I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

Somebody else, posting about the ongoing imbroglio, mentioned having discovered her last nerve. I now feel kind of similar. One particular card has been played by the defendants so often that I feel a need to defend my profession’s good name.

Let’s be clear about this: “you’re reading it wrong” is not an academic argument.

No scholar of literature in today’s field would ever make that claim, at least not with a straight face; in fact I would not expect even a student of literature who has passed her first lit crit class to make it. Theorists from Barthes to Fish have worked hard for this reward: we’ve all figured out that people make meaning and that at least two people–the writer and the reader–plus all their respective cultural baggage are directly, vitally involved in making the meaning of any written text. “You’re reading it wrong” is, at this point, a nonsensical statement.

This is not to say you don’t still sometimes hear it, even from academics who should know better, because assholes exist everywhere. But when they make it, they make it as a personal mistake, not as a solid academic and theoretically based argument, and they rarely make it to other academics, knowing good and well the instant load of scorn it would buy them.

The statement that is far more often heard, and which may have confused some people, is “the examples you’ve shown are not sufficient to support that interpretation”. In the current case, however, this is also insupportable, as any scholar who took the merest glance at the text in question (or even ithiliana’s notes on it) could tell you. There’s plenty of supporting examples to argue that B&I deploys racial stereotypes in some extremely naive ways and, while it may usefully problematize gender issues, fails to take any matching steps along the axis of race and instead just wears the stereotypes in deeper.

One that people may also have heard is “you’re missing some facts about the concepts you’re trying to argue with/about”, as for example the student who reads “Harrison Bergeron” and submits as a ‘Marxist analysis‘ the claim that the story is Marxist because the political system it pictures is Fascist, just like the USSR. The current imbroglio is not such an example; there are no complex theoretical structures or schools of analysis to misunderstand. There is only a careless use of broadly and commonly recognized visual cues, connecting ‘white’ with ‘normal’ and ‘black’ with ‘subjection’ and ‘exoticism’ and ‘blight’. And then there is a lot of refusal to listen when the most injured point out the harm that carelessness does. If anyone is missing some facts, it’s the defendants.

Once more, with feeling: “you’re reading it wrong” is not an academic argument.

What it is is an author’s argument, and specifically the plaint of an immature, self-indulgent author who has not yet figured out how to take any criticism of her/his precious, precious writing. All of fandom has, by now, likely recognized it as such, because we hear it so much from each other. In fact, the defendants have, throughout, acted exactly like a fandom coterie having a flamewar. If anyone needed a demonstration that there is no difference between pro writers and amateur writers, down at the bone, this is surely it.

So let us, please, dispense with any pretense that the defendants can make any pronouncements from the protective height of some ivory tower. They aren’t and they can’t, that has been abundantly demonstrated, and this acafan will thank them to stop soiling the name of her profession in their scramble to avoid the censure their own actions have so richly earned them.

So, I’ve been browsing back through some of my old fic and, in the process, the comments, and have been amused by something.  Amused in that “oi, people” sort of way.

Let us imagine that there is a manga or anime with a character who is underage during the course of the series (or most of the series).  Let’s say 12-15, since most people stop kicking over it at sixteen or thereabouts.

Let us further imagine that I have written fic for that series in which the character in question has hot, enthusiastic, participatory sex.

Let us further imagine that someone comments disapprovingly on this.

To which, upon mature consideration, my response is: If you read a story in which the only time-indicators are Some Time Later (probably because I’m not entirely sure when it does happen) and reflexively imagine the character who is having hot, nay even kinky at times, sex as underage, I am quite willing to agree that there may be a problem.

I just don’t think the problem is with me.

A distinction that may assist in clarifying thought:

The practical business of the sciences is to figure out how to change the material world.

The practical business of the humanities is to figure out whether and how it is a good idea to do so.

Many have asked, whenever the various vields of the humanities are judged not sufficiently Serious and Morally Approved, what is the good of studying philosophy, literature, history, political science, etc. And the answer is not, as some philosophers would have it, “because it’s the most noble and spiritual thing possible to do”. The answer is, rather, “to figure ourselves out”–so that, hopefully, we can learn our own strengths and weaknesses and improve our lives without shooting our collective foot off.

History, stories, politics, they all tell of the patterns that human action and thought take. The better we understand those patterns, the better we can judge what effect a new technology or change may have on our lives, and how we need to prepare for it. Understanding isn’t a simple A to B line, though; you can’t just study Great Literature ™ and think that will give you all the understanding you need. Someone has to study everything, so you get the whole alphabet, so you have all the parts.

Studying in the humanities is about finding those parts, and every place you look, every sort of thing you study, is another piece, another letter, that you can add to the collective bag.

Unfortunately, the pretentious philosophers were often the ones with the money and influence to be heard, and their version still pollutes the mind of many an interlocutor, who then wants to know what on earth is so noble and spiritual about studying, for example, fanfic.

Well, you know, fanfic is probably Q.

It’s the wrong question, you see. It comes out of centuries on centuries of self-serving propaganda about what scholarship in the humanities is good for. Yes, Plato, I’m looking at you. And Confucius, you too. I mean, honestly.

There’s nothing especially noble about any of this. Rather is is a) potentially useful and b) a lot of fun. That’s it. And, really, what more can you ask from any activity?

It distresses me greatly when people say Rukia is useless or wimpy or any of that. So let us talk about all the ways in which Rukia is amazing.

( There may be spoilers in here for those who do not follow the manga. )

Cultural relativism is a useful mental tool, especially in the field of anthropology but also in day to day life in a global world. It can be boiled down to the reminder that not all cultures are the same, and the conceptual categories of one may well not be what you need to understand another.

This can also be rendered, especially by frustrated anthropology teachers, as: it’s not yours, you are not at home, do not try to make this other place/time/people into your own, because they’re not! (Case in point of failure to remember, or even consider, this: Wallis Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead.)

This is, as I say, especially useful for people from a dominant, privileged or mechanically/technologically advanced culture who are going off to study people who are not any or all of those things. It keeps the arrogance of understanding, or, more accurately, assumed understanding, in check.

The thing is, what cultural relativism does only help ensure a person does not either a) assume they know all the whys and wherefores or b) dismiss everything unfamiliar to them as stupid and barbaric.

It does not mean that one does not make judgments about what one encounters.

Cultural relativism, especially of the non-anthropology-specific philosophical variety, does not mean “Oh, it’s their own way, they’re not from our culture, we can’t judge”, because that’s nonsense. Of course we can judge. And so can they. And so we all do. Pretending otherwise won’t help, and the notion that “outsiders have no right to judge” is exactly the kind of thing that prevents both legislation and action against violence inside the family. We have every right to judge, all of us, about everything.

The responsibility of an intelligent and thoughtful person is not to cease judging. It is, rather, to keep in mind that being outside a situation makes some things easier to see and others harder, and that the thing in question might be one of the ones that’s harder. An intelligent and thoughtful person has a responsibility to always be willing to look at new information and take that information into account, no matter how well they think they understand the situation already.

An intelligent and thoughtful person also has a responsibility to evaluate the information, of course, taking into consideration the source and occasion.

It’s always a balancing act. Always in motion. Judgments that are stable, that have stopped, that are satisfied… those are the ones that are categorically mistaken, not necessarily in content but in process. Those are the judgments that are insupportable, because time always goes on and we never know when new information will come to light that might change the whole question into something else. Because we never know, we must stay alert to the constant possibility.

The fact that good judgments are never final, never absolute and never finished does not let anyone off the hook from making them.

Or changing them.

What cultural relativism does is remind us that we might be wrong. Not that we are certain to be wrong, when we are judging someone else’s cultural activities, because having grown up with something or not grown up with it does not confer automatic and eternal rightness or wrongness. But that we might be wrong, and should remember where we’re standing.

Another way to boil down cultural relativism is: be aware of your own position.

No one is unbiased, whether inside or outside of a situation. Nor is it always clear where the in/out line lies. This is the other reason no one can make absolute judgments, because every judgment comes from a very specific life experience.

That does not invalidate the judgments in question.

The trick, in all cases, is to be aware of the interest one may have when judging a given cultural practice because one is female or white or the employee of an oil corporation or a dog owner. Be aware of the interest and ask oneself, not whether one’s position is influencing one’s judgment because of course it will, but instead whether it is obscuring one’s ability to view and consider all the information involved. That is what one must strive to avoid, not the making of ongoing judgments as best one can.

In the end, this can be a powerful tool in making judgments and then choosing where and when to act on them. What it should never be is an excuse to avoid the responsibility, as a thinking human being, to have opinions on how human beings act towards each other.

Ok, I finally skimmed the anime thread on fanfic_hate. My immediate reaction was: don’t these people have anything better to do with their time?

On reflection, though, I think there is, in fact, a valuable lesson to fic writers that can be derived from f_h. It lies in the very proliferation and drastically contradictory nature of the pitiful puling that I found.

The pessimistic way to put it is that there’s no possible way to “do it right”. If you write lots of sex, someone will complain that you’re ignoring the obvious gen aspects of your source; if you write only gen someone will insist that you don’t do justice to the obvious romantic tension of your source; if you use lyrical and image-laden language you are sure to be accused of prosy purpleness; if you write primarily in dialogue some will howl that you write mere scripts, not stories; if you write a lot of AUs they will say that you aren’t really writing Series X at all; if you tend to do missing scene stories they will deride you for lack of imagination. There’s no way to win this game.

The more pragmatic way to put it is that, no matter what you write, someone will get their panties in a big, starchy twist over it, so you might as well ignore them all, write however you damn well please, and let the chips fall any old how.

Author responsiveness to audience desire is a courtesy, in our non-commercial niche, not a market necessity, and certainly not some kind of moral imperative. The same, of course, holds true for audience response. I rather think it would do fandom good to remember this. As much as authors attempting to extort feedback are overreaching themselves, so, too, are readers who attempt to impose their priorities on the writers.

(I should probably say, here, that none of my own regular readers have crossed this line, and I treasure every one of you.)

Thus, the appropriate response to Jane Reader, when she says that some part of your story was not quite to her taste, and should therefore be changed, is: Too bad.

I have read a great many stories that delighted me. I have never read a single one that I would not, given the opportunity, alter in some way, great or small. This is an imperfect world.

For pity’s sake, deal with it.