What I’m noticing is that you keep saying objectivity exists in fiction because objectivity is the will of the author. That we can say the author objectively said XYZ. But a soulist doesn’t believe anything is objective. Not the existence of other people, not our interpretations of their work, and not their ownership of canon.
We don’t actually know that other people exist. It just seems as though treating others with kindness is an important part of living a good life, whether or not they exist. I like playing evil characters in RPGs quite often, but everyone needs to play games where they’re a good guy, and playing life as an evil character seems like too much for anyone’s conscience to bear. Plus, jail and other consequences.
Second, we can’t treat the words of others as objective. We misunderstand the words other people say all the time. We misunderstood Lucas’ intention with the word “balance”, and we’ve misunderstood a lot else. The entire concept of words doesn’t have any objectivity. They’re just shapes on a screen or on an auditory waveform. We choose to give words meaning because it’s useful. That’s soulist thinking too. The word “gubernatorial” isn’t possessed of an objective meaning, it means something because we choose to believe it does.
Third, an author’s ownership over a work is kind of a recent capitalist invention. Copyright law was only invented after the printing press, in order to guarantee businesses would earn the same revenue in a printing world as before. (Or perhaps much more). Nobody acts like Homer owns the Iliad. It’s a cultural myth. Stories used to belong to everyone. Copyright introduced ownership of the means of production to stories. It made myth capitalist. Soulists are anarchists, and we hate that. Writing fanfiction is anarchist praxis, copyright be damned. It’s even more absurd with entities like Disney which appropriate or buy old stories and then claim to control them. Disney shouldn’t get to decide the “canon” of The Avengers or Cinderella.
In all three of these cases, derived from a single statement, belief in objectivity blinds us to the complexity of the world and our agency in building it. Soulists take responsibility for what the world is and how it can be made better. We don’t pretend the world is happening to people, we encourage people to build a better word.
What I’m noticing is that you keep saying objectivity exists in fiction because objectivity is the will of the author. That we can say the author objectively said XYZ. But a soulist doesn’t believe anything is objective. Not the existence of other people, not our interpretations of their work, and not their ownership of canon.
We don’t actually know that other people exist. It just seems as though treating others with kindness is an important part of living a good life, whether or not they exist. I like playing evil characters in RPGs quite often, but everyone needs to play games where they’re a good guy, and playing life as an evil character seems like too much for anyone’s conscience to bear. Plus, jail and other consequences.
Second, we can’t treat the words of others as objective. We misunderstand the words other people say all the time. We misunderstood Lucas’ intention with the word “balance”, and we’ve misunderstood a lot else. The entire concept of words doesn’t have any objectivity. They’re just shapes on a screen or on an auditory waveform. We choose to give words meaning because it’s useful. That’s soulist thinking too. The word “gubernatorial” isn’t possessed of an objective meaning, it means something because we choose to believe it does.
Third, an author’s ownership over a work is kind of a recent capitalist invention. Copyright law was only invented after the printing press, in order to guarantee businesses would earn the same revenue in a printing world as before. (Or perhaps much more). Nobody acts like Homer owns the Iliad. It’s a cultural myth. Stories used to belong to everyone. Copyright introduced ownership of the means of production to stories. It made myth capitalist. Soulists are anarchists, and we hate that. Writing fanfiction is anarchist praxis, copyright be damned. It’s even more absurd with entities like Disney which appropriate or buy old stories and then claim to control them. Disney shouldn’t get to decide the “canon” of The Avengers or Cinderella.
In all three of these cases, derived from a single statement, belief in objectivity blinds us to the complexity of the world and our agency in building it. Soulists take responsibility for what the world is and how it can be made better. We don’t pretend the world is happening to people, we encourage people to build a better word.