From Nick:
In the first hour of seminar, we continued to think through Graham’s provocation last week regarding the chasm between scientific and humanistic epistemologies, practices, and doxa. We collectively brainstormed different key phrases associated with each half of this dyad: proof/verification, collaboration, reproducibility for the sciences; subjectivity, interpretation, “critical thinking” for the humanities. Paul drew our attention to the political-economic dimensions of the science/humanities split––external grants, more intense engagement with and regulation from state bureaucracies, and closer ties with the private sector (“industry,” as our STEM colleagues call it). How do the material conditions of the academy determine and delimit how disciplines form, cohere, and persist over time? What does it mean to talk about disciplines in the register of “rise and fall” or “birth and death”? Grace raised the important point that other cultures place a higher value on the sciences. How, as humanists, can we attend to and incorporate divergent understandings of knowledge production in different national contexts in our pedagogy? Fedor and Utku both shared their unease with Butler’s “additive” approach to epistemological self-reflexivity––there is no potential for transformation in this framework, just endless contingency. Jeff ended our conversation with a nod towards Agamben’s exploration of the pre-linguistic character of experience: “In terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the human and the linguistic. The individual as not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant––this is experience.” (50) What would it mean for the humanities to eschew its privileging of the linguistic in favor of the phenomenal, to conceive of our truth-procedures in terms of experience? Is this one way for us to bridge the divide we articulated in the beginning of class, without falling into the trap of treating human beings as “problems of knowledge” to borrow Graham’s phrase or indulging in “prestige envy” of our colleagues in the sciences?
Paize Keulemans began the second half of our seminar by bringing in a material object of his own––a Japanese action figure which takes its inspiration from a historical actor in early modern Chinese cultural and political history. Professor Keulemans called our attention to the multiple levels of mediation through which this action figure traveled––from an empirically existent historical person to his representation in the novel-form to the build-your-own Japanese toy sitting before us. That the toy did not come already assembled raised a generative question for us: how does one make an object their own? We then turned our focus to the Galloway chapter and Prof. Keulemans asked us about his distinction between “operator” and “machine.” Utku tethered the relative agency Galloway imbues the machine with his almost lyrical description of ambience–where is agential potential to be found when, as Jeff said, we abandon the game to “its own homeostatic self-sufficiency?” Ayluonne asked whether game studies can be said to sit within the intellectual tradition of new materialism, best epitomized by Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. We ended our conversation with an extended meditation on the institutionalization of game studies, its own internal battles over the discipline’s organizing principles and procedures (ludology or narratology?), and whether Galloway’s theories can be transposed onto other cultural forms. Keulemans ended our discussion on a distinctly Jamesonian note: can the conceptual tools which Galloway utilizes help us unearth previously illegible features of a text (its gamic/diegetic dimensions) and prevent us from “rarifying” our objects of study?
From Paul:
Paize Keulemans opened our discussion in the second half of class with a provocation: he showed us a contemporary Japanese action figure, which appeared to be part-human, part-robot, whose packaging labeled it as a character from sixteenth-century Chinese literature. When he opened the box, we saw that it contained a set of disassembled plastic pieces from the factory rather than a readymade object. This observation launched a wide-ranging conversation which I will try to condense into two broad categories. First, the semiotic: in what sense does the cyborg in the box map onto the literary figure named on the packaging? Second, the libidinal: what sort of drive makes consumers want to buy the set of plastic pieces which supposedly comprise this character, assemble it, and make it their own? Both of these directions proved fruitful. Semiotic problems, such as our Galloway’s distinction between a “player” and an “operator” in the context of gamic action, led us to reconsider our own position in relation to our objects of study, whether textual or otherwise: what would it mean to break down the familiar binaries which often delimit academic subjecthood (expert vs. amateur, critic vs. text, outside vs. inside) and re-encounter our work as a mode of fluid interrelation with various forms of difference? On the other hand, might the resources of traditional critique provide us with a means to enter into strange worlds, like that of a video game, without being subsumed by them –– can our disciplinary training help us attend to the nondiegetic machine acts which structure the ways we think and write, to immerse ourselves in something strange without losing ourselves within it? This question immediately turns libidinal –– how does the pleasure associated with gaming (allegedly: raw, vulgar, uncritical) relate to the affective domain of traditional academic media, and what configuration of social forces constructs these hierarchies? Our pursuit of these questions returned us neatly to the core concerns of this seminar: as a group, we reflected on why it seems so difficult to think “video game studies” within the vocabulary of academic disciplinarity, and we read that difficulty as a symptom of the recalcitrance of elite disciplinarity in the face of evolving habits of media consumption. I’m left asking myself: what would it mean to attend to the “nondiegetic machine moments” which construct our own academic formations –– the quiet glitches which both make them what they are and challenge their coherence? What drives make us want to continually play with the pieces that comprise our own disciplinary assemblages, like the action figure in the box? How can this sort of play –– in some sense, a prerequisite to participation in the academy –– be made to reflect the critical potential Galloway highlights in the word?
