When I was a philosophy undergraduate student, I had a life-changing experience in a class on the philosophy of language. It was a good class, as undergraduate classes tend to be: I learned the basics of a subject had known little about previously.

The course was taught by a newly minted PhD whose specialty was that subject. She was young and smart and energetic. Don’t underestimate this detail: philosophy is generally a field of old men, and as I had aspirations to make a living at this practice, it was important to catch a glimpse of a youthful, vivacious version of it.

The life-changing part came when I asked a question in class about the relationship between Donald Davidson’s idea of truth-conditional semantics and Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trace. I was intrigued by the fact that Davidson and Derrida were contemporaries, and the young version of me saw (or thought I saw) some kind of confused similarity between these ideas.

I was startled by the reaction I received. My professor launched into a vocal attack against the very idea that there would be any such relation, or that such a thing should be brought up in our course. I never attended Catholic school, but I got the sense that this is what must have happened whenever questions counter to faith might be raised.

It is obvious that I was struggling with the chasm between analytic and continental philosophy, a gulf I would eventually try to violate by taking a double major in philosophy and comparative literature. But there was something more to this struggle than just the content of the ideas; it was more about an approach to the idea of forming ideas itself.

I persisted by attending her office hours, partly out of earnest confusion. I can’t remember the content of our ensuing discussion, but I will never forget the way she punctuated it. I’m sure I recall it verbatim, almost a decade and a half later:

Why would you want to think that? Why would that be at all appealing?

I left that day with a sense of unwelcome clarity. My professor was not raising an objection inherent to my thinking, or even to my comparison of two thinkers’ ideas. She was objecting to the very act of raising the question. I was not being asked to defend the position, but the posture, the curiosity itself, which was so wasteful as to drift into obscenity. There are some things we simply do not touch.

As for me, I found the pedantry and intolerance of philosophy to be distasteful, and surely it was one of the reasons I pursued graduate studies in comparative literature instead. And once there I certainly overindulged in the lustful pursuit of obtusity, mistaking it for wit. I wouldn’t say that the best philosophy is done at some sort of Aristotelian mean between barren formal logic and turgid etymologism, but certainly I do believe that neither approach is enjoyable, let alone moving ideas forward.

All of this serves as preface to a strange experiece I’ve been having over the past few days on philosopher Jon Cogburn’s blog. Jon kindly linked to my recent DiGRA keynote, which he seemed to appreciate. Cogburn and his colleagues have a history of running detailed and immensely useful reading groups on recent philosophy and videogame theory, so I was happy to see the channel open.

But things quickly fell apart, and the conversation has descended into a set of aggressive complaints about the form of my argument and the inspirations I draw from, rather than its purpose or sense. My purpose is not to snark and grouse about individuals here, so I’m not going to name names nor quote sources (you can follow the link to Cogburn’s site if you are interested, and I do want to underscore the fact that Jon himself is clearly legitimately interested in what I had to say). Instead, I merely mean to reflect on the whole state of affairs, one that brings me full-circle to meet some of my earliest exposures to philosophy, experiences I’d somewhat forgotten about since having spent so much time in cultural studies, media studies, and continental philosophy.

How does one proceed in the face of an encounter of this sort? It is hardly a conversation, nor is it an inquisition. It sits at a purely metadiscursive level, and any invitations to dip down into discourse itself seem only like lures to enter a dark pool filled with piranha. It’s a fool’s gambit; one is challenged not for the ideas themselves, but for the fact of their existence in a particular form.

The indefatigable K-Punk has discussed these encounters in terms of a bestiary of trolls and grey vampires, extending those terms beyond their history on USENET and web forums:

In many ways, the academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence. Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity. But there is nothing more adolescent—in the worst way—than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from—the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only that in terms of time and energy wasted—the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them).

I am a thick-skinned person, capable of tolerating disagreement and sloughing off brickbats. Certainly I’ve encountered enough of it in my time as a game developer and critic, let alone as a philosopher. Heck, I even fended off Stephen Colbert! I even enjoyed ripostes to my attack on the Beatles!

Yet, this particular experience fills me with sorrow rather than anger or thrill. Despite K-Punk’s screed and the subsequent discussions of it among my philosopher friends, I guess I’d still retained the naive belief that they were wrong, and that the unwashed masses of ignorant, slavering videogame fans were more intemperate than the tweed cadre of of genteel philosophers. Maybe I was wrong.

published September 16, 2009

Comments

  1. Jim Preston

    I know where you’re coming from.

    I left philosophy in ’98 after getting my degree. About midway through my graduate career I began to get a clearer picture of the entire practice: the running scam that is the graduate stipend and teaching load; the fact that a typical NCAA basketball player has a better chance of making the NBA than a philosophy grad student has of landing a tenure-track position at a 4-year institution; the ridiculous, petty infighting; the prostitution of scholarship to pop culture studies; the running exploitation of adjunct or contract faculty at some schools (hello, WashU in St. Louis!); etc.

    The day after I received my diploma, I had a UHaul full of my stuff and one-way ticket to Toronto and filmmaking. As luck would have it, I went with my other love: game making and have never looked back. That would be my advice to many others as well. If you happen to hit it out of the park as a grad student, get something excellent published and land at a real liberal arts institution, then great, go for it. I have a philosopher friend at U of Toronto and I envy his life. For everyone else, my advice is to get out.

    If you love something, never watch it being made. I read the philosophy I want to read, and largely ignore what’s going in the academic world (present company excluded, of course) as Sturgeon’s Law applies in academia as well, if not more so. Make more games, read fewer blogs would be my suggestion.

  2. Mark J. Nelson

    As far as the style goes, is it even specific to academic philosophy? The typical analytical response to the style of continental philosophy reminds me of essentially the hipster-hate response: you think this is cool, but I find your style tiresome and you annoying, so please pack up your ironic vintage tshirt and obscure LP, and read your Derrida over a PBR somewhere else. Meanwhile, the typical Continental response reminds me of an disdain towards engineers: you think you’re doing Important Work, but you’re just slaving away at boring minutiae that don’t really matter, and furthermore you’re boring and incurious about the human condition.

  3. Erik

    I am not sure Derrida _is_ continental philosophy

    , but that aside, do you honestly think there is a philosophy as opposed to continental philosophy? Kant apparently had a Scottish grandfather, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, many famed logicians are or were European rather than Anglo-American..the term itself breaks down under scrutiny.

    As to philosophy versus game studies, Cogito Ergo Ludo. Time to turn back to the fun and games of Hilarius Bookbinder, the grandfather of existential philosophy.

  4. Ian Bogost

    Erik, it is a strange word indeed, but in the philosophy world “continental” typically refers to the European traditions of phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and their progenitors. It’s generally opposed to the “analytical” tradition that predominated among Anglo-American philosophers in the 20th century, although “continental” was a term applied retroactively, mostly in the past 30 years or so.

  5. Ian Bogost

    @Jim

    I understand your perspective, but I also don’t think it has to be that way. I do think things are different than they were in the ’90s, or at least they are becoming different, but clearly they are also still the same, as well.

    @Mark

    Not sure I fully understand your analogies, although I like their luridness. I suppose there are always objections to style, but the hipster-objector probably just drops into his BMW and drives away, rather than trolling the bars of Williamsburg, doesn’t he?

  6. D.E. Wittkower

    This is certainly a problem I’ve had in my career. My Ph.D is through Vanderbilt, which tends to get disrespected, I am convinced, because we are pluralists: Vanderbilt provides solid training in analytic, continental, and pragmatist approaches and philosophers. That makes things difficult for our graduates in general, but, furthermore, my work tends to be itself pluralistic.

    I end up publishing in predominantly interdisciplinary journals and books, and presenting at predominantly interdisciplinary conferences. Philosophers, in general, do not seem to want to hear presentations that discuss Baudrillard and Quine or read chapters that make use of Dewey, Marcuse, and Latourâ??â??much less discussions of social networking sites through Camus, Schopenhauer, and Aristotle.

    I’m not convinced that it’s about style, but I’m sure that’s part of the issue. I think a major part, though, is prejudice that comes through unfamiliarity. Someone not trained continentally will find Heidegger frustrating and obscurantist, just as someone not trained analytically will find Quine dry and concerned with meaningless minutiae. Related, of course, is Sturgeon’s Law, as already mentioned. Why do Continentalists think analytic philosophy is dry logic-chopping that gets nowhere? Well, because much of it is. Why do Analytics think continental philosophy is vague, crazy, and filled with improperly founded claims. Well, because much of it is. And if we don’t have the background to understand and appreciate the good stuff, it starts to look like the whole sub-field is nothing but crud.

  7. jeremy hunsinger

    I think that if there is one clear principle here, it is that certain people should be pretty much ignored in this field. They have not added anything substantive to this debate or to video game scholarship that I’ve ever seen. I could mention a specific interlocutor in your debate, but you can guess which one. The way I resolve this debate is… ‘Thank you for the stylistic critique, I hope that if you make contributions to this scholarly debate in the future, if appropriate, you’ll cite my work, as I’ll be pleased to engage your work similarly should I find it relevant.’ People have different disciplines… You can run into this sort of anti-intellectualism disguised as anti-obfuscation, anti-exposition, etc. etc. across a variety of fields. It is primarily ideological and boundary-maintenance in many fields.

    Like you I was an undergraduate philosophy major, and I’ve spent quite a bit of my graduate training in a philosophy department, but focussing on ethics and political philosophy. Philosophy is big on boundary work, half the time they are trying to throw other philosophers out, metaphysics is gone one year, ethics or applied ethics the next year, political philosophy the next, but sure it is part of the canon, but otherwise not philosophy or somesuch… For some the only thing that counts is linguistic analysis, for others only conceptual analysis… it is just really fun to watch. However, it is not really fun to get caught in someone’s boundary work. ON the other hand, it can be really fun to engage a philosopher in a debate about ideas as if you push some of them hard enough they usually discard the ideas entirely and start discussing methodology…. grand stuff.

  8. Ian Bogost

    Great comments, D.E.. As someone who is not a philosopher by title but who often does philosophy, I had found myself sheltered from this particular frenzy, and I suppose all I’m saying is that I’d forgotten that it continues, or convinced myself otherwise.

  9. Levi

    That was truly a frustrating discussion. I’ve encountered this all over the blogosphere and now just try to ignore it. I think one of the things that was missed in the discussion– though it did come up somewhat towards the end –was the issue of rhetoric and audience. As I see it, insofar as SR is addressing itself primarily to a Continental and cultural studies audience, it needs to build bridges between the theory that circulates in that context and what it is trying to develop. This means that it will make reference primarily to thinkers from that context.

    Despite the fact that Jon was trying to be congenial, I did find myself a bit irritated by his remarks about analytic philosophy having already dealt with these issues. Before I get to my reasons for this irritation, I should state in advance that my undergraduate training was analytic and that I purposefully chose Loyola because it was an eclectic department that does both Continental and Anglo-American work. I take good ideas and concepts from wherever they might come and don’t have any particular hostility towards Anglo-American thought. It just so happens that most of my research revolves around Continental thinkers and one cannot do everything.

    With that said, I take exception to the suggestion that OOO is somehow reinventing the wheel. At the heart of Anglo-American thought is the model of representation where you have knowers on the one side and reality on the other and the question is that of how knowers can accurately or truthfully represent reality. In addition to being staunchly anti-anthropocentric, OOO– at least as I understand it –is deeply anti-representationalist. The question of OOO in my view is not the question of how it is possible to represent reality or arrive at a knowledge of reality. This is because, for OOO, there is only one kind of thing: the real. There are not representations on one side and real things on the other side. There are just relations between different kinds of objects. When onticology raises the question the ontological status of fictions, it is not seeking to determine how we distinguish between true representations and fictions. Rather, it is analyzing the properties of a particular class of real objects, how they function and behave, how they relate to other objects, and so on. I have not seen anything remotely like this in Anglo-American thought, and I believe that part of this lies in the fact that the epistemological realisms we find in Anglo-American thought labor under the false premise that the real is what scientists deal with (i.e., physical reality) and everything else is something else (I know not what). Under this form of realism, the real consists of everything other than culture and mind. This is in no manner, shape, or form the onticological thesis. Onticology endorses a flat ontology where all entities are on equal footing. The thesis is not that the real is that which is independent of humans, but the more nuanced thesis that 1) beings are not dependent on their relations to humans, and 2) that not all entities involves are human-object relations. With that said, for onticology a dollar bill is no less real or independent than a grapefruit or the moon. The are all objects within this ontological framework… Without qualification or asterisks.

  10. Ian Bogost

    Levi, it won’t come as any surprise that I agree with your distinctions between OOO and Anglo-American thought, and that one of the primary differences is the analytical desire to apply one of its two inoculations, either a Knowledge Serum or a Truth Serum (or both), concoctions that don’t really apply to flat ontology.

    It wasn’t my intention to say much more about the discussion on Cogburn’s blog, but I do still believe that Jon was trying earnestly to open discussion, even despite his pre-emptive already-done-that insertions (which I read mostly as citations of a former self).

    Perhaps the most important snippet from your comment is precisely that “one cannot do everything.” And I suppose it’s best to identify early when a conversation is likely to lead somewhere, and when it isn’t.

  11. Mark J. Nelson

    @Levi: Doesn’t the claim that Anglo-American philosophy is all about representationalism and epistemological realism, ignore all the anti-representationalist realist positions, like direct realism and commonsense realism? Commonsense realists would be happy to grant that all the objects anyone cares to speak of are real, and we can analyze them and talk about them without getting hung up on perception and sense-data and representations. (A minority position, it’s true.)

    @Ian: Here’s a charitable reconstruction of what, stripped of style objections, I think might be the objection. Something like: You seem to be making a proposal, maybe this part: “game studies means not just studies about games-for-players, or as rules-for-games, but also as computers-for-rules, or as operational logics-for computers, or as silicon wafer-for-cartridge casing, or as register-for-instruction, or as radio frequencies-for-electron gun”. But rather than an argument for that proposal (i.e. why anyone should adopt it), it contains a tour of a bunch of authors you like, who inspired the proposal.

  12. Erik

    I guess I asked for that, but as an ex-philosophy person, I do know the distinctions, I just don’t believe they are truly distinct 🙂 As to your keynote, it was a keynote not an academic paper, meant to inspire game academics that their studies are meaningful and intellectually worthwhile despite their (seeming?) intractability, so I would not worry too much about stinging criticism by _other_ audiences. As long as the games people felt inspired by your keynote (and not ostracized) surely that is the criterion of success?

  13. Ian Bogost

    Erik, I apologize for that… my readers come from all walks of life and it wasn’t an unreasonable question for someone to have asked, thus my overly earnest answer. As for them not being distinct, I’d be curious to hear more about your position on this. Surely it is not just a matter of genealogy?

    You are right that the keynote was just that, and while I’m happy for it to be read in that way, I’m also involved in this whole OOO thing as a participant, not just an outside observer, so the audience of philosophers is a real one for me in a broader sense… just perhaps not the audience of analytics.

  14. Ian Bogost

    Mark, sure, that would have been an entry point into a conversation, and I’d have things to say about it (for example, why it’s more than a tour, that as a keynote it had different goals, and so forth). But that’s not the conversation that took place.

  15. Rory

    Hi Ian,

    I can sympathise with the experience you describe above, as I’ve had simillar ones within a philosophy department.

    It is important to remember that it generally goes both ways though. I’ve heard almost identical stories from grad students who came from the continent to study in England because they just couldn’t have an actual dialogue with their teachers about, for example, Quine, without being dismissed as terribly naive.

    Also, just a note, there is such a thing as an anti-representationalist Analytic philosopher

  16. Levi

    Given certain remarks, I guess I should specify that when I use the term “representation” I am using it in the Deleuze-Foucault sense of “self-identical objects”. Representationalism would just be the thesis that there are independent objects defined by an identity. Representation is not, under this construal, that we relate to objects through perceptions or concepts.

  17. Erik

    The C versus A divide is the subject of some very interesting debate but a simple explanation of beliefs similar to mine is articulated here: http://www.phil.cmu.edu/projects/carnap/jena/GabrielJena.rtf

    PS I understand the term ‘continental’ goes back to JS Mill’s discussion of neo Kantians, but I personally regard Kant himself as being heavily influenced / inspired by Hume..

  18. Ian Bogost

    Erik, that Kant was influenced by Hume is undeniable, as his first Critique responds to Hume directly. The Jena paper is interesting in many ways, but I fail to see your original point, that the distinction is false in the first place.

  19. Erik

    I won’t take up much more of your valuable time, I merely (and too flippantly) wrote

    “I am not sure Derrida _is_ continental philosophy”

    –he would not nor would probably want to be seen as a figurehead or representative of CP (some of his greatest critics are from the same ‘side’ so to speak, the North African associations/background of many so-called CPers himself included, plus CP is often a pejorative label, similar to ‘postmodern’ in architecture).

    “the term itself breaks down under scrutiny.”

    –AP vs CP as mentioned in that paper contrasts methodology (and not always well defined at that, )** with geography and that geographical distinction is also (IMHO highly) questionable.

    I can see one may argue with this so I will just say, I find the distinction unhelpful and too often pejorative.

    **

    http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521872676&ss=exc

    PS Hilarius Bookbinder was a nom de plume of S Kierkegaard.

  20. Ian Bogost

    Erik, I’m most happy to continue our conversation, and the internet has nothing but time… I am simply having trouble understanding the objection. Assuredly both “analytic” and “continental” are somewhat inaccurate terms when considered absolutely, but they have come to signify coherent concepts, and to claim otherwise simply confuses me.

  21. Erik

    Please tell me what you mean by “coherent” and I will try to answer! For I assume you do NOT mean

    # marked by an orderly, logical, and aesthetically

    consistent relation of parts; “a coherent argument”..