warning: meta junk.

Brother ghost has written us another post, and a reply we shall conjure.

He writes:

Stories have become primary methodology of education. It’s not that really different now. We have enormous variation in terms of media, but stories perform many of the same purposes: to educate the listener/reader/viewer in language and culture, and to be entertaining while doing so.

As I interpret and extrapolate, ghost establishes a methodology of learning via stories. Here, media acts as a vehicle for stories, which themselves are vehicles for values and norms (i.e. I learn through the bible that raeping women is r..wrong).

I add that stories have a meta-value here. The original methodology that we speak of – that is, the simple transmitting of values – can form the foundation of what some theorists might call critical consciousness, or, in other words, awareness, reflexivity, etc. Reflexivity occurs when people are critical of methodology: “no, ur doing it wrong!” “____ is cancer!” “only weeaboo like teh Narutos.” etc.

Because we’re intrinsically speaking of people here (people are basically the operative factor in talking about “transmitting values”), we have to frame all of this in terms of populations. For the sake of anime relevance, and we’ve probably spoke about this already somewhere down the road, fans are those who partake in methodology but are not critical of other fans. Once, however, a fan becomes critical (or remotely aware of other fans and their methodological behaviors) of another fan, they enter the fandom.

Yet here is the central problem: can fandom exist merely by the nonverbalized consciousness of individuals? – or does fandom require discourse? This is kind of a Foucauldian take on Marxism: critical discourse makes up the material base upon which the superstructural “fandom” is situated. Because this is the internet, discourse is necessarily “material”. It’s significant to consider, however, that in this perspective, fandom is not a material entity but an ideology whose territory engulfs its own constituents. So to speak, the process of becoming conscious (entering fandom) then expands the “mass” of the ideology of fandom.

But anyway, I would say that fandom requires discourse to exist.

An interesting turn on this is what you might call the “counter-meta methodological faction”. Of course, we’ve seen the sections of fandom that scoff at critical discourse, instead emphasizing focus on methodology, without all the wwwwwww stuff. It’s a good point, but it’s interesting because it’s a discourse that runs counter to itself in order to end itself.

There’s some more to this, but I forgot, so that’ll be part 2, maybe.

Actually, it’s the seventh, but I figure now’s as good a time as any to stop numbering them and just admit they’re a (semi-)regular feature.  Woo!

Anyhow, this time I’m doing an essay called “Coming to Terms” by Gary K. Wolfe.  It’s short, so hopefully I can get this entry done before the scourging weather wipes my house out of the valley in which it nestles.

I think this essay is especially pertinent here because the anime fandom is nearly always in a roil, the past few years, concerning what to call things.   At the beginning of the essay, Wolfe quotes Everett Bleiler:  ”Our terms have been muddled, imprecise, and heretical in the derivational sense of the word” (13).  This sounds awfully familiar.  Of course, Wolfe is talking about science fiction and fantasy, but both situations essentially stem from the same place:  a kind of ghetto status, either real or imagined, in terms of acceptance within the tradition from which most literary terms come from.

If you haven’t worked it out by now from general observation, SF and fantasy are sort of “my thing.”  SF and fantasy are what originally drew me to anime, even with the success of shows like Supernatural or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, American tv doesn’t have nearly as many SF or fantasy shows as Japanese anime tv does.  There’s a lot to choose from.  Now, obviously my interest doesn’t end there, but I’m always going to be interested in those genres.  Hence the use of an SF text here.

Anyway.  Much of Wolfe’s essay is in the format of a dictionary.  I don’t mean to quote his definitions entirely, but I thought I would the first one, as it too has special significance to the anime community:

Academic:  Used both as an adjective and a noun to describe the involvement of professional scholars and teachers in the criticism, history, theory, and teaching of science fiction.  Such a meaning might seem obvious, but the term has gained a great many overtones, usually either disparaging or defensive, and has come rather imprecisely to be contrasted both with ‘fan’ or amateur scholarship in the field, and with the various ‘internal’ works of history and criticism generated by science fiction and fantasy writers themselves.  In this usage, the ‘academic’ is ofted regarded as an outsider trained in traditional humanistic methodologies wich are sometimes felt to be inadequate for science fiction; interestingly, the term is seldom applied to university scientists or even social scientists, suggesting that it refers not necessarily to the academic world per se, but specifically to inhabitants of English or history departments in universities.  (13-4)

Yeah, I’m not going to bother explicating that one further.

Wolfe deals with “cognitive estrangement,” lifted from the writings of Darko Suvin and defined, here, as “estranged from the naturalistic world but cognitively connected to it” (15).  Now, what I wonder about this, in relation to anime, is how liberally this could be applied.  It seems as though the traditional use of strange hair colors might even qualify otherwise “realistic” anime as “estranged.”  Nothing’s wildly different, we don’t have trouble living within parts of the world, but there are notes within it that are not realistic, but are not considered strange.  It’s become so familiar that shows such as Bleach use it as an entryway — it is odd that Ichigo’s hair is orange, and this almost acts as a gateway to dealing with the estrangement in the spiritual world intruding on the material.  At least, the speculation on what that interference would mean comes across to me as better and more “realistic” than the same situation in, say, Yu Yu Hakusho.

He also cites Gene Wolfe’s term “posthistory” for far future stories so far in advance of our own that the characters aren’t connected to us any longer (19).  Think of Canticle for Leibowitz — then jump further into the future.  No, further.  Go ahead, go farther still.  Once all emotional or factual connection is gone, that’s posthistory.  It appears to be made in contrast to pre-history, and both terms indicate a time actively separated from our own by distances so great as to make nearly new worlds of the timeframes involved.  I’m wondering if any anime SF could qualify as posthistory; I can’t think of any right now.  Any ideas out there?  If there aren’t that many, I have to wonder if there’s a significance there, regarding perhaps differing views of the functioning of historical recall (or some such).

Oh, Wolfe (Gary, not Gene) mentions “sci-fi” as a neologism made up by journalists and others “outside” the genre who don’t understand it, and its widest non-pejorative acceptance within the genre is to indicate things that aren’t as complex as usually expected — Star Wars is the example cited from Elizabeth Anne Hull 20-1).  Am I the only one who has never encountered this?  ”Sci-fi” was just a short version of “science fiction” for me, growing up; I’ve never experienced it as pejorative at all.

Okay, this one strikes me as odd:

Wonder: Frequently invoked in definitions of fantasy but seldom defined, as in C. N. Manlove’s phrase ‘a fiction evoking wonder.’ The term is equally common in discussions of science fiction with its ‘sense of wonder,’ but it is quite possible the meaning there is somewhat different, relating to philosopohical notions of the sublime in the face of vastness. In fantasy, the term need not imply awe and terror in the face of the natural world, but rather suggests the desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being. (22)

Uh… I call bullshit. How does fantasy not enter into the “awe and terror in the face of the natural world?”  My impression is that fantasy is much more involved in portrayals of the “natural world” than SF is. I think Wolfe means to refer back to the supposed love and idealization of physics and other “natural” descriptors within SF, but the emphasis on technology and human aspiration is generally antithetical to sublime pursuits. On the other hand, fantasy derives directly from the Gothic, in which the sublime is absolutely essential. Radcliffe wrote one of the pre-eminent essays on terror, entirely relating it to the Gothic.

That’s about it.

Work Cited:

Wolfe, Gary K. “Coming to Terms.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Scarecrow Press, Inc.: Lanham, MD. 2005.

Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.

Diebuster, though.

You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.

So this is a post about Diebuster, ostensibly. But where to begin? “At the beginning,” some would no doubt suggest, but that’s part of the problem: the story’s structure resists that sensible impulse. It’s vexing now that I’m trying to put my thoughts in order, but it’s not something a first-time viewer would notice early on — the beginning seems just fine, and it is, in more ways than are evident from the beginning.

If that makes little sense, you can blame Diebuster’s unusual structure. Things we see in the beginning are parts of larger things that aren’t evident until later; crucially relevant information is withheld. Open an image in your favorite image editor, zoom in as far as you can, and then zoom out slowly, and you’ll get the idea. We could call it “revelation,” but it’s more ubiquitous than a series of run-of-the-mill reveals — plot, characters, setting, et al. (or, specifically, our perception of them, which is what matters anyway) are affected across the board, enmeshed as they are in a structure that’s heavily reliant on strategic obscurity and the unexpected.

It’s atypical, perhaps, but not unique, or even especially new; eighty or so years earlier, the same technique saw use by (you guessed it) James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses¹. Joyce scholar Fritz Senn calls it “circumdation:”

In [Ulysses's] first chapter we will figure out, not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting on top of a historical tower, somewhere near Dublin, at a certain time. The last two chapters, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” above all put much of what we had taken for granted into a different light. Adjustment takes patience and circumspection, many retracings in an Odyssean progression of trial and error… As often as not we may still be waiting for the final, redeeming “circumdet” that makes everything fall into line.²

It must be said that Diebuster is more comprehensible the first time through than Ulysses. Still, if you compared the point-by-point, beginning-to-end analyses of a first-time viewer and a second-time viewer, you may not find much middle ground. I’ve watched bits and pieces of earlier episodes after finishing the show, and the experience was quite different the second time around, relatively speaking; given how much we learn about Nono, the Topless, the space monsters, and the universe itself along the way, and how much of that information is the sort that’s probably evident to the characters all along even if we aren’t aware of it, the second viewing produces constructs of meaning vastly different from the first. Many stories (maybe all stories) have this quality to some degree, but Diebuster has it in spades — again, it shapes the story’s very momentum.

Since I’ve ended up on the topic of second viewing anyway, consider the first episode on rewatch. We know of Nono’s identity; much of what she does makes a new sort of sense, or assumes altered significance. We know that Lal’c, with all of her baggage (of which we also know), is responsible for the brief voice-over during the opening moments, and we’ve heard the complementary voice-over in episode 6. We know the basis of Tycho’s attitude toward Lal’c. We know more about the antagonists, about the setting, about practically everything. It seems, to me at least, a more profound change in experience than that brought about by simply knowing what will happen in future episodes.

With that said, circumdation isn’t specifically a process that takes place between viewings; it happens all along, and forces us to question our assumptions even during the first viewing. We’re kept on our toes, made to disassemble initial conclusions, insert new information, and reconstruct them as best we can, all while processing plot developments which, in six episodes, don’t have time to pause and give us a breather. It results in a very active, almost hectic reading process — I enjoy it, usually, though I wonder if this would be a basis of complaint for some viewers.

The effect is most evident in later episodes, when revelatory events invoke broad re-imaginings — episode four in particular comes to mind, and the sixth episode affirms that Diebuster’s circumdative nature can reach even Gunbuster, if we let it. Being a matter of basic structure, however, it’s present all along. In the first episode, for example, we aren’t even certain of the setting (that is, Mars) until the latter third or so, when it’s announced outright. Consider the screencaps above, both from the beginning; the predominance of blue, the snow, and the rustic nature of the houses are all deceptive. As the episode progresses, yellow and red come to dominate the palette, technology becomes more evident, and we might, if we’re perceptive, “figure out” (as Senn says) “not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting.” Appropriately enough, the reveal itself takes the form of a literal zoom-out.

Now, I do enjoy examining structure, probably more than I enjoy examining socio-culturo-historico-things in the usual way. But structural nuances, I must admit after a thousand-odd words about them, are not much of a starting point, which is to say that my thoughts on a story don’t begin with the specifics of its twists and turns. Customarily, I’ll try to attach broad identifiers to a thing, but Diebuster even makes that difficult — about which I am thrilled, as any excuse to combine Northrop Frye and mad speculation is a good one.

Diebuster is a mecha show, certainly. It might be postmodern, though I suspect it takes that half-step beyond that hints at postmodernism’s relevance having begun its slow death. Terms like “mecha” and “postmodern,” however, are narrower than the identifiers I have in mind — namely, Frye’s modes and mythoi. It’s possible that these terms are too restrictively Aristotelian; it’s also possible that, when these terms no longer serve our needs as-is (which isn’t necessarily the case, mind you), it’s time to play around with them, and you should know by now that nothing is sacred when I wield my Unlimited Interpretation Works.

We can say one thing with some certainty: Diebuster has irony. I don’t claim that it falls within the range of Frye’s ironic mode (I would’ve said it is ironic); it may, but I’m not yet certain of that. I simply mean that Diebuster is bursting with ironic elements, things that aren’t what they seem they normally would or should be and situations that play out in unexpected ways. Given circumdation, the very structure itself is ironic; one might say irony is its gimmick. And the characters — really, if you’ve seen Diebuster, I doubt I need to explain how the Topless are atypical super robot pilots. Consider Casio, who, despite his hanging around and offering words of wisdom where needed, essentially quit the mecha business out of fear, or Nicola, who, lacking any direction of his own, just rolls with whatever life throws at him. Tycho and Lal’c aren’t what you’d call paragons of awesome, either, until Nono teaches them how to be. And if you figured out what Nono is before the reveal in episode four, you’re probably superhuman, as it’s really just ridiculous (in a good way).

It’s possible, if we’re going with a descriptor that consists of mode and mythos (and we are, because I like to), that Diebuster is “ironic irony,” that it meets the conditions of the ironic mode (the work deals with characters presented as “below” the reader in situation or surroundings) and the ironic branch of the Mythos of Winter (the work applies myth conventions and storytelling methods new and old to realistic, recognizable situations). The latter is likely accurate; despite their capabilities and their surroundings, the Topless are all too human in their mannerisms and conflicts (perhaps it’s the effect of realism on familiar tropes that gives irony its unpredictable nature to begin with). But are they ironic characters in the modal sense? They do, after all, still have those capabilities, and they still inhabit those surroundings; the basic conditions under which their humanity takes place are unfamiliar to us. Consider the climax, during which, for a brief period, the laws of the physical universe don’t apply to Nono at all. Mode-wise, it’s almost mythological.

That in itself isn’t mind-blowing. I’ll borrow Cuchlann’s lovingly hand-crafted illustration:

It’s reasonable to imagine the modes as a cycle, and even Frye speculated in the Anatomy of Criticism that the literature of his time showed signs of moving away from irony and toward myth and romance, citing science fiction specifically. We could stick Diebuster somewhere between irony and myth, and label it transitional, and I’d be okay with that. But something deep in the untamed wilds of my mind insists that there must be more to it than that, that I shouldn’t be so quick to concede to Frye’s cycle as is. It almost feels as though we’re missing something.

Consider the relationship between contemporary “myth” and what we usually think of as myth, stories of gods and heroes and such. Both are basically myth, in Fryean terms, as both involve characters who surpass human beings in kind; whether we’re talking about Zeus or Buster Machine No. 7, we’re dealing with characters whose means fall beyond the comprehension of the humans below them. Those humans may possess the fantastical powers of the romantic mode, but they’re still human, literally speaking, and their abilities, however potent, cannot match those of the myth-figures present.

There is, however, one key difference between mythic paragons old and new. The former are made by older deities, generally, elsewise they simply are. In the beginning, there was Oceanus and Tethys, or Chronos, or Chaos, or Muspell and its guardian Surt, or God who created the heavens and the earth; these deities oversee the creation of other deities (when they allow other deities to exist), the processes of which don’t involve human beings much at all. But consider our alleged contemporary mythology. Nono is a war machine built by humans, one imbued with human-like intelligence and emotion. The Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is raw human potential made manifest. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, those we see gain power over time and space are either human or human-made. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith leverages Martian wisdom with his humanity to reach his state of godliness. The difference, then: we, humans, make the gods — sometimes we are the gods. I don’t believe that’s something we can ignore.

We might call this strategic use of the unexpected, irony in the vein of this ironic age. Or we might not; I’m not sure that it’s expected or unexpected, if that makes any sense. It’s simply a fictional truth that continues to appear in the fiction (especially the science fiction) I consume. It’s not even especially surprising; irony has primed me and others to accept that God is dead, disinterested, or irrelevant, that there is no concrete meaning of life, and that, subsequently, we’re free to fill the meaning-void with whatever meaning we choose, as soon as we stop moping about there being no meaning in the first place (did I mention I usually don’t like postmodernism?). We are creators, in that sense; Heinlein’s aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land presents that idea with little distillation. It’s as if we’ve been getting it wrong all along — rather than products of gods, we are fledgling gods ourselves. Thou art God, as it were. Please continue being a Messiah.

I’m not claiming that’s a fact of the natural universe, or even that the idea’s increasing presence in narrative art is evidence of some deep awareness of the idea on our collective part (realistically I might suggest the latter, but that’d make this post much longer than it is already, and I don’t want that). I am claiming that what Frye had in mind when he outlined the mythic mode…

If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.³

…may not describe satisfyingly or with suitable accuracy our new mythology, which, given that, may not be mythology at all. It is at the very least a mythology informed by our having written our way through the entirety of Frye’s cycle and emerged from irony intact, one which acknowledges that, even when gods grow beyond our ability to control, they wouldn’t exist at all if not for us — even from works in which gods exist literally, such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, and (since this is basically an anime blog, after all) Kannagi, we often get the sense that a god’s power depends in whole or large part on the devotion of its followers. Either we are gods, or we inflict them upon the universe — the two may be basically the same thing. Perhaps, if we’re going to keep the cycle of modes, we should accommodate expansion, turn it into a spiral whose size reflects the experience we accumulate as we travel the modes.

Or perhaps we must acknowledge that the cycle is a result of our oversimplification of an amalgam of modes with no clear demarcations between them. “Fictions,” says Frye, “may be classified…by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same⁴” — but what if, in fiction, our power of action knows no bounds, or if an apparently mythic hero’s power of action is no more or less than what we “mere” humans decide it is? Perhaps we haven’t come full circle, so to speak, but have integrated all modes known thus far into our understanding, in a linear progression — and if that’s the case, what undiscovered modes lie ahead? What happens when self-aware gods write stories about themselves?

Endnotes

¹Not that Joyce invented it singlehandedly, but, to my knowledge, he refined it into something like what we experience in Diebuster. Even very old literature relies on the withholding of information from the audience, but, in this case (and in the case of Ulysses), it’s synonymous with the narrative structure itself, which offers understanding slowly as a series of junctures which broaden setting and characters in steps.

²Senn, Fritz. “Anagnostic Probes.” Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Ed. Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989: 40, 44.

³Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000: 33.

⁴Ibid.

What is art?

Yeah, I went there. Trepidatiously, maybe, but it’s not as if we haven’t talked about it before. Besides, it’s bound to be fun if we pull relevant examples from the reader communities to which we belong. So strap yourselves in, my magnificent comrades; you’re in for some unusual posts.

Each post in this series will begin with a question, and this one seems as good a starting point as any: can an object with a use, such as a tool or a piece of furniture, be considered art?

In the 11,001-word opus I linked above, Cuchlann describes art thus:

A crafted chair can be beautifully wrought, but ultimately it is a tool. … And as such, eventually even the most sensitive person will view it as a chair, to be sat upon. … But art, with no use but to be art, to be “beautiful,” can never be written off as anything else.

And here’s the relevant bit from Oscar Wilde’s introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

I have a hard time accepting Wilde’s suggestion that a useful thing isn’t worthy of admiration, or at least artistic admiration, by virtue of being useful. Cuchlann’s take is easier for me to digest, as it seems to allow that a tool can evoke an artistic or art-like experience, even if its utilitarian origins are bound to creep in. I get caught up on the question of whether this creeping-in of utilitarian origins weakens or annuls the artistic experience; my immediate, visceral response is no, not necessarily, but then I don’t spend all my time looking at chairs and ornate screwdrivers and such, and I do question the artistic viability of beautifully-wrought weapons, given that a weapon’s most basic purpose is the harming of a living thing. In short, I’m all over the place on this issue.

So let’s back up. If I had to give a definition (and I suppose I do, so you’ll know where I’m coming from), I’d say that art must be human-made, and that it must be capable of entertaining without actively doing anything — that is, one artistically appreciates a novel not because of its potential usefulness as a doorstop, but simply because of those things that come together to make it a novel; one appreciates the crafted form, not the use. The reader is active; the text is not.

To stick with our first example, it’s clear that there are situations in which a chair is active; it actively holds people up. Could someone sitting in the chair in question appreciate the chair as art? Arguably not; after all, the chair is active, asserting its utility to the sitter, not to mention that it’s partly obscured by the sitter’s body. But what about a spectator viewing the chair from afar? Even if the spectator thinks of the chair as a useful thing, the chair is not actively useful. Prompted by the chair’s form, the spectator draws upon knowledge and experience to give it essence; it becomes a symbol, a sign. The chair has done nothing, the spectator everything. If, then, the spectator claims to have been entertained by the experience with the chair, that’s all the proof I need to call the chair art: it’s human-wrought and capable of entertaining someone passively, whatever its alternative uses¹.

It’s possible that, in calling upon personal experience, our spectator runs into something that holds entertainment back. For example, I have a hard time accepting a weapon as art in itself because I’m bothered by its social and historical context enough so that when I look at, say, a sword, I’m generally too preoccupied with what a sword can do to a person to appreciate the craft involved. This is not to say I’m bothered by the use of swords in fiction, or even that a sword can’t be art, by my definition; if someone else can appreciate a sword artfully, it doesn’t really matter that I can’t.

Surely you have your own definition of art, and it might not agree with mine, which is fine, of course; one of the greatest things about art, I think, is that we can all disagree and still be as correct as one another (I like to be positive about it and say we’re all right, but really there is no ultimate truth value to opinions on art²). Keep your definition in mind, whatever it may be, as the connection between my central question here and the rather intriguing image above depends upon it.

Whether we think anime and manga are SRS FKN BSNS or not, I assume that most of us would agree that those staples of our fandom are art. But anime and manga are not the only objects of the fandom; our money and support feed a towering machine that churns out all manner of merchandise and derivative work, some of which surely happens to be art. We might, for example, compare figures and models to statuary. The role of fan work is up in the air, I guess, but I suppose posters, wall scrolls, and the like could serve as visual art in themselves. None of these things really serve much purpose outside of being aesthetically pleasing.

Now, what about something more ambiguous? Something like, say, a body pillow?

It is, after all, a pillow; its use is to be slept or rested upon. But can we take a few steps back and appreciate it as art? I suppose so, assuming we like the illustration thereupon. I wouldn’t know personally, not being a collector of body pillows, but it’s theoretically possible, at least as much so as for a poster. We could always separate the pillowcase from the pillow and appreciate it that way.

But wait! We can’t sum up a body pillow by saying it’s something to be slept upon and it has a pretty picture on it, can we? Look at the art on most of them; body pillows have another purpose, don’t they? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. We’ll get to that in the next post.

Endnotes

¹Speaking of chairs: in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s fictional analogue, outlines a stance on art drawn heavily from Aquinas and Aristotle. He mentions that he “found [his] theory of esthetic” by answering “questions [he] set himself,” one of which is, “Is a chair finely made tragic or comic?” It doesn’t seem to bother him that a chair is a useful thing. Interestingly, though, he tries to appreciate the chair artistically in literary terms, as literature, he says, is “the highest and most spiritual art.” You might assume that my job as The Equalizer™ (no relation) doesn’t let me agree, and you’d be right. I bring this up because James Joyce is always relevant, but also because I’ll be referring to the Portrait again in the next “What the hell is art?” post.

²The topic of good and bad craft might be exempt from this. That is, there’s certainly a wrong way (or many wrong ways) to write literature; anything that jars the reader from enjoyment is bad. But then, if the nuance in question jars some readers but not others, I’d be hesitant to call it objectively bad. Craft might be best approached from a social angle: what percentage of readers does the nuance jar?

Also, you may wonder whether the outright rejection of objectivity is a cop-out; I’ve wondered this myself, but the more research I do on the reading process, the more it makes sense. At any rate, ousting objectivity from the “literary” approach doesn’t discredit a separate (but not unrelated) sociocultural approach which values works according to the relative sizes of their fan communities, general political impact, and other people-centric factors.

Remember me? It’s Pontifus, that guy who has successfully ignored the blog he created for about a month! Why, you may or may not ask? Because I’m embroiled in another of my regularly scheduled methodological crises, and those are well and truly crippling. But that’s boring, so let’s move on.

I realized recently that Baka-Tsuki and its cadre of rogue translators are working their way through the Toradora light novels, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge. Normally I would resist; I don’t like to be in the middle of more than one adaptation at a time. But I’m willing to make exceptions when I’m far enough in one that I’m well past the beginning of the other, and when I really like the franchise in question.

In retrospect, I almost wish I’d exercised some restraint.

I really like the Toradora anime, and I mean really like it. A lot of people do, it seems. It reminds me so much of my own high school and college years that it’s painful to watch¹ at times, which is, come to find out, a good thing by my reckoning. I suppose this means I’m even more predisposed than I normally am by pure literary douchebaggery alone to find flaws in the Toradora light novels.

And that’s all well and good, but why is it so? I have a few guesses, several of which may apply. There are, by my reckoning, two repeat offenders: disparity of written imagery and visual images, and disparity of narrative techniques. These differences are not in themselves bad things, but they go a long way in rendering my response to the Toradora light novels less positive than my response to the show.

Join me, if you will, as I examine a few lines from the first chapter of the first Toradora novel² and try to explain what in God’s name I’m talking about (with the help of plenty of spoilers from the show, so if you haven’t seen much of it, turn back!).

A frustrated hand wiped the mist from the mirror. The run-down bathroom was foggy due to an early morning shower. So after wiping the mirror, it returned to being cloudy. It was pointless to take anger out on the mirror no matter how frustrated one was…

Make yourself gentle with floating bangs — That slogan was seen in the latest men’s fashion magazine. Takasu Ryuuji’s bangs were now “floating”. As the article instructed, he pulled his bangs at length, blow-dried them until they stood up, and then gently rubbed them sideways with some hair gel. He specifically woke up a half-hour early in order to make his hair resemble that of the model’s and have his wish granted.

Even though he had always wiped the steam off, even after spending a whole day last week cleaning out the mold in the kitchen and bathroom… All his effort had gone to waste in that horribly humid room. Biting his lips begrudgingly, Ryuuji tried to see if he could wipe off the mold with some tissues. Of course, it was never going to be that easy, and he ended up tearing the tissues to shreds.

Ah, right, this scene — you know, I barely recognized it at first as the same scene with which the anime opens. This is one of those narrative technique issues I mentioned. In the show, it’s a very kinetic scene, all movement and very little language, and it’s entertaining for that reason; we begin to get a feel for Ryuuji without any need for straightforward exposition. But, here, that movement is slowed by the explanation (maybe necessary, maybe not) of certain minutiae: we’re told that the bathroom is foggy in the aftermath of a shower, for example, and that Ryuuji has a habit of cleaning things. We could probably figure out the cause of the fogginess for ourselves, and the obsessive cleanliness could just as easily be shown later on — we can see it when Ryuuji attacks the mold immediately with whatever cleaning implements he has on hand. Note that this is not a criticism; the novel’s way of doing things isn’t necessarily bad, as it does serve the purpose of situating us more thoroughly in Ryuuji’s thoughts. It’s probably safe to say that film is better at conveying movement while literature excels at conveying thoughts and emotions, and the writers of the respective adaptations may have been playing to the strengths of their media. In this case, though, I prefer the movement, and while this may be the fault of bias set in place by my having seen the show first, I suspect it may have more to do with general personal preference; I like movement and physical response in novels more than long, unbroken tracts of description. I wouldn’t describe the above excerpts as long, unbroken tracts of description, mind you, but they certainly aren’t as active as the corresponding animated scenes, and again, maybe it’s a constraint of the medium.

Last year, just a few meters from the south side of this house, a ten-story luxury apartment building was built. As a result, the sun no longer shone through. This had driven Ryuuji to the brink of madness and frustration countless times already — the laundry could no longer dry; the tatami now expanded due to the humidity, curled at the corners and grew moldy; and sometimes it would even get frosty. The wallpaper was starting to peel, which must have had something to do with the humidity as well. It doesn’t matter since this is just a rented apartment, Ryuuji wanted to tell himself. Yet being extremely sensitive about keeping a place tidy and clean, Ryuuji just could not get himself to tolerate and compromise on such a thing. Looking up towards the white-tiled high-class condo, there was nothing those two poor people could do but stand shoulder to shoulder with their mouths open.

There’s something to be said for well-placed exposition, though. As someone who knows what’s coming, I like this description of Taiga’s apartment as a shadow over Ryuuji’s home and a blight upon his tatami mats — he’ll be tossed out of his comfort zone, and whether that’s a good thing is a matter of reader opinion, but it’s certainly a thing that happens to most (if not all) teenagers at some point. I wonder if first-time readers would find this passage tedious — the lead-up to the above paragraph seems to make it obvious enough to me that the apartment will be important later, but then, I knew that much from the beginning.

In order to give birth to Ryuuji, Yasuko dropped out of high school when she was still a first year, so she was not familiar with what life as a second year was like. Ryuuji felt a sense of sadness for a moment.

Wait, wait, wait…did they just make Yasuko tragic? I always wanted the show to give her more depth — single mothers are characters for whom I can muster a lot of sympathy — but I imagine it may have been hard for the writers to balance sympathy with her visual portrayal as altogether ridiculous. In animation (and probably any film, really), I suspect a character’s layers of depth will always be seen through the shadow of their physical form. Surely some film critic has written about that, but I don’t really know film criticism. It reminds me of literary mind-body dualism (which Cuchlann mentions toward the bottom of this post, if you’re curious), but unavoidable insofar as making judgments at first sight, however cursory, is unavoidable³. We might say that the dualism, if there is dualism, is an end rather than a means.

…[Ryuuji's reputation] could be partly blamed on his rough personality. He spoke in quite an unrefined way, which had something to do with his extreme sensitivity. This was why he rarely joked around or said anything foolish.

Interesting; I didn’t get “rough” or “unrefined” out of the show’s characterization of Ryuuji. Where social class is concerned, though, I suppose he isn’t exactly at the top of the pecking order. If anyone could give me this paragraph in the original Japanese, I’d appreciate it, as certain connotations of whatever words Takemiya used may have been lost when they became the English “rough” and “unrefined,” and I’d like to try to puzzle through it myself.

To use soccer as a metaphor, Ryuuji would be a center defender who hardly ever had any chance of participating in offense.

OH LOL, for lack of a better term. Ryuuji is a professional wingman, of course, a groundskeeper of the friend zone, and it caught me off guard when the novel came right out and said so. Maybe it shouldn’t have; it’s funny, I suppose, but Ryuuji’s unfortunate predicament is pretty obvious anyway.

Her various cheerful expressions.

Her delicate body and exaggerated movements.

Her innocent smiles and clear voice.

Despite his intimidating appearance, she still managed to keep her usual cheerfulness in his presence, even to this day.

That’s Kushieda Minori for you.

As I read, I found myself trying to poke holes in this description of Minorin in spite of better judgment, which tells me it’s best to consider adaptations as independent entities, at least during the initial reading of each. I wonder now if that’s even wholly possible — it may be possible for someone, but my record is perhaps suspect, and it’s not as if I don’t know better. Is it related to my broader inclination to compare things with other things often and at length? Is it possible that those who disparage the Toradora anime for not being more like the novels (just as I feel inclined to disparage the first chapter, if not vocally or with any belief in the objective rightness of doing so, for not being more like the anime, or perhaps for not being the anime) aren’t consciously at fault? Perhaps we’re dealing with some mechanism of reading here, some attribute of the body of narrative art. Or — and this is of course an implicit corollary of all artistic interpretation, analysis, and such — maybe it’s just me.

For my part, my impression of Minorin does include some of the novel’s descriptors, but is best summed up by the three particular incidents from the show which come to mind when I think of her — the first, representing her genki girl craziness, which rubs off on her friends once or twice…or thrice:

The second, representing her dedication and dauntlessness:

And the third and most recent, in which Ami throws all her flaws in her face (and for great justice):

These are the images which really stick with me, and pull the most weight in determining Minorin’s character for me — the first because it made me laugh for five minutes, the second because Minorin is fucking gar, and the third because I still feel anxious just thinking about it (for about an hour prior to the writing of this sentence, I’ve been jittery at the prospect of having to watch that scene again for the sake of grabbing the screencap). Regardless of their taking place later in the…not shared narrative, as the two adaptations give us two different narratives, but maybe the Toradora proto-narrative…I can’t help bringing these and other scenes with me when I read the novel. Perhaps they’re confounding influences, mere distractions, but even if they are, they exist; when the novel cues me with “Kushieda Minori,” I need to mentally construct a character to attach to that name, and if I’ve already done so for an alternate adaptation, I don’t know how I could completely and utterly disallow that Kushieda Minori from lending qualities to this one, considering the importance of prior knowledge and experience in reading.

Specifically, expressiveness, physical exaggeration, and cheerfulness are all things I associate with Minorin, and so I didn’t have trouble accepting those traits when the novel handed them to me. But “delicate body” gave me pause — maybe she looks delicate, but she’s proven her ability to hold up under physical duress more than once in the show, rendering half the connotations of “delicate” inapplicable. Granted, that may be attributable to a translation nuance, but “innocent smiles?” We viewers all know what lurks beneath that presumed innocence by now. Of course, there’s no way the novel could convey all that in one chapter, and Ryuuji doesn’t know Minorin well enough at that point to judge her accurately. I comprehend that on a conscious, logical, intellectual level, just as I comprehend that the two Minorins are not practically one and probably should not be considered as such, but that isn’t going to stop impatience and jadedness from being emotional byproducts of reading, and it isn’t going to stop my mind from being hypersensitive to possible “inaccuracies” against my will. Knowledge of the one version affects the experience of the other, and there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it (and I try, believe me).

Oh, and let’s not forget that the light novel offers its own visual depiction of Minorin…

…which isn’t wholly analogous to the Minorin I’m used to lately, who is prone to romantic dilemmas and hitting people who point out her flaws. These alternate depictions and their discrepancies inform and perhaps confound one another, especially when the adaptations in question are fairly similar; I’m starting to suspect that whether they should or not is of little consequence.

Her long straight hair softly fluttered and covered the tiny body of the Palmtop Tiger.

Speaking of those illustrations present in light novels, I wonder if we should consider them separate in terms of characterizing influences from the descriptions of the characters they represent, and, if so, to what degree. I mention this because this…

…is not “straight hair.” Is this a minor discrepancy? Yes, but it illustrates that different creators bring different agencies to different depictions of the same character, and this isn’t mitigated by the two depictions coexisting in the same physical text. I don’t know how much this matters, but it could certainly lead to situations in which the reader must contend with differing adaptations in deciding, consciously or not, what to include in their mental image of the text.

At the end of the day, I’d maintain that adaptations of the same “proto-narrative” should be considered separate texts, and that “I like this less because it isn’t like the other thing” shouldn’t be considered an objective basis for making a value judgment. As Cuchlann more pithily suggests, we should at least try to appreciate varying adaptations on their own merits rather than simply throwing them against one another. But personal preference is a shifty bastard, and if knowledge from one adaptation creeps into the experience of another, I don’t suppose there’s a whole lot we can do to keep the resultant webs of influence from becoming significant and often complex.

Of course, much of what I’m talking about here depends heavily upon my own reading nuances, as those are the only reading nuances about which I can speak accurately. Maybe you can erect impenetrable walls between adaptations, in which case I’m curious to know what that’s like.

Endnotes

¹See also Casshern Sins and Clannad ~After Story~. Damn this season is deliciously painful. Damn that last sentence sounds creepy in retrospect.

²You can find the chapter in question here, though, due to the wiki nature of Baka-Tsuki, the wording of the translation may have changed since I quoted it.

³See this recent article from New Scientist for more on that. I’m not so sure about “new physiognomy,” but I suspect that the idea of judging by appearances and the inevitability thereof carries over to fictional characters with visual representations. Even in the case of Ryuuji, whose fierce appearance is deliberately mismatched with his gentle personality, that sense of being mismatched is a ubiquitous element of his character, as we’re reminded of it by his physical form, central as that form is to the depiction of his thought, speech, and action.

On second thought, I suppose it’s inappropriate to muse on Aria in a post which is, to some degree, about Fallout 3. The Capital Wasteland is most assuredly no place for gondolas. Hell, it’s no place for human beings, and that’s part of what makes it such a compelling setting, at least for me. If, like me, you find a certain creepiness in isolation, in abandoned radio loops and vast, empty spaces, in “towns” populated by two or three or four people, Fallout 3 will do horrible things to your sanity. Horrible, awesome things. Which, coincidentally, brings us back to our good buddy Steve Gaynor. The three-way parallel he draws is simple:

Literature excels at exploring the internal (psychological, subjective) aspects of a character’s personal experiences and memories.

Film excels at conveying narrative via a precisely authored sequence of meaningful moments in time.

And video games excel at fostering the experience of being in a particular place via direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent.

Oversimplification this may be, but Gaynor raises an interesting question: how are we to account for the idea of setting in video games? As much as it’s “the place where they are,” as in, say, a novel, it can also become “the place where I am,” and few games have made that idea more evident to me than Fallout 3.

Before we get into Fallout 3 and setting specifically, though, I want to lay some groundwork — and by “some,” I mean a lot, and in the disorganized spirit of exploratory writing, so now would be a good time to pour yourself a glass of your favorite hard liquor.

Gaynor elaborates:

Video games are able to render a place and put the player into it. The meaning of the experience arises from what’s contained within the bounds of the gameworld, and the range of possible interactions the player may perform there– the nouns and the verbs. Just like in real life, where we are and what we can do dictates our present, and our possible futures. Video games provide an alternative to both the where and the what of existence, resulting in simulated alternate life experiences.

It’s a powerful thing, to be able to visit another place, to drive the drama onscreen yourself– not to receive a personal account of someone else’s experiences, or observe events as a detached spectator. A modern video game level is a navigable construction of three-dimensional geometry, populated with art and interactivity to convincingly lend it an identity as a believable, inhabitable, living place. At their best, video games transmit to the player the experience of actually being there.

…After which he goes into his “agents of chaos” spiel, which is still as relevant as ever, but this time we’re concerned with the functions of specific story elements, rather than how the actions of the player, in a general sense, construct the narrative or narratives which constitute the game experience. In order to discuss setting in games as I intend to, however, we need to take for granted that the aforementioned principle, the constructive function of player agency, is more or less true — and I think we can do that, at this point, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree on what that entails.

One approach was put forth recently by Cuchlann. Of player agency, and the act of playing in general, he says:

If authorial consciousness is theoretically available in a game, does the gamer become dispossessed and filled in with the authorial consciousness? Yes, I would say so. The gamer takes up the skills offered by the game, learns them well enough to do without reminders, and then moves through the world of the game. It is less like being absorbed into a book and more like being caught up in a dance or a kata. The gamer is doing precisely what the author intends — and yes, that’s what happens, even with the idea of the gamer as an “agent of chaos.” The game world is constructed for the gamer to move through in the same way Poulet posits the world of the book is made to move into the reader. We’re simply dealing with activity rather than passivity.

This is predicated upon the assumption that entering into the world of the the author of a text, in the act of reading (or viewing, or playing, or what have you), results in the dispossession of the reader’s consciousness as it is inundated with the authorial consciousness into which it is immersed (if I’m understanding it correctly). In a comment on the quoted post, Cuchlann describes “authorial consciousness” as used here as “basically the ‘stuff’ readers, players, and critics get out of the text normally,” and that’s probably the best definition I can think of; it’s likely akin to what I’ve called “the surface level” of a text, the structural concerns of the author as opposed to the deep, limitless webs of potential meaning that people like me busy themselves with mapping.

The distinction made here between books and games seems to involve the location at which the reader’s movement into the authorial consciousness takes place. When reading a book, one brings the consciousness to oneself; the consciousness travels to the reader, at which point the reader inhabits it¹. The opposite may be true of video games; that is, they may require players to relocate themselves into the consciousnesses as they exist in the games themselves. To put it another way, when reading a novel, a reader, given both textual cues and informational absences, must personally conceptualize and construct story elements, whereas the same kinds of story elements — characters, setting, and such — exist in pre-constructed states in games, solidified into uncompromisable forms by the constraints imposed upon them by the computer language of which they are woven. The player is tasked primarily with determining the order and manner in which these elements are encountered, being free of the task of giving them form in the first place.

In the following paragraph of his post, Cuchlann delves into the implications of this.

My speculative idea here is that the activity of the game is what induces this state [of dispossession] in the gamer, not the story (if a story is present)… Little of the story is ever delivered, in [either Half-Life or Shadow of the Colossus], to a passive reader — how many cut-scenes are there in either game? True, they’re not absent, but more often than not the gamer is gaming, and not watching. Games dispossess the gamer through motion — the gamer’s own motion. Gamers are not immersed — logically, if we really did map ourselves onto the protagonists, then alarmists might actually have ground to stand on when they claim games make us more violent. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re coming in contact with the authorial consciousness, “enacting a wondrous merging with the presence of someone wholly other and unique” (1319). A video game is the least immersive form of entertainment, because it requires complete, willed action on the part of the gamer…

“Readers act on themselves,” Cuchlann later adds; “gamers, on the other hand, act upon something external to themselves.” We must ask ourselves whether gamers being forced to leave themselves behind, in a sense, thwarts immersion in video games. Cuchlann seems to suggest that it does, and I think I see where he’s coming from — at least, I disagree with Gaynor’s characterization of the player’s interaction with the main character as “direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent” — but I’m not ready to conclude that games lack immersion just yet. In my estimation, our question here is not “Is it immersive?” so much as “In what area is it immersive?” What we’re dealing with here is, at the very least, an entirely different kind of immersion than that offered by books and film.

And now that I’ve opened that can of worms, let’s talk about Fallout 3, as my experience with that Oblivion-esque romp through post-apocalyptia made me start to wonder about the role and function of setting in video games to begin with.

To be blunt, the Capital Wasteland creeps me right the fuck out, and not just because of its inherent loneliness (which the few NPC companions in the game do little to alleviate). We live in a world in which the United States, staunch enemy of communism, owes a startling amount of money to China; a world in which practically anyone can get their hands on nuclear material, and no number of UN injunctions or invasions of the Middle East can change that. Fallout 3′s ruinous Washington, DC area, the end result of war with China, serves as an example of what might happen if everything that could possibly go wrong in our world suddenly did. It is, after all, a setting in which every other explosion results in a mushroom cloud.

In a recent post, Gaynor comments on Fallout 3 in particular.

I’ve gained unique perspective by engaging with the fictional people and places of recent games… Freely exploring the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 and choosing to complete unanchored quests like Agatha’s Song illustrated just how much our world, and humanity’s value systems, might change when faced with global catastrophe. The most memorable stories I recall…lay outside the narrative spine…

That more or less sums up my enthusiasm for the game, though I’d take it a step further. Agatha’s Song was an interesting side quest, I suppose, but my most memorable experiences with the game often did not occur in conjunction with quest objectives; my nerve-wracking six-hour odyssey through the ghoul-infested DC metro comes to mind, or my first encounter with a deathclaw, or my off-the-beaten-path adventures in Vault 106 and the Dunwich Building. Fallout 3 has great potential to provide experiences “outside the narrative spine,” which makes setting a more significant aspect of what I like to call its “authorial shell” than it would be if the game wasn’t a game. Perhaps another name for the authorial shell I’m referring to here is, as Cuchlann called it, “authorial consciousness,” but giving form to abstract concepts always helps my understanding, and the shell might be bigger than the consciousness anyway, encompassing or using it.

It seems, then, that to understand setting in games, we’ll need to understand that shell. But, video games being as new as they are, there’s little consensus on how something like an authorial shell or consciousness functions in the context of games, perhaps because of the vastly different approaches of those discussing the medium. In the previously-quoted post, Gaynor argues for an “immersion model of meaning:”

…does abdication of authorship have the potential to convey profundity or deep meaning?

…

I would argue that abdication of authorship, when paired with certain existing game forms, points toward such an alternative: a mode that trades painstakingly-paced plot points or densely symbolic mechanics for a matrix of unstructured potential personal revelations; one that trades grand, orchestrated received meaning for the encompassing sensation of visiting someplace outside the player’s prior experience, with the potential to return deeply changed. The immersion model of meaning, as it might be called, takes the act of travel as its primary touchstone, instead of relying on traditional media such as film, the novel, or even sculpture, music or painting to inform the author’s role.

“Abdication of authorship” …to whom? Every text has an author, I think, whether it’s a lone writer, a video game design team, a set of social and cultural conditions, some combination thereof, or something else entirely. The player of a game, despite being an agent of momentum, still seems to be more a reader than anything; players determine the order in which the events of a game occur, but they do not determine the array of possible events to which they are bound. Even assuming that we could place such concerns entirely in the hands of a computer, could truly randomly determine which of an infinite number of events the player could experience in a particular playthrough, the computer would then become the author, and the player would remain the reader. The bottom line is that there is always a limit to what the player can do, and this limit is determined by an author. I cannot, for example, leave Fallout 3′s Capital Wasteland because none of the land beyond is virtually mapped, and I cannot brandish a broadsword because there is no such weapon in the game. I would rather it be this way; I maintain that a structured narrative experience can “mean” practically anything, but lack of structure seems to preclude meaning. If you can come up with a truly random way of scattering words on a page, and if you can subsequently achieve a sublime experience with your jumble of words, let me know.

That’s not to mention my disagreement with Gaynor’s characterization² of the “traditional media” of novels and film as employing a strict “message model of meaning,” in which “the genius author cooks up deeply meaningful thought in his head and hands down his superior understanding to the waiting masses.” Call me a tool of the poststructuralist critical establishment, but I’m one of those who feels that the author doesn’t have much to do with the reading experience, beyond contributing to that structured shell in the first place. Further, I don’t think there’s much meaning inherent in any text, that meaning will always be based primarily on the experiences of the reader; even if the “genius author” (and I think it’s erroneous to assume that the effective “author” of a text can be characterized as an individual human being anyway) did intend to convey some message, whatever message or messages would really be taken away from the text would depend on what the readers saw in it. To quote the ever-useful TV Tropes, I’m one of those who “[considers] the uncertainty and ambiguity of canon to be a good thing and [decries] the Word Of God as shackling the imagination and interpretations of the fans.” To take it even further, I don’t believe writers can have any more authority over the meanings of their texts than their readers; once the text is written, the writer is just another reader³.

Essentially, I’m saying that Gaynor is worrying too much, that “traditional” narrative media already give readers and viewers enough agency that the gap between such media and video games isn’t that big to begin with. But if Gaynor’s approach to the subject isn’t that useful to me, to whom shall I turn? How about Roger Ebert, who Gaynor seems to identify as a foe? It’s hard to blame Gaynor, actually.

…I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Et tu, Ebert!? “Serious” film and literature requires authorial control of what, exactly? If he’s talking about meaning, I’ll reiterate that I don’t think authors have control over that anyway. If he means our authorial shell, though, we’re in the process of establishing that games have that, too. It may not look quite the same as it does in the film Ebert’s used to, but it’s there all the same. And anyway, who is Roger Ebert to determine what narrative art is “serious?” By my reckoning, the only artistic experience Ebert can truly, deeply understand is Ebert’s. The same goes for all of us, no matter how many degrees we have or volumes we’ve written.

Ebert’s not done, though.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful.

Thanks for that, Big E. I feel so validated.

But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Ebert’s basic stance seems to be that, because video games don’t do what plays, novels, symphonies, et al. do, they aren’t art, or they’re at least not worthy of comparison with the greatest works of human history. The medium is young, I’ll grant him that — game designers haven’t had much time to produce yet — but his approach doesn’t make much sense to me. Novels don’t do what musical compositions do; given that novels are the newer of the two, shouldn’t it follow that, by Ebert’s standards, novels aren’t art because they don’t adhere to a form and purpose established earlier? On that note, people didn’t know what to make of Oroonoko at first, but eventually English novels reached their current prominence; if the novel as a basic form wasn’t capable of artistic power to begin with, the shape of literature today would probably be quite different. Video games constituting a very young medium may mean they haven’t realized their full potential yet, but we can’t write the medium off for that reason alone.

Ah well; disregarding that Ebert’s argument makes little sense, and that the last sentence of the above quote is a rather galling and pretentious generalization (I hope you can see here that I’m trying to use video games precisely to make myself “more cultured, civilized and empathetic,” though I doubt my definitions of those three words are the same as Ebert’s), he’s not really a staunch enemy of fan-kind. He liked Princess Mononoke, if I remember correctly (not that it would really bother me if he didn’t). But now that we’ve used Ebert up like a Grand Theft Auto whore, let’s kick him out of the car and punch him to death so we can get our hard-earned blood money back.

We can say, now, what the authorial shell of a game isn’t. It isn’t nonexistent, nor is it likely to be much more subject to the will of the player than the authorial shell of a novel is to the will of the reader, given the limits imposed on player action. But that’s inconclusive. A definition of isn’ts and maybes isn’t a very good definition. In particular, we still don’t know what setting has to do with anything.

It seems, then, that three questions beg for answers. How does a player enter the authorial shell of a game? How does the player then function within it? And what the hell is the authorial shell in the first place?

The answer to the first seems initially to be that the player enters the shell through the act of experiencing the story of the game, which requires play, as play constitutes the forward movement of the story. But then, those actions available to the player, in being predetermined by the game, are also a part of the shell, in a sense. The player cannot act beyond the shell — at that point, the player is playing a different game altogether. We might say that play doesn’t get the player into the shell; the player makes the decision to enter the shell, and play keeps the player inside, just as forward reading keeps readers inside the shell of a novel, and forward viewing keeps viewers inside the shell of a film. The difference here is that play need not necessarily be “forward,” in the traditional sense. Cuchlann says:

A gamer can still be actively engaging in that trade-off of consciousness — that is, still playing — even if they aren’t advancing the story at all. Think of modern sandbox games, such as Grand Theft Auto 3, where the gamer is still playing if they steal an ice cream truck and ride around a farm but refusing to do any storyline quests. The gamer could even stop and watch the sun set over Vvardenfell — that’s still playing. Doing these things, or their analogues, in the act of reading a book or watching a movie, effectively stops the act of reading or watching. Going back and checking out a cool scene in Star Wars isn’t absorbing the author’s consciousness — that consciousness is delivered to the watcher through forward motion through the story. Pausing in reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to reflect on the beauty of Clarke’s prose isn’t absorbing the consciousness either, it’s aesthetic appreciation of craft. So even in the most linear of games, the fact of how gamers dispossess themselves to take in, rather than receive, the authorial consciousness turns the story into something that results from the gamer’s actions.

I would argue that each act of play constitutes forward movement on the part of the game’s story as it exists within the play experience, even if it does not advance the game’s central plot. It can even go against the advancement of the central plot; isn’t this what happens when a player loses and must return to a previously-completed section of the game? Whereas the plot of a novel or film is, even in its most abstract and absurd moments, structured, its events predetermined and forever unchanging, and conducive to intense scrutiny in its relatively rigid form, the plot of a game is highly dependent on the methodology of the player. We might say that, where the plot of a novel or film is interpretable in its implications, the plot of a game is interpretable in the order of its events — but perhaps less so in implications, for how much weight has a sequence of events that could have gone differently? I don’t have a good answer — it has more emotional weight, probably, to the individual player, but it’s hard to compare one playthrough to the body of human fiction; for that, we’d probably need an array of all possible plots. A game has no “one true plot.”

I suppose that means that, unless we’re comparing playthroughs, we can get farther by discussing characters and setting (though, on the other hand, is discoursing critically ever anything more than comparing notes?). As I said, I agree with Cuchlann in that we do not “map ourselves onto the protagonists,” even when we directly control the protagonist’s actions — remember, the range of possible actions available to the characters under our control are for us to discover, but not decide. Assuming that the authorial shell, composed of characters as much as plot and setting, must exist within the player before the player can fill it with meaning, it may be more apt to say that the protagonist maps itself onto us — or from us. But it’s easier to make that claim in the case of a novel, which prompts us to compose the shell internally with its language cues. Many seventh-generation games seem to hand us a shell at least partially pre-constructed of elements with determinate visual and aural form and personality. In sandbox games such as Fallout 3, the game allows us some determination of these factors where the protagonist is concerned, but the game also limits our options out of necessity. Do we take the partially-whole shell the game gives us and draw it into ourselves? Do we leave ourselves, in a sense, and enter into the shell within the game? Or is there some sort of midway point at which the transaction takes place?

The second option, that of leaving the self and moving elsewhere, seems difficult to substantiate, even if we rephrase it as the player acting upon something external. To what degree can the shell even be external? The shell, once constructed, is the array of signifiers that point to the signifieds that fill the void within, and, as de Saussure notes, the semiotic sign is a “psychological entity,” connecting “not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image⁴.” It’s all, by necessity, in our heads. We can’t work with the shell if we don’t conceptualize it.

We might be inclined to say, then, that we draw the shell into ourselves and go from there. But wait! A new challenger appears, and his name is Wolfgang Iser.

…[T]he literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author’s text, and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its actualization but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader…⁵

Iser postulates a middle ground between text and reader that constitutes the work of literature — this middle ground is, I think, analogous to our as-yet-poorly-defined authorial shell. Now, this may sound odd; if we take de Saussure for granted, which I’ve done, how could anything exist between reader and text, when the text exists beyond the reader’s mind, and semiotic processes are “psychological entities?” The answer is simple: the text, or at least that version of the text that participates in the reading experience, that combines its powers with the reader to give birth to middle ground, doesn’t exist beyond the reader’s mind. What the reader is working with isn’t a physical text, but the mental impression of a physical text; the mind is a kind of white screen upon which a projection of the physical text is cast when the luminous reading process passes through it. That may seem obvious, but consider this: perhaps the act of play, being a reading process, a means by which the player experiences the story of a game, not only keeps the player engaged within the shell, but acts as a means of constructing the shell in the first place — a means that sometimes places enough determinative power in the hands of the player that the player is tasked with determining what they’ll get out of the story’s end result up front, as is the case in Fallout 3.

Iser (who apparently had kind of a thing for pinstripe suits) continues:

If the virtual position of the work is between text and reader, its actualization is clearly the result of an interaction between the two, and so exclusive concentration on either the author’s techniques or the reader’s psychology will tell us little about the reading process itself. …[S]eparate analysis would only be conclusive if the relationship were that of transmitter and receiver… In literary works, however, the message is transmitted in two ways, in that the reader “receives” it by composing it.⁶

From this, we can glean that Iser’s middle ground amounts to an outright interaction between reader and text. Insofar as both the reader’s consciousness and the mental text-image coexist in the reader’s mind, we can likely characterize this interaction as “discourse with oneself,” which seems in line with both Poulet’s phenomenology and the Foucauldian ideas discussed (among other things) here. Given that “the reader ‘receives’” the “message” of a text “by composing it,” we can also substantiate the text as text-image approach.

It is only now, after much tl;dr — that is, after much scholarly toil that the authorial shell begins to take shape. Consider the reader’s mind and the physical text in relation to one another.

The reader brings accumulated knowledge and experience to the table, but can’t simply toss it at the text; the text, through reading, must be brought inside. Now I’ll apply the process to which Poulet, de Saussure, and Iser have led me: the physical text, through the process of reading, casts a text-image upon the reader’s mind, and the reader’s knowledge and experience combine with the text-image to complete the authorial shell, which can then be filled.

This is a very simple representation, and not drawn to scale, if there even exists a scale to which it might be drawn. That is, don’t take the relative sizes of the reader’s knowledge and experience and the text-image to mean anything; the nature of the shell’s composition most likely differs from one reading experience to another. A graphic that depicted an authorial shell composed of bits of text-image scattered throughout the reader’s knowledge and experience would probably be more accurate, and it’s possible that the text-image and knowledge/experience simply become one in the construction of the shell, so bear those variations in mind.

Also note that this model is by no means specific to video games. I suggested earlier that games might deliver their authorial shells in “pre-constructed” or at least partially-constructed states, and I think that we can now more or less rule that out. Games might provide specific visual and aural data that novels present only in abstract, but even these amount to cues, raw data that must be “read” into a text-image as surely as language. The authorial shell model is, I think, general enough to apply to most narrative media.

How does setting in games fit into all this? How is it “the place where I am” in addition to “the place where they are?” To answer these and other questions, we need to scrutinize the composition of the text-image⁷.

As a general rule, what setting we see in literature and film is attached to the characters and their actions. That is, while both media have their share of epic pans over the countryside (I’m looking at you, Tolkien), readers and viewers will only tolerate so much of nothing eventful happening. This is not the case in games; as I said, a player need not be advancing any of the game’s scripted plots to advance the all-encompassing plot of the play experience. Though the same set of events would bore most readers and moviegoers, many Koreans players can and will gladly endure a two-hour game of Starcraft that consists mostly of building things and repairing or replacing them when they’re damaged. How many viewers would leave the theater or ceremonially burn the DVD (in a fire, not a DVD-RW) when faced with a film that made them watch the first twenty minutes of a Starcraft game? Not that I haven’t watched gameplay videos of very good players, but I certainly didn’t do so for the story, and I found myself skipping around.

The difference, of course, is play, which keeps the player engaged through what in other media would be very uneventful stretches, stretches during which countless minutiae of setting can be conveyed. Given engaging play, games stand to convey a higher volume of setting information than novels and film, which means setting is more strongly represented in the text-image, which means it plays a more significant role in composing the authorial shell — while “the place where I am” may not be the best way to describe setting in games, it’s a feeling I’m more likely to have while playing a game than when reading most novels, and, to me, that feeling is one of the markers of a good game.

Perhaps more importantly, I consider that sense of identification with setting a requirement in sandbox games such as Fallout 3, which often very purposefully don’t contain plots of epic proportions. As Fallout 3 made me feel as if my explorations of its setting meant something, even without quest objectives, far more than did, say, Oblivion or most of the Grand Theft Auto games, I can confidently recommend it over most games I played last year.

But the point here is that I don’t think it’s “direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent,” as Gaynor suggests, that sets games apart as a medium, nor do I think games are necessarily less immersive than novels or film. They’re simply different in that they’re played; we get more of some things and less of others to work with in our authorial shells, and setting seems rather well-represented therein.

Endnotes

¹The consciousness inhabits the reader, in a sense, insofar as we can call the reader’s conceptualization of the text inhabiting on the part of the consciousness, and then the reader inhabits the consciousness, which causes the consciousness to inhabit the reader — it seems paradoxical when termed thus. But think of it this way: concepts such as inhabitation and inside/outside aren’t really adequate, and just serve as convenient descriptors in explanation. “The extraordinary fact in the case of a book,” says Poulet, “is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside” (Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 1321).

²To be precise, Gaynor is running with some ideas first presented by Jonathan Blow.

³That is to say, the writer is just another reader in theory; effectively, the writer does have some authority, given the tendency of some fans to accept the testimony of a writer as irrefutable fact. We might say that the literary value of all readings is equal (in that there aren’t “levels” of literary value at all), while social/political values of readings vary widely. See also “Over 9000 meaningless words.”

⁴De Saussure, Ferdinand. “From Course in General Linguistics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 963.

⁵Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” The [you guessed it] Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 1674.

⁶Ibid.

⁷I’m inclined at this point to think that the text-image specifically is analogous to Poulet’s authorial consciousness, while the authorial shell as a whole is analogous to Iser’s middle ground, but I could be wrong; maybe it’s all the same thing.

I have to admit, this one’s a little ridiculous, even for us. Ghostlightning, lelangir, Cuchlann, and I all somehow ended up in a chat a scant few hours ago. Initially, the topic was Kannagi, but, when matters of disparate theory arose, things got a little crazy. The title is apt; in fact, what you’ll see after the break is no less than 11,001 words of our discourse and debate. Is it worth reading? Absolutely.

It’s a good thing the concept of tl;dr doesn’t exist on Super Fanicom.

lelangir: you there?

Ghostlightning: yeah

lelangir: cool, I need help thinking through this post

Ghostlightning: how goes?
okay

lelangir: so from what I’ve seen, Kannagi’s reception is that the plot sucks
but I’m arguing that it doesn
and so I was thinking

Ghostlightning: glad to help because i have a long term project that i need your assistance in a big way
okay

lelangir: what is the relationship between plot and genre?
lemme email you what i have so far

Ghostlightning: fire

lelangir: ok

Ghostlightning: my quick impression: the plot is generic, but it doesn’t make it bad

lelangir: hmmm

Ghostlightning: how many unique plots are there anyway?

lelangir: well kannagi is interesting

Ghostlightning: the disconnect that people feel
i think

lelangir: you could say its plot in and of itself is a double entendre
are we thinking of it as social commentary?
incidental?
or…typical harem crap?

Ghostlightning: is because teh execution in the chemistry is SO GOOD

lelangir: the latter, then there is no plot
the former, the plot is VERY intricate

Ghostlightning: but at the expense of a rushed conclusion, that seems forced

lelangir: and so the harm mush is predicated on its “incidental social commentary”

Ghostlightning: making people say: bad plot

lelangir: hehe but wiat
its not rushed

Ghostlightning: about what you’re saying:

lelangir: because the “lack of plot” was the plot itself

Ghostlightning: but there is a plot:
boy meets girl
girl has big reveal: she’s a goddess
conflict: IS SHE REALLY?

lelangir: I think the fanservice superficial plot is more vehicular to the metaphorical content

Ghostlightning: consequence of conflict: complication of ordinary high school life

lelangir: in the anime, what we see first and foremost is Nagi years ago

Ghostlightning: the metaphorical content does not equal plot

lelangir: clad in traditional clothing as goddess
hmm

Ghostlightning: plot can be ‘bad’ but metaphorical content can be awesome
kannagi’s metaphorical content is awesome imo
plot is ordinary
not a value judgment

lelangir: but the metaphorical content is so well lined up that I dont think it cant be anything but plot

Ghostlightning: hmmm

lelangir: the aspects of Kannagi that are mainstream “broadcasted” are whats incidental

Ghostlightning: let’s distinguish the metaphorical content

lelangir: IMO the point of Kannagi was Nagi’s idolatry
and no one picks this up

Ghostlightning: i would approach it as a “reading”

lelangir: that’s because they’re too caught up in what you define as “plot”
but I think here it’s switched

Ghostlightning: and not as a statement against those who dismiss kannagi
an xist reading of kannagi

lelangir: that’s good, since we know it has to make money

Ghostlightning: the rest of the sphere are STUCK in their formalist reading methodology

lelangir: and it has
industry, etc.

Ghostlightning: plot, character, etc
forms
structure

lelangir: well
its metaphors and “plot” are coextensive

Ghostlightning: so they can argue good plot, bad plot
and you can read it from a framework
of religion/idolatry

lelangir: but while its “plot” seems stupid and “inert” (as in not going anywhere, slice of life), this is precisely what propels its metaphorical content, nagi’s search for idolatry

Ghostlightning: if it were me, i would downplay plot ‘valuation’

lelangir: i dont get it

Ghostlightning: the commentary will appropriate your reading
and then people will use your arguments
to say that kannagi has a good plot lol

lelangir: I still think its metaphorical content is sufficient enough to upset the canon of plot

Ghostlightning: okay
please explain
‘canon of plot’

lelangir: well that “plot” is superficial
like you said, boy meets girl, etc.

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: vs. idolatry, “metaphores”
which constitutes “plot”?
is plot the same as “watching”?

Ghostlightning: okay, you in your reading will re-valuate formal plot elements, vs metaphorical content

lelangir: actually yeah…
plot is watching
hmm
well we can then say that kannagi also has a secondary, subtle plot

Ghostlightning: plot, strictly speaking is a formal element

lelangir: to supplement its “fanservice”

Ghostlightning: the sequencing of the narrative, the conflict and resolution

lelangir: (double entendre ,pun intended)

Ghostlightning: haha

lelangir: yes
so in your definition, my view also works

Ghostlightning: yes
only that i’m more comfortable that the content is distinguished from plot/structure
the plot merely ‘frames’ the content
‘how things happen’
the content is… what the events ‘mean’

lelangir: in very…uh..”non post-modern” situations?

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: i guess cowboybebop, faulkner, etc. complicate that

Ghostlightning: non-postmodern
formalism sucks, imo – only that it is very useful in the study of craft

lelangir: hmm so now I enjoy thinking of Kannagi simply as having two coextensive plots
one just more metaphorical than the other

Ghostlightning: that can work too!
i like it

lelangir: ooooo, the superficiality serves as a framework for its metaphor

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: ok that’s good
solved that
sheesh, it’s sooooo much easier talking it through with someone

Ghostlightning: yes
i have mechafetish irl for this, or rather, he has me

lelangir: my uni actually has a class on anime next semester lol

Ghostlightning: whoa

lelangir: this is going to sound arrogant, but I think the blogosphere would still be wayyy more insightful

Ghostlightning: what’s the content? not history i hope
or genre surveying

lelangir: oh lol

Ghostlightning: yes, but of course it would

lelangir: i was about to say that the class is probably more focused on history

Ghostlightning: yes, an introduction to the medium
you will be smarter than everyone
it will be hell
i remember my good friend, when he took an elective on SF

lelangir: and it’d be boring ’cause it wouldn’t view currently airing shows
so its not as “cultural” or memetic w/e
copyright issues, etc.

Ghostlightning: oh lol
he said to the class: “you cretins, i am erudite! i read more science fiction books than all of you have read books!”

lelangir: uh huh

Ghostlightning: so i anticipate that you will be in a similar spot

lelangir: lol i’m not well-read….or at least as not as I’d like to be
I wish I were more in tune with japanese history

Ghostlightning: in relation to anime

lelangir: so my aniblogging had much more substance
or foundation, etc.

Ghostlightning: you’d know more than anyone in the class
but it still may be worth taking

lelangir: ’cause the general populace is more attuned to viewing anime microscopically

Ghostlightning: because if the teacher is good, it will be very good

lelangir: which is why there’s all this talk about “viewing things deeply”

Ghostlightning: and you’ll be able to influence her

lelangir: whereas I enjoy looking at anime from a bird’s eye view

Ghostlightning: and contribute to education in some way

lelangir: intertextually, vis-a-vis one another and cultures, positions of viewing
I think the prof. had a website
he looked cool
but not a PhD
so i dunno

Ghostlightning: yes, that’s why i’m not so inclined to do so
because you’re around lol
you do it better than me

lelangir: nobody likes reading those posts though lol

Ghostlightning: i can play off your posts, etc. without having to lay foundations

lelangir: oh and the lucky star english dub is soooo interesting
they retain the japanese honorifics

Ghostlightning: o rly? tell me

lelangir: and even phonetics differ

Ghostlightning: ah i think i read a tweet or note of yours

lelangir: i’ve noticed that in recent dubs, they keep the flapped R
and in LS, some keep the flapped R while others anglicize it
crazy

Ghostlightning: whoa

lelangir: and there’s the whole thing about trying to sound like the original VA

Ghostlightning: i wonder how they discussed this

lelangir: yeah
it’s related to how its steeped in otaku culture

Ghostlightning: well, it may be just trying to appeal to the fan of subs

lelangir: I’m sure
yeah
I’d have to read into suzumiya haruhi sales in USA
as LS is definitely its successor (or giant advertisement)

Ghostlightning: your post reads good, so far

lelangir: that was the 2nd thing i needed help on
the relationship between style/genre and plot/progression

Ghostlightning: okay, frame your need

lelangir: it
it’s hard…hmmmm
I’m conceptualizing this as….
a hierarchy between the two, genre and plot
which “contains” the other
which has more prevalence

Ghostlightning: ohhhh
hohoho

lelangir: =p you have answer!

Ghostlightning: people i think choose subjects by genre first

lelangir: definitely

Ghostlightning: plot is secondary

lelangir: in terms of the viewer

Ghostlightning: but plot can ‘ruin’ the experience or ‘elevate’t
it
i think

lelangir: yeah
one sec…diagram time

Ghostlightning: characters and settings can elevate the subject
but plot is more destructive (a badly plotted story)
a good plot, can elevate unlikable characters (but not uninteresting)
i need examples
08th MS Team
boy meets girl
capulets and montagues
war
(subplots are: coming of age, shaking off one’s past – shinigami, hopes in wartime)
the plot(s) is/are ordinary

lelangir: http://i44.tinypic.com/219au7n.jpg
yeah, subplots

Ghostlightning: the setting is awesome, a great romantic sweep

lelangir: but wait that’s just what we said
metaphorical content, subplot, secondary plot, etc.
style
comedy, romance, drama, suspense

Ghostlightning: is metaphorical content in kannagi a subplot?

lelangir: yeah
or so I think

Ghostlightning: or is it a “sub” in terms of depth, but not necessarily subordinate in value
it is ‘beneath the surface’

lelangir: former
only in depth
all kinds of plot being equal

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: epistomologically equal i suppose
or however we phrase it

Ghostlightning: subplots in kannagi: jin (not)
finding himself in art
tsugumi’s trust in jin (relationship)

lelangir: equal in form but not in effect
those are more rhetorical
for fanservice

Ghostlightning: zange’s competition with nagi

lelangir: at least the cliche childhood friend thing
hmm
so this suggests subplots are hierarchical

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: zange/nagi is really just a contribution to nagi’s idolatry
christianity vs. shintoism

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: ok, so that’s just a complex form of story-telling
I still don’t get it….its the 2nd paragraph of the article

Ghostlightning: rather, it’s just the use of forms

lelangir: i was trying to theorize a 2nd form of plot vis-a-vis genre

Ghostlightning: this one: Kannagi isn’t so easily reducible to polarized styles precisely because of its plot. On the one hand, we could say that the plot functions as an adhesive that produces sensibility within the anime, but this perspective pigeonholes us back in the thought that genre is linearly coextensive with plot, which is to say that distinct sections of the progression of the story will be accompanied by correlating genres – comedy, drama, slice of life, and so forth. When we view Kannagi this way, we already set an expectation that
?

lelangir: yeah
that genre is linearly coextensive with plot
or….
and that’s where i went blak
blank

Ghostlightning: explain ‘coextensive’
lelangir: in tandem
1:1

Ghostlightning: i see

lelangir: http://i44.tinypic.com/219au7n.jpg

Ghostlightning: it isn’t i think

lelangir: me neither
so what’s the second form?

Ghostlightning: but it can be, in a contingent way

lelangir: and that’s where I thought the heirarchy of plot/genre was upset

Ghostlightning: particular to specific works

lelangir: ok
yeah

Ghostlightning: yeah

lelangir: so which form does kannagi utilize
I’m just having a hard time articulating this

Ghostlightning: i can imagine

lelangir: the first case is how plot is a glue that connects genre
the second is how everything is already cohesive in the first place
but it’s not visible
it takes something more to realize it

Ghostlightning: connects genre to what?

lelangir: to each other
this is why people are like “emo jin is stupid”
its not because it’s directly related to plot
emo jin isn’t irrelevant at all
poorly directed perhaps
but I construed viewer displease as “i dont get how this has to do with anything”

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: how comedy is disparate to drama
but….are they really disparate at all?

Ghostlightning: they go together well when done expertly
the comedy in kannagi is done expertly imo

lelangir: ok ooooo
so i just had it….

Ghostlightning: the drama – the jury’s still out

lelangir: when things aren’t viewed as disparate, it becomes hierarchical, one becomes the vehicle for the other

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: and plot isn’t the railway anymore
plot isn’t the cohesive force…
it’s like a product now
or something

Ghostlightning: wait

lelangir: yeah that’s not right…

Ghostlightning: plot, formerly is the railway to deliver the laughs, the tears etc?
i can agree with that
but that’s not necessarily subverted
by the metaphorical content
which is ‘srs bsns’
neither necessarily comedic or tragic
dramatic

lelangir: http://i41.tinypic.com/2hzibmu.jpg

Ghostlightning: i don’t get the second example (the line below)

lelangir: that doesnt make sense
what i posted
neither do i
the first line does

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: but i feel like there is a counter example

Ghostlightning: plot is the vehicle yes

lelangir: but i need a way to view genres not as spatially distant
and the only way is to make it hierarchical
not on the same plane
then, something,the glue, doesn’t “connect”

Ghostlightning: the points along the plotline can be comedic or dramatic in themselves, but there will be cases where the characters or other elements produce the emotional effects

lelangir: it just “produces”

Ghostlightning: when points, are ‘twists’
like code geass
twists are funny, ludicrous, etc
whereas kannagi’s reveal

lelangir: hmm

Ghostlightning: that she’s not sure of her divinity
is dramatic only because her character made so much of it
not that dramatic in itself
or, let’s take a big plot twist example:
“LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER”
is that in itself dramatic?
or is it made so by the reaction:
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
dramatic = sad
opposite of comedy
never mind the narm/unitntentional comedy of the scene

lelangir: ok
though…im still having a hard time seeing how that contributes to the relationship between genre/plot
or rather
a specific type of rel.

Ghostlightning: use sets
all genres have plots

lelangir: what I parced from vader example was that we cannot separate the event and the reception
the reception “enacts” the event
or at least amplifies it
I think even if Vader said “I am HIS father” directly to the audience in a soliloquy
the audience would be ‘OMFGWTFBBQHAX’

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: would still be*

Ghostlightning: i agree
it’s still dramatic

lelangir: hmm lol lemme ask
do you get what i’m trying to get at?
the two specific kinds of relationships between genre/plot

Ghostlightning: genre and plot relationship

lelangir: in the first, plot is all-encompassing
it contains genre

Ghostlightning: ok

lelangir: it acts as an adhesive
so the 2nd must upset the 1st
the 2nd is a counter theory

Ghostlightning: okay

lelangir: but i cannot articulate in such a way that it makes sense

Ghostlightning: but to say that, would mean…
that genre can make plot irrelevant?
i sense the sense in it… but

lelangir: yes….when there is no plot
hidamari sketch
lucky star

Ghostlightning: ahhh
yes

lelangir: minami ke (1st season)

Ghostlightning: but kannagi has a plot, yes?

lelangir: mmhm…subplots too, as we established

Ghostlightning: two, arguably right?

lelangir: yup

Ghostlightning: so it’s difficult to use it an example to prove the counter theory

lelangir: …how so?

Ghostlightning: sort of like, “it works great with lucky star, it works too with kanagi if you read deep enough”
is this what you’re saying now?

lelangir: the fact that “non-plots” exist shouldn’t refute this binary
because it’s not even in the same paradigm
“non-plot” isn’t in the “plot” paradigm
our “plot” paradigm can be constituted of several theories
“non-plots” should be irrelevant here I think

Ghostlightning: ok, list

lelangir: wait…”it works great with lucky star, it works too with kanagi if you read deep enough”
no…hmm…
no, like i said, it cant “work” because that’s a theoretical paradigm shift
apples and oranges

Ghostlightning: or, the enjoyment of kannagi is not shackled by its plot
limited by
its plot
and subplots

lelangir: right
yes
ah yes
shiet
oh god
then what is the rel. between COMEDY and plot????
(needs….to….read….aristotle….nao)

Ghostlightning: hmmm

lelangir: oh shiiiiet
so….is comedy like microplot?

Ghostlightning: again, the events in the plot can be comedic (situational comedy)

lelangir: like a shitload of 4-komas inserted together?

Ghostlightning: or jokes

lelangir: nearly in a nonsequiter fashion?
wait

Ghostlightning: yeah

lelangir: so
have you seen okawari?

Ghostlightning: micro-plots
sorry no

lelangir: hm ok
but yeah you get it
miniami-ke is microplot
a bunch of unrelated microplots

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: but okawari is macroplot
one plot per episode
thats why everone hates it
vis-a-vis first season

Ghostlightning: event a, b, punchline event

lelangir: yeah
x6 per ep.
[a, b, punchline][a, b, punchline][a, b, punchline][a, b, punchline]
like a train

Ghostlightning: yeah

lelangir: tangent….hmm
so

Ghostlightning: in ls, through the series of microplots, the value is… getting an intimacy with the characters

lelangir: hm
i dont see how micro/macro affects that

Ghostlightning: they are not ‘developed’ rather, they are revealed

lelangir: …
i dont think there’s any char. dev LS
development nor revealment

Ghostlightning: yes, exactly

lelangir: ok

Ghostlightning: reveal is simply this: no sruprises
how exactly tsundere is kagamin

lelangir: what about I am yuor father?
that’s surprise + revealment

Ghostlightning: how MUCH of an otaku is konata

lelangir: yeah precisely
it’s just amplification

Ghostlightning: yes, as opposed to starwars
the linear plot, twists in a new direction
instead of MUST DESTROY VADER, it becomes MUST SAVE VADER, there is good in him

lelangir: ah

Ghostlightning: from the viewer’s standpoint, there is value in both
one can say ls is entirely exposition

lelangir: yeah

Ghostlightning: but somehow, there is value in that

lelangir: “value”

Ghostlightning: because it is entertaining, funny

lelangir: so….going back again lol

Ghostlightning: value = the utility the viewer experiences from the subject

lelangir: mmh
mmhm
plot is the vehicle for genre

Ghostlightning: so there is value in the experience of watching kannagi, if one ignores the plot

lelangir: plot doesnt discriminate between genre
slice of life is an exception

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: but…i’m concerning people that took plot into account and were disappointed
is there a way to say that their disappointment wasn’t “properly directed”?

Ghostlightning: they were looking for plot, or were forced to look at the plot
nagi pun!

lelangir: that kannagi disrupts the notion that plot is a conduit for genre
lol

Ghostlightning: ‘properly directed’

lelangir: lol…that they were wrong
guy a: “dude this plot sucks”
guy b: “no, you’re just looking at it the wrong way”
guy c: “this different perspective is _____”

Ghostlightning: the game here is that it is foolish to immediately dismiss kannagi

lelangir: right

Ghostlightning: due to what you failed to see

lelangir: but we said that already
that there are subplots
ok
bu..ksalfkjasf
hmmmm
right
so this is where I said that its subplot disrupts “plot” itself
subplot disrupts plot as a conduit for genre
subplot disrupts genre
???

Ghostlightning: no
that’s confusing

lelangir: genre is already overgeneralized
….nice pun?

Ghostlightning: you can simply say, that underneath all this, is an essay on religion (idols, commodification)
and the fact that it was entertaining to watch, makes it awesome
because essays on religion aren’t supposed to be entertaining

lelangir: …but….it’s incidental
perhaps
no….
there’s too much evidence to say it’s incidental..they knew what they were doing
ok

Ghostlightning: yes
it’s not incidental

lelangir: ok, so, all metaphor aside, kannagi is awesome
because it’s funny and has naked DFC’s

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: but
its plot sucks
the religion metaphors weren’t properly connected
- or is what we’ve read
but
they were connected
it just wasn’t spoonfed

Ghostlightning: yes, not spoonfed

lelangir: the karoake episode was in fact subplot
it was, in and of itself
it was nagi getting faith
it had to be
it was incidentally or otherwise
because that’s what the metaphor sets up

Ghostlightning: i don’t know what to make of that ep tbqh

lelangir: the metaphor sets it up so everything contributes to the subplot
incidentally or otherwise

Ghostlightning: i know i was entertained
ahhhhhh
yes
wait

lelangir: so it’s really a convenience

Ghostlightning: nagi… wasn’t trying!
zange was forcing it

lelangir: oh shiet bring her into this now lol
hmmmm
from what i remember

Ghostlightning: so nagi, ‘not trying’ by virtue of song choice

lelangir: it was just a double cat fight for jin
ok so that ep was slice of life by nature

Ghostlightning: maybe not not trying, just doing it wrong
yes

but in the context of the idol/god metaphor

lelangir: but….doesn’t everything constitute idolatry?

Ghostlightning: nagi was doing it wrong

lelangir: making friends
she was even saying how she had to look over her friends
because she’s the goddess of the land

Ghostlightning: doing it wrong

lelangir: formed from the land

Ghostlightning: doing it wrong

lelangir: doing what wrong?

Ghostlightning: the whole time

lelangir: idolatry?

Ghostlightning: taking care of the land

lelangir: ….

Ghostlightning: dealing with the impurities
acting like a goddess

lelangir: ….and that’s the part that confused me in general

Ghostlightning: making friends
this is new to me too

lelangir: what’s interesting
is the hospitality metaphor

Ghostlightning: she had an idea of what she’s supposed to do

lelangir: jin saying “stay here!”
“is my house not good enough?”

Ghostlightning: but she’s doing everything wrong

lelangir: ok
she needed the freaking wand as an excorcism tool
since she lacked power
and that somehow stems from her container
the tree
as opposed to zange

Ghostlightning: figure out the rules, steps required for her to do her mission

lelangir: who is a parasite
but….

Ghostlightning: what did she do right?

lelangir: both have no identity
no memory
remember
the shrine is nameless
nameless god
which makes some weird pun

Ghostlightning: right

lelangir: kannagi, nagi
nagi means “calm”

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: but yeah that’s irrelevant

Ghostlightning: the more i think about it, the direction of your article needs to change

lelangir: or just expand

Ghostlightning: you can do it this way:
enjoying kannagi: ur doin it wrng

lelangir: lol

Ghostlightning: then play off on how nagi is getting everything wrong
and THAT is the plot

lelangir: hm….

Ghostlightning: all of you have been fooled

lelangir: eh
i was going for a general disruption of “plot”
“all ur plot belong to me”

Ghostlightning: or THAT is the point

lelangir: “cuz DIS is reel plot”

Ghostlightning: substitute point for plot

lelangir: ?

Ghostlightning: make plot irrelevant

lelangir: hmmmm

Ghostlightning: while everyone is looking at jin’s emo, it’s nagi’s story after all
her ridiculous failure

lelangir: but what’s the relationship!!!!!????

Ghostlightning: plot and genre?

lelangir: which is the product of the other!!!
yesssss

Ghostlightning: neither!

lelangir: that’s precisely what i was saying
people view them as intrinsically separate
connnected by plot

Ghostlightning: not a cause and effect thing necessarily

lelangir: ok
and thus, the 2nd counter theory
lol
doo doood dooooo listen to my song… guruguru mawaru….

Ghostlightning: wait, whose song is that?

lelangir: from school rumble
means “going in circles” lol
or so I’ve read

Ghostlightning: ah yes
school rumble had plots
a bunch of romance arcs
and harima’s manga career

lelangir: yup

Ghostlightning: ok, are you clear re your article now?
or did i just mess it up for you?

lelangir: I still haven’t come to the conclusion i was searching for
a different relation between plot/genre
wait

Ghostlightning: interdependent

lelangir: i think im obfuscating it for you
microgenre
genre within the same series
shifts from comedy to romance to drama

Ghostlightning: rendering genre meaningless

lelangir: whoa….maybe that’s it

Ghostlightning: or calling for lame portmanteaus like dramedy

lelangir: one sec….

Ghostlightning: brb, waifu calls

lelangir: ok
i’ll keep talkin
so it’s like, microgenres are hierarchical
in kannagi, drama takes a backseat to comedy
they cant be viewed horizontally

Pontifus has joined

Ghostlightning: ok

lelangir: ok so the question was
what is the relationship between genre and plot
wait, pontifus, have yuo seen kannagi?

Pontifus: yeah

Ghostlightning: you bastards are keeping me from writing my post (i don’t entirely mind)

lelangir: lol
you’re telling me…
http://i44.tinypic.com/219au7n.jpg

Ghostlightning: this is not going to end well

lelangir: that’s Kannagi, essentially

Pontifus: and, regarding genre and plot, cuchlann would be the one to ask…i don’t really like genre, and i’m trying to make an argument for genre being a superfluous construct (though i haven’t really figured it out yet)

lelangir: yes

Ghostlightning: bwahahahahaha

lelangir: but for all intensive purposes
genre not as discursive
as “style”
“approach”

Ghostlightning: we got to that conclusion too

lelangir: fuck where is that guy

Ghostlightning: after so much wrestling

lelangir: need total superfani jerk circle

Pontifus: what are we calling genre here? comedy?

lelangir: comedy, drama
basically
the distinct elements in kannagi

Pontifus: alright

lelangir: wait up one sec

Pontifus: lol, should i bust out some aristotle?

Ghostlightning: please
save lelangir the trouble

lelangir: lol
go ahead if you want
http://lelangir.dasaku.net/

Pontifus: norton anthology of theory and criticism, GO!

lelangir: the kannagi collection
look at kabitzin’s remarks
he’s like “this sucks, i dont get it, it doesnt make sense”
so why dont the distinct elements make sense?
grrrrr, uguu~

Pontifus: did either of you not like nagi very much?
or am i the only one in the universe?

Ghostlightning: read from a framework of failure, it all makes sense!

lelangir: i liked her
lol
oh jesus…

Ghostlightning: i like her so much more now

lelangir: HELP ME ANSWER MY QUESTION
LISTEN TO MY SONG

Ghostlightning: NAGI, THE ROMANCE OF FAIL

lelangir: fucking UGUU

Pontifus: i didn’t DISlike her, but she didn’t make me fangasm, either
alright, back on topic!

lelangir: right
so
plot is a conduit for intraparadigmatic genre
which is to say
when an anime deploys several genres within the same series
kannagi ie
the plot connects comedy and drama
but
what is the counter theory
theory1: plot is vehicular
theory2: genre isnt really disparate at all….so how does plot function?
i dont know….

Pontifus: northrop frye is suddenly relevant…i need to find something, give me a minute
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/dherring/ap/consider/frye/indexfryeov.htm
genres sort of bleed into each other
so you’ve got tragic comedy, romantic comedy, and ironic comedy

Ghostlightning: yeah, and code geass is the best example

Pontifus: but not really comedy “by itself”

Ghostlightning: if one includes anime-specific genre
such as mecha, harem
etc

lelangir: so there’s a distinction here
between style and genre
style is romance
genre is mecha
mecha romance
slice of life romance
mecha comedy
‘slife comedy

Pontifus: well, tragedy and comedy are kind of opposed as per frye, i guess he’d call tragicomedy ironic comedy

Ghostlightning: style… hmmm

lelangir: sooo frye says they’re in the same paradigm
opposed but comparable

Pontifus: right

lelangir: that’s good

Ghostlightning: oooh that frye model got me wet

Pontifus: damn, we really need cuchlann

lelangir: lol

Pontifus: he knows so much more about frye than i do, lol

lelangir: he’s got like over 9000 degrees lol

Pontifus: right
unlimited degree works

lelangir: haha
man
those are two REALLY complementing memes

Pontifus: oh shit, that mythoi circle i linked is kind of wrong

Pontifus: it says comedy, romance, tragedy, irony/satire…but i think the right order is romance, comedy, tragedy, and irony/satire
so comedy and tragedy do overlap

lelangir: how so?
wait yeah

Pontifus: mythos of summer/mythos of autumn

lelangir: they can….
like….monty python or something
well….”tragedy”
i’m not so familiar with grecian tragedy

Ghostlightning: shakespeare even

lelangir: oh shit

Ghostlightning: unless you dismiss comedic elements from let’s say romeo and juliet
as mere ‘relief’

lelangir: but that speaks directly tot he difference between style/genre
“tragedy” can be either totalizing or not

Ghostlightning: combo breakers for teh drama

lelangir: tragedy as in “everyone is sad”
or tragedy as in “everyone dies”
they’re not mutually exclusive

Pontifus: i think putting the mythoi on a circle might be too restrictive of them anyway
oversimplification

Ghostlightning: IN SHAKESPEARE: tragedy-everyone dies, comedy-everyone gets married

lelangir: ok
man….i’m done with this kannagi post lol
for another day….

Pontifus: in any case, when you said “plot connects comedy and drama,” i’d say they’re all connected anyway

lelangir: how so?
comedy and drama aren’t intrinsically connected
it’s a non-sequitor as it is
it needs something “logical” or “syntatical” to make it fit

Pontifus: well, “drama” is a hard term for me to deal with as a genre anyway
i think drama is just a device

Ghostlightning: UNIVERSAL SET: PLOT, inter-connecting sets: style, genre

lelangir: drama as in dorama
drama = emo

Ghostlightning: style:device right?

Pontifus: comedy has drama, tragedy has drama, everything has drama

lelangir: for all intensive purposes here
but in kannagi they’re very distinct
emo doesn’t equal comedy
they dont even self-satirize their emo

Ghostlightning: but to categorize a subject as specifically drama, one must ignore the intentional fallacey

Pontifus: you think so?

Ghostlightning: and go by how it’s marketed

lelangir: yeah
marketed as comedy
with harem undertones

Pontifus: i think that, maybe, if the drama (dorama or emo though it may be) serves comedy, ultimately, then it falls under comedy…it’s just not funny yet, but it promises humor
and if it isn’t ultimately funny, then it’s tragedy

lelangir: …hmm….

Pontifus: funny and/or generally happy

lelangir: i dont get it…
“generally”
but it isn’t monolithic

Ghostlightning: so people who dismiss kannagi, dismiss it within the framework of the market

lelangir: kannagi utilizes different approaches in tandem with the progression of its plot
“the market”

Ghostlightning: they are the consumers – the target market that kannagi “missed”

lelangir: which is different than the author (oh SHI- barthes)

Pontifus: now, i don’t know about the market

lelangir: wait ghostlightning hold on
“[t]his is my first original work. Whenever I thought it was a joke, it became too serious. And whenever I thought it was serious, it became a joke. That’s the kind of manga I’m aiming it to be.”
that upsets it

Ghostlightning: goodbye barthes

Pontifus: nooo, barthes, come back!

lelangir: lol
he is gooooone now
eri has spoken
BUTTTT
its different than the anime!
oh shi-

Ghostlightning: but the thing is, the author HAS LESS POWER

lelangir: vis-a-vis the viewer
yes
the market appropriates it
“the market”
which is just discursive

Ghostlightning: because the means of production is held by someone else

Pontifus: i can’t really agree that anything the author said is relevant here at all, lol
i don’t care what the creative process was, or even about the manga at all

Ghostlightning: the relevant thing here is what the marketers are intending

Pontifus: kannagi the anime is what it is

Ghostlightning: they invested in it
they distributed it

lelangir: ok Karl
Karl-chan

Ghostlightning: but the market has spoken: we dun liek it

Pontifus: they created an authorial consciousness, that the reader/viewer fills

lelangir: Marx-tan
yes

Ghostlightning: marx-tan yes

lelangir: [i'll stop lol]

Pontifus: really? kannagi wasn’t well recieved?

lelangir: yeah it was
dvd sales high
across the sphere too

Pontifus: yeah, i thought it was

Ghostlightning: oh so only teh bloggers are whining

lelangir: http://lelangir.dasaku.net/?p=928
no only a few
it’s not like index

Pontifus: ugh

lelangir: lol

Pontifus: don’t remind me
those six episodes were traumatic

lelangir: i was kinda sad i missed out a red haied loli tsundere with hot pants
but….i got tsugumi
red haired [at times tsundere] with seifafuku

Ghostlightning: i’m possessed by cuchlann and Ghostlightning: the market received it well, implying they are entertained and have been recommending it to firends, high entertainment value = high literary value

lelangir: er, seira….

Ghostlightning: so bloggers, STFU

lelangir: huh?

Pontifus: nonononononono
noooooooooooo

lelangir: since when does entertainment value = literary value

Pontifus: all things have the same value

lelangir: ?

Ghostlightning: cuchlann quotes this michael guy

lelangir: “value”
define…….

Pontifus: literary value

lelangir: idealistically
not politically

Ghostlightning: value = utility that a readery experiences from the subject

lelangir: in essence anime is not deep

Ghostlightning: reader/consumer

lelangir: [oh shi- calling omo]
because its controlled by the industry
completely different histories
the history of literature vs. the history of anime

Pontifus: fuck, i need cuchlann’s aid!

lelangir: totally different

Pontifus: i’m telling him to jump on google

Ghostlightning: pontifus, i get what you’re saying

lelangir: me too
but i’m not up for it
we’re in a very political situation
so disregarding it is like….fljalewrjfoi

Ghostlightning: but the context here is that the readers/bloggers value shit the way they do
heirarchies and all taht

lelangir: yes
the discourse
produced by the industry/market
the literary value paradigm is irrelevant

Ghostlightning: but i’m with you ponti

lelangir: [hence 'anime is not deep']

Pontifus: “the literary value paradigm is irrelevant”

Ghostlightning: nothing can be invalidated

Pontifus: AAAAAGH

lelangir: Pontifus, what “literary value” doesnt seem to take into consideration is discourse
in that discourse produces value

Ghostlightning: no need to scream, you can’t be invalidated LOOOOOL

Pontifus: right

lelangir: value is predicated upon discourse

Pontifus: but here’s the thing
no, wait, scratch that

lelangir: muahauahauahuah
you cannot beeat foucault

Pontifus: yes discourse produces value, but i think one could pretty much talk about anything…i think that latent value is basically value

lelangir: latent value?
oh shit
chuchlann is on!

Pontifus: a thing around which there is no discourse COULD have discourse, and that’s enough

Ghostlightning: hmmm, even latent value is put there by a “prime valuator”

Pontifus: i don’t think it’s “put” there, i think it’s just there

lelangir: no wait nonnonnonononono

Ghostlightning: hence, value is relative to valuer
RELATIVE

lelangir: things have no meaning until it is represented
representation is CONSTITUTIVE of meaning

Ghostlightning: YES

lelangir: there is no “thing” before it is represented
representation MAKES the thing

Ghostlightning: there is NO KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT LANGUAGE

lelangir: yes

Pontifus: yeah, i know
hang on, let me process

lelangir: just to let you know

Ghostlightning: tihs is funner tahn i thuotgh

lelangir: i’m like, in a constant state of jizzing right now
lmfao
“tihs is funner tahn i thuotgh”

Ghostlightning: owen’s post resonates within me

lelangir: the amount of typos makes that hilarious for some reason

Ghostlightning: but that typo is artifice

lelangir: llololowwwwwwww

Pontifus: alright, i’m ready

Ghostlightning: synthetic comedy

lelangir: oh my jizzzzzzzzzz
FUCK

Cuchlann has joined

Pontifus: narrative art doesn’t need discourse to have value, insofar as discourse is communication between art experiencers…in fact, discourse is only possible to a point
it only needs, in my estimation, one person to experience it

Cuchlann: Okay, so what’s happening here?

Pontifus: how to summarize, lol

lelangir: well

Ghostlightning: DISCOURSE can be between the subject and the viewer/reader

lelangir: we’re talking about kannagi
if you’d believe it
discourse is emepheral

Ghostlightning: DESHO?!

Pontifus: everyone, summarize your position!

Cuchlann: Well of course you are. And clearly, this is why the next podcast needs to happen soon.

lelangir: wait…
discourse is between the things
subjects are constituent of it
they create it
and anime is its objec
the discourse ON anime

Pontifus: right, and i think that isn’t necessary for art to have value

Ghostlightning: like right now, i’m having a righteous discussion with ep 06 of SDF macross. Global you are an idiot.

lelangir: you think eh?
but that’s your discourse

Ghostlightning: value is not necessary
value is contingent

lelangir: the discourse in which you are situated
take away your discourse, it takes away your meaning
then, what is value?
an empty signifier

Ghostlightning: value = is the utility of a being experiencing a subject
the utility being gained

lelangir: just because your “value” means to say that discourse is irrelevant…that in itself is irrelevant because it NEEDS discourse to in itself have meaning
er, i didnt mean to come off as offensive..

Pontifus: i’m not saying that ALL discourse is irrelevant, or that discourse is even irrelevant at all, but that the value of art isn’t predicated entirely upon discourse between people, and that i don’t necessarily think there are variant “levels” of value

Ghostlightning: there are levels of value!

lelangir: so art has an intrinstic value….

Pontifus: assuming that the relationship between reader and text is discourse, then, sure, discourse is required
no

lelangir: but wait

Ghostlightning: i value macross over other anime

lelangir: that’s the discourse split
political value vs. philosophical value

Ghostlightning: levels are subjective, but they exist

lelangir: both are right
but irreconciaibly different

Pontifus: art has no intrinsic value, which makes it infinitely valuable

Ghostlightning: OOOOH, PARADOX

Cuchlann: At which point am I meant to enter the conversation? O_o

lelangir: nao

Pontifus: whenever, lol

Ghostlightning: just jump in

lelangir: wait
so
okkkokkkokko

Pontifus: lelangir

lelangir: we cant explain philosophical value with political value…

Pontifus: you’re like a brick wall
i love it

lelangir: -_-

Cuchlann: I have two responses to this conversation: one is in the same spirit, and one is in my usual asshole, reductionist spirit.

Pontifus: seriously, test the fuck out of my views
i don’t get a chance to do this that often

lelangir: oh lol
i thought you meant i was STOOPID lollolololo

Pontifus: no, lol

lelangir: stop being a tsundere Cuchlann

Ghostlightning: uh, Cuchlann maybe we should leave

Ghostlightning: these two are gonna fuck

Cuchlann: Which one’s the uke?

Pontifus: me, i think

lelangir: seme…I R ATTACKAR?

Cuchlann: Now, remind me of which role uke is?

Ghostlightning: oh no, you have seme really written all over you

Pontifus: bottom
fuck why do i know that

Cuchlann: Written in what, I wonder?

lelangir: ore ga sasahara…omae ga OGIUE

Pontifus: haha

Ghostlightning: oh i got it wrong

Pontifus: I’LL SHOW YOU HOW AGGRESSIVE I CAN BE

Ghostlightning: uke is below right
desho?

Pontifus: yeah

lelangir: ok….so going back to value etc.

Ghostlightning: ok, your wish to be challenged is an act of spreading your legs

Cuchlann: Okay, here’s my reductionist answer: I cite Dark Side of the Moon.

lelangir: lmfao
and….

Cuchlann: And what? That’s the anwer. ; )
Okay, yes, I will explain.

lelangir: [dont look at me, im the only guitarist i know that's never heard it before]
[that and the fact that i dont like hendrix]

Pontifus: :O
it’s acceptible though, you’re a jazz guy

lelangir: DUN DUN DUN
still

Cuchlann: I wouldn’t compare Hendrix and Pink Floyd at all, actually.
But anyway.

Ghostlightning: me too

Cuchlann: No one listens to DSotM in a group. At any rate, not stereotypically.

lelangir: i dig radiohead now though
ok computer is beast

Cuchlann: You always hear it alone, when you’re like fifteen.

lelangir: at any rate, i’m listening on loop to the kimi ga nozomu eien OP
lol

Pontifus: lol

Cuchlann: For a whole lot of American teenagers, at any rate, it’s the most meaningful thing they’ve ever heard.
It “speaks to them.” Much as the voices do, I’m sure.

lelangir: lol
like stairway to heaven backwards?

Cuchlann: This is without contact with other fans of Pink Floyd.
Now, the OED tells me that “discourse” has a lot of different meanings.

lelangir: OED?
i think i read that in a book just now

Cuchlann: Oxford English Dictionary.

lelangir: ohh

Ghostlightning: one can discourse with the subject!

lelangir: discourse in the foucauldian sense

Cuchlann: Okay, hold on.

Pontifus: see, this is hard for me because i don’t know focault yet, lol

Cuchlann: That is one sense of the meaning of “discourse.”
Another is the conversation afterwards.

Ghostlightning: lelangir, distinguish focauldian discourse plz

lelangir: oh jezz ok
so
discourse is the bounds of thinkable thought
things outside discourse have no meaning
like anamolous categories
gay
mulatto
they dont fit into the binary

Cuchlann: We need to clarify our terms here, and “discourse,” in my opinion, isn’t useful in describing anything other than conversation.

lelangir: of straight and/or black/white
foucauldian discourse describes, in essence…”sociolinguistics”

Cuchlann: Of course, that assumes the discourse works in terms of a binary, which isn’t necessarily true.

lelangir: in a broad, instituationalized sense
not necessarily true yes
but works for those cases

Pontifus: i am now stepping into cuchlann, who is also mobile suit cuchlann-gundam, and setting him on autopilot

lelangir: ok here’s an example

Cuchlann: I propose that we should use a different word, and not “discourse,” as academically the word is typically used to mean the setting within which people discuss topics.

lelangir: the subject does not produe knowledge

Ghostlightning: binaries are just asses waiting to be raped by deconstruction lol

lelangir: “setting”…
i’ve been inculcated into discourse as like, the godliest device ever

Cuchlann: Or group. As we are busily quibbling over words, I will admit “setting” is not the best choice.

lelangir: ok
well
what is the poit of not using discourse as an analytic tool?

Cuchlann: Yes, I can tell. I think you’re in the place I was several years ago, when you discovered a good critical theory and decided it was the holy of holies. :)

lelangir: what were we talkinga bout again?

Pontifus: in my mind, what you’re calling discourse is just existential existence…it’s the only thing worth considering, imo, so there isn’t even any need to discuss anything “beyond” it
there is no beyond

Ghostlightning: LIEK ME AND DECONSTRUCTION LOL

Cuchlann: Discourse the act of using analytic tools, in my terminology.

lelangir: discourse is the act?

Cuchlann: I’m trying to make sure you know what I’m saying when I say it.
Yes.

Ghostlightning: i realize that i no longer contribute value to this discussion

lelangir: well discourse is also practice
me shooting a basket contributes to the discourse on basketball

Cuchlann: Any act, repeated, is practice.

Ghostlightning: but i will derive value from it by LURKING
LURK MODE ON

lelangir: system of agreements
language

Pontifus: right, but, correct me if i’m wrong, it seems like you’re saying that discourse is the entire range of possible actions, thoughts, etc.

Cuchlann: No, it doesn’t. You shooting a basket and learning a new way to consider the act, then telling others — that contributes to the discourse.

lelangir: discourse neednt be ‘active’
you’re actively participating in it
by subjugating yourself to it

Cuchlann: I’m trying to copy-paste what Pontifus just said, but it won’t let me.

lelangir: the only way to avoid discourse is to scoop your eyes out and slit your ears off
“right, but, correct me if i’m wrong, it seems like you’re saying that discourse is the entire range of possible actions, thoughts, etc.”
“possible”….yes, sort of

Cuchlann: Here’s the first point of my poly-pronged point: if everything is discourse, there’s no point in discussing it, as it’s everything. Thus, it’s nothing.

Pontifus: exactly
existentialism ftw

Cuchlann: It has nothing to contrast it in the chain of meaning.

lelangir: no

Cuchlann: Not even existentialism, just pragmatic defining of critical terms.

lelangir: discourse points out holes in itself

Pontifus: i just like that word

lelangir: discouse expands, contracts

Ghostlightning: existentialism 4tw

lelangir: reconstitutes
no yesssss

Pontifus: sure, but anything outside of it doesn’t exist, right?

Cuchlann: All right, let’s go on to prong number two…

lelangir: discourse theory takes into account silence
booya
it contains in itself its antithesis
without synthesizing

Cuchlann: Do we all agree that a piece of art has no meaning without a viewer?

Ghostlightning: LELANGIR: WHAT IS NOT DISCOURSE?

lelangir: silence
no meaning
i’m being sophist probably

Pontifus: but if silence is the opposite of discourse, and discourse is all that is, all i can concern myself with as a human being is all that is, and therefore silence doesn’t exist

Cuchlann: Silence is a perfectly acceptable answer, and thus part of discourse.

lelangir: i didnt say discourse was all that is
discourse is, paradoxicaly, everything and nothing
take race for instance
you MUST have race

Cuchlann: Which means it’s not very good for conversation.

lelangir: but is is NOTHING
it doesnt exist
O_o

Cuchlann: Actually, it’s not necessary to have race as a construction, it’s just habitual at this point in human history.

lelangir: nationalism too

Ghostlightning: silence in the context of a conversation is not NOT DISCOURSE

Pontifus: race in the sense of different kinds of human beings?

Ghostlightning: right?

lelangir: yes

Pontifus: because, yeah, i don’t think that’s necessary

lelangir: black/ white w/e
…………yeah it is

Pontifus: it’s habitual

lelangir: in this specific political history it is
well discourse is inert
it doesnt move
it is specific
yes

Cuchlann: Answers, though, real quick: does a book have content if no one reads it?

Pontifus: no

Cuchlann: I use “read” in the broad sense.

Pontifus: well, not really

lelangir: oh god…uhhmmm
yes
it needs an author

Pontifus: granted that the author has read it, probably

Cuchlann: Not necessarily.

Pontifus: it doesn’t have meaning “by itself,” no

Ghostlightning: the author who rote it?
read while writing

lelangir: [again to reiterate, i'm jizzing]

Cuchlann: And anyway, the “reading” of the author violates the terms of my question.

lelangir: wait
iin your sentence

Cuchlann: If no one’s read the book, does it have any content?

lelangir: is the author the subject or the object

Cuchlann: The author is outside the scope of my question.
You’re in a room with a book. You’re illiterate.

lelangir: i mean

Pontifus: no, it doesn’t have meaning on its own, says i

lelangir: ok

Cuchlann: You’re unaware of the social mores concerning books.

Pontifus: well, then the book might mean firewood, but we’re talking about the text, i guess, lol

lelangir: but wait
false dichotomy?

Cuchlann: Pontifus has hit on where I’m going, at any rate.

lelangir: shit
owen term
sorry

lelangir: in the absense of one type of meaning is there total lack of meaning?

Cuchlann: Without reading, a book is merely paper and ink.

lelangir: “specific” social norms arent everything

Cuchlann: I’m talking about artistic meaning here, sorry.

lelangir: it could reprsent that the reader is stupid
oh ok
yes
so if you’re illiterate
artistic meaning is impossible
wait
no
not necessarily
not if you’re inculcated into the SOCIAL DISCOURSE that books are inherently beautiful

Cuchlann: Artistic meaning from reading is impossible.
I said outside that.

lelangir: LIKE FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER????

Cuchlann: Yes.

lelangir: if i remember….

Cuchlann: This is a philosophical hypothetical.

Pontifus: GOTHIC, OH SHI-

lelangir: lol

Cuchlann: Excellent example, actually.
If the Creature hadn’t learned to read, what would the books he found have meant to him?

Pontifus: it makes me really happy that, for the most part, i can just reach over and grab the pertinent examples off my shelves

lelangir: i have stuart hall et al. sitting here…

Cuchlann: I would have to go to another room, and step over, uh, other books, but yes.

Pontifus: which i hope means i’m doing pretty well as far as collecting, lol

lelangir: oh shit and some mary shelley too!

Cuchlann: I think I have my Aristotle in here right now…

lelangir: poetics is right here
collecting dust

Pontifus: poor poetics

Cuchlann: Yes, in the stack with the Shakespeare essays, the grammar book, and the Norton critical theory text.

lelangir: :(
so yeah…..

Cuchlann: Okay, so in our hypothetical situation, the book is drained of all artistic meaning.

lelangir: insofar as you are illiterate

Cuchlann: Yes, that’s given.

lelangir: incapable of directly producing experiential meaning
but that is not social meaning

Cuchlann: Now, here’s the part that pleases lelangir: this means that discourse is necessary for art to function.

lelangir: /jizz
isn’t art discursive anyway?
me farting is art

Cuchlann: Here’s the part that doesn’t please him: the art itself must necessarily be outside the discourse itself, as it has no meaning.

lelangir: socrates raping a young boy is art

Cuchlann: If done before an audience, yes, both can be true.

lelangir: ah yes!
the audience is abstracted
reduced to a feeling

Ghostlightning: the audience could be the boy itself

lelangir: ” the art itself must necessarily be outside the discourse itself, as it has no meaning.”
i dont get that part

Cuchlann: The audience must necessarily be removed from the art, as art has no practical purpose — and the boy would have practical concerns at that point.

lelangir: how is it necssary?
no wait
it’s not removed
because the discourse created it

Cuchlann: Discourse is about making meaning. Art makes no meaning on its own, and cannot take part in discourse, as discourse is a two-way street.

lelangir: as we said before
representation is constitutive of meaning
there is no meaning outside representation

Pontifus: ok, hang on there

Ghostlightning: activities with practical purposes cannot be read as art? how come?

lelangir: it did not exist prior to representation

Cuchlann: I cite Oscar Wilde.

Pontifus: how analogous is the phenomenological idea of the author consciousness dispossessing the reader to discourse?

Cuchlann: “All art is quite useless.”
I’ll dig up a link…

lelangir: getting a bit marxist here
how does art make no meaning?
what if its social commentary via play?

Cuchlann: Art makes no meaning.
The audience makes meaning.

lelangir: the art of being earnest
it’s good to be earnest

Cuchlann: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/owilde/bl-owilde-pic-pre.htm

lelangir: yes…
so how does that make art situated outside discourse
does discourse “osmotize” it?

Ghostlightning: i’m familiar with the quote, but tieing a bow-tie for the purpose of looking good at a dinner party can be ‘artful’ or can’t it?

Cuchlann: Discourse observes art. It must be outside to be observed.

lelangir: no
what?

Cuchlann: Yes.

lelangir: observing is irrelevant to position

Cuchlann: No it’s not.

lelangir: how?

Pontifus: insofar as art isn’t practical?

Cuchlann: Let me line my ducks up for a second…

lelangir: if art is outside discourse it has no meaning in that discourse
no intrinsic art meaning
but it has social meaning
like mulattos
they are weird

Cuchlann: The meaning is within the discourse, because it’s not attached to the art.

lelangir: they dont exist in the discourse on blackness

Cuchlann: It’s in the space between.

Pontifus: but if the subject is the art, and the object is the discourse

lelangir: ah

Pontifus: they’re inside the same semiotic construct, sure

lelangir: oh ok isee that

Pontifus: but separate

lelangir: nice
hmmmm

Cuchlann: This is all reader-response and phenomenology, that the art doesn’t have the meaning, the audience does.

Ghostlightning: the audience, rather, creates the meaning you mean

Cuchlann: Or at least, my interpretation of those schools of thought.
Yes.

lelangir: i like chuchlann’s thought
that meaning is attached to the audience

Cuchlann: That’s why it’s possible to have different opinions on art.

lelangir: i’d like to view it as art being vacuum pockets in discourse

Ghostlightning: LELANGIR I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU THIS SINCE MY FIRST COMMENTS ON YOUR POSTS AT THAT

lelangir: …though different opinion is discourse in itself

Cuchlann: I don’t think I’d see too much of a problem with the very slight difference in that interpretation.
Yes, it is.

lelangir: but discourse defies quantum physics per se

Cuchlann: @Ghostlightning: haha.

lelangir: you can have multiple discourse in the same geopolitics
@ghostlightning….O_o

Cuchlann: I think that defines, not defies, quantum mechanics.

lelangir: oh yeah lol
oops
Cuchlann: Given that only in quantum mechanics can you have superposition.
:)

Ghostlightning: no, that the readers create the meaning, agreeing amongst themselves

lelangir: yeah…..

Cuchlann: Well now, it’s not that they’re agreeing amongst themselves.

Pontifus: or one reader agreeing with itself

lelangir: that’s so IKnight from last winter

Cuchlann: Go back to Dark Side of the Moon.
Okay, Pontifus got it, basically. Never mind.

Pontifus: i wish i had nexisted last winter

lelangir: no way

Cuchlann: I did, it was like any winter. ^_^

lelangir: from june-december
craziest time ever
or so owen tells me
but anyway
yeah, Cuchlann has convinced me

Pontifus: this is why i wanted him here, lol

lelangir: art’s lack of intrinstic meaning must implicate that discourse is attached to it. blah blah blah

Cuchlann: Art is, ultimately, an aesthetic experience. It can carry with it thoughts and opinions, but they won’t be worth anything if the art doesn’t make the audience feel.

Ghostlightning: the reader agrees with something as to waht a sign means, and communicates that meaning to others, the meaning strengthens, pending agreement from such others

Cuchlann: Hence Wilde’s line: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

lelangir: so…there’s a split between what art really is and what art is perceived to be
“modernism” is discourse
but that has no effect on what the art really is

Cuchlann: Yes.

lelangir: which n ever changes

Cuchlann: Art is basically art, always.

lelangir: yup

Cuchlann: That’s also why you get different readings of classic texts in different eras.

lelangir: yes

Cuchlann: Skim through a history of studies on Hamlet to see it in action.

lelangir: discourse is historically dependnat

Pontifus: now here’s where i jump in and be disagreeable…ghostlightning, i think that, once an agreement is established, there’s no making it stronger or weaker, it just IS

Cuchlann: But the aesthetic experience is not. Or at least, the strength of response. a differing system of mores could alter the particular aesthetic experience.

lelangir: ok well now that cuchlann has upset my notion of what things “are”, there are two routes

Ghostlightning: stronger in teh sense that more people agree, it becomse temporally on top of the heirarchies of meaning

lelangir: the “existential” route…and the social route

Pontifus: these agreements have relative strengths in different people’s artistic experiences, but no “ultimate” strength/weakness value

Ghostlightning: like for example: CODE GEASS = TRAINWRECK

lelangir: yep

Cuchlann: Oh, you youngsters (yes, I realize all our ages).
Because I would say X = trainwreck

Pontifus: geass is a trainwreck = true, geass is awesome = true, period

Cuchlann: But you guys probably don’t know anything about that.

Ghostlightning: it has power over code geass = not trainwreck, at present at least
wow, am i a youngster nao? LOL

lelangir: lol
32
ancient

Ghostlightning: both are true, but in practice, the former is more resonant

Pontifus: now, prevalent opinions, that’s a social thing, and isn’t related to artistic value

lelangir: wait…how’s that in rel. to an argument
isn’t an argument just a statement?

Ghostlightning: i argue even artistic value is a sign agreed upon by a society

Cuchlann: A statement that can be argued with, but yes.

lelangir: what it is directed at seems irrelevant

Ghostlightning: … a society of art theorists

lelangir: vis-a-vis its existential value
which is immutable
but its discourse potency….that’s different

Pontifus: “artistic value” as a term, sure, but not artistic value as applied

Ghostlightning: so art has no intrinsic value, as a meaning, has less power in practice

lelangir: i dont get it

Cuchlann: Actually, the lack of intrinsic meaning gives it more power.

Pontifus: agreed

lelangir: how?

Cuchlann: A crafted chair can be beautifully wrought, but ultimately it is a tool.

Ghostlightning: to use a cruder example, atheism (no theo) has less power than theism (yes theo)

Cuchlann: And as such, eventually even the most sensitive person will view it as a chair, to be sat upon.

lelangir: I guess I’m confused by greg’s use of “power”

Cuchlann: But art, with no use but to be art, to be “beautiful,” can never be written off as anything else.

lelangir: which is a loaded word in foucaultism…
oh wait hold on
art is art insofar as it has a definition
where did that definition come from?

Cuchlann: Ah. Power to affect an audience aesthetically.

Ghostlightning: if i sit on that artful chair, even artfully, am i reducing its artistic value?

Cuchlann: My definition comes from Wilde.

lelangir: oh shi- barthes again…

Cuchlann: I would say you aren’t affecting it, unless you break it.

lelangir: hmmmmmm sosifdkjsosjsojKJ!J!OIU$(*&(U93wt5w94u
so

Cuchlann: You simply occlude it, like standing in front of a painting.

lelangir: we’ve created art such that it has the agency to cast off structural hegemony
sorry i love that terminology
art has become art

Ghostlightning: the viewer, cannot experience the art the painter made, BUT HE CAN EXPERIENCE THE ART OF ME STANDING ARTFULLY IN FRONT OF IT

lelangir: yes

Ghostlightning: “ghostlightning’s shadow over cubism”

lelangir: but what is “art”
art came from where?
we say ‘art is art’
but that’s circular i think….

Cuchlann: Wilde again: We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
Art is a thing to be admired intensely.

lelangir: but….
that doesn’t consider its origin
or is origin pointless

Cuchlann: The origin is unimportant.

lelangir: why?

Cuchlann: The art stands before you. The author does not.

lelangir: no

Cuchlann: What is the origin of Beowulf?

lelangir: not origin as in author
origin as in meaning of the meaning of art

Cuchlann: The meaning is between you and the art.
That isn’t the origin.

Ghostlightning: etymology of art plz

Cuchlann: It’s the product of you consuming the art.

Pontifus: @ghostlightning observe, if you will, a battle of gods

lelangir: but
art has to be predicated upon something
everything is predicated
nothing is ahistoric
hence, from whence did art arrive

Pontifus: right, so
if nothing is ahistoric
“ahistoric” is nothing

lelangir: art cannot just exist all of a sudden

Pontifus: it doesn’t exist

Cuchlann: Art entered English through Anglo-Norman, from Old French.

Pontifus: so how is that important?

Cuchlann: It is created, but the artist effaces the creation with the completed work.

lelangir: wait
I mean
even art in an existential sense

Cuchlann: An orchestra doesn’t reveal its practices to the audience, only the performance.

lelangir: it must have a discursive root

Cuchlann: But it doesn’t matter to the aesthetic experience.

lelangir: correct me if i’m wrong (i probably am) its exisentialism needs discourse
guh so many types
no

Ghostlightning: the aesthetic experience is also up to the viewer/reader

Cuchlann: Art can be considered a product of discourse.

lelangir: but the aesthetic experience can be discursisve

Cuchlann: True.

Pontifus: insofar as discourse is one person agreeing with himself…is, i think, the idea, correct me if i’m wrong, o mighty cuchlann

Ghostlightning: i derive a lot of value watching practices

lelangir: ok

Cuchlann: Well, I’m generally inclined to say discourse requires at least two people, you folks came up with that one.

Ghostlightning: one person agreeing with the self, i find nothing wrong with it
i probably do it a lot

Pontifus: not i, lol

Ghostlightning: NONONO

Pontifus: it’s those focauldians over there

lelangir: lol

Ghostlightning: the discourse with the self
is between one’s memories

lelangir: nice

Ghostlightning: and the idea at hand

lelangir: your habitus
oh shi-
your habits
your consciousness

Ghostlightning: YES YES

Cuchlann: Hm. Okay, not bad, I can see that, I suppose.

lelangir: because
your identity is not stable

Ghostlightning: does the idea at hand, FIT?

lelangir: always morphing
being changed by external forces

Ghostlightning: with my past conceptions, etc?

lelangir: yes

Cuchlann: It works with the phenomenological idea of creating a second consciousness, which is one’s perception of the art.

lelangir: exactly

Ghostlightning: me: IS THIS ART?

lelangir: oh shi-
i dont get that….

Ghostlightning: or: IS MY IDEA OF ART… LIMITED?

lelangir: why does one need a 2nd con. for art?’

Cuchlann: It’s the same thing we said earlier, but recast into different terms.

lelangir: @Ghostlightning: i dont get that either

Cuchlann: Actually, now that I think of it, it’s probably a way to get at what you’re describing.

lelangir: yes ok i see that now

Cuchlann: Discourse within the self.

lelangir: but
that is predicated upon society

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: the self ineedss the othe
THE SELF NEEDS THE OTHER

Ghostlightning: instead of me listening to your words, i say it to myself, in my voice, to see if it ‘fits’ my self-concept
if it does, i probably will agree

lelangir: yes
all that is prediated upon memory
with your contact with society

Ghostlightning: memory yes

lelangir: no experience = no memory
= no discourse

Ghostlightning: THAT IS WHY WE REMEMBER LOVE

lelangir: nothing to discoure with or upon
lmfao

Ghostlightning: lololololol

lelangir: oh god…

Cuchlann: I have no problems with any of those statements, but they don’t alter the fact that art is solely aesthetic.

lelangir: in the existential sense
yeah
i guess

Cuchlann: In the experiential sense.

lelangir: if thats the right term
ok
oh yeah definitely
but then
there are fakers

Cuchlann: The experience is what I’m almost always concerned with, rather than the implications. :)

lelangir: “oh duuuuuude that art meant soooo much to me! [wanna fuck?]‘

Ghostlightning: since we agree, the idea becomes ‘stronger’

lelangir: but then
what i just said isnt even experiential
just machiavallian

Cuchlann: It’s based on experience.

Pontifus: sure, people lie, but i think our entire conversation here takes honesty for granted

Ghostlightning: um mutually exclusive?

lelangir: its just transplanting experience over social goals

Cuchlann: A lie is as based on experience as a truth, or else the liar wouldn’t be able to lie.

lelangir: wait
re@ghostlightning
it gets stronger?
yeah i suppose
that’s where discourse gets it strength
in #s

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: so

Ghostlightning: the grand march of ideas

lelangir: I think there is no finalized definition of art

Ghostlightning: never

lelangir: there are always contesting theories
of equal value

Ghostlightning: hegel: keikaku doori

Pontifus: which almost seems to be the way it has to be, but i haven’t put a lot of thought into that, so don’t ask me to back it up

lelangir: what is significant is each contesting theory’s political relevance

Cuchlann: No, political relevance is completely unimportant.

Ghostlightning: it is significant, yes, but i dunno about ultimate significance

lelangir: how’s it irrelevant?

Cuchlann: It’s an after-affect of the passage of art through consciousness.

Pontifus: it’s sociology

Ghostlightning: yea how?

lelangir: [insofar as we mean political in the same way]
i thought we said all theories were equal
one theory claims art is something beyond theory

Cuchlann: And I’m giving you mine. That’s what this conversation is, yes? ^_^

lelangir: so…we agree to disagree
that’s the end right?
so its FOR FUNNNNN
but yeah…
anyway

Cuchlann: It’s always the end. But didn’t you enjoy yourself?

lelangir: yeah

Ghostlightning: the art of conversation

Cuchlann: See, in my version, that’s the point.

lelangir: that’s actually the best conclusion lol
to enjoy yourself
?

Cuchlann: Aesthetic experience achieved.

Ghostlightning: yes

lelangir: i still dont like that….
[i'm still pleasuring myself]

Ghostlightning: and with agreement, the feeling is intensified

lelangir: if one theory proclaims art above theory

Cuchlann: Well, on a personal level, let me put it to you this way–

lelangir: that seems contradictory
it needs itself to invalidate itelf

Cuchlann: I didn’t start reading because of a political end (in any sense of the word political). I read habitually because I read once and the aesthetic experience appealed to me more than other pursuits.
And I never claimed art was above theory. In fact, when people claim that, I get angry.

lelangir: uhoh

Ghostlightning: nothing is intrinsically valuable over another thing

lelangir: i dont get it though…

Ghostlightning: people assign values into heirarchies

Cuchlann: Don’t get what?

lelangir: how….art can be nothing
but it needs meaning to be described in such a way
no wait
no it doesnt

Pontifus: thus spake derrida, kinda

lelangir: its nothing regardless
…

Ghostlightning: all this, is nothing, empty and meaningless

Pontifus: art being nothing is what lets it mean anything at all

lelangir: it exists if i dont see it
shiet…

Cuchlann: Who, like Zarathustra, found himself stinking in a cave, what?

lelangir: but then it doesnt exist…

Ghostlightning: its meaning is but a contingency of us meaning-makers

lelangir: so does that theory merely state that things are even if they aren’t?
ungh

Ghostlightning: and we, like the meaning, are ephemeral

Cuchlann: I never said art is nothing.
I said art has no intrinsic meaning. There’s a difference.

Pontifus: or, yeah

Cuchlann: Nothing has an intrinsic meaning.

lelangir: yes

Cuchlann: Trees don’t, or fire, or floods.

Pontifus: it is something that means nothing, inherently

Cuchlann: But they still exist.

lelangir: what i was getting at….hmmm

Ghostlightning: signs exist

lelangir: “existentialism” describes art as meaningless
do we even need existentialism for that MEANING in and of itself to continue to exist?
the meaning of meaningless

Cuchlann: Sartre… bleh.

Ghostlightning: kannagi exists, for the people who derive meaning from it (writer, producer, distributor, consumer, critic)

lelangir: so

Ghostlightning: and everyone will have an opinion

lelangir: but art is different i think
it’s much more abstract
that made little sense

Ghostlightning: and the majority of agreements, will have weight

Cuchlann: Kannagi exists as a bunch of digital files, and possibly some animation cels — or more likely, more digital files.

lelangir: waitwaitwitw go back to sartre
or is that thought wrong?

Cuchlann: The meaning is in the watching, not the existence.

Ghostlightning: each social group/entity will make it mean something

lelangir: that active knowledge is predicated upon existence of a buttress for that knowledge

Ghostlightning: yes, the experience, not the existence

Cuchlann: Oh, my ex just really liked Sartre, so I go “bleh.”

lelangir: oh

Ghostlightning: not experience isn’t limited to watching
selling, creating, discussing

Cuchlann: Yes, the experience. And it isn’t, no.

Ghostlightning: all part of it
i prefer camus to sartre

Cuchlann: But the thing itself isn’t part of any of those, except as a thing. It offers no special, extra value that wouldn’t be achieved with any other show in its place.

Ghostlightning: yes, the thing in itself is meaningless

lelangir: yes
but
that meaningless is meaningful

Pontifus: or, maybe it wouldn’t be achieved, but the important thing, i guess, is that it could be achieved

Ghostlightning: all things, in themselves are empty and meaningless

lelangir: important…

Ghostlightning: AND IT DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING that they are empty and meaningless
no consequence
no imnpact

lelangir: ok
insofar as we don’t observe them
maybe
its meaningless inasmuch as you make it meaningless, which is sort of impossible sounding

Ghostlightning: as long as when we do observe, we assign meaning, then it has consequence

lelangir: how do you make it meaningless?
you say
“this is meaningless”
but thats the same as “this is meaningful”

Ghostlightning: i cannot make it meaningless

lelangir: meaninglessness is another state of meaning
negative meaning
nevertheless

Ghostlightning: it is an acknowledgment that it has no ‘real’ ;true’ meaning

lelangir: meaning

Ghostlightning: aside from what we make for it
that’s what i mean
not a reduction of meaning to oblivion

lelangir: yeah

Ghostlightning: but an acknowledgment of the lack of ultimacy in the meaning i assign for the sign

Cuchlann: All right, with this new turn, I will retire. I have to get up early tomorrow.

Ghostlightning: thanks for participating!

Cuchlann: Someone save this and post it tomorrow.

Pontifus: i plan on it

lelangir: oh jesus

←[94]

Basically…

So when an author deliberately pens a text as social commentary, it is directed towards society, the mainstream. That’s subversive, counter-hegemonic, whatever you want to call it, since it steps outside the dominant discourse (which I tried to represent with the spray paint tool). The hegemonic text is one that is already in society, it has no political aims.

The location of the viewer is tricky, so their societal dislocation here doesn’t mean anything, it’s just for graphical convenience.

In the hegemonic model, it’s hard or impossible to distinguish between society, the text and the author because the author doesn’t try to step outside the discourse. It’s already immersed, that’s why the link is hazy (the question mark). It’s kind of like autonomous homogeneity, if you can parse that.

In the subversive model, the author’s text is also separated from the dominant discourse and its pointed towards it. The red arrow shows the line of reading; the viewer reads the text and is directed towards society through the words of the text/author.

I don’t know about the relationship between the text and the author.

Regardless of politics, both models are historical, and reading any one of them can provide clues as to what society was like way back when.

Pontifus:

Otouto-kun: True.

Pontifus: I finally realized that the purpose of critical writing isn’t to share a critic’s knowledge, it’s to teach a critic something and give other critics something to bounce their ideas off of. Remember my whole approach: there is no knowledge, only questions.

Otouto-kun: NO, NOOOOOOOOOO, DON’T SAY THAT, I just got done being pissed at critics. This brings me back to…CRITICS ARE A WASTE OF SPACE!

Pontifus: You’re a waste of space.

Otouto-kun: You’re a waste of space.

Pontifus: You are.

Otouto-kun: No, you.

Pontifus: NO U…and don’t even say I’m a waste of space because I’m not an artist, I just sent you a thousand words of creative writing that I’m pretty pleased with.

Otouto-kun: I thought you said critics are for strengthening the bond between x and y.

Pontifus: X and y being artist and reader?

Otouto-kun: Of course.

Pontifus: No, I said critics create a new x-y, with critic as x, remember?

Otouto-kun: OK, but if you are going to write about something as a critic, who are you helping if it’s for other critics?

Pontifus: It’s not for anyone…or, rather, it’s for everyone.

Otouto-kun: You just said…AAAAAAAAAHHHH

Pontifus: See, I’m in favor of a criticism that’s accessible to more than just critics. Take out all the big and borderline meaningless words and actually say something. A critic is just a reader who knows how to write a little. It’s fan fiction minus the fiction.

Otouto-kun: “I finally realized that the purpose of critical writing isn’t to share a critic’s knowledge, it’s to teach a critic something and give other critics something to bounce their ideas off of.” WHAT IS THIS?

Pontifus: Alright, it’s to give other people something to bounce their ideas off of.

Otouto-kun: I thought it was for the good of the reader.

Pontifus: I don’t know, define “the good of the reader.”

Otouto-kun: HELPING THE READER, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

Pontifus: If it’s “for” something, it’s for the unending search for knowledge — or, I mean, understanding. It’s philosophy.

Otouto-kun: Exactly, and it’s for spreading that knowledge, correct?

Pontifus: Not spreading so much as encouraging the pursuit of.

Otouto-kun: But still, it’s for helping the reader to better understand that knowledge, am I right or wrong?

Pontifus: I suppose that’s true, in a sense, though total understanding is impossible. The questions will never end.

Otouto-kun: So, as a critic, you find the knowledge and you write about it to help other critics and also to help people like me to better understand what they are reading, or watching, or playing, or anything, right?

Pontifus: If meaning in a text equates to knowledge, then yes.

Otouto-kun: Thank you, now it doesn’t seem so much like a useless club.

Pontifus: Criticism as a useless club is a common misconception…or at least I’ve decided it’s a misconception.

Otouto-kun: Well, that’s how you were talking about it; what was I supposed to think?

Pontifus: I didn’t mean to talk about it that way. I mean, I’ve talked about it like that before. It hasn’t been long since I changed my mind.

Otouto-kun: Well, I better understand now, I was just making it clear that it’s not ONLY for other critics.

Pontifus: It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t only be for anyone, at least not intentionally so.

I’m not conscripting Otouto into holding long conversations with me to avoid working on the three drafts I’m in the middle of, I swear. And even if I am, this one seemed relevant, given recent developments. I really am writing a few art-centric posts, though, so you can safely assume (more or less) that my next post will be something along those lines.

I posted this on a different non-anime blog of mine some time ago:

You can interpret the effect of technology as an archaeological study. Technology, a product of society – society, a product of technology – says and objectively states something about its influential parentage, its social pedigree, the conditions under which it was wrought. It’s objective: or rather, its subjectivity necessitates that very objectivity (lest we revert to simple-minded sophistry), because it was born of that exact subjectivity. It is pristine, virgin, unadulterated, unaffected by extra-sapient cognizance, which in itself is impossible at the moment. It is a direct product of the cultural womb from which it came, and thus is liable to be read textually; its inanimate authors leaving absolutely no ambiguity, no connotation, only denotation, because it is a mere fossil, a relic, a speechless artifact. That is the, for lack of better wordage, subjective objectivity of archaeological sociology.

To flesh this out, I mean to say that when reading anime (or anything specifically as text) it is possible to define the conditions from which that anime was produced because such a product was generated by those very circumstances. We can solve an equation in terms of y {34x + 5b/2y = 4c}, but “in terms of” doesn’t necessarily state what those terms are since we don’t escape the circular logic of recursive semantics; what is y? – it’s not x, b, or c; what’s x, b or c? – anything but y. Y is not concrete, it’s an abstraction.

Anime is subjective, we can never really know what it means in its entirety, even if we ask the animators. Perhaps the animators themselves don’t even know (or antecedent authors of adaptations). But I think we can know what an anime means in terms of the conditions it was produced from. Socio-historical context. Anime can’t precisely mean much besides y when y equals the history from 1xxx-200x, and even then it’s still going to be ambiguous to some degree. It’s not even really saying what the anime means (if such a thing exists), but, rather, what society means. What does anime say about the society that created it – where else could it have come from? Thus texts are archaeological, society is the hand that crafts text, criticism the excavator.

It’s a more refined way of spelling out what I meant by the objectivity of subjectivity and the subjectivity of objectivity.¹

1 http://lelangiric.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/presentation-the-problem-with-reading/

I’ve been meaning to make a fairly straightforward post about criticism and my thoughts thereupon, as that seems to be a step in the average critical aniblogger’s acquisition of internet tenure. But when an alternative presented itself, I resolved to do something a bit different. What follows is an IM conversation between myself and my younger brother, hereafter referred to as Otouto-kun (he wanted the -kun, don’t ask me why), an enterprising young hikikomori-type with game design aspirations. We got on the topic of criticism somehow, and I ended up spilling all my most recent thoughts on the subject. Being an IM conversation, it’s a bit spur-of-the-moment and rough around the edges, but I’ve cleaned it up for the sake of readability — and I think it makes a little sense, anyway. There are certainly enough of you out there to correct me if I’m mistaken.

Otouto-kun: Just remember, there will come a time when you have to choose: creator, critic, it’s a tough choice, but it must be done.

Pontifus: I don’t have to choose, I can do both.

Otouto-kun: You will be influenced too much by the one you excel in.

Pontifus: Granted, I think Eliot was a better critic than poet, but that’s just me; most people [who are English majors] love his poetry.

Otouto-kun: Which do you expect to do more, creation or criticism?

Pontifus: I can’t say…I mean, if I end up as a college professor, I expect I’ll write more criticism than fiction, because 1. it’ll pay my bills, and 2. it takes less time. Ultimately, my goal is early retirement paid for by fiction writing. I used to think there was a huge difference between the two — now, though, I’m not so sure.

Otouto-kun: On one side, you’ll be a creative critic, and on the other side, you’ll be an observant creator. I suppose I’m a lot like the way you used to be. I think the way you do it is the way it should be, but not the way it is.

Pontifus: Maybe…I [think] the majority would disagree with my ideas.

Otouto-kun: I think people shouldn’t be critics unless they create, but that’s just my opinion.

Pontifus: I agree, but artists and critics each tend not to trust the other group, without ever realizing that all critics are artists, and all artists are critics.

Otouto-kun: I rue the day when there is critical criticism; does that make any sense?

Pontifus: You mean, like, the criticism of criticism?

Otouto-kun: Yeah.

Pontifus: It’s called hermeneutics.

Otouto-kun: AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

Pontifus: I actually think it’s interesting, because criticism is a kind of art, so you can analyze it…and in doing so you’re doing criticism, which is a kind of art…it’s very cyclical.

Otouto-kun: AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH, IT BURNS, don’t utter those words. Criticism art, bah!

Pontifus: I like [Cuchlann's] opinion on the subject: “Derrida claimed that any work based on another work — he was primarily concerned with acts of criticism and scholarship here, probably not being aware of fanfiction at the time — is its own self-contained work, and not a kind of ‘lens’ to view the original through. That is, T. S. Eliot’s famous essay about Huckleberry Finn is just as much an original piece of work as his The Waste Land is. The audience for criticism, then, reads criticism to get ‘something good’ out of it, just as they might read the ‘original’ pieces that the criticism is based on.” Derrida is a lunatic of a theorist, by the way.

Otouto-kun: I hate to see criticism; I feel like the only relationship that need be is the one between artist and viewer.

Pontifus: You’re making the mistake of viewing criticism as some kind of confounding influence. It seems to me that you think of criticism as something that jumps between the artist and the reader/viewer.

Otouto-kun: Umm, yeah, I guess you could say that. I applaud what they are trying to do, but I don’t think it can be done.

Pontifus: Well, I’ll refer back to my quote of Cuchlann quoting Derrida. Criticism is a text in and of itself. It creates a new relationship, one between (surprise, surprise) writer and reader/viewer.

Otouto-kun: Damn it, you’re getting all critical on me. Like I said, I applaud what they are trying to do, but is it happening?

Pontifus: What do you think they’re trying to do?

Otouto-kun: I don’t know; like you said once, you have to drop the reader/writer mindset to be a critic, but in my opinion that leaves out all of the feeling. I just feel like it’s not helping the writer/reader or, in my case, player/creator relationship. To me it feels like a mass of smart words without feeling.

Pontifus: Well, a lot of people would agree with you, but what are they trying to do that they’re failing at? In other words, they’re turning out a mass of smart words instead of…?

Otouto-kun: What true criticism needs to be. A love for the art, but still…I can’t think of that word, it means you can’t pick a side, hate it or love it you…fuck.

Pontifus: Objective?

Otouto-kun: Yeah.

Pontifus: Say, for example, I can look at Lucky Star and say, “Well, this is pretty boring, but I can accept it as art.”

Otouto-kun: Yeah.

Pontifus: But what you’re saying is that, in the face of that, of being able to genuinely dislike something and accept it anyway, the critic needs to have a love for all art. The critic doesn’t have to like it, but by God the critic has to love it. Because if that’s your point, I absolutely agree.

Otouto-kun: Well yeah. Not exactly where it was going in the beginning, but yeah.

Pontifus: I think that’s part of love, whether we’re talking criticism or human beings, being able to accept something in spite of (and sometimes because of) its flaws. To be a critic, you must love art — not one work of art, but all art, just because it’s art. And your complaint is that love of art doesn’t come across most of the time?

Otouto-kun: I’m confused now; that’s what I was saying, but I’m second-guessing myself.

Pontifus: How so? I mean, on what point?

Otouto-kun: I guess I looked past what the critic can do, and what he/she has to do. I guess I took objectivity as no love for the art. Also, I realized I need to start being objective; it’s similar when you’re a creator.

Pontifus: Well, I’d argue that true objectivity is impossible, and that what you’re calling objectivity is just love of art, but I think you’re right in that the artist and critic should have a similar love of art. That doesn’t mean you have to like every marginally artistic thing you see; it just means you can look beyond your own dislike for it.

Otouto-kun: Yeah.

Pontifus: I mean, the artist in particular has a lot to learn from the successes of the past.

Otouto-kun: Of course.

Pontifus: I don’t like Eragon, I think it’s a triumph of good marketing over any kind of requirement for good writing…but tough shit, it made that little rich kid even richer. Something went right in that situation even if it was only situational. Granted, I didn’t learn a whole lot from reading it.

Otouto-kun: That’s something else that kicks my balls.

Pontifus: Commercialization?

Otouto-kun: Writers who have no love for what they write. How much do you think he really put into those books?

Pontifus: You know, I don’t fault the kid for being inexperienced; I have no reason not to believe he has passion. He just has a lot to learn. It’s hard to write something that long and not love what you’re doing…fuck, I love writing fiction, and I get too dissatisfied with my writing to continue longer than a few thousand words without stopping in frustration.

Otouto-kun: I’m no Picasso myself — in fact, I suck — so I suppose if I had a chance to easily get something published, I would take it. Damn it, we’re arguing the same point.

Pontifus: I mean, most people at his level of talent end up on FanFiction.Net or deviantART…he just happened to come from a family of publishers. Like I said, it’s situational. I don’t fault him in any way, though.

Otouto-kun: You know what? I can’t truly say anything about those books; I haven’t read them. All I know is he blatantly used things from other artworks.

Pontifus: Yeah, he is pretty obvious with his borrowings. One could argue that the borrowings being so obvious renders each of them a meta-literary reference, that the Eragon books are the fantasy equivalent of Ulysses…and as much as that sounds like bullshit to me, I’m bound to accept as valid any criticism, as there can be no “wrong” criticism if it’s supported by evidence. Joyce would probably be furious at that comparison…but, eh.

Otouto-kun: Oh man, Joyce…from what I’ve heard, that man was a writing god.

Pontifus: That’s because all you know of Joyce you’ve heard from me.

Otouto-kun: True.

Pontifus: I mean, here’s the thing about depth — and I’ve been talking about this a little lately — I don’t think works of art come with depth attached, I think depth is a matter of how deep someone, anyone, even if it’s only one person, is willing to dig, and if one and only one person can dig deeply into Eragon, who am I to say Eragon isn’t deep? It’s like, a hundred people on the surface can say the ground is only a foot deep, but if one person digs down twenty feet, clearly the surface-dwellers were wrong, regardless of whether they bust out shovels and dig for themselves.

Otouto-kun: I found my argument again. Well, one argument.

Pontifus: Have at it.

Otouto-kun: It’s hard for me to believe that there can be criticism of something that can be interpreted in as many ways as there are people in this world.

Pontifus: There exist people who think that the goal of criticism is to establish the “right” way of reading a text, I guess. I would argue that those people are [misguided, assuming one can even judge a critical approach]. Granted, they’d say the same of me.

Otouto-kun: I didn’t say that critics are trying to pinpoint the one correct way; it’s the opposite, in fact. How can there be criticism when there are so many ways?

Pontifus: Ah, so your question is more along the lines of, how can anyone be right?

Otouto-kun: Exactly.

Pontifus: To which I respond: how can anyone be wrong?

Otouto-kun: I didn’t say anyone could be wrong, just that no one person can be right. I guess it’s more of, there is no wrong, and everyone is right on their own.

Pontifus: I mean, what’s your complaint about everyone with some modicum of evidence being right?

Otouto-kun: That brings me back to, can there really be any such thing as criticism in a field where it all depends on the individual?

Pontifus: I don’t really understand your question.

Otouto-kun: How can there be criticism where the experience changes between each individual?

Pontifus: Well, I keep mentioning the need for evidence from the text. That’s why it’s important. Reading experiences differ, yeah, but if you can say, “Well, Leopold Bloom’s marriage is pretty tragic,” and cross-examine it with Frye and Aristotle, it doesn’t matter that most people think it’s comically ironic; they’ll be able to see where you’re coming from if you did a good enough job. (And, where that example is concerned, my grad school applications hinge upon whether I did a good enough job…)

Otouto-kun: I just don’t see the importance in that. How does that help the reader?

Pontifus: I thought you might ask that.

Otouto-kun: They see what they see no matter what.

Pontifus: Well, people have different answers because people’s goals as critics differ. My goal is, I think, to better understand human beings, and to understand the effect literature has on them, and its importance…you know, the same goals I have as a fiction writer. My goal is to raise questions. I’ll nod to Socrates here: you can’t learn if you think you already know.

Otouto-kun: Readers need questions, yes, but what about the answers?

Pontifus: No, I mean, my goal is to raise questions in readers about themselves: “huh, this could be ironic or tragic, maybe I should broaden my reading…” or “huh, this could be ironic or tragic, reminds me of my own marriage…” It reminds me of Aria. Your mind needs to be in a certain state to see itself most clearly, and literature can help it get there (so can gondolas on Mars, but that’s a different matter).

Otouto-kun: What is important about getting the reader to relate [art] with his/her life?

Pontifus: All I want to do is get readers to think. If they disagree with me, they had to decide consciously to disagree, so I’m fine with that.

Otouto-kun: To get them to better understand themselves?

Pontifus: Right.

Otouto-kun: I like it.

Pontifus: So, with any luck, I’ve answered your question about what criticism is good for, somewhere in that wall of text. But again, everyone does it for a unique reason, I’d imagine. Ask ten people, get ten answers. Actually, ask ten people, get eleven answers.

Otouto-kun: I understand.

Pontifus: And since I write fiction with the same goals in mind, I can’t help thinking of criticism and fiction writing as more similar than I used to admit. There’s also entertainment, but I think both have to be entertaining, on a certain level. I have a broad definition of entertainment.

…After which we spiraled into a largely irrelevant conversation about my ex-girlfriend, the Bible, and Catcher in the Rye, but I’ll spare you that. Feel free to leave comments for Otouto, if you like; he’s sure to see them eventually.

We could come at it like literary scholars and focus on narrative, and it’s true that many games tout stories explicit or implied, but we’d be missing the forest for the trees. Video games are visual, aural, tactile, even kinetic. Some take the act of experience and make it collaborative. Upon finishing a novel, one doesn’t come away knowing what it’s like to hammer the F2 button while chastising one’s guildmates on TeamSpeak for pulling aggro when they shouldn’t. The sense of accomplishment inherent in a three-man, hour-long Onyxia kill can’t be found in, say, the works of Jane Austen (though you might feel similarly upon reading that final “Yes” of the behemoth Ulysses).

We could approach games from a film studies perspective, adding audio and visuals to our sphere of consideration, and we’d be closer to where we needed to be as video game critics. But we’d still be failing to consider one rather confounding, rather important element. As 2K developer Steve Gaynor explains, “The player is an agent of chaos, making the medium ill-equipped to convey a pre-authored narrative with anywhere near the effectiveness of books or film. Rather, a video game is a box of possibilities, and the best stories told are those that arise from the player expressing his own agency within a functional, believable gameworld.”

Well damn. How are we supposed to take the uncountable, self-determined stories of gamers into critical consideration? How can we account for video games even operating in such a way? The solutions we seek can only arise from discourse, so let’s talk about it.

Ah, but wait. Early in our quest for video game academia (the rewards of which surely include 8,000 experience points, 75 silver coins, and an Elder Robe of Pretense), we run into a problem. Gaynor’s thoughts, as begun above, continue as such:

These are player stories, not author stories, and hence they belong to the player himself. Unlike a great film or piece of literature, they don’t give the audience an admiration for the genius in someone else’s work; they instead supply the potential for genuine personal experience, acts attempted and accomplished by the player as an individual, unique memories that are the player’s to own and to pass on. This property is demonstrated when comparing play notes, book club style, with friends– “what did you do?” versus “here’s what I did.” While discussing a film or piece of literature runs towards individual interpretation of an identical media artifact, the core experience of playing a video game is itself unique to each player– an act of realtime media interpretation– and the most powerful stories told are the ones the player is responsible for. To the player, video games are the most personally meaningful entertainment medium of them all. It is not about the other– the author, the director. It is about you.

Let me remind you that Gaynor works on games for a major company. Of course “it is about [the player]” for him. I’m not implying here that Gaynor’s motives aren’t pure, that he wouldn’t want to make fun games if not for his salary; in fact, he has a history of designing levels on his own time. The fact remains, though, that his prime directive as a designer is to make fun games. If a game isn’t fun for the player, not many people will play it. His is the role of the author: he wants to create a product that’s entertaining on the surface level, the reader-response level, so people will bother with it in the first place (or so his authorial role would have me believe).

The discourse I’m seeking to advance (or isolate, or jump-start, whatever the case may be) is presently dominated by authors, by the game designers themselves, and the impetus of the author is not that of the critic. The author wants to produce something enjoyable, which the critic will then make meaningful. Generally speaking, the critic isn’t concerned with fun, insofar as we can define “fun” as an enjoyable reading experience; to the critic, fun and art very often don’t mean the same thing. I’ve said before, I think, that artistic value and enjoyment are conjoined at the frontal lobe in my mind, that I feel most inclined to do that critical thing upon the art I most enjoy experiencing (Manabi Straight!), but I’ll readily admit that I don’t have to enjoy the experience of something to accept it as valid art (Lucky Star). The problem, then, is one of motive: while a game designer might read Gaynor’s insistence that “the most powerful stories told are the ones the player is responsible for” and nod at the screen in agreement, a critic could bounce back with “well yeah, Roland Barthes said that forty years ago.” Gaynor doesn’t engage with Barthes because, honestly, why the hell should he care what Barthes had to say? His concern is architectural; he just wants to build fun games. To Gaynor, “Death of the Author” isn’t one rung in an ever-growing critical ladder. From where he stands, it’s simply obvious.

I’m not saying game designers can’t be critical. That’d subvert my own goals; I fully intend to be both a narrative critic and a fiction writer someday, and I wouldn’t intend as much if I didn’t think it possible. But the authorial and critical mindsets differ in intention, and most available literature on games as narrative texts seems to come from game designers approaching the topic as a design problem, attempting to figure out how to build a better gaming experience. “If you know why people enjoy the games they do,” Gaynor explains, “you have a good idea of how to draw them into your project.” We can read these designers with a critical eye, and can almost certainly learn quite a bit from them, but it’s hard to call their writing truly critical. As a critic (albeit one in training), it’s my job to explore what video games say, do, and mean independent of what they are designed to say, do, and mean, and to do so free of the pressing need for games to be fun.

But how? Author-types though they may be, we can glean a few critical guidelines from Gaynor and others, such as the members of game design think tank Project Horseshoe, who, upon studying storytelling (or, rather, the construction of “mediated experiences”) in games, concluded:

We believe that game designers are in the business of experience creation rather than that of storytelling. The story that is generated through gameplay is the player’s personal story that has been mediated by the game systems.

This is a rather substantial shift from the concept of the auteur sitting down and penning a tale of love and despair. Instead of writing about passion, our goal is to help the user experience passion. Instead of describing fear, our goal as game designers to is cause fear. We construct systems, whirling social and mechanical environments that lead, poke, prod, react, connect and encourage the player to reach, out of their own free will, a peak physiological and mental state.

Out of this experience, the player constructs their own very personal story. They digest the experience. They link the pieces together with their past life lessons. In the end, if the gelled memories of the game were rich with meaning, they’ll share their narrative with others. Hearing our players’ stories burst forth from our game is the clearest possible signal that we created a great experience. And yet, we must never lose sight that these stories are secondary effect. Story is the tail of what we do as designers, where the mediated experience is the dog.

First and foremost, we must consider the players, as without them there is no story. On the whole, even the most cut scene-driven games do not function as typical novels or films, laying out a plot and detailing characters for readers or viewers to interpret as they will; games are by their very nature complex toolsets, collections of story elements players will not interpret as-is, but will pick and choose in the construction of complete stories that they may then interpret on the whole. Game narratives consist of the same building blocks as the written and performance narratives we readily call art; they differ primarily in that they are written and rewritten as seen fit by uncountable players. We cannot, of course, even begin to account for the actions of individual players in shaping the game experience, for what we’re discussing here is a medium in which something as simple and trivial as carving one’s name into a wall with digital bullets can contribute to the final shape not only of the experience, but of the story itself. But we can account for the fact that a game gives players the option of spelling their names in bullets. How does this allowance of self-identification via deadly weapon fit into what we know about the world? It’s the job of the game critic to postulate upon this, among a great many other things. The traditional narrative critic supports hypotheses with hard evidence, malleable only in interpretation; the game critic further supports hypotheses with possibility itself, particularly in situations where the player can choose to experience (or perhaps author) a certain story element or not. Can a player write on a wall with bullets in some or another game? Does the game’s control scheme and provision of narrative building blocks make this easy or difficult? Why?

I’ve said we can’t take the specific actions of individual gamers into consideration simply because they would be impossible to know, in most cases — there are just too many gamers. We could perform case studies upon willing gamers, I suppose, but I’m not sure doing so would contribute to a critical approach to games any more than considering offered or denied possibilities, as explained above. Besides, case studies are the domain of the social sciences, and while it’s true that game criticism would require a certain degree of social awareness, I’m not sure that we need to go so far as case studies.

Thanks in large part to the internet, however, we can observe certain trends among the body of gamers. Who among gamers are most vocal, and on what topics, and why? Consider the sandbox MMO — to be technical, the sandbox-style massively multiplayer online role-playing game — of which EVE Online is an example. In contrast to, say, World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online, sandbox MMOs provide players with open worlds in which to author their tales as they see fit, offering only a bare minimum of artificial guidance. EVE’s galaxy is one in which NPC quests were added only fairly recently, in which players can be slain anywhere by more advanced players and have all their worldly possessions looted from the wreckage of their spacecraft, provided they’re foolish enough to carry all their worldly possessions with them. It’s a galaxy in which one must toil in terms of time and social interaction to succeed — a very realistic galaxy, in other words. It’s a galaxy that breeds fear, corruption, and economic connivance, that threatens to bring the worst of human nature out of its players — and EVE’s small but loyal player base wouldn’t give it up if demanded to do so at gunpoint. Some of them, though it’s impossible to say how many, are quite vocal on this point, in fact. Others are quite vocal against the EVE design philosophy. And when I say vocal here, I mean argumentative to the point of belligerence.

We can, perhaps, use the trends of discourse among gamers to pinpoint topics in need of criticism. And indeed, when you dig into it, EVE’s sandbox quality is complex indeed. On paper, it doesn’t sound fun at all; in fact, it sounds quite a bit like genuine work. Real-life work. As a gamer, I’m not a fan of EVE and all it entails; as a critic, I don’t bother myself much with fun, which allows me to take a step back and examine how much we as human beings can learn about ourselves from a model that so closely emulates the tribulations of our existence. Where Ulysses is Dublin in miniature, EVE is a scaled-down model of capitalism. In the very choices it offers players, EVE engages with the concerns of our time. It’s every bit as relevant as a novel could be, and perhaps far more poignant in that it involves the player in its story-building (and meaning-building) processes directly. When I see pages upon pages of forum posts going back and forth on EVE’s economy, its rich-versus-poor politics, I begin to suspect that the possible artistic meaning of the thing has at least some catalyzing influence upon the unending debate.

At the very least, we can safely assume that games incite a great deal of emotion in their players, and quite logically so. For example, rather than reading on to see whether a character in which you’ve invested yourself lives or dies, you might be invited to make that decision yourself through your actions. Even in games where the narrative is largely handed to the player, such choices as these mark the gulf between games and traditional narrative media that necessitates the establishment of a distinct but related field of criticism.

While its narrative course was charted primarily by its developers, Final Fantasy VI represented the mid- to late-1990s trend toward greater self-determination in role-playing games. What freedom of choice it did allow often resulted in emotionally-charged situations with repercussions that lingered until the endgame. Consider, for example, the matter of the floating continent’s fall, during which you could choose to await consummate ninja Shadow, thereby saving him, or leap to safety without him and doom him to a vague but practically inevitable death. The game isn’t clear on how to save Shadow, exactly, and you’re left wondering what you’re supposed to be doing as a visible timer slowly runs out, counting the seconds to your own demise. It’s not at all unlikely that first-time players will lose their nerve prior to Shadow’s appearance during the last possible seconds and save themselves, forsaking their sporadic ally to an ignoble fall to his doom.

Of course, this decision would color the terminal feel of the game’s narrative. It’s quite tragic, really, that impatience and fear would cause a man’s comrades to forsake him thus. And as players complete the game, wondering how Shadow might have been able to aid them in this cave or that ancient ruin, the knowledge of having doomed him will linger just beneath these musings, like as not — it’s obvious enough that he can be saved, anyhow, even for first-time players. Conversely, Shadow is kind of a bastard, a mercenary and assassin who never seems to be there when you need him, and another kind of player might feel satisfied in having rid the world of him. Thus, in video games, emotions themselves become determining elements of story. Were Shadow a character in a novel, readers would be free to lament or celebrate his death (or his life) depending on how they felt about him; as it stands, players can choose whether he lives or dies at all depending on how they feel about him. Narrative criticism being as concerned with hard fact and the search for some kind of objectivity as it is, the great influence of emotion and personal whim — of many emotions and many personal whims, in fact — upon the narrative structure of a video game muddles the critical process considerably. Until we determine a way to discuss the outcomes of possibility (if we even can), it seems most prudent to focus upon possibility itself. Thus, we might ask why Shadow, of all characters, is singled out among a cast of fourteen for permanent death, why the choice of his living or dying is placed in the hands of the player, and what all this entails.

It’s possible that I’m doing nothing more here than stating the obvious. As you can see, I do tend to ramble when I get on a subject that interests me. Perhaps someone else has reached the same conclusions I have and more, and if that’s the case, I’d like to know. Either way, I want to make it perfectly clear that I don’t intend to provide answers on the subject of video game criticism; I wish only to raise questions. After all, we’ll need a good bit more discourse on the matter before we can claim the existence of a true critical sphere founded around video games. And besides, I’m not the most qualified person to be doing this.

Maybe you think you’re more qualified than I am, or that you have better ideas. Good. I hope you’re right. Now let’s discuss.