Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 1: Notes on a Preface)

Photo of Ian Bogost by Gregory Miller

Preface: Life Is Not a Game

Ian Bogost describes himself as a philosopher who also happens to be a game designer. But I've heard it said that he's more of a game designer with pretensions of being a philosopher. Either way, he's not stupid. But he is badly in need of a haircut.  

His Alien Phenomenology (2012) was a book that I enjoyed, so I've been looking forward to reading his most recent work, Play Anything, since its publication in the autumn of 2016 (apologies to readers who expect this blog to always be bang up to date).

From what one gathers from the Preface, Play Anything promises to be a work of object-oriented ethics; one that offers a perspective on "how to live in a world far bigger than our bodies, minds, hopes, and dreams, and how to do it with pleasure and gratitude" [x].

Bogost doesn't think life is a game. But he does think that games teach us an important life lesson. And it's a lesson concerning the pleasure of limits. To play, he says, is to accept things on their own terms. And to generalise this notion of play is to see structures constrained by their own limitations at work everywhere.

This doesn't sound all that much fun. But Bogost assures us that if we learn how to play anything, our lives will be "better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish" [x] - a line that could have been lifted straight from an overly-optimistic self-help book. Or off a bottle of snake oil.   

Our mad obsession with the ideal of freedom, argues Bogost, has made us "miserable and bored" [xi]. We need to understand that real freedom is the chance to find fulfilment by operating within and exploring the implications of "a constrained system" [xi] - i.e., the actual world as is.    

Further, according to Bogost - never one to shy away from the chance to project his own anxieties onto his readers - we are marked by a profound fear; not just of ourselves (our desires and dark fantasies) or our mortal fate (that great shipwreck into the nauseous), but also of the world and its contents - objects and events alike.

Whether confronted by a pickle jar with a tight lid, or the prospect of an illicit love affair, "we worry that it might harm or disappoint us" [xi] - or that we might fail to live up to the challenge that all things present. What we need to do, says Bogost, is "slough off all these false fears that keep us from truly living" [xii].

What he doesn't say is why these fears are false; I have to admit they seem pretty genuine and perfectly legitimate to me. Nor - in the Preface at any rate - does he instruct us how to "replace them with a new sense of gratitude" [xii] towards all the miraculous opportunities the world affords us.  

Well, that's not quite fair - he does suggest that play is the key. Though it's not play in the ordinary sense of the word; Bogost wants to convince us of the need for a radical form of play that is profound and deliberate and "bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things" [xii].

One suspects that Bogost has the Heraclitean line about man only becoming himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play in the back of his mind. Or maybe he's thinking of Nietzsche's playful vision of philosophy conceived as a gay science. But if he is, he's not going to give the game away as there's no mention of either philosopher in the index - something I regard as a bad sign ...

Still, let us read on and see where Bogost takes us ... Click here for Part 2 of this post on Chapters 1-4 and here for Part 3 on Chapters 5-7.

See: Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, The Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, (Basic Books, 2016). All lines quoted are from the Preface, pp. ix-xii. 

To See a World in a Grain of Sand and Being in the Infinite Density of a Dot

Photo: Gary Greenberg 

sandgrains.com

Everyone knows - and everyone seems to love - the opening line from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence concerning a grain of sand and the manner in which, if you look closely enough, it seems to reveal an entire world.

Indeed, when viewed at a magnification of over 250 times, grains of sand are shown to be delicate, colourful structures of great beauty; tiny fragments of crystal, shell and volcanic rock, many thousands of years old and each one as unique as a snowflake.

Viewing the amazing photographs taken by Gary Greenberg reminded me not only of Blake, however, but also of Ian Bogost, author of Alien Phenomenology (2012), who puts forward the interesting idea that rather than conceive of a flat ontological field or network, it's easier to think of a one-dimensional point or what he terms a tiny ontology:

"If any one being exists no less than any other, then instead of scattering such beings all across the two-dimensional surface of flat ontology, we might also collapse them into the infinite density of a dot."

This is being made simple and singular rather than small in size and it places a black hole at the centre of every object, just waiting to expand or explode with the ontological equivalent of the Big Bang.

See: 

Gary Greenberg, A Grain of  Sand: Nature's Secret Wonder, (Voyageur Press, 2008). 

Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 21, 26.  

Note: William Blake's poem, 'Auguries of Innocence', is from a notebook known as the Pickering Manuscript. It was probably written in 1803, but remained unpublished until 1863. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website by clicking here.  

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 2: Ethico-Political Considerations

Hiromi and Lisa by Photographer Hal

# 24 from the series Zatsuran (2013)

I illustrated in part one of this post how D. H. Lawrence's little read (and undervalued) 1922 novel Aaron's Rod anticipates the work of philosopher Graham Harman on the vacuum-sealed nature of objects. Here, I'd like to critically examine the latter's controversial and challenging notion in more detail ...

In a nutshell, Harman wants us to acknowledge something very obvious but not so easy to explain; namely, the fact that discernible, individual objects exist and that being isn't some shapeless, unified totality. Further, whilst these objects have relations with other objects, they aren't defined, determined, or exhausted by such. They always keep something of themselves withdrawn and in reserve; something hidden and untouchable, as Harman says, in the basement of being.

Ultimately, then, what gives to things their absolute distinctness is the fact that they are vacuum-sealed in perfect isolation and only ever have indirect (metaphorical) contact with one another; i.e., they only ever relate by translating one another (and in so doing generate difference).

This - if true - has interesting if not, indeed, crucially important ethical and political consequences; not least of all for any Lawrentians still hoping to establish a democracy of touch based on the interpenetration of bodies, the glad recognition of souls, and the re-establishment of the vital relations between objects which, according to Lawrence, were destroyed by the grand idealists.

Having said that, there is a positive aspect to Harman's thesis of withdrawal and isolation; namely, it allows objects to retain their volcanic integrity and thus to resist all attempts by external forces to control, coordinate, and exploit them. In other words, at some level, despite increasingly extended networks of power and surveillance, objects are essentially autonomous and ontological Gleichschaltung is an impossibility.

As Levi Bryant notes, nothing, for Harman, "is ever so defined, reduced, or dominated that it can't break free and be otherwise ... People, animals, minerals, technologies, and microbes are always threatening to erupt ..." In other words, all objects carry the potential for surprise, which is, of course, a revolutionary potential.

It's also a reason why we should treat them with caution and respect and attempt to see things from their perspective (Ian Bogost refers to this as alien phenomenology). This is more than simply a  question of exercising our human curiosity; it's about acknowledging that the world exists - and doesn't simply exist for us. Again, to quote Bryant here: "We live in a universe teaming with actants where we are actants among actants, not sovereigns organizing all the rest as the old Biblical narrative from Genesis would have it."

In conclusion: some commentators, I know, have little time for Harman and his object-oriented ontology; they aren't seduced by the speculative nature of his realism, nor charmed by the weirdness of his arguments. But, like Bryant, I still think that, at it's best, his work is original and engaging and does what all good philosophical writing should - i.e., encourage us to think outside the gate, even at the risk of losing our way or, perhaps, ending up on yet another foolish quest for that mysterious thing called the soul ...

See:

Levi Bryant, 'Harman, Withdrawal, and Vacuum Packed Objects: My Gratitude', posted on Larval Subjects (May 30, 2012): click here. 

Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

To read part one of this post - Egoism a Deux - click here. 

Moments of Wonder

Illustration of (Diane Morgan as) Philomena Cunk 

by Jack Hughes for Gallery 1988

http://jackmrhughes.tumblr.com/ 

Wonder, says Socrates, is the mark of a true philosopher. 

In fact, philosophy has no other origin but this dizzying sense of astonishment before the universe and the manifold things that compose it. Thus, in attempting to understand the latter, one must expect one's head to spin; for objects, although alluring, are ultimately alien and perplexing in nature, rather than familiar and reassuring.   

Sadly, this disconcerting, vertigo-inducing sense of wonder is, according to Ian Bogost, "all but eviscerated in modern thought". Some people speak of scientific wonder but this is founded upon a form of logic that merely furthers the will to knowledge and human conceit.  

However, there remains at least one woman sick with wonder in a way that invites a detachment from ordinary logics; a woman who is permanently puzzled and beautifully bemused by the world around her - Philomena Cunk - and any torpedophiles who have not yet watched her brilliant (and hilarious)  Moments of Wonder are encouraged to do so ... (begin by clicking here).

Notes

Diane Morgan is an actress, comedian and writer best known for playing Philomena Cunk: dianemorgan.co.uk

Jack Hughes is a London-based, freelance illustrator: jack-hughes.com

       

On the Philosophical Importance of Making Lists

Writing in the above work, Ian Bogost suggests that we might use the term ontography to refer to an inscriptive strategy that gives a snapshot of the world and the wealth of objects that constitute it, without necessarily providing a wider context of meaning. At its simplest, this would take the form of a list: "a group of items loosely joined not by logic ... but by the gentle knot of the comma" [38].

Lists are something we regularly come across in the work of object-oriented ontologists. Critics might say they take the place of argument, or are simply a form of bad writing. But that's unfair and it seems to me that lists can and do serve real philosophical importance. Further, at their best, they also have a stylistic charm that borders on being poetic. 

Lists matter because, as Francis Spufford says, they allow the things that compose them to retain their independence and uniqueness by refusing 'the connecting power of language, in favour of a sequence of disconnected elements' [quoted by Bogost, 40]. This idea of things as autonomous things in themselves is crucial to OOO and it offers a welcome alternative to the now tedious idea of Deleuzean becoming with its preference for continuity and underlying monism. 

As Bogost argues, the notion of becoming this, that, or the other,  ultimately suggests "comfort and compatibility in relations between units" [40]. In contrast, his own model of alien phenomenology assumes radical incompatibility and disjunction, instead of harmonious flow. His use of lists, therefore, reminds us that "no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated" [40] and alien to one another. 

In other words, lists don't just challenge the connecting power of language, but serve to remind us of the ontological claim that being is not one and undivided, but made up of a multiplicity of objects that may or may not relate to one another, but which never fully reveal or give themselves away.