{"id":143,"date":"2021-09-24T16:37:01","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T20:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/?p=143"},"modified":"2021-09-24T16:40:28","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T20:40:28","slug":"reflections-from-week-3-paize-keulemans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f21\/2021\/09\/24\/reflections-from-week-3-paize-keulemans\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections from week 3 (Paize Keulemans)"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Nick:<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the first hour of seminar, we continued to think through Graham\u2019s provocation last week regarding the chasm between scientific and humanistic epistemologies, practices, and doxa.\u00a0<\/em>We collectively brainstormed different key phrases associated with each half of this dyad: proof\/verification, collaboration, reproducibility for the sciences; subjectivity, interpretation, \u201ccritical thinking\u201d for the humanities. Paul drew our attention to the political-economic dimensions of the science\/humanities split\u2013\u2013external grants, more intense engagement with and regulation from state bureaucracies, and closer ties with the private sector (\u201cindustry,\u201d 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 \u201crise and fall\u201d or \u201cbirth and death\u201d? 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\u2019s \u201cadditive\u201d approach to epistemological self-reflexivity\u2013\u2013there is no potential for transformation in this framework, just endless contingency. Jeff ended our conversation with a nod towards Agamben\u2019s exploration of the pre-linguistic character of experience: \u201cIn 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\u2013\u2013this is experience.\u201d (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 \u201cproblems of knowledge\u201d to borrow Graham\u2019s phrase or indulging in \u201cprestige envy\u201d of our colleagues in the sciences?<\/p>\n

Paize Keulemans began the second half of our seminar by bringing in a material object of his own\u2013\u2013a 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\u2013\u2013from 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 \u201coperator\u201d and \u201cmachine.\u201d Utku tethered the relative agency Galloway imbues the machine with his almost lyrical description of ambience\u2013where is agential potential to be found when, as Jeff said, we abandon the game to \u201cits own homeostatic self-sufficiency?\u201d Ayluonne asked whether game studies can be said to sit within the intellectual tradition of new materialism, best epitomized by Jane Bennett\u2019s\u00a0Vibrant Matter.<\/em>\u00a0We ended our conversation with an extended meditation on the institutionalization of game studies, its own internal battles over the discipline\u2019s organizing principles and procedures (ludology or narratology?), and whether Galloway\u2019s 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 \u201crarifying\u201d our objects of study?<\/p>\n

From Paul:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0observation 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\u2019s distinction between a \u201cplayer\u201d and an \u201coperator\u201d 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 \u2013\u2013 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 \u2013\u2013\u00a0how 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 \u201cvideo game studies\u201d 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\u2019m left asking myself: what would it mean to attend to the \u201cnondiegetic machine moments\u201d which construct our own academic formations \u2013\u2013\u00a0the 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 \u2013\u2013\u00a0in some sense, a prerequisite to participation in the academy \u2013\u2013 be made to reflect the critical potential Galloway highlights in the word?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Nick: In the first hour of seminar, we continued to think through Graham\u2019s provocation last week regarding the chasm between scientific and humanistic epistemologies, practices, and doxa.\u00a0We collectively brainstormed different key phrases associated with each half of this dyad: proof\/verification, collaboration, reproducibility for the sciences; subjectivity, interpretation, \u201ccritical thinking\u201d for the humanities. Paul drew … <\/p>\n

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