Mark Ward Sr

Week 14: Summing Up

2009-04-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

How to sum up a semester of studying Topias through the lens of utopian science fiction? How to tie together works spanning Forster (1905) and Robinson (1992)? How to summarize theories as diverse as classical positivism and posthumanity?

Of course, blogging as a medium is limited to addressing these questions at length. So let me offer a few thoughts that stand out for me as I look back on the semester.

One way of tying together the SF works we have read is how they may (or may not) conform to conventions of utopian literature: the isolated community; the traveler who is shown its marvels; the absence of a money economy and of private property; the stasis of perfection that admits no decline or need for improvement.

Works that may (with qualifications) fit these conventions are Herland, Dr Bloodmoney, The Dispossessed, Woman on the Edge of Time, A Door into Ocean, and Red Mars.

> Herland is the clearest fit with classical utopian conventions, with A Door into Ocean running second

> Dr Bloodmoney begins as a dystopia but might cross over into Utopia if the second half of the book is seen as a journey through a "wondrous" land that evokes Dick's hopeful vision of people who are basically admirable

> The Dispossessed is, as Le Guin admits and we discussed at length in class, an "ambiguous" utopia

> Woman on the Edge of Time presents the utopia of Mattapoisett, by also draws energy from its dystopic visions of 1970s America and of Gildina's alternate world

> Red Mars depicts more of a utopia-in-becoming

Our other readings brought us into the dystopian genre: The Machine Stops, Brave New World, The Sheep Look Up, and Tiptree's short fiction (e.g., "Houston, Houston").

That leaves only Neuromancer, which I can't quite place in the utopia/dystopia continuum. Perhaps this is because Neuromancer is, for reasons discussed in class, a fairly conventional novel. Its reputation derives from bringing SF from outer space to cyberspace.

Another way of tying these works together is with the definition of Utopia I've been developing through my research this semester—namely that secularization is a precondition, along with its concomitant belief in the perfectibility of humankind. Thus, where Paradise is a divine provision, Utopia is built by human hands.

All the utopias we read—those by Gilman, Dick, Le Guin, Piercy, Slonczewski, and Robinson—start with a premise of human perfectibility. And in my mind, this raises two questions:

> Is the corollary proposition that dystopias assume human incorrigibility? Or do authors of dystopias assume that readers, once made aware of dystopic possibilities, can avoid them? I'm not so sure. The Machine Stops, Brave New World, The Sheep Look Up, and "Houston, Houston" all end in defeat. Is this cautionary or does it reflect a pragmatic pessimism?

> Though I'm satisfied with my evolving definition of Utopia (as a response to specific historical conditions, albeit an expression of innate human desires) on the macro level, in the future I may also explore the micro level. Namely, although the concept of Utopia arose with modernity, why does its literary expression come and go over the decades?

There were the Gilded Age utopias of Bellamy, Morris and Wells, followed by a long dry spell until the feminist utopias of the 1970s. Why the hiatus? If the basic concept of Utopia is tied to the historical conditions of modernity, are its contemporary coming and goings also tied to historical conditions?

That is, why did the conditions of the Gilded Age give rise to Bellamy, Morris, and Wells? Why did the conditions of early-to-mid 20th century—that period defined by two world wars—damp down literary expressions of utopia? Why did the conditions of the 1970s and 80s give rise to two successive waves of feminist utopias?

Is there a common thread?

+ How are the 1880s thru 90s (the heyday of Progressivism) similar to the 1970s thru 80s (a high-water mark for feminism)? Were they both periods of relatively peaceful social change and resistance to powerful Establishments, when the striving for human perfectibility was strong?

+ And is there a common thread between the 1910s thru 60s and the 1990s thru 2000s? Are these decades similar in being periods of war and postwar adjustment? The 1910s thru 60s were decades of unprecedented upheaval through war. The 1990s thru 2000s saw the end of an unprecedented 50-year Cold War, whose ending permitted long-festering regional hatreds to resurface and become globalized. Does human perfectibility seem less likely in such eras?

Digesting all the theories I encountered this semester will take me awhile. I found Jameson (even his semiotic squares!) and Garrard accessible. On the other hand, continental philosophers (LeFebvre, de Certeau, Foucault, Heidegger) are still somewhat of a struggle for me.

Continental philosophy becomes gradually easier as I find incremental opportunities to work these perspectives into my own research projects—for example, Foucault's views on discourse, discipline, and ethics are proving helpful for my dissertation. Yet these are not "Eureka" moments but a process that occurs over time.

So let me wrap up with some "takeaways" from this course . . .

> I got a paper that I hope is presentable and publishable

> I received a broad-brush introduction to the interesting scholarly conversations going on in utopian studies, so that I now have the foundation for another research interest on which I can write and publish more in the future

> Though my MA is in Comm Studies, my (1970s) undergraduate degree was in English Lit; so I had the experience of, in a sense, "returning to my roots" and taking a literature class for the first time in 30 years, getting reacquainted with the literature side of English Studies that may be part of the departmental world I will inhabit in the future

> Finally, after starting out the course with a longtime personal interest in SF, I read a lot of good books that I enjoyed and found intellectually stimulating and challenging, many of which I may (because I'm an inveterate "re-reader" of my personal library) revisit for years to come

Week 13: Robinson, Again

2009-04-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Let's begin this week with a brief overview of commentaries on the Mars trilogy and the work of KSR. Then I'll delve into an interesting question on which two commentators disagreed.

> Many of the commentaries (Dynes, Markley, Otto, Burling) took on various facets of the Red/Green debate and its sociopolitical ramifications. Ho hum. I got a lot of plot summary, though this was helpful in sketching out the last two-thirds of the trilogy which I haven't read. And I learned more about Ann and Sax who, as the respective allegories for the Red and Green positions, were the characters most frequently cited in these critiques.

> But these four articles disappointed in several ways:

+ Markley centered his analysis on KSR's "eco-economics" but without really explaining it

+ Otto gives more detail on eco-economics, but he uses Leopold's "land ethic" as a framework for interpreting the Mars trilogy without establishing that Leopold was important for KSR

+ Burling uses Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Social Strategy as an interpretive framework but without establishing that L&M were important for KSR, so that Burling's analysis becomes an appropriation of KSR to argue for his own politics

+ Dynes doesn't really suggest anything new, though he tangentially points out something I think is important—namely KSR's doctoral dissertation which describes Dick's "polyphonic narrative structure," so that we see the influence of PKD in the multiple viewpoint characters employed in the Mars trilogy

+ As a group, these four articles don't really take us much beyond the Red/Green impasse

> Nevertheless, agree with him or not, Markley easily wins the prize for getting off the best one-liner . . .

The trilogy ends on a beach with children eating ice cream . . . The technologies of terraformation offer, ultimately, a vision of small-town life, or such a life experienced in an ecologically pristine equivalent of Santa Barbara: scenic beauty, good restaurants.

What a hoot! And of course, Santa Barabara is just a few counties up the road from KSR's native Orange County, California.

> White easily offered the most helpful and nuanced analysis, taking us beyond Red/Green and (with a nice assist from Greimassian semantic rectangles) offers a nuanced yet clear analysis of . . .

+ the Red/Green/White/Blue metaphors in the Mars trilogy (p. 586)

+ the contrasting worldviews of the initial main characters (p. 590)

+ the contrasts between Boone and Chalmers (p. 598)

+ the functioning of Boone as a mythic questing hero (pp. 589, 594)

Since Jameson is a fan of Greimas, and KSR is a student of Jameson—to the point that KSR even puts semantic rectangles into the text of the Mars trilogy—then White's use of the rectangles provides us legitimate insights into the author's possible thinking

> Franko provides a nice summation of KSR's early pre-Mars work. Here we find that longevity treatments play a much larger role, as people live 500 or even 1000 years but lose their memories every 80 years or so. The plots KSR builds on this are quite interesting. And we also learn that major characters named "Clayborne" turn up in two prior works.

Now let's move onto the "interesting question" which I cited at the outset:

> Leane gives a very nice discussion of science and colonialism, demonstrating how the two discourses have historically gone hand-in-hand. The term "scientific discovery" itself implies an act of colonization. Having studied the rhetoric of science last semester, Leane's analysis opens for me a new perspective as her citations introduce me to the literature on "successor science."

Thus Leane sees KSR and his Mars trilogy as exploring the possibilities for a "successor science" that avoids the old link between science and colonialism

> But Michaels asks how the Mars trilogy can be viewed as postcolonial in its sensibilities when the Martians are themselves colonists. It's like, he says, the American colonists of yore claiming to be natives. He suggests the Martians' moral argument instantiates a lamentable claim that "the difference between someone who is here (Mars) and someone who is there (Earth) can do the trick" (p. 660).

Thoughts, anyone?

Chapter 12: Robinson, Jameson

2009-04-04T20:24:00.000-07:00

First, let me lay my cards on the table. Anticipating that I would need to read Sterling, I finished Red Mars a couple weeks ago. So it will be difficult for me to limit my discussion of Robinson only to his first 300 pages.

Instead, this week I will post some thoughts prompted by the Jameson chapter on the Mars trilogy. Then next week my post will explore insights suggested by the PDF articles found on Blackboard.

Jameson's observations accord with three points that recurred to me throughout reading Red Mars:

> The main characters function as allegories. In my view, this often got in the way of character development. I was reminded of religious fiction that I've read where (albeit to a far greater degree) characters are wooden figures whose actions are predictable. As other works we have read in this course (including last week's Ocean) will suggest, wooden allegorical characters are not necessarily de rigueur for utopian/dystopian fiction.

> The word "disquisition," used by Jameson, is exactly the same word that constantly came to my mind in reading Robinson's lengthy forays into hard science. While I admire his homework and (as Elisa assured us) know more about Mars than I did before the book, personally I find his disquisitions rather plodding.

> But I want to focus for the rest of this blog entry on Jameson's observation (which I echoed in a comment about Red Mars in last week's post) about the process of secularization described in the book. For one thing, secularization is a major issue in the scholarly discussions of Utopia which I have reviewed for my final paper.

Regarding this secularization Jameson writes:

What is important . . . is less the issue of causality . . . than it is the evocation of resistance: external reality organizes itself into a problem . . . whose nature poses a problem only insofar as it raises a question about its own coming into existence in the first place, about the very why of its happening. . . .

[This] moves us away from the standard history-of-ideas notion of the central role of the emergence of modern science . . . [and moves us toward] assimilat[ing] science to non-scientific activity and daily life as such. [My note: Latour has called this assimilation "technoscience."] Science thereby becomes only one of the byproducts of this increasingly specified "resistance" of reality, and not particularly even its primary agency, in a process we would do better to describe in terms of secularization.

For it is secularization as such which forestalls the easier answers of the theological or the traditional, the symbolic or the mythic . . . At the same time, this initial moment of secularization also precludes . . . the confusions that result when we are able to begin wondering about the very source of the answers themselves . . . (pp. 397-398)

Jameson's observation here is prompted by the character of Sax Russell who declaims that he wants to "try to understand" by "concentrating on the specificity of every moment," to "tease those reasons out" lest he by vexed by "the great unexplainable."

Let me try to translate. On Mars, conventional modernism won't do. The new planet is so complex and bewildering, its reality resists modernist cause-and-effect reasoning. Rather than wonder about causality, Russell must ponder why the realities and problems of Mars exist in the first place. Scientific and non-scientific activity are necessarily assimilated into the realism of the observable here and now. This process, which Jameson calls secularization, is necessary. For if the New Martians "begin wondering about the very source of the answers themselves," hopeless confusion will set in.

Boone and Chalmers are realists; they just want a pragmatic Martian polity that "works" and disdain metaphysics. In contrast, Jameson points to Ann Clayborne's transcendant Gaia-like worship of pristine Mars and to Hiroko's functionally similar conviction that "social cohesion is cemented by re-ligio, and therefore the unique relationship the settlers need to develop to Mars must be sealed and stengthened by ritual attachment to the planet" (p. 408). [For a discussion of the Gaia Hypothesis in the contemporary eco-movement see Garrard, pp. 172-175.]

Thus Jameson notes, "But it is obviously as the spiritual leader of the Greens that the figure of Hiroko takes on an ideological meaning comparable to Ann's" (p. 408).

For this reason I would propose that, rather than see in the Mars trilogy only the tension between Reds and Greens, a major source of the books' conflict is that between myth and transcendance (represented in their own ways by Ann and Hiroko) on the one hand, and realism and secularization (represented by, among others, Boone and Chalmers) on the other.

As I blogged last week, the secularizing impulse of Red Mars offers a stark contrast to Slonczewski's Sharers who celebrate spiritually derived values and (to repeat Jameson) recognize that "social cohesion is cemented by re-ligio." Jameson's italicized reference here is to the Latin derivation of the word "religion" from religare, "to tie back" (yes, I took four years of Latin). Our word "ligament" derives from the same Latin root, ligare, "to bind."

And how does this discussion connect with my final paper?

My readings have delved into, among other things, the scholarly controversy regarding the very definition of Utopia. Many have suggested a difference between Paradise (a religious concept ushered in by God) and Utopia (a secular concept ushered in by human effort). Here is an adapted excerpt from my second short paper:

Kumar (1978) argues that, as Zhang (2002) summarizes, "utopia is [not a universal human impulse but] a uniquely modern concept that emerged in specific historical conditions. The core of the utopian vision is a fundamental secularism, defined against the medieval and Augustinian idea of the original sin; and its prerequisite, the idea of an essentially good human nature or at least the perfectibility of human nature" (pp. 4-5).

Further, More wrote his Utopia at a time when discovery of the New World had given rise to the travelogue as a literary form. Thus, out of a general human striving for betterment, the function of Utopia emerged in the West as a response to secularization while its form came ready-made in the travelogue. Then, like Yalçintaş' (2006) example of digital media still driven by the QWERTY keyboard, the utopian genre developed along the path set by its antecedents. Thus Kumar (1978) concludes,

"[U]topia is not universal. It appears only in societies with the classical and Christian heritage, that is, only in the West. Other societies have, in relative abundance, paradises, primitivist myths of a Golden Age of justice and equality, Cokaygne-type fantasies, even messianic beliefs; they do not have utopia" (p. 19).

Interestingly, Zhang [a Chinese scholar writing about the Utopian concept in the East] disagrees with Kumar's conclusion but accepts Kumar's basic premise. He argues that China did develop a concept of utopia but explains that, as in the West, secularization of Chinese culture was the necessary precondition.

The secularizing influence was the rise of Confucianism. Its founder, Confucius, is seen in his Analects as "a thinker largely concerned with the reality of this life rather than afterlife" and "rather ambivalent about gods and spirits," who believes "the way back to ancient perfection is not through faith or divine intervention . . . but by a vigorous human effort at the present, in this world" (Zhang, 2002, pp. 7-8).

If this line of argument is correct then Robinson's trilogy could be Utopian only if his vision is secular. Ann Clayborne's Reds would commune with sublime Wilderness [see Garrard, chap. 4] and Hiroko's Greens would commune with Life. Their visions are transcendant Paradises, not human-built secular Utopias. Boone, Chalmers, Russell and their followers are the realists who seek not transcendant communion but prefer understanding to wonder.

-----

REFERENCES

Kumar, K. (1978). Utopia and anti-utopia in modern times. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

Yalçintaş, A. (2006). Historical small events and the eclipse of utopia: Perspectives on path dependence in human thought. Culture, Theory, and Critique, 47(1), 53-70.

Zhang, L. (2002). The utopian vision, east and west. Utopian Studies, 13(1), 1-20.

Week 11: Slonczewski, Dwelling

2009-03-26T09:14:00.001-07:00

A Door into Ocean was a delightful read. But beyond giving a plot summary or simply rhapsodizing about my enjoyment of the work, what can I add to a critique of Door? How can I use Door as an opportunity to understand the utopian genre better?

Thus, as I finished the book, several questions came to my mind:

> Why is Door not generally mentioned in articles we've read so far on feminist utopias?

> Is Door, in fact, really a feminist utopia at all? Is it better seen as a feminist ecotopia, or simply an ecotopia, or a pacifist utopia?

> Does Door fit Gearhart's (1984) definition of feminist utopia? Or fit the descriptions of ecofeminism found in Garrard (2004, pp. 23-27) and in Deegan and Podeschi (2001)?

So I began by searching for journal articles about Door. Not much, in fact, shows up in the article database about Slonczewski in general and Door in particular. But I did find one very good article:

Fitting, P. (1992). Reconsiderations of the separatist paradigm in recent feminist science fiction. Science Fiction Studies, 19(1), 32-48.

Notice the word "reconsiderations" in the article title. Fitting places Door (1986), along with Pamela Sargent's The Shore of Women (1986) and Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country (1988), as 1980s responses to the feminist utopias of the 1970s. He writes that

the three are very much replies to and reworkings of the central themes of the feminist utopias of the 1970s. A central concern of many of those works was understanding and explaining the violence of patriarchal forms and values. The utopias of the 1970s presented a range of explanations for male violence, grouped roughly around an "essentialist" pole . . . and a more materialist one, according to which male violence is socially produced . . . In any event, the novels of the 1970s often had answers to questions about the differences between men and women and the roots of violence, whereas the novels of the late 1980s are not so certain. At the same time, efforts to break down or blur the differences between men and women . . . have by and large disappeared; and the earlier ideal of "androgyny" is now recognized as a depoliticization and desexualization of the body rather than as a utopian fusion of male and female (p. 33).

Fitting offers an interesting critique of Door's pacifism. You should read it. In the end, while he finds it moving and almost convincing, Fitting believes the happy ending of Door seems contrived. (Slonczewski admits in her website that she changed to ending in order to get her book published and wishes her original ending could have been used.) But in juxtaposing Slonczewski's 1980s utopia to her feminist forebears of the 1970s, Fitting points out,

Although Slonczewski's vision distinguishes between male and female values, this is not ultimately tied to biological sex. There is no essential difference between men and women. Spinel . . . finds a Shoran partner/lover and becomes a full member of Sharer society. . . . On the other hand, the invading Valan troops include both men and women, and Commander Realgar's "interrogator" (or torturer) is a woman. The novel makes a clear distinction between values and plumbing (pp. 40-41).

This distinction extends to technology:

Nor does the juxtaposition of male and female values repeat the essentialist rejection of technology as male . . . The crucial distinction is rather between a machine and what might be called an "organic" technology . . . [T]he emphasis on female values has led to imaginary communities which pay special attention to the "life" sciences like medicine and biology, which are opposed to men's skill with war technology.

Fitting also sees that the 1980s utopias adopt a different strategy than those of the 1970s:

In contrast to the utopias of the 1970s, these three novels do not focus on the evocation of alternative societies in any literal sense. . . . In their dialogue with the utopias of the 1970s, then, these three novels blend literal representations of alternative patterns of life with more rhetorical and figurative evocations of a transformed world. . . . Their very titles—"gate," "door," "shore"—call attention to the transition; each text identifies itself as the representation of a fictional world which, unlike the relative certainty of the '70s' utopias, stands on the edge of or in between the old and the new. Whereas the earlier utopias . . . adopted textual strategies which sought to implicate the reader in the struggle for a better society, rather than simply juxtaposing the utopian society—explicitly or implicitly—with the present, these three novels all situate themselves in an afterwards. . . [T]hese later [1980s] novels, insofar as they stage the reconciliation of men and women, clearly refer to the separatism—real or figurative—of some of the '70s' utopias (pp. 41-42).

Finally, Fitting cites Moylan's description of the 1970s feminist utopias as "critical utopias," and argues that the 1980s utopias are, similarly, "critical reexaminations and reworkings of the now-classic utopias of the 1970s" (p. 44).

Thus we come to the question: Is Door a feminist utopia at all? Here we should recall Gearhart's (1984) definition of a feminist utopia as one that:

> Contrasts the present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time and space)

> Offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions

> Sees men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills

> Presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions

Using these criteria, Door is not a feminist utopia. Men or male institutions are not seen as a major cause of present social ills; instead, Door opposes values rather than sexes.

Nor does Door draw explicit contrasts with "the present" and with "present social ills" in the way that, for example, Piercy does. At the time of its composition, Slonczewski explains on her website, "My aim in writing A Door into Ocean was to give students a window into a hopeful future." Only now, in hindsight and "ironically," does Door "give today's post-Cold War students a look back at our dark past."

So is Door an example of ecofeminism? According to Deegan and Podeschi,

Ecofeminists stress the interconnectedness of life, nature, and the environment with the world view of women and reproductive capacity. Ecofeminists also examine the relationship between women's social oppression and nature's exploitation as two faces of patriarchal control (p. 19).

Door may be "ecofeminist" on the first count, that of stressing interconnections. But on Deegan and Podeschi's second count, which links oppression and exploitation to patriarchy, then Door is not ecofeminist. Yes, the distant interplanetary ruler in Door is called the Patriarch. And yet, as Fitting points out, in Slonczewski the domineering power is not specifically male.

Deegan and Podeschi's article claims that the pedigree of ecofeminism traces back to Gillman and Herland. But Gillman's book is an attempt to suggest that women can do whatever men can do, if permitted the freedom. By contrast, Door is not about women in a biological sense, but about the capacity for female Sharer values to achieve an advanced yet humane society.

Yet Garrard give us a different definition of ecofeminism:

Deep ecology identifies the anthropocentric dualism humanity/nature as the ultimate source of anti-ecological beliefs and practices, but ecofeminism also blames the androcentric dualism man/woman. . . . Ecofeminism involves the recognition that these two [dualisms] share a common "logic of domination" (p. 23).

By Garrard's definition, Door may be seen as ecofeminist. In the world of Shora, humanity and nature cooperate in a non-dualistic web of life. And in the societies of Shora and Valedon, social roles are not strictly gendered. Males can adopt female Sharer values (Spinel); females can adopt male Valan values (Jade). Even the dualism organic/inorganic breaks down as the Sharers learn how minerals are vital components of life.

Now let's look a moment at Slonczewski's website. Some thoughts . . .

> The chart of polarities and binaries that are resolved in Door is quite useful. And it set me to wondering two things: (1) Could these be expressed in Greimas semantic squares? (2) Does the focus on binaries mark Door as an essentially modernist work? Even if dualisms are challenged and resolved, it does seem that dualisms set the agenda.

> Having read Dune numerous times (though not lately) I can readily see how Door is a response to Herbert's universe.

> Slonczewski's personal asides—how she conceived of raft trees, how she had to compromise in order to get published—are very interesting and illuminating.

> The amount of space given to explaining pacifist principles leads me to believe that Door could arguably be read as principally a pacifist utopia. If the humanity/nature and man/woman dualisms share a common logic of domination, then wouldn't the most salient rejoinder be a logic of nonviolence?

> This emphasis on pacifism and spiritual values is in sharp contrast to Red Mars, which I've nearly finished reading. In Red Mars, religion and spirituality is virtually absent in the group of the First Hundred and their early society. Then as Mars develops, religion and spiritually are reduced to cultural eccentricities that stand in the way of achieving a humane new order. Of all the books we've read so far, Door seems to have the most sympathy for religious and spiritual values as integral to a humane society.

As for the Garrard and Heidegger readings . . .

Reading Heidegger was, as usual, pretty thick reading and at times impenetrable. But the Garrard reading was the most enjoyable chapter of Ecocriticism so far!

Most of you know my research interest in Holocaust Studies. So it's tough for me to read Heidegger and completely divorce him from history. Garrard did a deft job of summarizing the Nazification of Heidegger's views on dwelling. It was refreshing to read a critique of Heidegger that skipped the customary obeisance and dared to call out Heidegger's shame.

Having grown up with the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign and the tearful Iron Eyes Cody, I found Garrard's incisive critique of the Ecological Indian to also be refreshing. Of course this is a stereotype being appropriated by the establishment. But few have been willing, like Garrard, to point this out.

Neither have I made a secret of being a person of faith. So I found Garrard's critique of Berry to be very interesting. In evangelical circles there is a generational conversation going on between older leaders (e.g., James Dobson) who want to keep the movement's focus on hot-button social issues and newer leaders (e.g., Rick Warren) who want to also address broader issues of social concern such as poverty and the environment.

This conversation was illustrated a few years ago when some younger evangelicals mounted a "WWJD" campaign, where WWJD stood not for "What Would Jesus Do?" but rather "What Would Jesus Drive?" So I'll check out Berry and be interested to learn more about his Christian philosophy of dwelling.

Week 10: Gibson, Cyberpunk

2009-03-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

Star Wars is often described as a Western set in a SF universe. Truth be told, I kept wondering whether Gibson's Neuromancer should be similarly interpreted.

My ponderings began with the early and recurrent use of the term "cowboy" to describe Case and his breed of freespirited cyberspatial frontiersmen. Gibson was invoking for his imagined world the enormous power that the frontier myth exerts on American culture.

I tried to imagine myself reading Neuromancer in 1984. Its references to carbon ribbon, computer paper and tape storage, and its assumption that all connections must be wired and the human-computer interface keyboarded, would not have seemed archaic as they do today.

So, yes, I can readily see how Gibson's vision of cyberspace and his move to situate an SF story not in outer space but in a computer matrix, would have appeared groundbreaking and full of new possibilities.

Yet for all that, I found Neuromancer to be rather conventional, a frontier narrative for the computer age. Yes, I understand why we, looking back, read our own preoccupations with postmodern identity, with cyborgs and simulacra, into Neuromancer. Nor do I deny that such readings have merit. Part of Gibson's influence is that he created a prototype world that still works as a canvas onto which we can project our concerns.

But despite the merits of Davidson's invocation of Baudrillardian simulation—and references by multiple commentators to Harraway's Cyborg Manifesto—neither should we miss how Gibson updated the frontier myth in a story with many cowboy Western elements:

> The "hired gun" (Molly) and "faithful sidekick" who is an ethnic Other and speaks pidgin (Maelcum)

> The beloved "horse" (Case's deck) to whom the hero is emotionally attached and that takes the cowboy on swift rides across fantastic frontier landscapes

> The saloon (Ratz's bar in Chiba City) which, of course, was sent up in the famous Mos Eisley scene in Star Wars

> The tension between frontier and border (ably described in Concannon's article) which in Western films (Shane is an arch example) is often played out as a conflict between cattlemen and settlers

> The High Noon shootout between hero and villain, and even the captured maiden who is freed when the hero rides to the rescue

> The ending where the good guys, having finished their task, go their separate ways and ride back to the wild country from whence they came ("Who was that masked man?")

If you fault my reading for not going gaga over simulations and cyborgs, consider that my reading finds some support in the articles we perused for this week:

> Concannon explores the salience of the borderland in Gibson. Cyberspace functions, he concludes, as a "trope" that "reflects a balancing of impossibility and possibility" (p. 441), which is simply another way of expressing the frontier myth.

> While Davidson (p. 192) only notes in the portmanteau "Neuromancer" a cross between neuro and necromancer, Jones points out that the AI of the novel also saw itself as a New Romancer. The SF works of Aldiss, Gibson, Sterling, and Powers have distinct romantic element, Jones argues, perhaps even updating the 19th century romantic tradition.

> Moylan (as quoted by Fair) pans Neuromancer for seeking "refuge in recognizable film noir plots and macho heroes already embedded in the dominant ideology" (p. 97) and—as I too immediately noticed—the instantiation of Maelcum as "basically a humorous sidekick in the ignoble popular culture tradition of Pancho and the Cisco Kid or Tonto and the Lone Ranger" (p. 100).

Young people today might miss these associations, but readers in 1984 would not. Perhaps the closest we come is the allegation that the Jar Jar Binks character introduced in Star Wars Episode 1 is a racist stereotype.

> Several commentators see Neuromancer as modernist, rather than postmodern, in its sensibilities. As quoted by Fair (p. 102 n4):

Scott Bukatman argues that cyberspace achieves the modern ideal of a body dissolved into pure motion and perfect mechanized efficiency. Tony Fabijancic argues that the architecture of both Gibson's cyberspace and nineteenth-century urban spaces "[contribute] fundamentally to a wider moern rhetoric of being and thinking." N. Katherine Hayles writes . . . [that Gibson's] "narrator characterizes the posthuman body as 'data made flesh.' To the extent that the posthuman constructs embodiment as the instantiation of thought/information, it continues the liberal tradition rather than disrupts it."

> In this vein, I was struck by Fernbach's suggestion that Neuromancer has a "conservative dynamic" that belies the "democratizing rhetoric that surrounds the new technology of the internet" and which "tells us that gender and race are not fixed in this space." Instead, she suggests, "The notion that online personas transcend social and cultural hierarchies remains a utopian myth" (p. 248). Thus,

Despite being hailed as the apotheosis of postmodernism, cyberpunk uses the familiar Freudian narrative of a return to the wholeness of the pre-oedipal to discuss the crisis of contemporary masculinity. In cyberpunk, fears about the intrusive potential of technology are displaced anxieties about changes in the social order both now and in future worlds--changes that have already begun to threaten a stable, unified masculine identity that presents itself as the universal subject (p. 249).

> Myers makes a fascinating comparison—which, again, I too picked up—between Neuromancer and detective fiction, especially the atomized urban spaces of Gibson's Sprawl and of Conan Doyle's fogbound London and Chandler's steamy Los Angeles. But I also saw in Neuromancer a connection with the spy thriller genre, a genre that in 1984 (after the 1960s spy genre mania and before Tom Clancy) seemed dated and quaint.

But whether we see elements of film noir, detective fiction or spy thriller in Neuromancer, to me the important point is the one element common to all three genres and to westerns and frontier narratives—namely the archetypal American hero, the loner who keeps going against all odds, all opposition, and finally wins victory and vindication by his/her ingenuity and will power.

> Nixon picks up on this aspect of the quintessential American loner-hero when she writes,

Cyberpunk's fascination with and energetic figuration of technology represents the American cowboy as simultaneously embattled and empowered. In '80s America the Japanese megacorporations did dominate the technological market, but the cowboy's freedom and ingenuity allow him to compete purely on the level of mastery . . . [pitting] pragmnatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity (p. 225).

So far all these reasons, while I can see why Neuromancer is influential as the progenitor of the cyberpunk genre, the work itself impresses me as conventional.

P.S. I checked out Garrard's Ecocriticism and was surprised there appears (at least in the "Wilderness" chapter) to be no discussion of frontier myths. Did I miss something?

Week 8: Sheldon/Tiptree

2009-02-27T22:32:00.000-08:00

How very interesting this week! Why? Though readings in past weeks have held their own attractions, this week's readings on Tiptree were different in several respects:

> We read a half dozen short stories rather than a single novel

> As such, we got to read works that represent the body of an author's work over time

> By the same token, we read critiques of the author's entire body of work rather than a single work

> And because we were evaluating a body of work, details of the author's biography became important to the analysis

So this week my own comments are more directed to the panoply of criticism we read, because the differences in interpretations—and in interpretive approaches—was quite interesting.

(For example, most commentators say Lorimer was killed at the end of "Houston," but Lowry claims the drug given Lorimer was the antidote to the truth serum. And while most critiques of "The Women Men Don't See" assert that Parsons seeks escape through alien abduction, Lowry suggests Parsons is herself a stranded alien anxious to get home.)

To my mind, Pei asks the key question:

Are these cautionary tales, or is their goal to show that the human race is irremediably split by the barrier between male and female? Are these stories simply the extreme statement of what we should avoid, or is their purpose to prove that mankind [sic; this article was written in 1979] is ruled by drives . . . ? (p. 278)

Thus let me begin with Pei's article.

> Pei was, for my money, the most successful in drawing together a unifying theme in Tiptree's body of work:

This incompleteness [of male and female], a fundamental characteristic of humanity according to Tiptree, is clearly a two-sided quality. Mankind is made more beautiful and more human by being half of something; yet the race is doomed, and its history reduced to pointlessness by being half of something. This kind of paradoxical doubleness is found throughout the themes of Tiptree's work. To be human is to be half of something (p. 272).

And how does Pei resolve the question of whether Tiptree's stories are cautionary tales or affirmations of an irremediable split between male and female? Pei concludes that Tiptree's corpus is a duality so that the question is never resolved.

Is that a cop-out? No, I'm prepared to accept that Tiptree wrestled with an unresolvable duality. Being only half of something, don't we all?

> Barr offers an extended discussion of "Love is the Plan" as a way of pondering, as did Tiptree, "why the plots of many love stories are enhanced by the woman's death" and if the "destruction of women which sometimes results from their sexual connection to men [is] part of the biological plan of reproduction" (p. 47).

What a thought-provoking perspective, one which did not initially occur to me in my reading. But when I read Barr's observation, my immediate reaction was to note, "Yes, love stories are often enhanced by the woman's death. But war stories as just as often enhanced by the man's death. Is it significant that women die in love stories and men die in war stories?"

Though Barr recognizes that "men and women must live as two distinct and separate biological entities which come together to reproduce before breaking apart," she contends that "we must derive hope [for male-female coexistence] from Tiptree's true identity" (p. 47).

Yet this amounts to a claim that Tiptree/Sheldon's life shows us a move toward resolving the duality. Here I must disagree, side with Pei, and assert that Tiptree's writings and biography suggests the duality remained unresolved (and thus in productive tension) for the author.

> Steffen-Fluhr gives us an informative description of Tiptree/Sheldon's early life, providing a helpful biographical context for the observation, "There are few human women at all in most of Sheldon's early stories [but] there are metaphorical women everywhere" (p. 193).

But just to show how people can read the same words and draw different conclusions, Steffen-Fluhr offers a very different take on duality in Tiptree: "To 'come home' in Sheldon's fiction means to 'be at home' with all the many selves in one's self—to be complete, whole, at peace" (p. 194).

Again, this suggestion is far different than Pei's thesis that humans in Tiptree's work are incomplete and irremediably split in a duality that has no resolution.

Yet Steffen-Fluhr's extended discussion of "Love is the Plan" (pp. 199-202) is quite helpful. Her critique explores the themes of psychomachia (dialogue between various parts of the Self), biology and social behavior, love and devouring, love and possession/bondage, male egocentricity, death and orgasm, erotic and maternal love, change and adaptation.

An extended discussion of "Houston, Houston" (pp. 205-208) is similarly helpful and also introduces a larger exploration by Steff-Fluhr of how "the structure of suicide is the hidden subtext in a number of Sheldon's best stories." Later she notes how "suicide and survival are often link in Sheldon's fiction" as "characters frequently kill themselves in order to save themselves" (p. 208).

But how do we reconcile Steffen-Fluhr's earlier assertion that "coming home" and being at peace with one's self is a theme in Tiptree's work, with her assertion that the stories show how their author "especially feared the disorder that comes from within" (p. 208)?

Nevertheless, Steffen-Fluhr does a nice job of tracing the themes of disorder and death in Tiptree's later works.

> Two articles that focus on specific aspects of Tiptree/Sheldon's biography are offered by Elms and Galef.

The Elms piece is a fine example of bringing our a lesser-known phase of the author's life—namely her years as a psychologist—giving us a thick description of the phase, and then using it as a helpful new lens to illuminate aspects of Tiptree's writing.

The Galef piece brings to bear the literatures on postcolonialism and sociobiology as a lens to explore the tension in Tiptree between cultural relativism and biological determinism. As a child Tiptree/Sheldon was widely exposed to many cultures, but her later work as an experimental psychologist examined the link between biology and behavior.

> Finally, the Larbalestier biography of Tiptree/Sheldon is quite helpful in providing contexts for interpreting the body of the author's work.

In the end, I was also impressed by similarities between Sheldon's biography and mine. She and I spent important parts of our lives tied into the government and university scene around Washington DC. And (if I did my math correctly) she received her PhD at the same age I hope to receive mine.

Though our worldviews and politics are different, I was left with the impression of Sheldon as a writer and a person who struggled honestly with dualities we all face. As such, I've learned from her and from the critiques of her work, and gained some new perspectives.

In my own worldview I might call the root problem by another name (theologians call it "original sin" or "the Fall") but I too ponder the separation between peoples that, I believe, has resulted from the separation between the human and the divine. But new perspectives and insights other than one's own are always instructive, so that Sheldon's struggles with duality speak to me.

Week 7: Piercy, Feminist Utopia

2009-02-20T18:54:00.000-08:00

Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (WET) is the subject of several essays which I reviewed this week. Among these I found:

> Ferns ("Dreams of Freedom") usefully describes the development of the traditional utopia and, thus, provides a helpful context in which to better understand LeGuin's and Piercy's departures from that tradition.

> Booker ("Edge of a Genre") offers a nice analysis of how Piercy "draws the lines between utopia and dystopia quite clearly, and the resultant dialogue between the two is an important source of energy for the book" (p. 340).

> Moylan argues that WET neatly navigates the time paradox in a very tidy fashion that, frankly, I did not discern in my own reading.

Though I do not share Piercy's politics, this is not the space to debate them. Yet I readily tip my hat to the author's literary accomplishment in innovating the utopian genre. So with these observations as a setup, this week I will explore two questions:

1. How well does WET navigate what Jameson calls "The Barrier of Time" and how does her solution compare with other sf universes?

2. Our in-class discussion last week about "conservative utopias" prompted me to take a page from Gearhart ("Feminist Utopias in Review") and see if, in a similar way, I could devise a template for defining conservative utopian fiction. Or is "conservative utopia" an oxymoron since "conserving" and "change" are opposites?

I. THE BARRIER OF TIME

Time travel stories have always held a special fascination and enjoyment for me. So I've read and viewed numerous sf treatments of this subgenre.

In his chapter on Piercy, Moylan confidently tells us that the future residents of Mattapoisett deliberately intervened in 1976 to set in motion a chain of events that would lead to revolution and ultimate victory.

But my reading did not see the time paradox as being tied up so neatly. It appeared to me that Luciente and her cohorts never articulate their time travel project so explicitly as Moylan makes out, nor identify Connie as "the" key to their future.

Consider: When Luciente encourages Connie to attempt a second escape, Luciente accepts Connie's admonishment that Luciente doesn't know the odds and is indulging in heroic fantasy. Further, though Luciente encourages Connie in general to resist, Luciente makes no specific attempt to arrange the poisoning incident.

Instead I was constantly bothered throughout WET that, besides one or two weak protestations, Luciente and her cohorts meddled in the past with little apparent concern (as they say in sf) "polluting the timeline."

This brings me to the different ways I have seen time treated in sf works:

> In Wells' The Time Machine (1895), the Time Traveler describes to his friends how objects must have four dimensions to exist: length, width, height, and duration. Why, then, can we not travel along the fourth dimension as we do the other three? (Wells later admitted that sf, to be convincing, must have some suitable patter at such moments.)

> In Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952), reputed to be the most re-published short story in sf, a time traveler to the Age of Dinosaurs innocently steps on a butterfly and thereby alters the future.

Another such treatment is the classic Star Trek: TOS episode "City on the Edge of Tomorrow" in which McCoy accidently travels to 1930s America and innocently saves the life of a woman who, in the new future, becomes a pacifist leader and delays US entry into WW2, thereby leading to a Nazi victory and an alternate future without space travel.

In film, this "arrow" metaphor of time is seen in The Terminator and in Star Trek: Nemesis, where beasties of the future travel back in time to attack humanity before it has the capacity to resist.

> In Asimov's The End of Eternity (1955), the inventors of time travel establish a society that secretly intervenes to eliminate catastrophe from human history. They compute and then travel to key historical moments of maximum potential change to ensure that history takes the right turn. But their work is ongoing since their interventions are like casting a stone in a pond. The ripples in time occur for a few centuries until the effects gradually decrease and dissipate.

It seemed to me that Luciente and Mattapoisett must have taken this view of time. Rather than see time as an arrow whose deflection changes everything, they see time as an inert mass which can only be stirred in its broad outlines. Thus they could encourage Connie (and others?) to resist as individuals and contribute in small ways to a revolutionary climate, knowing the broad sweep of the future (and their own existences) would be intact in its basic essence.

> In The Time Tunnel (1966), one of my all-time favorite 1960s sf TV classics, the scientists of America's time travel project are positivists to the core. They take dominion over time, as they do over nature, with no compunction. In episodes where two of the scientists are trapped in an untenable situation (e.g., the Alamo) their cohorts of 1968 heroically intervene (yes, in one case even sending modern weapons!) to save the lives of their two colleagues.

> In a late 1980s or early 1990s episode of Star Trek: TNG the crew accidentally creates a "distortion in the time-space continuum" and brings hundreds of thousands of Enterprises into their own space. Time is seen as a series of infinite branchings and these starships, all from different branches, have been unintentionally thrown into the same branch.

> In the movie Somewhere in Time (1980) the hero lives in 1979 but is inexorably drawn to a woman who lived in 1912. So he rents a Victorian hotel room, dresses in period costume, obtains a pocketful of coins from 1912, removes everything in the room dated later than 1912, and merely "thinks" himself into 1912. Mind over matter! My wife and I saw this movie on Valentines Day (it's a perfect date movie) but both agreed that the patter of Wells' 1895 Time Traveler was much more convincing.

Okay, I've indulged in some tripping down memory lane. But this raises two questions:

1. Which of the conceptions of time, as described above, does Piercy adopt in WET?

2. Does it overcome Jameson's "Barrier of Time" and work as a concept for imagining a utopia? If so, why? If not, why not?

II. CONSERVATIVE UTOPIAS?

Gearhart proposes that a feminist utopian fiction is one that . . .

> Contrasts the present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time and space)

> Offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions

> Sees men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills

> Presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions

Now let me propose that a conservative utopian/dystopian fiction is one that . . .

> Contrasts the present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time and space)

> Offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions

> Sees large (Big Labor, Big Business), centralized (Big Government, USSR), elitist (Big Media, Liberal Establishment), or secularized institutions as a major cause of present social ills

> Presents traditional values as under attack

From this definition, let me sketch out a list of utopias/dystopias written or appropriated by conservatives . . .

> Charles Williams wrote seven novels during 1930-37 which, though out of print in his native Britain, are sold in the US by an evangelical publishing house and retain a following in those circles. The books depict worlds in which time and space are transcended. Williams was among the circle of Christian writers that included Tolkien and Lewis.

> Nineteen Eighty-Four and its dystopian vision of Big Brother was, as I can testify, a symbol of Big Government that captured the imaginations of conservatives in the 1970s. Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) was also a favorite fable of anticommunist conservatives.

> Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945) by C. S. Lewis depict, respectively, the utopia of a Venus whose Adam and Eve are saved from the Fall, and the earthbound dystopia of science hijacked by satanic influence.

> The Last Battle (1956), also by Lewis, offers a utopian vision of the afterlife in which heaven is depicted as a mountain, but the mountain gets bigger the higher you go, and each successive level is more "real" than the previous level.

> Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand, with its dystopia of cloying welfare-state economics control and the utopia of a secretly established laissez-faire community, is still required reading for young libertarian conservatives (and still dismissed by social conservatives for its laissez-faire sex and implicit atheism).

> The Third World War (1982) by Sir John Hackett was a popular book among conservatives, portraying a fictional war between NATO and the Warsaw that breaks out in 1985 when the latter invades Western Europe. Things go bad for NATO at first but resistance stiffens, the Soviets nuke Birmingham, England, and NATO retaliates by nuking Minsk and the USSR collapses. Yet the author also provides an alternate ending in which the Soviets win.

> Red Dawn (1984) is the ultimate anticommunist dystopia. In this John Milius film starring a young Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, the Cubans parachute into Colorado as an advance force for a Soviet land invasion. The first thing the Cubans do, of course, is confiscate everyone's guns. Adult males of military age are put in reeducation camps. But a group of high school students launches a guerilla war that holds up the invasion long enough for the US to prevail.

> This Present Darkness (1986) by Frank Peretti was a landmark in the evangelical publishing world. The novel depicts, in ways perhaps analogous to Piercy's juxtaposition of two worlds by means of telepathy, how evangelicals are contacted by angels to thwart a plot by demons using a New Age Consciousness Society as a front to take over a small college and extend their influence over the Pacific Northwest. (The book, though a religious bestseller, is criticized for its theology even by evangelical scholars.)

> The Left Behind series, launched in 1995 by authors LaHaye and Jenkins, are set during the biblical time of the Great Tribulation when the world is ruled by the Antichrist. An exposition of the eschatology would be too thick for this space. But for evangelicals the Tribulation is the ultimate dystopia.

Does my template, a la Gearhart, work for defining conservative utopian fiction?

Or do we stick with the suggestion, raised last week in class, that modern utopias are all from the Left. Why? Because only the Left wants change while conservatives, by definition, want to conserve?

Which is it?

Week 6: LeGuin, Jameson

2009-02-13T19:22:00.000-08:00

I. PROJECTION VS REDUCTION

An obvious difference between Brunner's TSLU and LeGuin's TD is narrative technique. Not surprisingly, given my earlier comments, as a critic I appreciate what Brunner was trying to do but as a reader prefer LeGuin. TD allowed me to enlist in the fictive world and figure out, a la Moylan, its "absent paradigm" by stages.

Then, too, I said before how much I enjoy LeGuin's writing and that her Earthsea cycle is a personal favorite. What a tribute to LeGuin that she could equally capture my imagination as well in the sf genre as in her fantasy.

But I want to write here about another difference between TSLU and TD that Jameson (p. 271) cites. While Brunner takes an idea and projects its ultimate extrapolation, LeGuin takes an idea and reduces it to essentials. Thus world projection versus world reduction.

Which works best? Or does world projection work with dystopias and world reduction with utopias (even "ambiguous" ones)?

> Think of dystopias: Wells projected class conflict into the far-future dystopia of the Eloi and Morlocks. Huxley projected eugenics and consumerism into the dystopia of Brave New World. Orwell projected totalitarianism and Stalinism into the dystopia of Oceania. Many classic sf films of the 1950s and 60s project the Cold War into the dystopia of post-nuclear devastation.

> Now think of utopias: Does Gilman's Herland use the device of world reduction? Does More's original Utopia? Does Bacon's New Atlantis (which I described in my report)? Does Fourier? I'm inclined to think so.

Any other thoughts out there?

II. THOUGHTS ON "ANTINOMIES"

Jameson (chap. I.10) offers an interesting discussion of "Utopia and its Antinomies." And this got me thinking along some different lines:

1. If utopias and dystopias are (by definition) ultimate cases, do they inherently establish a duality between "what could be" and "what is"? In other words, must the utopian author think in binaries?

Or can we take Giddens' strategy on dualisms and turn them into dualities? Usually we think that social rules constrain individual behavior. But Giddens theorized that individual action and social structuration are not binary opposites. Instead they are a duality.

That is, social structuration is both the medium and the outcome of individual action. Yes, social structuration guides the rules of individual action. But it is also through individual action that social structuration is produced and reproduced. One cannot exist with the other.

Similarly, could we say that "what is" and "what could be" are a coexistent duality? "What is" is equivalent to structuration and "what could be" is equivalent to individual action. Thus, although present reality establishes the rules, present reality is simultaneously the medium by which future alternatives are viewed and an outcome of the alternatives chosen.

2. Jameson (pp. 147-148) flatly states, "Crime, war, degraded mass culture, drugs, violence, boredom, the list for power, the lust for distraction, the lust for nirvana, sexism, racism—all can be diagnosed as so many results of a society unable to accommodate the productiveness of all its citizens."

Thus the issue of labor is, in the final analysis, said to be the basic crux of Utopia. Achieve full employment and—voila!—you've got Utopia.

Yet I must strenuously disagree here. And my point goes to heart of my argument about cultural variation. Just as all cultures are not equally oriented to the future, not all cultures believe that people are basically good.

Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, in an important 1960 text, note that all cultures must answer the question: What is human nature? Some cultures believe people are basically evil, some basically good, and some a mixture of good and bad.

Samovar and Porter (2004) argue that American culture, founded in Puritanism, historically sees people as basically evil but in recent generations has mixed that outlook with a consensus that people are also perfectable.

The American evangelical and fundamentalist culture I have studied through ethnography very definitely endorses the doctrine of original sin. To them (and most conservative-leaning Americans) the notion that evil will disappear if everyone had a good job is ludicrous.

So I cannot agree with Jameson that labor must be the foundational issue of Utopia. Instead, his assertion is based on the premise that people are basically good—and that premise is ultimately a cultural belief, not an incontrovertible fact.

3. Thoughts regarding human nature also brought to my mind the different world religions, which are "deep-structure" institutions for transmitting cultural values.

We might categorize world religions thus:

> Religions that believe in an eternal afterlife following the end of time

> Religions that believe life is continually reincarnated in an eternal wheel of time

> Religions that believe individual existence is ultimately annihilated and thus finds release

Here's food for thought: The idea that history has a conclusion is, as Jameson has noted, a legacy of Christianity to the West. Does Utopia have the same allure for non-Western cultures whose historic faiths see time as a wheel? Or who see their nirvana, their release, in nothingness?

III. THOUGHTS on "SCHISM"

Though I read the journal articles on LeGuin, most engaged in too much plot summary. But of the half dozen pieces I read, I found the Watson piece most interesting. The chart on page 68 that ties together LeGuin's Hainish cycle is quite helpful.

And since the Earthsea cycle is such a favorite of mine, I was interested in Watson's discussion (p. 69) on how Earthsea fits into LeGuin's overall corpus:

First, does not the Earthsea trilogy represent a . . . conscious separating of fantasy from SF? There is much in Earthsea about dreams, the minor magical powers of illusion, on the one hand, and the major magical powers of altering reality objectively through "renaming" of the world on the other.

But then Watson points out how Earthsea has

much emphasis on the vital importance of equilibrium . . . and equilibrium is a social/ecological concept to be taken up again in quite a different vein in The Dispossessed, carefully distinguished from static conservatism by its dynamic concept of a constant, complex remaking of the world, without overloading any variables.

So here, in the examples of LeGuin's Earthsea cycle and The Dispossessed, we saw Jameson's "Great Schism" between fantasy and sf in action.

Fantasy, says Jameson, is "organized . . . around the binary of good and evil, and the fundamental role it assigns to magic" (p. 58) and is "generically wedded to nature and to the organism" (p. 64). This we see in LeGuin's Earthsea cycle.

SF, on the other hand, has a bent toward historicism (the notion that history proceeds according to natural laws). The sf hero "stands as a symptom of that historical era and as the expression of a sense of impending well-nigh Utopian change" (p. 59). This we see in The Dispossessed.

Yet there is also in LeGuin the unity noted by Watson. Thus Jameson aptly writes,

[In LeGuin] there visibly reappears that mysterious bridge that leads from the historical disintegration of fantasy to the reinvention of the Novum, from a fallen world in which the magical powers of fantasy have become unrepresentable to a new space in which Utopia can itself be fantasized (p. 71).

Week 5: Brunner, DeCerteau

2009-02-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

So many diverse readings this week! With so many authors and ideas floating, all I can do this week is to organize the thoughts that struck me most:

1. Does Brunner's "jumpcut" narrative technique produce an effect that works best with "didactic dystopias"?

2. Brunner's technique collapses the readers' experience of time, which ties in nicely with (a) Jameson's discussion of time and (b) my first short paper.

3. DeCerteau makes an interesting analogy by likening walking as a spatial act to talking as a speech act. Does the analogy hold up when we look deeper into the theory of speech acts and codes?

4. Could Garrard's discussion of apocalyptic rhetoric be a helpful perspective for my ethnography of American fundamentalism?

I. BRUNNER'S NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

For myself, I did not care for Brunner's "jumpcut" technique. During Week 1 we noted Moylan's observation that science fiction and fantasy often work by enlisting readers in a fictive culture and allowing them by stages to figure out the absent paradigm. The rapid jumpcuts and non-linearity in The Sheep Look Up hindered my enlistment in its fictive world and characters.

Yet I could also recognize the effect that Brunner's technique was producing in me. It was a kind of "shock and awe" that, at least for me, will cause me to remember the vividness of the dystopia rather than the vividness of the characters or story.

By contrast, the dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four has stuck with me because I vividly recall the characters (Winston, Julia, O'Brien, Parsons, Charrington), situations (Two Minutes Hate, telescreens, memory holes, Golden Country, Room 101, Chestnut Tree Café, etc), and plot elements (the love affair, Miniluv, etc).

Will I remember the dystopic environmental hell of TSLU as vividly as I remember the people, situations, and story of 1984? Or will Brunner's jumpcut technique end up being like one of those movies that are great on special effects but thin on characterizations and story? You recall some of the images, but in time they fade. But great stories become a part of you.

Anyway, I could see what Brunner was trying to do. And I asked myself: Does his jumpcut technique work best with dystopias (and rather didactic ones, at that)?

Murphy's essay on "John Brunner's Narrative Blending" has a nice discussion of the "polyphonic jumpcut" technique found in TSLU. See especially pages 27-29. He notes how jumpcutting "more nearly reflects reality than traditional narratives," transcends the limits of a single-narrator viewpoint, conveys "the simultaneity of events" and, by "distributing the commentating-observer role among many different characters," undercuts the comforting notion that any heroic figure has "the" authoritative solution.

Somehow, though, I have trouble imagining the technique working with Herland, a classic didactic utopia that follows a linear narrative. The jagged, violent, defamiliarizing technique of Brunner may work for his dystopia. But a utopia such as Herland would seem to require the comfort of a conventional linear storyline in order to persuade readers of its desirability.

II. THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME

Murphy's observation, that the polyphonic jumpcut technique of Brunner conveys "the simultaneity of events," is an apt introduction to a discussion of how readers experience time. TSLU definitely has the effect of collapsing time, while conventional linear narratives can have (in the best stories) the effect of making time seem to slow down.

Jameson's discussion of time (Chapter 1.7) is, like most of his explorations, wide-ranging. Asimov is a favorite of mine, so that I could relate to Nightfall as an illustration of Jameson's points. And I found the typology of SF "eras," found on page 93, to be useful.

But rather than ruminate on Jameson, let me offer some excerpts from my first short paper that bear on the discussion of time. Perhaps these excerpts may help spark some class discussion when we meet next week.

In my paper I look at Ernst Bloch's suggestion that a "Utopian impulse" is rooted in human nature, and then contrast that with ethnographic and linguistic research which suggests that not all cultures are equally oriented (like the United States) to tomorrow. Here are some excerpts:

> If Ernst Bloch correct . . . then any lack of a utopian literature [in non-Western cultures] would owe to economic and political repression . . . Given the same resources as the West, other cultures would produce as rich and varied utopian works of their own. But there is another possible explanation: Utopian works may not speak to all cultures. This proposition would deny Bloch's thesis of a universal Utopian impulse and regard a relative abundance or lack of utopian literature across different societies as culturally situated.

> Bloch (1885-1977) saw past, present, and future in dialectical tension so that the latencies and tendencies of the past inform the present and can influence the future. "Bloch's understanding of time as possibility reconfigures the word itself," notes McManus (2003). "Knowledge of the world can no longer be fallaciously conceived via . . . the 'given,' and becomes, instead, a creative epistemology of the possible . . . [that] is both utopian and deconstructive" (p. 2).

> Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck proposed that all cultures must answer the basic question: What is the orientation toward time? . . . "Past-oriented cultures believe strongly . . . that the past should be the guide for making decisions and determining truth," while "present-oriented cultures hold that the moment has the most significance" and "future-oriented cultures . . . emphasize the future and expect it to be grander than the present."

> Then finally, there is Whorf's (1940) question, "Are our own concepts of 'time,' 'space,' and 'matter' given in substantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages?" (p. 138). In their seminal Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) noted how English-speakers, at least, cognize time by metaphorizing it as a commodity (e.g., time is money) or an object in motion (e.g., time flies). . . . [Yet] English speakers might talk of the future lying ahead, Mandarin speakers below, and Aymara speakers behind.

> Casasanto (2008) concludes: "In summary, people who talk differently about time also think about it differently, in ways that correspond to the preferred metaphors in their native languages. Language not only reflects the structure of our temporal representations, but it can also shape those representations. Beyond influencing how people think when they are required to speak or understand language, language can also shape our basic, nonlinguistic perceptuomotor representations of time. It may be universal that people conceptualize time according to spatial metaphors, but because these metaphors vary across languages, members of different language communities develop distinctive conceptual repertoires (p. 75)."

III. SPEECH ACTS AND "SPATIAL ACTS"

DeCerteau (pp. 97-102) makes the interesting assertion that, in the same way that talking constitutes a speech act, walking constitutes what I'll call a "spatial act." That's because:

> The walker appropriates topography just as the talker appropriates language

> The walker spatially enacts topography just as the talker acoustically enacts language

> The walker relates to the topography just as the talker relates to his/her interlocutor(s)

Thus the walker (or cyclist? or driver?) engages via spatial acts in a relationship with topography/place just as the talker engages via speech acts in a relationship with other discursants. This is a neat comparison. But like most analogies, is it imperfect and breaks down when carried too far?

Speech act theory treats speech as action, so that speech act theorists focus on how language functions (does an utterance give a command? negotiate rights and obligations? provide explanations and justifications?) rather than the cultural codes or linguistic structures of the speech. Analysts look at speech to discern its embedded motives and try to explain how the effectiveness of a speech act is determined by the rules and conditions for speaking in a given situation.

To carry on the analogy, a theory of "spatial acts" would treat walking as an action, look at what functions a given act of walking performs, analyze the underlying motives of the walker which are embedded in his/her spatial act, and discern how a given walk is (or is not) successful under the prevailing rules and conditions that govern the propriety and effectiveness of the spatial act in question.

Does DeCerteau's analogy hold this far? What do you think?

On the other hand, if we compared "spatial codes" (as Lefebvre suggested) to "speech codes," then we would ask how an act of walking (or interaction with a space) embodies taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about (a) the respective natures of people and space, (b) how people and space should be linked, and (c) the role of spatial action.

IV. APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC

Garrard's discussion of tragic versus comic apocalypse was new to me and seemed a typology I could usefully apply to my ethnography of American fundamentalist culture.

Not surprisingly, Garrard's description of Fundamentalist/Evangelical eschatology lacks nuance. There is, in fact, an enormous division in the ranks between premillenialism (that the world won't be set right until Christ returns) and postmillenialism (that believers, by setting the world right, will prepare the way for Christ to return).

This division helps explain the different rhetorics of, say, the Left Behind book series (which promote a premillenial eschatology) and Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition (which promote a postmillenial eschatology).

Left Behind urges believers to live godly and convert the lost while time remains before God decides at any moment to inaugurate the millenium. Robertson urges believers to perfect the world and thus proactively help to usher in the millenium.

My ethnography pays the most attention to the speech codes and rhetoric of Fundamentalist culture, specificaly of the premillenial persuasion. Garrard's typology might be useful is seeing how the underlying communal assumptions of the two competing eschatologies--premillenial and postmillenial--are embedded in the speech codes and rhetoric of each faction.

Week 4: Dick, Jameson (Again)

2009-01-30T18:10:00.000-08:00

So much commentary has been devoted to the work of PK Dick (even Jameson's AOTF accords three entire chapters) that I hesitate to venture any global comments in such a confined space. After all, what could I add—even to Jameson and this week's supplemental readings, much less the still-growing literature on Dick?

So I will restrict myself this week to three areas:

1. Regarding Dr Bloodmoney, I will focus on a single exchange between Jameson and Holliday on the role of nuclear holocaust in the Dick canon.

2. Next I will wrestle a bit with Greimas's semiotic square and ponder why Jameson is so enamored of this construct.

3. Finally I will share some emerging thoughts from my research for our first brief paper, in which I've chosen to take a closer look at Ernst Bloch.

I. DR BLOODMONEY AND THE BOMB

In her essay on "Masculinity in the Novels of Philip K. Dick," Holliday (2006) engages in a long excursus on "how atomic explosion figures into the drama of masculine crisis" and subsequently "challenges Jameson's enunciation of the problematic [explosion] in Dr Bloodmoney" (p. 286).

Jameson (2005) posits that "what is unique about the atomic blast as a literary event" in the work of Dick is the cataclysm's ability to, in the minds of readers, "prevent the reestablishment of the reality principle and the reconstitution of experience into the twin airtight domains of the objective and subjective" (p. 351). Unlike devices that Dick uses in other novels—drugged hallucinations, schizophrenia, fourth dimensions—to defamiliarize readers, nuclear holocaust is a "collective event about whose reality the reader cannot but decide" (p. 286).

Holliday has a point in arguing, contrariwise, that "Dick finally does not express atomic detonation as totalizing in this novel" (p. 286). In time, as the last line of Dr Bloodmoney states, "the city was awakening, back once more into its regular life." Dick himself, in an afterword the author wrote in 1980, states:

So in writing Dr Bloodmoney in 1964 I may have erred in many of my predictions, but upon rereading the novel recently I senses a basic accuracy in it—an accuracy about human beings and their power to survive. Not survive as beasts, either, but as genuine humans doing genuinely human things. There are no supermen in this novel. There are no heroic deeds. There are some very poor predictions on my part, I must admit; but about the people themselves and their strength and tenacity and vitality . . . there I think I foresaw accurately. Because, of course, I was not predicting; I was only describing what I saw around me: the men and women and children and animals, the life of this planet that has been, is, and will be, no matter what happens. I am proud of the people in this novel.

Yet I also believe Holliday (2006) is engaging in a conceit when she insists "there is no sense in which we can really understand those events [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as totalizing. It is the ideology of the Cold War that imposes the notion of totalization, and for that reason we should be especially suspicious of it" (p. 286). She relativizes nuclear holocaust by suggesting it is a "speculation [that] is not substantively different from other possibilities of total destruction, such as ozone depletion and global warming" (p. 287).

Thus Holliday (2006) asserts, "The atomic detonation in Dr Bloodmoney I would argue functions as an important site for an exploration of the masculine subject in crisis" (p. 287). The reason Jameson misconstrues the detonation as a totalizing event, she declares, is "because in 1975 [when Jameson was writing] nuclear detonation was situated ideologically as the ultimate collectively understood utterance, [so that] for Jameson it is then the final assertion of the symbolic (p. 287).

To my mind, her assertion indulges in the conceit of retroactively rereading contemporary sensibilities into historical actions. According to Holliday's bio on the Internet she earned her BA in 1990, which suggests she came of age in the 1980s as the Cold War was winding down. But only someone who lived through the Cold War, as I did from the late 1950s onward, can understand its totalizing grip on the popular imagination of that era.

(As an aside, we can be glad for that totalizing grip. It was only because US and Soviet leaders took seriously the threat of MAD, mutual assured destruction, that the world was saved from the nuclear World War III depicted in Dr Bloodmoney.)

So I would argue, contra Holliday, that Dick (writing in 1964) was more likely than not to have perceived nuclear holocaust as a totalizing event. That he would have seen atomic bombing through the lens of his times is further suggested by the fact that Jameson, writing (in 1975) near the same historical moment, also saw it that way.

(Of course, it's relevant to ask: Why was Dick so hopeful in his 1980 afterword? At that time, more than 15 years after writing Dr Bloodmoney, Dick was at the height of what Jameson [2005, p. 363] called his "religious" phase. The Dick of 1964 was writing just two years after the Cuban missile crisis; the Dick of 1980 was writing in an era of strategic arms limitation talks.)

Yet I am willing to concede that Holliday's proposal may be a reading that allows Dr Bloodmoney to continue speaking to the issues of our own day.

II. THE SEMIOTIC SQUARE

When I read Jameson's musings on the Semiotic Square developed by Greimas, three thoughts immediately came to mind:

> This seems like a riff on Peirce's famous Semiotic Triangle.

> If so, I'll bet Greimas devised his Semiotic Square for purposes of linguistic analysis rather than literary criticism.

> And if that's the case, and Jameson is "appropriating" the Semiotic Square for literary (and Marxian) criticism, is he being true to Greimas or simply latching onto a highfalutin heuristic he can adapt his own way?

You can make up your own mind by checking out a nice online article that describes the original Semiotic Square as devised by Greimas:

http://www.signosemio.com/greimas/a_carresemiotique.asp

Personally, after reading this online article, I get the feeling that the Semiotic Square is really designed for linguistic analyses of words and concepts—rather than characters, motifs, or plot elements in a literary text.

So in my view, Jameson is extending the Square beyond Greimas' original conception. Of course, building on and extending the work of others is fine and can result in new insights. But it remains to be discussed (perhaps we could do so in class) whether Jameson's extension is a legitimate one.

Now, if I understand the Square properly then, if I insert myself as the Subject, I could construct my identity through oppositional analysis:

1. Mark
2. antiMark
3. Not-Mark
4. Not-antiMark

Or if I wanted to do a linguistic analysis on a concept important to my dissertation, namely how Nazi Germans identified themselves, the Semiotic Square might suggest:

1. German ("culture-creating"; i.e., Aryan)
2. antiGerman ("culture-destroying"; e.g., Jewish, Bolshevist)
3. Not-German ("culture-using"; i.e., inferior races)
4. Not-antiGerman (antisemitic, anticommunist)

Or in line with my ethnography of American fundamentalist religion, which I blogged about last week, the Square might suggest:

1. Believer ("Christian")
2. antiBeliever ("liberal," "atheist")
3. Not-Believer ("unbeliever," "seeker")
4. Not-antiBeliever ("conservative," "decent")

But some things bother me about the Semiotic Square . . .

> Doesn't it establish binaries as the means for constructing identity?

> Isn't that a distinctly modernist mode of thinking?

> But then again (as suggested by my report last week on positivism and historicism), isn't Jameson's Marxism is a distinctly modernist philosophy?

III. NEW KID ON BLOCH

For my first brief paper I'm doing some reading on Ernst Bloch, whose works on utopia figure in the early chapters of Jameson.

I'll have much more to say after the paper is done. But in brief, Bloch (a Marxist) suggests utopias are products of cultural "surpluses" or the dreams and aspirations not satisfied by the current order. You can read a nice online article on Bloch's magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, at:

http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell1.htm

AND NOW A BONUS . . .

Here is a link to the report on Positivism that I presented last week:

http://people.clemson.edu/~mlward/rcid805/Positivism%202/index.htm

Week 3: Lefebvre, Forster, Huxley

2009-01-24T09:46:00.000-08:00

This week my blog will tackle three areas:

1. An extended musing about Lefebvre as his work relates to a current project of my own.

2. Thoughts about the two sf works assigned for this week.

3. Some responses to the questions Elisa posed in her 1/23 email.

I. LEFEBVRE AND MY OWN PROJECT

This will take some explanatory background, so be patient with me.

Ethnography of Communication (EOC)

For four years (2003-07) I did ethnographic fieldwork by traveling about 30 weekends a year to fundamentalist churches. As a member of a semiprofessional gospel quartet I visited some 200 churches in 17 states and was a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services.

Initially I intended to use my fieldwork to write an ethnography of communication (EOC) for fundamentalist culture. EOC is an approach that's been around since the 1960s, when it was proposed by Hymes (1962, 1964) as a way to bridge anthropology and linguistics.

A common EOC method, pioneered by Philipsen (1992, 1997, 2005) and well known in communication studies, is to discern a culture's distinctive speech codes as manifestations of its taken-for-granted assumptions regarding (a) the nature of persons, (b) how they should be linked in social relations, and (c) the role of symbolic action.

I was easily able to write an EOC for fundamentalist culture. My paper was presented at a conference in November and is now in the revise-and-resubmit stage with the Journal of Communication and Religion.

But I could see that the EOC approach could only tell half the story, because EOC was mostly equipped for analyzing the speech codes that members of fundamentalist culture used in their natural and unplanned discourse.

However, it was clear to me that preaching by professional clergy had a huge impact on the social organization of fundamentalist culture. It was not so much what they actually said, but rather the modes of argumentation and identification that they publicly validated.

Ethnography of Rhetoric (EOR)

Thus I was drawn to a recent proposal by Lindquist for a new approach she called ethnography of rhetoric (EOR). She proposed EOR for analyzing working-class culture, which is a culture defined not by geographic space but by ideology and practice--or by mental and social space, if you will.

Immediately it occurred to me that a minority religion such as American fundamentalism is likewise an ideological rather and geographic community. Thus in a recent paper I attempt to flesh out and operationalize Lindquist's proposal for an EOR method.

EOR allows the ethnographer to move beyond analyses of speech communities, an analytical construct developed more than 50 years ago by Hymes. Instead the ethnographer of rhetoric can analyze communities of practice, an analytical construct first describe by Lave and Wenger (1991).

Communities of practice are not necessarily held together not by geographic proximity, but rather by (a) mutual engagement, (b) joint enterprise, and (c) social resources its members develop to express identification.

Lindquist suggests that "planned" discourse (that is, public rhetoric) fills in the mesostructure "between practice and structuration" in a community of practice. Think of a three-tiered pyramid. At the bottom is the microstructure of individual speech and practice; at the top, or the macro level, is the structuration that (a la Giddens) the community has worked out.

The middle level is filled by public rhetoric which, Lindquist suggests, must be analyzed from a phenomenological perspective--that is, subjectively according to the way that community members experience the rhetoric.

By seeing my religious fundamentalists as a community of practice, I could use the EOR method to analyze how preaching rhetoric (according to whether it follows a narrative or a rational-world paradigm) impacts how members construct their identities, what logics and modes of reasoning are normalized, and whether leaders rule by expert or charismatic authority--and thus helps establish the power distances that govern social organization.

Earlier this month I wrote up my fieldwork findings on fundamentalist preaching and my case for the EOR method in a paper submitted to the journal Intercultural Communication Studies.

Ethnography of Structuration (EOS)

As I saw how rhetoric performs an integrative function in communities of practice, I began to ask myself how cultures bound ideology and practice--that is, by mental and social space--differ from cultures bound by geographic space.

This is a question asked in conversations about globalization theory and, of course, now takes us closer to our readings in Lefebvre.

Starting with the differences in physical spatiality, I conjectured that geographically defined cultures may be characterized by (a) people who inhabit a physical space, (b) who do so over multiple generations, and (c) who over time develop "deep" institutions (e.g., governments, economies, state religions, family structures) that become virtually autonomous transmitters of cultural values.

But communities of practice, which aren't defined by physical spatiality, lack these "deep" institutions. These communities are more fluid, less inert. Thus public rhetoric can (at least in the fundamentalist culture I observed) perform the integrative function--be the transmission belt, if you will, between individual practice and communal structuration.

So I have found myself asking if: (a) EOC is a good method for analyzing the micro level of individual practice, (b) EOR is a good method for analyzing the meso level of public discourse, and (c) a putative "ethnography of structuration" (EOS) might be developed as a method to analyze a community's macrostructure.

Lefebvre, Finally!

And this brings me to Lefebvre. In light of my own project, Lefebvre piqued my interest with his suggestions that:

> "Yet did there not at one time . . . exist a code . . . which allowed space not only to be 'read' but also to be constructed? If indeed, there was such a code, how did it come into being? And when and how did it disappear?" (p. 7).

> "The theory we need . . . [is] a 'unitary theory': the aim is to discover or construct a theoretical unity between 'fields' which are . . . first, the physical--nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and thirdly, the social" (p. 11).

> "To what extent may a space be read or decoded? . . . [T]he fact remains, however, that an already produced space can be decoded, can be read. Such a space implies a process of signification. And even if there is no general code of space, inherent to language or to all languages, there may have existed specific codes, established at specific historical periods and varying in their effects. If so, interested 'subjects,' as members of a particular society, would have acceded by this means at once to their space and . . . acting within that space and comprehending it" (p. 11).

> "If indeed spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial/social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding to them, then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise" (p. 11).

Could Lefebvre offer some insights for my ethnography of structuration (EOS) project? Could his "triple dialectic" between the physical, mental, and social fields of space provide a basis for discerning "spatial codes," even as Philipsen's theory allows ethnographers to discern speech codes?

(It strikes me, by the way, the Garrard's analysis of the pastoral and the wild offers an example of how cultures might trialectically construct spatial codes to express underlying cultural assumptions about the physical, mental, and social meanings of their spaces.)

Any thoughts, either as replies to my blog or through discussion in class, are welcome!

Another Thought from Lefebvre

Lefebvre begins on page 31 an interesting observation that every society produces a space unique to that society. He starts with the example of the classical Greek city and later, on pages 53 and following, asks whether state socialism (in particular, the Soviet variety) had produced any unique spaces.

Most of you know my interest in the Holocaust. So Lefebvre's discussion brought to my mind: What unique space did German National Socialism construct?

Numerous historians have remarked that Nazism was mostly a pastiche of ideas with long provenance in German society. But the Nazis did construct one institution that was completely unique to their regime and conveyed, in microcosm, their values.

That institution was the camp. We're accustomed to thinking of the concentration camps and death camps, of course. And so far historians have found evidence for more than 10,000 camps in the machinery of oppression--including transit camps, labor camps, and reeducation camps.

But the Nazis also built "positive" camps, a system of thousands of local Gemeinschaftlager or community camps where ordinary people would go for camping experiences under National Socialist principles. These ranged from Hitler Youth camps and Reich Labor Service camps (the equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the US of the 1930s), and camps for art or education or recreation.

It might be interesting in class to discuss how Nazi society is reflected in its camps, using Lefebvre's scheme that: social space is socially produced and reflects (1) the social relations of reproduction and (2) the relations of production.

Nazi culture had very definite ideas about biological and social hierarchies which, in my view and that of numerous historians, are enacted through the spaces of the "positive" camps for Aryans and the "negative" camps for political and racial enemies.

II. NOVEL THOUGHTS

Over the years I've read Brave New World about 3-4 times and Nineteen Eighty-Four at least a half dozen times. I rather enjoyed the 1984 film version (with John Hurt and Richard Burton) of Orwell's classis, but didn't care for the 1998 television miniseries (with Leonard Nimoy as Mustapha Mond) based on Huxley's book. The Machine Stops, however, is new to me.

Brave New World

BNW has attracted so much comment (indeed, the phrase "brave new world" is now a commonplace to describe the potential effects of any new technology) that I can add little in this space. Varricchio looks at BNW through the lens of how mass media are portrayed, Firchow through the significance of names, and Buchanan through Freud, while Adorno has a number of axes to grind. All are, in their own ways, informative.

My only thought is that, in the commentaries we read, I wondered why nobody speculated on the possible significance that Huxley had lived throughout the 1920s in Italy. He would have seen the Fascist takeover by Mussolini in 1922 and experienced the "good" years of the regime, when Fascism was seen by many as full of vitality and the wave of the future.

Perhaps more importantly, Huxley would have lived among the currents of Italian Futurism, a movement which was at its apex in the 1920s and prospered under Fascism. Through art and architecture Futurists exalted the values of speed, youth, violence, technology, industrialism, the city, and the conquest of nature.

Nevertheless, BNW continues to speak to us because it is that rare work that can be re-read by succeeding generations according to the issues of their own day. Huxley was probably not vexed over bioengineeering in the way we are today. But we can pick out from BNW those metaphors which speak to us about the basic concerns common to our generation and his.

The Machine Stops

TMS is clearly not as well known as BWN. In this case I read the story first, before any commentary. My initial impression was that TMS shared a number of generic conventions which recur throughout science fiction:

> The creation turning on its creator

> The underground hive metaphor

> The decaying civilization that ceases to understand its machines

> Machines no longer serve people but, rather, people serve machines

> The decay of knowledge as people read old books instead of conduct new observations

> Social control through religious dogmas that thwart scientific inquiry

> The triumph of the human spirit over technologized stasis

Seen in this light, TMS seems in some respects to be a rather modernist, even positivist, fable.

Something which nagged at me, however, was Forster's failure to tell us what caused the fouling of the earth's atmosphere and drove humanity underground. If we could know the raison d'etre for the Machine, we might better gauge Forster's intent. But he chose not to let us know.

III. ELISA'S QUESTIONS

Some of my thoughts on the questions below are implied in my comments above. But for the sake of starting a discussion, here are some quick takes:

How do TMS and BNW extend the tradition/conventions inscribed in Herland?

TMS does not extend Herland since the former (which appeared in 1909) precedes the latter (which appeared in 1915). The two works, however, both reference the hive metaphor and both uphold the value original inquiry and knowledge.

After that, Forster and Gilman seem to diverge. Gilman posits a static utopia; Forster decries stasis. Gilman depicts social mores naturalized through religion; Forster sees religion used as a control mechanism. Gilman's Herlanders are contented by plenty; Forster's world is controlled by plenty. Gilman's heroes are collectivists; Forster's hero is an individualist.

To my thinking, BNW has more in common with TMS than with Herland.

How TMS and BNW represent a distinctly Modernist sensibility and set of concerns?

Both works offer dystopias brought about by the decay of individuality and initiative, as humanity submits to mechanized control in exchange for bread and circuses.

What would an ecocritical approach to either/both works look like?

TMS depicts a world where ecological disaster has driven humanity underground, where it is dependent on artificial means to support civilization. But eventually the law of entropy cannot be cheated. How much better if the ecological disaster had been averted! And how much better if humanity could live in cooperation with the natural world rather than attempt its domination. In the same way, BNW depicts a world where humanity has achieved dominion over both nature and nurture.

What are the central elements of Lefevbre’s thinking, and what happens when we deploy them in analyzing Forster and Huxley (and Gilman)?

As for the central elements of Lefebvre's thinking, see Part 1 above. He believed the production of space occurred as a trialetic between three fields: physical, mental, social. Each society produces its own unique spaces that reflect cultural values regarding the biological reproduction and labor production.

Thus we can try to "read" the codes by which these unique spaces are constructed. In turn, we can use Lefebvre's scheme to read Forster, Huxley, and Gilman in two ways:

> First, what is the "code" of the spaces depicted in the novel, and what does it say about the utopian/dystopian societies that produced them?

> Second, what do these spatial codes say about the authors who imagined the spaces?

Week 2: Gilman and Herland

2009-01-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

In this week's blog I'll be tackling five topics, two left over from last week and three related to this week's readings:

1. Is the "Utopian impulse" a universal law of human psychology, as Bloch argues?

2. Do utopias reflect "our own incapacity to conceive them," as Jameson contends?

3. In light of Topic 2 above, how do I read Herland?

4. What thoughts come to my mind in reading the various critiques of Herland?

5. How is Herland analyzable according to Elisa's framework of utopian/dystopian characteristics?

I. The Utopian Impulse

Jameson (2007) writes, "To see traces of the Utopian impulse everywhere, as Bloch [1961] did, is to naturalize it and to imply that it is someone how rooted in human nature" (p. 10). Here Jameson counters Bloch by noting that utopian projects "have been historically more intermittent" and suggesting we must distinguish between "daydreams" and "fantasy production."

In my view Jameson is on the right track here, in a way that is important for our studies this semester. Let me cite two reasons. First, are we to say that every idle daydream or conjecture is a "utopia"? If so, we would universalize the term "utopia" to the point of meaninglessness as an analytical construct.

Second, while I might concede to Bloch that imagination is a human trait, I would also bring in my own studies in intercultural communication. Researchers (e.g., Hofstede, 1980; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961) in that discipline have developed typologies by which to analyze cultures.

These researchers agree that cultures differ widely in their attitudes toward the future and the relationship of individuals toward it. Some cultures (e.g., United States) are highly future-oriented, while others (e.g., Mexico) put a higher value on living spontaneously and in the moment. Some cultures are oriented to long-term thinking and others to short-term thinking. Some cultures have a "doing" orientation toward activity (i.e., humans are actors) and others have a "being" orientation (i.e., humans are acted upon).

So I argue here against Bloch, believing insteasd that it's important for our studies this semester not to "see traces of the Utopian impulse everywhere" lest we lose the integrity of the construct.

II. Our Capacity to Conceive

Is novelty possible? Jameson opines that utopias reflect "our own incapacity to conceive [them] in the first place" (1975, p. 230; quoted in Fitting, 1998, p. 9) since authors can only build their imaginary worlds from extant cultural materials "of which we are all in one way or another prisoners" (1982, p. 153; quoted in Fitting, 1998, p. 10).

I see a good deal of truth in this. As I blogged last week, I believe we can tell much about a culture by what it regards as idyllic or hellish, or by the futures it imagines. And I am also compelled by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which holds that different language patterns produce different though patterns. In other words, the thoughts we can think are somewhat constrained by the language we have to express those thoughts.

But the dystopian extreme of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is Orwell's 1984 and its portrayal of a despotism that seeks control over language so that it becomes impossible for residents to think unapproved thoughts. In Newspeak, for example, the concept bad is eliminated; residents of Oceania can only conceive of good and ungood.

I've long wrestled with this issue of cultural determinism and last year wrote a paper on it. I took issue with Goldhagen (1996) who argued that the Holocaust happened because Germans could not ideationally escape the antisemitism of their national culture. I countered that ordinary Germans, when confronted with the wholly novel knowledge of state-sponsored genocide, were compelled to rhetorically invent a novel belief in its legitimacy in order to keep their cognitive world in homeostasis.

Anyway, this is a good question for our class: Are literary utopias simply reflections of the authors' culturally constrained ideational tools? Or can utopias be wholly novel, creations that can't be inferred from previous ideas?

III. My Reading of Herland

Surely everyone noted the feminist and socialist aspects of Herland since, after all, it was Gilman's intent to make these arguments explicit.

What struck me most, however, were the taken-for-granted assumptions of her utopia. All is clean and tidy. The roads are straight and smooth. The land is a tended garden; even the wild forest was uprooted, each tree replaced, and pests eliminated. The technology is contemporary. Husbandry and economy are perfectly rationalized; no need even for a profit motive. Education is progressive. Population is controlled. The people are generous and wise; they are natural psychologists. Human relationships are satisfyingly platonic. The most sympathetic character, Van, is a humane sociologist and man of science.

This is a profoundly modern utopia. Despite the strenuous efforts of contemporary feminists to claim Gilman (a claim which is, in the main, justified), her underlying cultural assumptions and her very ontology are thoroughly Modern. Gilman's socialist utopia is just as Modern in its way as, say, the modernity of Wells in Things to Come (1936).

And yet, and yet . . . I wonder if Gilman herself really sees Herland as a utopia. Yes, she constructs Herland as a vehicle to illustrate the possibilities for women who can develop without preconceived biases. But toward the end of the novel Van and Ellador engage in discussion about sexual union.

To my reading, Gilman treats sympathetically Van's argument that sexual love can go beyond mechanistic procreation and be a motivator for good. Or at least, Van and Ellador leave open the possibility of establishing a sexual relationship in a way that implies: Van is not wrong in his desire; such a relationship will, in fact, occur someday; and, when it does, sexual love will deepen a bond which was built first on mutual respect rather than physical attraction.

I wonder if this is the real utopia that Gilman proposes; that is, a "bi-sexual" society in which women and men can develop their potentials with no preconceptions and where sexual love is the completion, rather than raison d'etre, for their relationships.

IV. Critiques of Herland

Now that I've been expatiating awhile, let me end with some quick comments about the various articles which critique and interpret Herland.

> Murphy ("Considering Her Ways") puts Herland in a group of four matriarchal utopias that, she argues, instantiate an ethic of the collective hive. Further, because insects are the most Other to humans in our taxonomic boundaries, the hive metaphor serves to defamiliarize readers.

In the case of Herland, however, I think this (otherwise insightful) reading may be a stretch. Murphy takes two stray remarks made by the character Jeff and builds a whole case on them. But I would not agree that the insect or hive metaphor is explicit, implied, or in any way important in Herland. You could just as well point, as a counterexample, to Ellador's rapturous description of the childhood incident that led to her life's vocation as she basked in the praise of helping exterminate a noxious moth.

> Jones ("Evolving Rhetoric") offers a helpful distinction between "traditional" utopias such as Gilman's that function didactically as apologues, and more recent feminist utopias that are "implicitly rhetorical" by using the interplay of literary elements to "dissolve the generic boundaries" and "produce new models of women's individual and social experience."

> Arnold ("Utopian Cognitive Mapping") is not convincing in her joining of Jameson's cognitive mapping concept and Turchi's writing-as-mapping metaphor. She merely uses these concepts as convenient devices to provide a garden-variety recap of Herland. The theorizing of utopian cognitive mapping is underdeveloped and, indeed, not really attempted to any degree. I've published a couple of articles on cognitive-cultural models and schema theory, and found the social science literature in that area to be more illuminating.

> Berkson ("So We All Became Mothers") offers some nice historical background about the generations of Stowe and Gilman, which helps me put Herland in its context. By contrast, several other readings this week attempted, with uneven results, to place Gilman within the lineage of contemporary feminist writing.

> Deegan and Podeschi ("Ecofeminist Pragmatism") were, to my mind, the least successful among the articles we read this week. There are rather severe "incongruencies" between their thesis and Gilman's writings, which to their credit they recognize in the penultimate section of the article.

But these incongruencies are merely sidestepped as possible results of Gilman's publishing schedule, her depressive illness, or her generation's low ecological knowledge. In other words, things which don't fit Deegan and Podeschi's thesis are swept under the rug. This article is a rather transparent attempt to give ecofeminist pragmatism, which most trace to the 1980s, a longer pedigree and thus more academic legitimacy.

> Miller ("The Ideal Woman") compares Gilman's feminist utopia of 1915 and Charnas's of 1978 as a way of illustrating how different generations create victorious heroines (as compared to the frustrated heroines found in realistic fiction) with meanings for their own times. But this seems to me self-evident. The article could use more theorizing, such as an analytical matrix (like the "Utopian/Dystopian Characteristics" matrix on Elisa's website) we could use to compare utopian heroines from different generations.

> By the way, where would I place Gilman within Garrard's taxonomy of ecocritical positions? How about Gilman-as-social-ecologist? Though we've always got to be careful in projecting today's categories into the past, I might venture that Gilman could fit within Garrard's description of social ecologists who "promote exemplary lifestyles and communities that prefigure a more general transformation and give people practice in sustainable living and participatory democracy" (p. 30).

V. Utopian Characteristics of Herland

> Causality: accident of nature, leafing to violent revolution

> Cosmology: on earth and in historical time

> Maintenance: stability through social engineering

> Physical Characterisics: semirural garden; isolated; climatic

> Social Organization: specialization of labor; religious norming; crime eliminated; decision-making and judicial procedures unspecified but appear to be collective; population voluntarily controlled

> Economic Organization: maternity replaces profit as economic motivator; residents choose own labor specializations; economic activity is primarily pastoral; no money or private property

> Attitude Toward Science: technological level comparable to outside world; useful technologies admired; education highly valued

> Gender: women only; reproduction via parthenogensis

> Family Life: communal responsibility for child rearing; childcare is professionalized

> Epistemology: reason and rationality are central

> Metaphysics: central myth is first Mother; central symbol is Maaia, the God Mother

A New Semester

2009-01-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

Asked to blog about my "hopes and expectations" for RCID 813 Topias, I believe an answer requires two parts: first, some background about my encounters with sf and utopian literature; and second, how that literature might dovetail with my current research interests.

PART I: BACKGROUND

1950s-60s: Childhood

For as long as I can remember, a fascination with alternate worlds and imagined futures has been a mainspring of my reading habits. I still vividly remember the thrill (and pray I never get over it) of learning to read "all by myself" in first grade; of discovering the Doctor Doolittle series in third grade; of a reading enrichment class in sixth grade that introduced me to Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, Jules Verne, and Tolkien.

And during my preschool and elementary years of the late 1950s and then through the 1960s, the old sf serials such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Phantom Empire, plus the many sf movies of the 1950s, were staples on Saturday kids TV. In prime time (and later in syndicated reruns) I was enthusiastic viewer of Star Trek, Lost in Space, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Time Tunnel, and other sf classics.

1970s-80s: Teen and Young Adult

Through the 1970s as I progressed through junior high, senior high and college (where I was an English major), I may have read American and Brit Lit for school. But sf and fantasy was my daily choice for pleasure reading. And of course, I can remember standing in line at the theater with my girlfriend to watch the first runs of Stars Wars (1977) and Star Trek: The Movie (1977). Even through the 1980s as I married and raised a young family, every night at bedtime I relaxed with a book that was nearly always a sf or fantasy novel.

A bibliography of all the sf and fantasy I read during the years would be long indeed! But generally I stuck to works by respected authors that impressed me as being of high quality, ones that challenged me to think, rather than pulp. A good example is my all-time favorite sf series, Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and Robot Novels. Another example from the fantasy genre is Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy and its sequels, a real favorite of mine.

1990s: Time of Change

After 1990, however, my sf and fantasy reading began to decline, though it still formed a substantial portion of my daily pleasure reading until about mid-decade. Thus over the past dozen years or so I've read little in these genres (even though I have remained a loyal viewer of the various Star Trek spinoffs and love to watch classic sf movies and TV on cable).

Why did I stop reading sf and fantasy? Two factors:

> The first factor was November 9, 1989. If you didn't grow up during the Cold War then you don't realize what a paradigm shift that was for my generation. Suddenly I was living in an "alternate future" that was totally unexpected. To understand what was happening around me and this new world in which I lived, I felt driven to expand my knowledge of modern history. In time this drew me to my interest in Holocaust Studies.

> The second factor was the changing nature of sf and fantasy. What I enjoy best about sf and fantasy is, as described in the Moylan chapter (pp 50-53), the chance to enlist in the fictive culture and by stages figure out the absent paradigm. But after the mid-1980s when cyberpunk ruled, it seemed that sf became mocking and ironic with too much in-your-face philosophizing. And fantasy works seemed more and more derivative of Tolkien, except they competed for the most unpronounceable names of characters and lands.

2000s: Reflections

Yet I have always believed that my formative years spent in reading sf and fantasy were a wonderful boon for me. Not only did I spend many leisurely hours in the adventure of exploring imagined worlds, and not only did I read many great stories and much writing of high quality.

But I've always believed my immersion in sf and fantasy truly enlarged my ability to imagine and conceptualize and see a larger vision, an ability that has suffused and enriched every aspect of my life. And this passion for imaginative thinking I was able to share with my children and build into their lives, so that I'm now seeing its fruits in a new generation.

RCID 813 Topias is may very well be the last seminar that I take for credit in my academic career. So perhaps, in closing the circle, it's fitting that worlds of imagination should be our topic.

PART II: HOPES

Now that you've indulged my trip down memory lane, the question arises: How might a study of utopias/dystopias fit into my current research interests? Four thoughts comes to mind:

> Though I was an English major in the 1970s as an undergrad, later in life I got my MA in communication studies. So I find myself less drawn to literary criticism of utopian works and more attracted to the project suggested by Jameson of digging into the underlying culture which produced the utopian/dystopian vision.

It strikes me that the analyst could discern much about a culture by what it regards as idyllic or hellish. I find myself initially persuaded by the argument, encountered in our readings this week (see Fitting, pp 9-10), that utopian writers necessarily construct their imagined worlds out of materials provided by their extant cultures. And if one believes that readers co-construct the meaning of a text, then audiences are likewise working from their cultural assumptions.

Twenty-five years ago in my hometown of Washington DC, I attended a Smithsonian exhibit entitled Yesterday's Tomorrows and also bought the accompanying book. The exhibit depicted how the futures imagined by people in the past tell us most of all about the great concerns of their own times. What a fascinating read! (In a similar vein, I recommend Larsen's The Devil in the White City and Gelernter's The Lost World of the Fair about, respectively, and 1893 and 1939 world's fairs.)

For example, in 1895 Wells's The Time Machine offered a commentary on industrialization and class division in his dystopian future world of Eloi and Morlocks. The 1960 film version was a riff on nuclear holocaust, not class struggle. And the 2002 film version was merely a shallow showcase for big-budget special effects with a few obligatory nods to feminist and environmentalist sensibilities.

Anyway, I can see some possible applications for my own researches. Right now I'm doing a lot of reading for my dissertation on organizational communication, discourse, and culture. Perhaps the utopias forecast by the organizations I'm studying might help me unlock their underlying cultures.

> Utopias are a mainspring that drives much of modern history. Consider the French Revolution (1789) . . . or the classical positivism of Auguste Comte (1830) that has deeply influenced science . . . or the Soviet workers paradise . . . or the Nazi vision of a racial New Order.

My dissertation is on the technical and organizational communication of the Holocaust. One recent framework for interpreting Nazism (as well as other revolutionary movements) is the concept of the political religion. (See Burleigh's recent books, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes.) In that vein, perhaps this course in Topias may give me a new interpretive tools to analyze utopian political movements.

> I also have a research interest in religious rhetorics, and in particular that of Christian fundamentalism. Last semester I presented a couple of conference papers on the subject and now have one journal article at the revise-and-resubmit stage and another under review. Again, I can see possibilities for analyzing fundamentalist cultures by studying their utopias.

> Finally, I still enjoy sf even if I read less of the genre than earlier in my life. And who knows? Maybe after graduation I will have more time, and perhaps more of a need, for pleasure reading outside my main research interests. So perhaps this course will give me new tools for revisiting favorite old stories, encountering new stories, and deriving insightful new meanings from both.

Takeaways

2008-12-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

And what will I take away from my immersion into game studies this semester? Let me count the ways . . .

1. I was introduced to the emerging field of game studies and to the basic conversation between ludologists and narratologists.

2. My interest was thus sparked to conduct additional research for my own paper, through which I explored an emering literature on games from sociocultural and media studies perspectives.

3. These explorations convinced me that, while I may not be drawn to ludology or narratology, game studies offer a fertile new field into which I can apply my existing interests in communication studies.

For example, my paper was entitled "Avatars and Immigrants" and applied theories of cross-cultural adaptation (a subfield of intercultural communication studies) to the problem of new player adaptation to MMOG worlds. The topic also allowed me to apply theories of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and uses-and-gratifications theory (a key perspective in media studies) to the phenomenon of gameworlds.

4. Along these lines, I believe my introduction to game studies may have opened for me a new avenue for publication. At an NCA panel I attended last month I was encouraged to keep exploring the intersection between comm studies and game studies.

Not much has been done in this area but, because of the growing MMOG phenomenon, comm scholars seem interested and ready for articles on the subject. Meanwhile, game studies scholars may be ready to consider what comm-related sociocultural perspectives can bring to their table.

5. This is just the sort of interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary approach that interests me and through which I have found some success in getting articles published.

6. Perhaps you may be waiting to hear the word "rhetoric"? Last semester I enjoyed digging deeper on my own into the literature on visual rhetorics for RCID 804. So many topics I want to explore, and so little time! Yet I'd like in the future to do some writing and publishing on visual rhetorics.

Thus our readings on Bogost's proposal regarding "procedural rhetoric" gave me a thought. As I've blogged, before declaring the discovery of an entirely new rhetorical domain, I would prefer to see how theories developed in the established fields of visual (and digital) rhetorics might be applied to the problem of videogames.

But I also agree with Bogost that visual rhetorics tend to privilege static and filmic images, and digital rhetorics tend to privilege digitized texts.

So the introduction to videogames which I've gotten this semester may have given me the tools to write articles about games for journals in the field of visual rhetoric/visual communication/visual studies. In other words, I would be "partnering" in a sense with Bogost. But while he is arguing that games constitute a new domain, I would be arguing that games should receive more attention in visual studies scholarship.

7. Further, through our Video Games course I have been introduced to the gameworlds themselves by playing World of Warcraft and building a project in Second Life. Though I cannot say that I am minded to continue WoW or SL as personal hobbies, I readily affirm that:

a. For the writing I have done in our class, and the writing I hope to do on game studies in the future, it is vital that I be familiarized firsthand with the dynamics of MMOG gameplay and culture.

b. I can better understand the literature on games, and participate in scholarly conversations about games, by having gained firsthand experience.

c. I am interested in the possibilities for using MMOGs in my pedagogy, namely as a way to teach principles about culture and communication to my future students, or (via Second Life) as a means for virtual interaction with my students.

8. My design project for RCID 813 (Video Games), taken together with a similar assignment for RCID 811 (Perspectives on Information Design), challenged me to consider how 3D spaces should be designed to facilitate user experience and interaction.

At the same time, our design document assignment challenged me to think of UX design in terms of mechanics (what users can do), artificial intelligence (how the space reacts), elements (items and objects in the space), story (what the experience says), and progression (how users move through the space).

These impress me as good principles not only for designing games but also for designing the layout of websites, classrooms, and even 2D documents. And in my future teaching career I expect to design lots of course websites, classrooms, and documents!

9. Finally, from a very practical standpoint, I am hopeful that our coursework--and in particular, the paper I wrote--will have given me another conference presentation and another published article which can been added to my CV.

In conclusion: I remember last spring when Jason Helms excitedly emailed everyone about the possibility of an RCID course emerging from the Serious Games Colloquium. He was polling students to find out who would attend such a class. I replied that a course on Video Games would not be my first choice for a cognate seminar.

Later, of course, the Video Games class was approved and, as it turned out, was my only choice for a third cognate seminar this fall. But I've always believed that, oftentimes, the most pleasing and interesting results come from serendipity and simply playing the hand you're dealt.

So I remember last May and our final S3S gathering for the 2007-08 academic year. It was at Randy's house and I chanced to sit on the comfy sofa near Jan Holmevik. So I asked Jan about his thoughts for our upcoming Video Games class. At the time he was thinking that students would actually construct a game with levels and all the bells and whistles.

Then I told Jan that I was interested in the idea that MMOGs constitute cultures of their own and, in microcosm, could be seen as laboratories for studying the dynamics of culture. Jan replied that if such was my interest then, certainly, the class could accommodate it.

Looking back now, after having taken the course, I'm glad this proved to be the case. Because it has broadened my horizons and, serendipitously, given me a new field of interest with which to combine my existing academic interests, thus opening up new transdisciplinary possibilities for research and writing.

SL Project and Final Thoughts

2008-12-03T11:39:00.000-08:00

As we wrap up our course on Video Games it seems appropriate to share some final thoughts by framing them in terms of my Second Life construction project.

Rhetorical Perspective

For our class I built an RCID Welcome Center (RWC), and for another RCID class I built an Information Design Hall of Fame & Interpretive Center (IDHOF). Though the two projects each standalone, I put them on a shared campus since they seem to share some synergies.

Yet the architecture of the two structures reflect, deliberately, two very different rhetorical choices . . .

> RWC is built on the seacoast and designed as a beach resort. So, why not construct a Classical building (say, something that resembles the Pantheon) to represent a program grounded in rhetoric?

The reasons I chose a seacoast location and beach resort architecture is because RCID is not a formal disciplinary program but, rather, invites open exploration of many perspectives. Thus the RWC setting and architecture are intended, rhetorically, to reflect this ethos.

Even the information for prospective RCID students is presented as a 3D boardwalk that takes visitors out over the ocean--indeed, at the very edge of the SL world--and allows them stroll and explore, in the open, at their own pace.

> IDHOF, by contrast, was designed with a decidedly Modernist architecture. Why? The discipline of informaiton design is strongly rooted in modernist sensibilities of efficiency, effectiveness, and clarity.

Thus the interior space is designed according to the conventions of a traditional museum where the visitor's path is prescribed, the experience is controlled, the information is presented with directness and clarity, and text is used to mediate and interpret the information.

Nevertheless, toward the second half of the tour I incorporate a "crack" in the modernist perspective by inviting visitors to reflect on the social and ethical implications of information design and the potential problems of a purely instrumental view of its practice.

Symbolically, the tour ends with an invitation for the visitor to teleport to the roof observation deck of IDHOF, which affords a stunning panoramic 360-degree view of the ocean and the Clemson Development Island.

But is it "Procedural" Rhetoric?

By instantiating these rhetorics in the designs of RWC and IDHOF, have I practiced "procedural rhetoric"? I must confess that I'm having trouble seeing how my rhetorical choices are "procedural."

Granted, Second Life is not a "game" and so I did not design an experience circumscribed by rule-based procedures. On the other hand, users must experience RWC and IDHOF in the settings I designed. Still, as a Second Life designer I feel the programming assisted rather than constituted my rhetoric.

Ludology, Narratology, Sociology

In our class readings we became acquainted with the conversation (or more accurately, debate) within game studies between ludologists and narratologists. At the same time (and as I blogged a couple weeks ago) my own research led to me into the emerging literature on the sociological aspects of MMOGs.

Ludology and narratology have at least this much in common: both perspectives view games are cultural artifacts. However, I found myself drawn to the sociological literature because it treats MMOGs not as artifacts but as constituting cultures of their own. (A fourth area of game research is in the media effects tradition and studies how gameplay may stimulate aggressive behaviors.)

A ludologist might explain my RWC and IDHOF in terms of their play value. For example, recall Bogost's (pp. 52-54) discussion of Sutton-Smith and his seven rhetorics of play: progress, fate, power, identity, the imaginary, the self, and frivolity. Perhaps from this perspective, RWC instantiates identity and self, while IDHOF instantiates progress and power.

Meanwhile, a narratologist would read RWC and IDHOF as "texts" to discern the stories they tell. Perhaps this narratologist would agree with my description above about the rhetorics instantiated by my respective architectural design choices.

Finally, a sociologist would be interested in how a virtual gathering place for RCIDers and friends might impact the culture of RCID. If students and faculty start using RWC for virtual meetings of our avatars, how would that impact our social relations? The same questions could be asked if IDHOF became a meeting place for information designers. Or in the same vein, how would a virtual encounter with IDHOF impact the culture of a future Perspectives in Information Designs class?

Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades

Earlier in the semester we read Bartle's proposal that online gamers can be typed as either Achievers, Socializers, Explorers, or Killers. Since then I have done other readings on my own which put a new twist on Bartle.

One researcher noted that Bartle relied simply on his own anecdotal experience to propose his four categories. This researcher instead did a scientific sampling of gamers, cranked the results through parametric statistics and factorial analyses, and came up with three first-order categories and seven second-order categories (or ten overall).

Another researcher used an alternate approach to Bartle, one that comes from the long tradition of uses and gratifications theory within media studies. Researchers from this perspective have studied why people use radio, television, music players, the Internet, etc. Now some attention is being paid to the uses and gratifications that draw people to MMOGs.

In designing RWC and IDHOF, I did consider these perspectives; namely, (a) how, according to a Bartlesque taxonomy, different types of Second Lifers might experience my constructions, and (b) what uses and gratifications might draw visitors to RWC and IDHOF.

RWC perhaps is most welcoming for Socializers (who have an indoor lounge and outdoor lanai at their disposal) and Explorers (who can stroll the boardwalk and access its information). And perhaps IDHOF is most welcoming to Achievers (who want to experience the whole museum) and Explorers (who want to see the various displays).

The Third Dimension

Finally, building RWC and IDHOF forced me to think about how best to design an experience that would (a) exist in three dimensions and (b) be governed by the mechanics of Second Life. For example:

> Should I have stairs when visitors can fly or teleport? In the end, I provided both stairs and teleportals.

> How much text is appropriate for information displays when visitors can click a prim and get a notecard? I decided the text on the prim itself could often be minimized, but also felt that notecard texts also had to be kept reasonably brief and with minimal scrolling needed.

> How true-to-life should the structures be when they don't really need foundations or support columns or roof trusses? I decided my constructions should resemble RL buildings, at least enough for people to suspend their disbelief and comprehend the rhetoric of my design. But in some cases--such as the RWC boardwalk invisibly cantilevered over the ocean, or my IDHOF stairway ramps that have no treads--I dispensed with "engineering" considerations.

> How would avatars not only eexperienc RWC and IDHOF in solo visits, but how would multiple avatars interact with each other in these spaces? When I was done with my projects, I was somewhat surprised at the amount of space and facilities given over for interaction.

RWC has a front porch with chairs, an indoor lounge with sofas, and a very large outdoor lanai with deck chairs, conversation benches, and a hot tub. IDHOF has two first-floor lounges, seating areas (beside panoramic windows) on the second and third floors, and an expansive roof garden/observation deck with bench seating and deck chairs. Further, I linked the RWC lanai and the IDHOF roof deck with teleportals so that partygoers could utilize both spaces in real time.

At the End of the Day . . .

Let me say that I enjoyed our class, particularly because it introduced me to a new conversation (game studies) that also provides an fascinating new context for exploring concepts (e.g., communication and rhetorical theory) which have always interested me.

For example, my paper "Avatars and Immigrants" for this class employs intercultural communication theories of cross-cultural adaptation as a framework to study the acculturation of new players into established MMOG cultures.

Since not a whole lot has been done in game studies from a sociocultural and communication point of view, I can take away from our class a lot of possibilities for publishable research and writing. This was confirmed last week when, at an NCA panel, I brought up the intersection of game studies and communication studies. Others attested this intersection hasn't been much explored and encouraged me to press on.

Comments on "Videogames and Art"

2008-11-17T20:16:00.000-08:00

Two weeks to cover a book as varied in its viewpoints and topics as Videogames and Art has been quite a ride, especially since videogame aesthetics are a completely new field to me. The volume was an eye-opener and thought-provoker. But as a newcomer I feel more inclined to digest the introduction I've received rather than venture any aesthetic criticisms of my own.

Yet sometimes the thoughts of a newcomer, who brings new eyes and a clean slate, can be useful or at least interesting. Thus let me offer a few impressions from my readings.

First, I detected a tension about what should be labeled videogame art. One view is expressed by Brody Condon who states:

It's difficult to define [videogame art] as the line between interesting cultural artifacts and intentional artistic production is completely blurry at ths point, and projects influenced by or using contemporary gaming have taken on so many forms. Just within the artworld we have seen machinima, online performances, pervasive gaming, console hacks, mods, etc, as well as traditional media like painting and sculpture incorporating elements from games and game culture (p. 85).

In this view, the term "videogame art" can encompass not only the creation of original games but also riffs on existing games and game artifacts, as well as traditional artworks inspired by games and game culture.

Another view is argued by Martin who contends:

Several online artists use the element of videogames in their work, but this is not videogame art. This is art based on games and presented in separate mediums such as computer art (pp. 207-208).

In this contrasting view, the term "videogame art" should only be applied videogames themselves and not on artistic expressions that merely appropriate elements from games and game culture.

Second, if forced to choose between these two perspectives I would, at this point, opt for the latter, that "videogame art" must reside in videogames. In part, this preliminary conclusion is because I found two chapters in Videogames and Art to be the most helpful and persuasive: namely "Should Videogames be Viewed as Art?" (Martin) and "Will Computer Games Ever Be a Legitimate Art Form?" (Adams).

The Martin chapter helpfully provides background about the antecedent cases of photography and cinema, and the struggles of these media for acceptance as art forms. The Adams chapter just as helpfully offers some background about the philosophy of art. Both chapters make concrete suggestions about what videogame artists must do for their work to be regarded as art.

Third, both Martin and Adams point to interactivity as the defining difference for videogames as compared to existing art forms. In particular, Martin castigates the industry for trying to produce what amount to "interactive movies" and exhorts videogame artists to explore the unique properties of their medium.

This rings true since, in the two books I've published on broadcasting history, I made the point that both radio and television, in their turns, were not successful until they learned to tell stories and convey ideas according to the unique properties of each. Radio was invented as a wireless telegraph but had to move past its original narrowcasting paradigm into true broadcasting. TV shows were originally radio with pictures but eventually learned to exploit visuality.

The Martin and Adams chapters helped me envision a day when I might play a videogame to experience its artistry, just as I now watch a favorite movie such as High Noon. When I watch that movie, it gets me involved in the characters and the plot and the emotions and the ideas. Someday I might play a videogame that gets me involved in the same things. But the experience will be different because the game will use its interactivity to involve me in a different way.

Fourth, though, Adams asks a fundamental question that, I believe, he glosses over and does not really answer:

So why aren't most games art? One possibility is that interactivity precludes art; that art is a form of communication from the artist to viewer, and if the viewer starts to interfere, the message is lost. It is certainly true that interactivity operates in a tension with narrative: marrative lies in the control of the author, while interactivity is about the freedom of the player (p. 257).

After this statement Adams goes on with a paragraph about a San Francisco science museum whose exhibits are considered (by the museum) to also be aesthetically pleasing. I'm not sure what this has to do with the question above. But at least I didn't find this illustration to be a satisfying answer.

We ran into the same conundrum with Bogost and his thesis about "procedural rhetoric." Namely, how persuasive can a videogame be when audience involvement is proportional to the amount of gameplay freedom and control ceded to that audience? The most "persuasive" games cited by Bogost seemed to be the most heavy-handed, with little game value to involve users.

Fifth, while Bogost was about rhetoric, Martin and Adams are about art. And when it comes to art, I begin to see the glimmer of an answer about the interactivity issue: A rhetorician is trying to mount an argument, but an artist is creating an expression.

This impresses me as an important distinction. When I hear a campaign speech on television or read an opinion piece in the newspaper, I must hear out the argument before deliberating on and deciding about its proposition. But when I listen to great music or watch a great film, I can participate in the expression while it is occurring.

In the same way, I could imagine that interacting with a videogame might not preclude my participation in the artist's expression. But perhaps that may mean giving up the idea, described (but not endorsed) by Adams, that art is a "communication" with a "message."

Sixth, while Bogost suggests persuasive videogames are "communications" with "messages," Adams sees these elements as being too narrow for videogames to succeed as art. Are these two views in tension?

So to summarize the three questions that arise from my class readings these past two weeks:

> What should be considered "videogame art"? Either art in any medium that appropriates elements of games and game culture? Or only games themselves?

> Does interactivity preclude art since narrative control and interactive freedom are necessarily in tension? According to one view, art is a communication from the artist to the viewer. Does "interference" by the viewer cause the message to be lost?

> Is there a tension between "persuasive games" (and Bogost's view of games as vehicles of argumentation) and "videogame art" (and Adams' view of artworks as vehicles of expression)? Does one preclude the other?

New Directions

2008-11-09T22:21:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks as we've been wrapping up Bogost's Persuasive Games, I've also been doing a literature review of my own in anticipation of turning my energies toward completion of our final paper for the course.

Since our assigned reading has now turned to Clarke and Mitchell's Video Games and Art, we now shift from rhetoric to aesthetics. The latter is a field of which I know little but look forward to learning more (and have already learned more in this week's readings). So perhaps as I get my feet wet then, in upcoming posts, I may venture some thoughts about art and aesthetics.

But our blogs are, I presume, intended not only for reflections on assigned readings but also on our own explorations into game studies. Therefore I will be borrowing a page from last spring's RCID 804 and be sharing some scholarly resources I have found beneficial in my own lit review.

Some Background

First, though, let me give you the setup: Since I first heard that our second-year RCID cohort would be taking a class on Video Games, I was immediately drawn to the possibility of seeing MMOGs are cultures in microcosm (or maybe not even in microcosm, since World of Warcraft and Second Life have so many millions of registrants), providing virtual laboratories for seeing cultures at work.

Since my MA in Comm Studies, I've had an interest in how communication is used to cultural work such as negotiating and managing identities. But I had to actually participate in World of Warcraft and Second Life before I could fully appreciate how much, as a "newbie," I was stepping into new cultures.

In essence, my avatar is an "immigrant" in World of Warcraft and Second Life. And this thought put me in mind of how, only in recent years, have formal theories of immigrant adaptation and acculturation been developed within the corpus of intercultural communication studies. Nishida's (1999) schema theory, and Kim's (2005) integrative theory, of cross-cultural adaptation come to mind.

Both of these theories (and others) posit that immigrant acculturation is inherently a social process and therefore can only be worked out through communication. So with this in mind I set out to find whether the literature on game studies provides any indication whether this is so for newcomers to MMOGs cultures.

Four Schools of Thought

This forced me to look at the schools of thoughts within game studies. I was able to discern four such schools:

> Ludology, which focuses on the dynamics of play

> Narratology, which sees games as texts whose stories can be read and critiqued

> Media effects, which looks at the psychological and physiological effects of games

> Social science/sociology, which looks at the dynamics of gaming communities

Though ludology can (as Huizinga pointed out) plumb the connection between play and culture, I'm more interested not in games as cultural artifacts but as constituting cultures of their own.

Though narratology can tell us much about the culture that produces a game, once again I'm more interested in games as self-contained cultures rather than artifacts of real-world culture.

Though media effects research suggests that games can instantiate an effect called cultural consonance (the idea that people who are well adapted to a culture will experience a heightened sence of wellbeing), effects research is conducted from a behaviorist perspective and I'm more interested in gameworlds as social constructions.

So in writing my paper I'm focusing my lit review more on the sociological school. But as it turns out, the literature on games from the perspective is still fairly new. Only with the emergence of massively multiplayer games (and with increasing interest, generally, in computer-mediated communication) has this perspective begun to gain some ground.

New School on the Block

Let me offer some quotes. For example, Eastin (2007) points out:

Media theory has focused on individual reactions to mediated content; however, the expansion to multiuser environments suggests that researchers should consider group processes (p. 453).

Similarly, Pena and Hancock (2006) relate:

Although our understanding of mediated communication processes in instrumental and organizational contexts is substantial, we know much less about these processes in social and recreational contexts. . . . such as playing video games. A number of research communities have highlighted the need for more research examining communication in recreational and playful contexts. Some research has begun to examine recreational social interaction on the Internet. . . . Although these studies have begun the investigation of recreational CMC [computer-mediated communication] contexts, they have not yet addressed the nature of the communication processes that take place in these settings (p. 93).

An Interesting Study

The latter study by Pena and Hancock, entitled "An Analysis of Socioemotional and Task Communication in Online Multiplayer Video Games," is an article I recommend. Interestingly, they started out with two perspectives:

> The cues-filtered-out (CFO) theory which, in analyzing computer-mediated communication (CMC), focuses on the absence or diminution of nonverbal cues

> The Social Information Processing (SIP) theory which holds that interlocutors in CMC can test each other's reactions, develop cues and, given enough time, learn to conduct true interpersonal communication

Pena and Hancock hypothesized that CFO theory would predict that MMOG players (with their nonverbal cues filtered out) would conduct more task-oriented communication than socioemotional communication, and that any socioemotional communication would tend to be more negative than positive.

On the other hand, they hypothesized that SIP theory would predict that MMOG players (being able to develop new cues over time) would conduct more socioemotional communication than task-oriented communication, and their socioemotional communication would be more positive than negative.

After coding and analyzing more than 4,400 text chat messages from 59 players in the game Asheron's Call 2, Pena and Hancock confirmed the SIP predictions: Communications among players were more often, to a significant degree, more socioemotional than task-oriented. And socioemotional messages were much more often positive than negative.

Interestingly (for my proposal that newbies are "immigrants" in a new culture), the study found differences in the communications of experienced and inexperienced players. Experienced players used communicative conventions (e.g., game jargon, emoticons, abbreviations) about half of the time, while inexperienced players used them very little.

And while experienced players easily conveyed mostly positive messages, a large majority of negative messages came from inexperienced players. These negative messages were mostly about breaking social rules, impolite behavior, and frustrations about losing the game or getting lost in its geography.

This sounds a lot like intercultural communication theories of immigrant adaptation, which Kim (2005) describes as a dialectical trial-and-error process of stress-adaptation-growth.

----------

REFERENCES

Eastin, M. S. (2007). The influence of competitive and cooperative group game play on state
hostility. Human Communication Research, 33, 450-466.

Kim, Y. Y. (2005). Adapting to a new culture: An integrative communication theory. In W. B.
Gudykunst (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.

Nishida, H. (1999). A cognitive approach to intercultural communication based on schema
theory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 23, 753-777.

Peña, J., & Hancock , J. T. (2006). An analysis of socioemotional and task communication in
online multiplayer video games. Communication Research, 33(1), 92-109.

Comments on "Purposes of Persuasion"

2008-11-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

With this blog we wrap up Bogost's Persuasive Game. Did his conclusion "save the best for last"? Happily (to my way of thinking) Bogost used his conclusion to pick up the thread of theory development that started with the first chapter.

I appreciated Bogost's "connect the dots" approach of using an existing body of literature in new applications. Specifically, I have a research interest in religious rhetoric and thought Bogost's link to this literature was interesting and useful.

How so? Religious homilies do not necessarily have a telos of inducing decision but, rather, of opening a space for reflection and eventual appropriation by listeners. This is an interesting dynamic to consider when pondering the rhetorical effects of videogames.

Perhaps I may engage the rhetoerical theory within Bogost's final chapter in more detail with a later post. But for now, having concluded Persuasive Games, let me arrive at my own general conclusions:

> Bogost's willingness to put his claims in public is admirable.

> I do not believe his claim that "procedural rhetoric" constitutes an entirely new domain is proven, but do believe this claim moves the conversation forward.

> Why forward? I agree with Bogost's contention that the literature on visual rhetoric privileges static and filmic images, and that on digital rhetoric privileges texts, so that neither adequately deals with videogames.

> However, I would rather see first whether the framework of (especially) visual rhetoric can be extended to account for videogames, before "throwing out the baby with the bath water" and claiming a new rhetorical domain of "procedurality" must be recognized.

> Nevertheless, Bogost has convinced me that videogames can mount rhetorical arguments (though admittedly, I did not doubt this) and that visual rhetoricians must address what games bring to the table (a topic of which I was less aware before reading Bogost).

> So while I continue to ask whether "procedural rhetoric" is a new domain or, instead, is "computer-aided rhetoric," I readily say that . . .

> I am glad to have read Persuasive Games for its describes phenomena which merit analysis, whether one endorses Bogost's solution or prefers another approach.

Comments on "Values and Aspirations"

2008-10-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

An interesting chapter! Let me say why in a moment. But first a preface . . .

As I've written before:

(1) I give Bogost real credit for addressing a gap in the visual and digital rhetorics literatures by suggesting a novel approach and putting his claim out in public,

(2) doing so helps move the conversation forward, and

(3) describing a phenomenon is a necessary step in laying out a proposed new perspective, but

(4) the next step is more theory development, and

(5) I believe that development should look to what's already available in the literatures on visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and procedural literacy.

Now, why did I find "Values and Aspirations" interesting?

Laying aside Points 1-5 above, I thought Bogost's "Values and Aspirations" chapter offered some good grist for thought on media effects. I've been around Comm Studies long enough, and seen enough good studies by good researchers, so that I'm not ready to discount the contributions that a behaviorist perspective can make to our understandings of media effects.

But Bogost's chapter, with its critical assessments of games that encode a given morality, was useful. Granted, there's a lot of knee-jerk reaction in the public square about the "evils" of videogames with violent or sexual content. And admittedly, I must identify myself as one of those citizens who is concerned about the coarsening of our culture. Yet Bogost's critiques take us beyond questions of what games show and offer insights into what games do to rig the rules in favor of the designers' moral perspective.

These observations from Bogost were interesting to me:

> Many "values-based" games do a poor job of instantiating their values.

> But more sophisticated treatments are possible.

Both observations lead to more thoughts:

> Do "values-based" commercial games inherently seek the lowest common denominator?

> Or on the flip side, would the emergence of videogames that are truly effective in promoting values be a positive or a scary development?

Your answer, I suppose, would be based on whether you believe (a) the behaviorist view of media effects, or (b) that the people's procedural literacy will increase over time so that they can read the rhetorics and critically engage the values promoted in a game.

I suspect the answer may be a combination of the two: Yes, if truly effective "value-based" games spread (like, say, TV has done) throughout the culture, then the values pushed will in time instantiate the mainstreaming and resonance effects documented by media effects research. Yet if so, then promoting procedural literacy becomes a more salient issue. Less happily, though, I would point out that we're still talking about teaching media literacy even after 60 years of television.

The discussion of the Left Behind game was quite interesting!

Yes, I make no secret about being a person of faith. But let me hasten to add I was never a fan of the Left Behind franchise. Here I agree with Bogost: the game (like the books and all the other LB licensed products) play a little fast and loose with the Bible in order to boost sales. They merely promote "interest" in and "discussion" about spirituality.

The way that "prayer" is operationalized in the LB videogame was disturbing to me, reducing prayer to merely an instrumental value. The business about Christians battling Antichrist to recover territory is absolutely not in the Bible and even against the doctrine of evangelical Christians who teach that Christ will return to establish his millenial kingdom and won't need earthly believers to prepare the way for him.

Bogost ends his chapter with a sentiment I can readily endorse: The rhetorical power of ethical and religious videogames remains largely untapped. But I would add: Is it even possible to reduce systems of belief to mere systems of rules-based procedures? For in reducing belief systems to mere sets of rules, don't we rob faith of its power? When activating a given rule produces a given result, no faith or belief is required.

And an added bonus for reading this post . . .

My wife was talking to our 25-year-old daughter (married, no kids, husband in grad school) this week and, since I'm taking a PhD class in Video Games, asked our daughter if she or friends play these games. Her immediate reply? "Who has the time!?!"

That got me thinking: Is the videogame market generationally self-sustaining, in that current gamers will keep playing even as new younger games are constantly added? Or will the gamers as they grow older eventually lose interest, so that the videogame market must constantly replenish its losses?

What do you think? Here are three research reports I found:

> This 2006 article from Hollywood Reporter describes a study released that year by the Consumer Electronics Association (sorry, but CEA website itself only allows association members to access past research):

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002539233

> Here is an industry facts page from the Entertainment Software Association website:

http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp

> Nielsen Media (the same people who do TV ratings) compiled this 2006 report on The State of the Console:

http://www.nielsenmedia.com/nc/nmr_static/docs/Nielsen_Report_State_Console_03507.pdf

Comments on "Procedural Literacy"

2008-10-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

A nice, meaty chapter which provides more of the theoretical underpinning that (as readers of this blog know) I've been looking for. Let me do three things:

> Make an observation about the argumentation and organization of Bogost's book.

> Summarize his thoughts about "procedural literacy" and share some of my own.

> Highlight another resource that Bogost cites, namely Gee's paper "Learning about Learning from a Video Game: Rise of Nations" which you can download by clicking here.

An Observation about Organization

We learn on page 258 that "Procedural rhetoric is a type of procedural literacy . . ." Aha! Thus procedural rhetoric is a subset of procedural literacy. This revelation causes me to think a bit more charitably about Bogost's proposal regarding "procedural rhetoric." (Yes, I'm still using the scare quotes until I'm convinced of his thesis.)

Why more charitable? The notion of procedural literacy has some provenance in the literature as far back (according to Bogost's citations) as 1980. (Further, media literacy and "electracy" are related concepts which have found some acceptance among scholars.) Thus Bogost is within an established body of literature and legitimately positioning himself to extend the work on procedural literacy in ways appropriate to changing conditions and understandings.

That being the case, I think Bogost would have been more effective in his argumentation if, rather than declaring "procedural rhetoric" an entirely new domain of rhetoric, he had argued for his concept of procedural rhetoric as a logical extension of (or corrollary to) evolving notions of procedural literacy.

In other words, instead of claiming discovery of a new domain of rhetoric (one not recognized in the literature of visual or digital rhetoric), Bogost could have been more effective by positioning his thesis of "procedural rhetoric" within the existing paradigm of procedural literacy.

Those of you who are taking Steve's class on the rhetoric of science know what I'm talking about. Rather than coming on as a "convention-buster" with a completely novel concept, Bogost would do better by arguing within--and then extending--an existing convention.

If that's the case, the Bogost should have started his book with procedural literacy and then demonstrated how "procedural rhetoric" is its logical extension, rather than starting with "procedural rhetoric" and then burying procedural literacy in Chapter 8. For if "procedural rhetoric" is a subset of procedural literacy, it doesn't make argumentative sense to privilege the former, bury the latter, and separate the two by 250 pages.

Summary and Thoughts

> We begin with a comparsion of behaviorist and constructivist theories of learning. A fairly garden-variety summation but useful in setting the ground.

> Now Bogost applies the two theories to videogames. Good! Applying a behaviorist framework leaves us with a deterministic view of gaming. Applying a constructivist framework leaves us, according to Bogost, with videogames that only teach general skills and values.

> We need to go further, he says, and see that videogames can teach specific skills. I'm having trouble understanding his argument here. Why does Bogost think that constructivist theories of learning assume only general skills and values can be learned? For example, I wrote an article a few years ago on how a constructivist approach could be used for teaching healthy food choices to schoolkids.

> Procedural literacy is a "new trend" (p. 244), though it's hard to see it as new or trendy since it's been around for nearly 30 years. Actually, though, I like the fact that a body of literature has developed over time about procedural literacy and (as stated above) wish Bogost would make more use of it.

> The excursus on Sayers is something I really don't get. Bogost could do a better job, in my view, of closing the circle and demonstrating how "The Lost Tools of Learning" offers a guide for teaching procedural literacy (or for tapping the educational power of videogames; I'm not sure what's being advocated here).

> Bogost writers, "Procedurality offers a possible bridge between the abstraction-poor behaviorist approach and the subject-poor constructivist approach, focusing on the way processes come together to create meaning." A creative thought. But I've got a problem with the terminology.

As we know, different fields may use the same word for different things. In cognitive psychology, procedural memory is the type of memory we employ for tasks such as riding a bicycle, typing on a keyboard, or shuffling a deck of cards. Is Bogost saying that videogames, because they teach such tasks, can bridge behaviorism and constructivism? I don't think that's what he means, but (as author) it's his job to clarify.

> The section on Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel as an example of teaching history from a procedural perspective is interesting (and, at the time Bogost was writing, the book was quite trendy). But Diamond's environmental determinism certainly had its critics. For example, Victor Davis Hanson wrote a book titled Carnage and Culture specifically to rebut Diamond and demonstrate that ideas do matter.

Both books are good reads, both are valuable, and I found myself thinking the answer lies in a combination of the two. In any event, I would suggest that history taught from a "procedural" perspective would, though valuable, be incomplete--and no a "bridge" between behaviorism and constructivism.

> To end the chapter Bogost writes, "Videogames teach biased perspectives about how things work. And the way they teach such perspectives is through procedural rhetorics, which players 'read' through direct engagement and criticism." This is a very good thought, which leaves me wanting more.

Why? Because it provides the opening to (as I mentioned above) describe "procedural rhetoric" as an extension of procedural literacy. I hope Bogost will take up this line, which I believe would be a more effective way of arguing than to claim "procedural rhetoric" is a totally new rhetorical domain.

Reading Gee's Article

Again, you can download the Gee article cited by Bogost if you click here. My recommendation is skip to the conclusion (starting on page 29) first and Gee's summation of 25 principles gleaned from learning theory.

Gee says these 25 principles are active in Rise of Nations, the game he reviews. It might be interesting to compare this list against the two games we're studying, World of Warcraft and Second Life. How do they stack up?

Comments on Bogost's "Advertising"

2008-10-10T07:51:00.000-07:00

Having now read the "Politics" and "Advertising" sections of Persuasive Games, let me sum up my general thoughts of the book:

What I like . . .

> Bogost sees a problem in the current literature and is willing to publicly propose a novel solution, namely procedural rhetoric. Further, he is willing to do the hard work of writing and publishing a book to support his thesis. Putting your ideas out in public is admirable!

> His book is a "keeper" as far as a good reference on the history of videogames. As someone who has an interest in (and has published on) media history, but mostly on "old media," Bogost's book offers a good resource as I ponder the continuities and differences of new media.

What I would like to see . . .

> In my view Bogost has moved too soon to criticism, without first developing his theoretical grounding.

> As such, Persuasive Games is mostly a book that features lots of game reviews (the "what") but gives less space to how "procedural rhetoric" actually works (the "how").

I'm willing to concede that descriptive work is important in developing a theory. But I would like to see in Bogost's subsequent writings more work on the actual theory development.

To see others' takes on Persuasive Games, I looked up reviews of the book. There weren't too many since the book is relatively new. But here are two:

http://www.jorisdormans.nl/article.php?ref=persuasivegames

http://game-research.com/index.php/book-reviews/book-review-persuasive-games-the-expressive-power-of-videogames/

In the first review, Dormans writes:

. . . The book touches upon a large variety of subjects beyond gaming: politics, education and advertising. In lengthy expositions Bogost shows how the logics of these fields have been incorporated in games, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. The high number of subjects and games discussed is probably one of the book greatest strengths, but I would have preferred Bogost to discuss procedural rhetoric itself more rigorously.

Despite the broad perspective and the wide variety of games discussed, Persuasive Games has a tendency to become a little bit repetitive. Games are either applauded for incorporating its primary message in its procedural structure, or dismissed for failing to do so. Although the analyses are solid and some of the verdicts are surprising you get the point after a couple of hundred pages. Looking at politics, advertising and education through the lens of videogames is interesting but I got the feeling that it could have been done just as effectively in about half of number the pages. . . .

Bogost discusses his procedural rhetoric in relation to classic and contemporary rhetoric, but the only rhetoric structure that is actually (and repeatedly) discussed in any detail is the procedural equivalent of the enthymeme. . . .

[Bogost's] humanist perspective on games makes Persuasive Games a very sympathetic book. But perhaps at certain points also a little bit descriptive and naive: Bogost believes games can restore contemporary culture broken by modern politics, advertising and ‘schooling’ (p. 64).

In the second review, Smith writes:

First of all, the plethora of competing labels and perfunctorily defined buzz-words floating about calls out for a careful survey of the field and a framework for analyzing the variety of specimen in the fast-growing serious games biotope. Second, we need a sense of the relative abilities of videogames to persuade; that is we need a theory of how, why and when they do persuade and preferably some documentation that they do in fact persuade. Bogost convincingly supplies the former but does not fully tackle the latter. No convenient model of game-based persuasion appears fully-formed in Bogost’s text. Instead we get a meticulously researched and clearly composed treasure-trove of examples alongside various hints of a larger theory. . . .

Bogost does not claim that all players necessarily reach the same conclusions [as his game criticisms] but this type of analysis does arguably make very strong assumptions about actual player interpretations without empirical basis. This approach in turn highlights the rather modest attention in the book to describing the exact working of procedural rhetorics and to documenting its efficiency. We hear little of why engaging with processes are a useful way of understanding the real-world phenomena that they represent. We are given very few leads to theoretical literature that might lend credence to the idea that personal engagement is important in persuasion. And we are not informed of one single instance in which anybody changed his mind or behavior after playing a game.

Bogost does well to tie his discussion to classical and visual rhetorics as well as captology. But practically passing the entire field of “persuasion research” which provides both theoretical models (e.g. O’Keefe, 1990) and empirical studies of the effects of various aspects of computerized persuasion (e.g. Sundar & Kim, 2005) is a curious choice. These omissions may leave the reader on shaky ground as to evaluating the very importance of games as tools for persuasion or critical thought.

Of course, few (sub)fields come nicely gift-wrapped and fully articulated in a single volume. Persuasive Games creates order from chaos and puts recent game developments into a much-needed historical perspective. This is an invaluable service to the field and the thoughtful treatment of a wide range of little-known games is inspiring as a case of game analysis in action. These achievements make me recommend the book warmly, while looking forward to Bogost’s future fleshing out of the theory and empirical merits of persuasive games.

Okay, so I'm not alone in (a) admiring Bogost for what he is attempting with Persuasive Games while also (b) finding the book more descriptive than explanatory.

Comments on "Digital Democracy"

2008-10-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm going to relax and realize that Persuasive Games is not, in fact, an academic book (as the first chapter initially suggested) but is rather a report on videogames in American politics, advertising, and education. As such, I will (1) cease looking for more theory development to bolster Bogost's claim for a new domain of "procedural rhetoric," (2) let me previously-posted reservations stand, and (3) confine my comments to the author's reportage.

My reading of Chapter 4, "Digital Democracy," left me with these questions and observations:

Is this book outdated? Having been published in 2007, presumably Persuasive Games was written in 2005 or just after the previous presidential election. So when Bogost was writing, the "first videogame endorsed by a U.S. presidential candidate" may have been legitimate news and portentous of things to come.

But now, as I check the websites of the two major presidential candidates for 2008, on neither site is any videogame featured (or at least, the front pages provide no visible way of navigation). Can "persuasive games" and "procedural rhetoric" be a force in "digital democracy" when, in this important election, neither candidate believes it important to employ such games?

A look at the index of Persuasive Games finds no references to MMOGs or MMORPGS. So has the well-known "light speed" of digital media passed the book by in the four years since Howard Dean for Iowa and Take Bake Illinois were introduced in 2004?

Thus far Persuasive Games has only featured rather ham-handed examples that seem crude by the standards of today's MMOGs. Thus my question is: Has the "center of gravity" in gaming shifted to MMOGs and left the likes of Madrid and September 12 far behind? In other words, do the "persuasive games" on which Bogost builds his case for "procedural rhetoric" matter anymore?

Of course, we still have seven more chapters to go and my mind remains open to the author's thesis. But Chapters 2-4 leave me with the abovementioned question.

What do "docu-games" have to do with politics? Their inclusion seems curious in a chapter on "Digital Democracy." Would these docu-games fit better in Bogost's section on the educational uses of "persuasive games"?

All because we can digitally recreate an experience, should we? Though I seldom agree with Ted Kennedy, I must concur with his assessment of JFK Reloaded as "tasteless." One of the sad memories of my boyhood growing up in Washington DC is the day my father took me to Arlington Cemetery, put me on his shoulders, and together we watched the funeral procession slowly make its way to the gravesite.

What's next? Should a Beltway Sniper game be created that allows players to be embodied as John Muhammad, to access road maps of the Washington DC area and see how many innocents they can be coldbloodedly killed? Or a Columbine or Virginia Tech Massacre game?

The same justification used by the makers of JFK Reloaded could be made for Holocaust Reloaded. Yes, it is possible to digitally recreate a simulacrum of Auschwitz, of the selections on the train platform, the gassings, the plunder, the crematoria, the medical experiments, the slave labor, the barracks. Game designers could make it possible for players to experience embodiment as SS killers.

But should it be done? I am reminded of Jaques Ellul's 1964 warning about the lure, which he believed inherent in technology, of perfecting a technology for no other justification than it is possible to do so.

Comments on "I Have No Words"

2008-10-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

The chapter, when read together with Jenkins' "Narrative Architecture," offers a nice counterpoint from a perspective more oriented toward ludology than narratology. So the two pieces, read in tandem, helped me to better understand one of the dominant conservations within game studies.

In my previous post, under the subhead "Is 'Persuasive Game' an Oxymoron?," I took up Costikyan's perspective and compared it to Bogost's thesis. Read below for an extended discussion.

But in essence, Costikyan cites a "direct, immediate conflict between the demands of a story and the demands of a game." Telling a satisfying story means keeping the game on a path, but this restricts players' freedom and therefore makes it an unsatisfying game.

So I ask: Does the same tension exist between "persuasion" and "game"? That is, if a satisfying argument means keeping the game on a path, does this entail restrictions on players' freedom which render the experience unsatisfying as a game?

Thus, is "persuasive game" an oxymorn?

Comments on "Narrative Architecture"

2008-10-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

Hey, a really good read! Jenkins' chapter is quite cogent in helping me understand the dividing line between ludologists and narratologists within the game studies discipline, while at the same time Jenkins himself takes a measured and moderate position between the two.

In reading the chapter I found myself trying to place Bogost's thesis within Jenkins' framework. Two thoughts stood out:

Is "Persuasive Game" an Oxymoron?

In his book Persuasive Games, Bogost wishes his proposal for a new domain of "procedural rhetoric" to be placed within--and then extend beyond--the conversation over visual and digital rhetorics. Yet in reading Jenkins I thought to myself: What if we placed Bogost within the conversation between ludologists and narratologists?

My presumption is that Bogost's rhetorical thesis would be classed in the narratological camp, rather than among the ludologists. Why? Because making an argument necessarily involves constructing a narrative.

But if we analyze Bogost's "persuasive games" according to the standards of Jenkins' "narrative architecture," then how do games that Bogost cites (e.g., Madrid, September 12, Kabul Kaboom, Darfur Dying, Balance the Planet, Tax Invaders, Vigilance 1.0) stack up? For example, Jenkins (p. 671) cites Costikyan's assertion that

There is a direct, immediate conflict between the demans of a story and the demands of a game. Divergence from the story's path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player's freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game.

Thus Costikyan might suggest that "rhetorical" games--which Boghost cites as exemplars of persausve games that employ procedural rhetoric--concentrate so much on story, they restrict players' freedom and thus are not satisfying as games. That is, "persuasive games" are good at rhetoric but ultimately fail as games.

This is a conundrum I've blogged about before when I posted about the "procedural gap" that Bogost acknowledges in his book. Namely, how "persuasive" are games that sacrifice gameplay for rhetoric? If the game offers little game value and thus attracts few comers, how will it be persuasive? Or if it ramps up the game value by downplaying the rhetoric and allowing players more freedom, then are the game's rhetorical possibilities diminished for the designer?

If we go with Costikyan's assertion, then the term "persuasive game" might even be an oxymoron. If the product is "persuasive" then it is diminished as a "game," or if the product is a satisfying "game" that gives wide freedom to the player then it is diminished as a vehicle of deliberate "persuasion."

Are Persuasive Games "Narrative-Poor"?

But of course, Jenkins does not side with Costikyan's dualistic approach. Instead he suggests that, when narrative is reconceived in architectural terms, game designers can tell "spatial stories" and engage in "environmental storytelling." Rather than criticize game designers for an emphasis on world-making and a neglect of plot and character development, their work should be seen as making "evocative spaces" which "create the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience" (p. 676).

Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts pushed forward by the character's movement across the map (p. 678).

I was especially impressed by Jenkins' explanation of the architectural element of his "narrative architecture." To illustrate, he cites the Star Wars game:

[We] would be frustrated if all it offered us was a regurgitation of the original film experience. Rather, the Star Wars game exists in dialogue with the films, conveying new narrative experiences through its creative manipulation of environmental details. One can imagine their place with a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comcics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each a relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels. In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly certain on their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the story world, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with (pp. 677-678).

What a good insight! But when I read this, again I found myself comparing this concept of game narrative with the narratives put forth by the "persuasive games" that Bogost cites.

If I am reading Jenkins correctly, then games succeed best as narrative devices when they are in dialogue with other representations, while creating a parallel immersive experience in which the story world can be explored.

By that standard Madrid, September 12, The McVideo Game, Tax Invaders and the other "persuasive" games that Bogost cites would seem to be rather narrative-poor. Why? Because they attempt to replicate (or as Bolter and Grusin might say, "remediate") rhetorical arguments which exist in other representations by merely transferring them from one medium to another. Thus my previous observation about whether Madrid or Tax Invaders constitute a new domain of rhetoric or, in fact, are simply "computer-assisted rhetoric."

For September 12 or The McVideo Game to successfully draw upon the properties of the game as a medium, and thus construct a compelling narrative, then (according to Jenkins' thesis) wouldn't they need to (1) be in dialogue with the representations we see in the news, but (2) offer players an immersive environment where they can explore and interact with the spaces which constitute the worlds of these stories?

Instead, if we go by Jenkins' description of a successful game narrative, then the "persuasive games" cited by Bogost seem to be only heavy-handed representations of rhetorical arguments rather than evocative spaces that add to the richness of our understanding by allowing us to explore, interact with, and immerse ourselves in the environments where these narratives take place.

Meet "Scaevola"

2008-09-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

In his brief 10-day career Scaevola (Latin for "left-handed"), a Night Elf Hunter, achieved Level 5 after completing numerous quests in Teldrassil. Alas, he did not earn enough coins to purchase a World of Warcraft subscription for himself and thus extend his existence. But Scaevola will be remembered by all who knew him as a stouthearted Elf who did his best, respected others, loved the cool shady woods of his native Shadowglen, and possessed an irrepressible curiosity to explore the wonder and beauty of the world around him.

First Reflections of a MMOG Noob

2008-09-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've downloaded the World of Warcraft (WoW) ten-day free trial and, at this writing, achieved rank as a Level 5 Night Elf Hunter. And earlier this month I created an account with Second Life (SL) and have visited such virtual sites as the Star Trek Museum of Science and the International Space Flight Museum.

These experiences leave me with a few questions:

> I can see how the designers of SL are mounting an argument by rigging their virtual table in favor of their concept of community. But while SL may be play (in Huizinga's sense), it is not a game. So does Bogost's theory of "procedural rhetoric" apply here? If a game has rules (says Huizinga), but if SL is not a game and thus by definition has no rules (in the sense of game-type rules), then is the possibility for Bogost's argumentation via "rule-based procedures" thereby vitiated? My impression is that SL players/communities ultimately set and police their own rules.

> But while WoW is a game, I can't yet see how its design is anything but what Bogost calls "self-referential" (p. 47). Though inducing players to increase their play is a type of persuasion, as Bogost explains, does it really amount to any argument? So far I don't see how the procedures of WoW do anything but what is "self-referential" for the player.

Comments on "Ideological Frames"

2008-09-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

Had I purchased Persuasive Games as an expose of the vast rightwing conspiracy at work in the world of videogames, no doubt my expectations would be satisfied. But having bought the book out of a scholarly interest in game studies I must confess, after three chapters, my general disappointment thus far.

Following a promising first chapter in which Bogost begins to set forth his case for a new domain of "procedural rhetoric," the second chapter reports that videogames can be rhetorical (was there any doubt?) and the third critiques three games (Tax invaders, Vigilance 1.0, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas).

Premature Move to Criticism

But the move toward criticism, before theory has been more fully articulated and research conducted, raises a problem cited by Messaris in his 2003 article "Visual Communication: Theory and Research." Referring to Van Leeuwen and Jewitt's 2001 book, Handbook of Visual Analysis, he observes:

Most of the book’s chapters are based on actual studies conducted by their respective authors, and although the descriptions of these studies are typically accompanied by methodological comments, in almost all cases it is the studies themselves that will be of most use to readers looking for guidance or inspiration. . . . [T]he types of research covered in this book do not lend themselves very well to systematic procedural rules (p. 553).

Although these analyses, and others in the book, are grounded in fairly detailed dissections of the visual images to which they are addressed, they all raise what is arguably the thorniest problem in visual research, namely, how we judge the validity of the analyst’s, or anyone else’s, interpretation. . . . How do we know that [researchers'] claims are adequate reflections of how other viewers would respond to the same images? . . . One of these ways is [to build on] . . . well-understood conventions whose functions have been studied systematically in the past, not only by other scholarly writers but also by media practitioners. When that is the case, and when an interpretation stays close to those conventions, the reader may perhaps have greater confidence that the meaning inferred by the writer is likely to be shared by an image’s intended viewers (p. 554).

Of course, the most straightforward way of validating an interpretation is to ask a representative group of viewers for their own responses to an image or set of images . . . [although] this kind of research does not receive much attention in Van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s book (pp. 554-555).

In the same way I am disappointed by Bogost's premature move toward criticism in his third chapter, before his theory of a new rhetorical domain has been more fully articulated, before he has meaningfully foregrounded his claim in "well-understood conventions" of visual and digital rhetorics, and before he has produced research. Without these we are left, like Messaris, to wonder "how we judge the validity of the analyst's, or anyone else's, interpretation."

As it stands, Bogost's third chapter offers only a polemic: conservative paranoia about thieving government, conservative obsession with moral policing, conservative callousness toward the less fortunate. But perhaps this is a shrewd double-move by the author. Maybe he intends for the perceptive reader to realize that, because Persuasive Games is presented in the conventions of a scholarly tome, the author's own ideological frame can slip through unnoticed. Touche!

Cursory Treatment of Lakoff

Finally, I'm disappointed by Bogost's shallow treatment of Lakoff's early and important work in the cultural-cognitive role of metaphor. I have more than a passing acquaintance with Lakoff's research since his work shows up in a chapter of my master's thesis and also figures in an article I had published last month in the Journal of Holocaust Studies (where I used schema theory as a framework for analyzing how perpetrators cognized their social world).

Lakoff's work is far too detailed and nuanced to adequately treat here. But in my view, Bogost mentioned Lakoff's seminal Metaphors We Live By (1980) only in passing to establish the bona fides of his argument, and then appropriates Lakoff's later "self-professed liberal" writing to bolster his critique of Tax Invaders, Vigilance 1.0, and GTA: San Andreas.

Again in my view, Bogost would have strengthened his case better by referencing Lakoff's earlier work on metaphor and cognition to offer his own discourse analysis of an actual videogame. Lakoff himself provides a nice model for such an analysis in his 1987 study, co-authored with Kovecses, on "The Cognitive Model of Anger Inherent in American English."

But then, if Bogost's case turns to cognitivism and discourse analysis, are we getting away from his claims regarding procedural rhetoric? It's been a couple of years, but I don't remember that Lakoff was a rhetorician or was much concerned about rhetorical theory in his 1980s works. That is, he was (if I remember rightly) primarily concerned with metaphor as a cultural-cognitive phenomenon rather than as a rhetorical trope. Thus invoking Lakoff may take us away from rhetoric and into another analytical framework altogether.

Alternate Approaches?

After the first three chapters I begin to wonder if Bogost would have been better served by another approach. For example, a couple of years ago I picked up Pratkanis and Aronson's (1992) classic Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. The book didn't pretend to break new theoretical ground but usefully synthesized existing theories (such as cognitive dissonance and elaboration likelihood) and demonstrated how propaganda (which they defined as "mindless persuasion") techniques occur in everyday life. Persuasive Games could have succeeded with a similar approach. Or as I mentioned at the outset of this posting, a straightforward polemic could be effective.

But if I'm going to accept the claim that the author has identified a new rhetorical domain, then I need more substantiation than Persuasive Games has presented so far. My mind remains open, and perhaps succeeeding chapter retreat from the premature rush to criticism and instead continue the promising theory development begun in the first chapter. But I'm not yet seeing how, say, Tax Invaders is anything more than "computer-assisted rhetoric" rather than an entirely new domain.

----------

REFERENCES

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G., & Kovecses, Z. (1987). The cognitive model of anger inherent in American English. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Messaris, P. (2003). Visual communication: Theory and research. Journal of Communication, September 2003, 551-556.

Pratkanis, A. R., & Aronson, E. (2001). Age of propaganda: The everyday use and abuse of persuasion (Rev. ed.). New York: Owl Books.

Van Leeuwen, T., & Jewitt, C. (Eds.) (2001). Handbook of visual analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Comments on "WoW Reader" and Bartle

2008-09-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

Some stimulating reading this week! Now we're getting into stuff that really interests me, the dynamics of "virtual" cultures. So let me offer, one at a time, some comments on our readings:

A Hollow World (Aarseth). A good scene-setter for those, like me, who are new to WoW. Not much original research here; really just a critique. But still helpful in sketching out the environment which forms the backdrop for WoW culture.

WoW as Rich Text (Krzywinska). Again, more of a critique than offering any original research, but still helpful for newbies in understanding the role of backstory in WoW culture.

A Note on Death and Dying (Klastrup). Easily my favorite read this week:

> First, there's original research here that brings me closer to actual WoW culture.

> Second, we've got gamers in their own words, which makes possible some discourse analysis as a way of unpacking their culture. This really got my mind to racing with added possibilities for my planned paper topic this semester. The distinctive speech codes here (instance, aggroing, creeps, pally, Leeroy, questing, leveling) are absolutely rife with potentials for cultural analyses, since speech always encodes cultural assumptions about social relations, truth discovery, and symbolic action.

> Third, the reading provided references to several websites where WoW culture is in evidence. Thus I checked out the discussion boards at http://wowvault.ign.com/ and then watched gamer-produced movies at http://www.warcraftmovies.com/. The latter was especially valuable not only for a novice like me to see game action, but also to observe the behaviors and values that WoW gamers prize enough to preserve as movies. The author's project website at http://www.death-stories.org/ also offers some helpful links to articles.

> Fourth, the author's premise of focusing on "death" as a microcosm of WoW culture is quite an illuminating way of approaching the problem.

Quests in WoW (Rettberg). Another good read which, after the author's lit review, was very helpful by offering actual quest examples from WoW. But where this chapter really shone was, for me, in its descriptions of actual gamer behavior. Where Krzywinska was content to critique WoW lore, Rettberg describes what players actually do. How interesting that the meaning of "quest" has been reinscribed from a transformative experience with closure to a transactional experience with no end. This says a lot about the values of WoW culture, especially in light of Bartle's (see below) typology of achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. Also, Rettberg makes reference to websites where aspects of WoW culture can be examined including:

> http://www.tentonhammer.com/
> http://www.bookofwarcraft.com/
> http://wow.allakhazam.com/
> http://www.wowwiki.com/
> http://www.thottbot.com/
> http://www.questkeep.com/

Players Who Suit MUDs (Bartle). The typologies here are terrifically helpful: Achievers, explorers, socializers, killers. Players vs world; acting vs interacting. The graph on page 761. Because I read this immediately after Retterg, my mind was racing to fit WoW culture and its emphasis on quests-as-transactions into Bartle's typology.

QUESTIONS THAT OCCUR TO ME:

> What would a discourse analysis of gamers' distinctive speech codes, found in Klastrup's death-stories, say about WoW culture?

> What do gamers' movies, which prize action and achievement over exploration and socializing, say about the values in WoW culture?

> Isn't it interesting that the speech of NCP quest givers is so different than the speech of gamers? That is, gamers don't pattern their speech after NCPs. This reinforces Rettberg's conclusion that narrative takes a back seat to achievement.

> If Rettberg's description of gamers' attitudes and behaviors toward their quests is correct, then would WoW fit into Bartle's typology as an achiever-oriented game?

> And if WoW is achiever-oriented, then how do the game designers maintain a viable balance with explorers, socializers, and killers? Or has advanced game technology outmoded (or found ways of getting around) Bartle's assertion that a balance between the four player-types is necessary for a game to be viable?

> Assuming that WoW is achiever-oriented, then what do we learn about WoW culture and its values? Has Blizzard given birth to a virtual culture that is Social Darwinist in its basic outlines? Or are there humanistic values which provide a counterweight to the achievement-oriented culture described by Rettberg?

> Finally, referring back to Bogost, is WoW a "persuasive game"?

In his definition Bogost states, "Partial reinforcement [to continue playing] is certainly a type of persuasion, but the persuasion is entirely self-referential: its goal is to cause the player to continue playing, and in so doing to increase [spending by producing] . . . experiences that players feel compelled to continue or complete. However, this kind of persuasion is not my concern here" (p. 47).

On the one hand, Blizzard is a profitmaking corporation and, as Rettberg documents, has designed in WoW a game that endlessly carries players along to the next quest. And the Aarseth chapter ably explains how even the geography of WoW is calculated for maximal stimulation. But on the other hand, WoW uses rule-based procedures to foster certain cultural values. Do these procedures mount an actual argument for those values? Or are the procedures merely "self-referential . . . to cause the player to continue playing"?

Thoughts, anyone?

Comments on "Newsgaming"

2008-09-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately for me, playing September 12 and Madrid did not shed much light on the questions described in my previous post. The "procedural rhetorics" of the two games are easily described:

> September 12 forces the first-person shooter to target terrorists mingling with residents of a Middle Eastern village. But missiles always arrive a moment too late, causing civilian casualties and collateral damage to homes and buildings, and thus stoking resentments that strengthen the terrorists.

> Madrid takes the player to an antiterrorist candlelight vigil. But though clicking each new candle causes it to glow more brightly, candles previously lit begin to dim. Thus the aggregate level of consciousness never really increases despite the player's best attempts (or seen another way, consciousness can only be maintained by the player's best attempts).

While at the Newsgaming website I checked out the link to Ludology blog and found an entry about McCain's new Pork Invaders videogame, clearly a takeoff on the Tax Invaders game described by Bogost.

The rhetoric of Pork Invaders is also simple to describe: Vetoes must be "shot" at invading pigs (an allegory for pork-barrel spending) before the pigs cause your house to crumble. Vetoes that shoot down pigs register points, measured in tax dollars saved, for the player. In the same way, Americans need a president, John McCain, who will veto wasteful spending.

Of course, as a class we played these games in order to explore their procedurality. But beyond that, they offered very little game value. Why would anyone other than cognoscenti who are already predisposed to the games' viewpoints actually play them? And if not, is their rhetorical power diminished?

And so once again, we return to a question I asked before: Have we set up a paradox where the most attractive games, the ones that let players control more action, have the least rhetorical possibilities for the designer? After all, you can't persuade people if you can't reach them . . . but how can you attract them without giving up substantial control to the gamers?

Comments on Bogost's "Politics"

2008-09-09T19:15:00.001-07:00

As you know, I completed Bogost's previous chapter on "Procedural Rhetorics" with a question about how a game designer uses procedurality to actually construct an argument. In my mind is the picture of a designer who encodes rule-based procedures into a game which then compel players to enthymematically fill in the missing premises.

I was hoping that the ensuing chapter on "Politics" might shed more light on my question. Instead the chapter focused on the content of the rhetorical arguments in the games under study, rather than explaining how those arguments were constructed through rule-based procedures.

In other words, Bogost's goal for the chapter seemed to be establishing the fact that persuasive games can make rhetorical arguments. But I already concede that point. What I'm looking for is not just the basic assertion that games can make arguments, but rather how those arguments are uniquely made through procedurality. For example:

> What specific coding decisions did the designer make (and not make) to construct specific arguments? How do these functions as enthymemes within the space of the game? Perhaps by interviewing designers Bogost could have gotten insights on how arguments were constructed, rather than only telling readers what arguments were made.

> How does procedurality uniquely argue for the values of, say, the US military in America's Game? It seems to me that the rhetoric of honor, duty, country has long been made in many other ways. Why should America's Game be viewed as a new rhetorical device rather than an intensification of existing devices? That returns us to a question I asked last week: Humans have followed rule-based procedures for making arguments since classical times. So, should videogames be seen as an entirely new rhetorical domain or as "computer-assisted rhetoric"?

> How can I, as an analyst, unpack something new from America's Game that I couldn't unpack from analyzing any number of US Army artifacts? The military ethos of objectifying the enemy, which Bogost mentions, has long been an object of scholarly study. (A classic work is Dower's War Without Mercy about the race war that developed between US and Japaneses forces in the Pacific Theater during World War II.) What can I learn by studying the game specifically as an artifact of "procedural rhetoric" that I couldn't learn by studying US Army artifacts in general?

Please know I have an open mind on all these issues. My questions are not rhetorical. I really do want to explore these questions.

Thanks for Bogost's Comments

2008-09-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

First, let me thank Ian Bogost for his thoughts comments to blog posting last week. His input was gracious and fosters a dialogue to which I look forward, because through this interchange I can better grasp his theses and increase my own understandings.

1. Last week I reviewed Bogost's first chapter on "Procedural Rhetorics" and, while I readily concede that persuasive games are rhetorical, expressed some reservations about whether their procedurality constitutes constitutes a new rhetorical domain. Should we not first see if existing theories of visual or digital rhetorics could be stretched and expanded to encompass persuasive games, before declaring a new domain is needed? That way, we could attempt to understand procedurality by tapping into existing literatures and analytical frameworks.

Ian's reply: You're right that there is a rhetorical move in claiming procedural rhetoric as "new," and indeed there are probably many precedents. I believe I mention legal process as one as well, in the first chapter. I'm not so much interested in procedural rhetoric as "new thanks to computers" but rather new as a theoretical concept, and I certainly would welcome articulations of historical versions of the concept.

My response: Ian, I appreciate your generous reply. Perhaps you agree with me that the "new-thanks-to-compuers" genre is rife with people who claim that today's challenges are "unprecedented" and thereby obsolesce all previous knowledge. Such a stance is, I believe, not very helpful in advancing understanding. We can learn much by building on scholarship which has gone before us. Like you, I would welcome collaborative opportunities to trace historical versions of procedurality that might inform current theory development.

2. In particular, I agreed with Bogost that current works on visual rhetoric seem to privilege static or filmic images and that works on digital rhetoric privilege text. But last semester I cited in my RCID 804 blog a number of visual rhetoric/communication scholars who are dissatisfied with the lack of theory development. They point out that much of the literature consists of articles in which authors simply select some image(s) and then write a critique. Yet without any theoretical frameworks to inform a repeatable research agenda, how do you know whether one author's critique is as good as any other interpretation.

It strikes me that the field of visual rhetoric may be ready for some solid theory development, that persuasive games could furnish useful cases, and that participating in this development rather than declaring a new rhetorical domain might be worth the attempt.

Ian's reply: On visual rhetoric: my position is "extreme" in relation to visual and verbal rhetoric perhaps because I think procedurality has been so ignored by (digital) rhetoricians. There is, of course, reason to consider the verbal, visual, sound, etc. aspects of games. The book takes some of them up, later on.

My response: Again, Ian, I deeply respect your forthrightness to acknowledge where you stand. The literature on the rhetoric of science suggests that knowledge-making in academe is ultimately a give-and-take process of argumentation and eventual consensus. Staking out an "extreme" position can be beneficial by, in this case, prodding those digital rhetoricians who have ignored procedurality. Though I maintain for now certain reservations as stated above, I look forward (as I mentioned last week, and as you stated in your reply) to reading the arguments laid out in the remainder of your book.

3. Finally, I asked last week about how, exactly, do "procedural rhetoricians" construct an argument. In so doing I noted that Bogost's book describes a "procedural gap" in which, like the "play" in a steering wheel before the gears mesh, gamers have "free space" to manipulate the game according to their own desires. If that is the case, is the game designer's opportunity to persuade the gamer diminished?

Ian's reply: On constructing a procedural argument; the constraint of additional rules produces a more richly meaningful possibility space. The concept of a game in which you can "do anything" (if it's even possible) is actually much less interesting than one in which you can do some very particular thing. The possibility space becomes more meaningful as it narrows.

My response: Thanks, Ian. Your reply helps me to better understand your argument.

Thoughts on Visual Rhetoric

2008-09-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

Comments on "Procedural Rhetoric" (#2)

2008-09-02T18:37:00.001-07:00

Now let me turn to the substance of Bogost's argument that a new domain of procedural rhetoric is required to adequately analyze procedural expression in general and persuasive games in particular. My potential objections revolve around these questions:

1. Is "procedural rhetoric" really new?

Bogost notes, correctly, that procedures are followed in many human activities. The raison d'etre for a new domain of procedural rhetoric, however, is the capacity for computers to execute rule-based procedures at superhuman speed.

Nevertheless, allow me to look back rather than forward. Is not classical stasis theory a rule-based procedure? (As you recall, the theory holds that rhetors proceed through a series of steps to identify actual points of contention.) And is not Aristotle's theory of pathos, which George Kennedy has called "the earliest systematic discussion of human psychology," a rule-based procedure? (The sage suggested how rhetors could alternately induce anger or mildness, love or hate, fear or confidence, shame or shamelessness, indignation or pity, admiration or envy.)

So I remain skeptical of Bogost's claim that procedural rhetoric is an entirely new domain, rather than a computer-assisted version of earlier theories with long antecedents. But I will reserve judgment until I read the next chapters in which Bogost provides examples of his thesis.

2. Is the domain of visual rhetoric really inadequate for videogames?

Though Bogost makes a case for a new domain, he frames his argument according to the old domain he desires to leave behind. Bogost notes how Hill's "continuum of vividness" omits videogames and software, and then proceeds to place those procedural media within Hill's continuum. But if that is so, then why can we not expand theories of visual rhetoric to encompasse videogames, rather than establish for those games a whole new domain?

By the same token, Bogost takes issue with Blair's contention that visual images do not make "propositions" with which audiences can agree or disagree. Thus, asserts Blair, visual images may have presence (a term he takes from Perelman's new rhetoric) but they do not make arguments in the conventional sense. But of course, Blair's thesis (on which I have favorably blogged in another forum) is not the final word. Again, why not take on Blair first, before creating a whole new domain?

Do not get me wrong: I have read widely on visual rhetoric/communication and I agree with Bogost that the literature seems to privilege static and filmic visuality. Further, my readings about digital rhetoric affirm Bogost's objection that the literature is largely concerned with textuality. But why not correct these shortcomings first?

Finally, I would point out that the literature of visuality contains three strains of thought which are labeled visual rhetoric (how visuals constitute sites for argument), visual semantics (how visuals are structured to convey meaning), and visual pragmatics (how visuals function to create their effects). My question is: Though Bogost has taken the rhetorical route, would it be possible to analyze what he has called "persuasive games" through seminatics or pragmatics?

3. How does a "procedural rhetor" actually make an argument?

Bogost claims, "[P]rocedural rhetorics do mount propositions: each unit operation in a procedural representation is a claim about how part of the system it represents does, should, or could function" (p. 36).

Here my mind pictures a game designer writing code and setting up rule-based procedures that will guide gameplay. Then as gamers play the game, their play enthymematically fills in the missing propositions of the syllogistic arguments intended by the designer. Thus the gamers persuade themselves as they complete the designer's claim.

But as Bogost points out, by way of quoting Murray,

"[The] mere ability top move a joystick or click on a mouse" is not sufficient cause for "agency"--genuine embodied participation in an electronic environment. Rather, such environments must be meaningfully responsive to user input. . . . "Procedural environments are appealing to us not just because they exhibit rule-generated behavior, but because we [the users] can induce the behavior . . . the primary representational property of the computer is the codified rendering of responsive behaviors. This is what is most often meant when we say that computers are interactive. We mean they create an environment that is both procedural and participatory (p. 42).

The more participatory the game, the more the user is embodied, the better. Such participation and embodiment best occur within "the free space of movement within a more rigid structure," like the play in a steering wheel before the gears mesh (p. 42). Bogost calls the space between rule-based representation and player subjectivity the "simulation gap."

But if embodiment is maximized in "free space," and this free space is a gap in the rule-based representations of the game, then is the game's rhetoric attenuated as free space increases and players become more embodied and in control? In other words: the better the game, the less possibilities a designer has to make rhetorical claims? If that is so, then technological advances would diminish rather than enhance the designer's opportunities for making arguments, since those advances would create more free space for players to control the experience.

Though I do not necessarily assert this argument at the moment--and will await further reading of Bogost's examples in succeeding chapters--at least I pose this question at the outset for everyone's consideration.

Comments on "Procedural Rhetoric" (#1)

2008-09-02T17:55:00.000-07:00

In a series of three posts I will comment on: (1) the structure of Bogost's argument; (2) his claim that procedural rhetoric constitutes a new domain; and (3) applications of my own studies in visual rhetoric to Bogost's claims.

As you may know, I am wary of claims that today's technologies pose unprecedented problems that obsolesce all previous knowledge and require entirely new analytical frameworks. So I was skeptical of Bogost's early suggestion of "the name procedural rhetoric for the new type of persuasive and expressive practice" of "using processes persuasively" (p. 3).

Yet while I reserve the right to ultimately demur, I must confess that Bogost's argument in Chapter 1 is effectively laid out and nicely anticipated (tough not necessarily answered) my objections at nearly every turn. Thus I found his argument a thoughtful one that merits sobser consideration.

Let me lay out Bogost's argument:

1. Define the term procedurality
2. Explain the tropologic nature of procedurality
3. Provide a (admittedly garden-variety) history of rhetoric
4. Argue why procedurality is not adequately covered by visual rhetoric
5. Argue why procedurality is not adequately covered by digital rhetoric
6. Argue why a new domain of procedural rhetoric is required
7. Explain why videogames are a privileged category of procedural expression
8. Define the term persuasive game
9. Distinguish persuasive games from--
a. Serious games
b. Rhetorics of play
c. Persuasive technology
10. Introduce examples of persuasive games

As an example of inventio Bogost's case is effectively constructed: When after Point 3 above I found myself asking "Yeah, but what about visual rhetoric?" then Bogost nicely anticipated that objection. And when after Point #7 above I found myself asking "Yeah, but how do 'persuasive games' align with our readings last week in Huizinga" then Bogost carefully distinguished between his concept and Sutton-Smith's rhetorics of play (p. 52).

(By the way, Sutton-Smith's thesis gets me far more interested in "the reasons people play and the cultural function of that play" than did Huizinga's somewhat vacillating musings. The notion that rhetorics of play are "placed in context within broader value systems" and thus serve to reproduce culture is a notion I would enjoy studying in more depth. For example: Are Sutton-Smith's seven rhetorics of play--progress, fate, power, identity, the imaginary, the self, and frivolity--exhaustive? Do they function as archetypes across all cultures? Thoughts, anyone?)

So to conclude this post: Bogost has made a thoughtful and reasoned argument that merits consideration. In my next posts I turn some thoughts of my own regarding his thesis.

Comments on Huizinga (#3)

2008-08-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society . . .

This opening quote from Huizinga is, to my mind, not so self-evident as its author implies. Huizinga asserts that even animals naturally engage in play without the accouterments of civilization. Thus even lone human individuals who live outside any society would still play. Culture may presuppose human society, but play has no such presupposition. "In culture we find play as a given magnitude existing before culture itself existed" (p. 4), contends Huizinga, so that "culture [is] sub specie ludi" (p. 5). Play simply exists, somewhere out there in the interstices between "instinct" and "will," possessing of itself "a meaning [that] implies a non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself" (p. 1). But is this argument (which is grounded in the modernist project of striving to "know" an independently existing phenomenon by "re-presenting" it through language) sustainable? I am not so sure.

To my way of thinking, culture precedes play and not the reverse. First, a lone individual living outside of any society would not cognize play in the same way as persons-in-society. Huizinga contends that play is a stepping-out from "ordinary" life, an interlude. But there is no "ordinary" life to step away from, except within the context of society. The putative lone individual would experience "play" as a part of the natural continuum of ordinary life, for he/she would have no other standard by which to judge an activity as "ordinary" or otherwise. Without society there are no "interludes." How could a lone individual have any conception of "play" as being a "free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life" (p. 13)?

Thus, secondly, play can only have meaning within the contexts of society and culture. Even in the smallest human grouping, already there are necessary interrelations of kinship and power. If we consider culture to be a shared organization of knowledge, then this social grouping already has a culture. Its members must, in order to function within the group, share a common way of organizing their knowledge regarding kinship and power relations. Thus they have an "ordinary" life, the precondition for any concept of "play" to have meaning.

Third, I would submit that society precedes play because a precondition for play is economic organization. Individuals preoccupied with survival cannot engage in "regular contests and beautiful performances before an admiring public" (p. 1) when their imaginative lives are oriented toward the next meal. Only as economic organization affords respite from such preoccupation can play emerge as a significant feature of individual and social life.

Do these musings have any bearing on our study this semester of serious games? I believe they do. If you agree with Huizinga that play is innate then you will look at the psychology of gaming with a kind of "natural law" orientation. But if you agree with me that play is social then you will regard gaming as an expression, not primarily of innate urges, but of socially constructed and coordinated meanings.

Comments on Huizinga (#2)

2008-08-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

Huizinga (p. 19) quotes Plato:

Life must be lived as a play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies and win in the contest.

Reading this quote in an essay on "The Play-Element in Culture" instantly reminded me of Goffman's work on frame analysis and his extension of Mead's symbolic interactionism by likening social relations to dramaturgy. Thus in explaining Goffman's thesis, Keesing (1974) sounded much like Plato when he wrote that culture consists not only of what individuals know and think and feel, but also each person's

theory of what his fellows know, believe, and mean, his theory of the code being followed, the game being played, in the society into which he was born. . . . It is this theory to which a native actor refers in interpreting the unfamiliar or the ambiguous, in interacting with strangers (or supernaturals) . . . and with which he creates the stage on which the games of life are played (p. 89).

In a paper (Ward, 2008) that I just had published for the Summer 2008 issue of the Journal of Holocaust Studies, I applied symbolic interactionism and frame analysis as a framework for explaining the willingness of ordinary Germans (and their non-German collaborators) to be conscripted for duty in the machinery of genocide:

Mead, who is accounted along with Dewey and Peirce as a leading early twentieth-century pragmatist, wrote prolifically but never published any systematic treatise of his ideas. After his death, students assembled his notes and published them as Mind, Self and Society (1934). The term "symbolic interactionism" was coined posthumously in 1937 by Blumer. According to Blumer (1969, p. 2), symbolic interactionism has three core concepts that revolve around meaning, language, and thought: (1) "Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them." (2) "The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows." (3) "These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters."

From these three principles arise Mead's (1934, pp. xxiii-xxvi) view of the self and of the community. A consciousness of self cannot exist without community since talk is the precondition for the development a self-concept. The self, then, is a function of language. Mead regarded as unique the human ability to take the role of the other, so that symbolic interactionists believe individuals socially construct their identities by imagining how they must appear to others. In symbolic interactionist terminology this is the looking-glass self. Mead believed that construction of the self is ongoing as the "I," which represents spontaneity and creativity, symbolically (i.e., via language) interacts with the "me" of the looking-glass self. Individuals also make composite mental images of their communities—called the generalized other—in order to align their choices with the expectations of their societies.

Goffman’s writings extend the concepts of Mead's symbolic interactionism by proposing the metaphor of social interaction as a dramaturgical performance. "The perspective . . . is that of the theatrical performance; the principles derived are dramaturgical ones" so that Goffman (1971, p. xi) studied the ways in which an individual "presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impressions they form of him, and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them." Thus, in his analysis, "the part one individual plays is tailored to the parts played by the others present, and yet these others also constitute the audience." Emerson (1994) explains how, for example, embarrasment at a gynecological examination is overcome as the participants enact their respective roles—an illustration that carries ominous import for comprehending the Nazi euthanasia program and death camp "selections."

Perhaps Goffman's (see especially 1974) best known contribution to social psychology is his concept of frame analysis—a process by which (1) social actors confront situations, (2) make (metaphorical) connections to recognisable experiences, and (3) build layered structures called keys that comprise sets of conventions by which actors can (4) stage their responses and thereby negotiate their identities with others. Thus the activity of flirting, as the primary framework for an interaction, becomes a social construction that is layered on the frame space of a dance performance, which itself is layered on the kinds of music that might be played. "Framing permeates the level of ordinary social action. We live in a world of social relationships, in which roles are acted out, with various keyings and deceptions played upon them. This is the core of practical activities and occupations, of power and stratification" (Collins, 1988, p. 61).

What does my crossing of Huizinga with Mead and Goffman suggest for our study of serious games this semester? In my view:

1. Mead's concepts of the "I" and the "me," and of "taking the role of the (generalized) other" to construct a "looking-glass self," may provide a theory for understanding how inhabitants of virtual worlds construct their virtual identities

2. Goffman's theory of frame analysis may offer an approach to understanding how gamers, well, "play the game" at the level of virtual interaction.

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References

Blumer, H. (1937). Social psychology. In E. P. Schmidt (Ed.), Man and society: A substantive introduction to the social science. New York: Prentice-Hall, pp. 144-198.

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Collins, R. Theoretical continuities in Goffman's work. In P. Drew and A. Wootton (Eds.), Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Emerson, J. P. (1994). Behavior in private places: Sustaining definitions of reality in gynecological examinations. In J. Brien & P. Kollock (Eds.), The production of reality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, pp. 189-202.

Goffman, E. (1971). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row.

Keesing, R. M. (1974). Theories of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3, 73-97.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ward, M., Sr. (2008). The banality of culture? Reassessing the social science of the Goldhagen Thesis on its own terms. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 14(1), 1-34.

Comments on Huizinga (#1)

2008-08-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

In reading Huizinga's connection between play and ritual, I immediately made a connection of my own to the fieldwork I did in 2003-07 and the subsequent ethnography I've been writing over the past year. During the previous four years I visited some 200 fundamentalist Baptist churches in 17 states and was a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services. Earlier this month, in response to a revise-and-resubmit invitation from the Journal of Communication and Religion, I described my observations of (among other things) the laic ritual of "sharing your testimony."

Initially I turned to Philipsen's speech codes theory as a framework for explaining my observations. The theory holds (among its six propositions) that cultural assumptions are inextricably interwoven into the very speech of a given culture. This interweaving is seen in patterned ways of speaking and as cultural members rhetorically invoke metacommunicative vocabularies (such as "sharing your testimony") through ritualized speech sequences, cultural myths, and social dramas. These vocabularies provide auditors with cultural resources to construction their identities and cognize their encounters.

The concept of social drama led me to Turner's works on performative anthropology, which is where we see a connection to our reading of Huizinga. Here is what I wrote, in my ethnography, to describe Turner's perspective:

Turner can be seen with Geertz as a leading figure in symbolic anthropology. As Deflem (1991, pp. 8-9) notes, Turner focused on symbolic operations in the social field (or "the groups, relationships, and social-structural organizational principles of the society in which the rituals are performed"), while Geertz explored the cultural field (where "ritual symbols are regarded as clusters of abstract meanings" embedded within the totality of a culture). Turner (1975, p. 32) departed from structuralist anthropologists when he argued that "ritual and its symbolism are not merely epiphenomena or disguises of deeper social and psychological processes, but have ontological value."

What I have been doing in all this, perhaps, is trying to provide an alternative notion to that of those anthropologists who . . . regard religious symbols as reflecting or expressing social structure and promoting social integration. My view would also differ from that of certain anthropologists who would regard religion as akin to a neurotic symptom or a cultural defense mechanism. Both these approaches treat symbolic behavior, symbolic actions, as an "epiphenomenon," while I try to give it "ontological" status (Turner, 1974, pp. 56-57).

Though Turner (1968, p. 7) allows that structuralism is "true as far as it goes," he contends the method "points to only one of many properties it [ritual] possesses" and then argues, "More important is its creative function—it actually creates, or recreates, the categories through which men perceive reality—the axioms underlying the structure of society and the laws of natural and moral orders." As such, Turner classified humankind as homo performans (1985, p. 187) and urged that "performance, whether as speech behavior, the presentation of self in everyday life, stage drama, or social drama, would now move to the center of observation and hermeneutical attention" (p. 182). He asserts that such a hermeneutic is appropriate to "postmodern ways of thinking" (p. 185). And Turner's proposal, that comprehending a culture's performances is the best way for analysts "to grope, in a more than cognitive way, towards an experiential or 'inside view' of the other culture" (p. 223), holds out promise for employing "the performative turn in anthropology" (Conquergood, 1989) to understand a Fundamentalist culture often disdained and dismissed by the academy.

According to Turner's method, ritual is "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers" (1967, p. 19) or "a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests" (1977, p. 183). Rituals are also repositories for symbols, which in turn are "storage units" (1968, pp. 1-2) of meaning and interpretation. And because rituals inherently implicate transcendence, ritual symbols go beyond mere encoding of shared values and—when used in a ritual performance—become efficacious to transform adherents.

As vehicles of ritual, symbols (see Turner, 1967, pp. 28-29, 50-55; 1968, pp. 18-19, 81-82; 1969, pp. 11-13) can be dominant and possess a largely consistent and autonomous meaning across the total system, or be instrumental and only have meaning in relation to other symbols within the system. Dominant symbols are characterized by their abilities to: condense multiple actions or objects into a single representation; unify disparate symbolic meanings through common analogies or associations; and polarize the meaning around the two poles of social obligation and personal desire. Fieldworkers can discern symbolic properties through exegesis (questioning informants, consulting written sources or oral traditions of myth and dogma); operation (observing how the symbol is ritually handled or excluded); and position (seeing how the symbol relates to other symbols within the ritual).

Ritual itself is processual, a concept that Turner began to develop in 1963 (Deflem, 1991, p. 7) after reading Van Gennep's classic The Rites of Passage (1960/1909) which had recently been translated into English. If rites of passage could be a process, Turner reasoned, other social rituals could also be conceived as social processes. Van Gennep divided passage rites into three phases (pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal) by which the initiate is separated from the social structure, then placed in a marginal state between old and new, and finally aggregated back into the social structure with a new identity. For his part, Turner saw in the liminal phase of ritual a quality of communitas in which hierarchy is suspended temporarily and comradeship prevails, before the social structure reasserts itself. Out of this concept of "ritual not simply as a mechanism of redress, but as humanly meaningful cultural performances of an essentially processual nature" (Deflem, 1991, p. 22) emerges Turner's theory of social drama.

Such dramas, Turner (1974, pp. 38–42) proposes, are comprised of four phases: breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration (or recognition of a permanent schism). As Conquergood (1983) has summarized the process:

All cultural performances . . . spring from a pervasive human process for absorbing the tensions and conflicts of collective life. Turner names this universal strategy "social drama." Because we are individuals as well as social creatures, consensus is always imperfectly achieved and tenuously held. From time to time, omnipresent vested interests are made manifest through the public breach of a norm. This display of discord must be dampened quickly or it will escalate to crisis. Redressive measures are invoked to achieve resolution either through reintegration or public recognition of a permanent schism (p. 89).

Using Turner's theoretical tools, let us look again at the composite conversion narrative cited at the outset of this essay. These Fundamentalist narratives function to maintain the social system and constitute a form of knowledge that Fundamentalists employ to build their theories of how the world works. But as Turner would have it, there is more going on. "[W]henever ritual is inspired by a religious belief in supernatural beings or powers, its status is different from other, inner-worldly forms of knowledge" and furnishes "some kind of 'surplus value' over and above other, secular forms of thought," so that "religion is not just like any other system of ideas and does have supreme ontological value" (Deflem, 1991, p. 12). Fundamentalists, like other religionists, are creating supreme reality in their cultural performances. "Sharing my testimony" is not merely epiphenomenal, not merely an expression of deeper processes; it is ontological. The speaker and audience are creating a world in which "spiritual warfare" (a commonplace term) is quite real, where the dangers of straying from communal expectations brings temporal woe and spiritual jeopardy, and adherence to culturally normative behavior is approved by God.

The testimony ritual occurs in settings replete with the manipulation of symbols. The dominant symbol (to use Turner's scheme) of Fundamentalism, as mentioned before, is the Bible. Many churches, perhaps a majority, have no crosses (or none which are readily visible) in the public ritual space. Yet many have oversized Bibles prominently displayed on the communion table below the pulpit. Some have depictions of the Bible carved into the wooden front of the pulpit or prominently mounted on the wall. A stylized open Bible is the logo for numerous churches and Fundamentalist colleges and mission boards. Preachers frequently hold up the Bible when gesturing. A large faction within Fundamentalism prominently features "the old-fashioned King James Bible" as its defining rhetoric.

Much more so than the cross, the Bible unifies all other instrumental symbols within the total system, while establishing the two poles of moral obligation and personal desire. In Fundamentalist conversion narratives, fealty to God's Word unifies such instrumental symbols as home and church (where the Bible is taught), the Christian school (which reinforces home and church by inculcating biblical principles), the preacher or pastor (who publicly proclaims the Bible), the pulpit (where the Bible is declared), the Christian friend or spiritual mentor (who privately holds the speaker accountable to the Bible), and the "life verse" (a Bible passage by which God has impressed a unique personal lesson). Note in the composite testimony story, presented above, how salvation comes as "mom (or dad) took the Bible," how a lack of spiritual commitment is indicated by "never read(ing) my Bible," how the preaching of the Bible initiates change, and how change is signified "a hunger for His Word." Moreover the Bible, as dominant symbol, forms the two poles of Fundamentalists' moral obligation (to read, heed, proclaim, and defend God's Word) and personal desire (to know God better by reading His Word and commune with God as He speaks to the believer through His Word).

In "sharing your testimony" lay speakers embark on a rite of passage as they progress through pre-liminal (testimony unknown), liminal (testimony shared), and post-liminal (testimony accepted) phases. In the scores of testimony narratives I observed, for the brief shining moment that the layperson inhabited the public ritual space of the church, a spirit of communitas prevailed in which social hierarchy was temporarily suspended and all were accounted equal in their shared need of divine redemption.

The testimony stories themselves are easily analyzed as social dramas which follow a pattern of breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. The breach occurs when the narrator falls away from parental and pastoral teaching, observing the letter of community norms without sharing in their spirit. Then a crisis ensues when the narrator realizes that he/she is afflicted with doubt and questions the reality of his/her salvation. Redressive action is undertaken as the narrator appeals to concerned members of the Fundamentalist community and ultimately to God through prayer. At last, reintegration happens as the narrator is truly assured of his/her salvation and endorses community norms both by letter and spirit. (Conversion narratives never testify to recognition of permanent schism, of course, else the narrative would not be offered in the first place.)

Based on hundreds of sermons and scores of testimonies that I observed in some 200 churches, the idealized Fundamentalist cultural norms for "the Christian life" include: expectations of daily personal devotions and "family devotions" (paternal Bible instruction at dinnertime); attending church "whenever the doors are open" and tithing regularly; being an "ambassador for Christ" in the workplace and neighborhood through personal rectitude and evangelistic "witnessing"; setting "godly" standards for entertainment choices and personal attire; and generally living a "godly life" according to biblical precepts. Testimony narratives reinforce these communal expectations as the social drama provides listeners with cultural resources to frame their own situations and identities.

So for me, as I compared Huizinga to Turner, the question arose: Is Huizinga a structuralist who sees in play/ritual an epiphenomenon of deeper structural processes? This might seem to be the case, since Huizinga describes play/ritual as stepping out of "ordinary" life. And if I am fairly characterizing Huizinga as a structuralist, then is his view correct? Or is Turner more near the mark when he asserts that ritual is ontological, rather than only symbolic, as participants create supreme reality through their performance?

This discussion of Huizinga and Turner leads to many questions that might be asked this semester about games:

1. Do gamers symbolically express social interaction or do they create supreme reality?
2. Do games manifest Turner's dominant and instrumental symbols?
3. Do games manifest liminality and communitas?
4. Do games encode social dramas that provide cultural resources for gamers?

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References

Conquergood, D. (1983, November). From ritual to theater: The human seriousness of play [Review of the book]. Literature in Performance, 4(1), 89-90.

Conquergood, D. (1989, January). Poetics, play, process, and power: The performative turn in
anthropology. Text and Performance Quarterly, 9(1), 82-88.

Deflem, M. (1991). Ritual, anti-structure, and religion: A discussion of Victor Turner's processual symbolic analysis. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30(1), 1-25.

Philipsen, G. (1997). A theory of speech codes. In T. L. Albrecht & G. Philipsen (Eds.), Developing communication theories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Philipsen. G., Coutu, L. M., & Covarrubias, P. (2005). Speech codes theory: Restatement, revisions, and response to criticisms. In W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Turner, V. W. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Turner, V. W. (1968). The drums of affliction A study of religious processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.

Turner, V. W. (1969). Forms of symbolic action: Introduction. In R. F. Spencer (Ed.), Forms of symbolic action: Proceedings of the 1969 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Turner, V. W. (1974). Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. W. (1975). Revelation and divination in Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. W. (1977). Symbols in African ritual. In J. L. Dolgin, D. S. Kemnitzer, & D. M. Schneider (Eds.), Symbolic anthropology: A reader in the study of symbols and meanings. New York: Columbia University Press.

Turner, V. W. (1985). On the edge of the bush: Anthropology as experience (E. Turner, Ed.). Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Turner, V. W. (1986). The anthropology of performance. New York: PAJ Publications.

Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1909)