tishaturk: (book)
*blows dust off DW account*

It's been a while, eh? More on that later.

For now: I was reading Rebecca Solnit's collection Men Explain Things To Me and came across these paragraphs in the essay "Woolf's Darkness." They made me think about fandom. In fact, there's some resonance with Rebecca Tushnet's essay on judges as bad reviewers, from which I posted some quotes lo these many years ago.

We often think the purpose of criticism is to nail things down. During my years as an art critic, I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something of that desire to secure, to stabilize, to render certain and definite the open-ended, nebulous, and adventurous work of artists is present in many who work in that confinement sometimes called the art world.

A similar kind of aggression against the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist's intent and meaning often exists in literary criticism and academic scholarship, a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate, to classify and contain. What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether.

There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself great art.

This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, to invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both which are irreducible and subjective. The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.
tishaturk: (professional geek)
I just read Rebecca Tushnet's "Judges as Bad Reviewers: Fair Use and Epistemological Humility," a fascinating and highly readable analysis of the ways in which copyright fair use cases turn on judges' willingness to acknowledge that texts can be interpreted in many ways; Tushnet uses vids as case studies. (Full disclosure: I'm cited in it! That is never not going to be exciting.)

Given last week's post on best vs. favorites, I was particularly struck by this bit, which is about the importance of explaining criteria for judgment:

[W]hen it comes to literary judgments, the bad reviewer is the one who insists that a work has only one meaning, and announces the bottom line as if it were an absolute. A good reviewer explains the sources of her judgment, making room for other interpretations, which may be one reason that a well-written negative review can be extremely helpful to someone deciding to go ahead and buy the book anyway.


Tushnet goes on to explain the main problem with current practice:

Unfortunately, copyright fair use cases rarely acknowledge multiplicity of meaning. Instead, even a defendant-favorable fair use case tends to fix one meaning to the plaintiff’s work and another meaning or purpose to the defendant’s work, and then declare them different enough that the defendant’s use is transformative and therefore fair.


What I found especially interesting was her analysis of a specific case (Blanch v. Koons) in which appropriation artist Jeff Koons' use of a copy of a fashion photograph was found to be fair use: the court deferred to Koons' own account of his reasons for using the photo—and by "[s]hifting to a particular expert, the artist himself, the court left the structure of expertise intact." As Tushnet explains,

fair use was determined not on the basis of potential audiences’ understandings of new meanings from the accused work, but on the ability of the artist to express his intentions.... Thus, rather than accepting that multiple meanings and interpretations can coexist, the court picked a side in a contest about true meaning, not unlike a ruling in a contracts case.


Not surprisingly, that passage also made me think of the DMCA hearings, where my primary value was not my academic credentials (except indirectly, insofar as the nature of my employment allows me to be cheerfully matter-of-fact about my fan activities) and certainly not my legal expertise (of which I have exactly none) but my willingness and ability to speak as an artist expressing intention: "This is what I need and this is why I need it." That kind of performance is always weird for me because I am hyper-aware of all the ways in which I can't speak for all fans or all fan video artists or even all vidders; I can only speak as one member of those larger groups.

Tushnet's article shows, I think, why we need both to encourage fans who can do that kind of speaking to do it (because many fans, for any of a variety of reasons, are not in that position) and to change the cultures—legal and otherwise—that value artistic expertise/authority at the expense of interpretive multiplicity.

I mean, that's a huge part of the point of fandom, right? Do all the readings! Make all the meanings! Explore every option in as many ways as possible! One of the many reasons that vids and vidding appeal to me is precisely that they're not isolated art projects; rather, they're embedded in a whole ecosystem of overlapping and intersecting and sometimes contradictory projects and goals and ideals and interests. That's what makes it fun.
tishaturk: (book)
For reasons related to teaching rather than research, I'm re-reading James Paul Gee's essay "The New Literacy Studies and the 'Social Turn'," which I have not read in many years, and in which I have just come across the following paragraph:
Sociohistorical psychology, following Vygotsky and later Bakhtin, has argued that the human mind is "furnished" through a process of "internalizing" or "appropriating" images, patterns, and words from the social activities in which one has participated. Further, thinking is not "private," but almost always mediated by "cultural tools," that is, artifacts, symbols, tools, technologies, and forms of language that have been historically and culturally shaped to carry out certain functions and carry certain meanings (cultural tools have certain "affordances," though people can transform them through using them in new settings).

It will, I suspect, surprise nobody to learn that I wrote "Vidding!" in the margin.

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Tisha Turk

January 2019

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