit: I think you're reading too much into this. It's Shakespeare. It's not about race. The fact that the actor happens to be black has nothing to do with it. He took the role because it's a great role.
Po-Mo: As soon as they cast that guy as Richard, that made it about race.
New-crit: I don't understand. It wouldn't matter to me if they cast a white guy as Othello. Don't you think it's kinda racist to even be noticing? I mean, what are they supposed to do, refuse to hire him because he's black?
Po-Mo: *head explodes*
The same two theatregoers go to see a production of Richard II. This is about a king having power taken away, and one famous production featured Fiona Shaw (a woman) in the role of the king. Let's say our viewers have been lucky enough to see that production.
Po-Mo: That was so cool! It really shone a new light on that play.
New-crit: It was certainly an interesting choice. A reversal of Shakepeare's time, when female roles were played by boys.
Po-Mo: It makes such a bold statement about female power!
New-crit: What? It's not about female power. She was playing a man. This kind of stunt casting is a way of making Shakespeare's words seem fresh; it helps the audience to approach them with greater interest, as if they've never heard them before.
Po-Mo: Yeah but by casting a woman in the role, they make it about gender. The play has really interesting and important stuff to say about female power, regardless of what it was about in Shakespeare's time.
New-crit: No it doesn't! It doesn't matter who's playing the role; that's just a presentation of the text.
Po-Mo: Of course it matters. The presentation *is* the text. Jeez, I thought you were a feminist!
New-crit: *head explodes*
Although I, as a white woman steeped in the western canon, enjoyed the new crit phase of my education a lot more than the postmodern phase (during which I found myself largely at sea), I agree much more with the PoMo way of looking at texts. Words don't exist in a vacuum and texts are, to a degree, fluid. The people hearing the words know things about their meanings that the person saying them may not know, or may not have thought about in depth. This doesn't mean people of color in this conversation are reading "from their gut" or "emotionally," it means that "the entire history of racial oppression" and "the mechanisms of silencing dissent" and "the legacy of western imperialism" and various other vast bodies of experiences and texts are part of their canons, and that knowledge informs their reading.
So, if you're white and you find yourself being accused of having said something racist, and you really don't think you did, PLEASE consider that the person on the other side may be interrogating the text from a different critical perspective--a well-developed, valid, academically-blessed perspective--and that to insist on a strict, dictionary-based, self-referential in-text interpretation of your words is to insist on an academic form of white privilege--one that isn't even in style any more. Worse, unless you're willing to frame your argument as a disagreement about interpretation, rather than an assessment of who understands how to read words and who doesn't, you're going to find yourself saying a lot of hurtful racist things, all the while insisting that you're not.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 08:04 pm (UTC)(Hi. I am here via links somehow, and I was glad to read your post because it lays out clearly some of the different stakes in the debate that had been nagging at my subconscious.)