adminicle

Games, reality, Trickster: finding ways to enhance imagination in a sustainable way

I've been reading from Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken, and I've come across what I think is an interesting notion about how games enhance our collective imagination.

Here McGonigal quotes Will Wright:

...if theres one aspect of humanity that I want to augment, its the imagination, which is probably our most powerful cognitive tool. I think of games as being an amplifier for the imagination of the players, in the same way that a car amplifies our legs or a house amplifies our skin.

The point being that by enlisting our willing involvement imaginitatively in game form, we can not only have an experience of flow, of fiero, of naches and the other positive emotions that McGonigal racks up as worthwhile aspects of games - we involve ourselves thereby in game activities that are by definition involving us in activities of collective intentionality. (The feeling is one of 'we-intend' as John R.Searle would put it.)And by gaming together, we build up massive amounts of collective intentionality. Games become a powerful force in, ironically, helping us work out our problems, together. But this notion collides with some of my other recent reading.

Games necessarily model an environment. There's a tension between imagination (which is often liminal, on the edges of breaking the rules or outright breaking them) and games, which exist because of their rules.

I've been reading Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, so my first thought is that Trickster, who is our embodiment of disruptive imagination, needs to be part of this process of amplifying the imagination. If we want to get the most out of human imagination, we need that force to be there. It will anyway, so we need to find ways of including it or at least anticipating the services we can provide for its positive side. (It'll still surprise, confound and delight us though).

My second thought links us to Douglas Rushkoff's Program or be Programmed. If anything digital has the role of the Trickster in it, it's programming, and certainly hacking. There are still boundaries on this though, but far more play to be transgressive and to go beyond the boundaries of a single system. But there are boundaries - at least ususally. The ur-hacker movie was War Games, and the thrill of that game was seeing how easy it was to unintentionally breach those supposed boundaries. That's a game, run amok. Yet its resolution was inventive and satisfying. Very Trickster, very Hacker. 

My third thought is that novels/ideas of the transhuman (eg Neuromancer, etc) pay with the idea of the Trickster in the net, subverting and corrupting/enhancing what he touches. This notion of the imagination in service of the beyond is important, and games designers need to be aware (I'm sure they are) of how they can serve the idea that imagination wants to go beyond. Maybe it can go in other directions too?

Games need to approach this tension between the complex modelling by rules, and whatever there is beyond the rules that imagination can work on. Even though, as McGonigal later notes, 'chess is infinite' (to show how complexity can be built up from very simple premises), chess is just chess, whatever it teaches us. I'm not sure that the real world games that come later are classically defined games at all. I'm not sure about the flexibility of their rules or their purview. They seem more like roles than games, scenarios rather than gameboards. That's not to denigratetheir effectiveness or to argue that they are anything else, really. But if a game is about its rules, these games exist to transgress them. To go beyond, to grow.

This begs a further thought. Isn't this characteristic of our species' relentless insistence on expansion being the only way to survive. Isn't ecology the art and science of living on limited means instead? Of living, imaginatively as possible, within the rules? This is much more gamelike. If trickster needs to work in the ecological sense, he needs to work inside the game board. Lessons from programming can teach us that. You can't program what cannot be programmed. (You can program a computer but not an ice-cream cone) Similarly, what we see instead of 'further' is deeper: more fine grained modelling that helps us make better decisions, that helps us, also, to disappear not over the threshold, but 'through the floorboards'.

 

Thought for the day

Washing dishes, as is my wont, I tuned in to have a listen to the radio while the suds were doing their cleansing work. Radio 4 was doing their 'thought for the day' religious programming bit. No particular objection to that myself. Except that as I was doing this, the man on the radio was telling me what Jesus said and did.

I guess this is more a sign of my age than anything else - but I heard this guy more as a contemporary of mine than as someone older whom I had to receive wisdom from. It was maybe the first time I'd felt in a really personal way that everything, all human knowledge, everything we collectively know and believe, only exists in the minds and experiences of those alive now. Pretensions to an establishment that goes back longer than a couple of generations of genuinely shared knowledge are really just predicated on the communicative power of media.

Yet these stories persist, and are made new, made meaningful by our continued participation in them. It's maybe easier to talk about if I choose a different example. The last World War 1 combat veteran died recently. The last link to someone who was actually there. From here on in our link is secondary, documentary, archaeological. I'm sure Steiner has something complicated to say about all of this. But just then it felt like something to me: we are all there is. We're not really part of some millenial monolith, just the latest ring on the tree. Although all that stuff holds us up, it's really dead matter.

We're alive. We're all there is. What we say makes things live.

sensible and intelligible: towards an erotics of artists' books

Formalist criticism asks us to look at art objects in terms of their materials. When we're talking about pictures or the plastic arts, this is pretty easy to do. In literature, I think it tends towards looking at how the literature is made, and thus a structural approach would be appropriate (The 'material of language' being itself either etymology or a range of linguistic studies, including structural linguistics. Whilst this level of examination is full of insight, a formalist literary critic would, I think, tend to use them at one or two 'removes of complexity'. That is, they would inform a structuralist criticism of the work.)

Perhaps the easiest way to see formalist criticism is over against what it is not, what it reacts against. It reacts against over-interpretation; the tendency to ask, not 'what is the work?' , but 'what does it really mean?'. The aesthetics of formalist criticism try to stay with the values actually intrinsic to the work, and the formalist critiques the interpretive (hermeneutic) approach, because it inevitably moves away from the work. Layers of interpretation shroud the work in a kind of fog of meaning, through which it is hard to see what really makes the artwork moving. Thus the formalist offers a different answer to 'what the artwork really is'. It is not 'what it really means', but what exactly it actually is.

If, then, we were to characterise the formalist and the interpretive positions in some way that reflected their relationship to our experiences as observing and reflecting beings, we might do worse than to characterise formalism as emphasising more attention to the sensible aspects of experience, and hermeneutics as emphasising the intelligible. For in the one there is a concentration on what the material form can tell us, and in the latter there is a concentration on what we can deduce synthetically from the form (bringing with us extrinsic understanding). Handling these terms roughly, I will conflate the sensible with the empirical, and the intelligible with the rational. The former pairing seems to describe the worldview emphasised by formalism, and the latter that emphasised by hermeneutics.

I introduce these terms because they have been thoroughly explored by philosophers. Kant tells us that experience must arise from both the empirical experience and our rational intelligence, and that to enter the realm of experience is to include as a necessary predicate of 'experiencing', certain synthetic a priori categories of intelligibility, that, in short, 'give form form'. Both are necessary components of our experience of reality, and of any claim to objectivity.

If we want to understand an artwork, might it not be the case that we might need (and are certainly already employing) both approaches there, too? It might. And perhaps on a larger scale we do. It's true that critical fashions come and go, and with new sweeps of the critical radar, new critical approaches tend to revivify our understanding of work. But what if we were to systematically include both critical approaches in our studies? What would this be like?

----

It's easy to read Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation as a formalist stance. Away with interpretations getting in the way of us seeing what work really is, it says. She says 'in place of a hermeneutics of art, we need an erotics of art'. Sontag argues that we need to 'recover our senses'. This moves strongly towards the sensible and the formalist. But it would be a mistake to read it solely in that light. Sontag doesn't rail against all interpretation. She doesn't mean 'interpretation in its broadest sense', by which light she might well be acknowledging that which was to develop as poststructuralist conceptions of epistemology and ontology as examining the interpretive histories that give rise to aspects of human society. Though Sontag cites Nietzsche  'there are no facts, only interpretations', we might read Foucault here just as successfully. But Sontag does get pretty formalist. The meaning of a work of art is illusory, she says. But she also admits that interpretation can be a 'means of revising, of escaping the dead past', (when it is not reactionary, 'impertinent', 'cowardly' or 'stifling').

My reading is that Sontag moves against interpretation as a corrective, aiming to 'recover our senses', over against interpretation run rampant. But in her mitigations of interpretation she seems to allow that it is not always in the wrong, just out of balance. It is too tempting to read Sontag's essay as a jeremiad against interpretation; I think it aims more towards a balance.

And this I think is illustrated most tellingly in the essay's closing line 'in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.' An erotics, though sensible, though concerned with experiencing the tactile and visual and other material qualities of the work, is no mere formalism. An erotics is also a system of desires, those of the object and the subject (and is a system where the 'view' works both ways, with the object becoming the subject and vice versa), and the exchanges between the two. (Something that should remind us more of the interpretive turns of hermeneutic approaches where the object/subject divide is constantly crossed by any worthwhile reflective practice.) Just as to 'experience experience', we require both the sensible and the intelligible faculties of mind, to have 'an erotics of art' would necessitate both the formal senses, and the interpretive noos that allows us to perceive the desires (the intentions, even) of the other. Unbalance either aspect, and the system begins to fall to pieces.

The majesty of art is that it does give us this sense of the other. I do not 'interpret' the music of Bach in the overly codified measures that Sontag criticises, because I am not a baroque music scholar (though I am aware that such interpretation exists, and I take pleasure in hearing the Radio 3 punditry explore such: classical music critics seem to enjoy a fine balance of formal and interpretive critique). I lack that extrinsic knowledge. But I do interpret the presence of Bach, and of the musicians, and of the centuries of other listeners somehow there in the music. For me, that is a powerful part of how I respond, and it seems so intermingled with the sensible qualities of the music I can barely describe it as interpretive. Nevertheless it is there, and I take pleasure in feeling (as I believe) how the others have felt, of being in concord with their feelings for this music. That seems to me to reflect an erotic understanding of the piece. I feel not only ravished by sound, but also held in the (usually imaginary) presence of all those I have shared that powerful impression with. Though the power of it begins with the senses, there is a kind of a priori capability to feel this as a person in common with others.

----

One of the strongest intentions I uncovered while exploring other artists' books artists' practices, was that they had a strong impetus towards making work for others. The book, with its wide reaching and socially important means of distribution, and its equally important formal capabilities of narrative (with its corresponding empathetic capability), has a twofold presence. Firstly, it is very often a means of such contact. It has such capabilities and artists use them. Secondly, and more universally, it is reified as the symbolic book. Even if it cannot be read, even if it cannot be shared, it promises this (if there were no promise of reading, the nailed-shut book sculpture would be meaningless). The sense of commonwealth in books has had a long history as 'the republic of letters', and it has developed in many other more or less tacit forms as well. The world of artists' books seems to be one such.

The quality that books have to amplify this connotation of a shared experience, both actually through the mechanisms of books, and symbolically, through the promise of reading and its republics, seems important to artist who make them. And I think this is because they more easily afford an experience of an erotics of art.

Books bring together formal mechanisms, modes of distribution and spheres of discourse, the presence of other media and roles for the artist, and in their symbolic role they connote a strong 'public field' of shared experience. This is the mysterious power of the printed word and the reason 'printing offices' dub themselves 'sacred ground'. Amongst their other felicities for the artist, using books gives access to this commonwealth, and, in doing so, they amplify the presence of that erotics of art that vivifies materials and intentions alike.

mining, surfing and storytelling

A quotation from a 2003 article by Henry Jenkins entitled Transmedia Storytelling:

Many of our best authors, from William Faulkner to J.R.R. Tolkien,
understood their art in terms of world-creation and developed rich
environments which could, indeed, support a variety of different
characters. For most of human history, it would be taken for granted
that a great story would take many different forms, enshrined in stain
glass windows or tapestries, told through printed words or sung by bards
and poets, or enacted by traveling performers.

I haven't yet read further into the subject, but it seems to me that world-creation (or something like it) takes other forms too, that we might not recognise as marketable, or, in fact, as relating to the same world. In fact, I would want to break down the notion of world-creation as such in terms of character and setting, to ask whether creators who bash away at consistent themes in different ways can sometimes be creating a recognisably related view of a set of topics that fans can view across both settings. For instance, for me, David Milch's John from Cincinnati works on similar themes to Deadwood. Addiction, forgiveness of the self and others, transcendence through the organising power of symbols... etc (and the same ensemble of faces keep showing up in different roles). A parallel dimension, if you will.

Miracles happen in JFC, but don't they happen in Deadwood too? Jane finds a little happiness and Hearst leaves without destroying everything. (And as many possibilities are denied amidst appalling agonies of irony: Hostetler's death, for one.) We don't recognise them as miracles at the time, because the story is told in a different way, and we get to allow ourselves a bit more of a feeling of knowing how it came about, of glimpsing (through the language, largely) what we think of as the forces that bring such events to pass. Whereas in JFC they just surf in from somewhere outside the plot. (Or they seem to, perhaps because John's language itself is impenetrable to such a degree.)

I don't know whether one could seriously hold this comparison up to the light, but it points up that we also hold valuable creators (like Milch) who make powerful stories that on one level deny the extension of the world that spin offs, franchises and sequels allow. Yet on another level their stories and their human consistency interweave them in topics that are of such wide interest as to enmesh them as parables of real life. (I don't mean, by the way, that Buffy and Tolkein don't do that.) And, anyway, there's a spinoff book from Deadwood for example. But this takes the form of almost philosophical disquisitions by Milch and his players on the nature of the story and its characters, inviting us to extend its meaning by extending our interpretation deeper into it, rather than simply extending the region the plot covers. To 'mine' it, if you will. What would it have meant if the Deadwood films had come about? Would it have meant that Deadwood became a transmedia story? Or just that the story itself got finished?

Of course, telling a story over more than one medium does make it transmedia, purely in terms of its media support. But perhaps there's a different distinction to be made -- one that we might have to call something else -- that is less about spreading the story over different media, as much as it is about the narrative's fragmentation and appearance from different angles. For example, if Deadwood had been completed as a pair of films or as a mobile phone novel, it would doubtless share consistency with the story told in the HBO series. But if I propose, for example, that Milch's oeuvre examines many of the same themes from different 'dimensions' (a clumsy word for what I mean, sorry), then there's a coming together of something from different approaches involved (even if they happen to be based in the same medium). This opens up my idea of what this world-creating actually comes from. Need it imply a map? Or, if I watch the same ensemble do a series of plays, might I not, as a viewer, be able to construct relationships between the possibly disparate narratives? I'll read on, of course, but I'm as aware as I can be that a whole lot of successful TV hangs together at the moment because their stories are solidly built, and this, surprisingly, makes them more accessible to the real world. Mad Men and The Wire seem to modulate themselves towards different aspects of their subjects (The century of the self and the intermeshing of society, politics, education and the media, respectively). They don't seem to me to be designed around opening up franchises:but they do open up connections to their sources.

Perhaps it's just this: a well-told story always invites us to explore further, because of its self-consistency. It need not be intentionally porous, because our imaginations work best on something we can believe in. If multi-platform storytelling is for anything other than novelty's sake, it will need to engage with the distinctive voices of its forms. I think that to identify the mere presence of different media with the dimensionality that a truly multivocal or multi-storied approach would take, would be a mistake. But I don't need to labour my muddled point any further. There is, after all, an ancient chant of computer operators that goes 'garbage in, garbage out'. This is as true of stories as anything else.

Song

To the tune of Cwm Rhondda

When my enemies deride me
Once again as heretofore
There's no doubt but they are naughty
I must even up the score:

They must perish, they must perish
In a sea of foaming gore
(foaming gore)
In a sea of foaming gore!

With apologies to Nick Craig (whom God preserve).

the republic of whoever is there

Cultivation Theory

How do societies exchange normative ideas? Does the telly affect what we think is right?

If we want to consider, in books, what the 'republic of letters' brings about ( we usually link it to the emergence of the Enlightenment ), what does publishing, in its varied forms, including electronic media, bring about today?

There are lots of small enclaves in whatever the 'republic' is today (and that's not even a particularly relevant term anymore, though it does conjure that sense of a shared socially constructed view of an imagined world made real).

Cultivation theory seems like a good place to set out from, even if only to kick it to death in the process.

Cosmological World-Making

Watching a snippet of John Mullan' s How Reading Made us Modern last night, my ears pricked up when the good professor intones the fact that in pre-eighteenth century England, the only books you'd find most places would be the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, "and perhaps some choice work of Christian devotion".

Would it be possible, I thought, to write a view of Pilgrim's Progress as fan fiction? Bunyan's certainly a fan of the good book, and as for world-making, there's a whole Christian cosmology in there that seems to still be pretty popular. As for governance of the formal boundaries and schisms of the field as such, no-one does sectarian suspicion quite like the church, and the very word canon meant church law before it meant anything else. (I think). And as for the Author of some of the texts in question...

To really get at this field ('Christian textuality and its fans'?) is a gargantuan task of Foucauldian proportions; mapping its powers and proclivities. One would have to perform a bit of sleight-of-hand to avoid exposing any such essay to the vast gulf that it opens up. But it does open it up.

Still haven't read any of Jenkins' views on the subject of authorial identity fandom, but I think I'll be carrying some baggage in there with me.

shaking hands

As I look at the website of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, I'm seeing pretty clearly that there's a whole lot of bridges to be built between that [field/tendency/whatever] and the things I write about in my thesis.

I've just written nearly 60000 words challenging the centring identity of the artists' books field, clearing space for a narrative of hybrid practice and trying to create a network of value for the hybrid practice's affordances as well as the formal affordances of the book form and whatever artists throw at it (affect and effect)... and taking this lot inward towards the book form's affect on the maker's consciousness, and outwards towards whatever version of the republic of letters makes sense these days. And I'm finding a whole raft of other ways of 'not belonging', of 'yet/also' cropping up here. There are some great models for the changing face of authorship, and ways of understanding common 'ownership' of a field that really light up some of the tensions so markedly to be found in Book Art in a new way.

I have to go do some more reading now, and come back with some sort of primer on how I might get these ideas to shake hands.

Some of the writing for my thesis - from the chapter on the concept of 'making-reading' - will appear in late summer/ early autumn in The Blue Notebook.

thoughts on metadata, artists' books and means of understanding

Picked up the bound volumes of my thesis today and began researching materials to help me prepare an application for an MSc in Information and Library Management. By way of an inaugural post on the topic, here's an, umm, exciting MIT video on metadata.

What I hope to do is to find ways to bring issues raised in information management into contact with issues in the practice and meaning of artists' books. As I've shown in my thesis, the sorts of things we use as descriptors capture a sort of formal essentialism that's entirely appropriate to cataloguing, but it doesn't come close to saying what they actually mean. This is no mean project, and it will have multifarious means of extending its arguments across all sorts of interdisciplinary poking around. So perhaps it's best to see it as a series of recces into and around the issue of how libraries might share "the meaning of the artists' book field", as well as the books themselves. That phrase in quotation marks is probably not quite what I mean. It's something like - how can institutions impart some of the "added value" that the field itself contains, or "feels like"? (And this is just as true of fiction genres etc, except that I have a special interest in artists' books.) You get inklings of it sometimes in exhibitions. Or is it something only makers get to experience? And is there any *point* in looking into this for libraries?

To probe that last point, I think that the information professional could be involved not only in the pursuit of systemic ordering, but of methods of understanding. There might be something hermeneutic, something pedagogical about the future librarian, who would not only help us to fish the sea of data, but help us to fully appreciate what we have caught. Something that helpud us to impart methods of understanding as well as simply information, could be of use. I think typically we see this 'baked-into' the narratives that inform our cataloguing systems. One of the great things about new ways of including metadata, though, is that our material can belong at the same time to many different hierarchies and structures. The task of the librarian becomes not so much to show how the structure works (though that is indispensible), but further to show how we can use that structure as a path to create or choose our own narratives. I'm 'thinking aloud' here, but I think what I might be proposing is a pilot into reader's 'interpretive narratives'. How they make their sense of the artists' books field. And what I can do as an information professional to facilitate that.

I suppose typical methodologies might include analysis of a 'folksonomy' or studying other's research habits, or conducting interviews that probe researchers'  means of understanding.

Come to think of it, this really sounds like another PhD. Hmmm.

Edit. I've just watched the first thirty seconds of the film, googled Henry Jenkins, who is mentioned in his absence, and decided that I nedd to investigate his theories of world-making and fandom in relation to the, perhaps parallel, notions of making-reading and the shared world of reading (which for me come out of book history, typically Darnton). I probably should've known about Jenkins, but I can't be everywhere. Anyway. Darnton says something interesting about all authors being readers, and that's true also of book artists. The sense of community, of building a world *together* (with perhaps a few hardcore canonical underpinnings) prevales strongly in artists' books. If one swaps out 'fandom' for 'republic of letters', we get some interesting correspondences. And "bookdom"'s ambivalence about canonical sorting might be looked at as symptomatic of its interpenetration by its producer-fans. Perhaps the 'democracy' of the artist's book is another telling sign here. (And of course that implies a democracy of art, which gets us into fairly deep art history waters, bobbling along with Beuys and his inheritors and critics). I haven't, um, actually read any Jenkins yet, I should add.

Readings of the Century

I'm working on a short piece of writing for the artists' books yearbook on ways to talk about artists' books. Here's a brief snapshot.

The one book everyone seems to have read about artists’ books, namely Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists Books, is open to readings that are less than helpful [regarding balancing the urge to define and the necessity for flexibility]. The book’s mission, to provide an identity for artists books and show how they’ve been important to almost every major art movement of the 20th Century, is highly successful. It’s too easy to read it and come away with the idea that one now has a pretty good idea of what artists’ books are. Drucker’s book is a bulwark for the identity of artists’ books. It is a critical foundation for making a claim that artists’ books are important. It’s too tempting simply to build on that foundation, I think. A different reading of the Century is of artists making books in concert with other processes, interests, forms and pursuits. Books are always a place where more than one thing, more than one role, is happening. They are always hybrids. If it’s the case the at the Century is the strongest case yet made for the identity of the artist’s book, it’s ironic that it also functions as a very compelling study of how that identity is always composed out of the shadows cast by other events and processes. It’s still true. The Century is an extremely useful survey, but its readers have often confused its function as a pedagogically- useful history with a functioning definition that they can use to  talk about books in the present. If we learn one thing from the Century, it should be that the books it describes arise not from definitions, but from collisions of materials, people and technology.