Cultural Appropriation and Frame Conflict.

Previously, on the internet, there was fail (more detailed recaps can be found at rydra_wong)

I've been staying out of it because there's been so damn much of it, and I was mostly in Boston. (Mystery Hunt puzzles and solutions are up, by the way.) There comment threads involved are massive, and in many cases, important comments, posts, and even journals have been made unavailable.

However, I was looking at a post by ktempest called "Dear Writers,"

A truth that I’ve come across many times over the years and passed on to me by writers much more experienced and intelligent than I and that I feel is apropos in these times:

Just because you wrote a piece of fiction doesn’t mean you own the only true way of reading/interpreting/understanding that piece of fiction. It is, in fact, one of the most wonderful and frightening things about being a writer that we do not.

But I was really bugged by a thread of comments. I was trying to respond, but I couldn't. There were too many things to try to respond to, and they all had to do with language before it even got close to race or culture.

It's something that's running through the entire discussion these past weeks (yes, weeks plural, sigh), particularly because the dialogue has largely been framed as an adversarial one between writers and readers—even though the writers are also readers, and the readers have, in many cases, been writers and editors as well. Two of the instigating posts were written by writers thinking about how they write; and many of the touchstone responses focused on the perspective of a reader (even if, as in DeepaD's case, they then considered how the reader then becomes a writer).

But it was Alma Alexander's response to KTempest's post was what finally dredged up from my memory something about language that I'd forgotten I remembered.

The Conduit Metaphor (A Devious Trap of the Mind)

The conduit metaphor is an extended metaphor that pervades the English language. It appears in several of the ways we talk about how communications work, how it succeeds or fails, and how we should work to make it better. But like most such metaphors, it isn't just an interesting way of speaking. Michael J. Reddy, in identifying this metaphor, explains, "English has a preferred framework for conceptualizing comunication, and can bias thought process toward this framework, even though nothing more than common sense is necessary to devise a different, more accurate framework." That is, so much of our vocabulary for thinking about language and communication fits into this metaphor that it's easy to forget that the metaphor isn't perfect. All of this language highlights certain aspects of communication but hides others, often at times when the hidden aspects are most critical. When we try to address problems and failures in communication, our efforts may be doomed from the start because our way of looking at the problem—of seeing what the problem to be solved is—is fundamentally flawed.

The conduit metaphor has three components that work together (expressed here by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By):

1. Ideas (or meanings) are objects.
   
2. Linguistic expressions are containers.
   
3. Communication is sending.

So when you say you have something to you're trying to get across by putting things into words, when you say there are things you get out of a story, when you say you're trying to give me an idea, when you say that my words are hollow, when you say that the meaning is right there in the text, these are all metaphors that express one or more component of the conduit metaphor.

These metaphors and the biased thoght processes they lead to have pervaded the recent discussions. Here are two quotes from Alexander's comments at ktempest's blog thatstarted me remembering:

Individual words, by themselves, have easily defined meanings - but string those words together and subtext appears as if by magic, whether it was originally consciously put there by the writer or whether individual readers found their own.

If I say that I consciously and conscientiously (gawd it just took me three tries to spell that word I need more coffee) did NOT put something into a piece that I wrote, then I can stand by those words absolutely, because this is something that was done with thought and planning.

(Empahsis on metaphoric language added.)

This language about language is so pervasive that you may not see how this metaphor leads to anything problematic. But as I mentioned above, it hides aspects of communication that are very important. As Lakoff and Johnson explain:

First, the linguistic expressions are containers for meanings aspect of the conduit metaphor entails that words and sentences have meanings in themselves, independent of any context or speaker. The meanings are objects part of the metaphor, for example, entails that meanings have an existence independent of people and contexts. The part of the metaphor that says linguistic expressions are containers for meaning entails that words (and sentences) have meanings, again independent of contexts and speakers.

In short, this metaphor only makes sense "where context differences don't matter and where all participants in the conversation understand sentences in the same way."

This metaphor might be useful in some limited contexts, but when trying to communicate to each other about wide-spread systemic differences in culture and context that have serious political ramifications outside of the realm of literature, it will prevent any constructive dialogue from taking place.

Fighting the Conduit (How the Trenches Got Dug)

During this discussion about writing, reading, and appropriation, several readers have, echoing Lakoff and Johnson, argued that context differences do matter and have been raising their voices to make it clear that not all the participants in the conversation understand the same texts in the same way. And the context in which these differences have been raised (race in most cases) is widespread and systemic. It would make sense that the conduit metaphor should be abandoned for something better. But when you don't understand the extent to which a metaphor is guiding your thoughts, it's hard to break free of it.

From the perspective of a writer guided by the conduit metaphor, if the reader opens up the container of a story and pulls out meanings or ideas that were never put there by the writer, there are only three things that could have happened.

1. The writer failed in capturing their ideas in putting them into the story.
2. The reader failed in pulling those ideas out of the story.
3. There was some other error that occurred in the transmission process, which fundamentally cannot be predicted by either the writer or the reader.

I have seen all three of these perspectives addressed. The initial posts by jaylake and matociquala often focused on the first. In general, the tone of "advice to writers" about how to deal with the constellation of issues addressed by this massive dialogue is in how to put your ideas into words better so that you can get your ideas across better and not accidentally send out conflicting or distracting messages. (The focus of the many posts were very clearly directed at this last idea, that writers put things into their work without realizing it, and that if they can stop doing so, then the only things in the work will be what the writer intended to put in it, and readers will not find things in it that they shouldn't.) In fact, most writing advice takes this form, so it's a familiar way to think about writing and about how to become a better communicator. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem.

Because within the conduit perspective, if some quantity of people (it could be small or large, depending on how you're feeling) do pull out the specific meanings put into the text by the writer, then failure 1 isn't applicable. Absolved of responsibility for the mistake (beyond that of generally "becoming a better writer," which most writers are committed to anyway and thus does not require any change), the writer, or one defending the writer, focuses on the other two possible problems which appear to be wholly outisde the writer's control. When truepenny argued that Avalon Willow wasn't "intepreting the text" correctly, she was arguing that the failure in communication must have been failure 2—the reader made an error. When Alma Alexander focuses on "the subtext that may be present in my text for someone who responds to any number of trigger words in a different way than I do," she attributes the failure essentially to the randomness of the universe over which she has no control, which is failure three.

It is ostensibly accepted by everyone in the discussion that each reader is going to have their own reaction to a text. This is what ktempest's post directly addressed. Yet so many of the people who actively profess this still clearly abide by the conduit metaphor in which alternate readings are errors or, in rare cases, fortuitous accidents. When truepenny attempts to draw a distinction between "interpretations" of a text and "responses" to a text, she is still thinking in terms of what the writer put into the text. "Interpretations" focus exclusively either on finding what the writer put into the text, or on the failure 1, how the writer, in a "context-free" setting failed to put her ideas into words as she should have. "Responses" are any other failure in communications, and are thrown out of the realm of serious criticism. Similarly, Alexander contrasts the text (and the meanings that were consciously and conscientiously put in) with subtext, the things taken out of the text by readers that were not put in by the writer. Focusing on different aspects of the problem, these two distinctions (and others like them) resolve the conduit metaphor with the knowledge that every reader may have their own response. And going further, it draws lines between what ideas the writer can be "held responsible" for sending out in their writing.

In short, the conduit metaphor nullifies any affect the existence of alternate interpretations might have on the discussion. The argument becomes divided between people trying to break out of the frame (knowing that alternate intepretations are a critical part of the discussion) and people remaining within the frame (because they've adapted the new information into their mindset without a need to change). The conduit metaphor has now created two entrenched sides that cannot effectively communicate.

Toolmakers (A Fable that Provides a Way Forward)

If the conduit metaphor is harmful, what do we do instead? We need a new, more accurate way of thinking about communication. Reddy tries to describe language outside of and in contrast with the conduit metaphor:

Language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone else's thoughts—a replica which can be more or less accurate, depending on many factors. If we could indeed send thoughts to each other, we would have little need for a communication system.

Reddy imagines a strange holding pen where several people have been placed in vastly different environments and left to survive. There is a device that allows them to send limited sets of instructions to each other so that they can share the technological advances that will aid them in survival, but they have no other contact.

There is, in this story, absolutely no way for the people to visit each other's environments, or even to exchange samples of the things they construct. This is crucial. The people can only exchange these crude sets of instructions—odd looking blueprints scratched on special sheets of paper that appear from a slot in the hub and can be deposited in another slot—nothing more. . . .

So one person, living in a forest environment, where there's lots of wood and lots of leaves to be moved around, invents a rake. His invention is so awesome that he draws up some blueprints for his friends and sends them through the hub. Another person receives these instructions, but she lives in a very rocky environment with very little wood. She tries her best to follow the instructions, but they just don't make sense. Improvising based on his environment, she comes up with an entirely different tool, a pickaxe, which is very useful for her own environment. She then sends her own set of blueprints for this "improved" object back to the forest dweller. But the revised object he builds doesn't look at all what he intended. The forest dweller and the rock dweller continue exchanging blueprints trying to get them to match up until the forest dweller has a flash of insight into what the rock dweller's environment might be like. He revises his instructions accordingly, and soon the two are not only able to communicate again, they've learned about each other's environment indirectly, which will help them communicate in the future.

Reddy explains:

In the analogy, the contents of each environment, the "indigenous materials," represent a person's repertoire. They stand for internal thoughts, feelings, and perceptions which cannot themselves be sent to anyone by any means that we know of. These are the unique material with which each person must work if he is to survive. The blueprints represent the signals of human communication, the marks and sounds that we can actually send to one another.

This all sounds well and good. It sounds like communication, good communication. So how is this new paradigm shape the story differently than the conduit metaphor would?

What the conduit metaphor does is permit the exchange of materials from the environments, including the actual constructs themselves. In our story, we would have to imagine a marvelous technological duplicating machine located in the hub. Person A puts his rake in a special chamber, pushes a button, and instantly precise replicas of the rake appear in similar chambers for B, C, and D to make use of. B, C, and D do not have to construct anything or guess about anything. . . . There will still be differences in environments, but learning about these is now a trivial matter. . . . Even if the marvelous machine should falter now and again, so that artifacts arrive damaged, still, damaged objects look like damaged objects. A damaged rake does not become a hoe. One can simply send the damaged object back, and wait for another person to send another replica. It should be clear that the overwhelming tendency of the system, as viewed by the conduit metaphor, will always be: success without effort. At the same time, it should be similarly obvious that, in terms of the toolmakers paradigm . . ., we come to just the opposite conclusion. Human communication will almost always go astray unless real energy is expended.

(Bold emphasis added.)

That so many writers, knowing or not, have been subscribing to a philosophy wherein "success without effort" is the implicit assumption is frankly frightening.

To bring things around to the cultural appropriation discussion, Reddy then considers the perils of relying on the conduit metaphor when it is not applicable. An evil magician passes by the compound, sees these people working hard at communication and survival, and becomes mad. He casts a spell on them so that now, even though the mecahnism still works the same old way (with them receiving instructions and building objects on their own), the inhabitants are now hypnotized so that they believe that the mechanism works according to the conduit metaphor. After they receive the instructions and build the object, they instantly forget having done so and believe that the object in front of them was sent through from the other person magically and without translation:

It was not long before each of the persons came to entertain, privately, the idea that all the others had gone insane. One would send instructions to the others for some device of which he was particularly proud, just as he had always done. Only now of course he believed that he sent not instructions but the thing itself. Then, when the others would send him instructions in return, to confirm their reciept of his, he would assemble the object, forget, think that they had returned him the thing itself, and then stare in horror at what he saw. Here he had sent them a wonderful tool, and they returned to him grotesque parodies. Really, what could explain this? All they had to do was successfully remove his object from the chamber in the hub. How could they change it so shockingly in performing an operation of such moronic simplicty? Were they imbeciles? Or was there perhaps some malice in their behaviour? In the end, [the inhabitants] all came privately to the conclusion that the others had either become hostile or else gone berserk. Either way, it did not matter much. None of them took the communications system seriously anymore.

And that, really, is the state of the internet arguments at this point.

Becoming Toolmakers (Writing Advice that Could Possibly Help)

What changes must a writer, or any person trying to communicate with language, have to make in light of this new paradigm? Well, it depends. As I said above, the conduit metaphor works well if everyone's dealing with the same relevant context. If I'm failing to communicate with somebody very like me (somebody who's likely to interpret my tool-making instructions in almost precisely the same way), then all I have to do is think about how I put things into words (or, perhaps, how clearly I draw my blueprints). Maybe I made a typo, or maybe my cell reception went out. But when that doesn't work, I can't simply assume that the other person is simply hostile or insane. I have to set aside the mindset of effortless success, remind myself that "human communication will almost always go astray unless real energy is expended," and start expending that energy. And by using the toolmakers paradigm, I can see that the place where I must expend that energy is on the part of the communication not covered in the conduit metaphor, the context and environment of the person with whom I wish to communicate.

This may seem like common sense when thinking exclusively about two people communicating (for some people it isn't, but I am moving on anyway for the moment). But when a person wants to communicate to a wide, near-universal audience (as professional writers generally seek to do), things become more difficult. I can learn in great detail the personal context of a friend when I wish to communicate to her, but there is no way for me to do so to the millions of readers that I hope my story will reach when published.

For many writers (including Ms. Alexander), this represents a fundamental failure of the toolmakers paradigm. A writer cannot ever hope to address these myriad contexts; the toolmakers paradigm cannot be useful in the context of this sort of writing; and therefore a writer should rely strictly on the conduit metaphor and take responsibility for only the things they "consciously and conscientiously" put into the text. But unlike the people in Reddy's fable who are extremely limited in the ways they can learn about each other's environment, we can learn about each other's environment and share that information. Large portions of readers can share several relevant, important perspectives, and those perspectives can be learned and kept in mind by a writer.

In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better one-on-one communicator, I must learn more about the person with whom I wish to communicate and communicate to that person in mind. In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better writer and address a universal audience, I must learn more about everyone by learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own, and I must write with all of them in mind.

Many writers in the past few weeks have tried to address the problems of "writing about the Other," the problems of both doing it and thinking about it. But when writing for a universal audience using the toolmakers paradigm, there should never be an "Other," because you are always writing to that person, not about that person.

The Sleepening (Mostly Unrelated to the Rest of This Essay)

I'm so overdue for bed that I'm going to cut things short. (Too late!) Suffice to say, that even this big old mess of theory doesn't address everything that's going on in the debate, but I think that there's enough in there for some of the people who've been banging their heads over the communication failures to move on to other aspects of the debate such as:

• Why it is an acto fo oppression and exclusion to assume that a white (or male or heteronormative . . .) perspective is "universal."
  
• Why it is wrong to expect a member of an oppressed culture to learn about your privileged culture while simultaneously refusing to recipricate.
  
• Why it is a betrayal of trust to send a person instructions to create an image of themselves that is harmful.

And other things. I'm sure I'm going to have to clarify things because I wrote this in a hurry; feel free to ask questions or offer corrections.

Bed now, theory again later, I guess.