not by pastagang

this is a quick response to the blog post "by pastagang" by, uh, pastagang. which talks about me miscrediting a previous blog post as being "almost certainly mainly or exclusively written by Lu". it wasn't! it was by pastagang! which is a bunch of people! I felt some embarrassment to be wrong publicly, and in a way which erased other people's work, and in a way which was done carelessly.

so, i feel a little weird harping on about this, because, again, it is something i feel embarrassed by, and generally it feels maybe unhelpful to keep harping on about a time you got someone's identity wrong - from my experience as a trans person, if you get something like this wrong, best to correct yourself, apologise briefly, and then don't make a huge fuss about it. a huge fuss is just uncomfortable all round.

and yet I'm here, writing! why? well, partly it's that I just read a post where pastagang has revisited it, and that makes me feel there's some implicit permission for me to revisit it. and more generally, I sense that pastagang is interested in talking about the question of where the boundaries of pastagang lie. the demarcation of group identity. I'm happy to be the example for a tendency they might have sensed in other cases. it's a thing of discomfort, to examine an embarrassing mistake you've made, but sometimes the thing to do with discomfort is to dive into it and try to understand the texture and source of it.

and also I sense that there's a second feeling of discomfort lurking around, and they're located around my feelings about working under a collective identity

i remember having to learn to explicitly course correct when doing press for Wild Rumpus. it was a bunch of us (six, to be precise), and we were putting on stuff together. we came to it with varying levels of pre-existing fame, different genders, and different levels of involvement. and if we talked excitedly about the work we were doing, there was a natural tendency for coverage of the things we were doing to focus upon the men who had a greater level of pre-existing fame. unless we explicitly worked to counteract that. i was (at the time) one of those men! i didn't recognise this pattern at the time, and it had to be pointed out to me.

and this makes sense from the outside! if you're writing about a project, you want to give references that your readers will be familiar with, to give legitimacy and context for them. if you're writing about a large collective, then naming everyone involved is tricky. but yet you want to personalise the people involved. your primary responsibility is not towards the people you are writing about and their preferences but for the people you are writing for. so if you can give your readers context, if you can highlight some faces they might know... you want to do that.

oh heck, i'm just reiterating The Tyranny Of Structurelessness. this keeps happening. here's an excerpt from it instead:

The idea of "structurelessness" has created the "star" system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women's liberation movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.

While it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the movement's position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default.

This is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who are labeled "stars." Because they were not selected by the women in the movement to represent the movement's views, they are resented when the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires.

(go read the whole thing, it's relevant in a ton of situations)

anyway: the upshot of all this is a basic rule i learnt early on, and have used to guide as to what i work on. here it is, i'm gonna make it big to stand out:

in general, the credit for a project goes to people in proportion to their pre-existing fame, rather than in proportion to their contribution

and... yeah, the reason i credited Lu for that post rather than the collective authorship is not because i looked at the metadata. but because i follow Lu and had seen a lot of the language and ideas expressed in that post expressed by them, previously. because (from my perspective, this isn't something that has an objective truth) they are the more famous person, the person I was more familiar with, the person for whom I had the context for. and so i gave them the lion's share of the credit.

i fell victim to my own rule. awareness is not the same as immunity! you gotta work to fight against this constantly!

and, like... obviously it sucks as a moral to say "well, if you try to do things collectively then people will fuck up the same way i did, so don't try". and i don't think collective authorship is wrong as a whole, i think there's a lot of strengths to it, and it can definitely lead to interesting things that wouldn't have worked otherwise. we build more interestingly when we work together. I do truly believe that ego-preservation is the death of creativity.

but – i guess what i'm getting at is – some of the most inspiring, creative times in my life have been when i have had this mindset*:

we didn’t create this to get credit or favour or recognition. we created this because we wanted to!

because we want to make music! we want to play strudel! we want to do hydra! we want to eat nudel! we want to make noise! we want to make noise! we want to make noise! we want to make noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise—

and yet when it those times have passed, i find that the credit for them drifts to other people and that feels unfair. or it drifts to me and that makes me feel guilty. it makes me hesitant to enter those environments again and embrace the jam wholeheartedly. maybe this is because i am an irredeemable career and legacy builder! but on the flipside... i do not have time and energy enough to do these things purely for the joy of it. i want to work sustainably, and in these fields that involves, among so many other things, collecting credit.

like... this is not the same thing as pastagang but when I was doing my DYCP and talking to a lot of artists about being an artist - one of them heard about the technical skills I had and told me to be careful about collaborating. to be careful not to do the complicated bits collaborating with another artist only for them to get the credit for that work because they're the bigger name.

and i don't have that fear so much with pastagang, i think posts like the one i'm responding to show a level of care and thoughtfulness about the nature of credit... but the instincts remain. and also, the pull of all the other things i've been trying to do, the paid work, the Big Project, the pottery, the being in the world and with my friends, the trying not to fall over from this energy limiting disease... alas my being creative on the computer time seems always too short... and yet i can feel the energy from here and i feel the urge to chase it down and join the jam.

[* I'd also say they are in times when the four conditions Jo Freeman lays out for an unstructured group to work efficiently are met:

1) It is task oriented.
2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. 
3) There is a high degree of communication. 
4) There is a low degree of skill specialization.

As she says, it can be a a very heady experience - but it also comes with a bunch of downsides. Go read the essay already]

followups:

(the quote was actually authored collectively, but that's messy and gets erased when attributing it)

There's also this classic example:

which I guess sums it all up.