#against representation

[olreid]

we literally Should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don't dream can't comprehend.

[the-everqueen]

sorry i'm gonna be insufferable about the final casting for s2 but just. yt ppl you seriously don't know what it's like to never see yourselves in media. or to only see yourselves in side characters who might be killed off or dropped or stereotyped or denied any sort of narrative power. you don't know what it's like to believe that you're inherently undesirable because no one who looks like you ever gets a thoughtful arc. you don't know what it's like to feel as though your own life/death is foreclosed because no one who looks like you or who comes from your culture survives in mainstream media. and yeah, sure, representation is NOT liberation, but you don't know how it fucking wears on you to NEVER be visible, to be told no matter what you are NEVER legible, unless you slot into a very specific trope that serves whiteness. not YOU. never YOU.

[olreid]

benjamin's the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

[olreid]

one more thing wrt 'if you read hp youre poisoned forever' discourse is like. i get the sense that some ppl think there is an object out there that is so morally sound that critical analysis is not required to engage with it, and that the goal is to dispense with bad objects that have bad things in them and trade up to something you don't actually have to question or push on because its worldview is your worldview. 'well you shouldnt be reading hp anyway cause it's antisemitic and fatphobic' it certainly is and if those things bother you, you can absolutely avoid it but the vibe in those conversations sometimes is like. that that isn't true of plenty of other media.. plenty of books reproduce prejudice and we continue to read them and there will never be a book or other analytical object that is so ethically unimpeachable that it will give you permission to turn your brain off while you engage with it. and yet it feels like that's what some ppl are looking to assure themselves of by campaigning against hp, the idea that if we can whittle out the bad books we'll be left with the benign ones that you can consume mindlessly without worrying that they'll poison your brain when you're not looking... like if hp can poison you as an adult by infecting you with prejudice it's because you're not reading it critically. and some people really do seem to be terrified of books that might have this nefarious infectious ability e.g. lolita because they don't trust in their own or others' ability to resist becoming enmeshed with the worldview of whatever they're reading or watching. people are not confident in their own critical abilities and also they would rather be absolved of the responsibility to employ them.. like youre not gonna get better at something by avoiding it at all costs!!

[olreid]

So I want to preface this with the fact that I’m being completely genuine here, there’s no gotcha, and that I’ve been an artist of some flavor basically my whole life but mostly I’m a writer of fiction. And. You have your against representation tag. And I’m coming around on the idea that Representation Doesn’t matter all that much, Actually, but jaws and birth of a nation and other works like them are still extant and have/had a measurable effect on our culture. So, that said, combined with that Kurt Vonnegut quote about the Vietnam War and the pie, is there any conclusion I can come to other than “art can’t help, it can only harm”? Is art at best irrelevant to societal struggles, and at worst, can only set us back?

help not birth of a nation AND kurt vonnegut!!

hashtag against representation is definitely not arguing that art is inherently either irrelevant or antithetical to social change; it is not even primarily making a claim about art so much as it is posting against a particular mode of critical reception which posits that art is only successful or acceptable insofar as it portrays a world which is either a mirror to ours and/or aspirational in some way. within this framework, art is pretty strictly utilitarian, and that only insofar as it manages to either reveal something already extant about our world or, more saliently, to set a moral example for how we ought to behave. i really disagree with the idea that art needs to accomplish either of those goals in order to adequately justify its existence, and i think that idea ends up retroactively making some claims about the relationship between art and life that i also disagree with.

namely, i would push back on the implicit claim that audiences can't be trusted with work that is dark or complex or portrays people behaving in ways that are unpalatable, that such work if left to proliferate unchecked would somehow exert nefarious influence over viewers or readers to the point of causing people to confuse depiction or exploration or critical inquiry for straightforward endorsement which of course they would be powerless to resist. idk it goes back to earlier posts about the idea that consuming #problematic media corrupts your soul and rubs off its problematicness on you whereas consuming moral media that has #positive representation conversely purifies you and serves as concrete evidence of your fundamentally good character. which in and of itself is just the latest iteration of the ever-recurring moral panic about the power of art to exert undue influence over us and bypass our ability to reason; see my pinned post for an example from an earlier historical period lol.

i think the vonnegut point you reference is helpful here insofar as he reminds us that while politically charged art can and does influence hearts and minds, it is also not a substitute for taking political action in other forms; representation paradigms and politics would have us conflate the two, such that just watching the right kinds of shows comes to stand in for being politically engaged. and while it may be meaningful or moving for people to see fictional worlds that are diverse along a variety of axes, i don't buy the idea that that automatically translates into structural change in the world we live in, where people can't afford rent or access healthcare or etc.

the point, at least as i see it, is that like. pushing for fictional diversity in and of itself is not going to save us; it blurs the lines between fiction and reality such that people begin to needlessly try and police or purify others' fiction consumption and production habits because they think it tells them something about those same people's political commitments, and imo is also often a drain on collective energy that could be more effectively deployed elsewhere. it's less that Representation Doesn't Matter and more that representation is literally just representation, no more and no less, and certainly not the lever by which we can most effectively bring about social change.

again that's not to say that art has no place in politics or political movements, but i think the relationship is much more complicated than make art where people are good to each other -> people will be good to each other in real life. and even if that WERE the case, it still wouldn’t obligate people to exclusively produce positive or progressive art.

[olreid]

[ID: Geo Wyeth: There are holes in every surface, and maybe we could live inside them. We become "visible" on our own terms, perhaps in order to eliminate the control that someone else's gaze has. The problem is that once I become visible through naming myself, I become an image. I have been recently making a lot of work with words and names, and thinking about the idea of going inside the word, or behind a name, to find an interior space -- some kind of windstorm or fish tank or inner chamber. end ID]

from representation and its limits in trap door: trans cultural production and the politics of visibility

[olreid]

[ID: In one of their earliest contributions to the then-nascent field of Euro- American disability studies, Snyder and Mitchell convincingly argue that the trope of disability has long functioned as a “narrative prosthesis,” a habituated emplotment for overcoming tragedy and lack in order to reconsolidate the able body. As their rich scholarship demonstrates, in novel after film after short story, the body that no longer functions properly, whether physically, emotionally, or sexually, drives narrativization through a cause-and-effect relation to rehabilitation and resolution, highlighting the normativity of able bodies and leading to the climax of the story. As they write, “The able body cannot solidify its own abilities in the absence of its binary Other." In this brilliant analysis they complicate the representational politics of disability by making a formalist argument about the ableist underpinnings of a certain narrative structure itself. Thus, what it means to represent disability is already superseded by the logic of narrative that pivots on the exceptional accident and triumphant rehabilitation from it. The prosthesis of disability allows a story to chug along.

The narrative prosthesis, then, may give us the cultural artifacts for the fantasy of resolution while economic structures manifest the proliferation of debilitation, using aspirational tropes for cover. end ID]

narrative prosthesis - jasbir k. puar, the right to maim

[olreid]

sorry. sorry. ianthe eating babs is 'overcoming a male power trip'?? i feel like im being punkd