Fanon recognizes the crucial importance...of retrieving [subordinated peoples'] repressed histories.

[melannen]

Today, working with writers' workshop, I was twice tempted to quote The Baby-Sitters Club.
I don't know what that says about the level of discussion. (I used to fangirl Janine. She needed her own series.)

Also, I finally got around to doing the first reading, Homi Bhabha's Locations of Culture. I was unable to do it on *time*, due to the fact that the course packet sales on this campus are the most screwed-up thing ever, but Laura said she really thought I'd enjoy it.

I got about one-and-a-half pages in before I decided that no, I didn't. Point one: I am fairly sure I would be unable to have any meaningful discourse with someone who is able to write fourteen pages about the way modern culture is formed in the interstices and in-between places, without once mentioning the vital mythological and folk associations of liminality with magic, power, and possibility. In a broader sense, he attempts to define and analyze "modern culture" without ever once mentioning anything that isn't part of modern culture; to discuss modernity as in-between, outside, and beyond without ever looking beyond or outside modernity. This is the sort of academia that, before I joined HP fandom, I would have described with a five-syllable word starting with "m," but I've since learned an easier four-letter synonym.

Second, anyone who is capable of saying "produced performatively" where "performed" would do-- to pick an example at random-- should not be allowed near literature, except in a corrective capacity. If he isn't even up to the level of chapter 2 of my freshman comp style manual, he should not be analyzing literature. English professors, foremost, should know how to write. (Although I must admit to a passing fondness for the elegant nullity of the phrase "ambulant, ambivalent articulation of the other.")

Speaking of literary-ness, on the fandom front I'm currently busy being confused by the use of the word-prefix "meta". I had understood meta in the sense I'd used it on usenet; the sense it's used in statistical meta-analysis: A meta thread is a thread discussing threads; a meta-analysis is an analysis of previous analyses. To quote the jargon file, "If X is some concept then meta-X is data about, or processes operating on, X." So meta-fandom is fandom of fandom, and meta-fanfic is fic about fic. To me, "meta" is not a particularly attractive way to describe a fanfic: it conjures up images of in-jokes, self-consciousness, and bad fanon parody.

But lately, "meta" seems to be being used to describe any sort of discussion, discourse or analysis about anything HP. Fics are labelled "meta" which, had I written them, I would have labelled "pretentious", or, to be a bit kinder, difficult or deep. If you're going to define "meta-fic" as "process operating on canon," then all fic is meta. Which I would agree with, but it's a meaningless distinction. I mean, the most plebey Mary-Sue stories are still making a comment on canon, even it that comment is, "These characters are so stupid I could do better than them, even if I was handicapped by an equally tragic past and various physical deformities." Are they meta?

Er, I suppose the above was "meta-meta," wasn't it? Talk about aforementioned four-letter word.

Comments

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

anyone who is capable of saying "produced performatively" where "performed" would do-- to pick an example at random-- should not be allowed near literature, except in a corrective capacity.

Word. I feel your pain. I've read countless critical essays and texts that would have been far more enjoyable (not to mention just plain more readable) if the author had resisted the urge to use at least three SAT vocabulary words in every sentence.

[rivetcat.livejournal.com]

I would have described with a five-syllable word starting with "m,"

"Masturbatory"?

Sad how much theory is like that.
Today I've been trying to read Bataille's Theory of Religion, and apart from being only tangentially about religion in the first place, it's riddled with the kind of clumsy logic and broad generalizations that result when one attempts to analyze a subject of which one is contemptuous.

[stellar-dust.livejournal.com]

Even worse:

"Paramasturbatory??"

/ end x-files quote. Sorry. Couldn't resist. Teehee.

[reclusivewaffle.livejournal.com]

Since none of the others guessed at it (though they guessed at the long one), is the four-letter wank?

Meta and meme are two four-letter "words" which should be considered as dirty and antisocial as the seven you can't say on television (oh wait! you can!).

--C

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Yes. Meme is one of those words which annoys the heck out of me. I will accept it if used in the restricted sense of "annoying link which spreads across the internet for no logical reason," as we needed a word for that, but people using it in Dawkins' original meaning, eew.

"Meta" I might not mind if the people using it actually *knew what it meant.*

[aelkiss.livejournal.com]

This is old, but I'll comment anyway because I was thinking about it. This might be a good time to bemoan the lack of <lj-cut> in comments.

When I use 'meme,' which is rarely, I tend to use it more or less as a synonym for 'idea' but with the connotation that I don't really directly care about the content (or at least not at a particular point in time and space) but more about its life as a little packet of information. More things can happen to a packet of information than it merely moving; it changes as it moves through time and space through processes like translation and the 'telephone' game, but those processes operate more or less independently of the actual information they operate on. I would be leery of calling a particular religion a meme, but would be fairly comfortable with somebody talking about the spread of the 'great flood meme.' (I felt some need to defend my use of the word when I was talking about 'Tom Marvolo Riddle / I Am Lord Voldemort' - the only word other than 'thing' I could think of to describe it was 'meme,' even if nobody else uses it quite like that.
I don't really like its usage to describe polls,quizzes,surveys if only because they're more or less content-free on their own and only make sense in the context of a particular person answering them. I think if you want a word to describe them as a class "spam" will work well >:->

As far as meta goes, just accuse them of being meta-* ignorant and watch them scratch their heads; meta-* ignorance being defined as being ignorant of how ignorant of how ignorant of how ignorant &c you are.

[melannen.livejournal.com]

See, to me, the fundamental quality of a meme is that it's self-replicating. Thus the application to lj memes, which to me have very little interest other than their replication patterns.

To call something a "meme" without that context of "something that independently spreads and evolves across an information network" is to misuse the word, in my definition of it. If it's not being used in that specialized sense, there's usually a more specific word. Idea, theory, trend, trope, motif, symbol, phrase, *something*. To use meme as an alternative to "thing" by turning it into an even less precise word is to do a disservice to them both.

--Plus, Dawkins just in general viscerally annoys me.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

(hi, just wandering through)

To attempt fairness, "performative" means something specific and discrete to theoryheads. OTOH, I'm inclined to agree with you that "performed" would work just as well, if not better. I've tried a few times (unsuccessfully) to read Bhabha for my diss. He's one of those scholars who receives bonus points for obfuscation, not for clarity and elegance of thought.

It cuts all the way to the bone, btw. A year or two ago, Bhabha delivered a talk here (http://www.berkeley.edu), and his most devoted local adherents admitted that they weren't sure what he'd said. Eeeeexcellent.