Intent, interpretation, legitimacy, accuracy & responsability

[etrangere]

I've been thinking about intent and interpretation, in communication and art especially, seeing a lot of things popping on my friendlist and journal related to the same thing.

Writer's intent is why people like thecorbie think there might be a case against fanficsIntent is something that might be or might not be gotten, with a responsability that may or

Comments

[apapazukamori]

Intent is what doesn't really matter when people say they hadn't mean to be racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, ableist, elitist... if this is what is read by the people who have the best reason to complain of it. Intent, there, is only a way to claim their own privilege, very often.Often, but one cannot always discount the biases of the offended party. If I am determined to view the world as against me because of my gender/orientation/religion/etc., then things that are not necessarily offensive become colored by my perception. No one has the right to tell me not to be offended, but the source of the offense comes from my bias, not his/her action. Naturally, extremes do not work in this way. Cross burning is racist, full stop. But if I'm running to catch my train and a black man pushes past me and that action prevents me from catching the train, his action makes him inconsiderate, but not immediately racist or chauvinist. If I choose to interpret his action as anything other than inconsiderate without additional information, that

[etrangere]

Even in issue of racism the criteria of accuracy should definitely be taken into account, although at least in fandom I see much more many cases of people dismissing being called on the racism of their text because it wasn't their intent than I see people being called on the racism of their text abusively.

I kind of think that "Character goes crazy/acts extremely irrationally when his/her romantic interest dies" is a universal trope.
I definitly think it is a universal trope. However homosexual relationships in media have been almost always depicted with this trope whereas heterosexual relationships have had this trope used among many many others. The wrongness of it isn't the trope in itself - as I was saying - but that it has been used overwhelmingly any time lesbian characters were featured - at least up until the late 90's.

[daf9]

Your perception that more people dismiss being called racist based on their intent than are mistakenly called racist is based on your presumption that there are objective criteria by which racism can be recognized. I don't accept your presumption. As far as I'm concerned, intent and context always matter.

[etrangere]

Hello! Welcome to my journal.

Yes, I think there are objective criteria that one can use to determine whether or not a text is vehicle for racism or not. Claiming lack of intent isn't enough if those criteria are present. You can say racist things without meaning to. Your belief that this is not so does not make it so.

[lodessa]

Pretty much just stopping in to say agreed.

Being as Lit Analysis is sort of my field, I had thought (before the internet showed me otherwise) that we had pretty much gotten over the idea of authorial intent. The validity of an interpretation is based on how well it uses the text.

[etrangere]

Never underestimate the diversity of people's education depending on their age, their background, their nationality when you are online - I think that may be one of the conclusion to infer from the way different people react very differently to ideas which one assumes to be a "given". I agree with you totally about authorial intent and interpretation :)

[lodessa]

Indeed. That's definitely something to take away from this issue.

[solesakuma]

RE: Lit Analysis. My personal theory is that, for people not in the field, Romanticism never ended. Therefore, the Genius Author stereotype is alive and healthy, school teachers ALWAYS MAKE YOU READ THE AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY (which can be an interesting exercise, but mostly serves the use of destroying any other interpretation that may arise), etc.

[elfwreck]

Of course some fanfics do work as criticical interpretations

I've got a half-finished thought that the "Five Things That Never Happened" stories are critical interp, narrative expositions about the characters or the world.

[etrangere]

The form itself can definitly be used for both (and it's one of the most fascinating storytelling-wise narrative form created by fanfics). I see so often critical discussions about "what would have happen if X would have gone differently" when fen discuss a book that I'm surprised when they don't understand some fanfics do exactly the same thing only in narrative form!

[solesakuma]

Sometimes, people don't get that my reasons for my choice of career and for being in fandom are exactly the same. I like texts and I like to, well, study them. Whether it's crack!RPGs or a lengthy essay doesn't really matter.

[sistermagpie]

Great post--on such a hard subject to talk about. Intention can so slip through your fingers. Shipping wars are often a good example of this, but there's a tendency to assume that if person A thought something, person B must therefore have intention to either offend A or at least to say whatever A thought was said. Hence a lot of talk of "ship baiting" by creators.

There's a really power in intention too--whoever controls the interpretation of intention gets to control the meaning. Like I've read a lot of discussions about, say, racial issues where on one side there's a person saying look, what you said is racist for A,B,C reasons, and that makes me react this way. While the other person says that since they didn't intend it to be racist, it can't be. It all comes down to what they say their intention was, and whether they would label themselves racist. If they don't label themselves a racist then they have no racist intentions then nothing they say can really be racist.

[etrangere]

Yes! Discussion on people's intent are very difficult to have and ultimately counter productive IMHO. One shouldn't presume of other people's intents, but people's intent shouldn't be held at the end all be all of the matter.

Your experience with discussions on racial issues sounds like mine, and describe exactly what I meant when I talked of privilege. Thank you for describing so well that pernicious logic.

[cryptoxin]

This is a really fascinating post. For me, the thing about intention is that it's hard to do without it -- I don't necessarily read with the conscious goal of decoding an author's intentions, but I do read as though those intentions are somehow manifest in the text and relevant. And even the parts of the text that might not result from imputed intention (your example of the dead lesbian/crazy lesbian trope) still come across to me as though they should somehow reflect on the author -- that a text could be read as the sum of the author's intentionality and unintentionality, and that both are significant

[etrangere]

but I do read as though those intentions are somehow manifest in the text and relevant.
Well, we are human being, as such our intelligence does tend to function with empathy, framing things as how people think. That's natural. I admit I also prefer Doyslian frames of interpretations than Watsonian ones that totally erase the idea that there were an author writing this things.

that a text could be read as the sum of the author's intentionality and unintentionality, and that both are significant.
For what objective? To judge the writer? Or to judge the work?

When I think about it, I approach intention in television shows differently than books, because TV shows seem more like the product of a collision of multiple "intentions"
Very true and one of the reason I prefer books to TV shows. I like having a feeling of consistent and coherent vision.

As for interpretation in fandom, I wonder if one additional reason -- beyond the ones that you list -- for why a particular interpretation might achieve a following in fandom regardless of