I admit that haven't read the whole CGS discussion. As a result, I'm reading this comment--
The refusal to 'get it' doesn't bother me so much as (a) an insistence they don't 'get it' when they clearly do, at least to a degree, and (b) an insistence that there isn't anything there to get. That's just wilfull ignorance, self-perpetuated and everything. But if it's how they make the world and entertainment work for them, so be it.
in dialogue with this portion of TC's interview--
TC: And there was this whole debate about whether or not comics have a deeper meaning; whether something like “Casanova” has a deeper meaning, and this guy who hosted the Comic Geek Speak show really believes that there is no deeper meaning. He just says “no.”
“No” to “Casanova” in particular?
TC: To any comic books. His defense was, “Well, whenever you guys play up the deeper meaning of anything, I just don't think that stuff's there. I think you're reading too much into it.”
More confessions--I don't know that website and don't know much about comics generally, especially ones directed primarily at the standard American male comics reader, which I'm guessing dominates those threads. And, finally, I obviously didn't go seeking out the podcast that Tim''s referencing there.
So, with that mass of confessed ignorance as our collective grain of salt, my impression is that a big part of Tim's frustration with the CGS readers who say "you're reading too much into this!!" is that, contrary to the points being made in the two posts by matt and Decadent nightfalling above (here), those CGS readers also want to police other people's reading.
If Tim's redaction of the podcast is basically accurate,* then the guy who hosts this show seems to imply that anyone who sees complexity in comics, and especially those who are willing to make an argument pointing out the evidence for that complexity, should just "shut up."
To me, Tim has every right to say: "I won't shut up; the complexity is there--here's the evidence."
In fact, I think it is not coincidental that the argument seems to parallel the course of most discussions of racism and sexism:
1. Someone who has been trained (whether by direct life experience or by the work of overcoming race- or gender- based privilege) to see racism or sexism or class-bias or whatever points it out. "That's a sexist comment/TV show/Mary Jane statuette/argument."
2. Inevitably someone who has not been so trained says: "you're being too sensitive" or "you're making too much of this," or "you're reading too much into it."
Refusal to "read" is a kind of anti-intellectualism, and it is a powerful cultural force that is at work in the protection of various kinds of privilege, particularly in the US, and is vital to consumer culture: an ignorant consumer is one who is more readily controlled. And this anti-intellectualism is often, but not always, intertwined with other sorts of privileges--often with simple financial power and race privilege. It is oppressive, and it is dangerous.
Now this is where it starts to get tricky, because advanced literary/analytical education is, quite simply, expensive. When the costs of education (esp. lost work time but also tuition, etc.) are almost wholly privatized, as they increasingly are in the US, rather than being publicly paid for, that advanced education is efffectively limited to an economic elite. Thus the charges of "snobbery" might at some level be legitimate, because there is a connection to simple socioeconomic reality.
But I think it's more complex than that, and that the similarity I'm sensing between anti-intellectualism and sexism and racism is not coincidental. At base, this represents a refusal to explore the complexity of texts beyond their "common sense" meaning--and "common sense" is a powerful way to reify the status quo.
When computer-using, English-speaking, comic book readers--i.e., people who have access to the time and resources necessary to devote to an extended, online debate about comics--resist seeing complexity in the material they purpost to like, and in fact do not want anyone else to explore meaning beyond what they perceive to be "common sense," I tend to suspect them of being self-serving. I suspect that, for most of these readers, theirs is the false innocence of a privileged position in our world.
In this case, I suspect that most of them are policing a particular form of white, middle-class, masculine identity that feminizes and demonizes critical thinking, using a kind of class-tinged rhetoric (snobbery, elitism) as camoflage. [Think of blue-blooded, Connecticut-raised, private-schooled George W. Bush's "Texas" accent, and faux-folksy-isms for a different version of this.] This often harms them, e.g., by making them more susceptible to slick ad campaigns and demagogery, but it actively oppresses others along familiar gender, orientation, and race lines.
So I'd say it's legit to call that "bad reading."
* as his further elucidation, posted while I was typing, suggests.
[edited to try to catch up!] |
