Ulmerder

From what I’ve learned about MEmorials thus far (which is, granted, probably not much) I’ve gathered that each MEmorial begins with a punctum that eventually becomes the abject sacrifice. The third part of Ulmer’s Electronic Monuments entitled The Categorical Disaster further explains the MEmorial and the punctum/abject sacrifice by, itself, presenting the reader with the abject. Throughout chapter five (“Formless Emblems [Testimonial]”) Ulmer describes his personal experience with the abject sacrifice within his MEmorial. By describing in great detail the murder of Bradley MeGee (Ulmer’s punctum) the reader him or herself is introduced to the feelings that Ulmer must have felt when reading about the incident. In reading this section I certainly experienced a the punctum.

One important aspect of this section, for me, was that Ulmer finally explains in brief detail why he is so fond of the “puncept” or pun + concept. He explains that “Puns supply the digital jumps between semantic domains” (116) which is an important part of electracy. Our understanding of the world changed as we moved from orality to literacy, and so it must change as we move from literacy to electricy. The way, it seems, that our brains must change to accept this new form of thinking is through the understanding of these punceps—through our ability to see all meanings and all related meanings to a given topic. Ulmer also addresses one of the questions I’ve had since beginning reading his Electronic Monuments. Where is the “me” in MEmorial? For a while I was wondering if the puncept wouldn’t function better as memeorial. (In fact, I think I’ll starting using that puncept myself.) That aside, Ulmer explains that the “me” in MEmorial actually comes from the punctum, which he describes as a sting—the sting one feels when reading, say, the story of Bradley McGee. Ulmer mentions borders and categories in describing the “me” in the concept of the MEmorial and I find this to be particularly helpful. When does the story stop and me begin? If I’m reading, for example, about Bradley McGee and I feel this sting (the punctum) then I become part of the story of Bradley McGee. This is, I believe, where the idea of the MEmorial begins to take shape. At this point, Ulmer explains how the MEmorial then becomes useful. He writes that “I will bear witness to this mediated scene by filling out the sting, expanding it into a chain of associations, gathering information from various discourses (news, theory, art, history), in order to map the degrees of separation between me and Bradley McGee” (119). This part of the MEmorial is best presented online, Ulmer further explains.

Throughout my personal experience with the MEmorial I’ve struggled with the understanding of the connection between the “abject” and the “freedom” it affords us. Though I admit that we certainly value these freedoms, I questioned whether or not they were worth the abject sacrifice. While working through my own MEmorial (regarding men with breast cancer as the abject and their sacrifice for us to have gender binary) I found a few of Ulmer’s statements to be particularly helpful. First, Ulmer writes that “The premise of a conventional memorial is that that loss it commemorates is recognized as a sacrifice on behalf of a public, collective value” (130). I wondered how we could allow even one child to die as a result of this value, but of course Ulmer explains that we must allow it in order to have the freedom to take care of our own children. However, I couldn’t work through my own personal issues with the freedom to have gender binary. I don’t think that gender binary is a particularly good value to have (I think it creates a lot of problems, a lot of sexism, a lot of hatred, for example). Ulmer, however, makes a good point when he is, once again, discussing Bradley McGee. He writes “The community is outraged by Bradley’s murder, but it does not recognize it as a sacrifice, that is, as a necessary consequence of the way of life we currently embrace as a civilization and hence fundamental to American national identity, at least as it is presently constituted” (137). The understanding that these values aren’t necessarily values that we will forever embrace makes me feel more comfortable about my own MEmorial which is recognizing gender binary as a value. It’s not a value I hold to be particularly helpful (other than, of course, as a categorization mechanism) but America as a whole certainly thinks that it’s important to our way of life—as we’re proving through our MEmorial. I think that this idea—that the values that we hold should be reconsidered—is at the heart of what the MEmorial is attempting to do.

Questions:

How does the McGee case show that the MEmorial confronts an aporia?

How can record (re-cord) be deconstructed?

How are our blogs excretions?

Ulmer Blows My Mind

Though Gregory Ulmer and his book Electronic Monuments are still enigmas, there are a few interesting things in Part II of the book called “Make it New(s)” that I understood, at least superficially.

One of the first (and most useful) things that Ulmer discusses in this second section is what exactly constitutes the MEmorial, which is significantly important since our groups in class are supposed to be creating our own MEmorials. One of the things that I’ve noticed about Ulmer is his love for the “puncept” and the need to deconstruct words constantly while reading his text. Interestingly, the name he gives to this is, paradoxically, a puncept. Puncepts, deconstructed, are puns + concepts. Once the reader realizes the importance of the puncept to Ulmer’s writing, he or she can begin to deconstruct the MEmorial. Of course, MEmorial is easily deconstructed into a me + memorial, but Ulmer’s description of the MEmorial  doesn’t exactly explain where the “me” comes into play. Ulmer begins his discussion by explaining that “a MEmorial consists of two parts: a peripheral (proposal for an electronic device to be placed at the site of an existing monument associating it with an abject sacrifice) and a testimonial (a Web site representing a meditation on the abject sacrifice)” (57). Have read Kristeva in passing, I am superficially aware of the abject (which she discusses in relation to vomit, and Ulmer brings up in passing). Ulmer, however, describes the abject in simplier terms. He writes that  a “MEmorial[s] function [is] of calling attention to abject (unacknowledged) sacrifices” (57). This makes sense in terms of Kristeva’s abject example of vomit… we certainly do not like to acknowledge that. Furthermore, and I’m sure Ulmer recognized this and used it to his advantage, Kristeva’s understanding of the abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown of meaning caused by a loss of distinction between the subject and the object or between self and other. (I’m not sure how to cite this… it was in my notes, but there’s no mention of who said it.)

This understanding of the abject moves into Ulmer’s forth chapter, “Transversal (Into Cyberspace)” and his discussion of “transsexuality.” Before getting into that discussion, I’d like to try to tie in his writing about the simulacrum in which he writes “in the spectacle[,] original and copy merge, rendering moot most models of literate truth  . . .” (85). Though the original sentence has no comma, I read and understand it as having one. I’m not sure if this is correct, but either way, I find this to be true and believe that in the MEmorial, abject and spectacle are similar concepts. I found Ulmer’s discussion of Dog Day Afternoon and Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory to be profoundly interesting following this understanding of the abject and the understanding of truth, which has frequently been called into question in Ulmer’s book. In his discussion of The Third Memory, Ulmer notes that John Wojitowicz (the “real” bank robber”) has seen Dog Day Afternoon—the retelling of Wojitowicz’s robbery. In The Third Memory, Huyghe examines the reactions of Wojitowicz’s recounting of the robbery after his relase. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell what was real and what was fiction as the “real” robber went through the re-telling. He’d seen the film. Was he acting out his real actions or the actions he’d seen on the film? Did he even know the difference? Furthermore, as Ulmer quotes Daniel Birnbaum: “The situation is complicated: Not only were Wojtowicz’s looks compared to Pacino’s in the press at the time of the robbery, but it was Pacino, along with Marlon Brando, who provided the fictional model for how to be a crook” (90).   This problematic issue regarding memory is further fleshed out in Martia Sturken’s discussion of Film as Memorial. She writes: “The personal memories of Vietnam veterans are merged with the cultural memories produced by documentary images of the war and the reinscribed in narrative cinematic representations that make claims to history” (100). If this is the case, then what is history? His/story… Is there one true history or is it a collection of the stories we’re told about it. Do we actually remember anything? Ulmer notes that “the history of writing shows that the experience of reading a text to oneself produced an experience of self-awareness that eventually produced the behavior and identity formation of self” (99). If writing produced the self, then has writing produced history? It seems that both exist in some form or another without writing or reading, but that the understanding of both are formed through those two tasks. Though I don’t have enough space to discuss it here, I’m always interested in sexuality and gender, and wonder if our writing about the two have created them as well? (I know for a fact that homosexuality is a construct of language… before the 1800s, there was no such thing. The act existed of course, but not the concept.) I think that, as we learned in class, Ulmer’s book will never be able to be summed up in 800 words…

Questions

Is there a true “history” that exists outside of the mind or is history literally his-story?

If history is HIStory, then how does this play into gender constructs and sexism?

Could transgendered people be considered an abject sacrifice to gender constructs? 

Electracy

This blog will be completely different than others because, frankly, I have no idea what I’m talking about. In his book Electronic Monuments, Gregory Ulmer discusses our move from literacy toward electracy (in the past we moved from orality to literacy) and the ways in which our understanding of the world is changing because of this. In his book Orality and Literacy, which made much more sense than Ulmer’s book, Walter Ong discussed the ways that thinking changed as our cultures changed from one’s that relied primarily on orality and became one that was literate. I get a sense that Ulmer is attempting to do the same thing: trace some kind of path between literacy and electracy.

In fact, Ulmer uses as one of his main examples in his introduction (which I found to be the most easily understood) the move from orality exemplified in pre-Socratic understanding toward literacy that was exemplified by Plato (and beginning to be understood through Socrates). Though Socrates never wrote anything, his understanding of the world was shaped by literacy. This example is very similar to the example used by Ong (and many theorists that discuss the different between written and spoken word and the ways in which the spoken word is often privileged over the written even today). In another similarity to Ong, Ulmer discusses the ways in which memories are shaped thanks to literacy and, now, electricy, and I believe this is the point of his Electronic Monuments though I have a hard time understanding it. Ulmer writes that “memory and identity have evolved with the changes in the language apparatus of civilization” (x), but I don’t believe that they have changed entirely. Memory is still fallible, as is language, and Ulmer discusses this throughout his book.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ulmer’s book is discusses throughout the first few chapters but explained best in his introduction. This is the idea of the “general accident,” a term which was coined by Paul Virilio. Ulmer explains that a general accident is “an accident that happens everywhere in the world simultaneously, related to the existence of the Internet” (xii). I think that this is a fascinating idea—the idea that an accident can happen everywhere in the world simultaneously because of the interest. I definitely agree that this is possible. Ulmer frequently uses the example of 9/11, but I think that a more recent example would be, say, the death of Steve Jobs. While many would argue that one person’s death is not nearly the same as the tragedy of 9/11, the news of Job’s death certainly spread quickly and similarly to that of 9/11 and this was, most of all, because of the internet. Almost simultaneously, people around the globe were learning of his death—not through news sources, radio, or television, but through social networking cites such as Facebook and Twitter. (I myself learned of Job’s death from Facebook.)

Though Job’s death certainly wasn’t “unremarkable,” the fact is that, without the internet, it probably would have been. Ulmer writes that “the appropriate site for mourning these ‘unremarkable’ disasters is the Internet as a living monument” (xv). These ‘unremarkable’ disasters he is discussing are traffic fatalities, which he discusses in chapter two of his book. He discusses the ways in which traffic related deaths can be memorialized by having a real-time print off of these deaths. What was once unremarkable suddenly becomes much more remarkable.

Technologies such as these create what Ulmer describes as “a single time—real time” that wasn’t possible years ago. This involves, I imagine, the idea of a socially constructed time. Without our label of “time” or the hour or what have you, there is a “real time.” Interestingly enough, while language created this time, it is technology that is attempting to break it down. Now that we realize that disasters in one part of the world can be experienced all over the world at the same time, the idea of a liner time seems much less important. Furthermore, the problems that arise are, in themselves, social constructs. Ulmer writes: “The basic premise of the EmerAgency is that problems, no less than the policies devised to address them, are social constructions” (xix). He then goes on to mention an example that Ian Hacking first noted: that of “women refugees.” Obviously, now that we’ve created such a concept, it’s easy to see that women refugees exist; however, without these words to describe this group of people, the idea doesn’t permeate our psyche.

Ulmer’s next chapters, which I don’t have much space to discuss, begin the dialogue regarding electronic monuments, which I haven’t been able to wrap my head around just yet. Though we were warned that Ulmer would be deep and difficult, the fact that my first blog regarding him was only able to cover a few points of the introduction is telling in an of itself.

Questions:

Have we moved completely from orality to literacy to electracy, or do we continue to show some semblance of them all?

How does the idea of the “general accident” shape our notion of truth? How does it call it in to question?

Ulmer writes that “societies from ancient Egypt to contemporary America have embodied their experience of death, loss, and separation in built constructions” but he is discussing society in general. How do individuals do this? 

Discussing Gender... Again

I spoke earlier about a number of troublesome comments Bonnie Nardi makes in her book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft regarding gender. At that point I hadn’t read much of the book (only a few chapters) so I was making assumptions about Nardi’s notions about gender; however, she spends a significant time discussing gender in her section “Cultural Logics of World of Warcraft.” While much of what she says is refreshing (considering the way some of her comments came across in earlier sections) some of it, to me, still problematic (and I plan to ask her these things during our discussion tonight).

Nardi spends a significant amount of time discussing the kinds of language males used in this virtual world. She explains: “The social space was maintained as one in which males set the rhetorical tone. Sexualized, homophobic language was normalized in text and voice chat (although stopping short of what would probably take place in a men’s locker room)” (153). She argues that this kind of language occurs because the virtual environment created in World of Warcraft is that of a “boy’s tree house.” She points out that though men appeared dominant because of this language the tree house “allowed females more latitude in speech and action than everyday life typically does—latitude they often leveraged and enjoyed” (153). I don’t feel that Nardi fully explains this concept—how exactly are females given more latitude in speech and action and how are they not allowed this in real life?

Speaking in terms of this kind of language, I will focus briefly on a quote from later chapters. In her “Coda” she discusses gambling in Crete and cockfighting in Bali and writes that “according to Malaby and Geertz, the displays of masculinity entangled in these activities drew on deep anxieties, and the need to constantly reassert masculine identity verged on a kind of social obligation” (199). Nardi seems to gloss over this point, moving directly into the fact that gambling and cockfighting can also lead to pleasure because of the pure “fun” of the game. I think, however, that she should have taken a closer look at what Malaby and Geertz had to say for a number of reasons.

Nardi discusses the fact that men who play World of Warcraft female characters typically let others know. She mentions several times that World of Warcraft doesn’t have a lot of players that gender-bend. I question this on a number of levels. First, she notes that she wasn’t particularly interested in certain guilds that cater to gay people and other minorities. In her discussion of masculine language, she discusses the frequent homophobic slurs used during play. It seems to me that gender-bending is deeply discouraged in these types of guilds and therefore she didn’t really get the full sense of the amount of gender-bending that occurs in the game. Furthermore, when discussing men that play female characters (and are “out” as men) Nardi focuses on the fact that the men play the character because they want to look a nice female ass. At first, Nardi questions the reality of this and asks one of her students if she should believe players when they tell her this is why they play female characters. Her student said yes, believe them. I wonder, though, if her student wasn’t merely attempting to reassert his own masculinity. I feel that the men in the game that claim they play just to look at females backsides are actually just attempting to reassert their masculinity, which Nardi’s book seems to prove is an important part of gameplay. Though it’s not within the scope of Nardi’s book, I feel that it would be important to look at the ways in which social construction of masculine identity plays into the ways in which these men answer such questions.

Besides the fact that Nardi seems to ignore the social construction of gender, another problem I had with her discussion of the topic was her use of the words “feminism” and “feminist” in this chapter. In one area of the book (though I can’t seem to locate it now) she mentions that even though the game has flowers and pretty colors, it’s not just a “feminist” game. I find this strange and I’m not sure Nardi has completely taken into account what feminism is. Feminism isn’t about making sure the game is pretty for girls but still has guns for boys. Feminism is about realizing that females can like pretty things as well as guns, or they can like bleak, black and grey things, or whatever. And males can like all these things too.

The one positive aspect that arises from Nardi’s discussion of gender is that she acknowledges that much more needs to be done to fully understand the gender dynamics that occur in-game.

Questions for the Class and for Nardi:

1.    1.  In her discussion of the boy’s tree house, Nardi points out that females are welcome despite the fact that it’s more of a place for boys. How does the fact that the female bodies are hypersexualized in games, even in World of Warcraft make this possible?

2.    2.  If players had the ability to change their characters appearance even more (i.e. body size, height, etc.) would this effect game play and the dynamics of the game?

3.   3.   Nardi mentions that she’s not primarily focused on some groups such as gay guilds, etc. She also talks about how there is little gender-bending in WoW. Is it possible that, because of the hostile environment, during her study she didn’t find gender-benders because of the environment? If she’d studied gay groups, for example, would she have found more gender-bending? If gender-bending actually does occur in-game (and Nardi just missed it) how would this change the study of gender within the game? 

Performance, Not Performance

Bonnie Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of War Craft, is, first of all, a much easier read once the reader has immersed him or herself into the virtual world of WoW. In the second section of the book, concerned primarily with Active Aesthetic Experience, Nardi performance, as do many video games theorists. One of the most interesting aspects of her discussion is, however, the she takes a different approach to the understanding of the performative. In Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other she discusses performativity as something similar to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity: “…that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Butler). This idea has been particularly interesting to me in regards to the performance of gender within videogames. Nardi is, at least in this chapter, not interested the understanding of performance in this way. She writes, “I do not use ‘performance’ as a metaphor for the reproduction of culture through certain actions (see, e.g., Butler 1990) in which people are unaware that they are ‘performing’ but rather as it is used in sports or theater, where participants engage in specific, recognizable instances of performative activity” (54).  Nardio explains that WoW is very much like “normal” visual-performative activities that occur in the real world such as dancing, theater, etc. Though to the untrained eye gaming may seem to better embody Butler’s understanding of the performative, it also allows for performance of activities within the game.

Nardi explains that “situational awareness” (originally a military term) is particularly important to playing World of Warcraft (which I learned first hand last night while participating in my first duel). Situational awareness, she explains, denotes “the ability to mentally process rapid multidimensional environmental changes” which is also necessary in team sports (55). Furthermore, it seems more likely that characters within these games know your performance better than they know you: first, they will know your performance of your avatar (gender, attitude, etc.), and secondly as the character’s “performance of its actions” (56). Interestingly, both of these aspects of the performative as ultimately controlled by the owners of such games. Nardi points out that “activity theory and actor-network theory posit that technology embodies a powerful agency not strictly under human control” (62). Because only certain actions are allowed in the game, performance is ultimately controlled by this agency. Nardi calls this type of activity “regulated performance.”

Further into the section, Nardi draws a parallel between performance and participation, which I believe is an important distinction. This better describes the difference between Butler (and other theorists’) notion of the performative and the way in which Nardi is using the term. As Nardi discussed in “Play as Aesthetic Experience,” John Dewey argued that aesthetic experience is participatory, and World of Warcraft is most certainly an example of an aesthetic experience, despite the fact that Huisman and Marckmann disagree that WoW’s type of participation is “interesting” because of the number of players (85).

When considering games the size of World of Warcraft, ideas about the difference between “work” and “play” begin to take on new meaning—there is certainly a lot of work to be done regarding games such as these. Nardi points out that theorists have struggled to define the two and that “whole seemingly straightforward notions, when scrutinized, they seem to dissolve into inconsistency and contradiction” (94). (She also notes that the discussion of these concepts “maintains a distinction between ‘game-play’—i.e., the performance of a game—and ‘games’ as cultural entities such as hide-and-seek or World of Warcraft” [94].) Nardi uses and interesting example to illustrate the difference (and lack thereof) between work and play: Mark Twain’s Tom Saywer chapter entitled “Tom Sawyer Whitewashing the Fence.” While describing the scene, Nardi writes, “Freedom and necessity, work and play, seem to inhabit clear categories. But Tom knows that these categories are open to manipulation precisely because they are subjective” (98). One of the ways World of Warcraft players distinguish work from play, for example, is by defining work as an obligation and play as something enjoyable, but as Nardi points out, the two often intersect. (We see this in her interview of Pen, Chiu, and Lefen, who describe mandatory WoW raids as work.) And yet, terms such as “hard work” appear frequently throughout gameplay. After successful raids, players congratulate each other on the “good work” they’ve done. Nardi sums this up by saying that “play is, at the highest level, a freely chosen activity while at the same time opening the potential for worklike results. A notion of freedom must be understood in its social matrix, not as a philosophical absolute” (101). I feel like this idea is one of the most important we’ve read in games theory. Because games, gaming, and gamers are so often misunderstood, it’s important to take into account the fact that our ideas on the topics should be understood in context rather as absolutes.

Questions:

How are the different ideas of performance seen in WoW?

How can the quotes “technology embodies a powerful agency not strictly under human control” (62) relate to the readings from Turkle?

In what ways has “situational awareness” come into play in your WoW experience?

Anthropological Dig

Bonnie A. Nardi’s book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft” is, I imagine, similar in concept to Celia Pierce’s Communities of Play. This book, like Pierce’s, starts off with an overview of the game Nardi is studying in “Part One: An Introduction to World of Warcraft. Having yet to start the game myself, this overview was helpful in framing the world in which Nardi positioned herself for her ethnographic research. Before getting into an indepth discussion of the nuances of World of Warcraft, Nardi mentions a number of purposes for this research. First she mentions that “World of Warcraft is an exemplar of a new means of forming and sustaining human relationships and collaborations through digital technology” (5). The notion that a game can form human relationships is, as we’ve come to see, quiet different from the stereotypes that so often permeate the gaming community. Rather than keeping gamers from forming real (i.e. out of game) relationships, these games help members to create new and different types of relationships. (Though, of course, there are members who have forsaken “real life” relationships for the game, Nardi posits that this is another stereotype of gaming.) Furthermore, Nardi explicitly states that there are three ultimate aims of this book, which are: 1) “to develop an argument about World of Warcraft that examines play as active aesthetic experience,” 2) “understanding play in its contemporary digital manifestations,” and 3) ethnographic reportage. More specifically, Nardi argues that “video games such as WoW are a new visual-performative medium enabled, and strongly shaped, by the capacities of digital technology, in particular the execution of digital rules powerful enough to call forth complex worlds of activity” (7). Since my entrance into the world of serious games study, I have been primarily interested in this idea of the performative as it plays out in games, and look forward to continuing this look into performance through the reading of My Life as a Night Elf Priest and through my own ethnographic look into WoW.

One of the main goals, it seems, of Nardi’s first few chapters is to dispel some of the stereotypes that often permeate discourse related to games. She writes that “WoW is a virtual experience like reading a book or watching a movie, but also an action experience like a sport” (8). I find this parallel between video games and sports to be an interesting idea, especially considering the stereotype Nardi points out of the lazy kid living in his parents’ basement. It’s difficult, I imagine, for non-games to realize the complexities of movement involved in playing the game. Not only are the characters moving, but the player develops his or her motor skills through these games. (James Paul Gee would point out that developing motor skills is only one positive outcome of serious gaming, and I agree.) Though, as I mentioned, I’ve yet to start playing World of Warcraft, I’ve already been warned that a mouse is necessary to play—simple finger movements on a keyboard will not suffice.

Nardi’s discussion of the intricacies of WoW play have made me realize that not only purchasing extra equipment (a mouse) will be important to game play, but committing an entire new knowledge set to memory will be a requirement. In her section “A Short WoW Primer” in chapter one “What is World of Warcraft and Who Plays It?” Nardi begins to describe some of the information one must commit to memory before playing. She explains ideas such as leveling, mobs, and classes. During this discussion, she points out a number of things that proves that WoW is certainly a serious game. She notes that WoW is a virtual world—“a set of linked activities chosen by the player and carried out within a three-dimensional virtual space” (13). The creation of such a space is particularly important to game play, and WoW goes so far as to eliminate the advertising that has become so popular in games (as Henry Jenkins would point out). Continuing this idea of the virtual world, Nardi explains a parallel between real world activities and gaming activities, namely the “character development” that occurs in both. Though she specifically mentions the Victorian meme, such character development has carried over into contemporary society. The developments that take place in games and out of games is, I believe, not only character development but also a form of performance. Though I don’t have the space to discuss performance in detail, Nardi brings up a number of instances in which gender is performed: Nardi mentions that female players don’t approve of “rough masculine discourse” such as profanity, homophobic discourse, and sexist comments (20). It seems to me that these virtual worlds are interesting for ethnographic studies as well as the ideas of gender essentialism (which, at this point, Nardi seems to be buying into).

Questions:

Nardi mentions that she rarely crossed her “virtual world” with her “real world.” How would her research have been different if she’s allowed this crossing-over?

Following the above question, what would happen (in general) if this were to occur?

Are virtual and real worlds becoming more difficult to distinguish?

What elements of performance have become evident just within these first chapters?