Eddie Izzard, apparently, will be voicing Reepicheep in the upcoming film version of Prince Caspian.
Archive for January, 2008
Now That I Like
Thursday, January 31st, 2008Process, Evidence, Closure
Thursday, January 31st, 2008There’s an interesting, complicated discussion of sexual assaults at Swarthmore in this week’s student paper, stemming partly from the case of a student last semester who was accused of having committed assaults and has not returned to campus this semester.
One of the consistent things that many students concerned with the issue say they want is a more open campus dialogue about the general issue of sexual assault but also some kind of resolution or closure on this specific case. As a contribution to dialogue, I want to point to one specific issue at the heart of much of the expressed dissatisfaction.
The students interviewed in the article seem generally satisfied with the counseling and support services provided by the college to victims of assault, and with the degree to which these services lay out some of the options and choices that victims have about how to deal with what’s been done to them. The issue for some is with what the college does in judicial or punitive terms.
In this case, it seems that the victims did not want to bring the accused into the judicial system outside of the college. As the article points out, there are a lot of reasons why they might not want to. One would be the difficulty of having to narrate and thus relive the incident itself in an institutional environment that is anything but consoling or supportive, where there is an expressly adversarial dimension to the way that their story gets authenticated as legal truth. The lawyer for the accused tries to find a way to discredit the accuser’s narrative, and the system itself by its nature is supposed to be scrupulously neutral about the truth of the narration until a jury has found it to be true beyond a reasonable doubt.
If we can step outside the usual terms of the acrimony about “political correctness” and so on, into the deeper waters of how we think about narration, memory and experience, I think just about anybody, of any political leaning, could acknowledge that stories and memories have immense human power, and that the circumstances under which we tell our stories transform us as individuals, and make our lives either deeply fulfilled or despoiled. A story I tell in an intimate moment that connects (and exposes) me to another person is very different from a story I am required by law to tell in front of an indifferent audience, even if both stories are exactly the same.
So I understand the reluctance to enter into the judicial system, or even a quasi-judicial campus system for this reason and others, including potentially a sympathy for the life and future of the accused. A victim who knew her attacker could well wish that her attacker be compelled to some kind of responsibility or understanding without wanting him to spend years of his life in jail.
But that’s the problem: we don’t have a middle ground in which we can compel an individual to do some things without having to go through a judicial process, nor should we. If we understand why it is emotionally traumatic to have to testify in front of an indifferent public institution, then we should also understand why compelling people to enter into therapy, confess their crimes, sit in workshops, or be marked forever in civic records as a transgressor against the community is serious business. You can’t say “I understand why you don’t want to testify in front of a court” and then say, “It’s only a workshop, it’s only therapy, it’s only a notation on transcript: it’s not a big deal. It’s not jail“. It cuts both ways: it is a big deal. For the same reason that the trauma of having to narrate private experience in public is a big deal: because all of those things forge a compulsory relation between private selfhood and a public transcript of experience. It is something to which someone is subjected.
If those consequences are a big deal, then there’s got to be a due process for arriving at truth that allows for public scrutiny, that protects the rights of the accused as well as the accuser, that starts as neutral towards the question of what happened, if not at all neutral in its views of the meaning of the crime itself. E.g., an institution can have a prior belief that sexual assault is an extraordinarily serious violation which it will pursue vigorously, but when there is a question of consequences for an accused person, it has to start as neutral towards whether that accusation in that instance is true and it has to ask of the accused that they be willing to step outside of the private support system into a public judicial system charged with making a finding of truth.
Maybe the formal judicial system in the United States isn’t the best model for determining that kind of truth. There are a lot of reasons to question it. But some of its basic requirements strike me as indispensible: that its workings be public, that it be neutrally disposed at the outset towards the truth of any given accusation, that it have persistent rather than ad hoc procedures. I don’t have any problem with a private college privately deciding that it no longer wants to enroll a given student for almost any reason. That comes along with deciding freely whom you admit and don’t admit. But if what people want instead is a permanent note on a transcript, a compulsory requirement to attend counseling, a judicial-type consequence, then there’s got to be an established judicial procedure which by its character is necessarily completely different than a support system. On one level, I can’t help but feel that some of the concerned students want the college to impose judicial-type consequences for assault without the accusers having to undergo judicial-type scrutiny, to derive punishment and consequences out of the necessarily private, non-judgemental, emotionally healing logics of a counseling and support system.
There are really good reasons not to get those two things intertwined, even when the only judicial consequences being sought involve counseling, therapy or even mandatory dialogue between the accused and accuser. I think that one of the victims is right when she says of the accused, “this kid needs some serious counseling”. But I wish she could see why administrators said that there wasn’t any way to make that come about. That can’t happen unless a serious judicial procedure happens, and if the accused isn’t here, there isn’t any way to compel him to come here and be a part of that procedure without turning to the court system outside the college. Because even in a very small way, that deprives that person of his liberty. There isn’t any way to investigate that doesn’t require the public collection of testimony, and public scrutiny of the same. The victim observes that the college told her that either she and the other accusers “do something or nothing happens”. Yes, that’s right. That’s how it needs to be.
One-A-Day: David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous
Thursday, January 31st, 2008Cory Doctorow makes a lot of sales to me through his recommendations on Boing Boing. He tends to have an eye for things that I at least think I’m interested in. Sometimes, though, I feel a bit let down, feeling more like “I gave a little bit of money to one of Cory’s friends (which seems an ok thing to do)” rather than “He’s right, this book or graphic novel is really compelling”.
Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous feels to me more like one of the former than the latter. The book strains to say something new about digital search and digital knowledge. It also has the obsession that some of the digerati have with proclaiming the digital as a utopian revolution against an old order. It’s not really thinking in original ways about the history of categories, typologies, information hierarchies, catalogs and so on: we get the obligatory fly-by of Plato and Aristotle, sure, but not much in-between. It’s only at the end that Weinberger even asks the question: if knowledge is intrinsically miscellaneous, why have we had such a long interregnum of typology, taxonomy, and classification? What he offers is a kind of three-page potted sort of Enlightenment-style fable about how we fell from miscellaneous Eden through the original sin of some old thinkers and now can glimpse utopia once again.
It feels as if he’s selling something. This is one thing that really wearies me about a certain kind of writing by the digerati. It’s often reads as if the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has just pulled up and invited me to hop on his caged bandwagon. On one level, Weinberger is just preaching the gospel of Web 2.0, and I’m pretty much inside that revival tent myself. When he describes four key strategies (filter on the way out not the way in, associate a piece of information with as many classification systems as possible, everything is metadata and everything can be a label, and give up control), I pretty much agree with them all as approaches. I just don’t accept them as inevitable, universal and ubiquitious.
What irritates me is the either/or character of his presentation, which is one of the basic attributes of digerati manifestos. You’re in or you’re out. This is the way to do it, all other ways are bad. Thank god technology is at last liberating information and knowledge. There are no choices to be made, only discoveries of the one true way. People who feel confused or alienated by a Web 2.0 environment are just fossils. Information is miscellaneous, in Weinberger’s description. Reality is being unveiled at last.
It reminds me a bit of naive holism, of flip dismissals of “reductionism” in knowledge systems. Saying that you’re against reductionism or for it is like saying that you’re against breathing out carbon dioxide but very much in favor of breathing in oxygen. We confine or expand the questions we’re asking of the world situationally, in dynamic relationship to other people’s questions and our own purposes of the moment. Today I may compress some heuristic boundary I’m using, tomorrow I may discard it, and I’ll be perfectly right to do so both times. The same goes for information and knowledge as “miscellaneous”. Today I may classify from the top, tomorrow I may tag from below. Today I may want to be in a narrow, tightly-bounded conversation with a limited number of specialists who are following disciplinary constraints; tomorrow I may want to drift on the ocean of humanity’s digital sea, seeing what I pull up in my net.
The problem with old expert-driven bibliographic control or academic disciplinarity is that its strong correspondence with institutional organization made it seem both natural and essential to its practicioners, rather than a strategic tool adopted at certain moments to heighten the generativity or focus of knowledge-production–and it encouraged highly specialized knowledge practices to claim the right to dominate public decision-making and everyday forms of knowing as their birthright. Old practices of cataloging and disciplinarity kept scholars and experts from remembering that those practices were provisional, tactical responses to knowledge production.
Weinberger is right that everything can be and often should be miscellaneous, as he describes it. The problem is that he goes well beyond that to proclaim this as manifest destiny: “traditional trees”, as he puts it, have been “useful”, but it’s rather the same way that we might say that horses were useful for getting around before the internal combustion engine. Knowledge, in his view, is not organized. This is a Platonic claim about the essential character of all knowledge, at all times. When it’s organized prior to use, that’s a false, misshapen imposition. No capacities, abilities, or possibilities are lost in the recognition of the truth of knowledge’s miscellaneous character.
“In the miscellanized world, every idea is discussed, so no idea remains simple for long.” (p. 213) Doesn’t that just warm your heart? I feel as if Tiny Tim is about to yell out, “God bless us, everyone”. But when there isn’t any discussion anywhere of the disadvantages, the problems, the practical challenges, the downsides of what Weinberger calls “the third order”, when there isn’t any kind of sophisticated investigation of why past systems for organizing knowledge came to exist, then I’m uneasy even if I’m interested in and open to what he’s peddling.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Independent
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008In American politics, independent voters are magical creatures. They are invoked, summoned, conjured with. Ritual sacrifices are made in their name. Candidates rub the fictive head of the Independent Voter for good luck. Never so much during primary season that the candidate loses the fidelity of his party constituency, of course. Unless it’s an open primary.
In reality, of course, the Independent Voter isn’t any single thing. There are voters who are unaffiliated out of casual disengagement, and those who adamantly refuse party affiliation as if it were poison. There are conservative independents, liberal independents, radical independents, libertarian independents. There are independents who barely bother to vote and have no real interest in the political system and independents who are as passionate about American politics as the most dedicated ward captain.
The independents whom some of the candidates are courting, though, do strike me as having some roughly similar views about politics, if not specific policy or ideological positions. As an independent myself, I’m conscious that I have some of these root-level, basically emotional, orientations. At least since the mid-1970s, these independents have been more attracted to the personal character, leadership style, and rhetorical mode of a candidate than to a match between the independent’s own specific convictions and the candidate’s declared positions. If a candidate seems fearless, bluntly honest, open-minded, willing to buck the conventional wisdom (particularly party-line ideology), they’re attractive to this kind of independent sensibility.
This explains why independents are easily seduced and abandoned, and stumble from one jilted political relationship to the next. (I very much include myself in this indictment.) Pundits have been using the “wouldya like to have a beer with the candidate?” test to evaluate the general likeability of political figures. For some independents, that’s not the test. Instead, it’s about about looking in the mirror and asking our reflections, “Who is the fairest of them all?”. We flatter ourselves and imagine that we are idiosyncratic in our loyalties, persuadable by rational argument, willing to side with truth wherever we find it, uncorrupted in a world full of corruption. And so we ask of a candidate: are you like that, too? A lot of independents are looking for the latter-day fantasy version of Harry Truman, so different from his historical reality.
Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes scored a direct hit on the “objective” liberal intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s, and the manner in which they delivered obsequious compliments to their own judiciousness and lack of ideology. We all have ideology, even the independent, and ideology is not some shameful fetish that one keeps in a locked box in the closet. If you don’t like that word, try philosophy or theory. We all have first principles from which we reason or feel or find our way to specific convictions and outcomes. The person of pure reason who comes to every issue as innocent as a newborn is not just a fiction, it’s a stupid and unattractive fiction.
That said, I do like the idea of being able to change one’s mind, of being open to unexpected evidence, of seeing things from multiple perspectives. I tend to look at politics the same way Jane Jacobs looked at cities, as something that grows organically out of experience and usage. The strong party or movement loyalist looks at politics the way that Le Corbusier looked at cities: as a thing to be built by rigid principles, and damn people if they’re too stupid or recalcitrant to live in the city of tomorrow the way that they’re supposed to.
So I’m an independent, and I want my preferred candidates to exhibit some of the outlook of the independent. If I turn on a candidate I’ve liked, it’ll often first be because they violated some crucial part of my expectation for independent behaviors. Take John McCain. I actually did like him somewhat in 2000, so I didn’t care so much about the fact that his open, declared political convictions were a million miles away from mine, and likely to violate many things that I believe in. But he first lost any hope that I might ever vote for him not because I woke up and paid attention to what he actually might do as President but because he fawned and cringed like a whipped dog at the feet of his master, because he went crawling to people and interests who had treated him so badly. The independent fantasizes that his ideal candidate will stand proud even if that means not winning, at least if the stakes are high enough and the principle important enough. When you get on a stage and give an enthusiastic hug to a man who slandered your family and yourself, not to mention a man who is dragging your country’s reputation down into the mud, you lose the independent voter.
This of course is all stupidly macho as a way to think about politics: it’s some kind of ur-brain thing about honor and loyalty and courage and so on working its way up into precincts that should be making other kinds of judgments. If McCain’s 2000 candidacy had ever gotten past the point of the protective cloud of media hype that burnished these images to a sheen, I think I would have rejected him for other reasons, namely, the things he’d actually do as President. That’s something else that happens to independents: they fall for image, and then when they get a look at reality, they realize that they’re better off with some dull old political hack. Because the person they thought they liked is either an extremist or a screaming lunatic or just a mildly charismatic hack. Or is just a propped-up media darling whose missteps and dirty laundry are being obligingly hidden by reporters who also have the same fetishes as independents.
A strong party-line voter seems to have an easier job of it, at least on the surface. You get out your checklist and you run down in and when you have the best match, you’ve got your candidate. In reality, it doesn’t work out that way. The independent has to work backward from what they perceive to be the personal and ethical qualifications of a candidate to a match on political positions. The party-line voter has to work from a match on positions to whether or not the candidate has the skills, charisma and ethical consistency to carry out the political program. If you’re a progressive at the left end of the spectrum, you might find Kucinich matching you closely on paper, but judge that in the end, he wouldn’t be able to institute any of the positions you value. Maybe for the same reason, you end up backing Clinton even though on paper, she’s not really that progressive on many issues.
I don’t think that my type of independent is wrong to want what we want (in either ourselves or our candidates) even if we overestimate its value and our own personal ability to live up to that expectation. It is important to think past the image. It is important not to fall too deeply into man-on-a-white-horse messianism, to forget that a candidate is going to have to govern within a two-party system, to play small ball as well as throw a few Hail Mary passes. It is important not to forget about the value of commitments to core political values.
But I think it’s worth remaining an independent in sensibility and outlook, too. Not just because the party-line candidate is business as usual in a time where we need something else (don’t we always need something else)? But also because the party-line candidate can’t even be counted on to deliver business as usual as a function of their superior ideological discipline or specificity. How much has a Democratic Congress delivered in the last two years in terms of Democratic positions? (Assuming there is such a thing amid the contradictions of the contemporary Democratic Party.) I keep hearing that building a big tent is a fool’s errand, that persuasion is for chumps, and that all we need is a leader with the correct checklist and the will to fight without compromise or hesitation for it. If that were sufficient, things would already be far different than they are. Independents have one set of illusions, party loyalists and activists another.
Grubeus Shagrid, At Your Service
Monday, January 28th, 2008Low-energy day today: I spent a good part of yesterday playing the part of Shagrid, distant cousin to Hagrid of Harry Potter fame, convening an American expansion of the famous Hogwarts School. This was the consequence of my daughter’s request for a themed birthday party. One thing I discovered: it’s hard to find a fake beard in the middle of January. Another thing I discovered: if you spray-paint a grey wig brown, it will smell so toxic even after drying for three days that you won’t be able to wear it. A third thing: magic potions made from vinegar and baking soda are surprisingly sticky when they overflow and then dry on the dining room floor. But it was good fun.
My mom happened to bring along some of my old schoolwork from first through third grades. Reading through a stapled-together volume of “Monster Stories” I wrote from when I was nine, I came across the following, in between various stories about monsters robbing banks, pushing other monsters off cliffs, and getting into arguments with witches. See if you can guess what year it was.
——————–
Monster News
MONSTERGATE
President Monster has tapes!
They could be the answer.
One-A-Day, David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin, eds., History of Central Africa Volume 1
Monday, January 28th, 2008Students looking at the piles of books strewn over my desk, my windowsill, my bookshelves and my floor sometimes understate things a bit and say, “You have a lot of books”. (One reason I don’t really want to move again, ever, is not just so I can avoid packing them but also so I can avoid the accusatory glare from movers.)
One thing I sometimes say in reply is, “Well, they’re the tools of my trade”. Truth to tell, there are some on the shelves that I haven’t opened in years, and maybe a few that it’s likely I’ll never open again. However, if they’re involved in my teaching in any manner, I tend to look at them a lot.
I’m guessing that many academics have a class of books that they frequently consult while preparing lectures or thinking about class discussions: books that concern areas of specialized knowledge that are not quite directly your own field but are quite close to it, that read very plainly and clearly, and that make minimal arguments or are theoretically unadorned while being informationally dense. Textbooks for specialists might be the best way to think of these works.
The Birmingham and Martin anthology is a great example of this kind of book. When I’m teaching precolonial Central Africa, I often pull it off the shelf to refresh my knowledge and prepare my lectures. I’m not familiar enough with various precolonial states or peoples in the region to rattle off details about them intuitively: keeping Fang, Azande, Mangbetu and so on clear from one another is important but I really have to get a refresher every couple of years. (Whereas most southern African states and ethnonyms I know without review because I make use of that history in my own writing as well as in teaching.)
Once upon a time, I’m sure that the editors and publishers of this volume and its companion modern volume hoped it might be adopted for undergraduate use. Maybe it was when it was in print. I haven’t used it myself as an undergraduate reading, because I think you need to know quite a lot before reading it to make good use of what it has to say. It has the problem that a lot of Africanist writing has when it comes to communicating with non-specialist American or European audiences: little or no prior experience with the subject matter makes retaining names, details, and places very difficult.
It is the kind of writing that I think specialists should be writing for other specialists, though: a concise review of specialized knowledge about some basic or fundamental subject area. Effectively, a high-level Wikipedia, written just for us. No intent to resolve major disputes or stake an original claim (though all the authors in the Birmingham and Martin volume were picked because at the time, they were known as scholars who had made original research findings about the history of particular regions or states within Central, East and Southern Africa).
Now You Know, and Knowing Is Half the Battle
Thursday, January 24th, 2008Geeky Mom gets two things right about the recent Frontline special about children’s use of the Internet. First, that some of the parents shown in the show have no one to blame but themselves for not knowing what their kids are up to online, and second, that the program largely sought to play up to the fears of those parents in a time-honored, well-tested fashion.
As with children’s television, radio, mass-printed books, cave paintings and storytelling at the dawn of human history, the basic solution is literacy and conversation. Not for the kids, for the parents. You want to know what your kid is up to on MySpace? Know what MySpace is. Have a MySpace page. Make a family culture. That’s not just so you can understand your kid: it’s about an enduring new mode of literacy that is powerfully distributed through every aspect of your life already, even if you don’t know it or don’t care to know it. (I’d go off on a tangent about humanistic academics and their lamentably low levels of digital literacy here, but I’ll save that for another day.) If you try to gain some digital literacy to understand your child’s world, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor as well.
The Frontline producer who shows up in the thread at Geeky Mom agrees that the Internet is a double-edged sword. I agree: one edge is knowledge and the other edge is ignorance. The Internet has two sides the way that all communication and representation and expressive culture have two sides. The technologically unique dimensions of digital culture have very little to do with the issues that most concern ignorant parents about online use by contemporary teenagers. Your teenager is keeping secrets from you? Heavens to Murgatroyd, that never happened back when we just had typewriters and television. People are writing bad things on the Internet? I never heard of a book with dangerous or disturbing content which happened to find its way into the hands of people under the age of 18. Sexual deviants are looking for children online? I guess the flashers and predators that were around when I was a kid were time-travellers from the digital future. Kids are looking at online pr0n? I guess I’m just imagining that the 13-year old boys in my junior high noticed the Cheryl Tiegs fishnet-bathing-suit issue of Sports Illustrated in the school library and helpfully passed it around potlatch style for a couple of months before the librarians caught on.
There are many genuinely novel capacities, abilities, and forms that digital technologies create or permit, some of which really are culturally transformative, sometimes jarringly so. But the “Won’t somebody think of the CHILDRENS??????” stuff strikes me as largely coming from a much more historically established infrastructure of moral panic and public anxiety about family, media and modern life.
It could be worse. At least the Frontline people are in there talking about the show, agree there are two sides to the coin, and actually care about things like facts. When the same kind of narrative gets in the hands of media producers who no longer have any sense of shame or any residual connection to the world as it actually is, you get something roughly like this Fox News segment on the game Mass Effect. What I love about the segment is that the poor guy from SpikeTV can straightforwardly say, “You’re simply wrong, and here’s the ways in which you’re factually wrong” and it doesn’t slow either the Fox newscaster or their pet “expert” Cooper Lawrence down for even a microsecond. She says, “You play as a man and the purpose of the game is seeking out women for sex”. He says, “Actually, you can be male or female and the discreetly sexual scene in the game is about 2 minutes long in a 3 to 4 hour experience”. They don’t even pause, on with the show. (I noticed looking at the Amazon reviews of Lawrence’s book that there are at least some reputational consequences to annoying the hell out of gamers, though I’m guessing that Amazon is going to remove most of those reviews. That, too, is another topic to take up soon in a separate entry.)
I’d love for digital literacy to progress far enough and fast enough across a number of spectrums that we could begin to have a public conversation about the real issues and choices it presents, rather than things like “it’s like kids have their own private world” and “I hear tell that there’s one of them video games where a kid could have sex or sumpin like that”.
Update: Cooper Lawrence confesses. Don’t hold your breath expecting Fox News to do the same.
One-A-Day: Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays in Algorithimic Culture
Thursday, January 24th, 2008Remember: these aren’t reviews. If I were reviewing Galloway’s Gaming, I’d spend a long while talking about why I like much of it, and think it works very well alongside similar works of critical theory applied to games and digital culture by Ian Bogost and McKenzie Wark. One of the old criticisms made by “ludological” scholars doing formalist criticism of games about scholars approaching games from the perspective of critical theory, media studies and film theory was simply that they didn’t know anything about games. Once upon a time, that had more than a little truth to it. When you read Bogost, Wark and Galloway, you can see that the debate, if such it is, has moved well past that point, because they’re thinking clearly about what kinds of “texts” games really are in the context of critical theory.
There is one thing that I wanted to discuss in this shorter, non-review context, however. I’m really taking Galloway’s work as an example of a wider pattern in humanistic scholarship, so it should be understood that what I’m going to say is not just applicable to him.
Rather than complain about jargon per se, what bothers me a little is the largely aesthetic need in critical theory to produce terminological and conceptual novelty in order to authenticate the labor of producing theory. It’s a formal characteristic of some theory-work that runs very deep. James Miller’s Lingua Franca essay “Is Bad Writing Necessary?: George Orwell, Theodor Adorno and the Politics of Literature” is still one of the best, concise treatments of some of these questions. (For all that Lingua Franca sometimes featured weakly reported pieces, I really miss it.)
You would think it would be enough to write some short, clever essays on gaming and digital culture that integrated theoretical insights where appropriate. The problem in terms of building academic reputation capital is that it’s not clear where the specialization or expertise enters into that, or what would distinguish essays by a scholarly critic of digital culture from, say, Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy. My answer would be, in the sense of Miller’s article, Orwellian: what would distinguish the work of the academic is that it is intellectual, not that it is expert. In other words, it’s sufficient to be smart and to write well, that is to say, clearly.
Galloway’s book is smart, has novel insights, and is often (to me, at least), written clearly. The frustration I have is first that Galloway regards theory as something which requires the creation of a technical vocabulary and second that he seems to think that in order to make a contribution which establishes his academic credentials as a theorist in this area, he must fashion that vocabulary himself. (Wark and Bogost do some of this as well, as do critical theorists writing about most forms or genres.)
So, for example, his argument that video games are actions? Completely legitimate, important, useful. His argument that they are algorithimic cultural objects, and thus, that video games in certain ways have more in common with spreadsheets than checkers? Also important. His use of diegetic and nondiegetic, borrowed from film theory? Ok by me, though here I think the vocabulary is beginning to be more about establishing credibility with a chosen set of academic peers than delivering analysis which can only come through this particular terminology.
Galloway’s insistence that this all adds up to a distinctive body of gamic theory? This is where I feel as if something’s going on that doesn’t need to go on, and it’s going on in a fashion that’s has a sort of excess performativity that grates on me. Start with that word: “gamic”. It’s not just that it has the inelegance that theoretical neologisms often have, that harsh-sounding quality that is meant to emulate the unnatural technical sound of much scientific vocabulary. It’s that there’s already a term which Galloway studiously ignores. Not argues against, except in a single footnote: interactive. Yes, sure, I know that a theorist could find a million ways to talk about why that term is misleading, inaccurate, and so on. This is what Galloway does in one footnote. (Not for the first time, I’m struck that critical theory sometimes has a back-door empiricism in the way it coins and dismisses terms and words, as if the goal of a particular term is to provide a fully mimetic match to a particular specific textual or expressive phenomenon.) But it’s there, it has a reasonably good common-language sound to it, and it’s already in use.
What Galloway does isn’t just prefer his own word, gamic. (Which, I was surprised to find, has another existing meaning: a product or consequence of sex.) He declares theory as if he is inaugurating or inventing it. “Begin like this”, he writes, “If photographs are images, and films are moving images, then video games are actions. Let this be word one for video game theory.” (p. 2) You read that and wonder if he remembered to pick up a few extra tablets of God’s Commandments while he was up on the mountaintop. Sure, eventually some of the standard names will be dropped, both on games (Callois and Huizinga) and on theory (Deleuze, Geertz, Derrida). But the essays work hard, especially the first, to perform the role of theory-creator, and to convey sufficient austerity and distance in the relation between the medium and the critic. There’s even the de rigeur exaltation of “countergaming” at the end: no work of high theory about an existing form is complete if it doesn’t wish for that existing form to be displaced by avant-garde alternatives which disrupt the complicit character of a culture-industry mass-medium and therefore aim to produce true art. (Though he makes a great point that most “serious games” or art-games attempt to dissent from the games industry “through a lapse back to other media entirely” [p. 126].)
Again, don’t get me wrong. The essay on the cinematic origins of the first-person shooter is terrific, and the treatment of “allegories of control” in sandbox games is also incredibly useful and insightful. Everything in the book is good and important, and Galloway is very much a peer to Wark, Bogost and others writing on the theory of digital games. But it just seems to me that there is a way to write theory with rhetorical humility, to get down into the trenches with audiences, and to not make neologism and conceptual invention the defining attribute of theoretical contribution.
[I made a slight change to this entry a short while after posting it to note that Galloway does have one footnote dealing with the term interactivity, in which he pretty much performs that back-door empiricism: e.g., that the problem with interactivity is that it's not accurate to the reality of games.]
Liberal Arts Poster Children
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008I was thinking last week, after another discussion of assessment, about what I would regard as a successful product of a liberal arts education. If I don’t want to have a test of a fixed body of knowledge, but I agree that we ought to have benchmarks, what represents the bull’s eye? I figure that if you can identify a successful embodiment of the liberal arts in professional and personal life, and the person who represents that successful standard feels that the content of their education produced ways of thinking about the world that led to that success, you might have a better idea about what kinds of courses and teaching approaches would favor that ultimate goal.
If I had to identify people who most absolutely represent the highest ideals of a liberal arts education, I would start with the hosts of the television show Mythbusters.
If you’re not familiar with the show, the basic premise is that they take a commonly held belief or a commonly repeated cultural trope and try to concretely test its plausibility using some version of the scientific method. This can range from “is it actually easy to shoot fish in a barrel?” to “Could James Bond really have blown up a propane tank with a pistol at 20 yards and escape intact in the movie Casino Royale?”
The show does a very good job of showcasing how they approach testing each of these myths, about the thought-process that goes into designing a test, and about the concrete use of skills and improvisational adaptation to deal with various real-world issues involved in a test. Naturally, it’s skewed towards technical and scientific skills, but the hosts also have to deal with humanistic and social questions ranging from “what are the historical or cultural origins of this particular myth (and thus, what is it that we’re actually trying to test)?” to evaluating what makes for a persuasive or meaningful test of a particular concept. If you wanted to teach someone about the core commitments underlying the scientific method, about six episodes of Mythbusters might do about as well as a semester studying the philosophy of science: they do a marvelous job of walking the audience through a reasoning process and underscoring the place of skepticism in that process.
In many ways, I’d love to feel that any graduate of Swarthmore could potentially make a valid contribution to a project undertaken in a spirit like that of Mythbusters, and figure out what you would need to do on the educational side to make that happen. There is no required subject that I would insist upon.
Jamie Hyneman, one of the MythBusters hosts, put it better than I could hope to: “You can’t expect to teach someone everything he or she needs to know. A broad foundation of experience allows you to extrapolate things with which you have no direct experience. Specialists are usually in danger of not seeing the forest for the trees. If you acquire both a broad foundation and deep knowledge in a specific thing, you become much more dynamic in that area. If one takes both of these things to extremes, something truly transcendental can happen. In my case, my college education was not specifically useful to me later, but it had an effect on me in fundamental ways that were very major in the long run.”
Hyneman, it turns out, studied Russian languages and literatures. Of the other people in the show, one graduated from film school, one with an unspecified major but who had a career after graduation as an artist, one graduated with a major in electrical engineering, and one dropped out from drama school. So I don’t think they necessarily demonstrate that to live the liberal arts, you have to study them. Their careers after school are a better demonstration of how to live the liberal arts. Hyneman has done a wild range of things in his life, as has Adam Savage. The other three main MythBusters turned their different educational experiences towards work in the film industry, specifically in special effects.
So that’s what I think is worth looking at: how to match a liberal arts education with liberal arts outcomes. I don’t think it’s true that you simply don’t need any such thing, that you should just dive into life and do stuff. But a liberal arts curriculum could be much more about diving in than it often is, much more about making use of knowledge, much more about building and making and testing. If you were the president of a liberal arts college, I think you could do a lot worse than sitting down with Jamie Hyneman, paying him a consultant’s fee, and asking him, “How would you build a curriculum designed to train a MythBuster?” If I were sitting on top of some Mellon or MacArthur money, that might be what I’d do with it before I paid for study groups and faculty workshops and so on.
Strategic Admissions Limitations Talks?
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008I’m seeing and hearing some interesting discussions in a number of places about recent changes to the price structure of tuition at highly selective colleges and universities.
In today’s New York Times, Roger Lehecka and Andrew Delbanco criticize the Harvard-led shift towards discounting the price of a college education to families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 a year.
They make a number of interesting points, primarily that while Harvard, Yale and other wealthy institutions (including Swarthmore) can probably afford to spread the discounting that they already do for families earning under $120,000/year, many other institutions can’t afford to do so. Lehecka and Delbanco argue that what this will probably force those less wealthy institutions to do is cut the level of support they provide to poor students.
The authors don’t go any further with that line of thought, but you could argue that the strategy for less wealthy private colleges and universities would be to aggressively target academic underachievers from wealthy and upper-middle-class families and to sweeten the deal for the latter group by negotiating limited discounts, while shedding most or all low-income applicants on the grounds that they’re unaffordable. In short, to become institutions skewed to giving wealthy ne’er-do-wells the certification necessary to have continued access to professional-class employment.
What Lehecka and Delbanco don’t discuss is the possibility of some other trade-off for less wealthy private institutions. Part of the problem is that many universities and colleges basically offer the same package of services in more or less the same conventional forms.
There is a big difference between a small undergraduate-only college and a large research university in terms of how education is delivered. That difference holds whether we’re talking about extremely wealthy institutions or not, all the way down the line. There are arguments to be made on behalf of either of those modes of education. I preferred the small approach as a student, and I honestly prefer it also as a teacher, but there are students and ambitions better served at a large research institution.
Within a given institutional type, however, there is actually a remarkable similarity of form and approach at the level of curricular design and services offered. Each institution uses marketing literature to highlight its major sources of distinctiveness, like Swarthmore’s Honors program or Reed’s focus on individualized senior research projects. But these are like shiny decorations on top of a basically similar cake. The big difference, in the end, is the relative wealth of a given institution: that’s what determines how big and lustrous and tasty the cake really is. Swarthmore can support the range of subjects and favorable student-faculty ratio that it has because in the end, that’s what it spends its considerable money doing: having a curriculum that’s unusually wide for the small size of the institution without using large lecture courses or adjunct instructors as the primary vehicle for delivering that curriculum.
Less wealthy institutions could make a different choice than throwing poorer students overboard in order to discount tuition to less academically qualified but financially attractive upper-middle class students. They could aim to live in the “long tail” of the education marketplace. Right now, there are relatively few selective colleges and universities that try to deliver a strongly distinctive kind of education. Hampshire and St. John’s College are often cited as examples. There are other variants out there: colleges and universities that strongly skew to service-learning or community-based learning, for example. Art schools and conservatories are another great example, one that works at several scales of institutional wealth. I tend to think of MIT and Caltech as “long tail” institutions in the best possible way: rather than build a curriculum that’s aimed to satisfy any and all possible enrolled students, they’ve made a very clear-headed decision to be exceptionally strong in particular areas, and tailor whatever is left over to their institutional strengths, and then to admit only applicants whose aspirations and skills fit with the institution’s design.
That’s a road that’s open to less wealthy institutions as well. Rather than trying to emulate the “all services and subjects for all students”, make a conscious decision to be a particular kind of institution strongly servicing only one approach or philosophy or curricular area. Otherwise, they’re stuck trying to pretend that a Yugo is a Mercedes-Benz.
Part of the issue here is also the desperate extent to which everyone, even the selective institutions, are locked into a helpless follow-the-leader mode. No one wants to be the first to look different in an unfavorable (or maybe even favorable) light, for fear of being the mole whose head is above ground long enough to get whacked by parents and prospectives. It’s a bit like the Cold War: the superpowers are, deliberately or otherwise, spending everyone else into the ground.
You could argue that wealthy institutions owe their less wealthy competitors some extra consideration, and shouldn’t undertake changes in their pricing that put those less wealthy institutions in an unfavorable light. But by that token, wealthy institutions shouldn’t offer better services, pay faculty better, or do anything which distinguishes them or makes differential use of their relative wealth. Instead, they should just create a revenue-sharing system that distributes money evenly across all private institutions. (There have been some people who’ve suggested that this is exactly what should happen.) I don’t see anything appealing about that idea, and not just because I’m working for a wealthy institution and benefitting accordingly. All that would do is aggravate the homogeneity in the educational marketplace that’s already something of a problem about a thousand times more severely. We’d go from a market with Chevys trying to pretend to be Benzes alongside actual Benzes to a market with nothing but Trabants.
The wealthy institutions could probably do a lot more to shoulder the responsibility of social mobility, to work harder to bring in first-generation college students. To a significant extent, I’d like to see Swarthmore and all of its peers shift some of the efforts we presently put into pursuing diversity across a very wide range into the dedicated pursuit of qualified applicants who would be first-generation college students, to look at economic diversity as Job #1. A lot of lower-income families don’t even consider sending their children to what look like very expensive schools, even if their children are qualified applicants, because they look at the price tag and figure it’s unaffordable. What they don’t know is that at most of the wealthy institutions, a qualified applicant from a low-income family is likely to be admitted for no cost at all. This is what the sticker price hides from the public. Elite colleges and universities charge on a sliding scale, essentially. “Financial aid” could just as easily be described as “bargain price”: it’s as if you walked into a store, brought a product to the cash register, and your price was determined by your income level. If an applicant’s family is below, at or even near the poverty line, it’s going to be free.
Of course, however much elite colleges might pursue such qualified students, they’re in short supply because of deeper inequities in public education in the United States, and because of all the consequences of structural poverty to children in terms of their ability to achieve academically. Leave aside for the moment the underlying causes of that: the fact is that there is a limited supply of such students unless elite universities and colleges are also prepared to make internal changes to the way they deliver education to try and compensate for weak preparation on behalf of marginally qualified students. For various reasons, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good idea, but it’s definitely worth discussing openly and clearly as a further direction to go.
However, even before that issue arises, I think it’s clear that wealthy institutions that are slightly less well-known than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton could probably do more (perhaps collaboratively) to explain how pricing and eligibility really work, and to pursue first-generation or economically disadvantaged students in communities where knowledge about higher education may not be well-distributed, where all that families know is that it looks like it costs a lot of money to go to college.
I think the answer for less wealthy institutions isn’t to either keep up with the Joneses or complain bitterly about the inequity of Harvard’s tuition initiatives. It’s to get out of the game of trying to be all things to all possible students, to drop services and curriculum not because of a need to indiscriminately economize but because of a strategic, deliberate decision to specialize or seek distinction in some highly specific area or philosophical approach. Frankly, I think the wealthier institutions could use a shot of this kind of thinking, too.