Gaming - An Irritating Fad That I Never Got Good At

I have struggled with this post... but here it goes.

My earliest memories of gaming were getting virtually beat up by my friend Mike.  Mike loved WWF games and every time that I tried to get closer to beating him, he sped ahead of me.  He was a computer gaming virtuoso.  He could beat me at almost every game and it left me feeling like I didn't have a forte in the realm.  Every kid in my neighborhood was obsessed with gaming and I had the wind knocked out of me, so I turned away and started reading books... and now I am an English grad student.  Interesting how that works.

It does not mean that I gave up on games altogether but in the last ten years I have become less reliant on them as a means of social engagement.  I play occasionally to relieve tension or boredom, but for the most part I don't play.  However, I grew up with the culture and I wanted to relay some feelings about that culture.

First off, I loved the chapter at the end that explained how to throw a good gaming party and the benefits relayed therein.  However, one thing that I would like to add is that gaming parties are only as good as the skill level of the group.  If everyone is on the same level of gameplay or the game allows for a level playing field then the experience is a much more enjoyable one.  However, if you are playing a game with players of differing levels or one that does not allow for a level playing field then the experience degrades significantly.  For instance, take my friend Mike.  He had all day and night to work on matches and hand-eye coordination on his own Nintendo then Playstation then Xbox.  I did not.  I always got my consoles later and the games even later; so I was always behind the curve and did not do well against other players of high skill level.  However, on a game like Tony Hawk 2 I was able to produce more wins because of the simplicity of the controls and ideas in the game.  It leveled the playing field for me.

I believe that this leveling effect is best seen in the Wii.  Its basic controls and ideas facilitate new gamers, particularly those that have never played computer games before.  Simplistic but fun, re-playable games like Wii Sports have allowed for new gamers to feel comfortable in in-game situations that are easily relatable (being in a bowling alley) and are realistic to the real world situations.  Beyond that, hyper-realistic games like Modern Warfare, though infinitely more complex than Wii Sports, allows players a real world situation to play through.  The popularity of these two games shows this principle.  One, a more realistic and simplistic game will attract new players to consoles.  Two, a complex game with hyper-realistic features will allow for greater popularity and profit.

It has been interesting to think about the role of computer games in my life.  They are not a huge part of life now, but looking back they had a role that taught me a lot about my life.

Music and Remediation

Remediation is an interesting concept for any person that consumes media on a regular basis.  The authors begin down an interesting road about music as they introduce the concept of hypermediacy and at one point state that music is the site where most hypermediacy is happening on a regular basis. However, the authors make no mention of remediation in music?  They do not include a chapter on this subject?  I thought that this was an interesting change of direction from the authors and I would like to spend a few minutes exploring the idea of remediation within music and music culture.

The authors focus on just a few base artists where hypermediacy is happening at an alarming rate.  However, I would like to argue that the entire discourse community of music is a large network of remediated actions.  One artist does something that is an elaboration or a continuation on a theme from a prior artist, then jazz and folk come along to work with these norms, but they are working on breaking them and remediating them to their own needs.  In recent years, since 1980, Hip Hop culture has been based on creating new ways of understanding music and ideas through repurposing other types of music.  For example, I watched a rapper named Theophilus London this last week use "Puttin' on the Ritz" to create a new song that creates similar themes just in a hip hop context.  I was surprised to see that David Byrne was one of the biggest examples the authors gave.  In the eighties he used Japanese play formats to create new and modern centerpieces of music.  However, Byrne as a focal point is not the best.  Groups like NWA and Public Enemy, and artists like Sage Francis and POS in hip hop and Fatboy Slim, Tiesto, and Burial used existing sounds to create new auditory collisions that both paid tribute to the prior works but also sent the genre in a new direction.  In an example that is closer to my music home, the first time that I heard Brand New sample gospel songs and then lace them to a song that has ties to Fugazi, Nirvana, and the Jesus Lizard it was like a light went on in my head.  Remediation can really show us ways to view the world in different and new ways, but also allow us to see the possibilities in the normal everyday things around us.

Here are some examples of my favorite musical remediations:

Broken Social Scene "Meet Me In The Basement" -

http://youtu.be/NiRjwpCrCMc

Brand New "Vices" (Video is unrelated, just listen to the song) -

http://youtu.be/UbONRHjtKb8

Fatboy Slim "Weapon of Choice" -

http://youtu.be/XQ7z57qrZU8

My Comments

Dr. Moeller,

Thanks for the good comments. Here are some thoughts about them.

From my reading I understood that it was a quote about the Information Revolutionists, not the cyber-marxists. DW is not positive about the material at all and the fact that he states that this is the dogma of the information revolutionists. Sorry if I did not make it clear that I understood the difference.

A cybermarx society is something that I am trying to nail down in my head and as I have more time to digest the material I will have a better idea of what I mean by that. However, I do have a feeling that it is a good explanation of the society we are in right now.

I certainly agree with DW, but I also think that we need to be wary of using Marxism in this society as we are open to the same problems that occured in the early 20th Century in Russia. Greed, over equality, always seems to win, and I am seeing that more and more in our society. Thanks,

Matt

CyberMarx and MediaMax

Cybermarx is an interesting jump within this class and it was probably good that we took a break to let our minds cool.  The jump is that we were talking about Fascism, one of the most influential dogmas of the 20^th century, and now we going to talk about one of the other influential dogmas: Marxism.  First off, it is interesting to note that as we leave the Frankfurt school and their anti-fascist lives, we are presented with a somewhat less philosophical book.  Cybermarx is certainly easier to read than D&G and Foucault, but it is no less pertinent to our society.  This true for a few reasons: its immediacy, the prose is less complicated, and the subject matter is written about now, or at least the not too distant past.  This allowed me instant attachment to the book and a much easier time adapting the text to my life.

            Although I am still formulating my thoughts on this text, there are a few ideas that really stand out.  On pg. 24, Dyer-Witheford lies out on the table, what I think, is one of the most important pieces of the information age doctrine; “These techno-economic changes are accompanied by far-reaching and fundamentally positive social transformations.”  Basically, any change in technology is essential and positive and cannot be seen in any other light.  Dyer-Witheford lays his thoughts on this somewhat emotionlessly, basically stating that according to groups that possess this new information or technology they have to be eternal optimists.  Never possessing a single doubt as to the worth of this product and how it will change our society for the good.  DW also states that the negatives are often downplayed and sometimes not even considered.  I think that most of DW’s thoughts are in the manufacturing and cybernetics departments but what about other technological advances?

            In 2005 the music industry was at the end of its rope when it came to illegal downloading.  How do they combat the millions of disgruntled customers that were sick of paying ridiculous prices for their favorite band’s new record?  How did they protect that music (information) under a single unified system?  Well, the jury is still out on that one, but Sony thought that they had it figured out.  They started pressing their records with a program called Mediamax configured into their system.  Mediamax made CDs unavailable to copy onto a hard drive and therefore un-sharable via online networks or through CD burns.  The reason why Mediamax did not survive to the present day is that, according to BBC news, “anyone putting a music CD bearing the MediaMax software in their PC introduced a vulnerability that malicious hackers could hijack to win control of a machine.”  Or basically, the music industry by saving their information (the music) they left your information (documents, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.) open to the world. 

            This brief anecdote displays the struggle that I have with the modern “Cybermarx” society.  DW does a good job making his case for Marxism in the technological age, however, the picture is incomplete; much like Animal Farm, we all start out equal in the technological era, once we are acclimatized to technology, but as we get further down the rabbit hole, that same equality falls to ash.  The music industry will always look for ways to screw with their customers and, honestly, that is why it is a failing industry.  If one person, high up in the music industry, would just come out and say that they messed up and they are trying to do better than they have, I would be a much less jaded individual.  As it stands, I will have to continue to be jaded for a very long time.  The base, though it has some say on what the superstructure looks like, will always draw the short end of the stick.  To the society that we live takes some of the scariest elements of both Marxism and Capitalism and creates a new monster that is, to some extent, eating our society alive. 

BBC. (2005, December 05). Anti-piracy CD problems vex Sony. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4511042.stm

Questions

           Many of the chapters after the initial two are basically looking at a similar question when it comes to rhizomes.  That question being: Are lines defined by the rhizome, are the rhizomes defined by the lines, or are they so intertwined that we cannot tell which came first?  Deleuze and Guattari are able to answer this by stating that lines intertwine so well that a change in one is a change in many, so would that be the same in the rhizome? In the first chapter we learn that rhizomes can be changed and destroyed but they always crop up on old or new lines of thought.  When they change do they include original lines of flight, segmentation, and molecular lines?  If not, are they changed to be a different and more reterritorialized rhizome or do the lines fall in the same contexts?  When we combine suicidal tendencies, singularity of mind, and a war machine in every segment of the molar community do we always get fascism?  Or if the fascism’s lines of flight or segmentation are clouded by something like a pocket of self-preservation, or a people’s desire to have freedom does that change the creation of the rhizomematic being?  Does the creation of the same type of rhizome depend on the same intersecting lines or can they be adjusted to the differing conditions of human existence?  Are there really changing conditions in human existence?

                I don’t feel up answering some or all of these questions at this point.  However, the fluidity of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing leads me to think that some, or all, of these questions were meant to be open ended.  Greatly these questions depend, like the creation of a rhizome, upon the individual circumstances of the situation that they are being applied to.  Although I do believe that there are new circumstances within our society, I do believe that once distilled down to the inherent components those new circumstances will reveal age old situations.  However, it is the combination of these situations that yield the new individual circumstance or moment in time.  For instance, many of the things that Deleuze and Guattari are writing about are not new, they have only been re-appropriated and manipulated to address the world that they were brought together in and the world that they see will be coming (the constantly shaping now).  They used methods and ideas from throughout the ages to address the fascistic horrors that they witnessed first and second hand within this century and addressed the concerns of our now.  They do address the issues well, and I understand their usefulness in our society but my question that has been growing throughout the text is: How do we re-appropriate these terms and ideas to our lives today?  How do we propose these terms will change in twenty years?  Fifty?  A hundred?

                Last week in class someone stated that Foucault said that A Thousand Plateaus is the handbook against fascism.  I would whole heartedly agree with this.  However, what is our handbook for now?  Are we really fighting pure and simple fascism?  Or are there a thousand new strains of fascism throughout the world due to the rise and takeover of technology?  What of the international conglomerates that seek to eradicate freedom of expression?  What of the constant war within third world countries?  I do not see these situations as all explained by this book, but their fluid ideas portray solutions to the new circumstances that we have in our society.  They do give us the tools to understand and fight the new fascistic tendencies in our societies.  It is our responsibility as tuned in individuals to make decisions that are along the same rhizomatic and arboreal thought patterns as this work. 

                One last parting question: What is the most important factor in this society that leads to the changing of rhizomatic structures?  I would propose the intense demand on time and our constant lack of attention to one single process or idea.  We are constantly confronted with a schizophrenic view of our lives and how we want to live our lives; a constant battle between binaries.  This battle forces time to become the most important variable.  To truly understand and work in anti-fascist way we have to commit time, more than anything, to becoming free of fascist tendencies.        

Be quick, even when standing still.

                As I began think about the concept of Rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus, I was reminded to three musical artists that chose to write in a similar style as Deleuze and Guattari:  The Blood Brothers, the Refused, and At the Drive-In.  All three of the groups for their seminal albums (Crimes, The Shape of Punk To Come: A Chimerical Bombation in 12 Bursts, and Relationship of Command, respectively) chose to write their own lyrics and music separately as individuals and then come together and write albums that are more than the single person’s thoughts.  They are rhizomes of music, connection points where thousands of plateaus are sent out to many different disciplines of music, art, and literature.  For an example, see below:

(For an interesting read, give the break up announcement for Refused.  It is one of the best break-up notices that I have ever read:  http://www.burningheart.com/refused/refmanifest5.htm)

                Onto Rhizomes – What are they?  How they produce interesting and logical positions within our own academic communities?  How do we root ourselves with them, while simultaneously create new and interesting frontiers in our academic discourses? 

                Rhizomes are the intersection points between two or more arenas of thought that create “plateaus.”  They are the connection points that allow for growth in an area of thought by assimilating with the thoughts of another area of thought.  For instance, originally psychology laid firm claim to the works of Freud and Jung, but over time they have become literary focus points that are heavily relied upon though being less credible in psychology.    Any given rhizome is ever changing and goes though changes in perception every day; we change our view of the connection between the works of Freud and their literary notions constantly.  “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles” (7).  Rhizomes are the pivot points between discourse communities and their ideas, the outside world, and other, more distant arenas of thought.  Rhizomes can also be destroyed, not just changed, “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (9).  The old idea that there is nothing new under the sun gets a new and frightening connotation.  Even if we are thinking new things they are only rhizomes that have been explored before and will be pushed to another spot on the network, pushed to new lines.  Basically rhizomes “connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play a very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states” (21).  Rhizomes are not trees, they are allowed to connect soil to the tree, trees to other trees, the sky to the tree, veins within the tree, but they are never the tree itself; “The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and…and…and…” (25). 

                Within “1914: One or Several Wolves” we see that Deleuze and Guattari are seeking a notion that establishes the notion of a misuse of rhizome.  They use Freud’s study of the Wolf-Man to understand when a rhizome can be used poorly.  Without summarizing, Freud’s use of psychoanalysis on this particular patient had gaps in which Deleuze and Guattari choose to explore their validity, and to sometimes point and laugh at the misdiagnosis.  Where “Introduction” is a dense exploration of the term from multiple facets and dimensions, “1914” is meant to explore the validity of their term in a historical and critical context.  To me it stands up, but I have been known to be wrong. 

                In “Conclusion,” we are confronted with dense and heavily coded paragraphs pertaining to the terms in the book.  Rhizome is therein defined once again as a connection point, “the line no longer forms a contour and instead passes between things, between points” (505).  However, a facet is added to the mix: that of lines.  The plane of knowledge is defined in three different and particular lines.  “Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose upon us the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally lines of flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative potentialities and turning into a line of death… (fascism)” (506).  Therefore we have lines that separate us (segmented lines), lines that make thoughts disappear (molecular lines), and lines that end thought (flight lines).  All of these are the effects of the change, creation, or destruction of a rhizome. 

Dark Passengers

“Why?  Simply because I am interested in the past?  No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present.  Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.”

                This is a fitting quote to end the first chapter of Discipline & Punishment.  It ends the graphic nature of the first chapter with a look at the philosophical and practical desires of Foucault in this volume.  He frames his thoughts and writing, like many of his contemporaries, under the banner of New Criticism; or at least as we understand it from the definition given last week.  However, what does this utilization of New Criticism do to the thoughts pertained within his work? 

                One of the claims that Foucault makes within ‘the spectacle of the scaffold’ is that as the penal system grew and became more attuned to the system that we know today, the severity of punishment for religious crimes went down.  In other words, as we approached the model of the contemporary penal system, crimes religious in nature (blasphemy, adultery, etc.) were sentenced to more lenient punishments.  However, one question that is implicit in the text throughout the text is the idea of the soul as the prison of the body.  Foucault addresses the matter somewhat indirectly throughout the text, offering up ideas that the physical nature of body can be punished much more easily than the soul.  Readers are confronted by thick descriptions of the horrors that can come from the tortures executed upon the body, but he does not get into the dark recesses of the mind and soul until later in the book.  He states that the punishment upon the body was enough for strong men to wither and die when the proper amount of time and pain was induced upon the criminal, but this connection between soul as prison and Foucault’s analysis comes at a timely point in history. 

                Although we, as a species, have been interested in our criminals, both fiction and non-fiction, from Judas to Brutus, Bluebeard, Jack the Ripper, and Magneto.  They interest us and have been a source of dark entertainment for thousands of years.  However, within the past century that dark entertainment has moved from interest to a desire for real understanding not only of their crimes but also of their emotional, religious and mental states.  For instance, the classical example of Russian Realism follows a fictional murderer, Raskolnikov, as he deals with his crime mentally and wrestles constantly with his soul.  Although though this was a work of fiction, Dostoyevsky is able to weave a complicated and engrossing narrative of a man soulfully dealing with his own choices and how those choices begin to destroy him.  No punishment that the court could levy on Raskolnikov would be worse than the guilt his soul feels as he struggles with his crime. 

                In the 20^th century, we are presented with multiple instances where we are entranced and addicted to the criminal’s plight against his own soul.  In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song are the first, and probably best, examples that come to mind.  Each work presents their criminals not only as a man, something that seems to be lacking in earlier versions of our society, but also as soulful victims of their own pitiless existence.  They are men who feel for their victims and are more distraught by their crimes than anyone else, a characteristic that is somewhat absent in the mythos of the criminal before this era.  Perry, one of two killers from In Cold Blood, is seen as an artist, a tortured soul.  He is the quintessential criminal as a tortured soul.  He is saddened by his actions and his soul is therefore more of a prison than the actual bars in front of him.  Truman Capote latched onto this idea and was able to exploit it to amazing cerebral depth within his work.  However, this work also illustrates another view of criminals within our society: the criminal act and the obsession that follows in its wake.

                Perry, on his way to the gallows, shakes the hand of his arresting officer and says “I am glad you could make it.”  These acts drove that officer to alcohol and his eventual death ten years later.  He became obsessed with what this act meant to him.  We, as a society, often deal with this obsession and it has become manifest in many different ways.  It can range from the whimsical (Dexter, buying Charles Manson LPs) to clinical (reading books about serial killers or other criminals, watching documentaries) to pathological (needing to meet criminals, erecting monuments or attending reenactments) to criminal (copycat crimes, crimes to prove themselves worthy of the mantle left behind).  This obsession is not new, but the manifestation of and the way that we individually deal with it has become much more open to options throughout the last few decades.  We are fascinated with criminals and that does not seem to be something that is going away any time soon.

                Foucault makes note of this, the entire first section is his own version of trying to understand criminals and how they operate within the common penal system.  However, he does give us enough evidence to understand that the soul, particularly the reason centers of a common man, can provide prison enough.  Then that prison can become an obsession of sorts for those that are trying to understand themselves, particularly their own dark passengers.  Foucault writes to understand the present, and in doing so unlocks some interesting thoughts about society’s obsessions and penal codes, most importantly that as laws became secular our understanding of the soul as a prison became more fluid and much darker.