post #34: on gatekeeping
[this was originally typed in response to a question asked in response to a comment left under this video (an amv for Sayako song Watered Garden of Souls) ; original comment said "i love gatekeeping sayako" and then the reply (that i was responding to) said "Why not let others hear this and and in turn supporting the artist? I never understood gatekeeping, if I had a following and they were actively trying to keep me small I'd be pissed lol"]
i apologize in advance- you are in the unfortunate position of being someone who left a comment that, when i came across it, prompted much rumination and ponderance on my end as to what may be potential limitations or flaws in your comment's arguments.
so essentially, you are having this question, why would you gatekeep something that you loved? which is being asked because the outset declaration is made that fans of Sayako's music somehow find it pleasurable to gatekeep the artist's music-- which is to say that there is at least one party who finds gatekeeping a positive action for some reason. you are asking in response to this, how can this be a positive action when it is being fundamentally limiting? and by limiting here i am meaning to refer to the propagation of art/information through peer to peer or social media-sided networks. to rephrase, you're asking, people claim that gatekeeping is a positive action, yet if it is limiting circulation, then would it not be a negative action? you are adding context here that the op implies that they like Sayako's music and so you are asking, what's more, how could you gatekeep something that is meaningful to you?
in an attempt to unpack what all may be at stake in considering this, i will try to work out sketches of what a steelman could look like for each side. in order to do so, however, i must address this primary frictional element in this discourse of, what is the function of art? what does it do, what can it do? and by address i mean acknowledge that this is an implicit question being glossed here. i will not answer this yet. in my opinion, a positive anti-gatekeeping perspective posits something along the lines of, somehow, circulating art-as-technology (which is being positive impacting to me) will have a positive impact on the wider systems of society or peer-to-peer networks. an example can be, Person A uses Sayako's music as a technology to unpack/meditate on/etc. their personal, storied history of their relationship to otaku media -- this can include such things as, through Sayako's songs, aesthetics, etc., Person A comes to understand that their affinity for the medium of visual novels and maybe some specific set of visual novel texts from say the 2000s is being related to their storied history of their relationship with, well, relationships & communications, that is to say, about how visual novels may function themselves as a technology for simulating worlds where conversations really are scripted and so forth. so then on the question of gatekeeping, because it is that Person A has had this personal and impactful relationship with Sayako's music, it is that they choose to circulate awareness of this music with their friends or other people online under the impression that this may somehow function as a productive technology for others as it has for themself. assumed in this is that probably Person A is autistic and, following from this, they are having autistic friends and/or are inhabiting a space online / a social presence where they are visible to other autistic people. (i'm using autistic in a literal sense and a metaphorical sense; i'm not intending to necessarily operate on a DSM medicalizing model, rather it is that autistic is a convenient shorthand for gathering a number of the features i mean to trace in this process -- e.g., social difficulties & however else u want to narrate this. even though autistic is probably having some other connotations that may not be relevant and could even be contrary to what i mean to narrate in this, it is the most convenient 1-word way to say what i want to say, and so i use it for now, knowing it's potential shortcomings). in this example, Person A's actively not-gatekeeping is positive in that it circulates and thus makes available a technology for healing and self-discovery to other people that are will likely be able to make similar use of it. stepping down from this steelman, however, it becomes possible that Person A shares this knowledge publicly in genuine hope that it could help other people only for folx to turn around and instrumentalize their awareness of Sayako to some imaginary negative end. i slipped into joking a bit in this last part. the more poignant pressure point is the unknowability of Person A's gesture having a net positive impact. it is possible that no one else in Person A's circles has anywhere near the same relation with otaku media or communication difficulties or whatever else as Person A has had, and thus this gesture produces vulnerability with i guess an abscess of vapid listening. what is the point of sharing Sayako's music if people are not going to benefit from it? what will people who won't benefit from it gain from learning about it? what will their engagement be like once they learn about it? there is a sheeting veil of unknowability with these. i think there could be a more spikingly negative force coterminous with them, but i cannot currently reconstruct what that argument would be. i will put this on hold now and switch to the other side.
the steelman for pro-gatekeeping can look something like this:
working off Kelly Fritsch's description of discourses of "access" in Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle -- specifically, in mind of her proposition that intentional inaccessibility can be a preservation and safety mechanism (citing the arcane language of academic writing as a way to produce this effect and render the ideas generated there alien to the enforcement efforts of, say, the government). gatekeeping can be positive then in that it maintains opacity, that is illegibility, and this can be beneficial for safety reasons. record labels and power and these other forces of structural violence in these worlds we live in are wont to exploit and extract value from people as they can. this can take the form of derailing potentially radical movement, for example, by reorienting it into machines that reinforce the positions of power. gatekeeping, then, can be a way of refusing to allow for the creation of such opportunities (or diminishing in their numbers; as i would argue it's impossible largely to fully prevent them as such; unless you want to engage with a more longevous politics of death which is beyond the scope of this comment).
it can also be a mode of respect. some people don't want to be known by so many people and gatekeeping can be a way of maintaining that choice
another serious question in this is, how does circulation happen? peer to peer & mass scale seem like the most common modalities for this
likewise, there can also be a question with regard to gatekeeping of how much it can really be working. as your actions of engagement in this era of algorithms, fyps, & feeds can, in a way, betray ur want to maintain exclusivity. that is, if it is not people who are circulating culture and information then, in our current media ecologies, it is largely the above mentioned circuits which do so. this priveleges the experience of the individual in a way, you don't have to be beholden to a person you are knowing for them having put u on to something (it is easier in this sense for something to be conceived of as Yours if it is that, seemingly, you have found it by yourself), but it is that the channels which you follow through which u come across some such things are (largely) ones which are owned an operated by corporations and so there is a real sense, i feel, to which they are writing themselves as the default and as a beneficial circumstance in this context of encounter. i mean to imply by this that there can be inherited problematics in this encounter if uninvestigated. on whose terms are we engaging? i mean as well to have as subtext with this that in this algorithm mode of discovery, it is that user-end utility of an art piece (what it has personally done for someone) is privileged under system-end utility (how it can capture and direct attentional economies of users to the benefit of the corp).
there can also be a question of, what is gatekeeping? I've been dodging it for this whole time, but my supposition has been that gatekeeping is somehow a non-action-- to gatekeep something is to not tell people about it. i think gatekeeping can also obtain meanings in the sense of gatekeeping as intervention, of actively trying to intercept and derail conversations about something so as to maintain lack of widespread knowledge about it, but i think this would be a comparatively minor way the term is deployed. but what i mean to point out with this is that there is a question of labor in discourses of gatekeeping. it takes work to spread information & tell people about things -- especially if you're trying to move thru the most intimate, peer-to-peer channels as such. gatekeeping can be a response to this of, just not having the time or energy to constantly be telling everyone about all the things that could be pertinent to them (choosing to keep some things to yourself). i think this too can be a matter of negotiation; sometimes you may have more energy, motive, and cue for passion to circulate information whereas others u have to just gatekeep as it were. gatekeeping can in this sense be a response to burnout culture of present day, of coming home from work and class so tired and out of breath every day, of saying, i'm going to refuse engagement with these xyz systems to put myself first in this moment and this regard
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i believe i'm undervaluing in this consideration the role that cultural capital can play in these discourses. i'm aware that part of the reason that gatekeeping discourses exist is because people can like to feel like or be one of the only people knowing about a good piece of art. ways of narrating this can be that it is about being a part of an exclusive, perk-granting in group-- proliferating information about this art seems, in this thinking, to threaten exclusivity. one metanarrative for explaining this, though, would be to say that it is inflected by some kind of selfishness- about wanting to own a thing to the exclusion of others (this is Mine, You can't have it). this may be the case in some cases and probably is, nevertheless, i feel that it probably is not functional enough a metanarrative as to explain all the reasons why someone may be engaging in such a practice. exclusion can be motivated by selfishness but it could also be motivated by a want for intimacy. if something opens up to a wider stage, it can be that the tight knit community that emerged around it (connecting at first on the level of that they are having in common their knowledge about and appreciation of this thing and then extending from that engagement and community with others). and probably there are still others that i'm not of mind enough to think out right now. that there are other reasons, though, is not meaning it's verboten to examine/reexamine if there can be other ways of moving that can fulfill the same needs/desires and also move toward the positives i glossed in the anti-gatekeeping steelman of what that engagement can produce.
though not necessarily implied in what i have written, i have intended the tl;dr of this to be that i am gatekeeping agnostic -- i think there can be positive and negative readings of this non-action & i can understand why people both would and would not gatekeep; at the same time, it can be helpful to continue to negotiate and renegotiate terms of engagement in these ways so as to produce... xyz
my ultimate point, though, is intended that a perspective of pure pro- or anti-gatekeeping is likely not feasible in a truly long term sense. there will necessarily be movement between the poles. i cannot say, though, which one should be appealed to more
someone else had replied to my comment originally and filled out the discourse further, but i guess maybe they deleted their comment now or something, cuz anyways when i went back to look for it again, it was gone :shrug:, but i guess take that as to say there r still places 2 expand upon this discourse
and then, i suppose in an attempt to uphold the framework i've outline here, i will recommend Girls Rituals' album, "I'm It!". I find this LP consistently electrifying in what it allows me to think and say and express -- not only personally but also poltiically. it is one of the most radically minded albums of the last few years and i think a considered engagement with it will give you tools to understand at least the world (and the violences of the ongoing regimes of fascism, neo-imperialism, neo-colonialism and so forth; especially as they intersect with music industries, but that's for another day) if not also to understand more about yourself (how our selves are coming to be formed in this world; our new selves; the ones being produced by the state and the ones we can yet produce of our own will and community and so forth). a vital piece of art that i would like to share with as many people as i can, in intimate modes of address and exchange when possible.