Gamers with Literary Theory

Jayhawker's comment on the front page got me thinking that discussion about things like postmodern deconstruction and literary theory since WW2 could become a pretty big tangent for an old Conference Call thread. So here we are!

Jayhawker was interested in the notion of the paratext (the information that sort of orbits around the text, like marketing materials, the book's dust-jacket and intro notes, comments made by the writer about the work — and, further out, stuff like how readers have received the work at different periods of time, including responses from censors). It's related to the theory of the socialized text, which comes from textual studies (studies of books as created objects). The socialized text is the published product of a process in which the writer arrives at a final draft, often working with friends and family to refine ideas, and generally working on that final draft with the publisher, an editor, perhaps a transcriptionist, etc. to produce a final set of copy that often imperfectly is type set and printed. Factors that come in during the process include things like human error, the price of printing, and the compensation scheme of the writer (Melville once added 50% to a book's length because he was getting paid by the word and needed to catch up on bills). It's ultimately a social process that gets loose ideas turned into physical copies on bookstore shelves, and that process is rife with error and cynicism.

Deconstruction, to start to answer Jay's second question, is largely about being cynical, and ripping apart motives, refusing to give writers the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't necessarily care what the author says they intended, but is perfectly willing to say that the author, intentionally or not, created a work that supports or tears down Big Ideas. Some of that gets a pretty decent overview in the Wiki article on Deconstruction.

Ooh, is this where I can get a quick re-hash of semiotics? I took a linguistics class in uni, but semiotics didn't make any sense to me at all. Signs, symbols, icons, that's about as much as I absorbed—I brushed it all off cos I was really just interested in learning the IPA. But now reading Bogost and Wark and others, the damn thing keeps popping up.

Fascinated by the idea and will follow but sadly have little to contribute.

Deconstruction is a fascinating idea that seems fleeting to my mind. As it is being described and examples are given, it produces some extreme "Ah-ha!" moments. Then, when I try to apply it to something I am reading, I draw a complete blank.

As for paratext, I was interested in the term because of the paper I was working on in regard to Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (think middle class Downtown Abbey) and how it was presented, as a serialized work, in Charles Dickens' Household Words Magazine. I was not familiar with the term, but it nailed exactly what I was studying.

In this case, Household Words, a weekly magazine of 6-10 articles a week, was edited by Dickens. But, more importantly, as he emphasized on every page, it was "Conducted by Charles Dickens." At first glance the articles seemed random. But closer reading reveals sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant connections of texts to each other. I was studying Cranford specifically, but connections were throughout and spread to all works. It was an attempt at creating a rich reading experience.

An article on Hindu mythology was blatant connection to a scene in Cranford where the women were hosting a dinner attended by their guest's eastern Indian servant. Less blatant was a rant against Dickens and a previous article that poked fun at some absurd laws and the way they were written. This seemed to connect to a scene in which the narrator of Cranford lamented the new rigidity of social customs now that former "ranking" member has passed away. It produced a harsher adherence to rules when the creator of such rules are no longer around to hear an appeal of sorts. In this case the current "ranking" woman could have authored the piece, and surely would have approved of it.

The idea is, we now read Cranford as a novel (or watch the BBC version on Amazon Prime!), and have lost the paratext in which it was created. It's an interesting concept that affects so much of what we consume as media today.

Do you watch a show live on Twitter using their predefined hashtags? Do you watch Talking Dead after each episode? Did you watch the Halo web series Forward Unto Dawn before or after playing Halo 4? Are you reading comics each week on the iPad or single issue, or do you what for trade paperbacks? Do you wait for TV shows to come to Netflix or DVD and consume them in a weekend? Do you prefer the week in between episodes?

I'm not saying paratext is a driving force that drives all of our understanding of textual studies, but it is kind of cool thing to recognize and discuss how it affects our enjoyment of different media.

Like Rahmen, I find this topic utterly fascinating. Never mind that I have next to nothing to contribute, but I'll definitely be reading and following.

In my experience with literary criticism, the next step is to immediately publish as many Marxist readings of video games as is humanly possible. Am I getting that right? :p

Here is a textual analysis of Breaking Bad that makes me want to dig back into re-watchng the seasons in prep for the final half-season.

Warning, spoils the first three seasons.

I always wanted to kick Derrida a good one in the ghoulies. He's done more to lower the average iq of college students than Ayn Rand. (Well, okay... but he's close.)

I always thought of semiotics as a meta-linguistics. It deals with all the mechanisms of communication, and breaks down the same way - meaning, rules and the social context. Kind of cool.

Gravey wrote:

Ooh, is this where I can get a quick re-hash of semiotics? I took a linguistics class in uni, but semiotics didn't make any sense to me at all. Signs, symbols, icons, that's about as much as I absorbed—I brushed it all off cos I was really just interested in learning the IPA. But now reading Bogost and Wark and others, the damn thing keeps popping up.

Quick rehash:

IMAGE(http://boourns.dynu.net/pics/this%20is%20not%20a%20pipe.gif)
IMAGE(http://yakketysmakkety.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/ceci-nest-pas-une-pipe1.jpg)
IMAGE(http://blog.netzpfa.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/ceci-nest-pas-une-pipe.jpg)

Basically, there's a difference between the word for a thing and the actual thing you intend to reference with that word.

Jayhawker wrote:

Deconstruction is a fascinating idea that seems fleeting to my mind. As it is being described and examples are given, it produces some extreme "Ah-ha!" moments. Then, when I try to apply it to something I am reading, I draw a complete blank.

Bullets might be best for this sort of thing.

1) You cannot "deconstruct" anything, strictly speaking. All language is always already deconstructed.

2) The most basic idea of deconstruction (notice that I have already lapsed into binary thinking, more on that below) might be that all meaning depends on context. The meaning of each word comes from its context, and the meaning of each word of that context comes from its context, and so on.

3) There is no real relationship between a word and the object it references, "between the signifier and the signified"

4) Binaries collapse. My writing in point 2 above was based on the logic that there is some 'basic' form of deconstruction and an opposing 'advanced' form (or alternatively, 'basic' and 'peripheral'). In reality, there are many different aspects of deconstruction, from which we can construct no meaningful intellectual hierarchy.

5) You can never recover (or "get back to") any primary or original meaning. Meaning is, to coin a phrase, always chasing its own tail.

To get back to Jayhawker's quote, I would say that the best way to 'get into' deconstructive analysis is to look for places where meaning slips or becomes multiple. It's crucial to think of everything as text, too, and not referencing some "real" world. To take Breaking Bad as an example, that show is a series of signifiers on the screen (purple, shaved heads, the word "chemistry,") and nothing else. Focus on the associations those signifiers take on as they are recombined in various ways on the screen, and in particular where expected binaries can be seen to collapse.

Here's the talk I give to my students to explain this stuff. I put a student desk next to me and put my coffee mug on it, and I say something like this:

"There is a physical object that's really there, keeping my mug from falling to the floor, and you often refer to that object as a "desk." But there is no relationship between the word "desk" and that object, at all, beyond your using it. And the only reason that you see this desk as being interchangeable with the other desks in the room is that you use the same word to refer to all of them. The use of that word is the only thing they have in common. Furthermore, when you use the word "desk" to refer to this object, you bring into relationship all of the associations people might have with that word, such as boredom, education, control, discomfort, prison, and so on. The encroachment of those extra meanings is not only unavoidable, all meaning works that way; it is the only way that language creates meaning."

It's because of this process that Barthes says that there is no author, but that's another post.

CptGlanton for the win.

Kind of on your point number two and four. I recall a heavy emphasis on binary opposition. The fact that left and right are established as much by their relationship to each other as by their own characteristics.

This also gives me a chance to post the greatest Onion story ever.

Spoiler:

I've actually done stuff like this.

The map is not the territory, but the Tanglebones is following the thread.

Jayhawker wrote:

Deconstruction is a fascinating idea that seems fleeting to my mind. As it is being described and examples are given, it produces some extreme "Ah-ha!" moments. Then, when I try to apply it to something I am reading, I draw a complete blank.

As for paratext, I was interested in the term because of the paper I was working on in regard to Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (think middle class Downtown Abbey) and how it was presented, as a serialized work, in Charles Dickens' Household Words Magazine. I was not familiar with the term, but it nailed exactly what I was studying.

In this case, Household Words, a weekly magazine of 6-10 articles a week, was edited by Dickens. But, more importantly, as he emphasized on every page, it was "Conducted by Charles Dickens." At first glance the articles seemed random. But closer reading reveals sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant connections of texts to each other. I was studying Cranford specifically, but connections were throughout and spread to all works. It was an attempt at creating a rich reading experience.

An article on Hindu mythology was blatant connection to a scene in Cranford where the women were hosting a dinner attended by their guest's eastern Indian servant. Less blatant was a rant against Dickens and a previous article that poked fun at some absurd laws and the way they were written. This seemed to connect to a scene in which the narrator of Cranford lamented the new rigidity of social customs now that former "ranking" member has passed away. It produced a harsher adherence to rules when the creator of such rules are no longer around to hear an appeal of sorts. In this case the current "ranking" woman could have authored the piece, and surely would have approved of it.

The idea is, we now read Cranford as a novel (or watch the BBC version on Amazon Prime!), and have lost the paratext in which it was created. It's an interesting concept that affects so much of what we consume as media today.

Do you watch a show live on Twitter using their predefined hashtags? Do you watch Talking Dead after each episode? Did you watch the Halo web series Forward Unto Dawn before or after playing Halo 4? Are you reading comics each week on the iPad or single issue, or do you what for trade paperbacks? Do you wait for TV shows to come to Netflix or DVD and consume them in a weekend? Do you prefer the week in between episodes?

I'm not saying paratext is a driving force that drives all of our understanding of textual studies, but it is kind of cool thing to recognize and discuss how it affects our enjoyment of different media.

Ultimately, the context of any work is always growing and has no definite boundary. The question becomes about how far out you look, and the way you trace that back in meaningful ways.

kazooka wrote:

In my experience with literary criticism, the next step is to immediately publish as many Marxist readings of video games as is humanly possible. Am I getting that right? :p

Marxist analysis is a big part of the platform studies movement.

Robear wrote:

I always wanted to kick Derrida a good one in the ghoulies. He's done more to lower the average iq of college students than Ayn Rand. (Well, okay... but he's close.)

I always thought of semiotics as a meta-linguistics. It deals with all the mechanisms of communication, and breaks down the same way - meaning, rules and the social context. Kind of cool.

Derrida offers a more complicated view on the world than most incoming college students have; Rand encourages a more simplistic view.

The problem with Derrida - *one* problem - and with this kind of criticism, is granularity. Sure, everything is affected by everything else, but in the past, it was sufficient to look at major influences on a work and call it a biography. The author's history, certainly, including friends, mentors, inspirations, etc. But with Deconstructionism, one can simply pick a view point - literally any viewpoint in the world - and start tearing into a work. Got an author who worked with the Salvation Army and dedicated his free time to soup kitchens? Coded language will let you argue that he's a racist bastard over-compensating unknowingly for his imperialist tendencies. Don't a like a Realist? Attack the idea that there's actually any accurate way of portraying the world. And so on. It seems to me that there are no boundaries, no area to plant a flag and say "All analyses stem from this principle". Everything is as important as everything else, which does a real job on meaning.

I'm sure I'm not the first to say it, but complexity can mask all manner of problems. Derrida annoys me in part because he's not interested in making things more simple, he's seemingly interested in making them more complex. Instead of studying the one equation that underlies a fractal, he'd rather have everyone go 10 levels deep, grab onto a tiny little extension, and argue for all they are worth that they've got the important truth about the design. But then where is the big picture, which is where most people experience art?

But the biggest flaw, to me, is the basic idea, that oppositional ideas cannot ever be balanced. For example, darkness and light. Pretty simple, eh? Darkness is the absence of light, and light is, well, it's presence. But to Derrida, as I understand it, they can never be equal, because some people will put more freight on darkness as related to evil, or comfort, or lack of sensation, while others will put more emphasis on light as related to goodness, or discomfort, or over-sensation. But wait! Even that example uses opposition, so it's *obviously* a flawed example! My cultural expectations have led me astray; this seemingly simple opposition of dark versus light is actually so complicated that I can't even accurately describe it! I obviously need to rethink *everything* to get rid of my bias in thought.

And yet, it actually *is* simple, if you think of the phenomenon as a source from which all manner of associations spring. If one accepts that there is a physical, real-world difference between dark and light that is quantifiable in the same way by any observer using the same equipment, then one has a baseline to work from, and we can account for everything else related to them from that starting point. We don't *need* all the complexity. (This is not to say that everything is utterly reducible; it's to argue that reduction is more *useful* than complication in most cases.)

You noted that Derrida encourages a more complex view than Rand; that's certainly true. But there's a well-known phenomenon among first years, where they don't yet have a full framework for their ideas, so all the ideas are equal and there's a highly creative mish-mash of *stuff* that occurs to them as their world-view changes. It's always struck me that Derrida sought to mine that vein, to remove any orientation along a particular idea, to make all ideas the equal of each other and thereby deny any claims to expert knowledge, through a method that requires expertise to use. (A lot of profiling of him has been done in this regard, in light of his personal history.) To me, it's just spinning wheels and getting nowhere. Sometimes a little is better than a lot, and Derrida seeks to deny the relevance of anything but everything, removing even residual hints of reductionism and sentencing us all to flounder in individual interpretations of the world, bereft of any way to rank them against each other.

YMMV.

Not to deconstruct [your analysis of] Derrida, but bear in mind that he came of age at the height of problems caused by people making broad assertions about things being "simple" and "true" while hand-waving away nuances and context. I think you well understand that there are situations where your "simple" take on light/dark is exactly what is called for, but there are certainly other situations (particularly psychological and artistic situations) where there's a lot more going on. Ultimately, I'd much rather try to probe out some of the Derridean aspects of an issue only to later conclude their irrelevancy rather than assume irrelevancy. If we're talking about a game, for example, in which the forces of light battle the forces od darkness, and where their lightness or darkness is reflected directly in their skin tones, it would be good and right and just for someone to say, "Hang on a minute, here."

I think you address the real frustration I have trying to implement deconstructionist theory. At this point, I'm just playing with literary theory, and figuring out what pops out. So when I see good examples of things being broken down, it makes a lot of sense. But when I try to apply it, I often feel like I am being disingenuously cynical.

One of the papers I had to write gave us a choice of reader-responce or deconstruction to apply to a poem from a list we were provided. I fully intended to use deconstruction, just because I wanted to practice something I was just starting to grasp. This was the poem I chose:

Finding Poems
By Glenn Irwin

She read from the book of poems
as she moved the white onion
softening and spreading
to the side so the celery
could fold into red sauce
that was simmering that we would eat
most of the week.

The pepperoni was sliced;
the house smelled of basil and oregano.
Her hands smelled of garlic.
My hands
on the back of her neck,
the small of her back
smelled of garlic.
But the girls were in the next room
writing their names on windows
nibbling hard yellow cheese.

I know the poet well, I told her.
I had rescued his book from between shelves
in the basement of the library.
It had been borrowed in 1981 and again
in 1995.
I asked her to look at it.
Someone should
occasionally look at it.
To make it whole, I said
To complete the circle.
She said,
There's a blue moon tonight.
You can see it
if you look up.

After fighting with it for awhile, I did a reader response paper, and got an A. The thing is, I think deconstruction would have really been useful, and my paper included a lot of skepticism of what the speaker in this poem was trying to say and what he meant. I think what he was trying to say was betrayed by his own perception of his circumstances.

For what its worth, I think I was the only student in the class that didn't argue that this was a metaphor for sex.

Any thoughts on this?

The poem has an interesting division: on one side interactions between people, and on the other side interactions between people and objects. It then blurs the discinction between those two types of interactions, a distinction upon which it simultaneously relies to make itself seem coherent.

On my phone. Can't write more now.

Jayhawker wrote:

After fighting with it for awhile, I did a reader response paper, and got an A. The thing is, I think deconstruction would have really been useful, and my paper included a lot of skepticism of what the speaker in this poem was trying to say and what he meant. I think what he was trying to say was betrayed by his own perception of his circumstances.

For what its worth, I think I was the only student in the class that didn't argue that this was a metaphor for sex.

Any thoughts on this?

I can see the sex route pretty obviously in "She read from the book of poems / as she moved the white onion / softening and spreading". That's the first of a series of ambiguous references — it makes sense that she's softening and spreading the onion, but there's no grammatical reason to interpret it that way. It's at least as likely that she herself is softening.

What makes it a decent poem for deconstruction is that it's full of that sort of loose reference, where a word or phrase might be pointing to a couple things (or multiple things), and in that way unites the possible referents in a sort of loose metaphor.

So who's up on Object Oriented Ontologies enough to help make it clearer for me?