Are There Any Valid Criticisms? (aka Kalessin's Rant)

[Kuruharan]

And back to the main point of this thread: the artists are themselves responsible for the state of the genre. In as much as they give into the realities of the publishing world and the market it dictates to - ah, ahem - I mean, serves, the artists are responsible for the pablum readers are stuck with.

Yes, but it is the publishing world and the market that puts food on the table. If an artist finds a formula that works, the pressure will be to exploit it for all it’s worth. Even when the artist becomes bored and disconnected from the art. If a writer is unable to find a publisher for some cherished work, then what? Much bitterness ensues I imagine.

Of course, there always looms the possibility of self-publication. Perhaps this dream keeps some working into the small hours of the night on something they no longer “feel” with the hope that they may accumulate enough money and fame to enable them to publish for themselves?

Of course, I say all this now. I have not had the luxury of reading an excruciatingly bad work in recent months, and that may mellow me somewhat.

[Rimbaud]

I mean this sincerely: authors have almost nothing to do with what is on display in Waterstones. Or Barnes and Noble for our cousins.

The uncomfortable equation is thus: books = units.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I couldn't agree more Rim, although the situation might even be worse than you are allowing it to be:

books = Movie units

There isn't an author writing today who doesn't have, at least somewhere at the back of his/her mind, the idea of movie rights to the book, and thus creates accordingly. If there are authors who avoid this, I would suggest that they instead follow one of the following two other equations:

books = Oprah units

or

books = Man Booker Prize units

I wonder though if there really is no room for an effective presence of the author in this however. If books-as-units were widgets, then anyone could be trained to write the kinds of books that different people want to read. But we can all agree that there is still some kind of speical non-quantifiable talent behind good writing, such that the people who produce book-units in response to a market demand, still do so from within a 'talent' or skill-set that is uniquely their own.

It's like any profession -- every computer programmer is still an individual using his or her creativity. While the lines of code written by that programmer might not have an overt or visible effect upon the whole, there is an effect which, when combined with the other creative/individual effects of other programmers, results in large-scale change.

So art is independent of the artist, and perhaps controlled by the publishing houses, but the culumative effect of creative artists moves the people (since publishers are people too! ) in certain directions?

Grasping for hope here. . .which is hard for a dyed in the wool Althusserian such as myself (free biscuits for anyone who knows what that means).

[Kuruharan]

Althusserian-pertaining to the ideas of Louis Althusser who said that ideology is the way we live our reality through representation. Social identification is a question of what we consume rather than what we produce, which I believe is what specifically relates to the point you are making.

So, are you implying that readers get junk because they deserve it, or maybe ask for it?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Following Louis Althusser strictly -- we are junk since in a consumerist culture you are, well, what you eat. . .or what is fed to you.

[Mithalwen]

But if we stopped eating it they would try to feed us something else maybe...

[Kuruharan]

Ah-ha!! So in offering me biscuits you were merely trying to perpetuate an unfair social system!! I shall begin concocting plans for your violent overthrow at once!!!

If only you had offered me waffles or caviar…


Is there any hope for this poor thread?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Ah, but you see, that's just the thing with Althusser -- we can't choose to stop eating what "they" give us, because "they" do not exist: we're all part of a self-constituting "us." We all of us order our lives within ideologies that find concrete expression in what LA calls Ideological State Apparatus (and, yes, he goes on to call them ISAs). With this view, the cultural productions -- pieces of 'art' -- that we consume appeal to us because they reflect the significations that we have all developed to explain and order our world. They are not imposed on us from without, but spring up from within ourselves, all of us, trapping us all in the same prisonhouse of consumerist, ideological representation.

We are all of us the "them" that imprison each of us individually. As such we cannot produce any kind of art that is not an expression of what we have made ourselves to be in order to find existence within the ISAs that we've built to order our existence. Freedom from these is a dream.

[The Saucepan Man]

Of course, in a perfect free market, producers will simply produce what the consumers desire. That is not to say that producers (and governments) do not have ways and means to influence consumers' desires, but then there is no such thing as the perfect free market.

On the whole, however, I would say that, just as we get the press that we deserve, we get the books that we deserve.

[Kuruharan]

They are not imposed on us from without, but spring up from within ourselves, all of us, trapping us all in the same prisonhouse of consumerist, ideological representation.

We are all of us the "them" that imprison each of us individually.

But if this is the case is it really a prison or is it just the world? And if it is just the world, why choose to view it so negatively? There are obviously limitations to everything, but that does not make everything a prison.

Anyway, Saucepan to the rescue...

we get the books that we deserve.

I was never convicted of the deeds I done did to deserve Dennis L. McKiernan (my apologies to those who like him).