tablesaw | Cultural Appropriation and Frame Conflict.

Current Mood: tired

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):

Ideas (or meanings) are objects.
Linguistic expressions are containers.
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.

The writer failed in capturing their ideas in putting them into the story.
The reader failed in pulling those ideas out of the story.
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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yay, linguistics!

(Just a quick question: when you say Lakoff, are you referencing George or Robin? I've read both, but Robin is my favorite). I'm guessing George because he's the linguist who, I think, has most popularized the idea of "frames" -- every intro linguistics text I've read tries to debunk the conduit metaphor. I'll have to think about the toolmaker metaphor: one of the problems I see is that every metaphor concretizes; human beings like concrete images (look at all the grammatical metaphors in English--metaphors that are such a part of the language we don't consider them metaphors in the Official Poetry Meaning: the foot of the hill, the face of the building, etc.) (I don't know if other languages have anything at all equivalent.)

For year, when thinking about intersectional theory/thinking, my images has been that of the busy roundtabouts I saw in Britain on my trip there (scared the bejeebers out of me).

And metaphors are necessary but always....incomplete (and the dominant group's metaphors tend to outweigh everybody else's).

I'm also now thinking of some of my favorite parts of Robin Lakoff's book (spacing out on title--will check tomorrow) where she talks about how hard it is to speak or write in opposition to the dominant paradigms, how the majority rule has so much built into the language, meanings so embedded by long usage, that opposing those meanings, or undercutting them, is hard work and takes longer.

Yea, it was George Lakoff (and Mark Johnson). I haven't read Robin Lakoff's Language and Women's Place.

She has other, later work out that's great (the WP was good but soon subsumed by further linguistic work that showed the patterns she identified were used by men with no power in social situations--i.e. men in court who were not trained as lawyers), so the factor was language/power (of course when she did that work, gender and power were different). I'll have to dig out and post about her later book that I'm drawing from above!

jWhen 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.

Especially if our way of looking at the problem is informed solely by white culture.

Also, this whole post gave me a very satisfying thought-gasm. Thank you.

Thanks.

I don't really use my LJ inbox, so I'll just say here that, yes, you may.

thank you.

Wow, this is fascinating. Good work.

I've been ignoring the Fail as much as possible, because keeping up could be a full-time job. I also mostly skimmed this, because my mind isn't quite awake enough to parse it all. I need Cliffs Notes.

But, speaking professionally...

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.

It's a fundamental hypothesis of semantics and pragmatics that (a) sentences have meanings, and (b) speakers mean something when they utter sentences. (Or at least, some traditions of semantics/pragmatics. Lakoff split off from Chomskyan views decades ago to do "cognitive linguistics", and he might not agree with the previous sentence. He gave a plenary address at the 2005 meeting of the LSA, titled "Directions in cognitive linguistics", but I don't recall the details.) Thus, if I say "Chicks aren't allowed in here", there's a meaning to the sentence (i.e., "the rules don't permit women to enter my location", or the like), but there's also something that I mean by saying it (among other possibilities: "Go away"; "I'm contemptuous of women"; "I'll meet you somewhere else"). The latter is extremely context-dependent: dependent on who says it, to whom, when, where, etc. The former, on the other hand, is taken to be an inherent part of the sentence, just as its syntax is.

Now, it's certainly the case that writers should be aware that their sentences won't have the same effect on all listeners, especially because listeners—in this case, readers—are going to be from a wider, unpredictable variety of backgrounds than a single listener in a conversation. That seems to be what you want to focus on: the fact that different people will take away different inferences. But I don't think that negates the idea that there is in fact meaning "contained in" the sentence itself.

I'm also not sure I follow Reddy's argument about "success without effort". Why assume that there's no effort involved in embedding or extracting information? Why assume that writers think getting a message across is easy? But I think perhaps I need to stare at that some more, perhaps after taking cold medicine.

Wikipedia's entry on semantics includes this sentence

Traditionally, the formal semantic view restricts semantics to its literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to pragmatics, but many find this distinction difficult to defend.

The citation for this statement is "George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Chapter 1. New York: Basic Books." So, yes, I suspect that answers to your questions that would are beyond my abilities as a layperson in this regard. The section you quoted is cribbed with very little change or interpretation from Metaphors We Live By, so I suspect that, yes, you will need to look to Lakoff instead of me.

I'll try to ask some Socratic questions that might lead you to answer the questions on your own, but it might not work. Your knowledge on the subject is much deeper, so I don't actually know the answers to the questions I can pose.

In framing your hypothesis that sentences have meanings, my impression is that you're skipping over some assumptions. The most basic would seem to be that the sentence has meaning within a language, but not outside of it. Also, you don't address in your example why the sentence has the meaning "the rules don't permit women to enter my location" and not "the rules don't permit small birds to enter my location."

It's easy to dismiss these particular differences as trivial (or, more likely, your study involves a context of certain implicit caveats that you neglected to include in a brief comment). But if we follow the hypothesis that the conduit metaphor only works "context differences don't matter and where all participants in the conversation understand sentences in the same way," it appears to me that you are able to say that the sentence has meaning because you've already delineated a field of speakers and hearers who have the same context and understand sentences in the same way.

I imagine that this is useful in many if not most examples that you're working with as you ply the deeper magic of linguistics. But I can also see how it could harbor the same sort of tendencies to exclude certain perspectives.

In elsewhere in his essay (which is no longer in front of me), Reddy looks at the idea of whether sentences or text can have meaning outside of the minds of the speaker or listener. If it is true that sentences contain meaning, he argues, then we can preserve meanings (and knowledge and culture) by preserving the sentences, trapping them in books, and locking them safely away in libraries. And yet what meanings can these preserved sentences contain after the cultures no longer exist that created them? If all human life disappears tomorrow, do the preserved sentences still contain meaning two days from now?

So, hm, let's see. Note, first, that if I had the energy to ever really edit Wikipedia beyond the odd misplaced comma, I'd probably go edit the entry you cite. Putting something in an encyclopedia article based on Lakoff and Johnson is like adding a fact to an article on religion based on the claims of Martin Luther; they have a valid way of looking at things, but far from the only way (or the standard way, perhaps). Of course, "many find this..." is weaselly: how many? which ones? etc.

The truth is that the line does indeed get hard to draw, even among people who agree that there's a line: there's endless debate over what part of the meaning of "Only John passed the exam" is part of the assertion, as opposed to background beliefs or implications. Beyond that, there are sentences like "Barack and Michelle are married" (is "to each other" part of the meaning of the sentence, or the speaker's implication?) or "I haven't eaten breakfast" (is "today" part of etc.?), and people differ as to what they assign to the "semantics / literal meaning / what is said" as opposed to "pragmatics / speaker meaning / what is meant". All the same, though the line may be hard to draw, I don't think that doesn't mean that there isn't a boundary. For instance, as you travel from Paris to Rome, you'll encounter people who speak Italian-influenced French or French-influenced Italian, and it may be hard to tell where the line is between "this is French" and "this is Italian"; but all the same, there's no doubt that they're speaking different languages in Paris and Rome. Semantics and pragmatics are like that: as you travel from one to the other, there're going to be points where you're not sure which side of the border you're on, but all the same there are endpoints where you aren't in doubt.

Right, enough metaphor about pragmatics; back to metaphors in pragmatics. (In the next comment. Stupid 4300 character limit.)

Stupid 4300 character limit.

Seriously! How are these responses that long?

Aw crap. Hey,

tahnan? You know that comment notification that you got for a comment that isn't here anymore? Could you send it to me?

I was trying to move it around to make this thread of long comments more readable, and I ended up deleting it totally.

It's true that I always work with a certain caveat about lexical ambiguity—chicks "women (dismissive)" vs. chicks "small birds"—and that caveat is "ignore it". That's one of the places where pragmatics and semantics start to blur. If I say "Michelle's on a plane right now, and she hates flying", you'll have to know which word pronounced "plane" I mean (prairie? aircraft? woodworking tool?) based on context; for that matter, you'll have to work out which word pronounced "Michelle" I mean (my wife? Ms. Obama? some Frenchman?). But that's something I really am willing to gloss over. Now, I have to admit that I do so because I believe that the literal meaning of the sentence can be agreed upon and that the pragmatics takes over from there, so it may sound a little circular; but I think that lexical ambiguity is the least of the concerns about sentence interpretation.

But what about "the sentence has a meaning within a language, but not outside it"; if a sentence falls in the forest, and no one is there to comprehend it, does it have a meaning? I think my feeling is that you're absolutely right that I'm already assuming my hearers have a shared context, i.e. that they comprehend whatever language I'm speaking. But my feeling is also, then, that that's really kind of OK. If I were to pass a blueprint of my tool to the next person over, I'm still assuming that the person has sensory organs capable of detecting my markings. All communication, whether it's verbal, visual, non-linguistic, conduitic, toolmakerish, whatever, necessary must assume that the hearer is capable of comprehending the communication. Otherwise, it's not communication, it's empty actions. If we're facing each other and I give you the finger, I'm trying to communicate to you; you may not understand my gestural language, but the attempt is made. On the other hand, if I raise my middle finger right now and hold it up to the screen, or in a west-south-westerly direction corresponding to where you're located from here, I'm not really communicating; I have no expectation that you'll receive my message.

Or, to take Reddy's question: if instead of a sentence we did the same thing with a blueprint, would the blueprint still contain meaning two days from now? The point of view of the linguist, I believe, is that the sentence has meaning, though it's certainly the case that words have meanings only insofar as speakers agree on what those meanings are (we know what a "dog" is because it's what we all point to when we say "dog"; "splunch", on the other hand, has no meaning even if I use it in a sentence because we haven't agreed on a meaning for it; "duck condundrum" had no particular meaning in 1998, but since then we've agreed on a meaning for it). But sentences of Etruscan still have meaning, as do cryptograms, even if that meaning isn't immediately retrievable by many/most/any people.

The next question may be, "And now what?" When I write in English, I'm excluding a sizeable percentage of humanity who have no way of extracting my meaning (illiterate English speakers; non-English speakers)—but what choice do I have, short of interpretative dance? That seems fair to say; but it seems unfair to say that I have no choice but to write in White Male American English (by using "he" as a default pronoun, or white as a default race, or baseball metaphors) and oh well too bad that I'm excluding people who can't extract that message (because they're not as white/male/American/small-minded as me). I think that's what the discussion is about, bearing in mind that I skipped as much as I could. If my feeling is "so it's in English and only means things to English speakers; big deal" but "it's in WMAE and only means things to white male Americans, and that's a problem", then I'm drawing a line somewhere in there, and now the question is where, and what to do about it, and how to be aware of it.

I think. I'd better stop before Livejournal bans me for posting comments that fill their hard drives.

But sentences of Etruscan still have meaning, as do cryptograms, even if that meaning isn't immediately retrievable by many/most/any people.

Mr. Etruscan writes a sentence in Etruscan. All Etruscan speakers at the time understand it to literally mean "I am awesome." Two millenia later, a group of archaeologists, after learning as much as they can about Etruscan society and language from the tools they have at their disposal, understand Mr. Etruscan's sentence to literally mean "Winter is long."

If the sentence has a literal meaning, which is it? Did it change? If so, when and how?

Reddy's examples focus on communication failures, and while the toolmakers paradigm can encompass situations where there is no failure of communication, it does so in a more cumbersome manner. Once the toolmakers have nailed down what a rake is and what it does, we can say that the work already accomplished is unnecessary: A sends B the rake instructions, and B recognizes the instructions as the rake. The conduit metaphor now "works" for them to say that the concept of the rake is in those instructions. But before that, the first rake instructions provided a different tool for both A and B (and also for C and D, in the original article). What meaning do the instructions have at that moment?

So if the Etruscans and the archaeologists both agree that a sentence has a meaning, but the two meanings are totally different, can we say that the sentence has a meaning (as you have before)? Can we say that it has meaning (the phrasing you use in the most recent comment) even though the meaning is different? Can we say that it has an identifiable potential for a meaning to be extracted, but not a meaning itself?

(This also seems to bring up the concept of sentences that do not have or are not intended to have meaning/a meaning/a potential for meaning, but I suspect that I'm out of my depth in trying to navigate those waters alone.)

"splunch", on the other hand, has no meaning even if I use it in a sentence because we haven't agreed on a meaning for it

Ah, but then how do you explain writers who coin new words and use them without providing a definition to their readers (Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, etc.)? The context of the sentence and the role the word plays in that sentence gives our brains clues as to what to expect of its possible meanings, as does the construction of the word itself.

For example, 'splunch' could be a noun or the stem of a verb ('He ate splunch' v. 'splunch it, baby!' or 'To splunch is to be human'); it is unlikely to be an adjective in English, considering that it ends in -unch, and it is certainly not an adverb.

Writers can predispose their readers to view/digest words both old and new a certain way by drawing on their knowledge of a particular language's syntax, just as they can set up their readers' expectations regarding particular character-driven plot points by drawing on shared knowledge/insights into human behavior.

The next question may be, "And now what?"

I've written a few different things to answer this that have been lost on different computers. Had I not been falling asleep on Sunday, I would have continued the essay with a bit about politics. Because the problems that I'm focusing on and that are being focused on in the failboat debacles involve both society-wide systematic oppression and the denial of that oppression.

Recently I listened to a story on PodCastle by Peter S. Beagle called "Gordon, the Self-Made Cat." It made me feel bored and annoyed, instead of amused or interested or intrigued. I believe this is because, to build the meanings and reactions intended by the author, the reader needs to have a certainly amount of love for the cuteness of cats or the antics of cats. I really have neither of these things.

So is that a "problem"? Well, Beagle may have intended for his story to be "universal" (among English readers/listeners), and now I'm telling him that it's not. But there isn't systemic, societal, institutionalized oppression against people who don't think that cats are as cute as everyone else does. And most writers in Beagle's position would probably accept and take responsibility for the fact that the story excludes parts of its potential audience. In a sense, most genre writers do this in that their writing caters to a specific audience of readers who have already read and have read within the genre. The attitude is "You can't please everybody."

The toolmakers paradigm does require a certain amount of "you can't please everybody" thinking when it comes to published work. The communication is static and directed at a wide audience, so the writer can't clarify himself with every reader individually. So a certain amount of failure by exclusion is accepted by the writer (especially writers working within a "genre"). But if a writer doesn't accept that this is happening, their communication can suffer (as currently the case with

tnh and the "this is not at all a threat" argument). And when the exclusion falls along patterns of oppression that exists across society, then the writer becomes an active part of that oppression.

Because issues like the cat-antic exclusion are not politicized, it's easy for a writer to accept these exclusions and even to, in a sense, retroactively intend to do so. This fits the interpretation back into the conduit metaphor; if a reader reports a problem that the writer did not intend but that is acceptable to the writer, the writer can admit to having put it in the text when writing (though perhaps not fully consciously). But when the issue is politicized, like racism, sexism, etc., the writer resists doing so and denies responsibility for what is made of their writing.

If all the writers involved shifted gears and said, "Well, yes, I take responsibility for excluding non-white readers, but I'm not going to change, even though I could; you can't please everybody, and I'm just never going to care about pleasing readers who aren't white," there would still (hopefully obviously) be a major problem. But it would be different from the one we are currently witnessing. Instead, writers are, on the surface, professing a commitment to anti-racism which would mandate changing their attitudes and their writing, but they avoid doing so by either arguing that they cannot/need not/should not take responsibility for the exclusion reported by nonwhite readers or arguing that it is impossible for them to make any changes to themselves or their writing that would fix it. In some cases, both.

The toolmakers paradigm demands that a writer be responsible for all failures of communication, no matter how wide the audience; and real-world politics demonstrate where those failures or systemic and problematic. The toolmakers paradigm also demonstrates that the way to effectively change the situation is to account for the culture and context across the systemic divide.

(Sheesh, how did this response get so long?)

I'm also not sure I follow Reddy's argument about "success without effort". Why assume that there's no effort involved in embedding or extracting information? Why assume that writers think getting a message across is easy?

It is an odd argument. In the fable that Reddy provides, the writer's work isn't getting the message across, which is almost always inherently successful, but in creating something to send across. That is, the focus of the writer becomes solely on inventing the rake, and the effort of the reader becomes solely on different ways to use the rake (effects in your explanation above). But the rake itself comes across clean (or damaged in a way that's easily indentifiable and correctable).

Beyond that, I think we're looking at ways in which the conduit metaphor guides thought around work that we know exists. I subscribe to the toolmakers paradigm, but I still tend to use container metaphors to describe the work. And at that point, it becomes more of a way in which the work is masked by the false frame (or the evil magician). Reddy's essay contains more effects of the evil magician, which might be helpful in answering your questions, but which were a bit too much for me to type out.

Examples of true, extreme "success without effort" thinking are rarer, and rightfully mocked. I think of people who believe that irony works because of the magic telepathy of what they mean, a phenomenon referred to as hipster irony (and, in reacial contexts, to "hipster racism"). I also think of people who believe that volume and enunciation will successfully carry their intended meaning across a language barrier.

As a future teacher of reading and writing, I really appreciate this. Where did you get the quotes you used? I might want to check them out.

Most of them are from "The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language" by Michael J. Reddy. It appeared in the book Metaphor and Thought

This gave me thought-food to chew on. Thank you for bringing a new perspective to this whole imbroglio/failxplosion/debate.

I have been following this whole thing since it began, and I personally feel that you gave the best advice on the "Other" issue. At least, your words resonated the most with me, since I am also struggling/trying to be a writer. It also ties in with my personal interest of learning about other cultures, so that's all good. And it makes so much sense. :)

(I did not read the other comments yet, since I am too headachey, but I bookmarked this and will definitely come and reread everything once I feel a bit better.)

I wish I could send you some of the money from my college education; this entry of yours taught me more than my second college literature class.

Thank you for this.

This is really interesting! I am going to have to come back and reread it more carefully when I have time.

Have you read Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series by any chance? There are things in the later books that are strangely relevant to your metaphors.

I haven't. I'll try to remember it next time I'm grabbing books.

Thanks for sharing! Definitely makes me want to go back and finish Pinker's The Language Instinct.

Thanks for this--I will have to come back and re-read to make sure I understood your arguments completely, but it's given me a lot to think about.

Thank you. I know whole thing is incredibly language/writer wonkish, but I hope everything got out marginally well, given that I eventually needed to sleep and go to my real job.

Wow, this is incredibly useful, and I think very applicable to vidding...but then I think everything is applicable to vidding. *g*

I hope it helps, but I'll take your word for it, because my knowledge of how vids work is next to nil.

Just popping in to say that of course it's appropriate to vidding which has visual rhetorics: images are signs too! There might be some differences, but yes, yes, semiotics is the branch of linguistics that applies to signs.

I wonder if Finnegans Wake is the ultimate effort of a toolmaker communicator. It seems at first glance to be infinite context without content. Further examination reveals multiple pathways of content, once a contextual basis is picked. Joyce also seems to sidestep questions of unfair cultural appropriation by throwing everything into the bowl without calling particular attention to anything. (Not so in Ulysses, which tackles questions of usurpation and cultural appropriation head-on)

Finnegans Wake is frustrating to read. It also took 17 years to 'complete'. I think if we ever want to say anything to each other, we're going to need to find shortcuts.

Actually, Ulysses is one of a few books that I never finish because at some point while reading them I drift off completely into my own imagined space. This happens predictably after every restart. Who knows what would happen if I tried Finnegans Wake; I might never make it back.

Speaking as someone who has 'finished' Ulysses and never finished Finnegans Wake for the same reason you don't finish Ulysses... just skip to Penelope (Chapter 18), read through that, and call yourself finished. Then you can revisit any part you want whenever you want and you'll have the rest of your life to devote to the imagined places it generates.

Finnegans Wake is awesome. I was studying medieval Irish (manuscripts) when I started it. So I admit I spent most of the time picking out the Old Irish allusions and, er, similarities that the text has with manuscripts.

Sorry. That made no sense. :p

Thanks, this is an excellent post. I'm also wondering if I need to friend you, because that icon is very familiar by now :-).

So, this is not actually to argue, but because I am actually engaged with what you're talking about here: I don't really like the toolmaker metaphor at all, and it seems to me to leave out a lot of important stuff about communicating that is important to me. I think of myself as having the conduit metaphor, because there are a lot of aspects of it I do use, including the metaphors about "putting ideas into words" and so forth, and they are important to me.

But I can't be using the conduit metaphor, because the things you describe as consequences of the metaphor made me go "Huh? No wonder no-one understands each other in this Fail". I don't have a good idea what my metaphor is, but I've thought of a different metaphor that at least superficially works for me:

My ideas are 3-D objects, but I can only transfer information about them to others by taking pictures and showing the pictures to other people. If I'm talking to people I know well about ideas we've talked about before, I only need to take one picture from one angle and the shared knowledge of the group means everyone knows which object I'm talking about. But talking to other people, I need to take photos from more angles, close-ups, shots of texture, maybe different times of day, and keep getting feedback from the other people until I'm convinced they've successfully managed to construct the same (or enough the same) 3-D object. (and I can still discover later that I'm wrong, and they built something out of steel that's squidgy foam on my side).

I may be surprised that someone seems to need me to take a photo from an angle I've never taken a photo before, or complains about the colour of the grass my 3-D objects are resting on. It's likely to take particularly long to figure out why the other person is not successfully building replicas of my beautiful sculptures when they're actually asking (using photos, still) why none of my sculptures, ever, have anything but a white background. Then I might have to have a think and realise that oh, yes, my 3-D sculpture garden is set among white gravel, and so are all my friends', and it might be interesting for me to learn a bit about grass, and even consider re-modelling the sculpture garden.

The problem, I think, with the conduit metaphor is that it works really, really well, right up to the moment that it fails catastrophically. I'll admit that, even when I know I'm "building meaning out of the instructions" of a text, I still think of the process as "getting something out of" a text. But when something goes wrong, I try to be more than ready to switch to the toolmakers paradigm to figure out why. I think about what meanings the author might have had in mind different from what I'm thinking, what differences in context and expectation would account for them, etc. At the same time, I try to be sensitive to the fact that using the conduit metaphor can also create communication failures that are concealed from my notice, and that's a problem.

I must admit that I don't fully understand your alternate metaphor. In what ways do you consider it to be different from the toolmakers paradigm?

I also admit the more I think about it, the more my sculpture/photo metaphor is pretty much the same as the toolmaker metaphor (or paradigm - sorry, I'm a scientist and so I am slightly allergic to the word "paradigm" because of the way, post-Kuhn, it gets thrown around by scientists who are sure they're Revolutionary Geniuses And Terribly Misunderstood. I have met far more of those than actual revolutionary geniuses during my career.)

Actually, my problem with the toolmaker metaphor/paradigm might be due to another word allergy of mine - the word "blueprint". That's because when I first got interested in genetics/genomics (my scientific specialty) the metaphor that was always thrown around was that "the genome (or DNA) is the blueprint of life". And "blueprint" is just such a shockingly bad metaphor. If you want one at the same level of over-simplification and ordinary accessibility, "recipe book" is much, much better. And as I got to learn more genetics/genomics and also became more aware of sexism issues in science, it became pretty clear to me that "blueprint" had been picked for some sort of sexist reason - either that the people who had to think up the metaphor just didn't spend enough time cooking, or didn't think the general public would take biology seriously enough if they were reminded of cooking rather than building, or whatever.

I don't know that any of this is relevant, other than you have a Free! No Obligations! insight into some ways my brain works.

I've just been using "paradigm" because that's what Reddy used. I don't know why he chose it instead of "metaphor" (perhaps because the way of thinking didn't really have a metaphorical basis in the language yet?), but I've just been going by that.

First: You've given me a new and powerful perspective on a problem which has been confusing me for years. (I'm not 100% sure I agree completely, but at this point anything is an improvement)

Second: Yesterday my husband was all excited and "YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO". And it was..your icon. So I got to be all smug and "Pfft, I've seen that like a million times" :) (Although it wasn't until this post that I noticed what your username is, since every other time I've been too transfixed by the icon)

How'd you get here from metafandom hours before the post?

Um..I'm psychic?

Just after I posted I realised I probably got here some other way (

rydra_wong maybe?) I also had a bunch of metafandom tabs open and confused myself.

See, when I first saw this, I looked on metafandom, saw nothing, and thought, "She must have MF confused with

rydra_wong's page." Only then this post did show up on MF, so I started wondering what was going on.

I might have got it from the MF delicious links, I was looking through those at one point to see if my femslash post was going to turn up any time soon.

Or, you know, maybe I am just psychic :)

This was really interesting and far too intelligent for me to give a clever response to. I was reminded of How All Communication Fails, Except By Accident (http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html). I was also reminded of the saying that we can't learn anything that we don't already know - in order to learn something, we have to step by step widen our worldview to the point where we are almost but not entirely aware of what we're about to know.

"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. "

I found this quite helpful. Thank you.

Thank you for writing this! It's very interesting.

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Cultural Appropriation and Frame Conflict.

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