Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 3: Chapters 5-7)

Dr. Ian Bogost: bogost.com 

I have to admit, four chapters and 120 pages in, I'm a bit bored with this book by Bogost. The assertiveness and the repetitiveness I can deal with, but I have real trouble with the folksy Americanism of the writing style and the overly-familiar - overly-familial - character of the book. It's certainly not philosophy as I conceive of it. However, as Magnus Magnusson used to say, I've started so I'll finish ... 

Ch. 5: From Restraint to Constraint

Is abstaining from a material modern lifestyle really the answer to the paradox of choice?

It's an interesting question. But as much as I approve of a certain degree of asceticism, I don't think the answer is yes. And neither does Bogost, for whom restraint is a type of fashionable narcissism that only leads to irony - and irony, as we have seen, is Bogost's great bugbear.

Further, as a strategy for living better, restraint also connects to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the values that lie at the foundations of the global economy (Bogost seems to take it as a given that both these things are highly suspect). Ultimately, he says, the feeling of any restraint results in "a terrible sensation" [130] and can even prove fatal (don't tell that to my friends in the BDSM community for whom orgasm denial is so delightful). 

What then? The answer, says Bogost, is to accept the world's constraints, rather than attempt to impose your own restraint upon it. Embracing constraint doesn't mean embracing asceticism (which is an expression of anxiety): "Rather, it means inventing or adopting a given situation as a playground in which further exploration is possible." [143]

In other words, for Bogost, there's a very real and important connection between constraint and creativity. He writes:

"Artists and designers have long known that creativity does not arise from pure, unfettered freedom. Little is more paralyzing than the blank canvas or the blank page. At the same time, the creative process is not driven by restraint either; one does not paint a painting or write a novel or form a sculpture or code an app by resisting the temptation to do something else. Rather, one does so by embracing the particularity of a form and working within its boundaries, within its constraints." [146]

But it's important to realise that Bogost is using the term creativity in a rather special (philosophical) sense derived from Whitehead. For Whitehead, creativity refers to a process (inherent to the universe) of generating novelty or newness; i.e. it's a fundamental feature of existence and not something unfolding exclusively within the sphere of human subjectivity and experience.

To mistakenly think man is central to the process of creativity, rather than peripheral, is what Bogost calls the fallacy of creativity. In the end, we don't speak, write, or sing the world - it speaks, writes, and sings us. Art emerges from a negotiation between the artist and a set of material conditions that impose certain limits. Graham Harman regards this as the culminating insight of Bogost's book and he might well be right; though, to be fair, it's found in Whitehead - as Bogost acknowledges - and we also find it in Heidegger, who famously declared Die Sprache spricht and that man is the poem of being (not the author).

The artist's job, then, is not to express his own desires, ideas, or fantasies. It is rather to allow the gods and demons to enter from behind and below; Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!, as Lawrence puts it.

Ch. 6: The Pleasure of Limits

Bogost picks up on this idea of inspiration in the context of ancient Greek poetry and the Muses. For the Greeks, of course, poetry was a worldly rather than a personal activity; one that was tied to a long cultural tradition, to myth, and to the divine. What he really wants to stress, however, is how structured it was - almost unimaginably so, for those raised into the idea of free verse in which almost any text "with unusual white space and line breaks" [158] qualifies as poetry. Bogost notes:

"A sonnet is not a poem even though it has to spill language across fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but because it does. It takes the surplus of language and offers a rationale for structuring a portion of it in a particular way." [161]

I suppose that's true. But I'd still rather read one of the great modernist poets than Shakespeare. And besides, free verse - if it's any good - isn't really free in the way implied by Bogost. Other than idealists who believe in an individual's right to total freedom of expression and the dissolution of all form, all structure, all rule, etc. no one in their right mind thinks art is anything other than a discipline.

There might be pleasure in transgressing limits - be they aesthetic, moral, or physical in nature - but this is still, of course, a pleasure reliant upon limits. This isn't to say we should therefore fetishise limitations and constraints or regard rules as written in stone (though some do), it's simply to acknowledge that they're necessary.

Indeed, they're not only necessary, but ontologically crucial. For as Bogost points out: "A thing is not only what it appears to be, but it is also the conditions and situations [i.e. the constraints] that make it possible for it to be what it is." [174]

Or, put another way: "Limits aren't limitations, not absolute ones. They're just the stuff out of which stuff is made." [203]     


Ch. 7: The Opposite of Happiness

"Fun is the opposite of happiness" [216], says Bogost. For fun "doesn't produce joy as its emotional output, but tenderness instead" [217].

And so we arrive at a quasi-Lawrentian conclusion; playful encounters with another being - whether it's human, animal, vegetable, or artificial in nature - result in affection and warmth and sympathy. The German's have a word for this: Mitleid.

Thus, OOO - as an ethic or art of living - rests on the presumption that the essence of morality can be defined in terms of purely selfless actions that ask for and expect nothing in return. Nietzsche, of course, was highly critical of this; he'd regard it as laughably naïve, lacking as it does any appreciation of man's ethical complexity and the fact that there are multiple forces at work within every urge and every action.

Ultimately, if Bogost wishes to save his work from falling into warm soft fuzziness, then he needs to spend a little less time watching babies sleep and either subject it himself to a little coldness and cruelty, or find an editor who will read it with steely intelligence and a sharp pencil.   

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

To read Part 1 of this review - Notes on a Preface - click here.

To read Part 2 of this review - Chapters 1-4 - click here. 

Cut the Crap: In Praise of Occam's Razor

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Occam's razor is a convenient problem-solving principle attributed to a 14th-century English monk, scholastic philosopher and theologian, William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347), which states that among competing theories, the simplest (i.e., the one with fewest underlying assumptions) is, more often that not, likely to be correct and that complexity should not be valued for its own sake or unnecessarily fetishised.

Obviously, all events are open to interpretation and for any accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there will be a large number of alternative (often ad hoc) hypotheses. Thus we need something that helps us cut the crap and cut to the chase and Occam's razor does the job - although it should be noted that it functions more as a heuristic guide, rather than an irrefutable method for determining what's right.

It does, however, encourage and enable us to choose between competing truth-claims by opening them up to falsification and for that I'm grateful; just as I'm also grateful that it serves as a weapon in the fight against occultists, conspiracy theorists, and crackpots of every description for whom nothing is ever easy or as it appears and there's always a darker, deeper, more diabolical level of meaning to be uncovered. 

When hearing the sound of hooves on cobblestone outside your window, it's reasonable to assume it's someone on horseback and not that there's a unicorn passing by, or that a member of a sinister cult or secret government agency must have released a zebra from the local zoo in order to spread panic and confusion amongst members of the general public.

The law of parsimony helps us understand and appreciate this by taming the wildness of our imagination and curbing our enthusiasm for the elaborate and fanciful. As Bertrand Russell put it in his own reworking of Occam's razor: "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."         

Having said that, I realise that Occam's razor is itself a metaphysical assumption; that there's little empirical evidence that the world is actually straightforward and transparent, or that simple accounts are more inherently true than weirdly complex ones. 

I also concede that Occam's razor is an inherently conservative device that tends to reinforce the general consensus of opinion and cut out opportunities to speculate, fantasise, and poetically re-imagine events. Artists, and those who like to daydream and listen to the (irrational) murmurs of their unconscious, as well as pataphysicists for whom knowledge is not only complex, but ambiguous, paradoxical and radically inconsistent, will naturally have an instinctive dislike for it.    

But, nevertheless, I think the scientific method and the axioms upon which it's based - there's an objective reality that is subject to natural laws which we can understand - is something worth defending, particularly in this present time of resurgent religiosity. And Occam's razor generally lends support to these axioms (although, of course, it doesn't prove them).

Afternote

An article by Chris Chatham that shows the limitations (or bluntness) of Occam's razor - particularly within a scientific context - has been brought to my attention by Simon Solomon: click here. It seems that Whitehead offers us the best perspective on this topic: "The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.'" 

Self-Enjoyment and Concern Part 2: The Aesthetico-Ethical Case For Masturbation

No wanker wanks twice

  

In his final book, Modes of Thought (1938), Whitehead argues that life implies immediate and absolute self-enjoyment. What I'd like to do here, is perversely interpret this theory of auto-affection and show how it might relate to the question of masturbation in a manner that allows us to conceive of wanking as a vital pleasure, rather than an unnatural vice; a pleasure which enables solosexuals to experience life directly by taking it in hand.

Further, Whitehead's philosophy enables us to think of pleasure as immanent to the act of masturbating; non-dependent upon the achievement of any goal or static result, including orgasm. A wank, as it were, unfolds entirely in and for itself, without conditions and without reference to any other living moment.          

So far of course, this merely reinforces the case that D. H. Lawrence and Rae Langton have against masturbation. But Whitehead goes further and affords us the opportunity to construct a novel defence of self-enjoyment; to argue that each occasion one jerks off is an activity of concern. Concern, that is to say - in feeling and in aim - with things and bodies that lie beyond it. This, insists Whitehead, is concern understood in the Quaker sense of that term.

Steven Shaviro - upon whose excellent reading of Whitehead I'm reliant here - provides a convenient explanation of this latter point:

"For the Quakers, concern implies a weight on the spirit. When something concerns me, I cannot ignore it or walk away from it. It presses on my being and compels me to respond. Concern, therefore, is an involuntary experience of being affected by others. It opens me, in spite of myself, to the outside. It compromises my autonomy, leading me toward something beyond myself." [14-5]

In other words - and contrary to what Lawrence and Langton believe - we masturbate from out of a concern with (and a desire for) others; it's a relational activity, even if the enjoyment is purely private and personal. Ultimately, masturbation is a way of reaching out and coming into touch with others and not just touching ourselves in an inappropriate manner.

Unfortunately, Lawrence and Langton confuse the fundamental difference between these two closely bound but contrasting conditions of self-enjoyment and concern; or, rather, they see the first but are blind to the latter. But as Shaviro points out, you can't have one without the other; for concern is itself a kind of enjoyment and both are "movements, or pulsations, of emotion" [16].    

Thus, whilst masturbation may not directly involve others, it always keeps them in mind. It's also, crucially, not an atemporal phenomenon; we may wank in the present, but we do so with fond memories of past experience and projected towards the hope and the promise of sexual contacts still to come. In other words, masturbation is "deeply involved with the antecedent occasions from which it has inherited and with the succeeding occasions to which it makes itself available" [15].

It's because we come in a way that unites and affirms our life not just in the living moment, but across time, that wanking is transformed from simple self-enjoyment into concern: "Conversely, concern or other-directedness is itself a necessary precondition for even the most intransitive self-enjoyment ..." [15]. For no wank is ideal, or ever entirely without object.

And, what's more, no masturbating subject ever experiences the same wank twice; each and every wank is selected from a boundless wealth of alternatives, thus ensuring that masturbation, as a philosophical practice, "has to do with the multiplicity and mutability of our ways of enjoyment, as these are manifested even in the course of what an essentialist thinker would regard as the 'same' situation" [18].

In sum - and to reiterate - the joy and the excitement felt by a happy masturbator, is always derived from the past and aimed at the future. As Whitehead says: "'It issues from, and it issues towards ...'" [16] someone, something, or somewhere else. But it's important to note that it doesn't really matter who, what or where; what matters is the activity of wanking itself as an event that explores modes of thought, styles of being, and contingent interactions.  

I don't know whether masturbation can be said to be beautiful - though it certainly belongs to any ars erotica worthy of the name. But it can, I think, be said to be ethical (if in a somewhat illicit sense) and, as such, part and parcel of a good life conceived as something physically embodied. Indeed, what Whitehead offers us, says Shaviro, is an "aestheticized account of ethics" [24] in contrast to any categorical imperative.

And what I've attempted here is to illustrate how such an ethic might result from masturbation - i.e. concern is the consequence of wanking, rather than the basis of its value or its moral justification; something which "cannot be separated from self-enjoyment, much less elevated above it" [25].

See: Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things, (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). All lines quoted and all page numbers given above refer to the first chapter of this book: 'Self-Enjoyment and Concern'. 

To read part 1 of this post - The Moral Case Against Masturbation - click here. 

Self-Enjoyment and Concern Part 1: The Moral Case Against Masturbation

D. H. Lawrence and Rae Langton

According to D. H. Lawrence, the one thing that it seems impossible to escape from, once the habit is formed, is masturbation; a simple pleasure that he regards, for a number of reasons, as the most dangerous of all sexual vices. Chief among these reasons, for Lawrence, is the fact that masturbation is a form of fatal self-enclosure rather than just innocent self-enjoyment; a vicious circle of narcissism and nullity that causes the breaking of bonds between people formed via an exchange of mutual affection and results in a state of inertia, each man and woman trapped and isolated within the dirty little secret of themselves.      

Eighty years later and the feminist philosopher, Rae Langton, is still making much the same argument in her work on what she terms sexual solipsism; leading a liberal crusade not only against pornography and objectification, but against masturbation too, as a form of self-objectification, thereby betraying her Kantian roots. 

For Langton, committed masturbators, playing all alone with their sex toys, are not merely sad losers and reactive fantasists, they're unethical. And they're unethical because they show no genuine interest in - or concern for - others and their otherness. Happy to imaginatively explore their own bodies and their own desires, Langton regards their auto-erotic activity as so inauthentic, as to border on the inhuman. 

For we have, writes Langton, a duty as human beings to love others as others and to open ourselves up to that which we are not. In so doing, we unlock the prison of the self and nourish the virtues. Further, we impose an obligation upon others to love us in return. And so, in this way, we slowly erect a moral utopia established upon love, reciprocity, and transparency of the feelings.

Now, readers who are intimately familiar with this blog will doubtless recall that I've discussed this material previously: click here, for example, for a post on masturbation as a form of sex in the head; or here, for another critical summary of Rae Langton's musings in this area. I suppose we might deduce that something else which seems impossible to escape from, once the habit has been formed, is writing about masturbation ...

However, with apologies for any repetition and at the risk of boring readers for whom masturbation isn't such a pressing issue, I would like to offer in the second part of this post a new perspective on this subject; an aesthetico-ethical defence of masturbation as an activity of concern - not merely self-enjoyment - inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher whose thought has recently been subject to a (post-Deleuzean) revival of interest after a prolonged period of neglect.

To go to part two of this post, please click here.


See:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), particularly chapters 14 and 15. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).