For the last week or so, I've been involved with a small-city offshoot of Occupy Wall Street. I haven't wanted to blog about it because I'm always suspicious of people who blog about protests as Carnival. It's easy for people to get caught up in the social aspects of protest, and not so much in the long-term work after; look at the comparative numbers of posts about the protests in Wisconsin and the subsequent recall efforts. Anyways, with Occupy it's far too soon to tell what the consequences will be, and my own self-chosen role, far from being carnivalesque, has much more to do with setting up Google Groups and helping people figure out how to use it.
But a few early observations:
1. There are a number of older people, like me, involved. But I'm genuinely surprised at the number of people for whom this is their first significant activism.
2. What is the first thing that happens when you set up a camping site in the city center? Of course the site becomes a haven for long-term homeless people, most of whom are more or less apolitical because politics requires that you first be able to deal with society well enough to do things like find shelter. "We are the 99%" is a great slogan, but the people directly involved have to deal with society's neglect of the lower 1% in a much more immediate way than with the politics of the upper 1%.
3. I'm also genuinely surprised at the low level of preexisting technology use here. I know that Occupy Wall Street itself is large enough to have all sorts of advanced technology projects, and I'm located in what is basically a hinterland. But the movement itself is a complete rejection of the techno-optimism of "Twitter Revolutions" and so on, involving as it does even the rejection of sound amplification. And at least where I am, the people are in general not technology types at all.
Lastly, the "We are the 99%" Tumblr has spawned a host of imitators. I'm not going to link to the tired right-wing "We are the 53%", although I will link to this post about it. What strikes me about the 53% bit, other than the obvious -- people on the left want to include almost everyone, people on the right want to divide the country in two and take the just slightly larger half -- is that the 53%ers tend not to hide their faces as much as the 99% pictures do. It's self-promotion vs shame, basically.
Other Tumblrs: We are the 1% and we stand with the 99%. The cruel and very, very funny Actually, you're the 47%. And one for comics fans.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
The return of Some Guy With A Sign
During the Bush years, one influential person made a common appearance on the political stage -- Some Guy With a Sign. No matter what you needed to have your opponents say to discredit them, Some Guy With a Sign could be found, somewhere, to obligingly have his sign say it. The right-wing media were champions of this technique, only occasionally overreaching, as with amateurs like Donald Douglas and "Sasquatch Israel". The left, of course, had the Morans! guy, but didn't have Fox to catapult the propaganda. The electronic version of Some Guy With a Sign is Some Guy With a Blog Comment, commonly held to discredit everything written on that blog, or indeed everyone on the same side of the political spectrum.
This is a bit different from the right wing's use of agent provocateurs, such as Patrick Howley, the editor of the American Spectator who openly boasted about trying to get Occupy protestors to turn to violence. Any really good Guy With A Sign could be an agent provocateur, of course. But it's not required. It's impossible to police and discipline every sign brought to this kind of demonstration, or to anything that has a contemporary style of mass involvement without a leadership cadre. And some of those signs are going to be brought by crazy or ignorant or bigoted or self-promoting people.
The Occupy version seems to be Some Guy at a General Assembly, as seen in this iconic picture (they are always iconic pictures, if they catch on) of Some Guy Marginalizing John Lewis. Some people gamely try to make the argument, in comments, that John Lewis is a politician and the movement can't let itself be taken over by politicians etc etc. Which just doesn't work. Any press flack, if Occupy had such things, would have said something like "Geez just let John Lewis talk for a while, then we'll go back to whatever we were doing." But Occupy doesn't have press flacks, leadership cadres, or any of the other things beloved by our mass media, so these scenes are inevitable.
I wish that people could move to a style of defense that doesn't involve denouncing Some Guy With a Sign, and that doesn't involve saying oops we are so sorry and blaming it on the "process". It's an unguided popular movement. Things are going to happen. We have a media addicted to sanitary photo ops, which loves to treat pictures like this as if they mean something symbolic, but really, what they mean is that in a consensus-driven general assembly, some guy named Joe can have a bad day. That's pretty much it.
If the general assembly was supposed to be a cadre making decisions, then sure, it's a very bad way to do that. But it's not. It's supposed to be a way for people to talk to each other, basically. People made fun of the grab bag of Occupy Wall Street demands, which I'd guess were indeed just a grab bag of things that someone got up and said and other people cheered to and that got written up. But the real point of Occupy is that the people are there, warts and all.
ETA: "Anarchists for good government", and the sign "Our economy could be more fair". (Via here) You can find vaguely British understated humor in these signs too. "Anarchists for good government" is worth coming back to, though.
This is a bit different from the right wing's use of agent provocateurs, such as Patrick Howley, the editor of the American Spectator who openly boasted about trying to get Occupy protestors to turn to violence. Any really good Guy With A Sign could be an agent provocateur, of course. But it's not required. It's impossible to police and discipline every sign brought to this kind of demonstration, or to anything that has a contemporary style of mass involvement without a leadership cadre. And some of those signs are going to be brought by crazy or ignorant or bigoted or self-promoting people.
The Occupy version seems to be Some Guy at a General Assembly, as seen in this iconic picture (they are always iconic pictures, if they catch on) of Some Guy Marginalizing John Lewis. Some people gamely try to make the argument, in comments, that John Lewis is a politician and the movement can't let itself be taken over by politicians etc etc. Which just doesn't work. Any press flack, if Occupy had such things, would have said something like "Geez just let John Lewis talk for a while, then we'll go back to whatever we were doing." But Occupy doesn't have press flacks, leadership cadres, or any of the other things beloved by our mass media, so these scenes are inevitable.
I wish that people could move to a style of defense that doesn't involve denouncing Some Guy With a Sign, and that doesn't involve saying oops we are so sorry and blaming it on the "process". It's an unguided popular movement. Things are going to happen. We have a media addicted to sanitary photo ops, which loves to treat pictures like this as if they mean something symbolic, but really, what they mean is that in a consensus-driven general assembly, some guy named Joe can have a bad day. That's pretty much it.
If the general assembly was supposed to be a cadre making decisions, then sure, it's a very bad way to do that. But it's not. It's supposed to be a way for people to talk to each other, basically. People made fun of the grab bag of Occupy Wall Street demands, which I'd guess were indeed just a grab bag of things that someone got up and said and other people cheered to and that got written up. But the real point of Occupy is that the people are there, warts and all.
ETA: "Anarchists for good government", and the sign "Our economy could be more fair". (Via here) You can find vaguely British understated humor in these signs too. "Anarchists for good government" is worth coming back to, though.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Take it away, Marty Lederman
First, read this Greenwald article. It describes one Marty Lederman; strong opponent of secret detention and expansion of executive power when Bush was President, and author of secret law once Obama became President allowing the President to have people assassinated at will.
What Lederman did is, in some ways, worse for the system than what Obama did. People expect Presidents to run off the rails. You don't get to be President in the first place without a strong liking for power and a lot of narcissism that convinces you that whatever you do must be right. The rest of the system is supposed to keep Presidents in check. Well, it obviously doesn't. The Supreme Court has been a joke since Bush v Gore. The Justices are, openly, appointed-for-life ideologues, chosen for their adherence to some political position or other, and the decisions on important matters don't come down to law but come down to this. And now it couldn't be more clear that the Constitution restrains nothing, that lawyers only rationalize whatever their client wants to do, and no judge will ever call them to account.
It's easy to shrug cynically and say, what did you expect from lawyers. But cynicism is too easy here. When Yoo and company were writing for Bush, they were an aberration. Even Ashcroft refused to do everything his President wanted. But now lawlessness has been normalized. There is no reason to think that any important decision about war, torture, surveillance, imprisonment, or assassination is ever going to be governed by anything but secret memos again.
We are currently imprisoning a higher percentage of our population than any other country on Earth. The rich are immune from prosecution for rich-people crimes like defrauding people out of their houses; the poor can be thrown in jail for any number of activities involved in being poor. Democratic legitimacy has gone from being a farce, a bought-and-paid-for property of lobbyists and PACs, to being simply irrelevant. The President can have anyone imprisoned at a black site, or killed, for secret reasons that presumably involve the accusation of being a terrorist. The President can declare war on Libya without even bothering to pretend to consult anyone. The population welcomes this, even people like Josh Marshall are perfectly willing to take the government's word that someone "was essentially waging war against the United States from abroad" without any of those messy trials or presentations of evidence that ridiculous documents like the Bill of Rights say we're supposed to have.
We no longer have a legitimate state. I'm tempted to write that what we have is an oligarchical anarchy -- anarcho-capitalism as it really is, not how its deluded advocates think it would be -- but that just confuses the issue, probably. In any case, law is now just something that you have to watch out for, not something that you have to take seriously at any intellectual or moral level.
Our elites are incompetent at even running a corrupt system in their own interest. It's likely that the system will collapse in one way or another, not because of anything that people do purposefully, but just because it will get increasingly unable to respond to reality, just as everyone knows what we have to do in our current economic crisis (and in our current global warming crisis) but somehow no one can do it. When we pick up the pieces afterwards, I hope that we don't try to put together the same fantasy that we had before.
What Lederman did is, in some ways, worse for the system than what Obama did. People expect Presidents to run off the rails. You don't get to be President in the first place without a strong liking for power and a lot of narcissism that convinces you that whatever you do must be right. The rest of the system is supposed to keep Presidents in check. Well, it obviously doesn't. The Supreme Court has been a joke since Bush v Gore. The Justices are, openly, appointed-for-life ideologues, chosen for their adherence to some political position or other, and the decisions on important matters don't come down to law but come down to this. And now it couldn't be more clear that the Constitution restrains nothing, that lawyers only rationalize whatever their client wants to do, and no judge will ever call them to account.
It's easy to shrug cynically and say, what did you expect from lawyers. But cynicism is too easy here. When Yoo and company were writing for Bush, they were an aberration. Even Ashcroft refused to do everything his President wanted. But now lawlessness has been normalized. There is no reason to think that any important decision about war, torture, surveillance, imprisonment, or assassination is ever going to be governed by anything but secret memos again.
We are currently imprisoning a higher percentage of our population than any other country on Earth. The rich are immune from prosecution for rich-people crimes like defrauding people out of their houses; the poor can be thrown in jail for any number of activities involved in being poor. Democratic legitimacy has gone from being a farce, a bought-and-paid-for property of lobbyists and PACs, to being simply irrelevant. The President can have anyone imprisoned at a black site, or killed, for secret reasons that presumably involve the accusation of being a terrorist. The President can declare war on Libya without even bothering to pretend to consult anyone. The population welcomes this, even people like Josh Marshall are perfectly willing to take the government's word that someone "was essentially waging war against the United States from abroad" without any of those messy trials or presentations of evidence that ridiculous documents like the Bill of Rights say we're supposed to have.
We no longer have a legitimate state. I'm tempted to write that what we have is an oligarchical anarchy -- anarcho-capitalism as it really is, not how its deluded advocates think it would be -- but that just confuses the issue, probably. In any case, law is now just something that you have to watch out for, not something that you have to take seriously at any intellectual or moral level.
Our elites are incompetent at even running a corrupt system in their own interest. It's likely that the system will collapse in one way or another, not because of anything that people do purposefully, but just because it will get increasingly unable to respond to reality, just as everyone knows what we have to do in our current economic crisis (and in our current global warming crisis) but somehow no one can do it. When we pick up the pieces afterwards, I hope that we don't try to put together the same fantasy that we had before.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Occupy Wall Street
From experience with how people reacted to Wikileaks, I think that I understand how this works now. Occupy Wall Street seems to me to be an unreservedly good thing. But most everyone who comments on it prefers to think of it as a platform for What They Are Doing Wrong. If anyone reading this is still unfamiliar with it, there are some convenient links here, though you should probably start with the We Are the 99% Tumblr.
First, the archetypal, much-derided media response from Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times on 10/3/2011:
Everyone loves this quote because it's so obviously and cluelessly corrupt. A reporter gets a call from the C.E.O. of a bank, asking whether he's in danger, so of course the reporter goes to check it out for him. You couldn't get a better illustration of the relationship between the wealthy 1% and the media. But there's another aspect that's less commented on. The "not brutal, not yet" phrasing functions to reassure the reader that this group of people could "turn brutal" any time that the C.E.O. gives Sorkin another call and tells him to report it that way. But there's also a certain obvious disappointment to it. Why aren't they being good anarchists and providing him with better copy? They'd better get some big black round gunpowder bombs fast or Sorkin will have to write about them as clueless hippies, which is not as good a career builder for him.
The mainstream left, meanwhile, is full of lectures about how these people should never have stepped outside without a list of demands and an organizational chart and a charismatic leader suitable for media profiles. Most of this stuff is too tepid to be worth quoting. Some of it is a bit better, but heavy on experienced people saying how Occupy is likely to fail without the advice and work of people like those experienced people: Rich Yeselson's article, say. One of the best and most sympathetic of them was David Atkins' Democrats: A necessary but insufficient condition post at Digby's blog, which I actually largely agree with. I certainly agree with:
I don't so much agree with the contention that real change can only happen with Democrats in power, frightened by activists on the left into doing the right thing. That could have happened a couple of years ago. I think it's too late now. Real change can only happen when the system collapses in one way or another. Atkins' post is nicely symmetrical with Ian Welsh's "I’ll just note that Occupy Wall Street is necessary and insufficient. That is, the revolt of the students and the young intellectuals is necessary. It must occur. It is insufficient."
This is better, but it still treats the people in Occupy as a way station towards the radical cadres that supposedly need to happen in the eye of the dispassionate, intellectual observer. Which, structurally, is no different from any of the other comments of the form "I admire their naive energy, but they'll only be what we need when they turn into X."
The most comical example of radical scolding was probably the "Anarcho-Liberal", as seen, say, in Bhaskar Sunkara's article here with Cyrus Lewis following on here:
That kind of piece is instantly familiar. The people we don't like should get a group name chosen by us, not one that they use. (Attaching "liberal" to anything means Very Bad Indeed.) If people begin to "proclaim a new politics of 'rhizomatic' and horizontally organized multitudes" (quoting from Cyrus Lewis) that means that they are anti-intellectual -- only people who read real leftist works are intellectuals, evidently, not poseurs who read Deleuze and Guattari. And of course these Anarcho-Liberals are individualistic and therefore unconnected to real political action. It would be so easy to write a parody counter-article, declaring people who write for Jacobin the "New Neo-Socialists", as people who must have a grand narrative even though it has proved false, as those with a condescendingly described gift for rigor in the service of nothing real, and with an incoherent attachment to mass politics while having far less connection to the traditional forms of left-wing organization like unions or political parties than Occupy does. But one paragraph is more than enough already.
What's actually going on? One of the best articles -- because it's an interview, probably -- was this one. Here'a a quote from David Graeber:
Parts of this are instantly familiar from the Bush-era protests against the Iraq War, during which a lot of leftist hand-wringing occurred over whether people should march in protests organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. But something different happened here. One group put out a call, and the usual Marxist groups were there with their one remaining, antiquated skill set: stages and megaphones and march planning. And people just wandered off and organized on their own. The existing leftist leadership, such as it is, is ineffectual at all levels, and there is no point in following them any more. Graeber again:
Yes, exactly. Yes, it's easy to score cheap shots against this: it's idealistic, it's undisciplined, it won't last. Is it really more realistic to say that a list of demands for reform of the banking industry would do better? Or that people need to pass through this way station on the way to being good Democrats, good radicals, good whatever else has already failed?
It's not supposed to last. If Occupy Wall Street lasts, it will have failed. We have plenty of organizations that have lasted, long after they should have gone away. Occupy Wall Street's success is now, and has already happened.
ETA: police riot.
ETA: And here. I don't get the left's liking for Jon Stewart as reporter. If a comedian is the only person in the media who can say anything true, then that's not a good thing. But still, he's the only one saying it.
First, the archetypal, much-derided media response from Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times on 10/3/2011:
I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.
[...]
As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet.
Everyone loves this quote because it's so obviously and cluelessly corrupt. A reporter gets a call from the C.E.O. of a bank, asking whether he's in danger, so of course the reporter goes to check it out for him. You couldn't get a better illustration of the relationship between the wealthy 1% and the media. But there's another aspect that's less commented on. The "not brutal, not yet" phrasing functions to reassure the reader that this group of people could "turn brutal" any time that the C.E.O. gives Sorkin another call and tells him to report it that way. But there's also a certain obvious disappointment to it. Why aren't they being good anarchists and providing him with better copy? They'd better get some big black round gunpowder bombs fast or Sorkin will have to write about them as clueless hippies, which is not as good a career builder for him.
The mainstream left, meanwhile, is full of lectures about how these people should never have stepped outside without a list of demands and an organizational chart and a charismatic leader suitable for media profiles. Most of this stuff is too tepid to be worth quoting. Some of it is a bit better, but heavy on experienced people saying how Occupy is likely to fail without the advice and work of people like those experienced people: Rich Yeselson's article, say. One of the best and most sympathetic of them was David Atkins' Democrats: A necessary but insufficient condition post at Digby's blog, which I actually largely agree with. I certainly agree with:
Ultimately, the institutionalists need to allow the Occupy Wall Street protests to develop organically without attempting to convert them into electoral activism in any form. Supporting the protests is perhaps the most important thing progressives can be doing right now.
I don't so much agree with the contention that real change can only happen with Democrats in power, frightened by activists on the left into doing the right thing. That could have happened a couple of years ago. I think it's too late now. Real change can only happen when the system collapses in one way or another. Atkins' post is nicely symmetrical with Ian Welsh's "I’ll just note that Occupy Wall Street is necessary and insufficient. That is, the revolt of the students and the young intellectuals is necessary. It must occur. It is insufficient."
None of the above is to disrespect the Occupy movement. I’m a big believer that they’re doing something important and that they deserve props for putting themselves on the line. Their embrace of apparently leaderless leadership is a master stroke of organizing, and indicates they understand that any visible leadership will be destroyed, smeared or co-opted. This is all good, but it is useful for those of us on the intellectual margins to disengage our emotions, keep our hopes in check, and look at the state of play dispassionately.
This is better, but it still treats the people in Occupy as a way station towards the radical cadres that supposedly need to happen in the eye of the dispassionate, intellectual observer. Which, structurally, is no different from any of the other comments of the form "I admire their naive energy, but they'll only be what we need when they turn into X."
The most comical example of radical scolding was probably the "Anarcho-Liberal", as seen, say, in Bhaskar Sunkara's article here with Cyrus Lewis following on here:
Some things were broadly shared by “anarcho-liberals”: an anti-intellectualism that manifested itself in a rejection of “grand narratives” and structural critiques of capitalism, abhorrence for the traditional forms of left-wing organization, a localist impulse, and an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action. The worst of both worlds, the “anarcho-liberal” can neither manage the capitalist state nor overcome it, and aspires to do both and neither at the same time.
That kind of piece is instantly familiar. The people we don't like should get a group name chosen by us, not one that they use. (Attaching "liberal" to anything means Very Bad Indeed.) If people begin to "proclaim a new politics of 'rhizomatic' and horizontally organized multitudes" (quoting from Cyrus Lewis) that means that they are anti-intellectual -- only people who read real leftist works are intellectuals, evidently, not poseurs who read Deleuze and Guattari. And of course these Anarcho-Liberals are individualistic and therefore unconnected to real political action. It would be so easy to write a parody counter-article, declaring people who write for Jacobin the "New Neo-Socialists", as people who must have a grand narrative even though it has proved false, as those with a condescendingly described gift for rigor in the service of nothing real, and with an incoherent attachment to mass politics while having far less connection to the traditional forms of left-wing organization like unions or political parties than Occupy does. But one paragraph is more than enough already.
What's actually going on? One of the best articles -- because it's an interview, probably -- was this one. Here'a a quote from David Graeber:
July 2nd. That was the first actual meeting. What happened was AdBusters put out this call for these protests. We had heard there was supposed to be a general assembly on July 2nd. So I just showed up. But it was a rally, not an assembly. Some Marxist groups had set up stages and megaphones and was making speeches and were planning a march. So we said we don’t need to do this. We pulled a small group together and decided to have a real assembly.
So we wandered over to another part of the area and began a meeting and people kept migrating over. But we had a problem because we only had six weeks. AdBusters had already advertised the date to 80,000 people. And their date was a Saturday. You can’t really shut down Wall Street on a Saturday. So we were working under some significant constraints. We assembled 80 or 100 people and formed working groups for outreach, process, so forth and so on. And we began meeting every week
Parts of this are instantly familiar from the Bush-era protests against the Iraq War, during which a lot of leftist hand-wringing occurred over whether people should march in protests organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. But something different happened here. One group put out a call, and the usual Marxist groups were there with their one remaining, antiquated skill set: stages and megaphones and march planning. And people just wandered off and organized on their own. The existing leftist leadership, such as it is, is ineffectual at all levels, and there is no point in following them any more. Graeber again:
You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.
Yes, exactly. Yes, it's easy to score cheap shots against this: it's idealistic, it's undisciplined, it won't last. Is it really more realistic to say that a list of demands for reform of the banking industry would do better? Or that people need to pass through this way station on the way to being good Democrats, good radicals, good whatever else has already failed?
It's not supposed to last. If Occupy Wall Street lasts, it will have failed. We have plenty of organizations that have lasted, long after they should have gone away. Occupy Wall Street's success is now, and has already happened.
ETA: police riot.
ETA: And here. I don't get the left's liking for Jon Stewart as reporter. If a comedian is the only person in the media who can say anything true, then that's not a good thing. But still, he's the only one saying it.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Anti-Copernicus (IX)
Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.
There are no fixed stars. All of the other sections in this piece are named after actual astronomical objects, although their order and implicitly their orbital center is wrong, based on what we now know to be an erroneous model. But the stars never were embedded in some material that kept them from moving relative to each other. They swirl around, although they do so on long time scales. So this section is really about unfixed stars, about familiar social-role reference points slowly shifting. In this case, the social roles around literary criticism. This section is also a sort of appendix, or a bait-and-switch; it has even less to do with the text Anti-Copernicus than some of the previous sections do. But I figure that anyone who has read this far must be really interested in literary criticism, and thus capable of writing answering opinions about it.
Because I think that this piece that I'm writing can be described as literary criticism, as a matter of genre classification. It's also fan labor, a subset of fanac, something that has existed as long as SF-as-a-genre has. Fan writing about SF is more often fanfic or book reviews, but literary criticism is sometimes written too. What good is this kind of thing, in general? Can it do anything other than participate in the fan gift/attention economy? Those aren't rhetorical questions.
The reasons why literary criticism is written are generally explicable in occupational terms. For a while, literary criticism was largely written by people who published in literary magazines. Then there was a shift to academia, with magazines generally going to the more restricted task of book reviewing. The reason for existence of the vast majority of current-day literary-critical essays is that they are either written by a student for a grade or by a professor for academic publication. These are understandable and familiar reasons.
Literary criticism might be written by ex-academics, or those with an academic education in the humanities, who never got or held a job in the field but don't want to give up doing what they like. I encourage anyone actually interested in this to read John Emerson's piece Les Érudits Maudits if they haven't already. But John Emerson does actual scholarly activities like translating Chinese texts and doing historical research. Most of the fans who write on SF are not under-or-differently-employed humanists, or even autodidacts who have found their own way to an education in the humanities. They aren't really capable of producing scholarship per se, even if the academically crowded humanities were disposed to include their work.
The usual response is to say something like “But fan communities can collect and annotate a huge amount of descriptive material. Have you seen any wiki page on something SF-related? Or TV Tropes? “ That isn't really what I have in mind either. People like Franco Moretti could undoubtedly make use of a horde of people without much training to classify works for some database or other, or analyze fan information already collected. But I'm interested in actually doing interpretations and readings, rather than furnishing raw material. In aesthetics, for instance.
Since the 1940s or so, SF in English has had a troubled relationship with attempts at aesthetic quality, starting out with Pulp, which didn't have time for it, and the Golden Age Campbellian work, which rather actively scorned it. The genre went through a "discovery" by academia, a single avant-garde movement, the New Wave, a reactionary period, during which many fans sullenly played up to SF's subcultural self-image by insisting that academia was ignoring SF and that academia's values had no place within it. And after that? Cyberpunk insisted that it was avant-garde in a certain sense, but particular qualities of writing really weren't one of those senses. Certain British writers, loosely grouped, had a lefti-ish political sensibility that gave their work coherence , and a willingness to do certain kinds of formal experimentation– here I'm thinking about Iain Banks, Alasdair Grey, the later Moorcock, et al. –but didn't really try to form an artistic sensibility as such. And other than some New Wave holdovers like M. John Harrison, and the scatter of individually gifted writers like John Crowley or Adam Roberts, that's about where things stood until China Miéville and the New Weird. Miéville, at least, combines a left political sensibility with influence from some current literary theorists, as least as shown by his interviews.
So now everything is fine, one would expect. Fans can read any one of a number of literary-SF writers, write screeds like this for whatever reason – but wait. Here's something that Martin Wisse recently wrote about:
Ouch. This is only one person's experience, of course, and not the only reason that Steph Swainston gave when she said that she was going to stop writing for now. But she was the only author that I remember reading when I was wondering if the New Weird actually meant anything more than China Miéville's books. The article mentions the first appearance of her character Jant, who (as I laughed to myself when I read her first book) was a kind of iconic shorthand of the New Weird: a winged guy in a T-shirt, carrying an ax, coming back on his way from doing illegal drugs and battling a giant insect to go to a press conference.
I'm used to thinking of what I write as having certain flaws. A tendency to start with a certain type of close reading and go on pointing everything out at far too much length. An impoverished critical vocabulary, due to never taking an English course that I remember past high school -- for instance, I really would have liked to use more than the word "concision" to describe (the real) Ange Mlinko's poetry, but I'm never able to come up with convenient descriptors or genre relationships in that regard. (Although I did cut myself off at a bare word because I was making a joke about egocentricity). I'm not used to thinking of it as potentially actually harmful.
I'm not thinking so much of Adam Roberts here; Adam seems to me to be a seasoned critic and not likely to be bothered by anything I might write. But what's the right attitude to take to something like, say, Jenna Moran's Hitherby Dragons? Hitherby is, I think, a work of genius, or could be, or contains them in some manner. It's unfinished, and may never be finished. It started as something written and published every day, so readers saw it as written, before later revision. Since I'm trying to consider more than this particular case, I won't try to describe specifically what I see in Hitherby. But the author claimed not to be writing high art, and I really wanted/want to perceive it as high art. I was itching to dig in, close-read, make an interpretive apparatus... all the usual. And to a limited extent, I did, in comments, along with fanfic and the usual fan exchanges.
And at some point I had to step back. What the work really seemed to me to need was an experienced publisher, hopefully one that employed both a publicist and an editor. It didn't need a critic, especially one that consistently saw the work in a different way than the author did. John Clute, a well-regarded SF critic -- well-regarded by me, at any rate -- wrote about misprision being a necessary element of good criticism. But that's after the work is sent out into the world, and can bear a "very vocal" (to quote Swainston) differing interpretation than the authorial one.
Hitherby is different from the vast majority of works that people read in that it is read before it's done. But this is not exactly new for SF and fantasy. It was in one of Adam Roberts' blog posts, I think, that I read that the fix-up -- linking short pieces together or re-writing a short story into a novel -- is a characteristic form of science fiction. (Apologies for the mis-paraphrase from memory.) And one of the other things that Swainston mentioned was the pressure to publish -- to keep writing books, in her case all within a linked series. If an author always is in the middle of writing the next book, then I can see how misprision could start to gum up the works. An author can always choose to ignore a fan, of course, but this is a small world and not that many people are actually paying attention, so it's correspondingly more difficult to ignore the very vocal ones.
None of this would be a problem if there were an accepted reason to do this kind of thing in the first place. Book reviewers have to write to get paid. Academics have to write to get tenure. But less and less literary criticism from either of these sources appears to be to be read by anyone outside the relevant professional communities. More and more of it, such as it is, is from fan sources like this one. And this is a form of writing that has no center. Theorizing one -- making reasons for readers to write something other than fan-chat and book reviews -- may be one of the more useful literary activities for SF at this time.
The Fixed Stars
“gambling, arrogance, boasting, stealing, self-mutilation, literary criticism, running with animals in the wild, or marrying strangers”-- fragment from Projects: A Manual of Ambition, by Jenna Moran
There are no fixed stars. All of the other sections in this piece are named after actual astronomical objects, although their order and implicitly their orbital center is wrong, based on what we now know to be an erroneous model. But the stars never were embedded in some material that kept them from moving relative to each other. They swirl around, although they do so on long time scales. So this section is really about unfixed stars, about familiar social-role reference points slowly shifting. In this case, the social roles around literary criticism. This section is also a sort of appendix, or a bait-and-switch; it has even less to do with the text Anti-Copernicus than some of the previous sections do. But I figure that anyone who has read this far must be really interested in literary criticism, and thus capable of writing answering opinions about it.
Because I think that this piece that I'm writing can be described as literary criticism, as a matter of genre classification. It's also fan labor, a subset of fanac, something that has existed as long as SF-as-a-genre has. Fan writing about SF is more often fanfic or book reviews, but literary criticism is sometimes written too. What good is this kind of thing, in general? Can it do anything other than participate in the fan gift/attention economy? Those aren't rhetorical questions.
The reasons why literary criticism is written are generally explicable in occupational terms. For a while, literary criticism was largely written by people who published in literary magazines. Then there was a shift to academia, with magazines generally going to the more restricted task of book reviewing. The reason for existence of the vast majority of current-day literary-critical essays is that they are either written by a student for a grade or by a professor for academic publication. These are understandable and familiar reasons.
Literary criticism might be written by ex-academics, or those with an academic education in the humanities, who never got or held a job in the field but don't want to give up doing what they like. I encourage anyone actually interested in this to read John Emerson's piece Les Érudits Maudits if they haven't already. But John Emerson does actual scholarly activities like translating Chinese texts and doing historical research. Most of the fans who write on SF are not under-or-differently-employed humanists, or even autodidacts who have found their own way to an education in the humanities. They aren't really capable of producing scholarship per se, even if the academically crowded humanities were disposed to include their work.
The usual response is to say something like “But fan communities can collect and annotate a huge amount of descriptive material. Have you seen any wiki page on something SF-related? Or TV Tropes? “ That isn't really what I have in mind either. People like Franco Moretti could undoubtedly make use of a horde of people without much training to classify works for some database or other, or analyze fan information already collected. But I'm interested in actually doing interpretations and readings, rather than furnishing raw material. In aesthetics, for instance.
Since the 1940s or so, SF in English has had a troubled relationship with attempts at aesthetic quality, starting out with Pulp, which didn't have time for it, and the Golden Age Campbellian work, which rather actively scorned it. The genre went through a "discovery" by academia, a single avant-garde movement, the New Wave, a reactionary period, during which many fans sullenly played up to SF's subcultural self-image by insisting that academia was ignoring SF and that academia's values had no place within it. And after that? Cyberpunk insisted that it was avant-garde in a certain sense, but particular qualities of writing really weren't one of those senses. Certain British writers, loosely grouped, had a lefti-ish political sensibility that gave their work coherence , and a willingness to do certain kinds of formal experimentation– here I'm thinking about Iain Banks, Alasdair Grey, the later Moorcock, et al. –but didn't really try to form an artistic sensibility as such. And other than some New Wave holdovers like M. John Harrison, and the scatter of individually gifted writers like John Crowley or Adam Roberts, that's about where things stood until China Miéville and the New Weird. Miéville, at least, combines a left political sensibility with influence from some current literary theorists, as least as shown by his interviews.
So now everything is fine, one would expect. Fans can read any one of a number of literary-SF writers, write screeds like this for whatever reason – but wait. Here's something that Martin Wisse recently wrote about:
"I don't have a problem with fandom," she says. "But I don't think fans realise the pressure they put on authors. The very vocal ones can change an author's next book, even an author's career, by what they say on the internet. And writers are expected to engage and respond." She pauses. "The internet is poison to authors."
Ouch. This is only one person's experience, of course, and not the only reason that Steph Swainston gave when she said that she was going to stop writing for now. But she was the only author that I remember reading when I was wondering if the New Weird actually meant anything more than China Miéville's books. The article mentions the first appearance of her character Jant, who (as I laughed to myself when I read her first book) was a kind of iconic shorthand of the New Weird: a winged guy in a T-shirt, carrying an ax, coming back on his way from doing illegal drugs and battling a giant insect to go to a press conference.
I'm used to thinking of what I write as having certain flaws. A tendency to start with a certain type of close reading and go on pointing everything out at far too much length. An impoverished critical vocabulary, due to never taking an English course that I remember past high school -- for instance, I really would have liked to use more than the word "concision" to describe (the real) Ange Mlinko's poetry, but I'm never able to come up with convenient descriptors or genre relationships in that regard. (Although I did cut myself off at a bare word because I was making a joke about egocentricity). I'm not used to thinking of it as potentially actually harmful.
I'm not thinking so much of Adam Roberts here; Adam seems to me to be a seasoned critic and not likely to be bothered by anything I might write. But what's the right attitude to take to something like, say, Jenna Moran's Hitherby Dragons? Hitherby is, I think, a work of genius, or could be, or contains them in some manner. It's unfinished, and may never be finished. It started as something written and published every day, so readers saw it as written, before later revision. Since I'm trying to consider more than this particular case, I won't try to describe specifically what I see in Hitherby. But the author claimed not to be writing high art, and I really wanted/want to perceive it as high art. I was itching to dig in, close-read, make an interpretive apparatus... all the usual. And to a limited extent, I did, in comments, along with fanfic and the usual fan exchanges.
And at some point I had to step back. What the work really seemed to me to need was an experienced publisher, hopefully one that employed both a publicist and an editor. It didn't need a critic, especially one that consistently saw the work in a different way than the author did. John Clute, a well-regarded SF critic -- well-regarded by me, at any rate -- wrote about misprision being a necessary element of good criticism. But that's after the work is sent out into the world, and can bear a "very vocal" (to quote Swainston) differing interpretation than the authorial one.
Hitherby is different from the vast majority of works that people read in that it is read before it's done. But this is not exactly new for SF and fantasy. It was in one of Adam Roberts' blog posts, I think, that I read that the fix-up -- linking short pieces together or re-writing a short story into a novel -- is a characteristic form of science fiction. (Apologies for the mis-paraphrase from memory.) And one of the other things that Swainston mentioned was the pressure to publish -- to keep writing books, in her case all within a linked series. If an author always is in the middle of writing the next book, then I can see how misprision could start to gum up the works. An author can always choose to ignore a fan, of course, but this is a small world and not that many people are actually paying attention, so it's correspondingly more difficult to ignore the very vocal ones.
None of this would be a problem if there were an accepted reason to do this kind of thing in the first place. Book reviewers have to write to get paid. Academics have to write to get tenure. But less and less literary criticism from either of these sources appears to be to be read by anyone outside the relevant professional communities. More and more of it, such as it is, is from fan sources like this one. And this is a form of writing that has no center. Theorizing one -- making reasons for readers to write something other than fan-chat and book reviews -- may be one of the more useful literary activities for SF at this time.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Anti-Copernicus (VIII)
Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.
I wrote previously about how SF has its own myths about population. But these are centered on even deeper, much more fundamental myths – myths about death, or rather, myths about a kind of necessary balance between life and death. Saturn, in Roman myth, was depicted with a sickle in one hand and a sheaf of wheat in the other.
Anti-Copernicus started with “The Mighty Adam”, started with Genesis. Midway through, it's reached the Book of Revelation. (I encourage anyone who's forgotten the book to follow that link. It's to a form of it that made the most sense to me.) That's where all of these thirds of humanity dying off come from. But this isn't just an element of Christian myth. There's a much more general myth cycle, ironically encouraged or drawn on by environmentalism itself, that says that life and death need to be in balance, that an unusually large number of births throws off the natural order and requires an unusually large number of deaths to balance it out. Well, of course every birth results in a death eventually. But since births in overpopulation are mentally thought of as a sort of huge wave, the deaths are mythically thought to have to be a huge counter-wave of war, famine, and other catastrophe, rather than deaths due to, say, old age.
This is a myth of closure. Instead of an overpopulated world causing people to have fewer children, so that population gradually declines and people find their own, individual ends, things are neatly wrapped up in a communal story conforming to Freytag's Triangle. And Anti-Copernicus, in keeping with how its story unexpectedly closes, participates in this myth.
In addition to the textual passage in which Ange dreams in Biblical imagery, deaths in thirds form a neat loop. The aliens go on a trip with three of them on board. Two of them die, and the third talks to Ange. Ange goes on a trip with three people on board. Two of them die, and the third, Ange, talks to the Cygnic. Cygnic itself meaning swan, this is the alien's swan song. The last alien dies (or does it? perhaps it escapes, since Ange does), and Ange lives on.
And this is where the text reinforces its skepticism about rationality in this important matters of birth and life and death. As she's mentally communicating with the alien, this happens:
And after the alien leaves, just before Ange is rescued:
A completely irrational act, given that she has no desire to die any sooner than necessary. It must be deeply risky to pop open a spacesuit helmet and put it back on with the assurance that if you fumble resealing it, you'll die in short order. But she's hungry – not starving, just hungry and bored. People eat themselves to death (more slowly, of course) all the time. A Heinleinesque or Golden Age, deeply boring old-type SF hero would never do this. But this is what the text wants to bring forward about how people are. When it comes to basic biological activities like food, sleep, and having children, rationality is most often a rationalization for what we've decided at a more basic level. At the end, flattered by being the focus of social attention, the “flush of near death and survival touched even Ange’s distant soul” and she decides to have a child – no more rationally or irrationally than how she previously decided not to have one.
There is something Gnostic or Buddhist, about this, as it's generalized to more than Ange's individual condition – there is not just contemporary Christian myth involved. When the alien is telling Ange how its companions died, it communicates “We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been ... poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well.” The Bardo Thodol (the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”) works in pretty much this way. After death, the individual sees one display of pure light after another, which if they have the ability to follow, will get them off of the wheel of reincarnation. But most people can't bear these light-visions, instead get attracted by the “glory and seediness and splendor” of visions of sex and blood, and are put back into life again. In Gnosticism, the whole seedy physical world with all of its tribulations is a sort of fake, concealing a higher truth, and attachment to biological reality is rather like … well, it's rather like being attached to reading SF.
For me, this is the final unity in the work. Ange's consciousness is “poisoned” in just the way that the alien's was; she's intoxicated by her brush with death, by the physically attractive, attentive crew that rescues her. But being intoxicated with the glory and seediness and splendour of life is, after all, the basic reason to live.
There will be one final section after this one, “The Fixed Stars”.
Saturn
”One night Ange had a dream. She was back in her house. A man clothed entirely in black, with white skin and black eyeballs, stood balanced upon an opened book. ‘Population is self-regulating,’ he said. ‘But we must understand self in the largest way! The Cygnic aliens have come to winnow humanity, and they will destroy a third, and a third more will die of famine and disease after they have gone! Rejoice!'”-- Anti-Copernicus
I wrote previously about how SF has its own myths about population. But these are centered on even deeper, much more fundamental myths – myths about death, or rather, myths about a kind of necessary balance between life and death. Saturn, in Roman myth, was depicted with a sickle in one hand and a sheaf of wheat in the other.
Anti-Copernicus started with “The Mighty Adam”, started with Genesis. Midway through, it's reached the Book of Revelation. (I encourage anyone who's forgotten the book to follow that link. It's to a form of it that made the most sense to me.) That's where all of these thirds of humanity dying off come from. But this isn't just an element of Christian myth. There's a much more general myth cycle, ironically encouraged or drawn on by environmentalism itself, that says that life and death need to be in balance, that an unusually large number of births throws off the natural order and requires an unusually large number of deaths to balance it out. Well, of course every birth results in a death eventually. But since births in overpopulation are mentally thought of as a sort of huge wave, the deaths are mythically thought to have to be a huge counter-wave of war, famine, and other catastrophe, rather than deaths due to, say, old age.
This is a myth of closure. Instead of an overpopulated world causing people to have fewer children, so that population gradually declines and people find their own, individual ends, things are neatly wrapped up in a communal story conforming to Freytag's Triangle. And Anti-Copernicus, in keeping with how its story unexpectedly closes, participates in this myth.
In addition to the textual passage in which Ange dreams in Biblical imagery, deaths in thirds form a neat loop. The aliens go on a trip with three of them on board. Two of them die, and the third talks to Ange. Ange goes on a trip with three people on board. Two of them die, and the third, Ange, talks to the Cygnic. Cygnic itself meaning swan, this is the alien's swan song. The last alien dies (or does it? perhaps it escapes, since Ange does), and Ange lives on.
And this is where the text reinforces its skepticism about rationality in this important matters of birth and life and death. As she's mentally communicating with the alien, this happens:
Ange went through, got herself some food. She held it in front of her helmet for a while, and pondered how to get it in her mouth. She could certainly hold her breath long enough to get the helmet off, and the food in, but there was always a risk that she would fumble her grip, and have to scrabble around to get the helmet back on. Was it a risk worth taking? She would be dead soon, but had no desire to die sooner than absolutely necessary. On the other hand, she was hungry.
And after the alien leaves, just before Ange is rescued:
Ange took the plunge, more out of boredom than hunger. Deep breath, pop up the helmet, morsel in mouth, helmet down again. Then she checked through the ship. She even managed to sleep—a nap, at any rate.
A completely irrational act, given that she has no desire to die any sooner than necessary. It must be deeply risky to pop open a spacesuit helmet and put it back on with the assurance that if you fumble resealing it, you'll die in short order. But she's hungry – not starving, just hungry and bored. People eat themselves to death (more slowly, of course) all the time. A Heinleinesque or Golden Age, deeply boring old-type SF hero would never do this. But this is what the text wants to bring forward about how people are. When it comes to basic biological activities like food, sleep, and having children, rationality is most often a rationalization for what we've decided at a more basic level. At the end, flattered by being the focus of social attention, the “flush of near death and survival touched even Ange’s distant soul” and she decides to have a child – no more rationally or irrationally than how she previously decided not to have one.
There is something Gnostic or Buddhist, about this, as it's generalized to more than Ange's individual condition – there is not just contemporary Christian myth involved. When the alien is telling Ange how its companions died, it communicates “We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been ... poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well.” The Bardo Thodol (the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”) works in pretty much this way. After death, the individual sees one display of pure light after another, which if they have the ability to follow, will get them off of the wheel of reincarnation. But most people can't bear these light-visions, instead get attracted by the “glory and seediness and splendor” of visions of sex and blood, and are put back into life again. In Gnosticism, the whole seedy physical world with all of its tribulations is a sort of fake, concealing a higher truth, and attachment to biological reality is rather like … well, it's rather like being attached to reading SF.
For me, this is the final unity in the work. Ange's consciousness is “poisoned” in just the way that the alien's was; she's intoxicated by her brush with death, by the physically attractive, attentive crew that rescues her. But being intoxicated with the glory and seediness and splendour of life is, after all, the basic reason to live.
There will be one final section after this one, “The Fixed Stars”.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Anti-Copernicus (VII)
Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.
The above was written by Ange Mlinko. (It's from here.) It transpires that Adam Roberts had read an article of hers in Poetry magazine, used her name as a placeholder, and then kept it. (Luckily she seems to like this, or at least not to mind. I wonder if she still won't mind once Google starts alerting her not only to mentions of her work, but also to irrelevant (from her point of view) pieces like this one? Having an unusual name can be quite an advantage in finding mentions of your work, as I well know.) So I in turn read some of Ange Mlinko's poetry. Her poetry is good, with the kind of concision that I can't do and therefore don't try for. See what I did there?
Adam mentioned this on his blog (together with a recommendation of this still-being-written piece: thank you), but I didn't find out about the exchange from there. I found out about it much earlier. Quoted in full:
That's from a post on ads without products, a blog written by one CR (who has pretty much said who he is, but it's polite to use someone's pseudonym.) This kind of thing is heartening. At least to me.
Most people want to be at the center. Not in an overly egotistical way, but in a good, part-of-the-social-web way. “Did you hear that Jim and Thomas got married? Hey, they met at one of my parties.” That kind of thing. Or “Someone named his blog after something I wrote. Not that it's an influential blog, but...” Or “I was Googling my name and found this weird connection.”
Why do I find this heartening? There are theories of people being at the center of their own worldviews, of people looking out for (mentions of) themselves. They usually come down to theories that because we're interested in events that even tangentially involve us, we're selfish, and that's good or at least unavoidable. In economics, this is the rational man looking out for his own self-interest. In politics, it's right-libertarianism, (plain libertarianism to people within the U.S.), which comes down to the rational man not wanting to pay taxes for public goods or to help anyone else in any kind of organized or sufficient way. But there is, or should be, a left social-economic version of people wanting to be at the center, too. Not the left dreaming of a return to the Party and the Great Book of some 19th century worthy. But a left in which most of the action looks like people wanting to be at the center of their own doing-good-connections.
But enough about politics. These exchanges, apparently tangential to the text as a text, should remind us that what writing is really about is sociability of a particular kind. Texts that are not notations to oneself are meant to be read, and every reading of a text is a social exchange between a writer and reader. Perhaps the writer is dead, perhaps they even left the work to be published after their death, but the text was written in the expectation of readers eventually. And a text in any kind of circulation makes its own connections between reader and reader.
That's the real center among all these imagined centers. A text isn't centered on the Earth, on its (physical or electronic) form, or on its aesthetic qualities, on its politics, on the systems that support it, or its genre history. It's a social occasion around which each reader picks out the piece that resonates to them. That's what really looms largest to us, and that's what should.
Jupiter
“There’s a TV reality show in the US (Same Name) about people with the same name swapping lives. I feel confident that the producers won’t be calling on me. But a few weeks ago, Google alerted me to the improbable existence of another Ange Mlinko.”
The above was written by Ange Mlinko. (It's from here.) It transpires that Adam Roberts had read an article of hers in Poetry magazine, used her name as a placeholder, and then kept it. (Luckily she seems to like this, or at least not to mind. I wonder if she still won't mind once Google starts alerting her not only to mentions of her work, but also to irrelevant (from her point of view) pieces like this one? Having an unusual name can be quite an advantage in finding mentions of your work, as I well know.) So I in turn read some of Ange Mlinko's poetry. Her poetry is good, with the kind of concision that I can't do and therefore don't try for. See what I did there?
Adam mentioned this on his blog (together with a recommendation of this still-being-written piece: thank you), but I didn't find out about the exchange from there. I found out about it much earlier. Quoted in full:
Just saw this on the LRB blog, and I’m wondering if I might just not be responsible for the connection. I don’t know for sure whether Adam Roberts reads this blog – though I suspect he’s glanced once or twice, perhaps due to SEK’s occasional links. On the other hand, I’ve posted stuff like this about Ange Mlinko… Anyway, funny stuff, who knows…
That's from a post on ads without products, a blog written by one CR (who has pretty much said who he is, but it's polite to use someone's pseudonym.) This kind of thing is heartening. At least to me.
Most people want to be at the center. Not in an overly egotistical way, but in a good, part-of-the-social-web way. “Did you hear that Jim and Thomas got married? Hey, they met at one of my parties.” That kind of thing. Or “Someone named his blog after something I wrote. Not that it's an influential blog, but...” Or “I was Googling my name and found this weird connection.”
Why do I find this heartening? There are theories of people being at the center of their own worldviews, of people looking out for (mentions of) themselves. They usually come down to theories that because we're interested in events that even tangentially involve us, we're selfish, and that's good or at least unavoidable. In economics, this is the rational man looking out for his own self-interest. In politics, it's right-libertarianism, (plain libertarianism to people within the U.S.), which comes down to the rational man not wanting to pay taxes for public goods or to help anyone else in any kind of organized or sufficient way. But there is, or should be, a left social-economic version of people wanting to be at the center, too. Not the left dreaming of a return to the Party and the Great Book of some 19th century worthy. But a left in which most of the action looks like people wanting to be at the center of their own doing-good-connections.
But enough about politics. These exchanges, apparently tangential to the text as a text, should remind us that what writing is really about is sociability of a particular kind. Texts that are not notations to oneself are meant to be read, and every reading of a text is a social exchange between a writer and reader. Perhaps the writer is dead, perhaps they even left the work to be published after their death, but the text was written in the expectation of readers eventually. And a text in any kind of circulation makes its own connections between reader and reader.
That's the real center among all these imagined centers. A text isn't centered on the Earth, on its (physical or electronic) form, or on its aesthetic qualities, on its politics, on the systems that support it, or its genre history. It's a social occasion around which each reader picks out the piece that resonates to them. That's what really looms largest to us, and that's what should.
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