Today’s Plan:
- Syllabus
- WTF is Rhetoric?
- Ian Bogost and Procedurality
- Homework
WTF is(n’t) Rhetoric?
Very soon I will ask you to conduct a rhetorical analysis of a video game. Which means you need some sense of what it means to be rhetorical. Over the next 5 minutes I will do my best to complicate that word, stretching rhetoric from what you might think it means to what I have convinced myself it should mean. Here we go.
First, let me get this out of the way. If you are familiar with the term rhetoric, then you probably think it means “persuasion.” That’s its most common academic definition. We have Aristotle to thank for that. But Aristotle is a philosopher. He wants rhetoric to mean persuasion so that rhetoric is reduced to communicating truth. Philosophy find truth, rhetoric figures out how to communicate to people. I do not think that rhetoric is merely about how to communicate things. I reject the definition of rhetoric as “persuasion.”
If you heard the word “rhetoric” in most contexts, then you would think someone is being manipulative. They are being evil. Or they are spouting bullshit. This is in part a legacy of Aristotle and–more importantly–his teacher Plato. Obviously I have not dedicated my academic career to learning bullshit.
Okay, so that basically covers what I don’t think rhetoric is. I am not going to directly tell you (yet) what I think rhetoric is. Moving on.
I would argue that rhetoric is the foundation of what we call the humanities (classically, the humanities emerge from two rhetorical scholars in Rome–Cicero and Quintillian; they are radically transformed by Petrarch, moving from a civic education to a personal/aesthetic one).
ENG 231 counts as your LAC 1 Arts and Humanities credit. While I have bunch of titles and credentials: professional writer, UX specialist, curriculum expert, I tend to self-identify as a rhetorical theorist and a post-humanist. My areas of expertise include asymmetrical ethics (ethics of hospitality) and digital technology. In fact, as I just wrote about, the former help us recognize the importance of the latter.
Rather than attempt to define rhetoric or humanities or asymmetrical ethics I will just read a bunch of quotes I like:
Emmanuel Levinas:
“Ontology [philosophy’s investment in truth, definition, categorization], which reduces the other to the same, promotes freedom–the freedom that is the identification of the same, not allowing itself to be alienated by the other.”
“We name this calling into question of my spontaneity [freedom] by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.”
(Totality and Infinity 42-43; “freedom” in direct conflict with “responsibility/obligation”)
Diane Davis:
“An ethics of decision in a world that has lost its criteria for responsible action begins with straining to hear the excess that gets drowned out, sacrificied for the clarity of One voice, One call, One legitimate position.”
(Breaking Up at Totality 19)
Michael J. Hyde:
“Rhetoric facilitates acknowledgement by transforming space and time into dwelling places where people can feel at home with each other, engage in collaborative deliberation, and know together ways of resolving disputed concerns. […] The rhetor is an architect, a builder of dwelling places, homes, habitats, where the caress of others is a welcoming occurrence.”
Adriana Cavarero:
Thinking and speaking are different activities. Thinking wants to be timeless […] furthermore, it is always solitary, even when it takes place between several people […] As Maria Zambrano notes, too, “logos proceeds without any other opposition than what it, in order to better show itself, poses to itself.”
Speaking, on the contrary […] does not know in advance where it is going, and it entrusts itself to the unpredictable nature of what the interlocutors say. In short, thought is as solitary as speech is relational.
Victor Vitanza:
My position is, especially in the next chapter, that we are not at home in our world/whirl of language. Any and every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations. (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, 157
Now it is crucial to understand that, for Heidegger, all that “we speak” by way of logos/language, or “speaking/saying” is perpetually an act of concealing/unconcealing. For Heidegger, this Being/essence cannot be realized, completely revealed or unconcealed. Any and every attempt to unconceal or answer definitively is to perpetrate an act of violence on Being and on human being. (NSHoR, 177)
Thomas Rickert:
Dwelling places us in the insight that rhetoric, being worldly, cannot be understood solely as human doing and that persuasion gains its bearings from an affectability that emerges with our material environments both prior to and alongside the human…
Julia Kristeva:
To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts. (Strangers to Ourselves)
Taken collectively, these quotes express why I value a particular kind of (postmodern) rhetoric and what I see as the mission, the importance, of the humanities. Both teach us how to productively orient ourselves towards others. How to be in a world without certainty. How to temper our desire to force others to match up with our categories, ideas, desires, and comforts. How to handle the disorienting feelings that another person can engender within us. Levinas wrote that, by our nature, we are allergic to difference. The humanities offer medication that can help remedy the symptoms. I believe some video games are learning how to maximize their potential for teaching us how to better experience alterity, deal with ambiguity, and reflect upon the “selfishness” of our own commitments, ideas, and values. This is a class about those games.
Okay, there’s your “out there” theoretical foundations of the course. How about something more grounded. Let’s swing back to the idea of a rhetorical analysis. Maybe you have had to write a rhetorical analysis before, in high school or in ENG 122 here at UNC. Let me riff a bit on how one might typically approach the rhetorical analysis of a video game.
- Text: What is the *purpose* of this text? What statement does it *intend* to make about our world, society, human condition, struggles? [Logos, meaning, argument]
- Player: How do you relate to the game’s intended purpose? Does it resonate with you? [questions of pathos and feeling]
- Writer/Designer/Programmer: Who are they trying to be? What voice/style do they assume? How do they position themselves in relation to genre/audience? Are they shouting or intending to be invisible? [Questions of Ethos]
So, the standard stuff–logos, ethos, and pathos. When we analyze a narrative, whether it is a book, a television show, a movie, a podcast, we ask ourselves variations of these questions.
Video games, however, are interactive in a way these other mediums are not. They at least afford us an image of agency, as if what we do matters to the world we traverse and the story we experience (this is a vibrant field of video game scholarship–determining to what extent our choices in games actually matter, and veterans of 225 will hear some Sicart stuff circulating here).
The interactive nature of video games, that fact that we “act” instead of merely “witness,” means we need to add a new, more complicated dimension to our rhetorical analysis: one that analyzes the actions a game forces us to take, and the rules that compute, score, or resolve that action. Philosopher Ian Bogost has termed the such action and computation as the game’s “procedurality.”
Ian Bogost and Procedurality
The first way we will analyze games this semester stems from Ian Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric. Bogost seeks to add procedural rhetoric to its other dominant traditions–oral/written rhetoric and visual rhetoric (which has gained increasing importance in the late 20th and early 21st centuries). Given the messy diatribe that preceded this paragraph, let’s just say that Bogost tends to define rhetoric as “influence,” close to persuasion, but recognizing non-rational and non-conscious dimensions to rhetoric. That is, we are being “persuaded” at almost every point in our lives by forces explicit and implicit (for instance, the ways that desks are arranged in rows are “persuading” you to accept my authority etc etc). Bogost believes video games are extraordinary good at this kind of passive, non-conscious persuasion. Let’s read some of his work.
Homework
Your first assignment is due before Thursday’s class. Read Bogost’s 2017 article “The Rhetoric of Video Games” (.pdf in the files section of Canvas).
I’m curious to learn you perception of this article–do you understand what Bogost is talking about? Do you find this article difficult to follow?–and so I’m going to ask you to reflect on a few questions. You can write your answers directly in Canvas or submit them as a Google Doc / Word docx.
These responses are meant to prime you for Wednesday’s discussion. I’m hoping everyone comes to class Wednesday with something to contribute (so you don’t have to be super happy with every response below, but you should be ready to share two of them).
- Question #1: Find me the line where Bogost defines procedural rhetoric. Try putting it in your own words.
- Question #2: Is there a term/part of this article you don’t understand or want me to address in detail? And/or is there a part of this article with which you disagree?
- Question #3: What do you make of Bogost’s analysis of Take Back Illinois and Bully?
- Question #4: Can you think of a time when a game did something interesting procedurally? What game? What did it do? Or can you think of a game in which the procedures and mechanics lack any kind of meaningful relationship to the argument/purpose/theme?
Syllabus
