Today’s Plan:
- Syllabus
- WTF is Rhetoric?
- Ian Bogost and Procedurality
- Homework
Syllabus
WTF is(n’t) Rhetoric?
Here we go again.
Levinas:
“Ontology, 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 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”)
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)
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.”
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.
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)
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…
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)
Constructive end point / foundations of rhetorical analysis of a video game:
- Game: What is the *purpose* of this text? What statement does it *intend* to make about our world, society, human condition, struggles?
- Player: How do you relate to the game’s intended purpose? Does it resonate with you?
- Speaker: Who are they trying to be? What voice/style do they assume? How do they position themselves in relation to genre/audience?
Now we will complicate this by adding a procedural layer to our questioning.
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 figure out why.
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 Thursday’s discussion. I’m hoping everyone comes to class Thursday with something to contribute (so you don’t have to be super happy with every response below, but you should be ready to share one 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?
