Remember when Obama claimed that white racism wasn't endemic, and nobody had any idea what he meant, but I was pretty sure I disagreed with him?

Mark Liberman at languagelog takes up the question here, interpreting the comment the same way I did. So apparently I was right to be disappointed.

There is a claim I've seen being made a lot lately, in a lot of different places (but part of the same overall argument) by different people, that if a word applies to everything it becomes meaningless. Can anyone explain this claim to me?

If I say "everything is made up of atoms" does that mean "made up of atoms" is a meaningless category?

I remember having a conversation on the OTW FAQ and the language it uses, referring to what I would call source texts as "original works" and thus inadvertently imply intentionality which isn't truly there in the case of many RPF canons, in the comments of this post, with jadelennox, in which she said:

The jargon term "text" encompasses the idea that all objects, experiences, encounters, etc. are analyzable under the same lens is we would use to analyze the non-jargon "texts". There really isn't any jargon-free way to say "I mean everything in the world, except everything in the world from the point of view that you can look at everything in the world as a text". I'm not even explaining it well when I try to translate it into a whole lot of English words. *shakes tiny fist*

Is the "except [. . .] from the point of view that you can look at everything in the world as a text" part of her definition really lacking any semantic content?

If I say everything is about sex, or the death-drive, or the means of production, or the will-to-power, am I making meaningless statements?

If everything is X then, a) that may say something meaningful about the state of everything, and b) that doesn't eliminate the possibility that some things are more X than others, closer to the center of the conceptual web, less problematically X, while others lurk in the fuzzy boundaries.

Or am I just insane?

Rhiannon Bury, "From a Room to a Cyberspace of One's Own: Technology and the Women-Only Heterotopia." In Feminist (Re)visions of the Subject, ed. Gail Currie and Celia Rothenberg. Lanham: Lexington, 2001. Page 58:

Women, however, have never simply accepted these normative discourses and, in response, enter or are placed in segregated sites in which they cannot only resist being categorized as "minus male," but take pleasure in identifying with the devalued "feminine."

Out of charity to Bury, I'm assuming that she was the victim of an overzealous copyeditor here. If I squint, I can almost make it make sense by having it mean that women must do more than "only resist," but really the only way to make it completely comfortable is to break the "cannot" up into two words.

The more I thought about it, though, the more uncertain I became--my reasoning makes sense, but language doesn't always--and so in the spirit of languagelog I turn to Google psycholinguistics, which give me 1,610,000 hits for "can not only * but" and only 80,300 for "cannot only * but" which makes it one-twentieth as common, and which confirms that my instincts seem to reflect the majority usage. Which is a relief.

For the record, I am white, male, heterosexual, middle-class, American, Christian, . . .  frankly? It'd be quicker to name the ways I'm not privileged.

I say this not because it's National Coming Out Day [I notebooked this post in class and on the train yesterday--Ed.] (although I sort of do want to make a long post about how I experience my heterosexuality, and how I feel certain labels apply to me, and what it means when everyone assumes those labels apply to me already anyway, but can't think of a way to do it that wouldn't make me feel like I'm appropriating), but because it means that I have pretty much two choices: I can, in the long tradition of privileged individuals, ignore my privilege, or I can learn to deal with it. I won't claim that I've done the latter; indeed, there is no doubt in my mind there are numerous ways in which I have not. What I have done is think a lot about what is the  best way to try.

Learning to deal with it is not necessarily accepting every claim made by a traditional victim (survivor?) of injustice. It is not to automatically agree that everything which is claimed to be descriminative or unjust or whatever-ist is. That'd be intellectual suicide, and an abrogation of one's moral responsibilities to boot. It may happen that, when all is said and done, when one looks at a situation from the perspective of who one is, there will still be disagreement. That's okay.

I vote for Party X (out of two choices, does any of my flisters really doubt which that is?) because my parents vote for Party X (or Party Q when they are reasonably sure Party Y won't win, as do I) and instilled me with the values that lead me to vote that way. Most likely, if my parents voted for Party Y than I would too. Recognizing this doesn't make me want to stop voting for Party X--I still think I am right to vote for Party X, and will continue to think so until convinced otherwise--but it does make me stop and think about why I am voting for Party X, to re-examine my premises.

Similarly, what is required when a claim of injustice is made is a pause, a hesitation, an honest assessment of oneself and one motives, and above all listening with an open mind.

. . .

( the part about Sapir-Whorf, which is very relevant to the above if you look at it sideways )

The book I ordered, Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture by Will "I'm Not Allowed to Say I Think Hayden Panettiere Is Hot" Brooker, has arrived. I'll tell you what I think of it when I've finished. That means, so far, I've gotten books by this guy, henryjenkins, and rozk, but I'm still waiting for kbusse_blog's book to show up. Woes.

*

I posted fic Tuesday night, Emma and Kitty acting out one of the femslashier (and cross-gen-y) scenes from "The Snow Queen," in a way which actually fits into AXM canon. I thought my flist would eat it up. (Apparently not?)

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Courtesy of slammerkinbabe: The Roberts Court continues to prove itself activist. (N.B.: My intent is to make fun of the "activist" meme, not to endorse it. There are times when when the Court should be activist [I have a very expansive view of Constitutional rights] and times when it shouldn't. The best government isn't the government which governs least, but the one which governs best. In other words, I'm unashamedly partisan.) Actually, looking at the front page of the New York Times, "activist" doesn't really begin to cover it. God they were busy. (And conservative. Oh, so very conservative. Much more than I actually expected, really. I guess stare decisis is a thing of the past.)

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Earlier today, I was confused whether it should be "Do you want Mom and me to go to the store?" or "Do you want Mom and I to go to the store?" On reflection, taking out "Mom and" makes it pretty clear that the "correct" pronoun is "me" (as one would never say "Do you want I to go to the store?") but I'm still not sure why that is the case, or what all of the pieces in that sentence are doing. Sentences that I can't diagram vex me.

*

The rector at my parish, who will be retiring shortly (woes!), gave me two books by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in order to clear out his own collection. I've only browsed through them, but in general I have to say I find theological works from that era absolutely fascinating, since besides a few pages of Tillich that I read and fell in love with in high school (yes, my Catholic high school had Tillich in its library) I've pretty much only read theology that was written since 1970 (mostly feminist, postmodernist, and/or liberationist theology) or else stuff like Aquinas and Augustine. The specific set of problems that a 1960's theology needed to address is similar in many ways to those of today, but alongside Beyond God the Father, Ecology & Liberation, and The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida it sort of ends up looking rather quaint, if you know what I mean. (OTOH, some parts I read and I totally go "OMG, I can't believe he just said that.")

So many of you, the ones who follow metafandom at least, will be familiar with the rough outline of the discussion: kradical--Keith R.A. DeCandido, the author of, among other things, the Serenity novelization (which I own but have yet to read)---made a post discussing the difference between fanfic and professional media tie-in fic in which he had the bad sense to call tie-ins "superior" (with the scare quotes) because they were a) legal and b) professionally edited. Discussion ensued, in which there was both much blowing what KRAD said wildly out of proportion and people who decided, much as they did during the SGA race discussion, that as long as the conversation was going on they might as well chime in. Which brings us to this post by liviapenn, who puts forth the challenge: "Let's make a list. Of awesome, legal, published fanfiction."

Now this post is wonderful just to see all the derivative works which have made their way into print, some which really boggle the mind, like Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So. But what I really find interesting are the places in the comments where fans question the criteria for inclusion into the list, by putting forth some defintion of their own of fanfic--their Theory of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, so to speak--and explaining how Professionally Published Work A doesn't fit into that definition of fanfic. What they're trying to do is put forth a conceptual analysis, the primary tool of "analytic philosophy," in which one attempts to sort out problematic cases. One of my professors from university (very much from the analytic tradition--he had a Ph.D. in math from Cambridge and one in Philosophy from the den of positivism known as M.I.T.) explained it like this: Everyone agrees that it is bad to boil babies and good to help old women across the street (although I must add that of course "everyone" agrees on no such thing), the trick is to tease out the essential qualities so as to address problematic cases and decide whether they fall under the concepts of "good" or "bad."

The goal is to "carve nature at the joints" which, of course, implicity assumes that nature (or at least language, as analytic philosophy has largely dumped metaphysics and epistemology in exchange for philosophy of language) has joints, that there's a clear cut place where something stops being fanfiction and starts being something else, even if no one else has managed to find it or quite agree on where it is.

The best way to point out that someone's analysis of goodness is faulty is to prove that it includes boiling babies or excludes helping old ladies across the street. (This is in contrast to, say, the deontological ethics of Kant, who would start with first principles and run with them irrespective of how ludicrous his conclusions ended up looking.) And with fanfiction, the best way to prove that a given Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not is faulty is to demonstrate that it excludes the latest McShep WIP.

The first Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not was provided in this thread, with the specific problematic case being Gregory Maguire's Wicked:

( Read more... )

Now to provide a functional definition of fanfic makes perfect sense to me (I don't agree with liviapenn when she accuses djonn of tying the definition of fanfic to issues of quality), but this definition seems particularly problematic. My problem with dividing fanfiction from "a manuscript where the [. . .] serial numbers were filed on" based on whether the work engages the source material isn't that I think the division is nonsensical, the way that I think a division between gen and het based on canonicity is nonsensical (although producing a workable account of what is and isn't "engaging with the source text" may well prove impossible). It's that it excludes a number of stories from being fanfic which aren't problematic cases--in this case, pretty much any PWP. Indeed, this type of story is so manifestly a part of fanfiction that we've coined a term for it: ATG, or "Any Two Guys/Girls." And the conclusion that these ATG PWP's aren't fanfic is a reductio ad absurdim which for me refutes djonn's entire Theory of What Fanfic Is and Isn't.

Another example can be found here, when azdak takes on the problematic case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead :

( Read more... )

First off, there's plenty of fanfiction which is written not out of an intense love for the source text, but out of a desire to play with it, to fix it, or just because one thought one could write it and put it down as such for yuletide. So azdak's Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not ignores the rich diversity of motives fanficcers might hold as they work their craft.

Secondly, the definition assumes that fanfic treats characters only as people and never as fictional characters. Some fics are more meta than others, but being a pretentious metafic doesn't make a fic not fanfic. Fic for Stoppard's play continues to treat Ros and Guil as fictional characters even as they slash them, because to remove that element would be to ignore sometime integral to the source text (one'd be writing Hamlet slash rather than Stoppard slash), but it's still fanfic. Most people on my flist are familiar with some of wisdomeagle's mind-blowing metafiction, and I've written a metafic or two myself.

Other Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not come off just as badly. Tying fanfic's status explicitly to copyright issue excludes not only the problematic cases but also half of yuletide as well. (OTOH, the Yuletide fics often don't rest as comfortably under our notions of fanfiction as other fics for 'thons might.) Notions of community can't unproblematically make a distinction between literary fiction and professional science fiction are also written in the context of a community (at times an overlapping one with fandom, at times not). cathexys' attempts to delineate a slash aesthetic haven't been as successful as she'd like.

I don't want to come off as claiming that Wicked or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead aren't problematic cases, or that it isn't problematic to lump Homer's The Oddessy and liz_marcs' Living History in the same category. liz_marcs' story is clearly and intuitively fanfiction in a way that Homer's isn't. But when the definition we construct to exclude Homer also ends up excluding Living History, that's a sign that the definition is fundamentally broken.

As a post-structuralist, I tend to view conceptual analyses as quaint holdovers from the days of Bertrand Russell, when it was thought that language could be made as wonderfully precise as mathematics. (It turns out mathematics ends up being as wonderfully imprecise as language.) But that isn't to deny that conceptual analyses can be great fun as logical puzzles, especially as one comes up with more and more convoluted examples to prove that under a given definition case A which intuitively falls on one side of the line in truth falls on the other. Indeed, that's why analytic philosophers are so much fun to spend time with--they always come up with the kookiest examples. (And then no one in the classroom laughs, and I'm looking around wondering if I was the only one in my Intro Phil class awake.)

Instead, I turn, as I did in the gen vs. ship debates, to the notion of genre, to the post-Wittgenstein idea that language is always-already fuzzy, and no matter how much you look you won't find uncomplicated joints in language or nature. In her defense, azdak recognizes (parenthetically) that what she puts forth may be if not "the defining quality" then "at least one of the central characteristics," but still she seems to think it to be defining enough to disqualify Stoppard's play without needing to refer to any of the other ways it is different from our core notion of what fanfiction is and does. In the end, all we have is partial truths and faulty definitions--and if you've ever looked inside a dictionary, you know that's all we ever have. Fanfiction is about engaging with the source text, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about treating characters as human beings, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about violating copyright, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about community, except when it's not. Fanfiction is written by women for women, except when it's not. Fanfiction is subversive, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about unleashing fantasies, except when it's not. Fanfiction "reads like fanfic" except when it doesn't. A fic that does many of these things will fit more comfortably under our intuitive notion of what fanfiction is then a fic which only does one of them. Some works are clearly fanfiction or clearly not fanfiction, being the fannish equivalent of baby-boiling, while some problematic cases rest in the grey areas between.

So keep on putting forth your Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, but expect me to be there, shooting holes in them, because that's my idea of a good time.

ETA: azdak continues the discussion with more on "Fanfic" as a fuzzy category.

So: I went to that "Usage and Abusage" panel with languagelog posters Mark Liberman and John McWhorter as well as Erin McKean and Ben Yagoda. Liberman is right, I think, in saying that a good time was had by all who attended.

One of the best things was being present for the audience reactions--the groans of distaste when some usage or another the audience didn't like was brought out, the audible frustration when the panelists refused to denounce said usage, and whatnot. There was much question and answer, and while I don't think the panelists said much one wouldn't have been able to predict, they always did so in a way which was charming and entertaining, and I had a great time--which makes up for the nightmare I had navigating the NJ/Philly public transportation system.

If anyone was there, I was the gentleman in the "interesting shirt" who asked about the death of whom. I probably should have been more specific or asked about speech instead of writing in order to get a more interesting answer than the equivocal "It'll last longer than you think it will" response I got.

Afterwards, I bought a book by each of the languagelog panelists and of course got them signed, and was present as Liberman conversed about the future and follies of the SAT system. (My response: "The SAT Writing was always graded by automatons, and I don't see the difference between the human and cybernetic variety.")

As remarked before in this journal, the underlying process of the game of "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" provides some interesting fundamental similarities and dissimilarities to other processes of inquiry: to a detective investigating a mystery, to a scientist developing a theory, to the work of logicians, linguists, and lawyers. So it should be in no way surprising that while going through my favorite blogs, I came across several matters of interest which speak to the philosophical issues at hand in the way we go about our canon-formation (speaking of canon here as a set of "facts" about a fictional and/or actual world derived from a text, rather than as the text itself).

( Language Log, Volokh Conspiracy, and Original Meta )

languagelog is always awesome (even if they sometimes lean a bit heavily to the positivistic side), but today's two most recent posts are particularly noteworthy and worthy of recommendation: a long, wonderfully detailed piece on who/m, and a more rambling piece on the descriptivism/prescriptivism battle that somehow ends up discussing Star Trek.

I strongly reccommend you head over and check them out.

www.languagelog.com

Via voleuse: hth_the_first on what makes a couple slashy, and liviapenn responding (not really rebutting) with "normal behavior isn't slashy."

See, the thing is: yeah, normal life is slashy. It's 'cesty. It's a lot of things, some of them things which even fandom doesn't have words for, that we don't see because we're not used to looking at a life-text that way. I've lived in an appartment with two other men, and I've lived in a house with my family members. And there have been perfectly innocuous events (doing the dishes even!) that if they were to appear on a television screen then yeah, I would read them as slashy or 'cesty.

Which is not to say that I wanted to sex with my roommates or my family members, or that they wanted to have sex with me. When we're looking at life, we tend to get caught up in the ding an sich, in issues of "what really happened." It seems perfectly sensible to wonder "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" when you've just had Lady Macbeth over for tea.

But literary texts don't work that way. Lady Macbeth has a dozen children and no children at the same time. The cat is both dead and alive. (Fanfic opens the box and collapses the eigenstates, so to speak. And this metaphor is so not my own; I remember wisdomeagle using it, but I doubt that it's hers either.) While for the most part we conveniently and deliberately forget that our life-text is a floating signifier (which doesn't mean that it isn't real or is radically modifiable or any other pomo nonsense, just that it's eternally cut off from the thing-in-itself), we can't forget that about our fannish texts. We can (and possibly should) argue over what is the most straight-forward interpretation of canon, or even the best interpretation, but not the right one. "It's just a story." (Real life is sort of story, too, but we don't usually look for morals in it, do we? And if I said, "The rain outside is a metaphor for racist intolerance" people would look at me funny, wouldn't they?) (Of course, sometimes we do treat life events as metaphors, like with tarot cards. But this is seen as an unorthodox response--and just not plain understood by some people.)

I mean, this is half the reason why RPF exists. Because John Kerry and John Edwards were slashy. Because William Moseley and Anna Popplewell really are het-tastic sometimes. (Sometimes as a deliberate choice on the part of the photographer, least as I construct the photographer-function.) Sometimes the subtext is a hint to "what really lies beneath" the floating signifier, as in the Lance Bass case, but I think that for the most case we (for at least the "my flist" value of "we") recognize that Kerry and Edwards weren't sexually attracted to each other, and that Will and Anna have almost certainly never had sex with each other. But because the signifier is floating, we can imagine it being attached to a completely different "what lies beneath," like Anna being a Vampire Slayer or Jason Dohring and Krsistin Bell breaking Katie Holmes out of a Scientologist fortress. (And OMG there's a sequel?! *goes to read*)

Do we really think that the only reason Simon could possibly have done what he did for his sister was if he were sexually attracted to River? And if we don't think this, does that mean their relationship isn't 'cesty? Because I think we can all agree that their relationship is 'cesty as hell and, if you privelege authorial intent or use interviews when constructing the author-function, deliberately so.

Reading subtext/slashiness/'cestiness isn't like finding out whodunit in a detective novel. Because whodunit is revealed at the end of detective novel (although I'm sure there's some postmodern detective novel out there that doesn't reveal whodunit) and, y'know, that's text. It's only subtext if there is no explicitly right or wrong answer.

Cinematic texts have elements like the camera work and the soundtrack which influence the way we read a text without changing one whit "what really happened." But these elements are objective features of the text, and part of the communicative mechanisms which make up the medium. Reading a text is more complicated than just figuring out "what is really going on."

So reading subtext/slashiness/'cestiness into/out of a text is a response to the floating signifier, to the text qua text, not to the Events Themselves. In Real LifeTM, if a brother accidentally enters a bathroom while his sister is getting out of the shower, that doesn't mean he wants to jump her bones (or vice versa). It just means they live in a house together and she forgot to lock the door and he neglected to knock or she didn't hear him and so he, completely by accident, saw his sister naked. That's what "really happened" (we say). And it happens. No big deal, although the sister probably isn't going to be very happy.

(Nor the brother, probably, who's likely to be actively repulsed by a combination of social taboos and the Westermarck effect. But we can read that repulsion as a performative act, either a deliberate dissimilation and pretense or as a less conscious Freudian denial. And of course this is why Freudian analysis is so much more popular in literary analysis than in, y'know, empirical psychology.)

And then, that evening, in the course of doing his wash, that brother takes his sisters' bras and panties out of the dryer and he puts them in a laundry basket. Hell, maybe he even folds them. This is Standard Operating Procedure in pretty much every family across the world that has its own washer and dryer.

But if I'm watching a forty-minute show and thirty seconds of it is devoted to each of these events, then yeah, it Means Something. Because things don't "just happen" when read as part of a literary text. Because we--if you let me channel Jubal Early for a moment--imbue them with meaning. We give it a purpose. We construct an author-function, and we decode a message, and yes, the decoder ring is jury-rigged so the message will be sex, sex, sex. The mechanism of literary (and within literary I include cinematic and other modes of artistic criticism) criticism is predisposed to read sex out of a scene, in large part because literary critics like thinking about sex. And so do writers, so they play along.

Let they who are without sin throw the first stone.

A long expositionary dialogue conducted while two female characters are dressed in towels in the girls' locker room is femslashy. Because yes, Virginia, the all-female space does queer the relationship, despite the fact that this is Perfectly Common Behavior and having conversations dressed in a towel in a locker room doesn't make one a lesbian. (I have doubts as a het male how often this type of behavior actually happens outside of television, but that's neither here nor there. Because, as I've said, "actually happens" isn't the point--there 's a system of cinematic signification and realism doesn't really play into it all that much at all.) (Plus we can't forget the camera as a placeholder for the het male gaze, which sexualizes things even further. I should probably have used two male characters in a boy's locker room, but that's not so much fun for me to visualize. But the point would be the same.)

When I watch Buffy and Faith in season 3 and see them as femslashy as hell, when the heart that Faith draws isn't a love-heart at all but really a vampire heart (with a stake through it), and besides teenage girls use that sort of heart imagery to each other all the time without meaning anything at all sexual by it (although I still think those interactions are femslashy as hell too), I'm not illegitimately reading my own interpretation into the text. (Although if I were reading my own interpretation into the text I don't see necessarily why that should be illegitimate, but I probably wouldn't write an essay for a grade on the Anne/Violet 'cest in Man and Superman just because there's not a lot of textual evidence.)

I'm using a more-or-less agreed-upon system of deciphering textual cues, regardless of whether cues were intentionally put in by the writer. (Are Rosalind/Celia so gay on purpose? Probably, but who cares if it's not deliberate? It's a facet of the text that's there. It even meets the non-visual criteria of hth_the_first's slash texts--and when I imagine it, it meets the visual criteria as well. Which is not to say that we would at all assume that two cousins who were that devoted to each other had to be sexually attracted to each other if it were happening in "the real world.")

And when someone points out that hermeneutic I'm using to interrogate the fictional text isn't the same one I'd use to interrogate real life, I answer: whyever the hell should it be?

And then I imagine them making out with their sister.