#but seriously might be the most influential piece of media I have ever encountered so far in my life

[technicallyaminecraftsimp]

I didn’t go in to the newest Tommyinnit video expecting to be sobbing by the end of it, but the world is full of surprises

[recentanimenews]

ESSAY: Berserk's Journey of Acceptance Over 30 Years of Fandom

  My descent into anime fandom began in the '90s, and just as watching Neon Genesis Evangelion caused my first revelation that cartoons could be art, reading Berserk gave me the same realization about comics. The news of Kentaro Miura’s death, who passed on May 6, has been emotionally complicated for me, as it's the first time a celebrity's death has hit truly close to home. In addition to being the lynchpin for several important personal revelations, Berserk is one of the longest-lasting works I’ve followed and that I must suddenly bid farewell to after existing alongside it for two-thirds of my life.

  Berserk is a monolith not only for anime and manga, but also fantasy literature, video games, you name it. It might be one of the single most influential works of the ‘80s — on a level similar to Blade Runner — to a degree where it’s difficult to imagine what the world might look like without it, and the generations of creators the series inspired.

  Although not the first, Guts is the prototypical large sword anime boy: Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife, Siegfried/Nightmare from Soulcalibur, and Black Clover's Asta are all links in the same chain, with other series like Dark Souls and Claymore taking clear inspiration from Berserk. But even deeper than that, the three-character dynamic between Guts, Griffith, and Casca, the monster designs, the grotesque violence, Miura’s image of hell — all of them can be spotted in countless pieces of media across the globe.

  Despite this, it just doesn’t seem like people talk about it very much. For over 20 years, Berserk has stood among the critical pantheon for both anime and manga, but it doesn’t spur conversations in the same way as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira, or Dragon Ball Z still do today. Its graphic depictions certainly represent a barrier to entry much higher than even the aforementioned company. 

    Seeing the internet exude sympathy and fond reminiscing about Berserk was immensely validating and has been my single most therapeutic experience online. Moreso, it reminded me that the fans have always been there. And even looking into it, Berserk is the single best-selling property in the 35-year history of Dark Horse. My feeling is that Berserk just has something about it that reaches deep into you and gets stuck there.

  I recall introducing one of my housemates to Berserk a few years ago — a person with all the intelligence and personal drive to both work on cancer research at Stanford while pursuing his own MD and maintaining a level of physical fitness that was frankly unreasonable for the hours that he kept. He was NOT in any way analytical about the media he consumed, but watching him sitting on the floor turning all his considerable willpower and intellect toward delivering an off-the-cuff treatise on how Berserk had so deeply touched him was a sight in itself to behold. His thoughts on the series' portrayal of sex as fundamentally violent leading up to Guts and Casca’s first moment of intimacy in the Golden Age movies was one of the most beautiful sentiments I’d ever heard in reaction to a piece of fiction.

  I don’t think I’d ever heard him provide anything but a surface-level take on a piece of media before or since. He was a pretty forthright guy, but the way he just cut into himself and let his feelings pour out onto the floor left me awestruck. The process of reading Berserk can strike emotional chords within you that are tough to untangle. I’ve been writing analysis and experiential pieces related to anime and manga for almost ten years — and interacting with Berserk’s world for almost 30 years — and writing may just be yet another attempt for me to pull my own twisted-up feelings about it apart. 

  Berserk is one of the most deeply personal works I’ve ever read, both for myself and in my perception of Miura's works. The series' transformation in the past 30 years artistically and thematically is so singular it's difficult to find another work that comes close. The author of Hajime no Ippo, who was among the first to see Berserk as Miura presented him with some early drafts working as his assistant, claimed that the design for Guts and Puck had come from a mess of ideas Miura had been working on since his early school days.

  写真は三浦建太郎君が寄稿してくれた鷹村です。 今かなり感傷的になっています。 思い出話をさせて下さい。 僕が初めての週刊連載でスタッフが一人もいなくて困っていたら手伝いにきてくれました。 彼が18で僕が19です。 某大学の芸術学部の学生で講義明けにスケッチブックを片手に来てくれました。 pic.twitter.com/hT1JCWBTKu

— 森川ジョージ (@WANPOWANWAN) May 20, 2021

  Miura claimed two of his big influences were Go Nagai’s Violence Jack and Tetsuo Hara and Buronson’s Fist of the North Star. Miura wears these influences on his sleeve, discovering the early concepts that had percolated in his mind just felt right. The beginning of Berserk, despite its amazing visual power, feels like it sprang from a very juvenile concept: Guts is a hypermasculine lone traveler breaking his body against nightmarish creatures in his single-minded pursuit of revenge, rigidly independent and distrustful of others due to his dark past.

  Uncompromising, rugged, independent, a really big sword ... Guts is a romantic ideal of masculinity on a quest to personally serve justice against the one who wronged him. Almost nefarious in the manner in which his character checked these boxes, especially when it came to his grim stoicism, unblinkingly facing his struggle against literal cosmic forces. Never doubting himself, never trusting others, never weeping for what he had lost.

    Miura said he sketched out most of the backstory when the manga began publication, so I have to assume the larger strokes of the Golden Arc were pretty well figured out from the outset, but I’m less sure if he had fully realized where he wanted to take the story to where we are now. After the introductory mini-arcs of demon-slaying, Berserk encounters Griffith and the story draws us back to a massive flashback arc. We see the same Guts living as a lone mercenary who Griffith persuades to join the Band of the Hawk to help realize his ambitions of rising above the circumstances of his birth to join the nobility.

  We discover the horrific abuses of Guts’ adoptive father and eventually learn that Guts, Griffith, and Casca are all victims of sexual violence. The story develops into a sprawling semi-historical epic featuring politics and war, but the real narrative is in the growing companionship between Guts and the members of the band. Directionless and traumatized by his childhood, Guts slowly finds a purpose helping Griffith realize his dream and the courage to allow others to grow close to him. 

  Miura mentioned that many Band of the Hawk members were based on his early friend groups. Although he was always sparse with details about his personal life, he has spoken about how many of them referred to themselves as aspiring manga authors and how he felt an intense sense of competition, admitting that among them he may have been the only one seriously working toward that goal, desperately keeping ahead in his perceived race against them. It’s intriguing thinking about how much of this angst may have made it to the pages, as it's almost impossible not to imagine Miura put quite a bit of himself in Guts. 

  Perhaps this is why it feels so real and makes The Eclipse — the quintessential anime betrayal at the hands of Griffith — all the more heartbreaking. The raw violence and macabre imagery certainly helped. While Miura owed Hellraiser’s Cenobites much in the designs of the God Hand, his macabre portrayal of the Band of the Hawk’s eradication within the literal bowels of hell, the massive hand, the black sun, the Skull Knight, and even Miura’s page compositions have been endlessly referenced, copied, and outright plagiarized since.

    The events were tragic in any context and I have heard many deeply personal experiences others drew from The Eclipse sympathizing with Guts, Casca, or even Griffith’s spiral driven by his perceived rejection by Guts. Mine were most closely aligned with the tragedy of Guts having overcome such painful circumstances to not only reject his own self enforced solitude, but to fearlessly express his affection for his loved ones. 

  The Golden Age was a methodical destruction of Guts’ self-destructive methods of preservation ruined in a single selfish act by his most trusted friend, leaving him once again alone and afraid of growing close to those around him. It ripped the romance of Guts’ mission and eventually took the story down a course I never expected. Berserk wasn’t a story of revenge but one of recovery.

  Guess that’s enough beating around the bush, as I should talk about how this shift affected me personally. When I was young, when I began reading Berserk I found Guts’ unflagging stoicism to be really cool, not just aesthetically but in how I understood guys were supposed to be. I was slow to make friends during school and my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood had my friends' parents moving away faster than I could find new ones. At some point I think I became too afraid of putting myself out there anymore, risking rejection when even acceptance was so fleeting. It began to feel easier just to resign myself to solitude and pretend my circumstances were beyond my own power to correct.

  Unfortunately, I became the stereotypical kid who ate alone during lunch break. Under the invisible expectations demanding I not display weakness, my loneliness was compounded by shame for feeling loneliness. My only recourse was to reveal none of those feelings and pretend the whole thing didn't bother me at all. Needless to say my attempts to cope probably fooled no one and only made things even worse, but I really didn’t know of any better way to handle my situation. I felt bad, I felt even worse about feeling bad and had been provided with zero tools to cope, much less even admit that I had a problem at all.

  The arcs following the Golden Age completely changed my perspective. Guts had tragically, yet understandably, cut himself off from others to save himself from experiencing that trauma again and, in effect, denied himself any opportunity to allow himself to be happy again. As he began to meet other characters that attached themselves to him, between Rickert and Erica spending months waiting worried for his return, and even the slimmest hope to rescuing Casca began to seed itself into the story, I could only see Guts as a fool pursuing a grim and hopeless task rather than appreciating everything that he had managed to hold onto. 

  The same attributes that made Guts so compelling in the opening chapters were revealed as his true enemy. Griffith had committed an unforgivable act but Guts’ journey for revenge was one of self-inflicted pain and fear. The romanticism was gone.

  Farnese’s inclusion in the Conviction arc was a revelation. Among the many brilliant aspects of her character, I identified with her simply for how she acted as a stand-in for myself as the reader: Plagued by self-doubt and fear, desperate to maintain her own stoic and uncompromising image, and resentful of her place in the world. She sees Guts’ fearlessness in the face of cosmic horror and believes she might be able to learn his confidence.

    But in following Guts, Farnese instead finds a teacher in Casca. In taking care of her, Farnese develops a connection and is able to experience genuine sympathy that develops into a sense of responsibility. Caring for Casca allows Farnese to develop the courage she was lacking not out of reckless self-abandon but compassion.

  I can’t exactly credit Berserk with turning my life around, but I feel that it genuinely helped crystallize within me a sense of growing doubts about my maladjusted high school days. My growing awareness of Guts' undeniable role in his own suffering forced me to admit my own role in mine and created a determination to take action to fix it rather than pretending enough stoicism might actually result in some sort of solution.

  I visited the Berserk subreddit from time to time and always enjoyed the group's penchant for referring to all the members of the board as “fellow strugglers,” owing both to Skull Knight’s label for Guts and their own tongue-in-cheek humor at waiting through extended hiatuses. Only in retrospect did it feel truly fitting to me. Trying to avoid the pitfalls of Guts’ path is a constant struggle. Today I’m blessed with many good friends but still feel primal pangs of fear holding me back nearly every time I meet someone, the idea of telling others how much they mean to me or even sharing my thoughts and feelings about something I care about deeply as if each action will expose me to attack.

  It’s taken time to pull myself away from the behaviors that were so deeply ingrained and it’s a journey where I’m not sure the work will ever be truly done, but witnessing Guts’ own slow progress has been a constant source of reassurance. My sense of admiration for Miura’s epic tale of a man allowing himself to let go after suffering such devastating circumstances brought my own humble problems and their way out into focus.

    Over the years I, and many others, have been forced to come to terms with the fact that Berserk would likely never finish. The pattern of long, unexplained hiatuses and the solemn recognition that any of them could be the last is a familiar one. The double-edged sword of manga largely being works created by a single individual is that there is rarely anyone in a position to pick up the torch when the creator calls it quits. Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and likely Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter X Hunter all frozen in indefinite hiatus, the publishers respectfully holding the door open should the creators ever decide to return, leaving it in a liminal space with no sense of conclusion for the fans except what we can make for ourselves.

  The reason for Miura’s hiatuses was unclear. Fans liked to joke that he would take long breaks to play The Idolmaster, but Miura was also infamous for taking “breaks” spent minutely illustrating panels to his exacting artistic standard, creating a tumultuous release schedule during the wars featuring thousands of tiny soldiers all dressed in period-appropriate armor. If his health was becoming an issue, it’s uncommon that news would be shared with fans for most authors, much less one as private as Miura.

  Even without delays, the story Miura was building just seemed to be getting too big. The scale continued to grow, his narrative ambition swelling even faster after 20 years of publication, the depth and breadth of his universe constantly expanding. The fan-dubbed “Millennium Falcon Arc” was massive, changing the landscape of Berserk from a low fantasy plagued by roaming demons to a high fantasy where godlike beings of sanity-defying size battled for control of the world. How could Guts even meet Griffith again? What might Casca want to do when her sanity returned? What are the origins of the Skull Knight? And would he do battle with the God Hand? There was too much left to happen and Miura’s art only grew more and more elaborate. It would take decades to resolve all this.

  But it didn’t need to. I imagine we’ll never get a precise picture of the final years of Miura’s life leading up to his tragic passing. In the final chapters he released, it felt as if he had directed the story to some conclusion. The unfinished Fantasia arc finds Guts and his newfound band finding a way to finally restore Casca’s sanity and — although there is still unmistakably a boundary separating them — both seem resolute in finding a way to mend their shared wounds together.

  One of the final chapters features Guts drinking around the campfire with the two other men of his group, Serpico and Roderick, as he entrusts the recovery of Casca to Schierke and Farnese. It's a scene that, in the original Band of the Hawk, would have found Guts brooding as his fellows engage in bluster. The tone of this conversation, however, is completely different. The three commiserate over how much has changed and the strength each has found in the companionship of the others. After everything that has happened, Guts declares that he is grateful. 

  The suicidal dedication to his quest for vengeance and dispassionate pragmatism that defined Guts in the earliest chapters is gone. Although they first appeared to be a source of strength as the Black Swordsman, he has learned that they rose from the fear of losing his friends again, from letting others close enough to harm him, and from having no other purpose without others. Whether or not Guts and Griffith were to ever meet again, Guts has rediscovered the strength to no longer carry his burdens alone. 

  All that has happened is all there will ever be. We too must be grateful.

      Peter Fobian is an Associate Manager of Social Video at Crunchyroll, writer for Anime Academy and Anime in America, and an editor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: Peter Fobian

[katiewattsart]

15/10/19 : EVER TRIED. EVER FAILED

Overview of lecture 

To examine the notion of ‘Failure’ within Contexts of Practice

To explore the theoretical writings of Lisa le Feuvre and Abigail- Solomon Godeau

To think about the idea of trying and failing within our own art practice with a particular focus on the West Coast artist John Baldessari

‘The struggle itself…is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ (Albert Camus) 

Jancovics Marcell (1974) 

Lets pose some questions 

What makes a good artist/designer/creative?

own style

True to their work

Message behind their work/strong narrative 

Understandable art

How do we measure success in our own and others artwork?

success comes in different forms

Individual to the person

What is success?

personal goals 

What is failure?

personal to the individual 

What is good art?

subjective 

Rodin. The Thinker. 

‘The Master Piece’ - Emile Zola 

Negatives 

I’M NOT AN ARTIST - I’M A PHONY 

I HAVE NOTHING WORTH SAYING

I’M NOT SURE WHAT I’M DOING

OTHER PEOPLE ARE BETTER THAN I AM

I’M ONLY A STUDENT

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MY WORK

NO ONE LIKES MY WORK

I’M NO GOOD

Can we reframe this?

There are gaps between intention and realisation ... must they be so torturous?

Doris Salcedo. Tate Modern. 

Art and its Currencies 

‘In the realm of art, failure has a different currency.’ (Lisa le Feuvre)

The Parisian Salon des Refuses of 1863 

Manet to Claude Monet about Renoir: 

‘He has no talent at all that boy! You who are his friend tell him please to give up painting!’ 

‘Ever tries. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.’ Samuel Becket

Contextualising Failure 

Provides a historical context for the notion of failure within art practices is an enduring and influential myth of artistic creation

Examines the impossibility of achieving artistic perfection ‘...emerges the idea that artistic activity is often tainted by anxiety and doubt, and by the INEVITABLE SPACE SEPARATING INTENTION AND CONCRETISATION’

Lisa Le Feuvre ‘Strive to Fail’

WHAT DOES SHE SAY?

“This very condition of art-making makes failure central to the complexities of artistic practice and its resonance with the surrounding world”. 

The currency of failure in the realm of art 

It can take us beyond our ASSUMPTIONS

Artists have long challenged the notion of PERFECTION

Art can utilise themes such as DISSATISFACTION or ERROR as a tool to RETHINK ‘our place in the world’(p12)

It can help us ‘STUMBLE ON THE UNEXPECTED’

Art practice can be PROCESS ORIENTED rather than GOAL FOCUSED

‘In this uncertain and beguiling space, between two subjective poles

of SUCCESS AND FAILURE, where PARADOX rules, where transgressive

activities can refuse DOGMA AND SURETY, it is here, surely, that failure can be celebrated.’ (LeFeuvre. p19)

Bruce Nauman. White Anger. Red Danger. Yellow Peril. Black Death. 1984 

Abigail Solomon-Godeau on John Baldessari 

Abigail Solomon-Godeau 

‘The Rightness of Wrong’ 1997

Baldessari’s National City paintings encountered in ‘Wrong’ have gained ‘art-historical’ importance

His work ‘transform(ed) the outrageous into the canonical’

Expels decades of aesthetic rules

John Baldessari. National City (W),1996/2009 

“Art comes out of failure. You have to try things out. You can’t sit around,

terrified of being incorrect, saying “I won’t do anything until I do a

masterpiece.” John Baldessari

What Rules? What Canons? What Assumptions?

 The belief that the art object occupy ‘ a special and rarefied domain’

The integral belief that Art is linked to the notion of ‘Beauty’

These belief linger in our current cultural discourse (Solomon-Godeau) “It’s historical eclipse has been demonstrably the precondition for all that has been most VITAL, DYNAMIC AND CULTURALLY SIGNIFICANT in modern and contemporary art”.(Solomon-Godeau)

The queer art of failure 

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Contaxtualising Creativity

THE CAPTIVE MUSE: ON CREATIVOITY AND ITS INHIBITION, SUSAN KOLODNY

‘This book succeeds in the very difficult task of making lucid, meaningful statements about the states of mind that are involved in making art’ (Thomas Ogden) 

‘Idealism, with its travelling companion doubt, is driven by a misplaced belief in perfection - a concept setting an in accurate route to what-might-have-been, to the past, and even to perfection itself. Is there a method more pertinent that perfection to the ways we understand our place in the world, and in which art can complicate what we think we know?’

(Lisa le Feuvre. Strive to Fail. Failure. Documents of contemporary art.)

TASK: your ‘self-nominated failure’

Choose one of your own discarded ideas that you have decided in the past is of no consequence

Dare to bring it to life, if only for one day

Allow yourself no self criticism, no self judgment and just observe what happens

Make one small piece of work from this idea and take it with you to your own programmes as your ‘Self Nominated Failure’ and listen to how others respond 

Examine your own responses, not only to making a piece of work outside of your preconceived comfort zone but on what evolves from this activity

References:

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/the-thinker-bronze-sculpture-auguste-rodin-legion-of-honor-san-francisco-california-1-kathy-anselmo.jpg 

https://www.allyoucanbooks.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/book_cover_medium/ebook-cover/His%20Masterpiece_Zola.jpg 

https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01192/arts-graphics-slid_1192498a.jpg 

https://whatshotlondon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Francois-Joseph_Heim_001b-500x322.jpg 

 https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/10/7/1444223380357/629735d7-3d59-4b22-9e21-b15accf6168a-2060x1236.jpeg?width=300&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c524b6a55812fb4c303ed0876161ceca 

http://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjQ0NzEwMyJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCItcmVzaXplIDIwMDB4MjAwMFx1MDAzZSJdXQ.jpg?sha=7a6dcbc8c868dd2c 

https://t1.daumcdn.net/cfile/tistory/2531D54E523FF3FB3D 

https://d5wt70d4gnm1t.cloudfront.net/media/a-s/artworks/john-baldessari/17893-490897824166/john-baldessari-natinoal-city-w-800x800.jpg 

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71FMVxVx1OL.jpg 

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347508093i/5972417._UY400_SS400_.jpg 

[equalmeasurefiction]

You’re Oppressing Yourselves: An exploration of interpretations, bad writing, and missed opportunities

Responders and Writing Techniques

There is a method to my madness.  Part of that method is to introduce an idea and then bring it up again only a few posts later to help me explain my logic.

So let me begin this meta by explaining that I’m a #4 in terms of how I engage with a piece of media—I’m a responder.  So, my first instinct is to try and make sense of a work within the framework that has been provided by the creator, or to provide my own framework in order to achieve a better understanding of what I’ve just absorbed.

This is why I tend to write fanfiction before I start writing metas.  I can’t actually ‘see’ a work until I’ve chewed it up and reprocessed it/responded to it.

As a result of this particular quirk, I’m less likely to point out ‘bad writing’ right off the bat.  When I come across something ‘inconsistent’ or ‘out of character’ for a given character in a fictional work, my first instinct is to try and figure out what the writer is trying to tell me about the character.  Now, most of the time, my approach falls flat, because there are many inexperienced or rushed or frustrated writers in the world and when a character does something dumb or out of character it’s usually because the writer didn’t think things through, didn’t like the job, or is simply lazy.

That said, my tendency to try and read into inconsistencies isn’t entirely unfounded.  Creating character inconsistencies is a valid writing technique, and it can be very effective when properly deployed. This technique can be used a foreshadowing, a means of setting up backstory, or even a proverbial Chekhov's gun.  Character consistency and inconsistency is immensely important to character development, so any action that is ‘out of the ordinary’ for a character is a big deal.

Okay, now that I’ve put a bit of framework in place, let’s dig into Legend of Korra.  This is, after all, a show so full of character inconsistencies that it’s the only standard character trait.  We’re going to be focusing on a particularly inflammatory line from Season 1, Episode 1.

I’m going to provide a bit of critical analysis before digging into my perspective as a responder, because it’s important to point out bad writing in all its forms.

The Scene

Equalist: Are you tired of living under the tyranny of benders?  Then join the equalists!  For too long the bending elite of this city have forced non-benders to live as lower class citizens!  Join Amon, and together we will tear down the bending establishment!

Korra: What are you talking about?!  Bending is the coolest thing in the world!

Equalist: Oh yeah?  Let me guess, you’re a bender!

Korra: Yeah!  I am!

Equalist: And I bet you’d just love to knock me off this platform with some water bending, huh!

Korra: I’m seriously thinking about it!

Equalist: This is what’s wrong with the city!  Benders like this girl only use their power to oppress us!

Crowd: *General Outcry and Agreement*

Korra: What?!  I’m not oppressing anyone!  You’re-you’re oppressing yourselves!

Critical Analysis

When I look back on this scene, I can’t help but think that everyone should have realized that Legend of Korra would never really be able to measure up to Avatar: the Last Airbender and adjusted their expectations accordingly.  There are some very serious writing problems in this first episode and, for me, this scene captures them perfectly.  All of these problems stem from one incredibly important, but often ignored fact: this is the first episode.

First episodes are ‘introductory’ episodes.  They’re the ‘first chapter’ of a story and it’s important to set the status quo.  While it’s certainly possible to drop a group of characters into the midst of crisis in the first episode, it’s important that you establish character during the crisis.  Unless a writer is pulling some big, fancy flash-back sequence, it’s too soon to start including character inconsistency moments (unless you want to establish ‘inconsistency' as a core character trait, which is what LoK did).

This scene is a character inconsistency moment.  It is built up over the course of several previous scenes and comes to a head in this particular character interaction.  The sequence begins with Korra trying to buy food off a food vendor and being told off for not having money…

It continues the thread with Korra meeting the homeless man and being surprised by his poverty...

These two scenes both set a thematic tone and reveal important information about Korra’s character.

The thematic tone that’s been set by these first two interactions is ‘money and poverty in a city.’  The audience is watching as Korra stops, listens, and learns from the people she encounters.  Korra is surprised at what she encounters, revealing her ignorance of the greater world, but at the same time, she does not become combative with the people who are ‘educating’ her.  She accepts what she’s being told as truth and places her trust in the locals…

In light of the thematic setup and the characterization provided by the previous two scenes, I think it’s readily apparent that this scene makes no sense in the context of episode.  Korra was not confronting non-bender oppression in the scenes leading up to this, she was encountering economic realities.  This scene disrupts Korra’s characterization as someone who is capable of listening and growing an awareness of the problems of others.

Even Korra’s interjection in this scene, which opens her conversation with the equalist is completely out of left field.  The equalist is talking about benders oppressing non-benders.  Korra, however, ignores the discussion of oppression (which is surprising considering her temperament and approach to ‘solving problems’ in the very next scene) and argues that the act of bending is great and amazing.  This has absolutely nothing to do with the point that the equalist was making, which goes against everything that we had been shown about Korra’s character up until that point.

All the same, this scene would have been fine if the writers had actually done something with Korra’s reaction in the course of the series.  But there is no exploration or examination of Korra’s behavior in this instance.  They gave the audience Chekhov’s gun and then did nothing with it—that’s one of the biggest sin’s a writer can commit.  A good editor would have nixed this scene before it made it to production.

So, this is a scene that is thematically inconsistent and creates character inconsistencies and traits which are never resolved in the course of the series.  Why does this scene exist?

I think it all comes down to one line: ‘You’re oppressing yourselves!’

That line carries a huge amount of emotional and psychological baggage for anyone who has ever been part of a minority group and has been shouted down by someone else.  Many have been conditioned to react to that line negatively because their lives have been flooded with it and similar sentiments.  That line is loaded with ‘shock value’ and was probably included to provoke a reaction.

Its inclusion isn’t just bad writing, it’s a blatant attempt at making a ‘statement’ through a character.  And making a statement through a character without ‘follow-through’ (making sure that Chekhov’s gun goes off) is bad form.

Responder Analysis

But this scene can make sense in the context of the series.  However, making it make sense would involve Bryke actually writing a loving family and exploring the dynamics of that family.  I’m not convinced that Bryke knows how to do that.

I’m going to pull a little from personal experience here.

Now, I’ve seen ‘you’re oppressing yourselves’ tossed around online for ages, but I’ve only ever heard anyone say anything remotely close to it in real life once.  A friend made the comment after we left a lecture that discussed theories on civil liberties and the development of certain aspects of oppressive language in regards to a specific group.  We ended up talking about it and I was really surprised to learn that they had a close relative who was part of that ‘you’re oppressing yourselves’ group.

This relative was a family matriarch, had a lot of power within their community, and was a financially successful business person.  For my friend, the idea that someone who was like that might suffer any form of oppression seemed absolutely ridiculous.  How could one of the most influential and powerful people in my friend’s life possibly suffer any form of oppression when they commanded so much power and authority within their community?

Back to Korra.  Up until this particular scene, Korra blindly and blithely accepts what she’s told, because she doesn’t know much about Republic City.  The writers are showing her lack of knowledge.  If Korra accepts what she’s told when she has no knowledge on a topic, then why would she argue against the idea that non-benders were oppressed unless she felt that she knew a thing or two?

Now, I doubt that the White Lotus took the time to explain bender/non-bender relations to Korra (one of the many, many baffling holes in her education…), so that means that whatever understanding that Korra has about non-benders comes from personal experience.  That means that there must have been a strong, non-bender in Korra’s personal life who informed Korra’s understanding of the relationship between benders and non-benders.

The first and most obvious strong non-bender in Korra’s life is Pema.  The wife of Aang’s son, Tenzin, who has no fear of her husband and who, on occasion, bosses him around.

But Pema and Korra don’t really share much screen-time and they rarely share much time talking about anything (outside of ill-fated romance).  So, that means that the tough-as-nails non-bender might be a little closer to home.

Let’s talk about Senna, the Avatar’s mother who is never shown to have any bending ability in any existent season of Legend of Korra.  Tonraq is a powerful bender, and someone that Korra clearly respects and admires.  If Senna, his wife, were a non-bender and Korra spent the first five years of her life in a household where her non-bender mother actively argued with, bossed around, and was respected by a powerful and formidable water bender what conclusion would she naturally reach?

This is why I favor the theory that Senna is a non-bender.  Korra’s outburst is out of character for her, unless it’s a defensive reaction to having her understanding of a close, personal relationship with a non-bender disrupted.  It can be painful and difficult for a child, particularly a sheltered child, to be made to recognize the vulnerability of a parent or provider, especially when the child is put on ‘the side’ of the oppressor.

But Senna is not a non-bender.  This scene only serves to tell the audience that the lead character is an ignorant, unlikable brat.  And it really bothers me that this scene, which could have set up for some incredibly powerful mother/daughter moments and an exploration of family dynamics, was nothing more than a pointless dig at the audience…

Which why I’m ignoring Bryke’s canon and going with my own head canon where Senna is concerned.  So, tough non-bender Senna is my jam.

[jeremystrele]

Japanese Influenced Interiors – A World Of Inspiration

Japanese Influenced Interiors – A World Of Inspiration

Interiors

Lauren Li

Amber Road designed a Japanese-inspired café called New Editions and incorporated ‘zaisu’: Japanese seating typified as a chair with no legs. Custom versions were upholstered in linen and featured the typical ‘sashiko’ stitching. Photo – Prue Ruscoe.

From Belgium to California, and right here in Australia, Japanese design has made a big impression.

I am an interior designer, not a Japanese design expert, but like a lot of us, I’ve visited this magical country, and I found it to be instantly captivating on so many levels. This feature won’t delve into what ‘true’ Japanese design is, but rather, will touch on the ways Japanese style has influenced a whole range of aesthetics globally.

While Japan might be recognised for ‘zen’ minimalism – think pristine spaces and glass elements that make up a house by SANAA or the bare concrete made famous by Tadao Ando – there are so many diverse Japanese interiors that I wouldn’t necessarily describe as minimalist. I’m very much drawn to more eclectic Japanese spaces, that are layered with texture, plants and meaningful objects.

This got me thinking about the paradox between how we imagine stereotypical Japanese minimalism, and then what you actually encounter when visiting Japan: a 100 yen store on every street corner, or at least a sublimely tasteful Muji! It seems to me that the Japanese appreciate minimal spaces, but also love to consume. Uh oh, Marie Kondo!

Inside Sydney’s New Editions cafe, by Amber Road.  Photo – Prue Ruscoe.

New Editions references traditional Japanese ideas and materials. The interior by Amber Road feature a highly textured yet all-black palette. Japanese techniques have been employed such as ‘shou sugi ban’ a traditional way to preserve timber by charring it. Photo – Prue Ruscoe.

These interiors see the ‘wabi-sabi’ philosophy interpreted by Axel Vervoordt. Photo – Jan Liegeois

Wabi-sabi

You might be surprised to know that even Kanye West (!) has been influenced by Japan throughout his career – firstly with collaborations with Takashi Murakami and recently with his brand new ‘minimal monastery’ house designed by Axel Vervoordt. This Belgian architect is known for his intensely pared back design approach, and has long been inspired by Eastern philosophies. His stunning book Wabi Inspirations, features his own Westernised version of wabi features, including peeling paint, bare boards, distressed plaster walls, and muted colours. ‘It looks poor but it’s very costly. It’s the opposite of what most people want, which is something that looks expensive but is cheap,’ Axel chuckles.

Axel’s greatest inspiration is the spirit of zen monks in Japan, who sought contentment in simplicity, purity and restraint. ‘It’s the celebration of beauty in humble things’ Let’s just let that sink in for a minute.

Simplicity, purity and restraint are values that are an antidote to our fast, frenzied consumerism, and the scrolling social media spiral in which many of us live. Kim and Kanye are the most influential celebrity couple of our time (love them or hate them) and they have bought wabi-sabi to the mainstream, by showing the world how they live in an entirely bone coloured house, void of decoration (other than some exquisite Japanese ceramic pieces – raw ceramic ‘rocks’ and vessels by Yuji Ueda) and an unbleached grand piano (a Steinway no less). Their house isn’t exactly humble, however, it is somewhat surprising to see they have rejected having ‘things’ in the pursuit of wabi-sabi. (If you haven’t already… suss their sleek new home by Axel Vervoordt here).

Courted House by Breakspear Architects. Photo – Tom Ferguson.

Studiofour use the technique of ‘borrowing scenery’ in their projects to create a quality of space that provides a sense of sanctuary, enclosure and comfort. Photo – Shannon McGarth.

This house by B.E Architecture features a particularly unexpected detail in an urban property; a secluded Japanese garden with an outdoor shower. Alongside Japanese design, they channelled inspiration from Chilean landscape architect Juan Grimm and Australian gardens by Edna Walling. Photo – Peter Clarke.

BE Architects often design the landscapes for their residential projects. They feel that these gardens should invoke a sense of calm and serenity. The purpose of the gardens is to support the architecture as well as the occupants, while not making a grand statement in themselves. Photo – Peter Clarke.

The tranquil gardens of the Kawaii Platypi project by Splinter Society. Photo – Jack Lovel, courtesy Australian Interior Design Awards.

Borrowed Scenery

We know that houses are seriously compact in Japan, although they still feel amazing to spend time in.

Often, this is thanks to a well-positioned window with a view to a garden, which gives an impression of more space.

To borrow scenery is an ancient technique known as ‘shakkei’, and it makes a lot of sense to employ this philosophy in our homes in Australia. A great example of this in practice are spaces by Studiofour, which have a tangible connection to the outdoors. The Melbourne-based firm believes that a strong relationship to the outdoors ‘is a pathway to human health and happiness’.

this Japanese-inspired ‘Hideaway‘ cabin on Tasmania’s Bruny Island was designed as a place of refuge by local firm Maguire Devine. It enjoys unencumbered views out to the natural surrounds. Photo – Robert Maver.

Timber cladding combines with seamless concealed joinery, offering hidden storage space, in the minimalist micro-living apartment in Richmond by T-A Square architects. Photo – Jack Lovel.

The handmade brick seen in the Mayfield residence by Studiofour was chosen for its imperfection and variance in colour, tone, texture and size. Photo – Shannon McGrath.

For their Captain Kelly’s Cottage by John Wardle Architects sourced tiles from Japan, the very same that were originally commissioned by Frank Lloyd Wright for his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Photo – Trevor Mein.

Although geographically very far from Japan, Captain Kelly’s Cottage by John Wardle Architects, also in Tasmania, references Japanese design. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the living space was crafted entirely out of Tasmanian oak, and furniture items like a writing desk and coffee table were made out of leftover materials. Photo – Trevor Mein.

Dramatic panoramic views across the coastline of the north end of Bruny Island from Captain Kelly’s Cottage by John Wardle Architects. Photo – Trevor Mein.

Materiality

Imagine visiting a construction site, taking off your boots and sliding on a pair of slippers. This is exactly what happened to me when I visited Japan to work on an interior design project for a global retailer. I’m used to dusty worksites, with Triple M blasting from a radio in the corner, but I didn’t find anything like that on the Japanese construction site that day. The boots/slipper comparison reveals a lot about the way that building is approached in Japan. I encountered the cleanest and most organised building site I have ever seen, and I began to understand that everywhere I went I was talking to craftsmen.

The Shinto belief system, indigenous to Japan, influences Japanese architecture in terms of materiality and form. Materials are treated with care and the greatest craftsmanship. Materials are most cherished in their natural form.

The Nobu Ryokan in Malibu, designed by Studio PCH, incorporates Japanese traditions in a Californian beach setting. The retreat features hand-crafted teak soaking baths, combined with indoor and outdoor spaces. Photo – Dylan + Jeni.

This mid-century home in San Francisco features interiors designed by Charles de Lisle, including a powder room with a hand-carved elm sink and black lacquered rosewood paneling on the walls. Photo – William Abranowicz.

(left) BE Architecture begin designing by looking at the materials that best represent the feeling that they want a house to embody. Photo – Peter Clarke. (right) Senses by Louisa Grey & Frama. Photo – Rory Gardiner.

Bathing

Having a bath in Japan has its very own set of customs and rules.

Maybe, in the West, we’re not ready to bathe completely naked with strangers (!) however, we could learn a thing or two about the Japanese ritual of bathing – and the serene way the Japanese design their bathing spaces, with great emphasis on the bath, natural materials such as timber and stone, and natural light.

This serene bedroom in Arent & Pyke’s Pyrmont Apartment features a hand-painted screen with a Cassina Tokyo Chaise Lounge. Photo – Tom Ferguson.

Back in the mid-century house in San Francisco, this living room’s bar is enveloped in a custom de Gournay silk inside a custom indigo-dyed ash cabinet with brass countertop and shelves. The inspiration from Japan is endless. Photo – William Abranowicz.

This space references design ideas by American designer/craftsman George Nakashima. He introduced an appreciation of a tree’s natural forms and colours to celebrate its ‘imperfections’ to the American market. His live edge tables are iconic and he also designed pieces for Knoll, which blend American Shaker design with  Japanese joinery. Photo – Terence Chin.

Decoration

It’s fascinating how Japan has influenced Western design for hundreds of years. Notably, designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright and William Morris found inspiration from Japan during the rise of the Arts & Crafts movement. Many Nordic designers have also found common ground in their shared appreciation for fine craftsmanship.

From nature-inspired motifs, to the use of timber cladding and black lacquer, there are countless ways that Japan has influenced design and architecture in Australia and beyond. Personally, I’m totemo grateful!

[how2to18]

This piece will be appearing in the next issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Comedy Issue, No. 17

To support the Los Angeles Review of Books and receive the next issue, donate to our fund drive today or become a member. 

¤

“Laughs exude from all our mouths.” — Hélène Cixous 

“Comedy, you broke my heart.” — Lindy West

¤

IN A BIT about sexual violence in his 2010 concert film Hilarious (recorded in 2009), the now-infamous Louis C.K. says: “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone. Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” I was delighted when I first encountered this joke on Jezebel in July 2012 in a post called “How to Make a Rape Joke.” Lindy West was responding to the social media controversy surrounding American comedian Daniel Tosh, who had recently taunted a female heckler with gang rape. West’s insightful essay later led to a 2013 TV debate with comedian Jim Norton as well as her best-selling memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, where she describes the fallout of becoming one of the United States’s best-known feminist comedy commentators, including her subsequent, painful decision to stop going to comedy shows.

In “How to Make a Rape Joke,” West wondered whether it is ever okay to approach sexual violence with humor. She wrote that she understood and respected those, like the woman who called out Tosh, for whom it wasn’t, categorically. The sexual assault of women poses a special problem for comedy, she reasoned, because it is an expression of structural discrimination against women. That is, unlike misfortunes such as cancer and dead babies known to befall people at random, if you’re a woman, not only do you face a one in three chance of becoming a target of sexual violence, but you will also likely be held at least partly responsible for it. To illustrate the inappropriateness of jokes about this kind of a situation, she drew a comic analogy between patriarchal society and a place where people are regularly mangled by defective threshing machines and then blamed for their own deaths: “If you care […] about humans not getting threshed to death, then wouldn’t you rather just stick with, I don’t know, your new material on barley chaff (hey, learn to drive, barley chaff!)?” Compassion about a culturally loaded form of suffering would seem, automatically and intuitively, to preclude humor about it. Yet West’s own humorous reframing demonstrated what she ultimately decided: that you could be funny about sexual violence if you “DO NOT MAKE RAPE VICTIMS THE BUTT OF THE JOKE.” In particular, Louis C.K.’s rape joke then earned West’s stamp of approval because, in her words:

[It] is making fun of rapists — specifically the absurd and horrific sense of entitlement that accompanies taking over someone else’s body like you’re hungry and it’s a delicious hoagie. The point is, only a fucking psychopath would think like that, and the simplicity of the joke lays that bare.

Though her recent New York Times piece “Why Men Aren’t Funny” makes it clear that West now regards her defense of Louis C.K. as a relic, her sharp distinction between acceptable and unacceptable jokes in “How to Make a Rape Joke” set the standard for mainstream feminist discussions of comedy for a good five years.

While I find West compelling, in my own efforts to navigate the contemporary feminist ethics of humor throughout this period, I’ve been resisting the impulse to draw limits. Instead, I’ve been looking back to the debates over sexuality that were central to North American feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During the so-called sex wars, feminists agreed that sexuality had always been held in a patriarchal stranglehold but disagreed about what to do about it. The Women Against Pornography saw explicit sexual representations as the very basest mechanisms of female sexual oppression and so focused their energy on educating the public about their harms and prosecuting pornographers. By contrast, sex-positive feminists, as they came to be known, claimed that trying to shut down or cordon off unacceptable expressions of sexuality only exacerbated the problem. They argued that the history of criminalization and widespread fear of any sex but the reproductive, romantic, married kind had not only led to the marginalization of sex workers, lesbians, gay men, trans people, and many other so-called sexual deviants, but also cast sexuality as such into the shadows. Targeting pornography was therefore counterproductive. As Susie Bright, vocal defender of the sex-positivity movement and founder of the first women-run erotic magazine, put it:

porn [can be] sexist. So are all commercial media. [Singling out porn for criticism is] like tasting several glasses of salt water and insisting only one of them is salty. The difference with porn is that it is people fucking, and we live in a world that cannot tolerate that image in public.

Sex-positive feminists actively chose not to contribute to this climate of moral panic, focusing instead on unearthing the deeply embedded mainstream prejudices around sexual practices and fantasies. Instead of turning away, they faced sexuality head on, acknowledging debts to the small minority of people — sexologists, fetishists, queers, sex workers, erotic performers, and indeed pornographers — who had already begun exploring human sexuality in all its complexity, often with little socioeconomic support and at the risk of criminal charges. By many accounts, it was this unabashed approach to sex that led to the development and popularization of safe-sex protocols and consent education later in the 1980s.

There are of course, limits to the comparison of sex and humor, especially given that the impact of hetero-patriarchy on sex is much more immediately visible. Nevertheless, I would suggest that sexuality and humor are not merely analogous, but are in fact overlapping categories of feminist experience. Both are understood to be culturally coded but with powerful bases in the body. Like sex, laughter has historically been considered an unruly instinct, even by the very philosophers who have most rigorously examined it. As scholars like Anca Parvulescu, John Morreall, and Linda Mizejewski have variously shown, the stigma of humor, like that of sex, has been intricately interwoven with its designation as an irrational impulse and with gendered and racialized notions of embodiment. Moreover, there is a shared double standard regarding both laughter and sex: both have been imagined, paradoxically, as things that men have to cajole “respectable” (implicitly white, cisgendered, pretty, heterosexual) women to do and, at the same time, as things that transgressive women instinctively want to do, in excess. The dangers of both sex and humor have been encapsulated in the figure of a woman open-mouthed and out of control. In the early ’80s, the influential sexuality scholar Gayle Rubin observed that the most common symptom of our culture’s general fear of sex, or “sex negativity” as she called it, is the very impulse “to draw and maintain an imaginary line between good and bad sex.” That is, while various mainstream discourses of sex differ from one another in terms of the value systems they deploy and their level of overt misogyny, their views of sex are, ultimately, remarkably uniform: “Most of the discourses on sex, be they religious, psychiatric, popular, or political, delimit a very small portion of human sexual capacity as sanctifiable, safe, healthy, mature, legal, or politically correct” and, once the lines are drawn, “[o]nly sex acts on the good side […] are accorded moral complexity.” Wary of simply rerouting sexual shame, sex-positive feminists instead actively cultivated a nonjudgmental stance.

This might seem the worst possible moment to advocate for an equivalent form of humor positivity, let alone with reference to a joke about sexual violence by Louis C.K. In the wake of the public exposure of numerous celebrity serial sexual abusers such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, the viral #MeToo campaign has uncovered thousands of male harassers and abusers, and pointed to millions of others as yet unnamed. Since C.K. confirmed reports of his nonconsensual exhibitionism, some of the feminist anger and despair that was already rippling across popular and social media is being directed specifically at the industry that gave him his power. Many mainstream feminists, not least West herself, feel more prepared now than ever to throw the bathwater of comedy out along with the many baby-men who have been cavorting in it. Yet, as I see it, it is precisely in the context of our well-justified outrage that humor positivity is most needed. Humor is a vital, elusive, and continually evolving aspect of human experience. Like sex, it has repeatedly served oppressive ends, but it is no more essentially or necessarily discriminatory an impulse than sexuality is. It is undoubtedly important that we probe and resist the misogynist culture of mainstream comedy. At the same time I propose a change in the way we personally and collectively engage with the material this industry trades in — that is, the jokes themselves.

How might we ensure compatibility between the jokes we hear or make and the tools and concepts that shape our responses? How can we prevent our resistance to certain jokes from reproducing the (historically patriarchal) marginalization and stigmatization of the desire to laugh? If we get used to approaching jokes with trepidation, expecting offense, how might that wariness affect our political movements? In the current feminist conversation, these questions have begun to be raised in, for instance, Cynthia Willett, Julie Willett, and Yael D. Sherman’s “The Seriously Erotic Politics of Feminist Laughter,” Jack Halberstam’s “You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma,” Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s “Comedy Has Issues,” and Berlant’s “The Predator and the Jokester.” My sense is that what we especially need now are some clear and concrete principles and practices for humor-positive feminism. Here are three lines of inquiry that I hope may help us to develop a richer set of responses to comedy going forward.

  Can we develop a more complex and flexible view of humor’s power dynamics?

One of the major contributions of sex-positive feminism to our current understanding of sexuality was the recognition of seemingly counterintuitive forms of agency from below. Sex-positive feminists showed us the through line between the patriarchal suspicion of sexuality and certain feminist critiques of sexual exploitation. Though the fear of sex was originally and widely promulgated in medical, religious, and legal discourses, some of the alternative schemas of anti-porn feminists heightened the idea that most sex is inherently terrifying. For instance, Catharine MacKinnon’s view that “the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual — in fact, is sex” — while it helpfully exposes sexual violence as a structural problem — also makes it impossible to distinguish consensual heterosexuality from rape. Sex-positive feminists turned to the less moralistic disciplinary frameworks of sexology, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired in part by the subversive theories of power of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, they insisted that saying yes or no to sexual contact, including sexual domination, was a fundamental form of sexual participation. Moreover, they saw that the patterns of giving, taking, and sharing power through sex are much more various and unpredictable than — and sometimes run counter to — the arrangements delimited by basic socioeconomic and patriarchal paradigms.

A first step for developing a similarly nuanced take on the power relations entailed in humor could be examining and loosening up our often-unconscious obsession with the cruelty of laughter. In the philosophy of humor there are at least three ways of characterizing laughter, which can help to parse the differences between various jokes, as well as modes of delivery and reception. Today humor philosophers are most convinced by the idea, first fully elaborated in the 18th century, that laughter is a response to incongruity: something familiar suddenly looks strange, and the resulting sense of surprise pleases us. Another branch of humor theory draws on psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious. Relief theorists, most famously Freud, have emphasized the way that jokes, like dreams, trick us into considering ideas that we normally repress: laughter specifically manifests the giddiness of released inhibitions. These two modern theories of humor are largely compatible. Amusement does not necessarily degrade its objects but may imaginatively reframe or transform them, circulating power between tellers, laughers, and their objects in any number of ways.

The oldest and still most popular notion of humor, however, is one that presupposes and depends on hierarchical and unidirectional power relations. Superiority theory perceives laughter as the expression of unexpected pleasure at discovering our own excellence relative to the things we laugh at. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Superiority theory initially emerged alongside and is consistent with explicitly elitist political ideologies. It may be the only theory of humor children instinctively grasp: even at an early age, the phrase “That’s not funny!” is understood to mean not what it literally implies — “What you’ve said is not amusing to me and could never amuse anyone” — but rather “That hurts my feelings.” For kids, joking about the wrong thing is an ethical violation; it simply moots the possibility of laughing. These days, distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable jokes seem to put a modern, grown-up face on superiority theory. But jokes labeled as “offensive” or “inappropriate” are determined to be “not funny” in more or less the same way that kids mean it. The tropes that oppose “punching up” to “punching down,” coined in the early 1990s by the feminist satirist Molly Ivins, have been crucial in the popularization and liberalization of superiority theory. Those phrases also put a deceptively simple spatial spin on the relative socioeconomic power of laughers and objects. Reinforcing a David and Goliath moral code, the tropes imply that jokes are crucially aggressive in form, but that in some cases violence is justified. It’s okay — heroic even — to take on a bigger meaner guy, but undoubtedly a bad thing to pick on someone littler and weaker than you.

Of course, jokes can be hurtful, sometimes intentionally so. However, taking cues from sex-positive feminists, we might want to stop simply assuming that they are. Just as consensual sexual relations of domination and submission may look like abuse to those who don’t understand the rules, so might some apparently mean jokes. Think of insult comedy or a roast, where the target welcomes the jokes that really sting. But the larger and more important point is that, more than any other factor, our theories of humor will determine our perception of any joke and of the social and political arenas in which they are being made. Keeping our minds open to the possibility that surprise or relief rather than aggression may be the primary affect or intention will better equip us to see the various, potentially contradictory, facets of any comic provocation. Mainstream feminist critics have specific reasons for rejecting jokes about sexual violence: for some survivors suffering from post-traumatic stress, the power dynamics of humor and of assault can sometimes feel so painfully intertwined that certain jokes are experienced as violations akin to the initial trauma. Yet it is precisely because the very perception of aggression can recharge past suffering that it seems important to remember humor’s other impulses. Recently, artists like Emma Cooper, Heather Jordan Ross, Adrienne Truscott, and Vanessa Place are turning to humor expressly in an effort to destigmatize the experiences of sexual assault survivors and change the tone of our conversation. How might a more general focus on humor as incongruity or relief also help to reduce the frequency or intensity of fight-or-flight responses and open up new aesthetic, therapeutic, and political prospects?

  Can we develop a more thoroughgoing and flexible view of the rhetorical and performative aspects of humor?

In recent years, I’ve often been surprised to hear irony or ambiguity denounced in feminist humor criticism, as though it would be possible, if people would just say what they really mean, to be assured of a perfectly direct transmission of ideas or a fully inclusive joke. For example, in her study of the dangers of rape jokes, Lara Cox reiterates the superiority theory view that the pleasure of irony depends on “the idea that there is someone out there who won’t ‘get’ the nonliteral nature of the utterance” — and these dupes are “the joke’s ‘butts’ or ‘targets.’” In his study of race humor, Simon Weaver distinguishes between polysemous jokes, which inadvertently reinforce racism, and clear jokes, whose antiracist message cannot be mistaken. I worry that such arguments seem to disavow the fundamental slipperiness of language. Contributing in their own way to North American sex positivity, Frenchpoststructuralist feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous underscored that words have never been equipped for transparent representation. While many jokes do depend on linguistic play, comedians are not responsible for the essential arbitrariness of their medium. Words will always interact and impinge on one another; signification will always be subjectively, historically, and politically inflected, by both speakers and listeners, in myriad ways. Reminding ourselves of the basic wildness of language — and the range of meanings and identities that this wildness makes imaginable, especially in jokes — can temper our anxiety about the inevitability of misinterpretation.

At the same time, let’s attend more carefully to the theatricality of humor, including the jokes and quips that bubble up spontaneously as part of ordinary conversation. In particular, stand-up comedians are in character even when they speak as themselves, and many comedians regularly adopt multiple personas, some of whom channel views that they find especially awful or absurd. Very often these views are already in the air, and the comedian, by giving voice to popular perceptions, hopes to draw fresh attention to them. Moreover, comedians tend not to put on and take off these various personas like so many hats, but rather to alternate and layer them, turning some up and others down, as if each one was a different translucent projection on a dimmer switch. These uneven amplifications of characterization actually generate the dialogic structure of comic performance, as stand-up scholar Ian Brodie explains: “The audience is expected to try to determine what is true [that is, closest to what the comedian generally thinks] and what is play. The comedian[’s] […] aim is […] to deliver whatever will pay off with laughter.” Staying conscious of these shifts will help us to recognize that the most challenging moments — those moments when we don’t know quite where to locate a comedian’s values and commitments — are not incidental but central to the interpersonal dynamics of stand-up comedy.

  How can we expand our theories of laughter’s social conditions and effects?

Our most definitive and intense experiences of laughter tend to be in groups of three or more. For most of us, sex and humor are different in this respect. And humor theorists have written very engagingly about the feelings of communion potentially generated through laughter. Ted Cohen writes, for example, that laughing together “is the satisfaction of a deep human longing, the realization of a desperate hope. It is the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another, to be able to live together.” However, as Robert Provine and others argue, we have so much more to learn about humor’s social aspirations, from the vantage of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and many other disciplines besides. Feminists will have a lot to contribute to this inquiry, not least because we know to be skeptical of any account of collective social experience that neglects to factor in the uneven distribution of socioeconomic resources and respect and because we are acutely aware of the likelihood of exclusion and humiliation within any diverse group, and the likelihood that these bad feelings will remain invisible to the most entitled people in the room.

As we help to flesh out our understanding of the social benefits and costs of humor, however, I hope we will get better at waiting for the initial wash of feeling to pass before assigning political positions and moral values to jokes, their tellers, and our own and others’ responses. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, some pro-porn feminists have recently been exploring the consumers’ prerogative in shaping their reception of any sexual representation, regardless of its intended public. In an essay called “Queer Feminist Pigs: A Spectator’s Manifesta,” Jane Ward contemplates her taste for mainstream porn and proposes that,

We need […] a means of “queering” porn that doesn’t rely on filmmakers to deliver to us imagery already stamped with the queer seal of approval, and that doesn’t automatically equate queer viewers with queer viewing. […] Can we watch sexist porn and still have feminist orgasms?

Many of the most successful comedians purposely write material that can reach very different audiences. What if we were to recognize that as listeners or consumers of jokes we have a comparable level of freedom in determining a joke’s meaning, of finding a place from which the joke can be funny to us? Adapting Ward’s question, we might consider: “Can we have a feminist laugh at a discriminatory joke?” Especially given the current state of US and world politics, some humor researchers have been perturbed to discover that certain satires appeal to both progressive and conservative viewers alike. But if humor, like sex, can make strange bedfellows, that capacity to bring people together may be something not — or not only — to fear, but also something to maximize strategically and even celebrate. Even when we’re laughing for different reasons, couldn’t the fact that we’re doing so across too-familiar divides be invigorating in unpredictable ways?

To consider how humor-positive feminism might differ from the censuring approach that is dominant now, let’s return to C.K.’s 2009 joke. It starts with a basic prohibition — “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone” — then follows with a rationalization of nonconsensual sex that completely overrides that prohibition: “Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” The statements contradict one another and the speaker’s casual diction suggests that he has made a habit of justifying acts of criminal violence. In 2012, West’s superiority theory of humor dictated that her central critical task was to work out who was most hurt by this crazy illogic and determine whether or not that hurt was deserved. She implicitly centered the shift in C.K.’s delivery from one statement to the next, reading these lines as a joke that mocked the perpetrator-persona’s twisted thinking. Feminists had permission to laugh, and in fact wanted to laugh, she argued then, because we felt confident that all of us, including C.K. himself, were not just much nicer but also much smarter than the asshole he was briefly inhabiting on stage. However, C.K.’s recent confirmed sexual misconduct has thoroughly destroyed this version of the joke by eroding the distinction between C.K.’s own voice and that of his perpetrator-persona. As playful distance has given way to painful alignment, the liberal superiority theory must seek a new target. From this vantage, the 2009 joke — insofar as it can still be construed as an utterance capable of eliciting laughter — has to be recognized for what it actually always was: a trivialization of rape.

When West was writing “How to Make a Rape Joke” in 2012, C.K. was appreciated by feminists for regularly raising difficult questions about white heterosexual male privilege. This status provided an important touchstone for West’s feeling that his rape joke, unlike many others, was critical of rape culture: “Louis CK has spent 20 years making it very publicly clear that he is on the side of making things better.” Already by the time she was writing her memoir, however, West had stopped actively defending this joke — “I should have been harder on Louis CK, whom I basically let off on a technicality.” In recent weeks, C.K. has been made a symbol of one of the most insidiously misogynist formal features of confessional stand-up comedy: the way the whole audience is made to share in the comedian’s personal shame. According to this revised binary feminist view, everyone who ever laughed at this joke bears some responsibility for pain it may have caused to assault survivors and for contributing to rape culture.

  But is it necessary — or advisable — to turn against our desire to laugh, even as we shift our attention away from C.K. himself? A humor-positive feminist frame invites us to remember the other laughs that we have lost now that C.K. and his perpetrator-persona are not fully distinguishable. We can see that it was previously available as a relief joke that provocatively illustrated the kind of exceptionalism to which we are all capable of falling prey. And as an explicitly anti-sexist incongruity joke, about the tendency of oft-repeated prohibitions to become empty slogans, especially where endemic, shame-inducing patterns of sexual violence are concerned. Paradoxically, though C.K.’s long history of abuse has destroyed his credibility as a critic of the ineffectiveness of liberal platitudes, it also proves the urgent necessity of the kind of critique he was trying to offer.

In December 2017, as I write this, a humor-positive frame also allows us to turn C.K.’s lines into a dark feminist superiority joke that, instead of stressing our own pain and disappointment, capitalizes on the situational irony here. This once-celebrated self-exposer has been exposed as yet another man with a consent problem. That is, since his accusers bravely went public and Louis C.K. affirmed their reports, the coyness of the original lines may be unraveled through a revenge joke: like a deranged wooden puppet, the comedian punches up at himself much harder than he intends. Feminist humorist Jill Gutowitz effectively put this metajoke into circulation when she posted links to C.K. telling a variety of rape jokes over the years, including the one discussed here, below the Tweet: “Surprised about Louis CK? Here’s every time he told us, to our faces, that he was a creep.” Because righteousness isn’t my favorite flavor, I don’t find this new version of the joke as funny as the one I thought that C.K. was telling in 2009. But I do like knowing that it’s going around.

¤

Danielle Bobker is associate professor in the English Department at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is also co-organizer of a working group on Feminism and Controversial Humor.

The post Toward a Humor-Positive Feminism: Lessons from the Sex Wars appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ByUf7k via IFTTT

[memoryinsufficient]

Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election one year ago, the games sector has tried to work out how to use our medium to resist the rise of the far right. In March, Resistjam brought game developers together around the world to create consciousness-raising works of political art. Rami Ismail is one developer who has used his platform as a respected public speaker at games conferences to speak out against Trump’s discriminatory travel ban and elevate the voices of developers whose work has been affected. Games criticism outlet Waypoint’s remarkable first year included a week-long special feature on the prison-industrial complex.

Videogames and neoliberalism

Class politics of digital media

Art as political response

How to use games politically

References

One year on, it may now be a good time to evaluate the cultures of resistance that are growing in games. What does it mean to resist fascism with games and tech? How can the videogames and technology industries confront our role in fostering cultures of isolated young men who become radicalised? Does it still make sense to focus on videogames at a time like this?

Videogames and neoliberalism

“Duke Nukem’s Dystopian Fantasies” appeared on Jacobin on April 20th, marking a debut post for writer and artist Liz Ryerson on the leftist commentary site. In it, she makes the affirmative case for looking at videogames as historical and cultural artefacts while judging them on their own merits, and makes the connection between the male power fantasy the game embraces, the alienation people feel under late capitalism, and how that can translate into reaction without a coherent understanding of history.

“This is the power of the fantasy Duke Nukem as a cultural figure represents: that through raw machismo, the series of oppressive neoliberal forces that form the framework of our society can be conquered and transcended. Duke cannot exist in a rational world. He can only exist in a one filled with internal contradictions, crossed wires, and broken down buildings.

“His world is never stable. It can only ever be dominated by irrational fears of the unknown and one-dimensional, cartoonish archetypes. His world never resolves any of its cognitive dissonances, and sometimes even seems to be aware of its own self-destructiveness.”

Liz Ryerson (2017) “Duke Nukem’s Dystopian Fantasies”, Jacobin

For the most part, Ryerson’s piece received praise from leftist partisans whether or not they were particularly committed to videogames as a craft. But not everyone felt it was appropriate for a socialist journal like Jacobin to have published a close reading of something like Duke Nukem 3D.

https://twitter.com/garliccorgi/status/855241007692210177

It’s not as if they’d ever previously published pieces on the art, culture and business of games or tech, to relatively little backlash:

Les Simerables, Eva Koffman “SimCity isn’t a sandbox. Its rules reflect the neoliberal common sense of today’s urban planning.”

Empire Down, Sam Kriss “The player in Age of Empires II doesn’t take on the role of a monarch or a national spirit, but the feudal mode of production itself.”

“You can sleep here all night”: Video Games and Labour, Ian Williams “Exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how many of us may be working in years to come.”

In my own experience occupying the art fringe of the videogame industry–which is admittedly a highly reactionary space–I’ve learned that while there are a lot of young people pouring a lot of energy into their craft, it’s easy to feel lonely and beholden to a lost cause. I’ve worked as a writer and small-time artist and developer for almost a decade, focusing primarily on indie and alternative development communities and agitating in my limited capacity for more of a spotlight on them, their histories, and the labour involved in them. My political activity outside of my work consists largely of anti-fascist organizing in my city–that means participating in teach-ins, free food events, as well as protests and counter-demonstrations against the far-right. This work is voluntary, but can sometimes feel much more fulfilling than my actual profession. It’s easy to feel like no one really cares about fringe technical arts because, well, most people don’t. If the industry’s flagship mainstream titles give us very little to seriously engage with, then why bother digging any deeper?

[bctt tweet=”Political critique of AAA games is a lot of work, for something juvenile at worst, and culturally peripheral at best.” via=”no”]

As the Jekyll that is liberalism has once again fallen into crisis and gives way to its Mr. Hyde that is fascist reaction, I’ve felt increasingly insecure about the nature of my work and why I chose it. I laugh nervously and tell people what I do is bullshit before going any further. Luckily, most of the people I’ve encountered while organizing, or even just through having had a political affinity online, have expressed genuine interest in the medium, the inner workings of our opaque and cloistered industry, and its potential as an expressive and communicative tool. Still, I have met those who think of things like social media as “inappropriate technology”, who automatically assume that anyone who has any interest in videogames is a pepe nazi, or who think of any engagement with new media as a cultural and political dead end.

That said, some of the most personally influential leftist thinkers I’ve come across are also writers, artists and academics in this incredibly weird field. More often than not we organize and march together. This is not an attempt to scapegoat anyone specific or to do as so many desperate thinkpieces did after the election and try to reaffirm the dubious political importance of games as an artform through headlines such as “Trump as Gamer-in-Chief”.

I don’t think that making videogames, no matter how fringe or alt, should be conflated with tried and true forms of street activism. Game jams about the immigration ban are not a form of direct action in the way shutting down a consulate or doing an hours-long sit-in at an airport are. Your app is not saving the world.

ResistJam was an online game jam about resisting authoritarianism. Over 200 games were made by participants.

The dominant ideological expression of late capitalism is liberalism, or more specifically, neoliberalism. Liberalism prefers to try to diversify the middle class of the currently existing system, rather than try imagining something that might liberate greater masses of people. According to this view, capitalism fundamentally works, only needing a slight tweak here or there to make it more “accessible” to those who are deserving. A major way it seeks to accomplish this is by centering symbolic representation of various marginalized identities while also depoliticizing things like technological progress, framing them as inherently good and proof of societal advancement. All actual material concerns and real struggle can then be ironed away in favour of simply trying to optimize the level of participation for marginalized groups, as one would fiddle with a dial. This isn’t to say symbolic representation doesn’t matter, but to fixate on it strips us of the ability to think in terms of collective political power, and cultivate a real political program that fights for material improvements to people’s lived conditions.

Class politics of digital media

Media consumption doesn’t determine political outcomes, at least not in a direct sense, but it does help shape people’s political imaginations. Taking the time to unpack the media we consume can tell us a lot about the conditions of production–that is to say, the ways in which labour power is exploited in order to produce entertainment commodities. This may include the mining of cobalt to make computer hardware, or the manufacturing of consoles and other devices at Foxconn plants, or developers coerced into overwork in order to meet production quotas. There is a potentially international struggle of exploited workers even just when it comes to videogames, yet hardly a labour movement to speak of. That there’s hardly a union presence in the technical arts or in tech work broadly, and that these industries tend toward meritocratic, libertarian or even fascist thinking that tends to be expressed ideologically via their major cultural properties, is not an accident.

Conversely, if politics are the “art of the possible”, then media creation allows us to expand the conceptual scope for what’s possible. Most of the art we consume is conservative in character–even works we consider liberal or progressive are often deeply reactionary in their base assumptions. For example, David Grossman explains why diverse Brooklyn Nine-Nine can’t avoid being apologia for the NYPD, and why using progressive representation to paper over the faults of repressive institutions is indefensible.

Earlier this year, the Vera Institute of Justice polled young people in high-crime areas of New York, and found that only four in ten respondents would feel comfortable seeking help from the police if they were in trouble, and eighty-eight percent of young people surveyed didn’t believe that their neighborhoods trusted the police. Forty-six percent of young people said they had experienced physical force beyond being frisked by a police officer.

“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” tries to get around this problem by pretending the actual Brooklyn doesn’t exist.

David Grossman (2013) “If you think the NYPD is like Dunder Mifflin, you’ll love ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine'”, New Republic

Videogames in particular have their own sordid history of using diversity rhetoric as a way to deflect criticism of unwieldy, increasingly shoddy games produced under highly exploitative conditions, and reflect profoundly disturbing ideological tendencies (sometimes with the help of the arms industry or the U.S. military.) This has led some leftists to believe that the interactive arts as a craft are inherently reactionary and devoid of creative potential. I sympathize to an extent with this position, but having spent significant time in tech and games spaces, I believe these problems arise from the same historical conditions that render most art conservative, as well as specific ones owing to the opaqueness of the industry itself. I think these are things that can be overcome, not without some effort, and part of what keeps me interested in games is its creative fringe, where artists are finding ways to use the medium to capture as well as suggest alternatives to our current predicament.

[bctt tweet=”Videogames have matured entirely within the context of late capitalism and neoliberalism.” via=”yes”]

Videogames have barely a labour movement to speak of, and are an appendage of the tech-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. An important aspect of their heritage resides in engineers meddling with MIT military computers. They have never, in their production or conception, been entirely separate from the state or the military-industrial complex or from corporate interest, and as a result often exist as an ideological expression of these institutions.

Maybe this was unavoidable, the forces underlying the technical arts world too strong to ever be meaningfully opposed by a few dissenting voices, but I struggle to think of anything in the modern world for which this is not true. Maybe a game jam, or a book fair, or a block party should not be the centerpieces of our activism. These things have their place, but should not be confused for things like street actions (protests, counter-demonstrations against the far-right), grassroots electoral activism, coalition-building between social and economic justice groups, public disobedience (like the destruction of hostile architecture), accessibility and anti-poverty efforts, workplace organizing and so on. This work can be thankless and grueling, but it’s absolutely vital. Still, engaging with media and culture in a way that actually resonates with alienated people is a good way to let them know there’s something else available to them than resigned helplessness. Perhaps it seems like too much effort for too small and marginal a community, but going to any independent games site will bring up literally thousands of entries, much of it being made by people under the age of 30. Many of these people work multiple jobs while making their art for free or almost free, or work under precarious conditions (employment instability, contract work, etc,) and scrape by on crowdfunding, and many–as I’ve experienced both by playing their works and by actually building relationships with them–lean acutely left and hunger for more robust progressive spaces that reward creative experimentation, but often lack the time, energy or organizational guidance that would help them achieve those goals.

But even more broadly, more people play games than identify strictly as “gamers.” Plenty of people who do work in the industry recognize this term as a corporate invention, and don’t actually resemble the stereotype of the socially-awkward, emotionally stunted, self-pitying bourgeois recluses that so much of the industry has historically built its marketing around. While mainstream ideologies in the subculture tend to range from milquetoast liberalism to right-wing libertarianism to cryptofascism, quite a lot more people consume media like games, comics and even anime than are intimately involved with the worst elements of these subcultures. Snobbishly refusing to make any use of these “deviant” or “degenerate” new forms and reacting with hostility at anyone who tries to strikes me as missing an opportunity, and as needlessly ceding cultural ground to people we seek to oppose at every level.

Art as political response

Though GamerGate is nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been following it closely, it’s unusual in that it captured the attention of people who have nothing all to do with video games when it’s ostensibly preoccupied with whether certain online blogs have properly disclosed their writers’ ties to indie game developers. A recent post at Breitbart, however, helps to explain GamerGate’s appeal: It’s an accessible front for a new kind of culture warrior to push back against the perceived authoritarianism of the social-justice left.

Vlad Chituc (2015) “Gamergate: A culture war for people who don’t play video games”, New Republic

Reactionaries–from bog standard republicans to the fractured jumble of fascoid revanchists that make up the so-called “alt-right”–have for a long time viewed nerd culture as part of the broader culture war. This is why Gamergate attracted conservative figures like Christina Hoff Sommers, Todd Kincannon and Milo Yiannopoulos (both disgraced), Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich and so on. I don’t think gaming or memes really impacted, say, the election, and I tend to think the way we talk about Gamergate–as though it’s the cause of, rather than a product of, the resurgence of the far-right–misses the forest for the trees. I don’t think leftist and labour activists ought to go out of their way to address these hard-identified gamers either. There’s no reason for us not to remain critical of the industry and the ideologies it reproduces.

But it’s obvious that this is a group that gets really anxious when they start to feel like they don’t have control over “nerd culture” anymore, and who have in many ways acted as shock troops to dissuade people from asking too many questions about the industry’s inner practices. In retrospect, there was an opportunity with Gamergate for those in and around the industry to really interrogate the relationship between its issues with labour and its issues with incubating angry reactionary nerds, and for the most part that didn’t happen. It couldn’t, because those who were most likely to suffer professional and personal attack weren’t organized, and still aren’t. It’s no wonder so many YouTube celebrities turn out to be fascists. Actually embracing those who work in or around these fields and who are desperately trying to inject a little grace and intelligence into the medium may help weaken that stranglehold. Not such a terrible idea considering how many kids are watching the likes of PewDiePie and JonTron.

https://twitter.com/liberalism_txt/status/894978105021956096

We’ve seen this work to an extent: bots that tweet out liberal self-owns and dank communist memes can help bring together people who feel their concerns aren’t otherwise being articulated and addressed, and find if nothing else in this a bond with other like-minded souls. I don’t think these things are necessarily directly persuasive, but they do allow us to give voice to that which both invigorates us and that which causes us to despair.

https://twitter.com/ra/status/828686383623593985

Tim Mulkerin (2017) Nazi-punching videogames are flooding the internet, thanks to Richard Spencer

They’re also a natural consequence of a diverse mass of people all feeling the same disillusionment and disgust in their everyday lives, needing solidarity but also craving catharsis. Taking a second look at these commodities we mindlessly consume may not in itself be movement building, but it can help put things in perspective. (And if these things are in your estimation not meaningful, why waste time getting angry at the people who do find value in them, especially if those people are your comrades in every way that does matter? Don’t we value a diversity of skills and tactics?)

We know this can work with podcasts, publications, flyers, banners, zines, comics, and music, despite the problems endemic to all creative industries. Not only can these things let people know that in fact they aren’t alone, but they also give us an opportunity to craft a compelling alternative vision. Unfortunate though it is that the most visible videogames tend to express the vilest characteristics of the industry, certain indie critical darling games have proven that the same tools can be used to vividly illustrate the daily grind of making ends meet while working a minimum wage job, the dehumanizing procedure of immigration bureaucracy, or the desperate, soul-crushing banality of office work.

Games of labour and the avant-garde

Richard Hofmeier Cart Life

Lucas Pope Papers, Please

Molleindustria Everyday The Same Dream

The Tiniest Shark Redshirt

Jake Clover Nuign Spectre

micha cárdenas Redshift and Portalmetal

Paloma Dawkins, Gardenarium

Colestia Crisis Theory

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  Even more avant-garde works like Nuign Spectre or Redshift and Portalmetal use mixed media aesthetics to illustrate the grotesqueness of prevailing ideologies and conditions, while the dreamy work of an artist like Paloma Dawkins allows us to envision worlds which are seemingly impossible but nonetheless worthy of imagining. Colestia’s Crisis Theory subverts the tech world’s own obsession with Taylorism and systems, specifically using flow chart representation of capitalism to lay bare its inherent instability.

This isn’t to repeat the canard about games being more inherently capable of producing empathy than other art forms, or that we ought to focus on one art form to the exclusion of others. But I do think the exercise of ranking different art forms according to how sophisticated they are is inherently reactionary, arbitrarily limits the scope of expression, and constrains our ability to cultivate the new and different when it’s staring us right in the face.

As film critic Shannon Strucci pointed out in her video “why you should care about VIDEO GAMES”–which was made in response to the very attitude I’m describing–no conservative holdout in the history of the arts has ever been vindicated by a wholesale dismissal of a new form or movement as delinquent and therefore not worth engagement.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.

Walter Benjamin (1936) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

But this is just regular old art criticism. Not all art is or should be explicitly used toward political ends, and games are no different. Walter Benjamin famously warned about confounding aesthetic with politics, and how doing so creates space for fascism. Grossman’s piece mentioned above ultimately links the dopey neoliberalism of Brooklyn Nine-Nine to an underlying apologia for a racist police state; this sort of prioritization of representation and aesthetics is commonplace in liberal bourgeois rhetoric (the fixation, for example, liberal pundits have with condemning bigotry as being a “bad look” rather than being actively harmful in calculable ways). The tech world, too, is remarkably consumed with style over substance–it’s a world where rainbow capitalism and tokenism reign supreme while the oligarchs who run it not only would be too happy to work on behalf of fascist governments, but have in the past and are in the present.

make this into a footer link

rainbow capitalism

tokenism

“IBM ‘dealt directly with Holocaust organisers'”, The Guardian

“Peter Thiel, Trump’s tech pal, explains himself”, The New York Times

In Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger tracks the history of the reification of dominant ideologies through art, from colonialism to sexism to capitalism. Berger describes the nostalgic yearning for more “legitimate” forms of art displaced by newer technology as fundamentally reactionary and regressive, writing:

“The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture.”

How to use games politically

Suffice it to say, there is little in the history of games or the arts generally that should stop them from expressing reactionary tendencies. It can’t really be helped, after all, if art is to be a reflection of current and historical conditions. By extension, the most regressive elements of gaming culture tend to value only those games that functionally and aesthetically resemble classic games, and classical forms of art. If games are a reflection of an industry full of people who literally want to suck the blood of the young and think unions are a trick of the devil, that’s at least in part true because art forms that preceded them, like oil painting, are a reflection of an inbred aristocracy that believed in the divine right of the propertied classes to rule and thought that they were justified in pillaging entire peoples because of their superior skull shape. That doesn’t mean we ought to deny subversive art where it exists, and it’s a piss poor reason for refusing to support its cultivation in new forms which are as-yet barely understood.

I want socialist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist art to exist anywhere art is being produced, even if it’s with computers, and especially if its core demographic is young people and kids.

Supporting bold, avant-garde and subversive art is a much bigger social project than simply using what exists toward political ends, but I think if we are going to use what exists for political ends it’s useful to think about how what we create can reconfirm our reality. It’s also worth pointing out that plenty of political art is embarrassing, ineffectual or just plain preachy. The same has been true for lots of “serious” games (maybe even some of the ones I listed above), which may be accused of being boring, simplistic, or worse at conveying their overall point than a book or article on the same subject. (I would counter that games should not try to be like articles or books, but more like paintings, where being simple and straightforward isn’t such a big deal. I would also caution that it’s possible to engage serious subject matter while maintaining a sense of humour.) Conversely, when political operatives try to make use of games–rather than game developers trying to portray current events–this also runs the risk of coming off as condescending, tin-eared and trite. For example, the Clinton campaign made use of a “game-style app” called Hillary 2016 that Teen Vogue described as like “FarmVille but for politics”.

https://twitter.com/emily_uhlmann/status/757570149490761728

But I don’t think this is a bad way to approach politics because they used a game–it’s a bad way to approach politics because it avoids addressing constituents and answering simple policy questions. It betrayed a valuing of data over people that so many find bloodlessly reptilian about tech evangelism. Also, Christ does it sound boring.

A politically meaningful use of interactive art could mean the creation of workshops for marginalized communities, similar to the Skins Workshop for indigenous kids run by AbTec, a research network based in Montreal. Or, it could mean the kind of partnerships like the one Subaltern Games had with Jacobin to promote their game No Pineapple Left Behind, thereby using games as yet another way to engage people about issues like colonialism and capitalism in the global south. I’ve personally recently become involved with the Montreal collective behind Game Curious, an independent annual gaming showcase and workshop that seeks to bridge the gap between the medium, non-gamers, and radical activist groups organizing around real-world political struggles.

Initiative for Indigenous Futures | Workshops: Bringing Aboriginal Storytelling to Experimental Digital Media  The Skins workshops aim to empower Native youth to be more than just consumers of new technologies by showing them how to be producers of new technologies.

Subaltern Games | Jacobin sponsorship “We are proud to announce that we will be collaborating with Jacobin Magazine to help promote our upcoming game, No Pineapple Left Behind. […] Jacobin will tell all of the leftists about our upcoming Kickstarter campaign (even YOU). They are also providing copies of their book Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook as backer rewards.”

Game Curious | Are you game curious? “Game Curious Montréal is a free, 6-week long program all about games, for people who don’t necessarily identify as “gamers.” Sessions are two hours long and will provide an introduction to a wide variety of games, as well as open discussions and group activities, in a zero-pressure, beginner-friendly environment.”

Likewise, mainstream gaming symbolism can be subverted toward leftist messaging–the appropriation of famous imagery or characters for “bootleg” leftist art could be a means for engaging youth culture and kids. Even having something like a YouTube channel or Twitch stream to engage young people on their interests from a left perspective could help shape healthier, more progressive perspectives. And, although the use of incubators and game jams are not inherently radical, and in many ways benefit the industry by training new exploitable workforces, there’s still no reason we can’t sometimes use some version of them for social and teaching events in the future.

[bctt tweet=”Why should we use games to engage and give voice to people, when other art forms exist?” username=”meminsf”]

There remains the question of why we should use games when we can use any other art form–and especially literature–to engage people on ideas and give exploited or marginalized communities more tools for making themselves heard. My answer may not be satisfying, but it’s this: why not?

I want to use all of these tools and more. I want to use whatever’s available to me and whatever works. I want to go wherever there’s movement and culture, and especially where there’s a mass of alienated, unorganized young people looking for an alternative. I see no reason to leave that on the table, or to throw fledgling modes of expression to people who post videos of themselves drinking a gallon of milk to prove their manhood and long for the Fatherland to cleanse itself in the blood of the degenerate races, or the corporations that love them.

Of course it means more to me because it’s my regrettable industry and subculture, and I don’t blame anyone if they read this and still can’t find it in themselves to give a shit. Still, these cultural properties aren’t going away, so we might as well engage with them. More than that, we can make good on the promise of so many oleaginous tech disruptors that Gaming is revolutionary in how it makes possible different and exciting new worlds. Isn’t a new world what we want?

References

ResistJam brings game devs together against authoritarianism

Your app isn’t helping the people of Saudi Arabia

George Monbiot on neoliberalism (a fantastic article that both introduces neoliberalism to those unsure what the word means, and gives those who have been using the word for years an enriched perspective)

Eleanor Robertson (2016) Get Mad and Get Even, Meanjin Quarterly

Jonathan Ore (2017) “Viewer discretion advised? Your child’s favourite YouTuber may be posting offensive content”, CBC News

Laura Stampler (2016) “Hillary Clinton campaign launches ‘Hillary 2016) game app”, Teen Vogue

The Gamer Trump Trope

Patrick Klepek (2017) “The power of video games in the age of Trump”, Vice

Christopher J. Ferguson (2017) “How will video games fare in the age of Trump?”, Huffington Post

Asi Burak (2017) “Trump as Gamer-in-Chief”, Polygon

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Labour issue examples

Children as young as seven mining cobalt used in smartphones, The Guardian

Chinese university students forced to manufacture PS4 in Foxconn plant, Forbes

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Otto von Bismarck, Wikiquote

Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), was a German aristocrat and statesman; he was Prime Minister of Prussia (1862–1890), and the first Chancellor of Germany (1871–1890).

Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen. Politics is the art of the possible.

Interview (11 August 1867) with Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung: Aus den Erinnerungen eines russischen Publicisten. 2. Ein Stündchen beim Kanzler des norddeutschen Bundes. In: Die Gartenlaube (1876) p. 858 de.wikisource. Back to text

Politically meaningful games under neoliberalism Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election one year ago, the games sector has tried to work out how to use our medium to resist the rise of the far right.