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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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 02:40 am (UTC)As a young-ish grad student in comp lit, steeped in postmodern criticism, one of the things about this debate that has astounded me is the distinction some people (some of whom I respect greatly) tried to make between the "academic" and "emotional" reading of texts. As if it were impossible to consider emotion in an academic reading. As if I weren't currently engaged in re-reading texts largely considered Western Canon in new, postcolonial ways, giving presentations at conferences and exciting my colleagues with it. Just about everyone I work with in complit and translation studies is taking the postmodern perspective for granted and building on it, going further and making new distinctions in our discourse. To find people back at square one, seemingly arguing about the validity of that kind of criticism just boggles me.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 02:53 am (UTC)(thanks for friending me!)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 09:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 01:33 pm (UTC)thank you for teaching me.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 02:21 pm (UTC)(Here by a link from
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 02:47 pm (UTC)Whoa. As a writer, no matter which 'ego' is doing the work or what the goal is (fun, money, fun and money ;-), I'd long ago realized that what I had to say in a story was less important, over all, than what the reader got out of it. I've had people constantly point out things I had no idea I'd put in. Sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't, but it never occurred to me to think they were somehow wrong. All I can do is put the story out there and let the reader take what they will from it.
I had no idea it was a post-modern sensibility. :-) Now I do. :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 02:56 pm (UTC)Given that the day job is frequently working as a critic, this helps a lot. It also means that where other people watch Armageddon and see a ghastly, overwrought bloated Summer blockbuster, I see an at times deeply touching celebration of the Apollo program spirit. But I suspect I'm alone there:)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:07 pm (UTC)I liked Algebra. I wanted to work in Science, in the still new and ever-expanding Space Program. I didn't know until that day that I didn't count, I actually didn't count, that all the work I'd done up until then, learning to read and to count and to use a library and dictionaries really.didn't.matter because "your husband will take care of the checkbook".
So.
And then I had sons.
Who experienced the world entirely differently. And who were born AFTER a woman could (easily) get credit in her own name. Graduate in Physics (though not so easily). Assume that she could be a lawyer or doctor or feminist, write from her own point of view, study her own history, talk about what women have to do, can do, want to do.
And then I went to college. And worked in the Women's Studies Center, cataloging and running its little library, and found out all over again: There's more to learn, because I'm white. Privileged after all in a way I'd never recognized, because it'd never come up.
And been learning ever since.
/ramble. Thank you for making me want to learn more, and understand better, and recognize again that I'll never "get" it all- but all I need to get is that what's true for the other person is true, and listen to them.
I hope you don't mind my (post-night shift, pre-bed) ramble here. I just- even if I don't quite recognize everything you're writing about- I did end up in Science, in Nursing, but it's sure not Lit!thinking - you've moved me and calmed me, and that's something to thank you for.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:40 pm (UTC)Though I'm sure there are departments that have resisted it. There always are.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:42 pm (UTC)I do want to note that the privilege in all literary criticism is the privilege of study, not necessarily the privilege of wealth. John M. Ford came from a blue-collar family, had a year of college, and simply read with amazing retention, comprehension, and analysis.
Well. Off to tell my readers to come here!
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Date: 2009-01-29 06:45 pm (UTC)*see also the cool New historicism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_historicism), which is apparently what the kids are into nowadays.
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Date: 2009-01-29 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:51 pm (UTC)That sucks about being shunted in the wrong direction. I'm glad you pushed ahead with your education and career.
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Date: 2009-01-29 07:00 pm (UTC)I think the "privilege of study" is tied to other privileges; that of language, for instance. (I won't get into, with you, whether white privilege exists) But I think self-study is as valid as any other form of learning, and--this is the key part, to me--it is influenced by the same trends as official academic study. A well-read person can be a postmodernist, a new historicist, a new critic, without actually having had their philosophy imparted directly by a university.
I think everyone in the discussion actually has a big slice of new historicism in their reading, actually, but that's not a sticking point, because everyone shares it. Whereas the arguments about "my words did not carry the meaning you say they carry" are deeply divided along new-crit/po-mo lines, I think, more than along color lines.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:07 pm (UTC)Your posts have been wonderful, by the way, and very enlightening. I've tried not to spam them up with white-girl its-about-me comments but I've been reading them.
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Date: 2009-01-29 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:15 pm (UTC)Oh. I should clarify something. I do believe white privilege exists. If anyone can find a place where I said it didn't, I would be very, very grateful.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:21 pm (UTC)I had a thought very similar to this a few days ago (years in internet time)... about the context from which one experiences a text, and it's relevance and importance. And how by ignoring the context from which other people read, one winds up ignoring most of the basis for their argument.
It's the difference between arguing from the text, and arguing from experience. To me, you can't really argue experience (or emotion, or opinion, or any number of other subjective things,) and trying to approach any text as an objective thing seems a bit limiting. Huck Finn is both a story, and a collective cultural experience and commentary.
Which is all to say, I agree with this. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:29 pm (UTC)But I always reach this snag in literary criticism: why must it always be one or the other? Isn't it more useful, more enriching, just more in every way, to look at a text in every way it can be looked at? Why kill the author? It's such a permanent thing to do! Can't a text both be racist and not be racist? In your example of the Richard III performance, for instance, is it that the moment they cast that actor as Richard, they made it about race, or that because he played that role, this performance can be talked about, among other things, as having encouraged the audience to think about racism. After all one could as easily think, not that the play was making a statement about black men in power being evil, but that the director/actor was ridiculing, even protesting against, the the first conclusion. S/he could be saying, "Power corrupts without reference to the colour of a wo/man's skin; I dare you to come to the conclusion that it corrupts men of colour specifically, and then struggle with the fact that the historical Richard III was emphatically white". Language always has double, triple, multiple meanings; does the emotional response evoked by one meaning negate the rest? Isn't that terribly limiting?
I suppose the answer is that language should be used carefully, and with as full and complete an understanding of and consideration for context, but the entire point of Post-Modernism is that contexts cannot all be known.
What I'm trying to say is that keeping contexts in mind is as much the responsibility of the reader as it is of the writer. Looking at textual material from her or his own perspective will naturally open the text up a great deal for the reader, but doing so from a perspective s/he disagrees with will add something else, which will get lost or be cast aside as irrelevant if it's only viewed in the first context. With the enormous capacity of language to cause miscommunication, I rather think it's essential to put the actual principle of Post-Modernist criticism in practice: the validity of every single reader's response to a work does can coexist with the validity of the author's.
Oh, I should tell you how I suddenly appeared on your journal.