An Abstract of an Essay
ETA: Please read this before this post. Note that this is not a post about RaceFail.
My head is full of thoughts and ideas, partly based on my RaceFail readings, particularly thrown up by
oliviacirce's big post about RaceFail, WisCon, and family fights, but also based on my rasfc experiences, mixed in with some other thinky thoughts about Fandom I've had for a while, based eg on
ellen_fremedon's Id Vortex. And I think I have to get them all out, but I'm worried if I did it properly, it would be the size of a PhD thesis and take weeks just to get all the links and references, and in addition to writing this post today, I need to clean the kitchen, get exercise, and do some job hunting. So like my man Darwin, this will be just the summary notes of the full thing, however long the summary notes turn out to be.
I'm going to start with Jane Austen. I've long held the belief that Jane Austen was a specfic writer - despite the fact that her books are in and of her time, they (in my opinion) need very little historical background, because JA either leaves those bits out, or provides enough incluing. And I feel, reading Pride and Prejudice particularly, that JA knows/hopes that what she is describing is not a permanent state of affairs and sometime in the future women will want to know what it was like back then, and they are who she is writing for.
More recently, I've become aware that not only was JA writing specfic, she was in fandom. What she wrote was not the proper thing for women of her time to be reading, let alone writing; she published anonymously; and I believe the reason her work has survived (to create the entire literary category of the Novel, more or less) when the Serious Proper Art of the time hasn't, is because she was surfing the Id Vortex of her time. Moreover, she was part of a fannish community as can be seen from her correspondence, and which Joanna Russ and others have already pointed out has been suppressed from the "official" history of her achievement.
Now onto Little House on the Prairie. I've already described my experiences at reading the Oyate review of LHotP, realising how I was blind to that angle when I read and loved LHotP as a child, and how it reinforced my developing white privilege. My immediate reaction was that I could never let a child of mine read LHotP, but as others have pointed out, LHotP actually does contain significant clues to the Indian Problem, and is a massive improvement on Thirteenth Child's erasure of the Native Americans altogether, despite the fact that I believe TC was a well-intentioned attempt to improve LHotP.
And it occurred to me that TC was a part of a genre that LHotP had created, which genre I had far less interest in than LHotP itself, just like Jane Austen has spawned the regency romance genre (and possibly the entire romance genre) and I've never wanted to read regency romance (I've read some romance in general) but always go back to JA when that's the kind of emotional experience I want because despite romance novels (I believe) trying to re-create that experience again and again, they fail, for me anyway.
And I honestly believe the reason LHotP and JA succeed and the following genre doesn't, (the genre itself being the proof of the success of the original) is partly because the problematical aspects of the times, from the point of view of posteriority, are there at the correct level: the level they had at the time. Not the level that results from our attempts to figure out how people back then thought about women or Native Americans or people with same-sex attractions or the disabled, nor the level that results when we well-intentionedly try to re-imagine something with the same power but without the icky problematical attitudes to [fitb].
And because I am an evolutionary biologist (it does come into this, honest, I cannot detach evolutionary thinking from anything I think about seriously and I regard this as a strength even if society at large is a bit weirded by it), I apply evolutionary principles: right now is the same as every other time, only we can see right now with a detail we can't see the past, and we can see the past with a perspective and a sense of proportion we can't see right now. And we can see what happened to the past and we can only guess what will happen to right now, but our guesses are likely to be better if we use all the information at our disposal.
(I know the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house, but I think the sneaky thing about empirical science is that it's not actually the master's tool, it's just one he's borrowed, and we can use it too. Also I think it's fundamentally the only tool we have: observation, judgement, information sharing, adjustment of judgement or change of observation in response. All other tools build on it.)
I feel like I need to explain what I'm pointing at in more detail but I don't know how to explain just a bit more, it's either these hints or full-blown book chapters. And I have to get something out today because I think any future book chapters will be better and stronger for the kind of feedback this might get. As explained in the above parentheses.
So, there's all these people, you, me, our families, our neighbours, our peoples and nations and cultures. And somewhere it becomes too hard for our big monkey brains to see lots of individuals and we start seeing groups. And something that at least I am very guilty of is that I see what the group wants, or what I think the group wants, and it's often quite antagonistic to me and what I want. And when the group is small enough that I do actually know many as individuals, and I think about it carefully, it's not actually obvious to me that the group really does want what I think it wants, and I wonder why I construe the larger group as so hostile to me.
And I think I need to implement my evolutionary principles of thinking about time to thinking about people: that I am actually "the same" as everyone else, but I have detailed information about myself I don't have about "the group" and I have perspective on the group I don't have on myself, and I can see what happens to other groups, but I can't really see how I am in a group and what's happening to it. And whenever I look at and judge a group I'm part of, I see it minus myself of course, but equivalently when you look at and judge a group you're part of you see it minus yourself.
Which is part of why WisCon doesn't look quite so overwhelmingly White to the white bodies there as it does to the coloured bodies there. And as my sister always mentioned, why left-handed fencers are initially so much worse against other left-handed fencers than the right-handed fencers in the same club. She was one of two left-handed fencers - so they literally got half as much practice against left-handers as all the right-handers did.
Anyway, it's clear to me that a lot of what we with our historical perspective can define as Great Art was marginalised at the time - Shakespeare was a populist hack, Jane Austen was writing fan fiction, nobody cares about Arthur Sullivan's Serious Compositions. And science fiction/fantasy also began in the margins - as pulp, and with Tolkien rejecting 20th Century literature only to be nominated as the author of possibly the greatest book of the 20th Century.
And every time there is recognition of something's greatness, there's also the attempt to recapture that greatness, and genres are created and become mainstream and the genres rarely succeed the way the original does - because I do not think a Mills&Boon romance can ever capture the true desperation of Jane Austen contemplating the fate of women in her time and imagining how she might escape that - within the strictures of her society, because that's what she was capable of imagining. Now we can imagine women escaping so much further, romance novels reinforce the structure JA was trying to break free of in a way she doesn't, and never will, herself.
I do think one of the purposes of Art is to show the places that are broken right now and the places we need to move out of. But I don't think deliberate attempts to do it work all that well, because I think history shows that the successful attempts tend not to be recognised as Great Art at the time, and that the artist in question is usually working so hard just to express the sticky, unpleasant, marginal place they are stuck in without getting completely beaten down by the hegemony, that they don't have time for big Philosophical Thinky Thoughts About Their Place In History.
And I do think the best art shows the stuff that is broken Right Now, not our re-imaginings of how we think stuff was broken back then, or attempts to re-capture the lightning without the bits we now clearly see as icky, because that lightning includes the icky bits from then, and is unapologetic about it mostly because it doesn't realise (being in the Right Now) just how icky those bits are going to look once it's The Past. We have to understand the strengths of Right Now and The Past and not mix them up or try to get one bit to do the other's job.
And, well, RaceFail and rasfc: it's pretty obvious to me that the original strengths of SF were of its time, but at the same time, SF is very white male colonialist, and that's a strength from an abstract historical perspective of it as a phase humans moved through, but currently we have a bunch of people who are still trying to re-capture what SF was like for them when they read it back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and who get very angry when they're told that the sexism of the time is not an essential requirement for good SendaWunda escapism (although it might be an essential requirement for SensaWunda escapism of that time but then I'd prefer to read the originals, not the following genre, thanks). They're the people I think now mostly rule rasfc.
They don't rule SF/fandom overall, because SF did actually move on into a feminist phase and we got Ursula Le Guin Left Hand of Darkness SensaWunda and I think it's the people who were captivated by that stage and created the Feminist SF genre and perhaps WisCon out of it who are nearer "the centre", and seem to match up with
aamcnamara's Scary Ponies Oh No. And these people are used to being somewhat the liberal, enlightened crowd (because they've got the generation older than them as per Colonialists up above as constant reminders) and they're not dealing at all well with finding out that there's a newer generation slashing away out in the margins, and that newer generation is not interested in publishing its definitive Great Novel so it can be the next generation of SF.
I think there's both, among the Pretty Princess Monsters Blargh, the creation of a new genre/art form/expression of marginalisation as per the historical expectation and an increasing awareness of the marginalisation and its strengths and weaknesses. I think this is not at all something revolutionarily new - past generations have had for example The Madness Of Genius and The Starving Artist as their attempted expressions of that marginalisation/Id Vortex thing.
And I expect that 200 years in the future, they'll have decided which particular corner of early 21st Century marginalisation the Great Art actually came from, and have new issues of marginalisation to struggle with, and there'll be PhD theses on how exactly how the misogyny of slash despite being written by women fits into the great movements of art and society. Because that'll be their job, once we're The Past and not Right Now.
But as I said, we don't get to mix up roles or try to figure this out ahead of time because it's not the best use of resources, we should take advantage of our Right Now. And there is no excuse for thinking that because there will still be injustice and still be marginalisations in the future that we don't have a responsibility to deal with the marginalisations we have right now, to the best of our ability, however we are able, whether that's as a marginalised person producing marginalised art whose greatness will only be recognised later, or as a not-so-marginalised person helping the marginalised be heard.
And I very definitely think that one of the processes of technology Right Now is a leveling of the playing field, in the same way that the invention of printing made reading and writing available to many more people, the tape deck made dubbing and mixing available to many more people, and DVDs and computers made vidding possible in the way it now exists.
Too many people have become complacent by the growth of mass media and capitalism out of the Industrial Revolution, to think that the hierarchical structure of a few people of authority with many more quietly listening, is somehow 'natural' or 'normal' or 'right' for humans. It is simultaneously frustrating and yet somehow inevitable that the more level playing field of the LJ model (and now I think the Dreamwidth model that is in the process of evolving out of that), in comparison to blogs, is the "irrelevant corner the girls all hang out" of the internet.
I do think we apes can manage something less hierarchical and less capitalistic in terms of our social cultural exchange, and I hope ultimately in terms of our government, than the status quo, and I do think LJ/DW is closer to that model than blogs are. Because I think that's where we started back when we were groups of 100 or so, and we just haven't had the technology to pull it off at larger scales, and I don't deny there are any number of issues we have to address on the way, but I at least can imagine I can see a path from here and I think that means it's as Right Now as it's going to get.
Not least of the issues that have to be addressed is getting the people who are currently higher up the hierarchy to accept that some of us don't want a hierachy at all, or as little of one as possible. And the people who function comfortably with capitalism to understand that it's an inadequate model of human exchange of goods, services, and value, and some of us would like to ditch it in favour of something more human. I suspect, from my place of relative privilege, that those tasks are closer to being my job than anyone else's I know. Which is not fun to face because I'm not an economist or sociologist or whatever, and yet I know I'm not an economist because that model fails, and I knew it in my gut but not to the capacity to argue with it, when I was deciding what to study at university.
I feel like I'm about at the end. And there was remarkably little actually about RaceFail or rasfc in there. I think that's because my assorted posts about RaceFail and comments elsewhere covered that aspect, for me, to the same depth at least as the rest of this. I realise it is unsatisfactory to others, so I'll at least point you at this thread. (Oh, and do read all the comments in general, there is so much thinky goodness in there).
Okay, on with the rest of my day.
This entry was originally posted at http://aquaeri.dreamwidth.org/65936.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
My head is full of thoughts and ideas, partly based on my RaceFail readings, particularly thrown up by
oliviacirce's big post about RaceFail, WisCon, and family fights, but also based on my rasfc experiences, mixed in with some other thinky thoughts about Fandom I've had for a while, based eg on
ellen_fremedon's Id Vortex. And I think I have to get them all out, but I'm worried if I did it properly, it would be the size of a PhD thesis and take weeks just to get all the links and references, and in addition to writing this post today, I need to clean the kitchen, get exercise, and do some job hunting. So like my man Darwin, this will be just the summary notes of the full thing, however long the summary notes turn out to be.
I'm going to start with Jane Austen. I've long held the belief that Jane Austen was a specfic writer - despite the fact that her books are in and of her time, they (in my opinion) need very little historical background, because JA either leaves those bits out, or provides enough incluing. And I feel, reading Pride and Prejudice particularly, that JA knows/hopes that what she is describing is not a permanent state of affairs and sometime in the future women will want to know what it was like back then, and they are who she is writing for.
More recently, I've become aware that not only was JA writing specfic, she was in fandom. What she wrote was not the proper thing for women of her time to be reading, let alone writing; she published anonymously; and I believe the reason her work has survived (to create the entire literary category of the Novel, more or less) when the Serious Proper Art of the time hasn't, is because she was surfing the Id Vortex of her time. Moreover, she was part of a fannish community as can be seen from her correspondence, and which Joanna Russ and others have already pointed out has been suppressed from the "official" history of her achievement.
Now onto Little House on the Prairie. I've already described my experiences at reading the Oyate review of LHotP, realising how I was blind to that angle when I read and loved LHotP as a child, and how it reinforced my developing white privilege. My immediate reaction was that I could never let a child of mine read LHotP, but as others have pointed out, LHotP actually does contain significant clues to the Indian Problem, and is a massive improvement on Thirteenth Child's erasure of the Native Americans altogether, despite the fact that I believe TC was a well-intentioned attempt to improve LHotP.
And it occurred to me that TC was a part of a genre that LHotP had created, which genre I had far less interest in than LHotP itself, just like Jane Austen has spawned the regency romance genre (and possibly the entire romance genre) and I've never wanted to read regency romance (I've read some romance in general) but always go back to JA when that's the kind of emotional experience I want because despite romance novels (I believe) trying to re-create that experience again and again, they fail, for me anyway.
And I honestly believe the reason LHotP and JA succeed and the following genre doesn't, (the genre itself being the proof of the success of the original) is partly because the problematical aspects of the times, from the point of view of posteriority, are there at the correct level: the level they had at the time. Not the level that results from our attempts to figure out how people back then thought about women or Native Americans or people with same-sex attractions or the disabled, nor the level that results when we well-intentionedly try to re-imagine something with the same power but without the icky problematical attitudes to [fitb].
And because I am an evolutionary biologist (it does come into this, honest, I cannot detach evolutionary thinking from anything I think about seriously and I regard this as a strength even if society at large is a bit weirded by it), I apply evolutionary principles: right now is the same as every other time, only we can see right now with a detail we can't see the past, and we can see the past with a perspective and a sense of proportion we can't see right now. And we can see what happened to the past and we can only guess what will happen to right now, but our guesses are likely to be better if we use all the information at our disposal.
(I know the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house, but I think the sneaky thing about empirical science is that it's not actually the master's tool, it's just one he's borrowed, and we can use it too. Also I think it's fundamentally the only tool we have: observation, judgement, information sharing, adjustment of judgement or change of observation in response. All other tools build on it.)
I feel like I need to explain what I'm pointing at in more detail but I don't know how to explain just a bit more, it's either these hints or full-blown book chapters. And I have to get something out today because I think any future book chapters will be better and stronger for the kind of feedback this might get. As explained in the above parentheses.
So, there's all these people, you, me, our families, our neighbours, our peoples and nations and cultures. And somewhere it becomes too hard for our big monkey brains to see lots of individuals and we start seeing groups. And something that at least I am very guilty of is that I see what the group wants, or what I think the group wants, and it's often quite antagonistic to me and what I want. And when the group is small enough that I do actually know many as individuals, and I think about it carefully, it's not actually obvious to me that the group really does want what I think it wants, and I wonder why I construe the larger group as so hostile to me.
And I think I need to implement my evolutionary principles of thinking about time to thinking about people: that I am actually "the same" as everyone else, but I have detailed information about myself I don't have about "the group" and I have perspective on the group I don't have on myself, and I can see what happens to other groups, but I can't really see how I am in a group and what's happening to it. And whenever I look at and judge a group I'm part of, I see it minus myself of course, but equivalently when you look at and judge a group you're part of you see it minus yourself.
Which is part of why WisCon doesn't look quite so overwhelmingly White to the white bodies there as it does to the coloured bodies there. And as my sister always mentioned, why left-handed fencers are initially so much worse against other left-handed fencers than the right-handed fencers in the same club. She was one of two left-handed fencers - so they literally got half as much practice against left-handers as all the right-handers did.
Anyway, it's clear to me that a lot of what we with our historical perspective can define as Great Art was marginalised at the time - Shakespeare was a populist hack, Jane Austen was writing fan fiction, nobody cares about Arthur Sullivan's Serious Compositions. And science fiction/fantasy also began in the margins - as pulp, and with Tolkien rejecting 20th Century literature only to be nominated as the author of possibly the greatest book of the 20th Century.
And every time there is recognition of something's greatness, there's also the attempt to recapture that greatness, and genres are created and become mainstream and the genres rarely succeed the way the original does - because I do not think a Mills&Boon romance can ever capture the true desperation of Jane Austen contemplating the fate of women in her time and imagining how she might escape that - within the strictures of her society, because that's what she was capable of imagining. Now we can imagine women escaping so much further, romance novels reinforce the structure JA was trying to break free of in a way she doesn't, and never will, herself.
I do think one of the purposes of Art is to show the places that are broken right now and the places we need to move out of. But I don't think deliberate attempts to do it work all that well, because I think history shows that the successful attempts tend not to be recognised as Great Art at the time, and that the artist in question is usually working so hard just to express the sticky, unpleasant, marginal place they are stuck in without getting completely beaten down by the hegemony, that they don't have time for big Philosophical Thinky Thoughts About Their Place In History.
And I do think the best art shows the stuff that is broken Right Now, not our re-imaginings of how we think stuff was broken back then, or attempts to re-capture the lightning without the bits we now clearly see as icky, because that lightning includes the icky bits from then, and is unapologetic about it mostly because it doesn't realise (being in the Right Now) just how icky those bits are going to look once it's The Past. We have to understand the strengths of Right Now and The Past and not mix them up or try to get one bit to do the other's job.
And, well, RaceFail and rasfc: it's pretty obvious to me that the original strengths of SF were of its time, but at the same time, SF is very white male colonialist, and that's a strength from an abstract historical perspective of it as a phase humans moved through, but currently we have a bunch of people who are still trying to re-capture what SF was like for them when they read it back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and who get very angry when they're told that the sexism of the time is not an essential requirement for good SendaWunda escapism (although it might be an essential requirement for SensaWunda escapism of that time but then I'd prefer to read the originals, not the following genre, thanks). They're the people I think now mostly rule rasfc.
They don't rule SF/fandom overall, because SF did actually move on into a feminist phase and we got Ursula Le Guin Left Hand of Darkness SensaWunda and I think it's the people who were captivated by that stage and created the Feminist SF genre and perhaps WisCon out of it who are nearer "the centre", and seem to match up with
aamcnamara's Scary Ponies Oh No. And these people are used to being somewhat the liberal, enlightened crowd (because they've got the generation older than them as per Colonialists up above as constant reminders) and they're not dealing at all well with finding out that there's a newer generation slashing away out in the margins, and that newer generation is not interested in publishing its definitive Great Novel so it can be the next generation of SF.
I think there's both, among the Pretty Princess Monsters Blargh, the creation of a new genre/art form/expression of marginalisation as per the historical expectation and an increasing awareness of the marginalisation and its strengths and weaknesses. I think this is not at all something revolutionarily new - past generations have had for example The Madness Of Genius and The Starving Artist as their attempted expressions of that marginalisation/Id Vortex thing.
And I expect that 200 years in the future, they'll have decided which particular corner of early 21st Century marginalisation the Great Art actually came from, and have new issues of marginalisation to struggle with, and there'll be PhD theses on how exactly how the misogyny of slash despite being written by women fits into the great movements of art and society. Because that'll be their job, once we're The Past and not Right Now.
But as I said, we don't get to mix up roles or try to figure this out ahead of time because it's not the best use of resources, we should take advantage of our Right Now. And there is no excuse for thinking that because there will still be injustice and still be marginalisations in the future that we don't have a responsibility to deal with the marginalisations we have right now, to the best of our ability, however we are able, whether that's as a marginalised person producing marginalised art whose greatness will only be recognised later, or as a not-so-marginalised person helping the marginalised be heard.
And I very definitely think that one of the processes of technology Right Now is a leveling of the playing field, in the same way that the invention of printing made reading and writing available to many more people, the tape deck made dubbing and mixing available to many more people, and DVDs and computers made vidding possible in the way it now exists.
Too many people have become complacent by the growth of mass media and capitalism out of the Industrial Revolution, to think that the hierarchical structure of a few people of authority with many more quietly listening, is somehow 'natural' or 'normal' or 'right' for humans. It is simultaneously frustrating and yet somehow inevitable that the more level playing field of the LJ model (and now I think the Dreamwidth model that is in the process of evolving out of that), in comparison to blogs, is the "irrelevant corner the girls all hang out" of the internet.
I do think we apes can manage something less hierarchical and less capitalistic in terms of our social cultural exchange, and I hope ultimately in terms of our government, than the status quo, and I do think LJ/DW is closer to that model than blogs are. Because I think that's where we started back when we were groups of 100 or so, and we just haven't had the technology to pull it off at larger scales, and I don't deny there are any number of issues we have to address on the way, but I at least can imagine I can see a path from here and I think that means it's as Right Now as it's going to get.
Not least of the issues that have to be addressed is getting the people who are currently higher up the hierarchy to accept that some of us don't want a hierachy at all, or as little of one as possible. And the people who function comfortably with capitalism to understand that it's an inadequate model of human exchange of goods, services, and value, and some of us would like to ditch it in favour of something more human. I suspect, from my place of relative privilege, that those tasks are closer to being my job than anyone else's I know. Which is not fun to face because I'm not an economist or sociologist or whatever, and yet I know I'm not an economist because that model fails, and I knew it in my gut but not to the capacity to argue with it, when I was deciding what to study at university.
I feel like I'm about at the end. And there was remarkably little actually about RaceFail or rasfc in there. I think that's because my assorted posts about RaceFail and comments elsewhere covered that aspect, for me, to the same depth at least as the rest of this. I realise it is unsatisfactory to others, so I'll at least point you at this thread. (Oh, and do read all the comments in general, there is so much thinky goodness in there).
Okay, on with the rest of my day.
This entry was originally posted at http://aquaeri.dreamwidth.org/65936.html. Please comment there using OpenID.