Remix: Making Art & Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy: Copyright & Culture

Title: Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Author: Lawrence Lessig

Year of Publication: 2008

LC Call Number: KF3020 .L47

Sorry for the hiatus. I’m a slow writer and my life has been… not bad but just busy lately.

Lawrence Lessig is a well-known advocate for copyright reform; he’s most famous for founding Creative Commons and arguing against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension before the Supreme Court in 1998.  Although he’s a law professor, his books are addressed mostly not to his learned colleagues but to the general public, whom he wishes to inform and persuade.  I’d read Free Culture in the past but didn’t get around to reading Remix until now. I’ve been interested in copyright for some time, both as a librarian and as a person who lives and consumes culture in the twenty-first century.  In general, I like Lessig a lot, but I’m starting to think that my level of sophistication has passed the point at which this sort of analysis is really helpful to me and I need to be reading, I don’t know, Kevin Smith or somebody.

In any case, this book doesn’t focus on copyright as strongly as Free Culture did. Instead, Lessig puts together an argument about the nature of cultural transmission. The bulk of the book focuses on the distinction Lessig draws between what he calls Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) culture. This vocabulary is drawn from computer science and describes the permissions that an individual may have with regard to a file; RW means you can make changes to it and RO means you can’t.  To Lessig, this same distinction holds for culture. Folk culture has always been around, but the emergence of mass culture had in some ways pushed it into the background throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.  The reasons for this are both economic and cultural; new forms of culture are often expensive to produce, and we have come to think that culture is about enjoying the quality of work done by those who are good at it, placing less emphasis on the creative and participatory aspects of culture.  However, he argues that technology has brought about a new kind of RW culture, because we are now able to produce, say, movies and music, more easily and cheaply than formerly, and because we’re able to share them easily and use them to form communities. This argument was very familiar to me, because he is drawing heavily on Henry Jenkins here, who makes a similar argument in much greater detail in Convergence Culture (yes, Lessig does cite Jenkins).  However, where Jenkins was concerned with the social and cultural effects of this shift, and with establishing that those who participate in this way are legitimate cultural producers, Lessig is more interested in how society supports or punishes this sort of cultural participation.  Ultimately, he argues that the current copyright system is a threat to cultural participation and needs to be rethought in several ways.

I think this is a really important and valuable argument to make, but the way it’s made here is really pitched to an audience who hasn’t thought about this very much yet, so there are certain rhetorical strategies that rub me the wrong way.  Lessig frames what he calls remix culture as a kind of youth culture; although, throughout the book, he cites several instances of really interesting artists who are involved in this, many of the arguments he makes early in the book are based in his concern about the criminalization of “our kids.”  While I’d certainly agree that being able to create adaptations of cultural products is a very important part of youth for many, this framing can sometimes seem a little condescending. The desire to participate in the culture in which one lives is not a childish thing which one outgrows—rather, I’d argue that it’s part of being human.  I think Lessig understands that, but he wants to use the emotional appeal associated with both individual parenthood and the sense that we, as a culture, are responsible for helping children to develop, and he can do this by emphasizing the importance of such activities to young people.  If one is writing about childhood (as Jenkins does at one point, actually), then this is a really powerful point, but in the broader context of participatory culture, I didn’t really need it. Again, this is an audience mismatch.  It’s also very important for Lessig to present himself as a moderate throughout.  In fact, I agree that he is a moderate, as the reforms he suggests here are actually rather modest.  However, since I’m already on board with the copyright reform thing and am in the process of becoming fairly well-informed about participatory culture, I didn’t really need the constant reassurance that the point he’s making here is a reasonable one.

There was a long section in the middle dealing with hybrid cultures—partially RW and partially RO which I need to think through further.  This is an interesting thing, because it becomes difficult to draw the distinction between enabling participation and exploiting free labor, and Lessig does a good job of showing where the expectations of the participants may conflict with the desires of the more commercial side of things.  I wish this part had been expanded and treated more philosophically. Lessig uses many enlightening examples, but in this part of the book he actually ends up sounding a little like Jeff Jarvis: here are some things that technology enables! These things are great! Look what we can do now!  … and many of them are pretty cool, actually, but what are the risks, and what are we gaining, and who’s reaping the benefits?  He mentions the “Lego-ization” of technology—that is, the ability for these tech companies to build on each other—and the provision of platforms, but the timing is bad; reading this just as the demise of Google Reader has been announced casts it in an altogether less celebratory light.  Personally, I have my concerns about the ability for such “hybrid” cultures to convert what is created as RW culture into RO culture through the use of profitable corporations, and I’d definitely like to read more about that.

The end of the book offers practical solutions to the problems that Lessig points out, many of which hinge on making the distinction between amateur and professional creativity.  Much of the book has already shown that this can get messy, but I think in many ways this is a good idea; after all, the concept of fair use already recognizes “effect on the market” as one if its four factors.  (Lessig argues that we are over-relying on fair use to ameliorate the stringent copyright system we have in place, and he is probably correct, especially given the difficulty of making a good assessment of fair use.)  Still, I’m not sure how this would work out legally. They also rest on the argument that the US should have a method of automatic or compulsory licensing that doesn’t require lawyers and legwork and huge fees, especially for orphan works.  I’m not sure that his specific proposals will work well—one of them, as far as I can tell, really amounts to setting a price on a cultural product in a way that can’t be influenced by the market.  But I do agree that we need to do something about the licensing issue (and I’d say Creative Commons has been a step toward this).

Looking over this post, I guess I’d have to say I was a little disappointed by the book, but not, you know, in a bad way.  Lessig is a very engaging writer and I’m glad that we have someone like him, who has both credibility and rhetorical talents, to do this activism in a really prominent way.  I guess I’ve just been taken by surprise by how much I know now…

A Game of You: So about Wanda…

Author: Neil Gaiman

Illustrators: Colleen Doran, Shawn McManus, Brian Talbot

Year of Publication: 1993

LC Call Number: PN6728.S26 G35

The fifth installment of Sandman is a really strange one; the tone is very different from the rest of the series, and the subject matter, while related, seems different, not least because Dream himself plays such a minor role.  At this point in the series, there are many established characters who have drifted in and out during various storylines. A Game of You, however, is structured around a formerly minor human character, Barbie, last seen in The Doll’s House having detailed dreams in the mode of high fantasy.  She’s left her boyfriend Ken (yup) and has moved from the strange house in Florida where Rose Walker became the vortex to a seedy tenement in New York. She’s stopped dreaming, and the volume focuses on her relationship with the dream that we saw in her earlier appearance.  Morpheus is barely seen; he puts in an appearance early on to comment that one of the skerries of dream is about to disintegrate, and of course he arrives at the end to put everything right—not because he is a deus ex machina so much as because this is his job. By this point in the series, we expect that.

Because the volume pulls in a minor character and focuses on her story, the moments in this volume which call back to the prior stories feel less like continuity and more like references.  There is Barbie’s dream, of course. When Foxglove turns out to be Donna, Judy’s friend from Preludes and Nocturnes, this is enlightening not because it tells us anything about Fox herself, but because it reminds us of the events in the diner that Judy experienced, and the feeling of trapped helplessness that went with it.  The reference to Rose Walker doesn’t pull the story into a neat line with the rest of the series, especially since it’s made to a character who has no way of understanding it;  it does, however,  inspire an oddly ominous sense that everything is weirdly interconnected in this world through a series of uncanny (in the Freudian sense) coincidences.

I enjoy this sort of story, and the sense that it is set aside from the main storyline, although of course it can be executed more or less well.  However, I can’t focus on this in my post because I really need to write about the portrayal of Wanda.

Wanda is Barbie’s best friend and another occupant of the building.  She is Barbie’s confidant in the early pages of this volume and, when the dream attack occurs, it is Wanda who provides entry into Barbie’s apartment and stands guard over her body as the other characters try to follow her into the dream world.  Now.  Wanda is transsexual, and I’m not hugely impressed by how her gender identity is handled in the book.  The portion of the plot that occurs in the “real” world mostly happens at night after the characters have been unexpectedly awakened by Thessaly’s detection of the dream attack.  She gets all the other inhabitants of the building out of bed and brings them downstairs to the culprit’s apartment, where she has murdered him.  The group includes a lesbian couple (Foxglove and Hazel), Thessaly (who turns out to be a witch), Wanda and Barbie, who cannot be awakened. All the characters but Wanda have either thrown on bathrobes or are wearing pajamas, but Wanda is wearing an undershirt and panties.  It’s reasonable and realistic that there would be some variety to what the characters choose to wear to bed, of course, but because this is a graphic novel, this means that Wanda’s body is put on display for the reader to examine for signs of femininity or masculinity.  The other characters are not so exposed. There are a few panels of Foxglove before she puts a on a shirt, but that lasts for a much shorter portion of the book.  Furthermore, Wanda’s gender and her body are discussed by several of the other characters in these scenes.  The reader is thus implicitly invited to notice these characteristics of her body. She hasn’t had surgery—her dream suggests that she is afraid to be operated upon—so her body does have some characteristics generally associated with masculinity, including a penis. In fact, Hazel, who is, ah, somewhat anatomically naïve, points at it and says “you have a thingy.” The art here makes me think back to Whipping Girl (see my post), in which Julia Serano writes about how, when she comes out to people as trans, the get this look on their faces as if they are examining her body closely for signs of masculinity. I can’t help but feel that the same thing is happening here.

Of course, there’s also the textual aspect of the story, which is somewhat equivocal.  As mentioned above, the other characters frequently comment on Wanda’s gender. Thessaly, who emerges around the middle of the volume as the only character with any knowledge about the dream world, dismisses her as a “man” and doesn’t ask her to walk the moon’s road with the others.  George, formerly a servant of the Cuckoo (that is, the villain of Barbie’s dream) and presently a severed face nailed to the wall (yes, this is pretty gross), explains to Wanda that this is because the moon won’t accept her as a woman and that her subjective gender identity doesn’t matter to the gods.  It’s a complicated scene to analyze because, while the reader is very sympathetic to Wanda’s rage, the scene also establishes the other world as one that enacts its own notions of what gender is and means, and in a nondiscursive way, no less. When Wanda states firmly “That’s something the gods can take and stuff up their sacred recta. I know what I am,” it’s a moment in which you want to cheer for her, but it’s also an expression of an impotent rage against something that won’t change.  This is just after Wanda has a Cuckoo-induced dream in which her body becomes increasingly masculine while she is about to be forced into surgery (and is misgendered by superheroes).  Later, in the dream world, the Cuckoo explains that girls are different from boys because they engage in different fantasies, different dreams. So it appears throughout the volume that the supernatural half of reality is not only bounded by gender but also regards gender as a fixed quantity which is determined by it, not you.

BUT.  There’s a late save.  All the commentary in which characters engage concerning the nature of gender earlier in the volume is just that, commentary, and is not proven.  The only time that Wanda interacts directly with the supernatural is when she is seen with Death. And Death, who is probably my favorite character in all of Sandman, gets it.  At this moment, Wanda’s body is transformed; Barbie describes her as “perfect.”  Death doesn’t reject Wanda but rather takes her in as the version of herself that she (Wanda, I mean, not Death) presumably imagines and desires.  Now, this could just be because Death is awesome. It’s obviously very difficult to tell whether this happens because Death’s magic is very different from Thessaly’s moon-magic and the dream world,* or because Thessaly is actually wrong.  What is suggestive, though, is that this takes place in Barbie’s dream. So—it’s not clear. It leaves the rest of the book in question, which is good—but it’s not entirely satisfying.

The non-supernatural characters also react to Wanda in differing ways. Thessaly’s already been mentioned. There’s also the homeless woman who questions what Wanda is and doesn’t seem to totally understand, but is at least nice to her.  And then, of course, there’s Wanda’s horrible family, because apparently there is some law that trans characters can never have even vaguely supportive families in fiction.  Sigh. But the last part of the volume is about Barbie, who truly is a friend to Wanda, interacting with Wanda’s family and trying to maintain some integrity by not entirely complying with their demands that she refer to Wanda by a masculine name and pronouns, etc. Ultimately, she engages in a small act of defiance that’s really as much about her as it is about Wanda, but it is meaningful in its way. So I guess I’m not sure what to make of the way Wanda is handled in this side of the story, either.  If I go back to Serano, who complains that there are really only two ways that trans characters are portrayed in fiction (by cis people, anyway), Wanda’s very much the tragic figure—but at least she has some character beyond that.

The thing I wish I could do is put this in context with the rest of the volume, because it does change things.  This is really a story about gender in lots of ways. The central character is Barbie. We’ve already met her in another volume in which her femininity seemed rather extreme and a little unsettling—she’s not called Barbie for nothing.  The way she works through her childhood and her own gender throughout the book is pretty important and not something I’m able to readily make sense of. There’s the fact that most of the characters in the book are female, and it’s all about how they interact with each other, sometimes to protect each other and sometimes with their own agendas.  There’s the pregnant lesbian, and the witch who does exclusively feminine magic. But I can’t really do that analysis well, at least not on a single read, partly because I’m distracted by my wish to analyze the way Wanda is portrayed, and partly because I just don’t have room. So I’ll just note that there is more to it than this and leave it at that.

(interesting that there’s much more than I can cover, even on that particular topic, in what is really a very short book. Is this because it’s a graphic novel, or because it’s just that deep? Or because I’m inefficient? NOBODY KNOWS.)

*these are also separate realms and different kinds of magic, in case that isn’t clear.

Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Study ALL the Fans! Use ALL the Methodologies!

Title: Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World

Editors: Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington and Cornel Sandvoss (authors many)

Publication Date: 2007

Library of Congress Call Number: HM 646 .F36 2007

Fandom:  Identities and Communities in a Mediated World is an edited volume on the subject of fandom. It covers a lot of ground, both in terms of the fan activities that it describes and the particular fandoms that it examines. The twenty-six articles included in this collection are divided into six sections: one about how fandom works generally, one about the treatment of more prestigious fan objects, one about fandom and physical locations, including fan tourism, one about global fandom, one about the history and contexts of fandom, and one about anti-fans. There is obviously more in this book than I can even imagine covering in a single blog post. If I were really diligent, it would have been a good idea to have blogged each chapter as I read it, but, well, I just don’t have time for that.  So first I want to offer some thoughts about the anthology as a whole, and then I’m going to discuss a few of the essays which I found particularly striking.

This anthology (entirely unlike Fan Cultures!) would be an excellent place for a person to begin thinking about fan studies.  Most of the essays are both accessible and very high in quality, and most of the topics that seem to come up again and again in fan studies are covered. If I were to pick up a book and use it as a textbook on the subject, it would be this one. It doesn’t feel like a textbook, though. As is fairly typical with collections of this type, there is an introduction about the general concerns of the collection and an afterword which tackles “The Future of Fandom” (cue ominous music), but the articles in between are, for the most part, specific without being technical and arcane.  Jonathan Gray, Cornell Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington write in the introduction:

More than merely bring together extant work on fandom, though, we hope that this collection will inspire and encourage new research on these and all other sorts of fandom, from a healthy variety of disciplinary perspectives.  (16)

And it does. These are essays written by a variety of academics,  some of whom I’d heard of because they are significant in this field, which engage seriously with actual questions rather than taking on a pedantic tone.   I also enjoyed the effort to make the book as heterogeneous as possible; to continue with my textbook comparison, this makes it less like a textbook because most textbooks are not written this way, but it also makes the book more like a good textbook because it exposes the reader to a variety of concerns, fandoms, methodologies and voices.  So on the whole, I really recommend it.

Now, to some of the highlights…

Christine Scodari’s article, “Yoko in Cyberspace with Beatles Fans” considers the hatred of Yoko Ono among many Beatles fans.  Obviously, there is an element to misogyny to the attacks on Ono, but Scodari takes it a little further. She looks at the various factions that exist in Beatles fandom and the tensions among them, pointing out that fans of John Lennon can often be found devaluing the contributions of Paul McCartney and vice versa.  Other fans are very invested in the relationship between Lennon and McCartney. In all these cases, Ono can be invoked as an interloper.  Fans of McCartney need to show that he was more important than Ono was. Fans who need McCartney and Lennon to have been very close friends stumble over the existence of a potentially more important relationship in Lennon’s life. Fans of Lennon may resent her presence—and here Scodari draws a parallel to female X-Files fans who idolized Mulder and denigrated Scully, and fans of some other shows where the same dynamic was present.   As I’ve summarized her argument here, I am making it sound as if Scodari portrays Beatles fans as a bunch of whiny infighters, but that’s not really how it seems in the article; rather, she provides an interesting look at the way that fandoms become sites for the struggle over the signifier. Who were the Beatles, what did they mean? This is an important question for fans to engage and of course they argue vigorously.  And I really like how Scodari manages to bring this out and at the same time hold fandoms accountable for the way that cultural forces originating in culture generally, such as misogyny, are used in service of these arguments.

Rebecca Tushnet’s chapter, “Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author” looks at the legality of fan creations, especially fan fiction. This has been done before, of course, but it’s quite difficult to find a good article about this that doesn’t belong in a law journal. Tushnet’s chapter is quite accessible, and it does an excellent job of showing how fair use applies to fan works and considering several other arguments that have been brought up in this context, including moral rights, attribution, transformativeness and so on.  Tushnet’s argument is that fan fiction (and fan art, etc.) are usually legal under the fair use doctrine. She invokes The Wind Done Gone, a spoof of Gone with the Wind, which always seems to come up in these arguments, I think because it’s a rare example of a court case. She makes an interesting point here that the use of a work is more likely to be considered fair when it depends more heavily on the source material.  This makes sense the way she explains it—the more heavily it depends on this source material, the more it needed to be that particular work and nothing else—but it’s a surprising argument at first glance.

In “The Fans of Cultural Theory,” Alan McKee is really making a point more about the way that fans are studied than about a particular group of fans.  He intentionally chooses a group of texts to which he suspects many of his readers will feel some strong attachment—that is, theory texts such as those by Marx, Foucault, Baudrillard (and I think the invocation of Baudrillard, whose work has certainly had a strong influence on all fields of cultural studies, is very deliberate here) and discusses devotees of these texts in terms of their practices, turning a skeptical eye to their self-concept as oppositional, anti-capitalist, etc.  McKee’s tone becomes increasingly tongue-in-cheek, (it is kind of a tip-off when he describes Marx’s ideas as “surprisingly anticapitalist”) until he stops the essay entirely, with the words:

Game over.

OK. (94)

He describes his essay as a scherzo, which pokes fun while making a serious point.  His point here is that fan studies scholars often look at fan culture in a way that doesn’t really do it justice; rather, such studies often hold fans to impossible standards and demanding that they somehow escape capitalism while not taking seriously their real intellectual work. This is really close to the point that Matt Hills made in Fan Cultures, but McKee makes it without producing hundreds of pages of dense academic language, so, you know, bonus. This is really clever and well done, but I’m a little sad that I take McKee’s critique of the academic publishing industry more seriously than he does. There are some actual problems there.

John Tulloch’s chapter, “Fans of Chekhov: Re-Approaching ‘High Culture’” looks at theatergoers who attended different plays in the city of Bath: Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull and another play based on Chekhov.  I enjoyed this chapter a lot because it makes the case that there are different kinds of fans who may be interested in the same text. In this case, he compares fans of Chekhov to fans of the actors who starred in the play, and finds real differences between them. Fans of the actors have different criteria from fans of the play, and one group liked the play much more than the other.  The difference in the ways that the different fans talk about the plays is quite striking.

In “On the Set of The Sopranos: ‘Inside’ a Fan’s Construction of Nearness,” Nick Couldry describes a tour of New Jersey for Sopranos fans.  The chapter is really about Couldry’s disappointment with his visit to the strip club that doubles as a set for the show. He discusses the “negative aura” of the room he surveys, but what really happened here was the removal of mediation.  The show, which I haven’t seen, had apparently imbued this space with some significance which disappeared when he Couldry stood in the actual space, thus removing it from the fiction. This makes an interesting contrast to Matt Hills’s experience in Vancouver, which I briefly described in my post on Fan Cultures; Hills went to a city in which fan pilgrimages are not formally supported and sought out clues which seemed to have a special, hidden meaning—more or less the same meaning that Couldry failed to find.

Lawrence B. McBride and S. Elizabeth Bird’s contribution, “From Smart Fan to Backyard Wrestler: Performance, Context and Aesthetic Violence,” is one of the strongest and most interesting pieces in the collection. It covers the world of professional wrestling in a way that I certainly didn’t expect.  One of several major points made here is that fans approach a text with different levels of savvy and irony.  The fans discussed here are certainly not under the impression that professional wrestling is “real;” they understand it as a performance and are most interested to see, not how the constructed narrative plays out, but how things are done.  It’s to this end that they create backyard wrestling federations, which many fans consider superior to the more “mainstream” wrestling performances.  Backyard wrestlers create a performance in which they can enact a particular type of showmanship and to encapsulate their understanding of the aesthetic that informs this type of wrestling.  In many ways, this essay is intended to rehabilitate these fans from perceptions of them as violent, thoughtless fools, and in fact, it does make them much more interesting than I may initially have assumed they’d be.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby’s “Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies” because it’s really just a survey (and because this is starting to get long), but it was very good in its attempt to quantify some of the practices of those who study fandom, particularly in terms of whether they are fans themselves, and especially in putting these practices into cultural context. By “culture” here, I mean both the specific geographical culture in which these scholars exist and the culture of the scholarly disciplines within which they work (turns out the business management folks are really different from everyone else).

Anne Ciecko and Hunju Lee look at the career of a Korean movie star in “Han Suk-kyu and the Gendered Cultural Economy of Stardom and Fandom.”  It seems that Han took a hiatus at the height of his career, claiming that he wanted to study and become a better actor, but his return film was disappointing and he was never really able to come back.  In this chapter, though, it becomes clear that this isn’t entirely Han’s fault. He embodied a particular type of masculinity which was culturally popular at the time, especially among his female fans.  His gender performance was rather traditional and drew on subtle acting, stoicism in the face of adversity, and loyalty to beloved women (sometimes conflicting with his political loyalties). During Han’s hiatus, however, this particular ideal of masculinity was replaced by, in essence, the action hero.  This change was driven by a perception that the audience had changed; the notional typical moviegoer during much of Han’s career had been a middle-aged woman, but during his hiatus, this perception changed, and studios started making films aimed at young men, whom they believed wanted more action and less feeling. Han’s attempt to adapt to this genre failed.  This is an interesting case study of the relationship between fan behaviors and studio perceptions, and how this changes the sorts of cultural products that get made.

In “Loving Music: Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America,” Daniel Cavicchi shows that fandom actually predates mass media and uses fascinating archival materials to show how fans expressed their attachment to texts in the nineteenth century.  Again, I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but it’s quite striking how all the same concerns can be studied from a historical perspective.

Derek Johnson’s “Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom” does indeed study antagonistic factions in fan communities; as you can see from some of the chapters I’ve mentioned above, this is a pretty common theme.  However, Johnson’s chapter is interesting because it discusses the way that producers might push back.  The chapter is about Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is apparently reviled by most fans but beloved by Buffy/Spike shippers. The interesting thing here, though, is not the way that some fans manage to achieve dominance in saying which seasons are good and which are bad, but the producers’ use of fan surrogates to snipe back at the fans who would dictate which way they think the series should go.  These characters are not portrayed especially sympathetically and are seen as an obstacle to the goals of the main characters.  So, on the one hand this in one case in which the relationship between fans and producers is, after all, reciprocal, as they acknowledge and criticize one another, but then again, fans are still in the more vulnerable position because the producers can fall back on stereotypes of the-fan-as-loser, which will of course be consumed not only by those who are in the know.

Melissa A. Click’s chapter, “Untidy: Fan Response to the Soiling of Martha Stewart’s Spotless Image,” makes Martha Stewart much more interesting than I ever thought she’d be.  Click distinguishes between fans of Stewart’s various media products and anti-fans of Stewart herself, who like to mock her ultra-feminine, perfectionist, arbiter-of-taste persona.  To Click, this is in part a conflict between feminism and femininity, although she notes that self-identified feminists are equally represented in both groups; I’d argue that the criticisms of Stewart as presented here (that she concerns herself with supposedly frivolous matters such as interior decorating and that she is pushy and difficult to get along with) are actually misogynist, but Click doesn’t go there.  In any case, Click’s research was rendered more interesting than she expected when Stewart was imprisoned for insider trading.  Click has the very interesting finding that neither group of fans seemed to have a more negative view of Stewart because of this incident. Instead, those who enjoyed her media products shrugged it off (they were not interested in her personal life), while those who enjoyed mocking Stewart’s persona actually became more sympathetic to her because they were bothered by the media’s attacks on Stewart, which they found sexist.  This surprised me; I always thought going to jail was bad, but in some cases it can increase support for a public figure, I suppose.

Vivi Theodoropoulou looks at Greek soccer fans (he calls them football fans, but I’m American) in “The Anti-Fan within the Fan: Awe and Envy in Sport Fandom.”  Of course, many of his insights into the way that sports fandom encourages participants not only to be fans of one team but also to be fans of another have applications in many other sports in many other contexts.  But what he also covers here is the way that fans of sports teams are constructed according to class (and gender).  He discusses two teams based in Athens, one of which is seen as a blue-collar, rowdy team, while the other is a “classy” team with less demonstrative fans. Theodoropoulou looks into the history behind these two teams to explain how each of them came to be associated with a particular class status; although the specific factors that led the teams to be perceived in that way may no longer be quite as relevant, this aura has stuck to the teams in question.  Much of the essay focuses on the antagonist relationships and name-calling between these two groups of fans; the insults themselves are fairly predictable, but I like how Theodoropoulou shows that different constructions of masculinity have a lot to do with the way  these fans perceive themselves and each other.  Of course, he also uses the notion of Sassurean linguistic binaries, but that much is obvious, right?

Jeffrey Sconce’s “A Vacancy at the Paris Hilton” isn’t the last chapter of the collection, but it’s the last one I’ll discuss in detail here.  Sconce’s writing style is brilliant; the essay is scathingly funny and manages to build up the antics of Paris Hilton into a harbinger of the destruction of Western culture in such an over-the-top way that he doesn’t even sound like a crank. However, I did feel a little uncomfortable with it because, while I find nothing especially endearing about Paris Hilton, I don’t really approve of forgetting that she is a human being.  He writes:

But herein lies the evil genius of this object we have come to know as the Paris Hilton, and why only the theoretical armature developed by Baudrillard over the past twenty-five years is equal to the task of “explaining” her continuing presence on the contemporary mediascape. For years, Baudrillard’s work has been facilely dismissed as ignoring the real world, overvaluing sign and stimulation, and thus avoiding meaningful intervention into some leftist fantasy of a nonexistent public sphere. But honestly, what model of political economy, psychoanalytic demystification, or reception analysis is up to the challenge of explaining Paris Hilton? (330)

Sorry for the long quotation, but I think this is a decent illustration of Sconce’s writing.  It’s really a pleasure to read. He goes on to consider the role of what he calls the meta/meta-famous, who achieve notoriety without talent or hard work, and the resentment that that public at large feels when confronted with someone like Hilton.  To Sconce, this is a larger cultural trend and the logical endpoint of hyperrealism.  If we keep spinning off metatexts and meta-metatexts and meta-meta-metatexts, with the understanding that everything that we experience is mediated and constructed and fake in one way or another, we’re bound to end up with Paris Hilton at some point, and at this point, culture is essentially completely devoid of content (hence the title).  He’s funny enough to sound tongue-in cheek rather than alarmed at this prospect, but I do think the mean-spiritedness stems from a certain fear that this is what has become of our culture.

In any case. Those are the highlights. At some point I began to wonder what the difference is, really, between fan studies and media studies generally; as we become more and more aware of the many different ways that people interact with texts, it becomes harder and harder to nail down what a fan, and what a fan text, and even what a text is.  I was amused that just as I started thinking about this, the Afterword came along, where Henry Jenkins himself appeared just to make that same point. So, I guess I was on the right track.

Anyway, I know this isn’t always the case with collections of this type, but all the essays in this collection were good, and many of them were useful insofar as I think I’ll be able to use them in my class.

Fan Cultures: Studying Fan Studies

Title: Fan Cultures

Author: Matt Hills

Year of Publication: 2002

LC Call Number: HM646 .H55

I apologize for the generalizing nature of this post; I had to turn in the book last week, so I can’t have it near me while I write, as I usually would.  It isn’t quite the right book to write about from memory, either, as it’s quite dense!

Despite its inviting cover image, Fan Cultures is a heavy, theoretical book in which Hills questions some of the prior work on fan culture while proposing different ways forward.  If the reader is up for very dense academic writing, this is actually a good way of becoming more familiar with the academic dialogue around fandom.  Hills is very interested in deconstructing what he calls the “moral dualisms” that have sprung up in the study of fans.  For this reason, each chapter is titled according to a contrast between perceptions of fandom: “Between consumerism and resistance,”  “Between knowledge and justification,” etc.  So if there is a group that sees fans, unsympathetically, as particularly enthusiastic consumers, and an aca-fan contingent which sees fan production as a site of resistance, Hills shows how each group is flattening the diversity of fan communities, privileging one group of fans over another, and reifying the concepts that they discuss. He argues for a dialectical view in which both ends of this continuum are acknowledged.  He argues pretty vigorously and attacks essentially everyone who has worked on this. This is one of the things that I like most about academic culture, actually; he can write a book about everything that is wrong with fan studies today, and Henry Jenkins, who is the king of fan studies and whose work Hills critiques in several places as defensive and naïve (while obviously still acknowledging it as important), still writes a blurb for this book.

This approach has interesting consequences. One of the moral dualisms that he is most interested in breaking  down is that between fans and academics. There’s been a lot of work on the similarities between the two groups;  although I am relatively early in my foray into fan culture research, I’ve definitely come across it. However, Hills notes that this work tends to set up a contrast between fan cultures and academic culture that either privileges academia as rational, dispassionate, and more legitimate, or to construct fans as rebellious and cool.  In either case, it allows academia to go mostly unexamined, granting it the subject position.  As I say, this gets a bit dense and theoretical. Hills suggests taking on a more sophisticated point of view in which it is acknowledged that, shockingly, academics have emotions and strong preferences and opinions; he recognizes that there is a risk of losing credibility for this but argues holding prestige based on supposed neutrality is, actually, harmful to social science research.  In a way, although there’s a critique of the likes of Henry Jenkins for building up fans as an idealized, democratic community and ignoring other aspects of fandom, this argument is a logical extension of the defense of fans mounted by such scholars, who were struggling for the legitimacy of fan cultures.  According to Hills, we need to consider not only fan-scholars (fans whose practices are similar to those of academic), but also scholar-fans (scholars who are also fans), to break down some of these distinctions.

Hills spends the first half of the book engaged in this sort of deconstruction.  He covers all the bases: the pathologizing narratives to which fans are often subject, the scholarly characterization of fans as creative and collaborative, and the problems/benefits of making fans experts on their own experiences and communities. Again, he walks through all these dichotomies in a way that illustrates what the important inquiries in this field are, which is valuable to me as something of a novice here.  By the second half of the book, he begins to demonstrate alternate ways of approaching fan scholarship.

His most important contribution in this book, or at least the one that I found most intriguing, was his use of the fan autoethnography. This is the logical outcome of his argument about scholar-fans;  he is studying, specifically, himself, and attempting to do so without justifying his choices and while at the same time understanding all the sociological factors that led into his decisions. This seems like quite an extraordinary thing to do; he’s gone into some detail about how fan accounts of their own fandoms both can and cannot be trusted, showing how there are some aspects that fans cannot really articulate and other places where they feel they must justify themselves, but he has also been adamant that self-reflection is important, because nobody else is examining academics.  So, he makes a timeline of his own fandoms and how they’ve overlapped with each other, and attempts to account for it with reference to his social position over the course of his life, including his gender, his social class, his race, and so on.  It’s probably his least dense/most engaging chapter, and I think it is an interesting and healthy exercise.  It may be a useful thing to ask students to do, even though they will not be able to achieve Hills’s rigor, because it gives them an opportunity to look at their fandom from a perspective other than “I like this” or “this is good.” Once this is done, it becomes possible to look at other fandoms with less prejudices, as well.

He covers some other important questions of fan studies as well. There were two other sections that I found especially interesting. One had to do with the texts that seem to attract cult fans; is there such a thing as a cult text? Hills identifies several aspects of a text that may help to put it in this category;  following another critic, he defines this as a “family resemblance” but it reminded me more of a DSM diagnosis—the text should have some of the characteristics from this list, but may not show all of them.  Of course, being Hills, he declines to say that the cult status of a text is based fully on the characteristics of the text and not the way that the audience uses it; for Hills, it’s always both.  In any case, the characteristics he came up with were interesting; leaving space for fan production seemed especially important, but there were several of them.  I may have to revisit this text at some point.  The other  section of the book that I found intriguing detailed Hills’s visit to Vancouver as an X-Files fan; the city of Vancouver seemed to provide little in the way of support for media tourism, but the savvy X-Files fan can find subtle reminders of the show’s presence in the city. Seeking them out like clues, the fan re-enacts the experience of watching the show.  It’s an interesting meditation on the relationship between a media product and the way that the fandom of that particular property is enacted, and I’d like to compare it to other forms of media tourism. I’m also vaguely reminded of my own visit to Hawaii; I didn’t go there as a LOST fan per se (I am a LOST fan, but when I went to Hawaii, I really just wanted to hike around and look at volcanoes and nenes and things), but I nevertheless found myself keeping an eye out for things that reminded me of LOST. The two shows are similar in their use of mysterious clues for the viewer and the protagonists to attempt to puzzle out, and so things that look like clues have a similar effect. Of course, Hills assumes it’s already been established that we lead a mediated existence, so he doesn’t present this as some kind of staggering insight—but it’s interesting how a place appears to take on characteristics from media.

Anyway, this certainly wasn’t an easy read, and I certainly can’t share it with my students, but I think I got a lot out of it and will be applying Hills’s ideas to a lot of what I read in the future.

Samurai Champloo: Creative, Cynical History

Title: Samurai Champloo
Director: Shinchiro Watanabe
Publication Date:2004

This is a pretty entertaining anime series, but I probably wouldn’t have written about it here if I didn’t remind me so strongly of Mushi-shi. I use the word “remind” not to imply that the series are at all akin but rather that they contradict each other and have exactly the similarities that opposites require. (i.e, if the opposite of up is down, it is only because they are both measuring the same qualities. The opposite of up is not birds.)

I wrote about Mushi-shi soon after I watched it. I had taken great pleasure in the series, enjoying its empathetic protagonist, familiar but slightly..well, odd… format, and the beauty of its traditional Japanese setting. It is not at all clear in what time period Mushi-shi is set, but it clearly belongs in some sort of idealized pastoral history in which, perhaps, the slow pace of life matched the pace of the series, mystical beings seemed to exist, and people lived in tight-knit communities with breathtaking views. Obviously, this is, ahem, a slightly romanticized way of looking at history. It resonates with viewers in our current culture because we feel like the present is stressful, ugly, fast-paced and alienated, and we justify this by figuring it against an imaginary idyllic (calm, close-knit) past which it is comforting to visit in shows like Mushi-shi. This view is ahistorical at best, but undeniably persistent. Like Mushi-shi, Samurai Champloo is set in the past and isn’t interested in improving our understanding of Japanese history. In fact, the word “Champloo,” which refers to a dish that combines many disparate elements, appears in the title precisely because the series throws in anachronisms with wild abandon, gleefully combining what’s been described elsewhere as a hip-hop sensibility (I’m too ignorant to make this assertion myself) with Edo period Japan. It’s full of modern language and contemporary music, throws in references to baseball and Van Gogh and graffiti and, uh, zombies and generally refuses to admit to a discourse of accuracy in a pretty belligerent way. At the same time, it also evades the romanticized “past” of a show like Mushi-shi, opting instead to portray a cynical and mostly corrupt society in which violence is ever-present, hierarchy is a significant factor in how life works, and everything is a bit seedy. (Note that, because of the show’s self-conscious use of anachronism, the show is not making the claim that this is how this period of history “really” was, either.)

In Mushi-shi, there is a singular protagonist, Ginko, who wanders around Japan helping people, listening to them and understanding their problems. He’s kind of a hippie, eschewing material possessions and seeking, maybe not enlightenment, but certainly a series of small insights. He is deeply, even supernaturally, aware of the world around him and interacts with others from a position of great empathy. The poignancy in his life comes from his inability to form deep connections with individuals or communities because he can’t stay in one place for too long, because the mushi are attracted to him. This is also an excellent description of exactly what doesn’t happen in Samurai Champloo. The three protagonists in the latter show are also wanderers; each episode, in a Mushi-shi-like fashion, features them arriving in a new place and finding that there are problems there. The difference is that Ginko is wise and compassionate and tries to get to the bottom of the problem, whereas the three companions of Samurai Champloo are self-centered and often violent, and they often end up getting caught up in the problem–making it worse and/or putting themselves in danger. One of the three travelers is Fuu, a naive teenage girl who wants to find a particular person and manages, through the sheer force of her personality and the general shiftlessness of the others, to convince them to travel with her. Her primary concerns are her quest, keeping the group together, and finding food, not necessarily in that order. The second is Jin, a ronin. The show really does put some consideration into what it means to be a ronin; Jin is a highly trained warrior who is allowed to carry the appropriate swords but otherwise has no social standing. He’s traveling because he’s been ostracized from his dojo, and because he doesn’t wish to submit himself to a lord. His personality is best characterized as “phlegmatic;” he’s reticent and unexpressive. The third is Mugen, a street tough whose primary method of interacting with other humans is to begin riots. He picks fights with powerful people for no particular reason other than that he resents the exercise and even the appearance of power, and the audience is left with the impression that he has survived this long mostly because he also happens to be really, really good at fighting. Although there isn’t much effort to make these characters “realistic” per se–they are certainly all exaggerations of a type–they make mistakes and have personality flaws that a viewer can identify as “human.” We are less likely to think that we are or would like to be like these characters, but they are still closer to our experience. Then, too, there is conflict among the members of the group; Mugen and Jin are each impressed by the sword-fighting skills of the other and would therefore like to kill each other, while Fuu desperately wants to group to stay together and does her best to maintain progress toward a goal that, in reality, only she really cares about. She believes that the three of them are or can be a group of close-knit friends working toward a common goal, but Mugen and Jin do not cooperate with her dream. For most of the series, it is the aggression between the two men that holds the group together rather than Fuu’s efforts.

Fuu, Mugen and Jin arrive in town, then, with their own agenda(s), generally to seek money, food, and shelter (or sometimes just passage). There is often something wrong, but these are generally problems caused by corrupt humans; unlike Mushi-shi, this show does not attempt to construct a harmonious society in which all the problems are caused by psuedo-supernatural beings. Instead, they run into mobsters, human traffickers, men who sell off their wives to pay their debts, religious feuds, passport scalpers, etc. Interestingly, many of these episodes are concentrated toward the beginning of the series, which is of course the point at which the series needs to situate the audience in the world it constructs. Later on, the show reminds the audience of its intentions not to be taken as historical reality by throwing in the episode about graffiti artists, and of course the bizarre episode late in the series in which our heroes arrive in town, and by “town” I mean “an old mine which is being worked by zombies,” just in time to participate in a treasure hunt, and by “participate,” I mean “question the head zombie’s claims of aristocratic birth.” This episode is atypical, but its self parodic nature helps to maintain the show’s don’t-take-this-too-seriously ethos at a moment when we may be at risk of becoming invested in the characters. It warns us against that. In any case, the problems that the travelers encounter in towns are not only of human origin but usually caused by people acting in destructive or shady ways. Fuu, Jin and Mugen (especially Mugen, although Fuu has her moments too) get involved not as heroes who can potentially solve the problem but as suckers who fall into it by accident and need to extricate themselves (i.e., oh, look, Mugen got poisoned by a prostitute again?!?). They often work as bodyguards, that is, the side on which they are fighting is determined not by morality but by economics. By the end of the episode, things usually degenerate into violence; there are a lot of drunken bar fights, street riots, and the occasional actual duel. Life in Samurai Champloo proceeds not through careful counseling but as a constant search for the necessaries of life, punctuated by violence. The attention of the series is focused on the seedier portions of the population, focusing on disreputable characters such as artists (not at all well-thought of in the Edo period), vagrants, secret illegal foreigners. Occasionally we get up into the merchant class. Representatives of the state do show up from time to time, usually as a threat to more central characters.

The scenery is also very reminiscent of Mushi-shi; I swear that mountain they are always walking by is the same one. But the relationship of the characters to the landscape is very different. Although the towns through which the travelers pass are often quite small, there’s an urban feel to the action. These landscapes are always inhabited, and usually by the sort of people I described in the paragraph above. There’s no sense of luminous wonder associated with the landscape, but rather a recognition that it is a huge pain to walk all the way from Edo (currently Tokyo) to Nagasaki. A viewer may lift her eyes to admire the landscape, which is quite beautifully drawn, but the characters never do.

I n any case, despite everything that I’ve been saying here, and its lack of respect for the time stream, Samurai Champloo actually is concerned with some historical realities that were part of life in Edo-era Japan. It deals with the closed borders of the era by bringing in a secret foreigner in a poor disguise and by considering the flow of culture between Japan and Europe. Toward the end of the series, there are several episodes that deal with the banned status of Christianity, and the secrecy therefore practiced by Christians. Some of the problems with the refusal to accept diversity are explored here. The rigid social structures of the time are certainly in evidence here, and I’ve written above about the show’s portrayal of the ronin life. So without adopting the concept of accuracy, the show is, in fact, in dialogue with history.

Samurai Champloo was produced at about the same time as Mushi-shi and probably isn’t intended to be a direct commentary on it, but when you watch the latter and then the former, it feels as if it were. The relationship between them reminds me slightly of the relationship between Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, except that Samurai Champloo has a sense of irreverence and an unwillingness to take itself seriously that A Song of Ice and Fire never had. This makes it a little more effective as a critique; it also is short enough not to bog down. In any case, it performs a similar function in that it reminds us that we are all guilty of romanticizing the past, and although THIS is not what it was like, it certainly wasn’t what you keep thinking of it, either.

I, Robot: Solving Reality

Title: I, Robot

Author: Isaac Asimov

Year of Publication: 1950, but many of the stories were previously published elsewhere

Library of Congress Call Number: PZ3 .A8316 I3

I, Robot is a series of interconnected short stories in which Asimov works out his ideas about robots.  I’d read two Asimov books before, Prelude to Foundation and Foundation, but this was my first foray into his famous books about robotics.  As should be immediately obvious, I don’t know too much about classic science fiction, but perhaps I can learn more.

Asimov’s general theory of life seems to be that if one has enough information and processes it correctly, one can always optimize to an ideal solution.  This is true of Foundation, in which Hari Seldon predicts human behavior and uses it to make an optimal society, and in I, Robot, where, by the end of the book, the Machines do the same thing, managing the entire economy.  They are essentially God: They have 100% of the possible information and are able to account for and manage every detail of human life, but they do so benevolently. During most of the book, though, the robots are smaller, and more fallible, and they go wrong in various ways. However, when they do go wrong, it’s almost never the case that something is wrong with the robot itself; rather, humans have made a mistake in interacting with the robots, and the robots behave in a totally consistent manner within that particular story.  In this way, then, each story reads like a little logic puzzle, with the human characters trying to get from the information that they have to the solution of the puzzle.  This detective-story format is ideal for Asimov’s perspective on life as detailed above; not only do the stories assert that having the right information leads to the right decision, but they demonstrate this by asking the reader to try to draw conclusions based on the robots’ behavior and the rules that we know (the Three Laws of Robotics, which are too famous to recap here). The solution to these puzzles is not based on near-supernatural powers of observation, Sherlock Holmes-style, but rather on logic and the scientific method. Even if you can’t figure it out as a reader, the characters finally do, using methods that at least appear to be applicable by mere mortals.

The optimism and rationalism of this philosophy are both rather extreme. In real life, we never have all the information; there are simply too many factors to calculate and their relationships to each other are mysterious. In real life, too, it’s not always possible to optimize things in a way that benefits everyone.  You get into political relationships among groups and conflicting interests and it becomes complicated in ways that Asimov is able to sublimely ignore. Of course, in the real world, robots also don’t work the way that he presents them. There’s no way to program a robot not to harm humans because programming has to be more specific than that, and I’m not sure how a robot would think ahead in the ways that he describes here. In any case, Asimov posits robots as an intelligence without bias, but I’ve been pretty well trained out of the belief that humans, shaped by their surrounding ideologies and biases, are able to create a system that is somehow nonideological and totally free of bias. So this is unrealistic, which is fine, but it is also philosophically suspect. I do, however, enjoy his recognition of the fact that systems that people set up often behave in ways that we might not expect, even if they do follow the pre-established rules, and his exploration of how such behavior emerges. In the meantime, of course, he has it both ways by anthropomorphizing the robots pretty heavily.

It’s interesting, too, that I see this as overly optimistic because it assumes that mastery over all facets of existence is possible and that such mastery can be carried out in a benevolent and universally useful way, whereas Asimov actually presents it at being kind of creepy, or at least assumes that humans would be uncomfortable with such a milieu because of the need to cede control to machines.  Part of this, I think, has to do with the historical period in which the book was written; these days, I think many of us are fairly blasé about the ubiquity of machines performing certain tasks more accurately than humans could, but we are pessimistic about the ability of technology to improve the future in any way not limited to the benefit of the elite. Or maybe that’s just me? Maybe that’s just me.

So. From his perspective in the relatively recent past, what kind of future did Asimov imagine?  There’s actually not that much information about the milieu, because he focuses mostly on people who he imagines are not especially interested in politics or other non-robotic issues of the world. In the final story, we can see that the former nations of the world have been subsumed into larger “regions” in which the focus is economics rather than politics.  He sees space colonization becoming a more pressing need and scientists becoming more important in society (this last is unsurprising, as Asimov was a scientist himself!).  This is very interesting, but it’s also striking to me, sixty years after he wrote, is that in the midst of all this change, Asimov assumed that the family would remain exactly the same.  Thus we can recognize the family in “Robbie” as a historical artifact, an idealized 1950’s family living in a different time period, Jetsons-style.  In “Liar!” there is the assumption that a thirty-eight year old female scientist is much too old to marry a thirty-five year old male scientist; the reader is not supposed to be surprised that he prefers to marry a twenty-year old who giggles.  (Perhaps unrelatedly, here as in Foundation, Asimov assumes that women can only have political power in societies which are declining; the Co-ordinator of Europe mentions that Europe as a woman as Co-ordinator as she remarks on how sleepy and unimportant the region is).  Really, this shows the power of that particular ideology; even while flinging himself far into the future, when almost everything about the world has changed, even though he is surely aware that there have been many other models of the family, and even though the story that was written last is copyright nineteen sixty-nine, by which time I’m sure Asimov was aware of the women’s movement, he assumes that the model to which he is accustomed will carry into the future.

(which isn’t to discount the character of Susan Calvin, because, you know, she’s pretty good.)

I wanted to look briefly at each of these stories. Yes there are spoilers.

“Robbie.” This story is the only one that isn’t connected to the rest; none of the characters from US Robots and Mechanical Men plays an important role in it. Instead, it focuses on a family that keeps a robot as a pet and some of the social stigma that comes with it. This is probably the weakest story of the collection.  A lot of it is about irrational and baseless fears of harm that technology may do, harbored by those who do not understand what the technology actually does. These fears are mostly harbored by a 1950s housewife figure, who is show to be very silly, while the possibility that technology sometimes doesn’t work as it should is discounted.  At the end, there is a heartwarming moment in which the robot reunites with the little girl by saving her life—maybe not so heartwarming when we reflect that literally any robot would have done exactly the same thing, whether it wanted to or not? Then again, wanting the rescue to be personal only goes back to the point about robots’ lack of bias, so maybe this story is deeper than I think. In any case, as an introduction to the collection, it is a reasonable choice because it demonstrates the three laws in a straightforward way and gives us a glimpse of the society in which they exist.

“Runaround.” Here we meet the field engineers, level-headed Powell and fiery Donovan, who are doing research on Mercury (by which I mean: they are on Mercury, doing research).  It’s a fun story to read; it has both humor and danger in it and it centers on the frustration of robots not working quite as they should at exactly the wrong time, and also working slightly too well.  What’s interesting here is that the laws are shown to be somewhat malleable; in the expensive robot, the third law (self-preservation) is stronger than the second law (following orders).  This is interesting in view of the insistence that the laws are an insurmountable physical reality (are they?) –but the problem of the old slow robots who still respond to situations as they were programmed to do is perhaps more interesting.  It makes me wonder how many old robots are lying around and leaping (slowly) into action at a time when they actually only make things worse.  Hmm.

“Reason.” Okay, this one is just weird. It explores the possibility that self-aware robots may need to build their own philosophy; I’m not sure whether this is a commentary on human philosophy or not, but the humans regard the robot’s philosophy as completely preposterous. Eventually, they conclude that the philosophy is actually a manifestation of the Three Laws, which means, though this is not discussed, that the robot’s experience of itself is actually an illusion.  There’s also a little bit of robotic benevolent duplicity here; this is explored in further depth in other stories, but Asimov is convinced that humans can’t bear to know that robots are better at some things than they are.

“Catch that Rabbit.” This is the only story in the collection where something actually goes wrong with the robot itself; in all other cases, there is just some error of interaction where humans have not accurately thought through the results of the programming.  It’s a little longer and more involved, but it’s really about the deductive reasoning of the engineers.  That’s three stories in a row with these two;  they’re especially well-written in this one, but just as I began to get tired of them, the book switched to stories about other characters, so—good guessing, I suppose.

“Liar!” There are two ideas here, one overt and the other less so.  The first is that the concept of “harm” works in the first law; it extends beyond physical harm all the way to simple hurt feelings. The second is that robots, or at least the robot in this story, do not have the capacity to think ahead or weigh harms against each other. So the robot prevents the humans from feeling hurt through the use of transparent lies that cause a lot more mischief when they are discovered.  (It makes you wonder: would a robot be able to pull a human out of traffic at the cost of possibly bruising them?) However, in the other stories, robots do show an ability to think further ahead—either these are supposed to be more advanced robots (plausible) or Asimov didn’t want to get stuck in this problem.  What’s done to the character of Susan Calvin in this story is a little cringeworthy, but if we don’t think of the stories as coming in this order (and in fact, this is the last one to be written), she’s a complex enough character that I think this is okay.

“Little Lost Robot.” This story, I think, is intended to underline the importance of the first law; you have one dangerous robot hidden among all the others and undetectable by normal means—so, essentially, a Cylon.  The first law is modified in this robot, much to the wrath of Susan Calvin, who is given the opportunity to monologue rather impressively about how important it is to keep these laws in place in order to ensure that robots remain subordinate to humans.  At the same time, this is probably the story that anthropomorphizes the robots the most, imputing emotions such as resentment and smugness to them. It’s a little disturbing because, while imputing all these emotional reactions to robots and generally appearing to regard them as sentient beings with something resembling a human moral compass, Calvin’s immediate response to the description of the problem with this robot is, “Destroy them all.”

“Escape!” I said “Reason” was weird, but I think this one is the weirdest.  It’s the most complex and interesting story and it brings in all the US Robots characters together.  And this is a case where I don’t even want to say too much more about it—but it’s pretty fun. Notice that the behavior of the Brain here contradicts the behavior of Herbie in “Liar!” but then, the Brain is clearly a much more sophisticated robot.

“Evidence.” And here we start getting into politics, with a political figure (Byerley) who is suspected of being a robot.  What stood out to me here, and I hope that I’m not the only one who thinks so, is the queer subtext.  You have this political figure who is upstanding and highly qualified, whose opponents find him objectionable for ideological reasons and thus want to dig up dirt on him.  Eventually, they insinuate to the public that he is a robot.  There are a few clues to back this rumor up, but the strongest hint is the man with whom Byerley lives. Calling him a robot is an attack on his character intended to manipulate the prejudices of certain sectors of the human population. The rumor can never be disproved because anything he does or doesn’t do can be reinterpreted to support it, so it’s really just a witch hunt.  It’s pointed out several times that there is no real reason that his being a robot should discredit him, and he deals with the attacks with equanimity, relying on the rights that society grants to citizens even as his citizenship is made suspect.  So, okay, maybe this doesn’t have to be read as a metaphor for the closet—but that is a powerful way of reading it and that’s how I will always think of this story.

“The Evitable Conflict.” In a way, I guess this is mostly the story that I’d been dealing with above; this is the one where robots run the world with rationality, justice and excellent mathematical abilities.  I’ve dealt with the big stuff about this above, but what I’d like to point out here is a smaller moment near the end, where Susan Calvin points out:

How do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven’t at our disposal the infinite resources that the Machine has at its! Perhaps, to give you a not unfamiliar example, our entire technical civilization has created more unhappiness and misery than it has removed. Perhaps an agrarian or pastoral civilization, with less people and less culture, would be better. If so, the Machines must move in that direction, preferably without telling us, since in our ignorant prejudices we only know that what we are used to, is good—and we would then fight change. (192)

So there are limits to the optimism here! She goes on to point out several other possible configurations of society. In any case, while I don’t see how it’s possible for a civilization to have “less culture” (what does that even mean?), I’m intrigued by the way that Asimov both carves out a milieu and hedges its universality by pointing out that it doesn’t need to be the way it is, that all extrapolations of the future from the present are necessarily limited.  In any case, the reference to an “agrarian or pastoral civilization” makes me think of LeGuin’s massively underappreciated Always Coming Home, which wasn’t written for quite a while after this but which takes him up on this, imagining a future in Northern California which is really more like its precolonial past than anything else.  Is there any relationship between the two books, really? I don’t know, but it is certainly interesting to contrast their philosophies of science fiction.

(Yes, I do realize that LeGuin also wrote quite a bit of more traditional science fiction with space exploration and ansibles and things, but that is not my point here.)

Feminism without Borders: Inquiry vs. Business

Title: Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

Author: Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Publication Date: 2003

LC Call Number: HQ 1870.9 .M64

I can’t even begin to write about this book as a whole, because it is long, complex and dense, but just as an introduction…. Mohanty wants to write about worldwide feminism and in particular the condition of Third World Women (a term she defines carefully and uses advisedly) while at the same time being very careful not to flatten “women” into a coherent group with identical interests. This means that she has to take all the nuances into consideration: legal and social differences in the status of women around the world and in different social strata, economic and class issues, the effects of race, the way that family is constructed, and everything else that affects what “women” means in that particular context in time and space.  So, yeah, this is really difficult.  It means recognizing that there is no way to immediately solve all the problems of sexism and racism and imperialism in the world because everything has to be addressed carefully, one context and one social group at a time, and it means that it’s quite difficult to find a position from which one can speak.  It’s overwhelming, but as Mohanty points out, all alternatives are oppressive and center women of privilege, so—she is probably right.   The post on the first chapter of the book at A Year of Feminist Classics includes a better discussion of this than I can give here.

I should note that, according to Mohanty’s definition, third world women can include women in wealthy countries who are poor, have migrated or are of color, because they are affected by globalization in much the same way as women in poor countries and often end up doing similar work. Mohanty’s methodology is one that she describes as eclectic, but it has a strong Marxist component, and she is deeply concerned with globalization and the ways that women around the world are exploited—and how women resist exploitation, and are discouraged from resisting.  Early in the book, she uses examples such as Indian lacemakers and women workers in Silicon Valley to show both how she thinks about the economic conditions of women and to teach her readers how such distinctions can be made.  She also includes a really interesting discussion about why it is so difficult for conditions to improve for such workers. Mohanty, then, actually shows how some analysis is actually possible when taking all these things into account.

But what I really wanted to focus on was a different part of the book. In the last several chapters, Mohanty quickly shifts focus to higher education in the United States. This seemed like a very strange move; there is a huge social and economic distance between many of the issues that she discussed earlier in the book and the problems of higher education. It was a real surprise, then, to find myself thinking about the goals of higher education, the problems of temporary part time educational labor, and the dangers of allowing commercial interests to participate.  Despite the strangeness of the way this fits into the book, I was really excited to see it, and if the book had been split into two, this may actually have been the half I’d have been interested in reading, if only because I work in higher education myself and am acutely aware of some of the problems she describes.

Mohanty is very concerned with the privatization of higher education, in particular, the relationships that have been formed with governmental and business interests.  She cites several authors who have written about the expansion of the military-industrial complex into various institutions and shows that even theoretically public higher education is implicated in this complex.  She’s concerned with the research done in universities is given a monetary value as “intellectual property,” so that it can be sold to military and industrial types.   With this move, the university becomes part of the economy, and is presumed to have its own economic interests.  Mohanty writes:

[I]mmense power as well as oppression is dispersed, funneled through, recycled, consolidated and above all justified through the daily operations of US universities newly resurrected through the processes of economic globalization.  It is this link between the university and other scapes of global capitalism that recycle and exacerbate gender, race, class and sexual hierarchies that concerns me.  (173)

In short, Mohanty argues that by participating in the project of globalization, the university gives up its pretensions of creating an atmosphere in which intellectual freedom is the primary value and democratic citizenship is an important goal.  Mohanty describes a set of ideals under which higher education is a means of both distributing and thinking through justice and equality. She points out the discrepancy between the university’s involvement in structures that create oppression throughout the world and the ideals on which the academy is supposedly built. The “entrepreneurial university” as she calls it, not only contributes to exploitation elsewhere in the world but also uses labor in a way that perpetuates inequalities of class, race and gender by employing white male professors on the tenure track, a large number of (mostly white female) adjuncts for less prestigious teaching work, and what she would third world women in menial and staff positions.

There is a ton going on here, so I’m going to look closely at only a couple points.  First, Mohanty is worried about the decay of the concept of public goods. She contrasts the more traditional ideals of the academy with the concept of “corporate citizenship,” which find the ideals of citizenship in the work of the self-interested capitalist marketplace:

Ideas of the public good, collective service and responsibility, democratic rights, freedom and justice are privatized and crafted into commodities to be exchanged via the market.  The institutionalization of capitalist citizenship at the corporate university thus profoundly transforms the vision of the university as a democratic public space, a sanctuary for nonrepression. (184)

This reminds me very strongly of the arguments Siva Vaidhyanathan makes in The Googlization of Everything, which I wrote about early in the life of this blog.  Vaidhyanathan’s interest is narrower; he focuses on the ways in which Google has co-opted many functions formerly assumed to be those of the university and privatized them in service of corporate profits.  He’s skeptical of Google’s user-friendly public image and points out their US-centric nature and their status as a for-profit company.  Although he doesn’t address the problems within the academy in that book, I’d recommend it to anyone who finds this argument compelling. I found that Mohanty’s critiques gave me more perspective on Vaidhyanathan’s argument as well.  Curiously, she criticizes the Human Genome Project, which he used as an example of promising collaborations rather than exploitative ones.

In any case, back to Mohanty: she finds  many problems with corporatized education and, for her, they are all linked together. She writes about the devaluation of her own field, women’s studies, and others that do not produce income but are intended to increase the amount of justice and equity in the world. She writes about the demographics of labor as I’ve mentioned above. She briefly discusses access to education and how public defunding decreases access, while information is instead being sold as described above.

I was a little surprised how close she came to discussing the problematic publishing practices of scholars and the need for open access, and then disappointed that she didn’t quite get there. I didn’t really expect it, of course, but it is such an important part of the constellation of things that she describes.  Current academic publishing practices provide profit to multinational publishers who may or may not embody some of the problems with globalization but who certainly contribute to the corporatization of the academy by charging outrageous prices for their journals and increasing money pressure on the academy.  Not only that, of course, but by limiting access, they contribute to the restriction of scholarly knowledge to the elite, which is a huge part of the problem that she describes.  Not only that, but the open access movement represents a kind of resistance that may be of interest to her.  Since Mohanty is not a librarian, of course, this is not at the forefront of her mind—but maybe it should be. Social justice types need to start thinking about this stuff.

In any case, Mohanty is hardly the first to note the shift of the university’s priorities from a place of free intellectual inquiry to a place where future workers can be trained.  Mohanty doesn’t discuss how and when this shift took place; from what I understand, it happened when just as higher education became accessible to those other than the elite.  The ideal of the academy as a place where citizens are created is—historically complicated. It’s been embraced within critical pedagogy for sure; I love critical pedagogy, but it’s hard to cast it as an integral part of the academy when it’s actually a radical movement.  Thus, I’m not sure about her characterization of the ideals of academic life, and I suspect that this shift to the corporate university comes about, historically, as a result of some of the changes that happened as a result of letting in people who were not previously considered worthy. This makes it a little complicated, actually, but I don’t think that it undermines her point about the importance of the kind of inquiry she wants to support and the difficulty of supporting it under the current circumstances.