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. 

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. 

A Deleuzean Approach to Literature

Portrait of Deleuze by Nicolas Cours-Barracq
www.behance.net

According to Deleuze, literature is not as an attempt to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience. 

Rather, to write in a literary manner - be it poetry or prose - is to move in the direction of the ill-formed or incomplete; to learn how to unexpress the expressible and to problematize everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar usage.  

Above all, Deleuze wishes to stress that literature should not become a form of personal overcoding; it is not an opportunity for an author to give the world a white face that somehow resembles their own. This is why any form of writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing - but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality.

Literature, at its best - which is to say most inhuman - transports us from Oedipal structures and instigates a process of becoming; helping us locate zones of indiscernibility wherein we can lose ourselves and become-Other (think of Ahab's becoming-whale in Melville's Moby Dick, for example; or Gregor's becoming-insect in Kafka's Metamorphosis). 

And just as crucially, as I have indicated above, literature carries language away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign language within the writer's native tongue. It does this not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant and well-known language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it  stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

And when a language is so unsettled and pushed to its limit, then ultimately it is obliged to confront a profound silence that doesn't signify there is nothing left to say, but, on the contrary, that there is still everything left to say.