Tag Archives: Caro

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Female Comics Creators

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As I mentioned yesterday, Kelly Thompson is running a poll to make a list of the best female comics creators. I thought I’d reproduce one of Caroline Small’s comments on this topic from some time back. She’s responding to the late Kim Thompson. (The back and forth was actually on another site…click through to the thread if you want all the ins and outs.)

I’m guessing nobody’s still reading this thread but I’m going to do something contrarian and agree with Kim — although for reasons he might not like. I think he’s absolutely correct that any discussion like this is problematic without some discussion of the values that make work “great.” But to me, the reason that is so important is because, if the history of women’s writing is any comparison, the work of women cartoonists, considered altogether and on its own terms, without reference to the historical criteria used to evaluate (mostly male) cartoonists, may in fact challenge the assumptions and criteria that we use to evaluate the work that’s been done so far.

I’m a known partisan for Anke Feuchtenberger’s marvelous work. Having recently been introduced to Charlotte Salomon’s work I anticipate a similar feeling to emerge.

But a lot of people say artists like Feuchtenberger and Salomon are not “cartoonists” because they don’t work in quite the same aesthetic tradition as the ones in your list, Kim — even though Feuchtenberger at least describes herself as a cartoonist. When I start from their work as my aesthetic benchmark, more women emerge: Ana Hatherly, Elisa Galvez, Dominique Goblet.

The aesthetic tradition of “classical cartooning” (?) unfortunately hasn’t coincided historically with a very welcoming environment for women, one where we have lots of role models and fellow travelers to smooth the path, to provide encouragement and motivation and inspiration, and to create a sense of shared voice. That’s why I’m resistant to the 60-year metric. It doesn’t let the best work by women who have come of age after the advances of recent decades — advances Fantagraphics was part of — come to the surface for critical examination. I think if we limit ourselves to that historical precedent, we can’t, say, evaluate the work of innovative cartoonists like Cathy Malkusian or Lauren Weinstein in the context established by cartoonists like Feuchtenberger and Salomon. And I think reading them that way, instead of against, say, Herge or Herriman, leads to fascinating insights about the cartooning aesthetic and its possibilities — the comparison made me like Malkusian and Weinstein’s work much more than I did before I approached in from that perspective. It remains an open question what such comparisons would yield for reading Alison Bechdel or Lynda Barry or other women who work in the more traditional cartooning aesthetic.

Maybe it will in fact be 60 years before we can accurately say who the greatest women cartoonists will be, but I don’t think we should be afraid of recognizing and celebrating the work of women cartoonists as “great” until that time has passed. That’s largely abdicating any role that critics and criticism can play in making the environment of cartooning in the broad sense more nourishing for women cartoonists. If we need to codify and celebrate and advocate a separate tradition of “women’s cartooning” with its own aesthetic and cultural criteria in order to be able to roar these women’s names as greats in comics, then so be it. I think Herriman can stand the competition. Maybe we need another word for “comics artist” than just “cartoonist.” But what I think is sexist is the demand that women work in that tradition and only that tradition in order to be considered great.

 

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Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Delany, Definitions, and Comics

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Caroline Small wrote an interesting commenton Samuel Delany’s view of comics and Scott McCloud; thought I’d reproduce it here.

Jeet and Noah: I guess I am still deeply skeptical about the assertion that Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman represent “Delany’s taste” in comics, rather than a strategic choice of writers to call attention to. I guess I just disagree that “taste” is what’s at stake here at all, or even that “taste” is a particularly useful category for understanding the role that Gaiman and Moore play in what Delany has to say about comics. (I realize I’m making a big deal out of something that I’m sure Jeet said casually, but it seems to me a particularly fecund slip…)

It’s not that I don’t agree to some extent: I find it deeply unpalatable when Delany uses words like “powerful, insightful and brilliant” to describe Scott McCloud. McCloud is the epitome of “middle-of-the-road” as far as I’m concerned. But I tend to read Delany’s praise as strategic rather than sycophantic.

I’m not sure what else from comics Delany could engage OTHER than Gaiman and Moore, given his project of deconstructing the binary between art and genre: despite those writers being palpably middlebrow (and with that I certainly agree), comics just doesn’t have a Marge Piercy or even a Sam Delany of its own that he could grapple with instead. And Gaiman/Moore have the strategic advantage, even over Piercy and Delany himself, of being very familiar to a great many people and therefore valuable as illustration. Jeet, are there comics creators/writers whom you think he should write about instead, that would be less disappointing, but still effectively work for his project?

I think the way I phrased my initial comment led to this notion that Delany exhibits some “highbrow” taste in literature, and that he hasn’t shown as sensitive an “ear” for comics. But — to use Jeet’s examples — Nabokov and Updike are really no less middlebrow than Gaiman and Moore. Delany’s fiction leaves no doubt that he reads and engages writers much much much more ambitious than Nabokov and Updike. But his project (and possibly but not necessarily his taste) dictates that he not privilege the highbrow at the expense of the lowbrow. I prefer to view him as capable of such great appreciation of human creativity that he privileges instead a synthesis of the entire spectrum: low, high, and middlebrow. There’s a “hippie appreciation” to his writing about art that I think has to be recognized and taken in context rather than at face value.

So for me the “disappointing” thing here is not that Delany has less sophisticated taste in comics than he does in literature: I don’t think we have access at all to his taste through his criticism, because he is far too fine a critic to be concerned with matters of taste.

What’s disappointing — although, really, it’s not so much disappointing as fascinating — is that as a writer he wasn’t able to make as much hay out of his perspective in comics as he was in fiction. Sam Delany’s prose SF really does participate in and advance his project of challenging the ways in which we presume genre cannot be art: Dhalgren is an essential, if not the essential, text for re-examining the conventional wisdom about how the strictures of genre characteristics preclude literary experimentation. But you both pointed out that his comics do not challenge the binary between genre and art in the same way. That’s interesting. Saying that he has middlebrow taste in comics is not sufficient to account for the fact that what Sam Delany has to offer can’t complicate and “elevate” graphic genre fiction in in the same way that it did prose genre fiction…

It’s a fun thread in general; Caro has some more thoughts, as do Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, and others.

Outside Charlie Hebdo

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I’m really appreciative to all the Francophones on various sites who have taken the time to put Charlie Hebdo’s work in a rich cultural context, opening up the magazine’s visual aesthetic and clarifying their editorial and political vantage point with more nuance than most of our mainstream Anglophone sources. These people’s willingness to do the tedious work of translating image after image, kindly and with probably strained patience, has elevated a very stark conversation into a vastly more nuanced one.

Here we have a convergence of so many issues that compel our culture to debate: free speech, extremism, faith and fascism, violence, humor, bullying, mockery, racism, sexism, and art. And yet so many opinions seem to fall broadly into one of just two camps – the ones that just outright call CH racist, and the ones that cloak it in the venerable mantle of satire.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of a long discussion with me on the subject of satire knows that I really just, generally, don’t find any aesthetic pleasure and only very limited intellectual pleasure in satirical work. Even when it’s very well done, it is a mode of discourse that relies on a spectrum ranging from discomfort to derision, and my response is almost always to turn away on purely emotional grounds. I’ve been very open about this opinion; it’s not new this week. It’s made me feel very awkward about adopting the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag, because I wouldn’t have said something like that before last Wednesday’s events. The hashtag makes the magazine a metonym for all the people killed – even the Muslim policeman. I respond strongly and decisively to those who were killed and wounded as people, with voices and rights and subjectivity. But I respond to the magazine and the cartoons with ambivalence – because even though I tend to agree with the politics, the aesthetics are beyond me.

Probably for that reason, my reactions are not substantially mitigated by actually understanding the satire, although it helps. The logic of Charlie Hebdo’s satire is certainly much clearer to me now that so many people have spoken patiently and eloquently to clarify it. In particular, the cover depicting the sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens appears much smarter and more complex when interpreted as “why do you care so much about these threatened and disadvantaged girls, but not about the threatened and disadvantaged girls right on your doorstep?” I am convinced that much of the work is indeed more complicated — and certainly contextually rich – than appears at first glance to readers who do not inhabit the immediate cultural context. These are political cartoons, and politics is always contextual.
 

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But I don’t think there’s any amount of context that will make me find that cartoon less viscerally off-putting. It’s just so ugly to represent those girls that way. The explanation makes sense, but it doesn’t change my aesthetic reaction. It doesn’t feel ok to use their horrifying experiences, even for some noble cause. The complicated reading makes my reactions more complicated too, but it doesn’t make the negative reaction go away.

And even if the explanation did actually make me like that one, not all the cartoons yield to complicated readings. Some of the work really does seem to be simply calling a stupid fig a stupid fig, nothing more than making a wrongheaded idea look sickly and unappealing by shining a puce limelight on it. Basically an intensified form of caricature, It’s a tactic embraced by a lot of contemporary satire. It’s popular – a lot of people really do like it. But I’m not one of them. I’m not sure that type of satire, whether it occurs relatively gently on the Daily Show or with poison incisors at Charlie Hebdo, is anything more than vulgar mockery – even if it’s not racist, sexist, imperialist or otherwise. I’m not convinced it’s a meaningful way to deal with stupidity and wrongheadedness – at least, it doesn’t really seem to be trying to change the wrongheadedness so much as it seems like gallows humor for people who see no possibility of change. It doesn’t recast the stupid thing in a way that raises questions and doubts among the community that believes it or even tolerates it; it doesn’t get inside the heads of the people who think the wrongheaded thing and challenge their motivation or logic; it just puts people on the defensive. The target doesn’t feel outsmarted; they just feel disrespected.

In what way does that serve a positive end or increase our overall intelligence? Doesn’t satire need to be effective at challenging and destabilizing stupid beliefs if it is intended to have political power? If it only reaches people who don’t hold the belief, isn’t it just mockery? Mockery just ends up creating a group identity among the people who collectively believe the stupid thing is stupid. I think that may be why people react so negatively to this kind of imagery – even if it doesn’t actually qualify as racist (and I will refrain from an opinion on that in this particular context that is not my context), it does alienate and separate, working against solidarity rather than increasing it.

So faced with the difficulty of feeling intense compassion and so much horror at Wednesday’s events, yet not quite feeling the identification with Charlie Hebdo that the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag implies, I am left with an intellectual’s inward-looking response, trying to explain to myself why it just doesn’t feel quite honest to use the tag. I know I am not Charlie Hebdo’s target audience. I struggle to appreciate satire even when it’s really obviously well done. I am stopped by the tone and the feel of the work. I cannot spend enough time with it to understand. But that means the nuances of my emotional and aesthetic responses to this kind of work are largely inaccessible to me – I can intellectually see why much of this work is satire, but I can’t experience it as anything other than raw and ugly and mean and sad.

Again, I am indebted to conversations that catch me up in ways I can’t do myself. In response to the original version of this comment on Facebook, a friend made a comment that struck me as important – “who are outsiders to presume to ‘cast doubt’ on someone else’s beliefs?” Outsiders don’t speak from a place of profound understanding. An outsider’s satire doesn’t know; it just knows better. And when I tried to think of satire that I like better than most, I noticed that Stephen Colbert and Jonathan Swift both rely very heavily on the first person, which is a way of “inhabiting” the person and ideas being satirized. I think the first person is a little sop to people like me, who are put off by how much emotional and critical separation is necessary to make satire work.

This is, perhaps, what makes Charlie Hebdo’s Boko Haram “welfare queen” cartoon so particularly hard for me. What am I supposed to do with the empathy and sadness I feel for the kidnapped girls? Just transfer it over to the welfare moms – as if empathy is generic and disconnected from each group of women’s real stories? The pregnant bodies in the cartoon are named as the “sex slaves of Boko Haram,” the cartoon asserts that they are speaking. But it’s not their voice and their story and their point of view – it’s the voice of the “welfare queens.” The reality of those girls being forced into sexual slavery is alluded to through the pregnancy, but it’s sidestepped and displaced into the significantly different resonance that pregnancy carries in discussions of welfare and indigence. Any identification with anybody here is uncomfortable and unsatisfying – to “get the joke”, to see how smart it is, everybody must be kept at emotional arms’ length.

Clearly I’m just not supposed to react to it this way. Is it even possible to simultaneously satirize and empathize? I don’t know that it is – it is certainly easier to avoid satire altogether than to find the hypothetical example that succeeds at this. And first-person does get very complicated very fast when the subject being satirized is “other” from the satirist in some palpable way – like race or ethnicity or religion. You bang quickly up against issues of authenticity.

And yet – I’m not typically much for authenticity so I’m not entirely comfortable with that, either. Surely it cannot be impossible to satirize someone different from you. That’s why I initially went with the “getting inside someone’s head” – surely the greatest satirists understand their subjects in some profoundly incisive way, not just knowing that they are wrong, but comprehending why they believe they are right.

Perhaps in all of this, I am just missing human nature. It is not human nature to inhabit the minds of people whose beliefs are anathema to us. And surely satire cannot be truly politically effective if it discounts human nature. So all this has brought me back to again concluding that I just don’t like satire, or appreciate it, or enjoy it.

I suppose it has to be said, in all of this, that the use of violence against speech is never anything other than brutal totalitarianism, regardless of the speech and regardless of the violence. But I think about mockery and judgment and how destructive and alienating they are. And I want to be able to understand what distinguishes, on one end of a spectrum, the great artistic and political tradition of satire from, on the other end, plain old bullies mocking people and ideas they don’t like because it makes them feel superior. Understanding is not as easy, I think, as I would like. Satire traffics in mockery and judgment, and the world already has too much of those things and too little connection and justice. I cannot be Charlie, because I am an outsider, and I do not understand. But perhaps I can be Charlie, since by their own logic, being an outsider is good enough.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on the Failures of Comics Symbolism

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This is from a ways back, when Caro would theorize at length in comments threads.

Caroling Small: Questions about storytelling and representation and all those things are literary themes. But literary narrative is also a lot about the manipulation of device. Device is higher level than prosecraft, and lower level than theme. Maus fails at the level of the sophistication of its devices. It relies too heavily on symbolism, and straight symbolism in literature is less sophisticated than the more elaborate deployment of metaphor or metonymy. This is why so many literary people sneer at it getting the Pulitzer: it’s a good instance of “medium-specificity constituting a free pass.”

Symbolism is a component of metaphor on some level, but literary metaphor is bidirectional whereas symbols are unidirectional. The technical definition of a symbol is something like “using a concrete object to represent an abstract idea,” although the “concrete object” can be a “figure of speech.” (Notice the visual reference there to “figure” — in pure prose, a symbol is metaphorically concrete, but it still has to be concrete to qualify as a symbol.) But in literary metaphor the concrete drops away; instead you are juxtaposing two — preferably more — relatively ungrounded and fluid abstractions and having them structure each other.

(It’s also important to guard against the metaphor itself then functioning as a symbol; it needs to be integrated back into the narrative in some way, so that the metaphor illuminates character or theme or casts the plot in a different light, etc.)

This all happens very self-consciously in postmodern fiction, which calls attention to these things happening and generally integrates a self-consciousness about device into the theme, so that device in some way is always referenced by the theme. However, with the exception of the self-conscious self-referentiality, it happens in non-pomo fiction too — in Shakespeare, in Shaw, in Austen, in every literary writer. To get to something that uses symbols as directly as Maus you have to go back to the great Renaissance allegories — and they are so much more elaborate in the sheer quantity of symbols. There’s no puzzle to Maus — and Watchmen isn’t nearly as puzzling as The Fairie Queen.

So the more you’re able to connect a myriad of abstractions to each other and to the devices used to build the narrative, the more literary the work is. If there aren’t multiple abstractions interacting independently of whatever is happening concretely (so abstractions that are not symbols) and working in the service of the theme, the work is not literary.

Ware’s pretty explicit about his imagocentrism and his concern with the materiality of the page. But images are definitionally concrete. What happens when you’re imagocentric and concerned with the materiality of the page is you elide this layer of device and have a closer interweave between the concrete materiality and the highest abstractions of theme. This is a medium-specific property of comics — indeed of visual art — that makes it more difficult to build “literary” — or logophilic — narratives.

Even visual abstraction is concrete in the sense I’m using the word here, because it is working at that epistemological limit where the distinction “abstract/concrete” that is so native to, even constitutive of, the logos breaks down and you are faced with the material, visual word, evacuated of meaning. This is why the Imaginary and Symbolic are so named: the shift from the image-world, where the abstract is concrete, to the symbolic where they’re separated so that the concrete can be made to represent the abstract — that is the emergence of the logos (or in poststructural-ese, the founding gesture of differance).

Ware and Gilbert and to a lesser extent Clowes are all overtly concerned with the visual aspects of representation — it’s extremely hard to be a cartoonist and not be. This does not make them bad; this is not a criticism. It doesn’t even entirely exclude them from being thought of as a graphic mode of “literature”. But it does make them significantly less logophilic. Eddie Campbell might honestly be the only person working in a narrative mode in English who doesn’t fall victim to this — and an awful lot of people will derogate him by saying his work is either “mere illustration” or too verbose/literary. But he really seems to understand what’s missing, what’s different.

And, you know, honestly, on a much, much less sophisticated and theoretical plane, the actual prose that there is in American comics generally just blows. It’s ugly and colloquial and the writers apparently have the vocabulary of an average high-schooler. Regardless of how much prose you include in a comic, every single word of the prose you include should be _amazing_ — or you should pay someone to write it for you. If you love words, you put in great words. Period.

Illustrated children’s books, including but not limited to comics that include children in their readership, tend to be BRILLIANT at that, actually. But it’s really easier in children’s books, because the ideas are simpler, because there are less moving pieces — you can work with one device at a time rather than having to make the prose engage multiple devices simultaneously as well as multiple themes.

 

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Caroline Small on Critic-Practitioners

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Caroline Small has been away from HU too long. She left a comment recently on Suat’s post about comics criticism, though, and so in the absence of a real full length post, I thought I’d highlight this, in part because I miss new Caro content, but mostly because it’s worth highlighting.

Having spent a great deal of time lately thinking about critical theory and art practice in the company of some marvelous, critically minded practitioners (and not thinking at all about comics), I second Suat’s suggestion that at least one reason comics criticism is in this condition is because so few cartoonists practice criticism. And by “practice”, I mean read and write not journalism, not the “theory of craft” (as Frank Santoro does so brilliantly and charmingly), but classical “criticism” – argumentative/philosophical/descriptive essays, about art in general, both inside and outside their area of specialization. In fields where there is a strong critical culture, there is typically also a significant population of working artists who consider critical conversations about art, with other artists and critics, in their own and other fields, to be an essential part of their creative practice. Something they do for themselves, because it makes their art richer and better.

Film and literature and music have extremely healthy critical cultures, but they also have large numbers of engaged critic-practitioners – not just practitioners who occasionally toss off a piece of writing about something they’ve read or something they think is important, but practitioners who consider the work of criticism (i.e, reading incisive, informed essays on a range of art-related topics as well as working out their own ideas about their art and practice in essay form) to be an essential facet of being an original, challenging practitioner. (Fine art has a tremendous history in this regard although post-postmodernism is a bit of a nadir.)

This is not to say you have to be a practitioner to be a great critic (or vice versa), but to have a great critical conversation about any field, you need a critical mass of practitioners participating in that conversation at the highest levels. The conversation between…let’s call them practitioner-critics and philosopher-critics — so many of the great critical ideas historically have come out of that conversation. But the practitioner-critic has an exceptionally tough go in comics’ supercool, DIY, populist, “a picture is worth a thousand words” climate. There are vigilant souls, but by in large the critical stance seems to be treacherous waters for cartoonists.

 

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A practitioner-critic.

 
 

Not the Spokesman You Are Looking For

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A lot of artists I know sang the praises of David Lowery’s recent post in response to NPR blogger Emily White because they agree with what they see as Lowery’s morality – the importance of the idea that creative work is valuable and worthwhile and worth paying for, not just a side product to lure advertisers or some sort of cultural spirit that doesn’t belong to anybody and longs to be free. Lowery’s post was validating, and people felt that he was sticking up for them and speaking out for their interests. A lot of people in the music industry came out against Lowery’s analysis, but there was still a strikingly strong outpouring of support for the simplicity of his argument and his willingness to stick up for a morality in the artists’ interest.

I agree — that morality should be incontrovertible. Cultural creative work is work; it is valuable; it deserves generous compensation and respect. It should not be stolen by consumers and neither artists nor their work should be exploited by other entities in the production and distribution chain. Encouraging people not to steal is a good thing now just like it’s always been a good thing, and firing back sharply at anybody who denigrates creative work is even better.

But the challenges facing artists in the digital economy require extremely informed, eloquent advocates who can go beyond emotional validation and imagine creative new solutions to the complicated new context in which artists work. Lowery is not that advocate. He’s not even a particularly good spokesperson for this constellation of moral ideas, because being a spokesperson for a morality is about convincing people to change. Lowery’s post, and the comments he’s made on this topic previously, are neither persuasive nor effective because the them/us quality to his rhetoric results in a patronizing superiority that’s nothing more than moral shaming. That’s more the language of clashing subcultures, cliquish sectarianism and bad parenting than it is the language of advocacy, moral persuasion, and cultural change. It’s as if Lowery was put-off by the tone of the tech subculture and those damn kids on his lawn, and allowed that feeling to blind him to how much the arts and technology “subcultures” have in common, in general and on these issues in particular.

Strange and Insidious Bedfellows

In the process of rejecting those shared interests with the tech world, Lowery — probably inadvertently — builds common cause with people and individuals (and even nation-states) who advocate different insidious forms of immorality, ones much more harmful to artists in the long term: violations of civil liberties, violations of privacy, and the subjugation of the interests and voices of individuals to the interests and voices of corporations and state power.

This week’s news gives a good example of what happens when artists take the wrong side: last week, the European Parliament rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA, by a decisive vote of 478/39. The United States signed ACTA in October of 2011, and the EU trade representatives supported the agreement as well – but the EU required it be ratified by Parliament, and this week that ratification failed.

Why did it fail? Despite widespread agreement that international action was necessary to combat international criminal piracy and intellectual property fraud and counterfeiting, the bill contained numerous provisions that targeted individuals and technologies, including ISPs, for criminal prosecution and that, perhaps even more importantly, placed restrictions on the use of legitimately obtained material that are much stricter than those in current international law. The EU’s opposition to the agreement was predicated on these specific concerns:

“On individual criminalisation, the definition of ‘commercial-scale’, the role of internet service providers, and the possible interruption of the transit of generic medicines, your rapporteur maintains doubts that the ACTA text is as precise as is necessary,” (Scottish MEP) David Martin, the rapporteur, wrote in his statement to Parliament (PDF) explaining his recommendation to reject the bill. “The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties.”

Almost all of the identified threats to civil liberties are provisions that grow out of the American model of digital copyright enforcement, promoted by organizations like the MPAA and RIAA and legislated in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA loosely follows what copyright activists call “copyright maximalism” – when digital distribution upended the theretofore “natural” limitations to copyright infringement by eliminating material scarcity, the response of large corporations and governments was to remove pretty much all the existing limitations on copyright enforcement, including any meaningful application of fair use. Maximal enforcement = “copyright maximalism.” Back in the ’90s, when the DMCA was being formulated, Wired magazine didn’t even try to hide their contempt for the principles:

1. Give copyright owners control over every use of copyrighted works in digital form by interpreting existing law as being violated whenever users make even temporary reproductions of works in the random access memory of their computers;

2. Give copyright owners control over every transmission of works in digital form by amending the copyright statute so that digital transmissions will be regarded as distributions of copies to the public;

3. Eliminate fair-use rights whenever a use might be licensed. (The copyright maximalists assert that there is no piece of a copyrighted work small enough that they are uninterested in charging for its use, and no use private enough that they aren’t willing to track it down and charge for it. In this vision of the future, a user who has copied even a paragraph from an electronic journal to share with a friend will be as much a criminal as the person who tampers with an electrical meter at a friend’s house in order to siphon off free electricity. If a few users have to go to jail for copyright offenses, well, that’s a small price to pay to ensure that the population learns new patterns of behavior in the digital age.);

4. Deprive the public of the “first sale” rights it has long enjoyed in the print world (the rights that permit you to redistribute your own copy of a work after the publisher’s first sale of it to you), because the white paper treats electronic forwarding as a violation of both the reproduction and distribution rights of copyright law;

5. Attach copyright management information to digital copies of a work, ensuring that publishers can track every use made of digital copies and trace where each copy resides on the network and what is being done with it at any time;

6. Protect every digital copy of every work technologically (by encryption, for example) and make illegal any attempt to circumvent that protection;

7. Force online service providers to become copyright police, charged with implementing pay-per-use rules. (These providers will be responsible not only for cutting off service to scofflaws but also for reporting copyright crime to the criminal justice authorities);

8. Teach the new copyright rules of the road to children throughout their years at school.

Now, ACTA isn’t merely about enforcment against individual users. It also addressed serious large-scale counterfeiting, something which global trade agencies need tools to deal with. But because the language in the legislation was so slanted toward copyright maximalism – toward protecting the economic interests of rights holders without thought to the expressive interests of individuals, the legislation was seen as threatening civil liberties and conflicting with international and US law, and it failed to pass Parliament.

In a very real sense, this means the agreement is dead. Six of the 8 original signatories would need to ratify it for it to become international law, and this is extremely unlikely to happen given the loss of European support.

In other words, a desperately needed international trade agreement, that diplomats from all over the world spent over a half-decade drafting and promoting, failed because organizations who purport to represent artists insisted that it include inflexible provisions that threatened civil liberties.

What does it mean when artists, through the actions of their representatives on the global stage, are no longer seen as standing on the side of humanity and freedom of expression against exploitation and oppression, but are seen as against civil liberties themselves? What does it mean when artists like David Lowery make arguments that justify and encourage artists to turn a blind eye to these implications and side, instead, with those representatives, the corporations they represent, and their narrow interests?

Why I think David Lowery’s post did more harm than good

In his response to White, Lowery appeals to some very intuitive pro-musician sensibilities, but in the process of outlining those sensibilities and the priorities and moral actions he thinks they should lead to, he makes those musicians into an interest group like every other interest group. This is especially evident in his presentation to the SF Music Tech convention, held earlier this year. It’s a deeply politicized speech that makes explicit that “cliquish sectarianism” I mentioned earlier — his treatment of the tech community in the final section is strident, vitriolic, and divisive in the worst way. Lowery defines his interest group very narrowly and fans the flames of hostility toward anyone who isn’t 100% part of his group.

Yet there are so many stakeholders in this debate who don’t quite fit Lowery’s interest group: people who make obscure kinds of music that record companies never cared about, artists who have had measurable success with Internet business models, people who make forms of art which have never been well served by the “old boss”, people who make technology, entrepreneurs, and a really large variety and range of consumers and expressive individuals. All of those groups have valuable perspectives, ideas, and influence. Consolidation of that grassroots influence is a viable way of fighting entrenched power structures – as my friend Harold Feld says, “policy is not about getting people to do the right thing for the right reasons, it is about getting them to do the right thing for their own reasons.”

The consolidation of influence from the tech and arts communities motivates technological advances with artistic purposes and artistic uses of technology. It spared us some pretty awful legislation when a coalition of artists and technology people defeated the SOPA and PIPA bills. It was important for convincing stores like Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3s that consumers can actually back up and transfer from machine to machine. Finding ways to get artists, the technology sector, and consumers to see each other as compatriots with shared goals is important for making sure everybody’s interests are well served as tech policy around issues important to the arts evolves.

Making musicians into a narrow interest group, oppressed by the “new boss” and at odds with the rest of society (whose world is “made of computers”) is the opposite of the collaborative spirit our current situation calls for. David Lowery is a polemicist, someone who plays to emotions and likes to get people riled up. That’s maybe natural terrain for a songwriter (although not all emotion is polemical), but it’s an abysmal approach for the actual real politics facing artists in the digital economy. His polemic distorts other people’s positions, whether due to passion or ideology, in ways that obscure the full factual landscape, that create rifts between groups who need to be working together and that ossify people’s commitments and vantage points rather than getting everybody informed about the big picture and stimulating imagination across economic sectors. Right now, there’s little more counterproductive than such “partisanship.”

Why I think David Lowery maybe can’t read

Lowery’s response to Emily White emphatically claims a moral high-ground in response to White’s saying she and her generation are unlikely to “ever pay for albums.” Lowery makes an elaborate, and completely accurate, case that stealing music is a bad thing to do, and that all the reasons people usually give to rationalize file sharing are besides the point.

The problem is that almost nothing Lowery says in his incredibly patronizing letter to White has much to do with what White actually said.

Lowery’s letter is a riff. He picks up on that one phrase about not paying for albums — which doesn’t mean won’t pay for music — and improvises for a few dozen measures, making a largely unrelated piece that only vaguely alludes to the original. In jazz, that kid of riffing is how musicians build culture. But in argument, we call it building a strawman. His points are valid on their face, but would have been stronger and more effective – and more ethical – had he cast them in response to examples of people actually saying the things he’s complaining about.

The core issue of White’s post – which was a response to her boss’s post about uploading his entire (legally purchased) record collection into the cloud – was not rationalizing why peer-to-peer file sharing is good or even why it’s ok to get music for free from your friends. White’s point, which almost everybody ignores, is instead that we are in a post-file-sharing world. (Bob Lefsetz describes it by saying that arguing against file sharing is like arguing against a dot matrix printer.)

It’s important that White didn’t file-share to build her collection, and that she didn’t use any of the excuses that Lowery is at pains to debunk in order to defend herself or the ways she did build her collection. She in fact says straight up that both file sharing of copyright material and collecting songs without paying for them are wrong and hurt artists. So in making a strawman out of her, Lowery ends up chastising someone who agrees with him. No good can come of that. People who make strawmen out of other people who already agree with their moral point are not good spokespeople for that moral point.

Why I think David Lowery doesn’t get it

I know a lot of people feel really wronged by the way the digital economy, its stakeholders and its watchdogs, have failed to deal expeditiously and effectively with the very real problems created by changes in manufacturing and distribution structures after widespread digitization, and they want some moral justice as well as real solutions. I understand the desire of artists to emphasize these moral concerns. But Lowery could have written a post focused on morality without also building a strawman, if he were a careful reader interested in a conversation. White’s conclusion isn’t without a moral element — it’s just that the moral element has nothing to do with stealing.

White’s conclusion — her really smart and interesting and provocative conclusion — is basically this: in a post-file-sharing world, large-scale consumer demand for owning media in any form, including CDs, vinyl, paper books, DVDs, even digital files, will be significantly reduced, possibly to the point that demand for owning music or copies of any art no longer exists at all. The collector’s impulse will be transformed (although probably not eradicated) by on-demand delivery and the end of scarcity.

Think about what this means for everybody except the historically minded archivist.

No bins full of CDs or racks of DVDs above the TV.
No overstuffed bookshelves and stacks of books in the corner.
No long boxes.
Not even the massive hard drives full of downloaded songs.

A near-complete dematerialization of reproduced culture.

As the cloud and various on-demand and streaming technologies evolve and mature, White predicts that most people will prefer using them to buying. Her point is basic demand-side economics. Not that people will file-share. Not that some significant percentage of people under, I dunno, 30 years old see nothing wrong with stealing content. But the idea that in the future most people, period, will prefer to buy access to music than the music itself. They will, as with all cloud technologies, begin to consume and interact with art as a service rather than as a product.

It’s provocative, and radical, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for artists: there are predictions that, once a critical mass of media becomes instantly available on-demand, artists will actually make more over a single listener’s lifetime from that listener streaming their albums over and over than they could possibly ever make from that fan buying the album. Lowery could have grappled with this new way of thinking. He could have questioned whether there are inherent and meaningful moral or ethical problems for artists in legitimate cloud-based business models, and he could have asked what potential new illegitimate uses cloud-based models might give rise to. He could have called attention to the ethical and moral dimensions of artists’ standing in the cloud. Writing about those would still have been a riff, but it would have been a vastly a more honest and productive riff than the one he came up with.

However, I don’t think morality is what’s really at stake here. Those issues need to be framed up in detail – that’s one of the potential good outcomes of a large-scale public conversation – but they’re definitely not simplistically moral like consumer theft, or even the more complex terrain of how to ensure our society values creative work both culturally and economically. More important than morality here is politics: who has control of those “universal databases” White calls for? How fair is the competitive landscape? What are the licensing obstacles? Are there tensions between the existing structures of copyright and adequate compensation based on playcounts? Do the models of ownership and rights holding that have evolved for media, and in particular for software, really work ethically and effectively for creative workers? There are lots of questions about digital distribution – what it even means to “own” a copy of an artwork; whether the use of arts should be and can be subject to the kinds of licensure restrictions placed on software use; when and how fair use applies to creative reuse; the extent to which all the various middlemen, technological and creative, are beneficial to the process or are in the way; whether there are meaningful differences between a personal collection in the cloud and the catalogs of streaming services, what those differences are, and whether they make sense and provide value to the consumer given the relative costs of those models.

Too much emphasis on morality in this particular context creates the illusion that people are more immoral and entitled than they actually are. There are plenty of immoral, entitled people, but there are also a lot of people who prefer paying to file-sharing or file-swapping. Lowery’s post suggests a sort of “demand management through ideology”, direct from the artist to the consumer, where moral shaming performs the economic function of interest rate manipulation or a sin tax, with the idea that if artists say enough times that the old model is better for them people will do the right thing and go back to buying CDs and DVDs and never downloading and minimizing their streaming and supporting the old model of advances recouped through sales. But the take-home is that, even if we set aside the old problems with the old models, even if we discount the damage such a trust deficit would do to the market period, that kind of demand management probably just won’t work.

This is because people who use Spotify and other cloud-based streaming services don’t see a moral difference between the subscription fees they pay and buying a CD, or between the advertising on Spotify and that on network TV. They do, however, see the moral problems with the discrepancy between what they pay for a CD and what the artist gets, and with myriad models which primarily enrich a very inefficient infrastructure of middle-men. And they see practical problems with the choice between paying for a CD without instant delivery versus paying for a digital music file that perhaps has a finite lifespan or at least where they’re responsible for backup, especially when cloud-based subscription services offer them instantaneous access to the same music, and much more music, in a model where the restrictions and inconveniences seem better aligned with the cost model.

When physical albums, CDs or vinyl or whatever, were sold as the standard means of buying music, the cost, and value, of the item was based not only on the unique properties of the intellectual, creative content, but also on the physical materials, and most importantly on the control and access that ownership of the physical media gave the purchaser. Owning your own physical copy was the only way to ensure access to what you wanted to listen to, when you wanted to listen to it. A listener without a copy had to wait until the one or two songs that were going to be played on the radio came on, or they had to listen at a friends’ house. If you wanted full access to the content, and full control over when you heard it, you had to buy your own physical copy of the album.

But after digitization, the benefits of owning the physical media largely evaporated, and the exchange telescoped down to focus just on the value of the creative content itself – something which had always been a blurry and opaque percentage of the cost of the material good. In making the physicality of the product obsolete, digitization also made the packaged information vastly more material and tangible.

It’s often pointed out and absolutely true that there’s no material scarcity associated with digital copying – a digital resource is not a limited resource. But material scarcity isn’t as relevant as many people suggest — it’s vastly more relevant that digitization and computing advances made control and access plentiful. This is true for all culture, not just music: I no longer have to watch the Billy Graham Crusade or the Bob Hope Special right along with the rest of America because there are only three channels; I can go to Netflix on Demand and watch a documentary about Africa or a James Coburn movie and if I am the only person in the world interested in that movie at that exact instant, it’s still available to me. There’s no meaningful difference between accessing that material on demand and owning my own copies.

So even though it’s possible to shame people into a better morality, it is not possible to shame people into treating – and paying for – a plentiful commodity as though it is scarce.

This ties into Lowery’s interesting and valid point that we’re more willing to pay for electronic equipment than we are for content. Electronic equipment, though, is still physical, and subject to scarcity. The cost of commodities is a measure not just of their cost of production but also of their exchange value. In situations where the exchange value is insufficient to cover the cost of production, a commodity that it is possible to produce, might not ever actually be produced. You can increase a commodity’s exchange value by increasing people’s willingness to pay for it in some way, but there’s going to be a limit to how much you can talk people into valuing something when they don’t see a direct benefit to them. You can convince people that it’s immoral to not pay anything for music, because you can show them how that affects production. But you can’t convince people that existing, already recorded music is scarce, expensive to produce, and difficult to distribute – because it isn’t.

Why I think David Lowery is dangerous

Lowery’s unwillingness to distinguish between brute file-sharing of copyright material, which is immoral, and paid services like Spotify, which aren’t, obscured the real issues in White’s post and derailed what started out as a really valuable and much-needed public discussion about the impact of streaming and the cloud on the stop-gap download-driven revenue models that have characterized the digital culture economy up to this point. Ignoring that and driving discussion toward the issue of not paying for music, which nobody was arguing against, allowed Lowery to evade the more difficult issues that require greater imagination. He turned a provocative and forward-looking prompt from NPR into an opportunity to push his backward-looking mantra that the digital economy is bad for artists. And the creative sector, emotionally ginned up, kind of let him get away with it.

That’s short sighted. The digital economy isn’t going away just because David Lowery isn’t pleased with it, as both TechDirt’s Mike Masnick and Merlin CEO Charles Caldas point out in their responses to Lowery (linked below). Realistically, artists just have to deal with the digital economy. Fortunately, it’s still evolving enough that there’s time to make sure that the new business model’s not a disaster. But critical energies can’t get distracted — they have to move from primarily talking about fringe models often used for illegal purposes, like the Pirate Bay and Bit Torrent, to serious discussion of legal services like Netflix streaming and Spotify, because those are the models that increasingly will dominate the market. Most people don’t want to steal music. They just want value for their money and convenience.

This conversation is particularly important for books, more so than for music and DVDs, I think, because books do not yet have any kind of viable, widespread subscription or even library-like models. Almost every single book in print was printed from a digital file, yet most books aren’t even available for purchase as ebooks, let alone available to digitally “rent”, borrow, or browse. Google Books has set a dangerous precedent that books online will be free – a precedent that will only be overcome by a viable cloud-based, on-demand model for “print” media. But the publishing industry appears to still be struggling even just with making books available digitally for purchase. This is way behind the curve, and it needs to be pushed into more innovative directions.

Distracting the Internet from a smart discussion about streaming and the cloud by making the conversation about stealing — as Lowery’s response to Emily White does — does absolutely nothing toward resolving those problem; it only creates a false sense of conflict between the tech community and the arts community that is likely to result in reactionary policy that maintains the worst elements of the status quo.

Links

Original post by NPR’s All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen
Blog response by NPR Intern Emily White
Response to Emily White by David Lowery
Response to David Lowery by Gizmodo and the CEO of global rights agency Merlin, which represents 10,000 independent artists
TechDirt’s summary of articles by musicians who disagree with Lowery’s letter to White
Talk by David Lowery at the San Francisco MusicTech Conference in early 2012
Response to David Lowery’s talk at SFMusic by TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Ghost World

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Caro’s been busy with real life things, so hasn’t been about here much. We miss her though, so I thought I’d reprint this comment about Ghost World. I think it’s from about the first thread she ever commented on.

So I got home and read Ghost World through again, looking specifically for three things: disaffection –> emotional maturation/emotional resonance, the gaze of the adult male, and the unreliable Nabokovian narrator. (Google sends me to Comics Comics quoting Clowes referencing the latter in TCJ #233 in relation to David Boring so we do have evidence that he knows the phenomenon.)

A lot of people here have pointed out that dynamic between disaffection and really tumultuous emotional moments as what makes the book resonant for them. My recollection of Enid had been “archetypal disaffected grumpy teen.” I actually didn’t get that much at all this time, and I think it’s the way the conversation here has underlined the distinction between Barthian disaffection – which is really a kind of psychic paralysis that bears only a metaphorical relationship to “real” experience – and pop-cultural ironic distance, which is a pretty common subject position. I admit the latter is there, but it didn’t feel “disaffected” in that light. It’s more a cultivated disconnection –“this thing that matters to them? It so does not matter to me,” – and it felt entirely self-protective rather than truly detached. She didn’t feel like she was “searching for an identity” and coming up “nowhere.” She felt like she was fearing adulthood and coming up adult anyway.

I was looking for unreliability, and suddenly it was everywhere: is she really detached, or is she just pretending to be? Did that thing really even happen or is she just making it up? Her stories were always obviously, well, embellished, but this time, looking specifically for places where her narrative might be unreliable, suddenly they felt even more fictional. The trick seems to be that if it happens in dialogue with Becky, we’re probably supposed to think it happened. If Enid tells it, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The images give us clues what to hang onto and what to read as hyperbole … from there, Enid’s propensity to exaggerate and overdramatize seemed to be the thing she outgrows over the course of the story, not her ironic detachment or disaffection. She stopped protecting herself with stories, hanging on to the way when you’re a child you can fabricate imaginary events, escape into your imagination in a way that you can’t do as an adult.

But maybe it’s more unreliable than that. Maybe the scenes with Becky really aren’t the tell: Melorra by all conventions SHOULD be lying (“I’m in a commercial”, OMG Carrie’s face) but both are backed up by my previous logic, so maybe instead that Lynchian grotesque moment when you see the tumor actually is the moment where you’re supposed to say “oh, wow, all that stuff is unreliable.” Maybe there’s a level of unreality that we’re not even touching on.

Either works to some extent, and both are kind of fun, – but is not being sure whether the narrative is true or imagined really what it means to have an “unreliable narrator”? I guess it is, in a simple sense. But it’s more than a puzzle in the best literary fiction that uses the device: it’s a veil that can’t really be lifted to ever determine what’s true and what’s not . The unreliability stays in play and becomes a metaphor, often, for fiction itself, for how narrative and belief get tied together with merely some typographical characters on a page. Here it could become a metaphor for how narrative and belief get tied together with typography and image, but instead it’s really just a metaphor for adolescence itself. Whether or not Enid’s telling the truth about ANYTHING, the issue resolves when she grows up. You still end up with this basically sweet story about letting go of childhood (bracketing Noah’s reading for now), and the only real difference is at the level of close reading and whether Mark thinks I am making things up. (Pfft.) The jury’s still out on whether unreliability becomes a metaphor for the work that comics do in David Boring: it seems intuitively on tonight’s first ever quick read-through of that like it might.