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Tag: literary criticism

  • Zachary Loeb — General Ludd in the Long Seventies (Review of Matt Tierney, Dismantlings)

    Zachary Loeb — General Ludd in the Long Seventies (Review of Matt Tierney, Dismantlings)

    a review of Matt Tierney, Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies (Cornell University Press, 2019)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    The guy said, “If machinery
    makes you so happy
    go buy yourself
    a Happiness Machine.”
    Then he realized:
    They were trying to do
    exactly that.

    – Kenneth Burke, “Routine for a Stand-Up Comedian” (15)

    A sledgehammer is a fairly versatile tool. You can use it do destroy things, you can use it to build things, and in some cases you can use it to destroy things so that you can build things. Granted, it remains a rather heavy and fairly blunt tool, it is not particularly well suited for fine detail work requiring a high degree of precision. Which is, likely, one of the reasons why those who are famed for wielding sledgehammers often wind up being characterized as being just as blunt and unsubtle as the heavy instruments they swung.

    And, perhaps, no group has been more closely associated with sledgehammers, than the Luddites. Those early 19th century skilled crafts workers who took up arms to defend their communities and their livelihoods from the “obnoxious machines” being introduced by their employers. Though the tactic of machine breaking as a form of protest has a lengthy history that predates (and post-dates) the Luddites, it is a tactic that has come to be bound up with the name of the followers of the mysterious General Ludd. Despite the efforts of writers and thinkers to rescue the Luddite’s legacy from “the enormous condescension of posterity” (Thompson, 12), the term “Luddite” today generally has less to do with a specific historical group and has instead largely become an epithet to be hurled at anyone who dares question the gospel of technological progress. Yet, as the second decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, it may well be that “Luddite” has lost some of its insulting sting against the backdrop of metastasizing tech giants, growing mountains of toxic e-waste, and an ecological crisis that owes much to an unquestioned faith in the benefits of technology.

    General Ludd may well get the last laugh.

    That the Luddites have lingered so fiercely in the public imagination is a testament to the fact that the Luddites, and the actions for which they are remembered, are good to think with. Insofar as one can talk about Luddism it represents less a coherent body of thought created by the Luddites themselves, and more the attempt by later scholars, critics, artists, and activists to try to make sense of what is usable from the Luddite legacy. And it is this effort to think through and think with, that Matt Tierney explores in his phenomenal book Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies. While the focus of Dismantlings, as its title makes clear, is on the “long seventies” (the years from 1965 to 1980) the book represents an important intervention in current discussions and debates around the impacts of technology on society. Just as the various figures Tierney discussed turned their thinking (to varying extents) back to the Luddites, so too the book argues is it worth revisiting the thinking and writing on the matter from the long seventies. This is not a book on the historical Luddites, instead this book is a vital contribution to attempts to theorize what Luddism might mean, and how we are to confront the various technological challenges facing us today.

    Largely remembered for occurrences including the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the space race, and a general tone of social upheaval – the long seventies also represented a period when technological questions were gaining prominence. With thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Stewart Brand all putting forth visions of the way that the new consumer technologies would remake society: creating “global villages” or giving rise to a perception of all of humanity as passengers on “spaceship earth.” Yet they were hardly the only figures contemplating technology in that period, and many of the other visions that emerged aimed to directly challenge some of the assumptions and optimism of the likes of McLuhan and Fuller. In the long seventies, the question of what would come next was closely entwined with an evaluation of what had come before, indeed “the breaking of retrogressive notions of technology coupled with the breaking of retrogressive technologies…undergoes a period of vital activity during the Long Seventies in the poems, fictions, and activist speech of what was then called cyberculture,” (15). Granted, this was a “breaking” that generally had more to do with theorizing than with actual machine smashing. Instead it could more accurately be seen as “dismantling,” the careful taking apart so that the functioning can be more fully understood and evaluated. Yet it is a thinking that, importantly, occurred against a recognition that the world was, as Norbert Wiener observed, “the world of Belsen and Hiroshima” (8). To make sense of the resistant narratives towards technology in the long seventies it is necessary to engage critically with the terminology of the period, and thus Tierney’s book represents a sort of conceptual “counterlexicon,” to do just that.

    As anyone who knows about the historical Luddites can attest, they did not hate technology (as such). Rather they were opposed to particular machines being used in a particular way at a particular place and time. And it is a similar attitude towards Luddism (not as an opposition to all technology, but as an understanding that technology has social implications) that Tierney discusses in the long seventies. Luddism here comes to represent “a gradual relinquishing of machines whose continued use would contravene ethical principles” (30), and this attitude is found in Langdon Winner’s concept of “epistemological Luddism” (as discussed in his book Autonomous Technology) and in the poetry of Audre Lorde. While Lorde’s line “for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” continues to be well known by activists, the question of “tools” can also be engaged with quite literally. Approached with a mind towards Luddism, Lorde’s remarks can be seen as indicating that it is not only that “the master’s house” must be dismantled but “the master’s tools” as well – and Lorde’s writing suggests poetry as a key tool for the dismantler. The version of Luddism that emerges in the late seventies represents a “sort of relinquishing” it “is not about machine-smashing at all” (47), instead it entails a careful work of examining machines to determine which are worth keeping.

    The attitudes towards technology of the long seventies were closely entwined with a sense of the world as made seemingly smaller and more connected thanks to the new technologies of the era. A certain strand of thinking in this period, exemplified by McLuhan’s “global village” or Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth,” achieved great popular success even as reactionary racist and nativist notions lurked just below the surface of the seeming technological optimism of those concepts. Contrary to the “fatalistic acceptance of new technological constraints on life” (48), works by science fiction authors like Ursula Le Guin and Samuel R. Delaney presented a notion of “communion, as a collaborative process of making do” (51). Works like The Dispossessed (Le Guin) and Triton (Delaney), presented readers with visions, and questions, of “real coexistence…not the passage but the sharing of a moment” (63). In contrast to the “technological Messianism” (74) of the likes of Fuller and McLuhan, the “communion” based works by the likes of Le Guin and Delaney focused less on exuberance for the machines themselves but instead sought to critically engage with what types of coexistence such machines would and could genuinely facilitate.

    Coined by Alice Mary Hilton, in 1963, the idea of “cyberculture” did not originally connote the sort of blissed-out-techno-optimism that the term evokes today. Rather it was meant to be “an alternative to the global village and the one-town world, and an insistence on collective action in a world not only of Belsen and Hiroshima but also of ongoing struggles toward decolonization, sexual and gender autonomy, and racial justice” (12). Thus, “cyberculture” (and cybernetics more generally) may represent one of the alternative pathways along which technological society could have developed. What “cyberculture” represented was not an exuberant embrace of all things “cyber,” but an attempt to name and thereby open a space for protest, not “against thinking machines” but which would “interrupt the advancing consensus that such machines had shrunk the globe” (81). These concepts achieved further maturation in the Ad Hoc Committee’s “Triple Revolution Manifesto” (from 1964), which sought to link an emancipatory political program to advances in new technology, linking “cybernation to a decrease in capitalist, racist, and militarist violence” (85). Seizing upon an earnest belief that the technological ethics could guide new technological developments towards just ends, “cyberculture” also imagined that such tools could supplant scarcity with abundance.

    What “cyberculture” based thinking consists of is a sort of theoretical imagining, which is why a document like a manifesto represents such an excellent example of “cyberculture” in practice. It is a sort of “distortion” that recognizes how “the fates of militarism, racism, and cybernation have only ever been knotted together” and “thus calls for imaginative practices, whether literary or activist, for cutting through the knot” (95). This is the sort of theorizing that can be seen in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s commentary on how science and technology had made of “this world a neighborhood” without yet making “of it a brotherhood” (96). The technological ethics of the advocates of “cyberculture” could be the tools with which to make “it a brotherhood” without discarding all of the tools that had made it first “a neighborhood.” The risks and opportunities of new technological forms were also commented upon in works like Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex wherein she argued that women needed to seize and guide these technologies. Blending analysis of what is with a program for what could be, Firestone’s work shows “that if other technologies are possible, then other social practices, even practices that are rarely considered in relation to new technology, may be possible too” (105).

    For some, in the long seventies, challenging machinery still took on a destructive form. Though this often entailed a sort of “revolutionary suicide” which represented an attempt to “prevent the becoming-machine of subjugated human bodies and selves” (113). A refusal to become a machine oneself, and a refusal to allow oneself to become fodder for the machine. Such a self-destructive act flows from the Pynchon-esque tragic recognition of a growing consensus “that nothing can be done to oppose” the new machines (122). Such woebegone dejection is in contrast to other attitudes that sought to not only imagine but to also construct new tools that would put the people and community first. John Mohawk, of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca people gave voice to this in his theorizing of “liberation technology.” As Mohawk explained at a UN session, “Decentralized technologies that meet the needs of the people those technologies serve will necessarily give life to a different kind of political structure, and it is safe to predict that the political structure that results will be anticolonial in nature” (127). The search for such alternative technologies suggested a framework in which what was needed was “machines to suit the community, or else no machines at all” (129) – a position that countered the technological abundance hoped for by “cyberculture” with an appeal for technologies of subsistence. After all, this was the world of Belsen and Hiroshima, “a world of new and barely understood technologies” (149), in such a world “where the very skin of the planet is a ledger of technological misapplications” (154) it is wise to proceed with caution and humility.

    The long seventies present a fascinating kaleidoscope of visions of technologies, how to live with them, how to select them, and how to think about them. What makes the long seventies so worthy of revisiting is that they and the present moment are both “seized with a critical discourse about technology, and by a popular social upheaval in which new social movements emerge, grow, and proliferate” (5). Luddism may be routinely held up as a foolish reaction, but “by breaking apart certain machines, we can learn to use them better, or never use them again. By dissecting certain technocentric cultural logics, we can likewise challenge or reject them” (162). That the Luddites are so constantly vilified may ultimately be a signal of their dangerous power, insofar as they show that people need not passively sit and accept everything that is sold to them as technological progress. Dismantling represents a politics “not as machine hating, but as a way to protect life against a large=scale regimentation and policing of security, labor, time, and community” (166).

    To engage in the fraught work of technological critique is to open oneself up to being labeled a Luddite (with the term being hurled as an epithet), to accusations of complicity in the very systems you are critiquing, and to a realization that many people simply don’t want to listen to their smartphone habits being criticized. Yet the various conceptual frameworks that can be derived from a consideration of “words against machines in the American long seventies” provide “tactics that might be repeated or emulated, if nostalgia and cynicism do not bar the way” (172). Such concepts present a method of pushing back at the “yes, but” logic which riddles so many discussions of technology today – conversations in which the downsides are acknowledged (the “yes”), yet where the counter is always offered that perhaps there’s still a way to use those technologies correctly (the “but”).

    In contrast to the comfortable rut of “yes, but” Tierney’s book argues for dismantling, wherein “to dismantle is to set aside the dithering of yes, but and to try instead the hard work of critique” (175).

    Running through many of the thinkers, writers, and activists detailed in Dismantlings is a genuine attempt to come to terms with the ways in which new technological forces are changing society. Though many of these individuals responded to such changes not by picking up hammers, but by turning to writing, this activity was always couched in a sense that the shifts afoot truly mattered. Agitated by the roaring clangor of the machines of their day, these figures from the long seventies were looking at the machines of their moment in order to consider what would need to be done to construct a different future. And they did this while looking askance at the more popular techno-utopian visions of the future being promulgated in their day. Writing of the historic Luddites, the historian David Noble commented that, “the Luddites were perhaps the last people in the West to perceive technology in the present tense and to act upon that perception” (Noble, 7), and it may be tempting to suggest that the various figures cataloged in Dismantlings were too focused on the future to have acted upon technology in their present. Nevertheless, as Tierney notes, “the present does not precede the future; rather the future (like its past) distorts and neighbors the present” (173) – the Luddites may have acted in the present, but their eyes were also on the future. It is worth remembering that we do not make sense of the technologies around us solely by what they mean now, but by what we think they will mean for the future.

    While Dismantlings provides a “counterlexicon” drawn from the writing/thinking/acting of a range of individuals in the late seventies, there is something rather tragic about reading these thoughts two decades into the twenty-first century. After all, readers of Dismantlings find themselves in what would have been the future to these late seventies thinkers. And, to be blunt, the world of today seems more in line with those thinkers’ fears for the future than with their hopes. An “epistemological Luddism” has not been used to carefully evaluate which tools to keep and which to discard, “communion” has not become a guiding principle, and “cyberculture” has drifted away from Hiton’s initial meaning to become a stand-in for a sort of uncritical techno-utopianism. The “master’s tools” have expanded to encompass ever more powerful tools, and the “master’s house” appears sturdier than ever – worse still many of us may have become so enamored by some of “the master’s tools” that we have started to entertain delusions that these are actually our tools. To a certain extent, Dismantlings stands as a reminder of a range of individuals who tried to warn us that we would wind up in the mess in which we find ourselves. Those who are equipped with such powers of perception are often mocked and derided in their own time, but looking back at them with hindsight one can get a discomforting sense of just how prescient they truly were.

    Matt Tierney’s Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies is a remarkable book. It is also a difficult book. Difficult not because of impenetrable theoretical prose (the writing is clear and crisp), but because it is always challenging to go back and confront the warnings that were ignored. At a moment when headlines are filled with sordid tales of the malfeasance of the tech behemoths, and increasingly terrifying news of the state of the planet, it is both reassuring and infuriating to recognize that it did not have to be this way. True, these long seventies figures did not specifically warn about Facebook, and climate change was not the term they used to speak of environmental degradation – but it’s doubtful that many of these figures would be particularly surprised by either occurrence.

    As a contribution to scholarship, Dismantlings represents a much needed addition to the literature on the long seventies – particularly the literature that considers technology in that period. While much of the present literature (much of it excellent) dealing with those years has tended to focus on the hippies who fell in love with their computers, Tierney’s book is a reminder of those who never composed poems of praise for their machines. After all, not everyone believed that the computer would be an emancipatory technology. This book brings together a wide assortment of figures and draws useful connections between them that will hopefully rescue many a name from obscurity. And even those names that can hardly be called obscure appear in a new light when viewed through the lenses that Tierney develops in this book. While readers may be familiar with names like Lorde, Le Guin, Delaney, and Pynchon – Tierney makes it clear that there is much to be gained by reading Hilton, Mohawk, Firestone, and revisiting the “Triple Revolution Manifesto.”

    Tierney also offers a vital intervention into ongoing discussions over the meaning of Luddism. While it may be fair to say that such discussions are occurring amongst a rather small group of people, it is a passionate debate nevertheless. Tierney avoids re-litigating the history of the original Luddites, and his timeline cuts off before the emergence of the Neo-Luddites, but his book provides valuable insight into the transformations the idea of Luddism went through in the long seventies. Granted, Luddism does not always appear to be a term that was being embraced by the figures in Tierney’s history. Certainly, Winner developed the concept of “epistemological Luddism,” and Pynchon is still remembered for his “Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?” op-ed, but many of those who spoke about dismantling did not don the mask, or pick up the hammer, of General Ludd. Thus, this book is a clear attempt not to restate others’ views on Luddism, but to freshly theorize the idea. Drawing on his long seventies sources, Tierney writes that:

    Luddism is not the destruction of all machines. And neither is it the hatred of machines as such. Like cyberculture, it is another word for dismantling. Luddism is the performative breaking of machines that limit species expression and impede planetary survival. (13)

    This is a robust and loaded definition of Luddism. While it clearly moves Luddism towards a practice instead of simply a descriptor for particular historical actors, it also presents Luddism as a constructive (as opposed to destructive) process. There are several aspects of Tierney’s definition that deserve particular attention. First, by also evoking “cyberculture” (referring to Hilton’s ethically grounded notion when she coined the term), Tierney demonstrates that Luddism is not the only word or tactic for dismantling. Second, by evoking “the performative breaking,” Tierney moves Luddism away from the blunt force of hammers and towards the more difficult work of critical evaluation. Lastly, by linking Luddism to “species expression and…planetary survival,” Tierney highlights that even if this Luddism is not “the hatred of machines as such” it still entails the recognition that there are some machines that should be hated – and that should be taken apart. It’s the sort of message that you can imagine many people getting behind, even as one can anticipate the choruses of “yes, but” that would be sure to greet this.

    Granted, even though Tierney considers a fair number of manifestos of a revolutionary sort, Dismantlings is not a new Luddite manifesto (though it might be a Luddite lexicon). While Tierney writes of the various figures he analyzes with empathy and affection, he also writes with a certain weariness. After all, as was noted earlier, we are currently living in the world about which these critics tried to warn us. And therefore Tierney can note, “if no political overturning followed the literary politics of cyberculture and Luddism in their own moment, then certainly none will follow them now” (25). Nevertheless, Tierney couches these dour comments in the observation that, “even as a revolution fails, its failure fuels common feeling without which subsequent revolutions cannot succeed” (25). At the very least the assorted thinkers and works described in Dismantlings provide a rich resource to those in the present who are concerned about “species expression” and “planetary survival.” Indeed, those advocating to break up the tech companies or pushing for the Green New Deal can learn a great deal by revisiting the works discussed in Dismantlings.

    Nevertheless, it feels as though there are some key characters missing from Dismantlings. To be clear this point is not meant to detract from Tierney’s excellent and worthwhile book. Furthermore, it must be noted that devotees of particular theorists and social critics tend to have a strong “why isn’t [the theorist/social critic I am devoted to] discussed more in here!?” reaction to works. Nevertheless, there were certain figures who seemed to be oddly missing from Dismantlings. Reflecting on the types of machines against which figures in the long seventies were reacting, Tierney writes of “the war machine, the industrial machine, the computer, and the machines of state are all connected” (4). And it was the dangerous connection of all of these that the social critic Lewis Mumford sought to describe in his theorizing of “the megamachine” – theorizing which he largely did in his two volume Myth of the Machine (which was published in the long seventies). Though Mumford’s idea of “technic” eras is briefly mentioned early in Dismantlings, his broader thinking that touches directly on the core areas of Dismantlings are not remarked on. Several figures who were heavily influenced by Mumford’s work appear in Dismantlings (notably Bookchin and Roszak), and Mumford’s thought could have certainly bolstered some of the books arguments. Mumford, after all, saw himself as a bit of an anti-McLuhan – and in evaluating thinkers who were concerned with what technology meant for “species expression” and “planetary survival” Mumford deserves more attention. Given the overall thrust of Dismantlings it also might have been interesting to see Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope: toward a humanized technology and Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality discussed. Granted, these comments are not meant as attacks on Tierney’s excellent book – they are simply an observation by an avowed Mumford partisan.

    To fully appreciate why the thoughts from the long seventies still matter today it may be useful to consider a line from one of Mumford’s early works. As Mumford wrote, in 1931, “every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers” (Mumford, 1). To a certain extent, Dismantlings is an argument for those currently invested in debates around technology to revisit “and make friends” with earlier generations of critics. There is much to be gained from such a move. Notable here is a shift in an evaluation of dangers. Throughout Dismantlings Tierney returns frequently to Wiener’s line that “this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima” – and without meaning to be crass this is an understanding of the world that has somewhat receded into the past as the memory of those events becomes enshrined in history books. Yet for the likes of Wiener and many of the other individuals discussed in Dismantlings, “Belsen and Hiroshima” were not abstractions or distant memories – they were not the crimes that could be consigned to the past. Rather they were bleak reminders of the depths to which humanity could sink, and the way in which science and technology could act as a weight to drag humanity even deeper. Today’s world is the world of climate change, border walls, and surveillance capitalism – but it is still “the world of Belsen and Hiroshima.”

    There is much that needs to be dismantled, and not much time in which to do that work.

    The lessons from the long seventies are those that we are still struggling to reckon with today, including the recognition that in order to fully make sense of the machines around us it may be necessary to dismantle many of them. Of course, “not everything should be dismantled, but many things should be and some things must be, even if we don’t know where to begin” (163).

    Tierney’s book does not provide an easy answer, but it does show where we should begin.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Lewis Mumford. The Brown Decades. New York: Dover Books, 1971.
    • David F. Noble. Progress Without People. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995.
    • E.P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
  • Siobhan Senier — What Indigenous Literature Can Bring to Electronic Archives

    Siobhan Senier — What Indigenous Literature Can Bring to Electronic Archives

    Siobhan Senier

    Indigenous people are here—here in digital space just as ineluctably as they are in all the other “unexpected places” where historian Philip Deloria (2004) suggests we go looking for them. Indigenous people are on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; they are gaming and writing code, podcasting and creating apps; they are building tribal websites that disseminate immediately useful information to community members while asserting their sovereignty. And they are increasingly present in electronic archives. We are seeing the rise of Indigenous digital collections and exhibits at most of the major heritage institutions (e.g., the Smithsonian) as well as at a range of museums, universities and government offices. Such collections carry the promise of giving tribal communities more ready access to materials that, in some cases, have been lost to them for decades or even centuries. They can enable some practical, tribal-nation rebuilding efforts, such as language revitalization projects. From English to Algonquian, an exhibit curated by the American Antiquarian Society, is just one example of a digitally-mediated collaboration between tribal activists and an archiving institution that holds valuable historic Native-language materials.

    “Digital repatriation” is a term now used to describe many Indigenous electronic archives. These projects create electronic surrogates of heritage materials, often housed in non-Native museums and archives, making them more available to their tribal “source communities” as well as to the larger public. But digital repatriation has its limits. It is not, as some have pointed out, a substitute for the return of the original items. Moreover, it does not necessarily challenge the original archival politics. Most current Indigenous digital collections, indeed, are based on materials held in universities, museums and antiquarian societies—the types of institutions that historically had their own agendas of salvage anthropology, and that may or may not have come by their materials ethically in the first place. There are some practical reasons that settler institutions might be first to digitize: they tend to have rather large quantities of material, along with the staff, equipment and server space to undertake significant electronic projects. The best of these projects are critically self-conscious about their responsibilities to tribal communities. And yet the overall effect of digitizing settler collections first is to perpetuate colonial archival biases—biases, for instance, toward baskets and buckskins rather than political petitions; biases toward sepia photographs of elders rather than elders’ letters to state and federal agencies; biases toward more “exotic” images, rather than newsletters showing Native activists successfully challenging settler institutions to acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ continuous, and political presence.

    Those petitions, letters and newsletters do exist, but they tend to reside in the legions of small archives gathered, protected and curated by tribal people themselves, often with gallingly little material support or recognition from outside their communities. While it is true that many Indigenous cultural heritage items have been taken from their source communities for display in remote collecting institutions, it is also true that Indigenous people have continued to maintain their own archives of books, papers and art objects in tribal offices, tribal museums, attics and garages. Such items might be in precarious conditions of preservation, subject to mold, mildew or other damage. They may be incompletely inventoried, or catalogued only in an elder’s memory. And they are hardly ever digitized. A recent survey by the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums (2013) found that, even though digitization is now the industry standard for libraries and archives, very few tribal collections in the United States are digitizing anything at all. Moreover, the survey found, this often isn’t for lack of desire, but for lack of resources—lack of staff and time, lack of access to adequate equipment and training, lack of broadband.[1]

    Tribally stewarded collections often hold radically different kinds of materials that tell radically different stories from those historically promoted by institutions that thought they were “preserving” cultural remnants. Of particular interest to me as a literary scholar is the Indigenous writing that turns up in tribal and personal archives: tribal newsletters and periodicals; powwow and pageant programs; mimeographed books used to teach language and traditional narratives; recorded oral histories; letters, memoirs and more. Unlike the ethnographers’ photographs, colonial administrators’ records and (sometimes) decontextualized material objects that dominate larger museums, these writings tell stories of Indigenous survival and persistence. In what follows, I give a brief review of some of the best-known Indigenous electronic archives, followed by a consideration of how digitizing Indigenous writing, specifically, could change the way we see such archives. In their own recirculations of their writings online, Native people have shown relatively little interest in the concerns that currently dominate the field of Digital Humanities, including “preservation,” “open access,” “scalability,” and (perhaps the most unfortunate term in this context) “discoverability.” They seem much keener to continue what those literary traditions have in fact always done: assert and enact their communities’ continuous presence and political viability.

    Digital Repatriation and Other Consultative Practices

    Indigenous digital archives are very often based in universities, headed by professional scholars, often with substantial community engagement. The Yale Indian Papers Project, which seeks to improve access to primary documents demonstrating the continuous presence of Indigenous people in New England, elicits editorial assistance from a number of Indigenous scholars and tribal historians. The award-winning Plateau People’s Web Portal at Washington State University takes this collaborative methodology one step further, inviting consultants from neighboring tribal nations to come in to the university archives and select and curate materials for the web. Other digital Indigenous exhibits come from prestigious museums and collecting institutions, like the American Philosophical Society’s “Native American Images Project.” Indeed, with so many libraries, museums and archives now creating digital collections these days (whether in the form of e-books, scanned documents, or full electronic exhibits), materials related to Indigenous people can be found in an ever-growing variety of formats and places. Hence, there is also a rising popularity in portals—regional or state-based sites that can act as gateways to a wide variety of digital collections. Some are specific to Indigenous topics and locations, like the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, which compiles web-based resources for studying U.S. boarding school history. Others digital portals sweep up Indigenous objects along with other cultural materials, like the Maine Memory Network or the Digital Public Library of America.

    It is not surprising that the bent of most of these collections is decidedly ethnographic, given that Indigenous people the world over have been the subjects of one prolonged imperial looting. Cultural heritage professionals are now legally (or at least ethically) required to repatriate human remains and sacred objects, but in recent years, many have also begun to speak of “digital repatriation.” Just as digital collections of all kinds are providing new access to materials held in far-flung locations, these are arguably a boon to elders or Native people living far away, for instance, from the Smithsonian Museum, to be able to readily view their cultural property. The digitization of heritage and materials can, in fact, help promote cultural revitalization and culturally responsive teaching  (Roy and Christal 2002; Srinivasan et al. 2010). Many such projects aim expressly “to reinstate the role of the cultural object as a generator, rather than an artifact, of cultural information and interpretation” (Brown and Nicholas 2012, 313).

    Nonetheless, Indigenous people may be forgiven if they take a dim view of their cultural heritage items being posted willy nilly on the internet. Some have questioned whether digital repatriation is a subterfuge for forestalling or refusing the return of the original items. Jim Enote (Zuni), Executive Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, has gone so far as to say that the words “digital” and “repatriation” simply don’t belong in the same sentence, pointing out that nothing in fact is being repatriated, since even the digital item is, in most cases, also created by a non-Native institution (Boast and Enote 2013,  110). Others worry about the common assumption that unfettered access to information is always and everywhere an unqualified good. Anthropologist Kimberly Christen has asked pointedly, “Does Information Really Want to be Free?” Her answer: “For many Indigenous communities in settler societies, the public domain and an information commons are just another colonial mash-up where their cultural materials and knowledge are ‘open’ for the profit and benefit of others, but remain separated from the sociocultural systems in which they were and continue to be used, circulated, and made meaningful” (Christen 2012, 2879-80).

    A truly decolonized archive, then, calls for a critical re-examination of the archive itself. As Ellen Cushman (Cherokee) puts it, “Archives of Indigenous artifacts came into existence in part to elevate the Western tradition through a process of othering ‘primitive’ and Native traditions . . . . Tradition. Collection. Artifacts. Preservation. These tenets of colonial thought structure archives whether in material or digital forms” (Cushman 2013, 119). The most critical digital collections, therefore, are built not only through consultation with Indigenous knowledge-keepers, but also with considerable self-consciousness about the archival endeavor itself. The Yale editors, for instance, explain that “we cannot speak for all the disciplines that have a stake in our work, nor do we represent the perspective of Native people themselves . . . . [Therefore tribal] consultants’ annotations might include Native origin stories, oral sources, and traditional beliefs while also including Euro-American original sources of the same historical event or phenomena, thus offering two kinds of narratives of the past” (Grant-Costa, Glaza, and Sletcher 2012). Other sites may build this archival awareness into the interface itself. Performing Archive: Curtis + the “vanishing race,” for instance, seeks explicitly to “reject enlightenment ideals of the cumulative archive—i.e. that more materials lead to better, more accurate knowledge—in order to emphasize the digital archive as a site of critique and interpretation, wherein access is understood not in terms of access to truth, but to the possibility of past, present, and future performance” (Kim and Wernimont 2014).

    Additional innovations worth mentioning here include the content management system Mukurtu, initially developed by Christen and her colleagues to facilitate culturally responsive archiving for an Aboriginal Australian collection, and quickly embraced by projects worldwide. Recognizing that “Indigenous communities across the globe share similar sets of archival, cultural heritage, and content management needs” (2005:317), Mukurtu lets them build their own digital collections and exhibits, while giving them finely grained control over who can access those materials—e.g., through tribal membership, clan system, family network, or some other benchmark. Christen and her colleague Jane Anderson have also created a system of traditional knowledge (TK) licenses and labels—icons that can be placed on a website to help educate site visitors about the culturally appropriate use of heritage materials. The licenses (e.g., “TK Commercial,” “TK Non-Commercial”) are meant to be legal instruments for owners of heritage material; a tribal museum, for instance, could use them to signal how it intends for electronic material to be used or not used. The TK labels, meanwhile, are extra-legal tools meant to educate users about culturally appropriate approaches to material that may, legalistically, be in the  “public domain,” but from a cultural standpoint have certain restrictions: e.g., “TK Secret/Sacred,” “TK Women Restricted,” “TK Community Use Only.”)

    All of the projects described here, many still in their incipient stages, aim to decolonize archives at their core. They put Indigenous knowledge-keepers in partnership with computing and heritage management professionals to help communities determine how, whether, and why their collections shall be digitized and made available. As such, they have a great deal to teach digital literary projects—literary criticism (if I may) not being a profession historically inclined to consult with living subjects very much at all. Next, I ponder why, despite great strides in both Indigenous digital collections and literary digital collections, the twain have really yet to meet.

    Electronic Textualities: The Pasts and Futures of Indigenous Literature

    While signatures, deeds and other Native-authored texts surface occasionally in the aforementioned heritage projects, digital projects devoted expressly to Indigenous writing are relatively few and far between.[2] Granting that Aboriginal people, like any other people, do produce writings meant to be private, as a literary scholar I am confronted daily with a rather different problem than that of cultural “protection”: a great abundance of poetry, fiction and nonfiction written by Indigenous people, much of which just never sees the larger audiences for which it was intended. How can the insights of the more ethnographically oriented Indigenous digital archives inform digital literary collections, and vice versa? How do questions of repatriation, reciprocity, and culturally sensitive contextualization change, if at all, when we consider Indigenous writing?

    Literary history is another of those unexpected places in which Indians are always found. But while Indigenous literature—both historic and contemporary—has garnered increasing attention in the academy and beyond, the Digital Humanities does not seem to have contributed very much to the expansion and promotion of these canons. Conversely, while DH has produced some dynamic and diverse literary scholarship, scholars in Native American Studies seem to be turning toward this scholarship only slowly. Perhaps digital literary studies has not felt terribly inviting to Indigenous texts; many observers (Earhart 2012; Koh 2015) have remarked that the emerging digital literary canon, indeed, looks an awful lot like the old one, with the lion’s share of the funding and prestige going to predictable figures like William Shakespeare, William Blake, and Walt Whitman. At this moment, I know of no mass movement to digitize Indigenous writing, although a number of “public domain” texts appear in places like the Internet Archive, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg.[3] Indigenous digital literature seems light years away from the kinds of scholarly and technical standards achieved by the Whitman and Rosetti Archives. And without a sizeable or searchable corpus, scholarship on Indigenous literature likewise seems light years from the kinds of text mining, topic modeling and network analysis that is au courant in DH.

    Instead, we see small-scale, emergent digital collections that nevertheless offer strong correctives to master narratives of Indigenous disappearance, and that supply further material for ongoing sovereignty struggles. The Hawaiian language newspaper project is one powerful example. Started as a massive crowdsourcing effort that digitized at least half of the remarkable 100 native-language newspapers produced by Hawaiian people between the 1830s and the 1940s, it calls itself “the largest native-language cache in the Western world,” and promises to change the way Hawaiian history is seen. It might well do so if, as Noenoe Silva (2004, 2) has argued, “[t]he myth of [Indigenous Hawaiian] nonresistance was created in part because mainstream historians have studiously avoided the wealth of material written in Hawaiian.” A grassroots digitization movement like the Hawaiian Nupepa Project makes such studious avoidance much more difficult, and it brings to the larger world of Indigenous digital collections direct examples—through Indigenous literacy—of Indigenous political persistence.

    It thus points to the value of the literary in Indigenous digitization efforts. Jessica Pressman and Lisa Swanstrom (2013) have asked, “What kind of scholarly endeavors are possible when we think of the digital humanities as not just supplying the archives and data-sets for literary interpretation but also as promoting literary practices with an emphasis on aesthetics, on intertextuality, and writerly processes? What kind of scholarly practices and products might emerge from a decisively literary perspective and practice in the digital humanities?” Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks (2012, 309) has asked similar questions from an Indigenous perspective, positing that digital space allows us to challenge conventional notions of literary periodization and of place, to “follow paths of intellectual kinship, moving through rhizomic networks of influence and inquiry.” Brooks and other literary historians have long argued that Indigenous people have deployed alphabetic literacy strategically to (re)build their communities, restore and revitalize their traditions, and exercise their political and cultural sovereignty. Digital literary projects, like the Hawaiian newspaper project, can offer powerful extensions of these practices in electronic space.

    Dawnlandvoices.org: Curating Indigenous Literary Continuance

    These were some of the questions and issues we had in mind when we started dawnlandvoices.org.[4] This archive is emergent—not a straight scan-and-upload of items residing in one physical site or group of sites, but rather a collaboration among tribal authors, tribal collections, and university-based scholars and students. It came out of a print volume, Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England (Senier 2014), edited by myself and eleven tribal historians. Organized by tribal nation, the book ranges from the earliest writings (petroglyphs and political petitions) to the newest (hip-hop poetry and blog entries). The print volume already aimed to be a counter-archive, insofar as it represents the literary traditions of “New England,” a region that has built its very identity on colonial dispossession, colonial boundaries and the myth of Indian disappearance. It also already aimed to decolonize the archive, insofar as it distributes editorial authority and control to Indigenous writers, historians and knowledge-keepers. At almost 700 pages, though, Dawnland in book form could only scratch the surface of the wealth of writing that regional Native people have produced, and that remains, for the most part, in their own hands.

    We wanted a living document—one that could expand to include some of the vibrant pieces we could not fit in the book, one that could be revised and reshaped according to ongoing community conversation. And we wanted to keep presenting historic materials alongside new (in this case born-digital) texts, the better to highlight the long history of Indigenous writing in this region. But we also realized that this required resources. We approached the National Endowment for the Humanities and received a $38,000 Preservation and Access grant to explore how digital humanities resources might be better redistributed to empower tribal communities who want to digitize their texts, either for private tribal use or more public dissemination. The partners on this grant included three different, but representative kinds of collections: a tribal museum with some history of professional archiving and private support (the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Rhode Island); a tribal office that finds itself acting as an unofficial repository for a variety of papers and documents, and that does not have the resources to completely inventory or protect these (the Passamaquoddy Cultural Preservation Office in Maine); and four elders who have amassed a considerable collection of books, papers, and slides from their years working in the Boston Children’s Museum and Plimoth Plantation, and were storing these in their own homes (the Indigenous Resources Collaborative in Massachusetts). Under the terms of the grant, the University of New Hampshire sent digital librarians to each site to set up basic hardware and software for digitization, while training tribal historians in digitization basics. The end result of this two-year pilot project was a small exhibit of sample items from each archive.

    The obstacles to this kind of work for small tribal collections are perhaps not unique, but they are intense. Digitization is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, even more so for collections that do not have ample (or any) paid staff, that can’t afford to update basic software or that don’t even have reliable internet connections. And there were additional hurdles: while the pressure from DH writ large (and granting institutions individually) is frequently to demonstrate scalability, in the end, the tribal partners on this grant did not coalesce around a shared goal of digitizing their collections wholesale. The Passamaquoddy tribal heritage preservation officer has scanned and uploaded the greatest quantity of material by far, but he has strategically zeroed in on dozens of tribal newsletters containing radical histories of Native resistance and survival in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Tomaquag Museum does want to digitize its entire collection, but it prefers to do so in-house, for optimum control of intellectual property. The Indigenous Resources Collaborative, meanwhile, would rather digitize and curate just a small handful of items as richly as possible. While these elders were initially adamant that they wanted to learn to scan and upload their own documents, they learned quickly just how stultifying this labor is. What excited them much more was the process of selecting individual documents and dreaming about how to best share these online.  An old powwow flyer describing the Mashpee Wampanoag game of fireball, for instance, had them naming elders and players they could interview, with the possibility of adding metadata in the form of video or narrative audio.

    More than a year after articulating this aspiration, the IRC has not begun to conduct or record any such interviews. Such a project is beyond their current energies, time and resources; and to be sure, any continuation of their work on this partner project at dawnlandvoices.org should be compensated, which will mean applying for new grants. But the delay or inaction also points to a larger conundrum: that for all of the Web’s avowed multimodality, indigenous digital collections have generally not reflected the longstanding multimodality of indigenous literatures themselves—in particular, their longstanding and mutually sustaining interplay of oral and written forms. Some (Golumbia 2015) would attribute this to an unwillingness within DH to recognize the kinds of digital language work being done by Indigenous communities worldwide. Perhaps, too, it owes something to the history of violence embedded in “recording” or “preserving” Indigenous oral traditions (Silko 1981); the Indigenous partners with whom I have worked are generally skeptical of the need to put their traditional narratives—or even some of the recorded oral histories they may have stored in cassette—online. Too, there is the time and labor involved in recording. It is now common to hear digital publishers wax enthusiastic about the “affordances” of the Web (it seems so easy, to just add an mp3), but with few exceptions, dawnlandvoices.org has not elicited many recordings, despite our invitations to authors to contribute them.

    Unlike the texts in the most esteemed digital literature archives like the Rosetti Archive (edited, contextualized and encoded to the highest scholarly standard), the texts in dawnlandvoices.org are often rough, edgy, and unfinished; and that, quite possibly, is the way they will remain. Insofar as dawnlandvoices.org aspires to be a “database” at all (and we are not sure that it does), it makes sense at this point for there to be multiple pathways in and out of that collection, multiple ways of formatting and presenting material. It is probably fair to say that most scholars working on indigenous digital archives dream of a day when these sites will have robust community engagement and commentary. At the same time, many would readily admit that it’s not as simple as building it and hoping they will come. David Golumbia (2015) has gone so far as to suggest that what marginalizes Indigenous projects within DH is the archive-centric nature of the field itself—that while “most of the major First Nations groups now maintain rich community/governmental websites with a great deal of information on history, geography, culture, and language. . . none of this work, or little of it, is perceived or labeled as DH.” Thus, the esteemed digital archives might not, in fact, be what tribal communities want most. Brown and Nicholas raise the equally provocative possibility that “[i]nstitutional databases may . . . already have been superseded by social networking sites as digital repositories for cultural information” (2012:315). And, in fact, that most pervasive and understandably-maligned of social-networking sites, Facebook, seems to be serving some tribal museums’, authors’ and historians’ immediate cultural heritage needs surprisingly well. Many post historic photos or their own writings to their walls, and generate fabulously rich commentary: identifications of individuals in pictures, memories of places and events, praise and criticism for poetry. Facebook is a proprietary, and notoriously problematic platform, especially on the issue of intellectual property. And yet it has made room, at least for now, for a kind of fugitive curation that, albeit fragile and fugitive, raises the question of whether such curation should be “institutional” at all. We can see similar things happening on Twitter (as in Daniel Heath Justice’s recent “year of tweets” naming Indigenous authors) and Instagram (where artists like Stephen Paul Judd store, share, and comment on their work).  Outside of DH and settler institutions, indigenous people are creating all kinds of collections that—if they are not “archives” in a way that satisfy professional archivists—seem to do what Native people, individually and collectively, need them to do. At least for today, these collections create what First Nations artists Jason Lewis and Skawennati Tricia Fragnito call “Aboriginally determined territories in cyberspace” (2005).

    What the conversations initiated by Kim Christen, Jane Anderson, Jim Enote and others can bring to digital literature collections is a scrupulously ethical concern for Indigenous intellectual property, an insistence on first voice and community engagement. What Indigenous literature, in turn, can bring to the table is an insistence on politics and sovereignty.  Like many literary scholars, I often struggle with what (if anything) makes “Literature” distinctive. It’s not that baskets or katsina masks cannot be read expressions of sovereignty—they can, and they are. But Native literatures—particularly the kinds saved by Indigenous communities themselves rather than by large collecting institutions and salvage anthropologists—provide some of the most powerful and overt archives of resistance and resurgence. The invisibility of these kinds of tribal stories and tribal ways of knowing and keeping stories is an ongoing concern, even on the “open” Web. It may be that Digital Humanities writ large will continue to struggle against the seeming centrifugal force of traditional literary and cultural canons. It is not likely, however, that Indigenous communities will wait for us.

    _____

    Siobhan Senier is associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the editor of Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England and dawnlandvoices.org.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] A study by Native Public Media (Morris and Meinrath 2009) found that broadband access in and around Native American and Alaska Native communities was less than 10 percent, sometimes as low as 5 to 6 percent.

    [2] Two rare, and newer, exceptions include the Occom Circle Project at Dartmouth College, and the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection at Amherst College.

    [3] The University of Virginia Electronic Texts Center at one time had an excellent collection of Native-authored or Native-related works, but these are now buried within the main digital catalog.

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums. 2013. “International Conference Program.” Santa Ana Pueblo, NM.
    • Boast, Robin, and Jim Enote. 2013. “Virtual Repatriation: It Is Neither Virtual nor Repatriation.” In Peter Biehl and Christopher Prescott, eds., Heritage in the Context of Globalization. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology. New York, NY: Springer New York. 103–13.
    • Brooks, Lisa. 2012. “The Primacy of the Present, the Primacy of Place: Navigating the Spiral of History in the Digital World.” PMLA 127:2. 308–16.
    • Brown, Deidre, and George Nicholas. 2012. “Protecting Indigenous Cultural Property in the Age of Digital Democracy: Institutional and Communal Responses to Canadian First Nations and Māori Heritage Concerns.” Journal of Material Culture 17:3. 307–24.
    • Christen, Kimberly. 2005. “Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons.” International Journal of Cultural Property 12:3. 315–45.
    • Christen, Kimberly. 2012. “Does Information Really Want to Be Free?: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication 6. 2870–93.
    • Cushman, Ellen. 2013. “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive.” College English 76:2. 116–35.
    • Deloria, Philip Joseph. 2004. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
    • Earhart, Amy. 2012. “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon.” In Matt Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Golumbia, David. 2015. “Postcolonial Studies, Digital Humanities, and the Politics of Language.” Postcolonial Digital Humanities.
    • Grant-Costa, Paul, Tobias Glaza, and Michael Sletcher. 2012. “The Common Pot: Editing Native American Materials.” Scholarly Editing 33.
    • Kim, David J., and Jacqueline Wernimont. 2014. “‘Performing Archive’: Identity, Participation, and Responsibility in the Ethnic Archive.” Archive Journal 4.
    • Koh, Adeline. 2015. “A Letter to the Humanities: DH Will Not Save You.” Hybrid Pedagogy, April 19.
    • Lewis, Jason, and Skawennati Fragnito. 2005. “Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace.” Cultural Survival (June).
    • Morris, Traci L., and Sascha D. Meinrath. 2009. New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses. Flagstaff, AZ: Native Public Media.
    • Pressman, Jessica, and Lisa Swanstrom. 2013. “The Literary And/As the Digital Humanities” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7:1.
    • Roy, Loriene, and Mark Christal. 2002. “Digital Repatriation: Constructing a Culturally Responsive Virtual Museum Tour.” Journal of Library and Information Science 28:1. 14–18.
    • Senier, Siobhan, ed. 2014. Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
    • Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1981. “An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in Two Parts.” In Geary Hobson, ed. The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 211–16
    • Silva, Noenoe K. 2004. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Srinivasan, Ramesh, et al. 2010. “Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum.” Science Technology Human Values 35:5. 735–68.

     

     

  • Bradley J. Fest – The Function of Videogame Criticism

    Bradley J. Fest – The Function of Videogame Criticism

    a review of Ian Bogost, How to Talk about Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

    by Bradley J. Fest

    ~

    Over the past two decades or so, the study of videogames has emerged as a rigorous, exciting, and transforming field. During this time there have been a few notable trends in game studies (which is generally the name applied to the study of video and computer games). The first wave, beginning roughly in the mid-1990s, was characterized by wide-ranging debates between scholars and players about what they were actually studying, what aspects of videogames were most fundamental to the medium.[1] Like arguments about whether editing or mise-en-scène was more crucial to the meaning-making of film, the early, sometimes heated conversations in the field were primarily concerned with questions of form. Scholars debated between two perspectives known as narratology and ludology, and asked whether narrative or play was more theoretically important for understanding what makes videogames unique.[2] By the middle of the 2000s, however, this debate appeared to be settled (as perhaps ultimately unproductive and distracting—i.e., obviously both narrative and play are important). Over the past decade, a second wave of scholars has emerged who have moved on to more technical, theoretical concerns, on the one hand, and more social and political issues, on the other (frequently at the same time). Writers such as Patrick Crogan, Nick Dyer-Witherford, Alexander R. Galloway, Patrick Jagoda, Lisa Nakamura, Greig de Peuter, Adrienne Shaw, McKenzie Wark, and many, many others write about how issues such as control and empire, race and class, gender and sexuality, labor and gamification, networks and the national security state, action and procedure can pertain to videogames.[3] Indeed, from a wide sampling of contemporary writing about games, it appears that the old anxieties regarding the seriousness of its object have been put to rest. Of course games are important. They are becoming a dominant cultural medium; they make billions of dollars; they are important political allegories for life in the twenty-first century; they are transforming social space along with labor practices; and, after what many consider a renaissance in independent game development over the past decade, some of them are becoming quite good.

    Ian Bogost has been one of the most prominent voices in this second wave of game criticism. A media scholar, game designer, philosopher, historian, and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost has published a number of influential books. His first, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006), places videogames within a broader theoretical framework of comparative media studies, emphasizing that games deserve to be approached on their own terms, not only because they are worthy of attention in and of themselves but also because of what they can show us about the ways other media operate. Bogost argues that “any medium—poetic, literary, cinematic, computational—can be read as a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning. I call these general instances of procedural expression, unit operations” (2006, 9). His second book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007), extends his emphasis on the material, discrete processes of games, arguing that they can and do make arguments; that is, games are rhetorical, and they are rhetorical by virtue of what they and their operator can do, their procedures: games make arguments through “procedural rhetoric.”[4] The publication of Persuasive Games in particular—which he promoted with an appearance on The Colbert Report (2005–14)—saw Bogost emerge as a powerful voice in the broad cohort of second wave writers and scholars.

    But I feel that the publication of Bogost’s most recent book, How to Talk about Videogames (2015), might very well end up signaling the beginning of a third phase of videogame criticism. If the first task of game criticism was to formally define its object, and the second wave of game studies involved asking what games can and do say about the world, the third phase might see critics reflecting on their own processes and procedures, thinking, not necessarily about what videogames are and do, but about what videogame criticism is and does. How to Talk about Videogames is a book that frequently poses the (now quite old) question: what is the function of criticism at the present time? In an industry dominated by multinational media megaconglomerates, what should the role of (academic) game criticism be? What can a handful of researchers and scholars possibly do or say in the face of such a massive, implacable, profit-driven industry, where every announcement about future games further stokes its rabid fan base of slobbering, ravening hordes to spend hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours consuming a form known for its spectacular violence, ubiquitous misogyny, and myopic tribalism? What is the point of writing about games when the videogame industry appears to happily carry on as if nothing is being said at all, impervious to any conversation that people may be having about its products beyond what “fans” demand?

    To read the introduction and conclusion of Bogost’s most recent book, one might think that, suggestions about their viability aside, both the videogame industry and the critical writing surrounding it are in serious crisis, and the matter of the cultural status of the videogame has hardly been put to rest. As a scholar, critic, and designer who has been fairly consistent in positively exploring what digital games can do, what they can uniquely accomplish as a process-based medium, it is striking, at least to this reviewer, that Bogost begins by anxiously admitting,

    whenever I write criticism of videogames, someone strongly invested in games as a hobby always asks the question “is this parody?” as if only a miscreant or a comedian or a psychopath would bother to invest the time and deliberateness in even thinking, let alone writing about videogames with the seriousness that random, anonymous Internet users have already used to write about toasters, let alone deliberate intellectuals about film or literature! (Bogost 2015, xi–xii)

    Bogost calls this kind of attention to the status of his critical endeavor in a number of places in How to Talk about Videogames. The book shows him involved in that untimely activity of silently but implicitly assessing his body of work, reflectively approaching his critical task with cautious trepidation. In a variety of moments from the opening and closing of the book, games and criticism are put into serious question. Videogames are puerile, an “empty diversion” (182), and without value; “games are grotesque. . . . [they] are gross, revolting, heaps of arbitrary anguish” (1); “games are stupid” (9); “that there could be a game criticism [seems] unlikely and even preposterous” (181). In How to Talk about Videogames, Bogost, at least in some ways, is giving up his previous fight over whether or not videogames are serious aesthetic objects worthy of the same kind of hermeneutic attention given to more established art forms.[5] If games are predominantly treated as “perversion, excess” (183), a symptom of “permanent adolescence” (180), as unserious, wasteful, unproductive, violently sadistic entertainments—perhaps there is a reason. How to Talk about Videogames shows Bogost turning an intellectual corner toward a decidedly ironic sense of his role as a critic and the worthiness of his critical object.

    Compare Bogost’s current pessimism with the optimism of his previous volume, How to Do Things with Videogames (2011), to which How to Talk about Videogames functions as a kind of sequel or companion. In this earlier book, he is rather more affirmative about the future of the videogame industry (and, by proxy, videogame criticism):

    What if we allowed that videogames have many possible goals and purposes, each of which couples with many possible aesthetics and designs to create many possible player experiences, none of which bears any necessary relationship to the commercial videogame industry as we currently know it. The more games can do, the more the general public will become accepting of, and interested in, the medium in general. (Bogost 2011, 153)

    2011’s How to Do Things with Videogames aims to bring to the table things that previous popular and scholarly approaches to videogames had ignored in order to show all the other ways that videogames operate, what they are capable of beyond mere mimetic simulation or entertaining distraction, and how game criticism might allow their audiences to expand beyond the province of the “gamer” to mirror the diversified audiences of other media. Individual chapters are devoted to how videogames produce empathy and inspire reverence; they can be vehicles for electioneering and promotion; games can relax, titillate, and habituate; they can be work. Practicing what he calls “media microecology,” a critical method that “seeks to reveal the impact of a medium’s properties on society . . . through a more specialized, focused attention . . . digging deep into one dark, unexplored corner of a media ecosystem” (2011, 7), Bogost argues that game criticism should be attentive to more than simply narrative or play. The debates that dominated the early days of critical game studies, in this regard, only account for a rather limited view of what games can do. Appearing at a time when many were arguing that the medium was beginning to reach aesthetic maturity, Bogost’s 2011 book sounds a note of hope and promise for the future of game studies and the many unexplored possibilities for game design.

    How to Talk about Videogames

    I cannot really overstate, however, the ways in which How to Talk about Videogames, published four years later, shows Bogost reversing tack, questioning his entire enterprise.[6] Even with the appearance of such a serious, well-received game as Gone Home (2013)—to which he devotes a particularly scathing chapter about what the celebration of an ostensibly adolescent game tells us about contemporaneity—this is a book that repeatedly emphasizes the cultural ghetto in which videogames reside. Criticism devoted exclusively to this form risks being “subsistence criticism. . . . God save us from a future of game critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study” (188). Despite previous claims about videogames “[helping] us expose and interrogate the ways we engage the world in general, not just the ways that computational systems structure or limit that experience” (Bogost 2006, 40), How to Talk about Videogames is, at first glance, a book that raises the question of not only how videogames should be talked about, but whether they have anything to say in the first place.

    But it is difficult to gauge the seriousness of Bogost’s skepticism and reluctance given a book filled with twenty short essays of highly readable, informative, and often compelling criticism. (The disappointingly short essay, “The Blue Shell Is Everything That’s Wrong with America”—in which he writes: “This is the Blue Shell of collapse, the Blue Shell of financial hubris, the Blue Shell of the New Gilded Age” [26]—particularly stands out in the way that it reads an important if overlooked aspect of a popular game in terms of larger social issues.) For it is, really, somewhat unthinkable that someone who has written seven books on the subject would arrive at the conclusion that “videogames are a lot like toasters. . . . Like a toaster, a game is both appliance and hearth, both instrument and aesthetic, both gadget and fetish. It’s preposterous to do game criticism, like it’s preposterous to do toaster criticism” (ix and xii).[7] Bogost’s point here is rhetorical, erring on the side of hyperbole in order to emphasize how videogames are primarily process-based—that they work and function like toasters perhaps more than they affect and move like films or novels (a claim with which I imagine many would disagree), and that there is something preposterous in writing criticism about a process-based technology. A decade after emphasizing videogames’ procedurality in Unit Operations, this is a way for him to restate and reemphasize these important claims for the more popular audience intended for How to Talk about Videogames. Games involve actions, which make them different from other media that can be more passively absorbed. This is why videogames are often written about in reviews “full of technical details and thorough testing and final, definitive scores delivered on improbably precise numerical scales” (ix). Bogost is clear. He is not a reviewer. He is not assessing games’ ability to “satisfy our need for leisure [as] their only function.” He is a critic and the critic’s activity, even if his object resembles a toaster, is different.

    But though it is apparent why games might require a different kind of criticism than other media, what remains unclear is what Bogost believes the role of the critic ought to be. He says, contradicting the conclusion of How to Do Things with Videogames, that “criticism is not conducted to improve the work or the medium, to win over those who otherwise would turn up their noses at it. . . . Rather, it is conducted to get to the bottom of something, to grasp its form, context, function, meaning, and capacities” (xii). This seems like somewhat of a mistake, and a mistake that ignores both the history of criticism and Bogost’s own practice as a critic. Yes, of course criticism should investigate its object, but even Matthew Arnold, who emphasized “disinterestedness . . . keeping aloof from . . . ‘the practical view of things,’” also understood that such an approach could establish “a current of fresh and true ideas” (Arnold 1993 [1864], 37 and 49). No matter how disinterested, criticism can change the ways that art and the world are conceived and thought about. Indeed, only a sentence later it is difficult to discern what precisely Bogost believes the function of videogame criticism to be if not for improving the work, the medium, the world, if not for establishing a current from which new ideas might emerge. He writes that criticism can “venture so far from ordinariness of a subject that the terrain underfoot gives way from manicured path to wilderness, so far that the words that we would spin tousle the hair of madness. And then, to preserve that wilderness and its madness, such that both the works and our reflections on them become imbricated with one another and carried forward into the future where others might find them anew” (xii; more on this in a moment). It is clear that Bogost understands the mode of the critic to be disinterested and objective, to answer ‘the question ‘What is even going on here?’” (x), but it remains unclear why such an activity would even be necessary or worthwhile, and indeed, there is enough in the book that points to criticism being a futile, unnecessary, parodic, parasitic, preposterous endeavor with no real purpose or outcome. In other words, he may say how to talk about videogames, but not why anyone would ever really want to do so.

    I have at least partially convinced myself that Bogost’s claims about videogames being more like toasters than other art forms, along with the statements above regarding the disreputable nature of videogames, are meant as rhetorical provocations, ironic salvos to inspire from others more interesting, rigorous, thoughtful, and complex critical writing, both of the popular and academic stripe. I also understand that, as he did in Unit Operations, Bogost balks at the idea of a critical practice wholly devoted to videogames alone: “the era of fields and disciplines ha[s] ended. The era of critical communities ha[s] ended. And the very idea of game criticism risks Balkanizing games writing from other writing, severing it from the rivers and fields that would sustain it” (187). But even given such an understanding, it is unclear who precisely is suggesting that videogame criticism should be a hermetically sealed niche cut off from the rest of the critical tradition. It is also unclear why videogame criticism is so preposterous, why writing it—even if a critic’s task is limited to getting “to the bottom of something”—is so divorced from the current of other works of cultural criticism. And finally, given what are, at the end of the day, some very good short essays on games that deserve a thoughtful readership, it is unclear why Bogost has framed his activity in such a negatively self-aware fashion.

    So, rather than pursue a discussion about the relative merits and faults of Bogost’s critical self-reflexivity, I think it worth asking what changed between his 2011 and 2015 books, what took him from being a cheerleader—albeit a reticent, tempered, and disinterested one—to questioning the very value of videogame criticism itself. Why does he change from thinking about the various possibilities for doing things with videogames to thinking that “entering a games retail outlet is a lot like entering a sex shop or a liquor store . . . game shops are still vaguely unseemly” (182)?[8] I suspect that such events as 2014’s Gamergate—when independent game designer Zoe Quinn, critic Anita Sarkeesian, and others were threatened and harassed for their feminist views—the generally execrable level of discourse found on internet comments pages, and the questionable cultural identity of the “gamer,” probably account for some of Bogost’s malaise.[9] Indeed, most of the essays found in How to Talk about Videogames initially appeared online, largely in The Atlantic (where he is an editor) and Gamasutra, and, I have to imagine, suffered for it in their comments sections. With this change in audience and platform, it seems to follow that the opening and closing of How to Talk about Videogames reflect a general exhaustion with the level of discourse from fans, companies, and internet trolls. How can criticism possibly thrive or have an impact in a community that so frequently demonstrates its intolerance and rage toward other modes of thinking and being that might upset its worldview and sense of cultural identity? How does one talk to those who will not listen?

    And if these questions perhaps sound particularly apt today—that the “gamer” might bear an awfully striking resemblance to other headline-grabbing individuals and groups dominating the public discussion in the months after the publication of Bogost’s book, namely Donald J. Trump and his supporters—they should. I agree with Bogost that it can be difficult to see the value of criticism at a time when many United States citizens appear, at least on the surface, to be actively choosing to be uncritical. (As Philip Mirowski argues, the promotion of “ignorance [is] the lynchpin in the neoliberal project” [2013, 96].) Given such a discursive landscape, what is the purpose of writing, even in Bogost’s admirably clear (yet at times maddeningly spare) prose, if no amount of stylistic precision or rhetorical complexity—let alone a mastery of basic facts—can influence one’s audience? How to Talk about Videogames is framed as a response to the anti-intellectual atmosphere of the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and it is an understandably despairing one. As such, it is not surprising that Bogost concludes that criticism has no role to play in improving the medium (or perhaps the world) beyond mere phenomenological encounter and description given the social fabric of life in the 2010s. In a time of vocally racist demagoguery, an era witnessing a rising tide of reactionary nationalism in the US and around the world, a period during which it often seems like no words of any kind can have any rhetorical effect at all—procedurally or otherwise—perhaps the best response is to be quiet. But I also think that this is to misunderstand the function of critical thought, regardless of what its object might be.

    To be sure, videogame creators have probably not yet produced a Citizen Kane (1941), and videogame criticism has not yet produced a work like Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). I am unconvinced, however, that such future accomplishments remain out of reach, that videogames are barred from profound aesthetic expression, and that writing about games preclude the heights attained by previous criticism simply because of some ill-defined aspect of the medium which prevents it from ever aspiring to anything beyond mere craft. Is a study of the Metal Gear series (1987–2015) similar to Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) really all that preposterous? Is Mario forever denied his own Samuel Johnson simply because he is composed of code rather than words? For if anything is unclear about Bogost’s book, it is what precisely prohibits videogames from having the effects and impacts of other art forms, why they are restricted to the realm of toasters, incapable of anything beyond adolescent poiesis. Indeed, Bogost’s informative and incisive discussion about Ms. Pac-Man (1981), his thought-provoking interpretation of Mountain (2014), or the many moments of accomplished criticism in his previous books—for example, his masterful discussion of the “figure of fascination” in Unit Operations—betray such claims.[10]

    Matthew Arnold once famously suggested that creativity and criticism were intimately linked, and I believe it might be worthwhile to remember this for the future of videogame criticism:

    It is the business of the critical power . . . “in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature. (Arnold 1993 [1864], 29)

    In other words, criticism has a vital role to play in the development of an art form, especially if an art form is experiencing contraction or stagnation. Whatever disagreements I might have with Arnold, I too believe that criticism and creativity are indissolubly linked, and further, that criticism has the power to shape and transform the world. Bogost says that “being a critic is not an enjoyable job . . . criticism is not pleasurable” (x). But I suspect that there may still be many who share Arnold’s view of criticism as a creative activity, and maybe the problem is not that videogame criticism is akin to preposterous toaster criticism, but that the function of videogame criticism at the present time is to expand its own sense of what it is doing, of what it is capable, of how and why it is written. When Bogost says he wants “words that . . . would . . . tousle the hair of madness,” why not write in such a fashion (Bogost’s controlled style rarely approaches madness), expanding criticism beyond mere phenomenological summary at best or zombified parasitism at worst. Consider, for instance, Jonathan Arac: “Criticism is literary writing that begins from previous literary writing. . . . There need not be a literary avant-garde for criticism to flourish; in some cases criticism itself plays a leading cultural role” (1989, 7). If we are to take seriously Bogost’s point about how the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Gone Home reveals the aesthetic and political impoverishment of the medium, then it is disappointing to see someone so well-positioned to take a leading cultural role in shaping the conversation about how videogames might change or transform surrendering the field.

    Forget analogies. What if videogame criticism were to begin not from comparing games to toasters but from previous writing, from the history of criticism, from literature and theory, from theories of art and architecture and music, from rhetoric and communication, from poetry? For, given the complex mediations present in even the simplest games—i.e., games not only involve play and narrative, but raise concerns about mimesis, music, sound, spatiality, sociality, procedurality, interface effects, et cetera—it increasingly makes less and less sense to divorce or sequester games from other forms of cultural study or to think that videogames are so unique that game studies requires its own critical modality. If Bogost implores game critics not to limit themselves to a strictly bound, niche field uninformed by other spheres of social and cultural inquiry, if game studies is to go forward into a metacritical third wave where it can become interested in what makes videogames different from other forms and self-reflexively aware of the variety of established and interconnecting modes of cultural criticism from which the field can only benefit, then thinking about the function of criticism historically should guide how and why games are written about at the present time.

    Before concluding, I should also note that something else perhaps changed between 2011 and 2015, namely, Bogost’s alignment with the philosophical movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. In 2012, he published Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, a book that picks up some of the more theoretical aspects of Unit Operations and draws upon the work of Graham Harman and other anti-correlationists to pursue a flat ontology, arguing that the job of the philosopher “is to amplify the black noise of objects to make the resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, their unit operations” (Bogost 2012, 34). Rather than continue pursuing an anthropocentric, correlationist philosophy that can only think about objects in relation to human consciousness, Bogost claims that “the answer to correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate but the acknowledgment of endless ones, all self-absorbed, obsessed by givenness rather than by turpitude” (78). He suggests that philosophy should extend the possibility of phenomenological encounter to all objects, to all units, in his parlance; let phenomenology be alien and weird; let toasters encounter tables, refrigerators, books, climate change, Pittsburgh, Higgs boson particles, the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, bagels, et cetera.[11]

    Though this is not the venue to pursue a broader discussion of Bogost’s philosophical writing, I mention his speculative turn because it seems important for understanding his changing attitudes about criticism. That is, as Graham Harman’s 2012 essay, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” negatively demonstrates, it is unclear what a flat ontology has to say, if anything, about art, what such a philosophy can bring to critical, hermeneutic activity.[12] Indeed, regardless of where one stands with regard to object-oriented ontology and other speculative realisms, what these philosophies might offer to critics seems to be one of the more vexing and polarizing intellectual questions of our time. Hermeneutics may very well prove inescapably “correlationist,” and, indeed, no matter how disinterested, historical. It is an open question whether or not one can ground a coherent and worthwhile critical practice upon a flat ontology. I am tempted to suspect not. I also suspect that the current trends in continental philosophy, at the end of the day, may not be really interested in criticism as such, and perhaps that is not really such a big deal. Criticism, theory, and philosophy are not synonymous activities nor must they be. (The question about criticism vis-à-vis alien phenomenology also appears to have motivated the Object Lessons series that Bogost edits.) This is all to say, rather than ground videogame criticism in what may very well turn out to be an intellectual fad whose possibilities for writing worthwhile criticism remain somewhat dubious, perhaps there may be more ripe currents and streams—namely, the history of criticism—that can inform how we write about videogames. Criticism may be steered by keeping in view many polestars; let us not be overly swayed by what, for now, burns brightest. For an area of humanistic inquiry that is still very much emerging, it seems a mistake to assume it can and should be nothing more than toaster criticism.

    In this review I have purposefully made few claims about the state of videogames. This is partly because I do not feel that any more work needs to be done to justify writing about the medium. It is also partly because I feel that any broad statement about the form would be an overgeneralization at this point. There are too many games being made in too many places by too many different people for any all-encompassing statement about the state of videogame art to be all that coherent. (In this, I think Bogost’s sense of the need for a media microecology of videogames is still apropos.) But I will say that the state of videogame criticism—and, strangely enough, particularly the academic kind—is one of the few places where humanistic inquiry seems, at least to me, to be growing and expanding rather than contracting or ossifying. Such a generally positive and optimistic statement about a field of the humanities may not adhere to present conceptions about academic activity (indeed, it might even be unfashionable!), which seem to more generally despair about the humanities, and rightfully so. Admitting that some modes of criticism might be, at least in some ways, exhausted, would be an important caveat, especially given how the past few years have seen a considerable amount of reflection about contemporary modes of academic criticism—e.g., Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) or Eric Hayot’s “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do” (2014). But I think that, given how the anti-intellectual miasma that has long been present in US life has intensified in recent years, creeping into seemingly every discourse, one of the really useful functions of videogame criticism may very well be its potential ability to allow reflection on the function of criticism itself in the twenty-first century. If one of the most prominent videogame critics is calling his activity “preposterous” and his object “adolescent,” this should be a cause for alarm, for such claims cannot but help to perpetuate present views about the worthlessness of the humanities. So, I would like to modestly suggest that, rather than look to toasters and widgets to inform how we talk about videogames, let us look to critics and what they have written. Edward W. Said once wrote: “for in its essence the intellectual life—and I speak here mainly about the social sciences and the humanities—is about the freedom to be critical: criticism is intellectual life and, while the academic precinct contains a great deal in it, its spirit is intellectual and critical, and neither reverential nor patriotic” (1994, 11). If one can approach videogames—of all things!—in such a spirit, perhaps other spheres of human activity can rediscover their critical spirit as well.

    _____

    Bradley J. Fest will begin teaching writing this fall at Carnegie Mellon University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in boundary 2 (interviews here and here), Critical Quarterly, Critique, David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (Bloomsbury, 2014), First Person Scholar, The Silence of Fallout (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), Studies in the Novel, and Wide Screen. He is also the author of a volume of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), and a chapbook, “The Shape of Things,” was selected as finalist for the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize and is forthcoming in Verse. Recent poems have appeared in Empty Mirror, PELT, PLINTH, TXTOBJX, and Small Po(r)tions. He previously reviewed Alexander R. Galloway’s The Interface Effect for The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

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    _____

    NOTES

    [1] On some of the first wave controversies, see Aarseth (2001).

    [2] For a representative sample of essays and books in the narratology versus ludology debate from the early days of academic videogame criticism, see Murray (1997 and 2004), Aarseth (1997, 2003, and 2004), Juul (2001), and Frasca (2003).

    [3] For representative texts, see Crogan (2011), Dyer-Witherford and Peuter (2009), Galloway (2006a and 2006b), Jagoda (2013 and 2016), Nakamura (2009), Shaw (2014), and Wark (2007). My claims about the vitality of the field of game studies are largely a result of having read these and other critics. There have also been a handful of interesting “videogame memoirs” published recently. See Bissell (2010) and Clune (2015).

    [4] Bogost defines procedurality as follows: “Procedural representation takes a different form than written or spoken representation. Procedural representation explains processes with other processes. . . . [It] is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language” (2007, 9). For my own discussion of proceduralism, particularly with regard to The Stanley Parable (2013) and postmodern metafiction, see Fest (forthcoming 2016).

    [5] For instance, in the concluding chapter of Unit Operations, Bogost writes powerfully and convincingly about the need for a comparative videogame criticism in conversation with other forms of cultural criticism, arguing that “a structural change in our thinking must take place for videogames to thrive, both commercially and culturally” (2006, 179). It appears that the lack of any structural change in the nonetheless wildly thriving—at least financially—videogame industry has given Bogost serious pause.

    [6] Indeed, at one point he even questions the justification for the book in the first place: “The truth is, a book like this one is doomed to relatively modest sales and an even more modest readership, despite the generous support of the university press that publishes it and despite the fact that I am fortunate enough to have a greater reach than the average game critic” (Bogost 2015, 185). It is unclear why the limited reach of his writing might be so worrisome to Bogost given that, historically, the audience for, say, poetry criticism has never been all that large.

    [7] In addition to those previously mentioned, Bogost has also published Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009) and, with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (2010). Also forthcoming is Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2016).

    [8] This is, to be sure, a somewhat confusing point. Are not record stores, book stores, and video stores (if such things still exist), along with tea shops, shoe stores, and clothing stores “retail establishment[s] devoted to a singular practice” (Bogost 2015, 182–83)? Are all such establishments unseemly because of the same logic? What makes a game store any different?

    [9] For a brief overview of Gamergate, see Winfield (2014). For a more detailed discussion of both the cultural and technological underpinnings of Gamergate, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the algorithmic governance of sites such as Reddit or 4chan and online misogyny and harassment, see Massanari’s (2015) important essay. For links to a number of other articles and essays on gaming and feminism, see Ligman (2014) and The New Inquiry (2014). For essays about contemporary “gamer” culture, see Williams (2014) and Frase (2014). On gamers, Bogost writes in a chapter titled “The End of Gamers” from his previous book: “as videogames broaden in appeal, being a ‘gamer’ will actually become less common, if being a gamer means consuming games as one’s primary media diet or identifying with videogames as a primary part of one’s identity” (2011, 154).

    [10] See Bogost (2006, 73–89). Also, to be fair, Bogost devotes a paragraph of the introduction of How to Talk about Videogames to the considerable affective properties of videogames, but concludes the paragraph by saying that games are “Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk-flavored chewing gum” (Bogost 2015, ix), which, I feel, considerably undercuts whatever aesthetic value he had just ascribed to them.

    [11] In Alien Phenomenology Bogost calls such lists “Latour litanies” (2012, 38) and discusses this stylistic aspect of object-oriented ontology at some length in the chapter, “Ontography” (35–59).

    [12] See Harman (2012). Bogost addresses such concerns in the conclusion of Alien Phenomenology, responding to criticism about his study of the Atari 2600: “The platform studies project is an example of alien phenomenology. Yet our efforts to draw attention to hardware and software objects have been met with myriad accusations of human erasure: technological determinism most frequently, but many other fears and outrages about ‘ignoring’ or ‘conflating’ or ‘reducing,’ or otherwise doing violence to ‘the cultural aspects’ of things. This is a myth” (2012, 132).

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    WORKS CITED

    • Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
    • ———. 2001. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1, no. 1. http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html.
    • ———. 2003. “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis.” Game Approaches: Papers from spilforskning.dk Conference, August 28–29. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Aarseth.pdf.
    • ———. 2004. “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 45–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Arac, Jonathan. 1989. Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Arnold, Matthew. 1993 (1864). “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini, 26–51. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    • Bissell, Tom. 2010. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Pantheon.
    • Bogost, Ian. 2006. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
    • ———. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • ———. 2009. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT
    • Press.
    • ———. 2011. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. 2015. How to Talk about Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. Forthcoming 2016. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. New York: Basic Books.
    • Bogost, Ian, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. 2010. Newsgames: Journalism at Play.
    • Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Clune, Michael W. 2015. Gamelife: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
    • Crogan, Patrick. 2011. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Tehnoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Dyer-Witherford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Fest, Bradley J. Forthcoming 2016. “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction.” “Videogame Adaptation,” edited by Kevin M. Flanagan, special issue, Wide Screen.
    • Frasca, Gonzalo. 2003. “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 221–36. New York: Routledge.
    • Frase, Peter. 2014.  “Gamer’s Revanche.” Peter Frase (blog), September 3. http://www.peterfrase.com/2014/09/gamers-revanche/.
    • Galloway, Alexander R. 2006a. “Warcraft and Utopia.” Ctheory.net, February 16. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=507.
    • ———. 2006b. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Harman, Graham. 2012. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43, no. 2: 183–203.
    • Hayot, Eric. 2014. “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1: 53–77.
    • Jagoda, Patrick. 2013. “Gamification and Other Forms of Play.” boundary 2 40, no. 2: 113–44.
    • ———. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Juul, Jesper. 2001. “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” Game Studies 1, no. 1. http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/.
    • Ligman, Chris. 2014. “August 31st.” Critical Distance, August 31. http://www.critical-distance.com/2014/08/31/august-31st/.
    • Massanari, Adrienne . 2015. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society, OnlineFirst, October 9.
    • Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso.
    • Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • ———. 2004. “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 1–11. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Nakamura, Lisa. 2009. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 2: 128–44.
    • The New Inquiry. 2014. “TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism.” New Inquiry, September 2. http://thenewinquiry.com/features/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
    • Said, Edward W. 1994. “Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler.” boundary 2 21, no. 3: 1–18.
    • Shaw, Adrienne. 2014. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Williams, Ian. “Death to the Gamer.” Jacobin, September 9. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/death-to-the-gamer/.
    • Winfield, Nick. 2014. “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.” New York Times, October 15. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/technology/gamergate-women-video-game-threats-anita-sarkeesian.html.

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  • A Closing Discussion to 'Legacies of the Future'

    A Closing Discussion to 'Legacies of the Future'

    Only to put a pin in b2‘s Legacies of the Future: The Life and Work of Edward Said, and the question: what is criticism? And: what is ‘its relationship, among other things, to specifically–but not exclusively–literary form and the function of imagination?’ Here, the scope found in Said.

    Trace the entirety of the conference here. (The volume is better with earphones.)