The Guardian ran a story today about videogames and cognition, which covers the usual assumption that games are popular/good/whatever because they tap into some innate cognitive drive, whether it be for learning or obsession. Good games, the article concludes, are the ones that do what we want, but that we don’t know we want. This, it turns out, amounts to “fulfilling intrinsic human needs.” You know, like “The basic skill of…being able to aim objects accurately.”
Keith Stuart interviewed me for the story, and although I’m generally a fan of his work, I’m a little relieved I didn’t make the cut this time. I suppose it will come as no surprise that my comments regarding cognition and games amounted to suspicion. I’m very wary of the current trend to try to understand everything people do and think via reductionist explanations of depth, among them brain science. Apart from the troubles with reducing complex human behavior and contexts to simple explanations, these approaches also risk instrumentalizing games (and everything else)—a trend that has already proved popular via social games and what I’ve more recently called exploitationware.
As it happens, I’ve also been reading philosopher Iain Thomson’s new book Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. The book discusses Martin Heidegger’s famous and confusing position in favor of art and against aesthetics. This morning I also happened upon an excerpt in the book about just the same topic, art and cognition. I’ll reproduce it here:
For, once aesthetics reduces art to intense subjective experience, such experiences can be studied objectively through the use of EEGs, fMRIs, MEGs, and PET scans (and the like), and in fact aesthetic experiences are increasingly being studied in this way.
Indeed, the humanistic obsession with brain science is only spreading, as psychological and cognitive scientific methods appear increasingly appealing to fields who have failed find their own way to make their work resonate beyond the cloisters of their own programs.
As it happens, Thomson observes exactly this critique in Heidegger’s writing itself, as early as 1937:
Aesthetics becomes a psychology that proceeds in the manner of the natural sciences; that is, states of feeling become self-evident facts to be subjected to experiments, observation, and measurement.
As Thomson’s book makes clear, Heidegger’s solution is to reject aesthetics itself, a practice whose creation and experience only further plunges us into the logic of enframing, the modern worldview that treats everything as resources to be optimized, art included.
Instead, for Heidegger, we can admit the incommensurable withdrawal of things, and see art as a means to neutralize our preconceptions toward them. From the perspective of object-oriented ontology, we can add to this precept the reminder that we ourselves, we humans, are but one of innumerable partners in innumerable pairs, each with its own preconceptions worthy of resistance and revelation.
For a glimpse at one way to begin thinking in such a way about games-as-art, watch Frank Lantz’s GDC 2011 talk Life, Death, and Middle Pair: Go, Poker, and the Sublime. While not yet a perfect match, Lantz begins to show us what it might feel like to see games as primordial objects, beings uncaged, rather than coops of potential action awaiting release as avian projectiles.
Comments
Robert Jackson
A provocative post indeed. I await Thomson’s book with baited breath (it isn’t released in the UK until the end of May sadly).
The obvious question here is, do you think that Heidegger’s essential Earth/World Strife would apply to games in this way as well as Heidegger’s thoughts on the essence/origin of artworks? – That games highlight the, deep, inconspicuous, ‘thingly-ness’ of objects as well as artworks: or as its usually described, games/art reveal ‘the tension of emerging and not emerging’. Strife ‘as’ strife.
Moreover – this is something that I’m trying to entangle in my thesis, and hopefully Thomson’s book can shed light on this. Why didn’t Heidegger rewrite his 1930’s essays on art following his essay on the thing? If a jug can be a thing, a cross, a field, a crook, then why should we pay attention to games, or even artworks? This reveals a certain crisis for what we would generally adhere to calling art, such that all found and made objects reveal ‘uncaged’ strife in the same way. Thus any difference between art and non-art becomes negligible.
From the perspective of Object Oriented Ontology this crisis is not solved, but made plural between discrete entities. Carrying over Heidegger’s criticism of ‘aesthetics’ into object-to-object relationships may help (and in part, this is why I admire Harman’s allure), but I do think a change must occur on the object that is engaged.
Keith Stuart
Hi Ian
I’m sad that you didn’t enjoy the article, but I understand your position. I did actually use your comments, but the editing as always with newspaper articles, was savage, and a few contributors were lost as part of that.
I never really intended the article to simply be an explanation of games and cognition – I am in no way qaulified to do that. I just wanted to give people a few little clues about //why// they are compelled to play games. The clues may be wrong, but I’m hoping it may stimulate discussion, or just get the odd FPS or Angry birds player to think about compulsion and game design.
I was certainly never looking to compete with Iain Thomson or Frank Lantz – in this context, I’m not surprised I disappointed you ; )
Ian Bogost
@Robert
On the Earth/World Strife, this is precisely the question I’m trying to consider, really for the first time, as I read Thomson’s book. I don’t know yet, but I think Frank Lantz’s position, in the talk linked and elsewhere, begins to suggest the answer, “perhaps.”
@Keith
I enjoyed the article, as I do all of your writing. I just abhor the positions advanced within it!
Alan Au
Just because human have an innate desire to play doesn’t mean that all forms of play are equal. Consider that people need to eat, and yet the quality of food can vary tremendously.
When you get right down to it, you could just hook up a dopamine feed directly to my brain, but a chemical reaction isn’t the same as an experience.
dmf
thanks for the book recommendation, his Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education, is worth a read if you haven’t already.
Ian Bogost
I have indeed read Iain’s Heidegger on Ontotheology, which is also very good. He’s a fantastic interpreter of Heidegger, and one who doesn’t fall into the trap of only providing historical coverage.
Mr. Seacrudge
Hi Ian,
OWA is probably my least favorite work of Heidegger (so far). His nostalgia, subjectivizing tendencies, and quasi-theological imperative are on full display here, it seems to me. To substitute world/earth for subject/object and/or form/matter isn’t entirely satisfactory either.
However, we probably have everything we need for a proper artistic practice in the situational and historical analyses of Division 2 in Being & Time. We can consider artistic practices and objects situationally without the need for an overarching theory. Or we can think of overarching theories merely as stepping stones to a real situational analysis/practice. This is basically an admission that reality is far more complex than we are yet able to assimilate literally into our sign systems; and that none of our constructed systems are really closed. This approach is based in the situational uniqueness of concrete reality.
I read the lengthy analysis by Thomson a few months ago while re-reading OWA ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/ ). He gets a lot of things right (the bankruptcy of modernist esthetics, and materialist presuppositions underlying it), but also some things wrong in my view. I think its inaccurate to call Heidegger a pluralist, tho that doesn’t necessarily make him a monist.
As he states in the essay, Section 3.7 “Heidegger’s Post-Modern Understanding of Art”:
“Heidegger’s view that the hints intelligibility offers us can be gestalted in more than one way makes him an ontological pluralist (or plural realist), but he does not believe that just anything goes.”
How does the recognizing fact that I can theoretically perceive–or gestalt–a “thing” in more than one way necessarily involve a tacit statement of my ultimate ontological position? There can be “individual” “subjective” totalities within a larger more fundamental totality. Just because, on an esthetic level, over time, I can discover or imagine different versions of a “figure/ground”; that I can even make a representation that hints at different aspects of “thing” that remain undiscovered; even considering that the “thing”, the “representation”, and my “own” being may be unified in a more fundamental sense; all this doesn’t necessarily make an ontological statement in the way Thomson presumes, as far as I can see. Nor does the idea of an “earth” which both discloses and withdraws necessarily imply an ultimate pluralism, since the supposed “subject” is a noumenon even to itself–the dimension of alterity is even within one’s own being–and opposing forces can remain in a state of tension in a single being. Earlier in the same essay Thomson quotes Heidegger saying “World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated…”(section 3.5)
The “rift-design” of “art” is put forward as that in which world/earth unity becomes apparent to us. This unity is mirrored in the “between” of the viewing subject, and the viewed art object, the place where esthetic reality actually takes place. To interpret the “being of the between” as implying a pluralist ontology we would have assume the poles of subject and object are real (rather than just our own ideal superposed idealist extremes) and that the “between” is one more object added to them. This is one area where I agree with Latour: the extremes of pure “subject” and pure “object” are not real but ideal: it is the “between” that is real. Though this “between” is actually self-sufficient, and is only “between” when thought in terms of our imaginary extremes.
I’d say Heidegger’s closer to a monist position, although he’s not really a monist or a pluralist. He’d read Kant and understood that there were/are inherent paradoxes in both these positions. I think this is part of the reason he spends so much time deconstructing the correspondence theory of truth. We get into an order of truth where literal statements/arguments can’t avoid paradox. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are invalid or must stop, or that we can’t adopt a more multivalent language. But then we are moving from philosophy as science (logic) to philosophy as art (literature), or maybe a new combination of the two is possible. The whole discourse of OWA takes place at a more superficial level than that in Being & Time: the level of art as made object rather than life as art. At least that’s my interpretation.
I also found Thomson’s defense of Heidegger’s analysis of Van Gogh’s painting interesting but inadequate. To give a truly situational analysis of the painting, Heidegger would have had to analyze the “content” of the painting in relation to how he had come to that point, to be standing in front of that particular painting, in that particular place, at that particular time. This would eventually move beyond his being thought as an individual ego, into a broader historical and metaphysical analysis, including Van Gogh’s historical being as manifest in the painting. This would have kept the starting point and the context concrete, consistent with B&T, in my view.
For Thomson then to simply move from modernism, to “postmodernism” or even “nonmodernism” or “amodernism” or “antimodernism” seems to me extremely weak, and quite alien to Heidegger’s project. What clearer admission could a thinker make that he has essentially failed to think beyond the modernist reference frame than the use of such terms?
Maybe this is why Thomson wants to project his own pluralism onto Heidegger: its more in line with Thomson’s own postmodernist project.
My impression is that both Thomson and Latour are misreading Heidegger. I’m looking forward to reading Harman on this, eventually.
Iain Thomson
Very interesting, Ian, and thanks to you all for the appreciative words. The issue about pluralism Mr Seacrudge raises is a deep one, but I think it boilds down to conflicting presuppositions. If anyone is interested, I defend my reading of Heidegger as an ontological pluralist in brief in section 1 here: http://bit.ly/jRagxW
Put simply, if one follows Heidegger’s deconstruction of the subject/object dichotomy, then it is more consistent to read pluralism back into reality, rather than thinking a unified reality is being pluralized by a subject (as I take Mr. Seacrudge to be doing, as is Taylor). To do that is to reintroduce the very split Heidegger undermines.
I’ll just add that Heidegger dedicated his entire later thought to getting beyond the nihilistic presuppositions of modernity (which means, most essentially, the subject/object dichotomy) as well as beyond late-modernity (the technological understanding of being). One has to get far beyond B&T to see this, of course, but it is not anti-modernism; as I argue in the book, Heidegger thinks the only way out is through. (And that’s where Van Gogh comes in, on my reading.)
With best wishes, Iain
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