Regarding the Pain of Others (Virtually)

7.February.2010 in Art, Daily Nonsense, Social Justice, games | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Last weekend I read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, which is a small but important book about the way in which we become spectators when presented with photographic representations of war. While the photograph is still an enormously powerful, pervasive medium, and indeed one of the primary ways we see the things that happen abroad, I couldn’t help but think about the ways in which we “see” things that happen abroad in other ways. Sontag discusses films very briefly, and mentions video games but once. (She is, after all, probably best known as a critic for On Photography.) But I also noticed that, in the later part of the essay, she critiqued her own view that we become desensitized to violence through overexposure to images of suffering.

This idea is problematic on a number of levels. First, she writes that it is difficult to say with any certainty that image-glut does, in fact, create the kind of callousness that critics claim it does. Second, the virtualization of war is a phenomenon restricted to those for whom war is not real and immediate — that is, spectators in the West. Sontag makes a point of calling these claims “platitudes” and tearing them apart as ungrounded and provincial. The effects of these kinds of images need to be reassessed.

Of course, my thoughts turned to video games. Much is often made, in the mainstream media, of the damaging effects of video game play on the minds of youngsters — the desensitization to violence and suffering can now be taken to a new level, where the player is virtually involved in the violence, instead of just a spectator. (But is not the video game player still a spectator, in some way? And how is viewing art on a wall not in some way interactive, perspectival, and affective? This relationship is complicated.) And within the game studies community, many scholars have written on the propaganda value of a good, clean first-person shooter, the gore turned down and the stakes lowered through the very nature of the gamic medium.

But I think in many ways a new generation of first-person shooters is problematizing the assumed relationship between the video game, the gamer, and the suffering of others. I’ve been trying to come up with useful cases, and I think we could examine the controversial “No Russian” scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) as a starting point. [Basic spoilers follow.] Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve Been Working on the Same Post for Three Days Now

3.February.2010 in Alternate Reality Gaming, Daily Nonsense, Metablogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Recent discovery: the need to write really involved blog posts that take multiple days to write. I spent a couple hours yesterday and at least an hour the day before trying to flesh out this post I’m working on about Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and video games, but it’s just not working out. I think it’s been making me feel a little batty. Or maybe that’s just because I spend most of my time in a black-walled room typing on a computer.

I guess also my brain has been moving very fast. It’s time for me to get down to business and start doing some coding for the (still) unnamed Red Light, Gren Light project. I’ve also been thinking about the social coding — as in, do I let campus security know what I’m up to, and that while what I’m doing is kind of disruptive, it’s “art” and “harmless.” Reading the books I got about campus architecture don’t make me feel very good. They sort of politely skim around the topic of control. Nobody wants to be overt, but also nobody wants to be critical.

I’m thinking about reading Lefebvre anyway, this is about not-just-architectural space, the construction of hybrid space in between physical and social space. Though I am sure the architecture has a great deal to do with it. Did you know  you need to sign up to use the open field next to the Center for the Arts? I understand this is the case. There is no other gathering space in the Academic Spine. Or campus, really. What does that do to you? My architecture books aren’t saying anything but I have my suspicions.

I think tomorrow morning I will be going to the University Archives. For now I am going to make broad gestures at this blog entry that might turn into a really serious paper at some point.

What Are You Really Saying?

25.January.2010 in Daily Nonsense, Gender | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

By now I imagine most people who are interested in what I write about have seen Clay Shirky’s recent blog post, A Rant About Women. While the title of the blog entry itself is a bit of a misnomer (I don’t think Shirky is really ranting about women so much as he is ranting about femininity) it’s also a bit of a hot-button topic for a lot of people. I’ve read several smart critiques of the general thesis, but I haven’t seen a critique from the specific angle I would like to tackle. The assumptions that Shirky makes about the way society should be are a little bit frightening, but I’ve been thinking more and more about where these ideas come from, and some of them are more well-formulated than others, but I’m going to give it a go.

The one thing I’ve not been seeing explicitly is the idea that Shirky is taking issue with femininity. In her book Whipping Girl, Julia Serano discusses how our entire society — many feminists included — treat femininity as something to avoid. This is manifested in many ways. Consider how it’s generally okay for little girls to play with action figures, but when a little boy wants to play with a baby doll, suddenly red lights go off in his parents’ heads and the boy is punished. Or consider that when women were first allowed to enter the working world they were expected to assimilate with men. Or consider that because I’m a trans man I get certain privileges over trans women, like acceptance in more cis queer circles or the freedom to not worry about violence constantly.

What Shirky completely misses in his post is that he’s becoming part of this problem — the oppression women (all women) face in our society is not just income ceilings (or being locked out of employment altogether) or socialization into subservient roles, but that anybody who conforms in any way to that notion of femininity is viewed as weak, inferior, and, often, problematic. By saying that it doesn’t matter that his blog post asks women to be more like men, Shirky is essentially cosigning the erasure of feminine identities, which is completely and utterly unacceptable.

I think danah boyd raises a great point, too, when she points out that diversity isn’t just about arranging “diverse-looking” people in a room and calling it a job well done. (Also if we were all self-aggrandizing jerks nothing would ever get done! Too much infighting!)

Beginning Research for Red Light, Green Light

21.January.2010 in Alternate Reality Gaming, Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , , , | 3 comments

I’m starting to do my homework for designing and implementing the Red Light, Green Light game I’ve blogged about here in the past. At the moment I’m putting together a reading list about architectures of control, but I’m having a hard time finding any information specifically about designing campuses in response to the Kent State massacre. Since UB’s North Campus was built post-Kent State, I suspect that I might even be able to find specific information about the design of this campus as a response to that event.

The idea of putting together a bibliography for a game is kind of odd, but it makes sense if you want to make an effective intervention. I think it would be beneficial for players to have a resource to be directed to after the fact. And also something to prove that I’m not just a “fun” designer. I think I will make the bibliography available via AAAARG, both for political and practical reasons.

Anyway, if anybody has any ideas about additions to the bibliography for me to check into, please let me know. I’d really appreciate it.

Oh, and also, we can play Name That Game, since I’m not yet sure what to call this exercise.

300 Words on Non-Violence

18.January.2010 in Daily Nonsense, Social Justice | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the commitment to non-violence, and what that means when squared with the idea that oppression is violent. I think it’s very easy to point to the successes of non-violent movements, and I think that it’s also really wonderful that non-violent resistance to oppression has worked in the past. However, I also have mixed feelings about how resistance to oppression has changed tactically since the advent of social media.

On the one hand, social media enables non-violent protesters to circumvent institutional media, thereby allowing them to depict, say, police brutality at a protest from their own point of view. However, these points of view often only get picked up by people who support them in the first place. They are merely preaching to the choir.

Which is to say nothing of the fact that non-violent protest seems to be losing traction in many ways. People are jaded with the format of most protests — although this does offer exciting opportunities for people working on social media projects to use their technologies to respond to this need — and very little is sensational about people with signs marching on anything these days. On the other hand, many experiments with using social media to intervene in situations has been largely very ephemeral, which is a big complaint about social media-related justice work in general. And the internet in general.

So what are we to do? I think it’s a many-faceted problem, but I also don’t know about ruling out a certain degree of militancy in responding to certain situations. I don’t think armed conflict or violent aggression is, in fact, the solution to every problem, nor am I advocating meaningless violence. However, in cases where all legal and civil resistances have failed, sometimes you have to raise your fist. Stonewall was a riot, not a candlelight vigil.

This Post is Not Going to Make Sense…Yet

12.January.2010 in Daily Nonsense, games | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 comments

So I’ve started reading Homo Ludens finally, because I have to (sometimes I think it’s kind of awful that I have to be made to do these things, but I think I would eventually, it’s just that things get done faster when someone is there to man the bellows) and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Huizinga talks in his introduction about the mysterious impulse of living things to play, and I kind of wonder if this has something to do with the way the brain works — in ways that we’ve come to learn now, post-Huizinga. Since he writes about the performative creation of art, religious ritual, and the phenomenon of flow, I can’t help but wonder if maybe there is something about play that is related neuropsychologically to our need for religion.

I think I just wanted to jot that down because I just got really excited about it. Back to reading.

Back from Break

11.January.2010 in Academia, Daily Nonsense, games | Tags: | Leave a comment

I really meant to write a bunch over break, but after going home, I found it very hard to. I think it has a lot to do with the state of being home, and also the difficulty I had in terms of access to technology while I was home (this was partially intentional).

Home was alright. It was kind of refreshing to see people and play at how my life used to be. It also reminded me that I am glad my life is the way it is right now, not because I dislike anybody at home, just that home is not home anymore. Buffalo has been so nurturing to me in the past four months, I can’t even begin to say. It’s not like Ann Arbor was for me — actually, in contrast, Ann Arbor was kind of stifling. I mean that on a number of levels. I can’t tell you how weird it is to think about my life a year ago, let alone ten. I guess I am just not ready for Michigan again. I guess I’ve fallen in love with Buffalo (sorry, Michigan).

I got a lot done over break but I still have a lot to do — I just bought a pile of books for the comparative literature class I’m taking this semester. The syllabus is packed with books I’ve been meaning to read, and now I get to, and talk about them with a bunch of other people who want to read them, too. I have a lot of things to read and write about and consider and plan. Now I have a great lair in the back of the VR lab to do my planning in. I am thinking about getting a chart-making surface to hang back there, so I can make flow charts and to-do lists and other things that make me look enormously productive.

I have a lot of goals this semester, and a formidable course load. Oh, but I can’t wait. What’s even more exciting for me is that I know where my thesis is going…hee!

Alternate Technologies for Alternate Realities

22.December.2009 in Daily Nonsense, Intertubes | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Last night I had dinner with Josephine, Dave, and their daughter Lucy. Josephine and I talked a little bit about the neurological implications I discuss in my paper on neurotheology’s social and scientific impact on theories of the evolution of consciousness. Then we talked about A Cyborg Manifesto and feminism (and -isms in general) as a purported totality — and how that’s fucked up. And I started to think to myself, there are other technologies out there to create “alternate” realities, in our brains. We’ve been doing it as a species for millennia. This idea isn’t too out there, and it happens all the time.

In the sense that the individual nature of consciousness and the isolated conscious experience of reality is “alternate,” we are constantly experiencing a kind of alternate reality. I guess this also came up last night when I was out for a cup of cheer with Danielle, and we talked about how important it is to validate the personal experiences of others, especially when you’re talking about privilege and oppression. Our realities are alternate realities in the sense of her experience of oppression as a black woman, and my experience of oppression as a biracial transgender human. I find this sense of “alternate reality” not very exciting, but the idea of social technology to expose such alternate realities to one another pretty rad.

Of course, another thing I couldn’t help but think of is psychedelic drugs. While there are certain legal, personal and health-related risks and downsides to doing a project using psychedelics as practice, I also would be afraid of such an adventure turning into something very trite. I would want to do a project of this sort falling somewhere between an erowid.0rg-type study and free-form creative sessions. Also, I would want to create some kind of tangible output that isn’t just a video of someone tripping. (How do you make someone feel like they are there? In a psychological sense.) Also, I would not want to trigger anything psychologically negative in myself or others. This seems risky on a number of levels, and would require an enormous amount of planning and execution. And legal disclaimers. (Though, from an amateur chemistry standpoint, it could also be totally rad.)

Finally, though, Twitter peep @mcburton proposed lucid dreaming as a possible alternate technology to create, explore, and document alternate realities. And I think this kind of goes back to the original concept — that we already contain alternate realities (and maybe each of us contains several, or more than several, legion, realities), the challenge is merely becoming conscious of them and then imparting the knowledge of those realities to others.

So the idea is — I learn to lucid dream. I document the process of learning to do so, and then use my lucid dream state to create an open-source virtual reality that others who are interested in lucid dreaming can also access via their lucid dreams. Maybe I will make a version of my virtual space using Unigine or something, too…although I don’t really want to, it’s hard to say how else to impart my vision of “my” alternate lucid dream reality to other users. I worry that a visual representation that you can walk through and see is a little too literal. I guess if I did it textually it would also raise the issue of continued isolation within our own interpretations of reality. In a perfect world, I think I’d like my open-source lucid dream engine to have its own wiki where other lucid dreamers can “build” on stuff, post it, and that would allow other users to visit it.

I guess it’d be a little like a meat-based MOO. MMOO?

This, ultimately, also goes back to my idea of hacking the body, optimizing human experiences to be the most pleasurable and fulfilling, through a variety of technological and social (which are sometimes interchangeable) methods. Also, what happens when someone is able to induce an experience of a fictional place in a dream state that is tangibly similar to someone else’s experience of that fictional place, and we construct it together?

Some other questions for consideration:

  • How will MMOO be run? Will there be a government? Am I willing to take on the role of an administrator in my virtual world?
  • What, if any, are the ethical considerations to managing someone’s dream experience?
  • How do you even find other people who can lucid dream? Or alternatively, how do you convince your friends to learn how to lucid dream so they can “play” in the virtual space? (I’m sure I have some takers, heh.)
  • When documenting MMOO, how much information is too much information? Is there such a thing? Would a 3D virtual representation of MMOO kill it?
  • Is it possible to network brains?

Your feedback, potential answers, and further questions are appreciated.

Copenhagen: An Aftermath We Can Avoid

19.December.2009 in Daily Nonsense, Social Justice | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Post-protest at the Bella Center, Copenhagen (Matthew McDermott/Treehugger)

I’ve been following the proceedings at COP15 with some degree of suspicion, especially since the leak of the Danish Text last week. I have to say, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Voz has been saying on Twitter about how climate change is a convenient target, and ignores a lot of the more fundamental problems with our environment that continue to screw over both the Global South and poor people in this country, too.

Living in Buffalo, it’s hard to avoid some of these facts. My friend Katy is the environmental justice coordinator for the Buffalo-Niagara Riverkeeper — when it’s warm enough to fish, she often goes out and talks to local anglers, warning them about the risks of eating the fish they catch. Unfortunately, and tragically, many of them tell her that they need the fish to feed their families. It’s a destructive cycle of environmental and human rights abuse. It’s happening in our backyards, to our neighbors, and it’s a direct result of our completely flippant attitude toward the environment.

It’s not just about carbon emissions, people. It’s about dumping heavy metals into our waterways. It’s about the island of plastic in the ocean. It’s about being able to live in and with our environment, and climate change is the last thing on my mind when I think about environmental justice. By correcting a lot of these other problems, the whole climate change issue might even be resolved.

So when I saw the above photo on Treehugger’s Bella Center protest slideshow, I just about blew a capillary in my brain. It really doesn’t look like this particular site was near where protesters were beaten by police, and the slideshow suggests the rest of the demonstration was largely quite peaceful, including intentional de-escalation on the part of the Copenhagen police. Why in god’s name would environmental activists leave so much shit lying around on the streets of one of the most beautiful cities in the world? How do they expect to be taken seriously if they leave trash in their wake? THIS is an aftermath of COP15 that we have every right and leverage to avoid. I’m just saying, and I am seriously disappointed.

Towards a Transgender Reading of A Cyborg Manifesto

18.December.2009 in Daily Nonsense, Gender, Philosophy, Social Justice | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yesterday I re-read Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” [PDF hosted by AAAARG.ORG]. The first time I read it was when I was starting to think about what it means to be post-gender, but I have to say that this re-reading was so much richer and full of interesting stuff than that first reading could ever have been. My context has been strengthened and my own thinking has become more sophisticated, as well.

One of the things that means a lot more to me now is Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a being who does not strive toward totality of theory, or ultimate all-encompassing explanation. Something I have struggled with has been this demand placed on me, especially as a public face of trans advocacy, to come up with some nugget or essence of what it is to be a transgender person. I guess there isn’t a kernel that some fundamental “trans-ness” can be boiled down to.

And maybe that is part of what resonates so strongly with me about this anti-imperialist critique of feminism. Unlike other critiques of feminism I have read, Haraway identifies a very particular characteristic of most feminisms (and most -isms, really), especially of the radical variety. Haraway writes

The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction.

And I think this gets at something very important about what it means to me to be a transgender person — many cis people tend to read into my self-identification an attempt to resolve the apparently irreconcilable contradiction between man/woman, whereas I think putting the weight of such a reconciliation on an individual is basically harmful and sort of, well, imperialistic. It is the use of a differently (and intentionally) gendered body to negotiate a certain gendered social reality that has come to be thought of as oppressive.

I suppose ultimately what excites me the most is the idea of an ideological system that is content with its incompleteness, that being a cyborg or being post-gender (post-human) is about a kind of becoming as opposed to a being. It seems to me that this is about shifting lines of definition, not just of oneself but also of one’s society and social categories, regulations, and expectations.

In attempting to formulate a cyborg politics, Haraway asks, “what kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective — and, ironically, socialist-feminist?” The rhetoric of both socialism and feminism don’t give room for incomplete, in-process identities. An in-process identity requires an affordance for what Haraway calls “polyvocality.” I think Haraway’s critique of Marxism and feminism is on point in ths way — and why feminist theorizing about transgender bodies and identities has a historical tendency to be screwed up. I don’t think that transgender selves or any semblance of totality.

On the contrary, I tend to think if there is anything at the core of trans-ness, it is a joyful expression of “permanently unclosed” identity if I’ve ever seen it. What feminist theorists get wrong about transgender selves and transgender bodies, then, is trying to squeeze a process (i.e., a temporal metaphor) into a spatial metaphor of categorization. I think this idea needs a little working out, especially since our understanding of time is spatially mediated, but the point is you cannot make a process or even a series of relations into a category because it is ongoing, open-ended, destabilized, and generative.

Trans people are the ultimate cyborgs. “Our” postmodern identities are predicated on an acceptance of the partiality of our perspectives and selves, even as a collective. I also think that in “our” constant contemplation and manipulation of language, “we” live Haraway’s “struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication.” She even goes so far as to say that this struggle is a subversion of “the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so [subverts] the structure and modes of production of Western identity.” (emphasis mine)

What I’ve learned in the past year or so is that the struggle for postcolonial identity, transgender identity, and a complex conception of multiple overlapping identities is a matter of struggling against exactly that structure. Complex multiple identities — at play in both the theorization of the postcolonial self and the transgender self — make it impossible to theorize about a totality of people. Who, after all, are the “transgender people” of this world? Who are really the “subaltern”? Who do we intentionally or accidentally exclude by naming these things?

Haraway’s critique of feminism translates directly in this way to (my) transgender critique of feminism. Re-reading this in light of everything that I have learned in the past two or three years was a total joy. I am sure I will be revisiting many of these ideas soon, hopefully a bit more rigorously. Thanks for playing!

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