Ghost in the Wire

Steven Johnson's most recent book, Everything Bad is Good for You, has sparked some controversy over at his blog, largely over the use and interpretation of statistical data relating violent video games to subsequent violent behavior. This particular debate is motivated by general concerns over violent and inappropriate portrayals in video games, typified by Hillary's recent letter condemning the excesses of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The participants in the conversation over there have already mentioned a number of studies, and I should defer to the insights provided therein. I don't do quantitative studies, nor do I do psych work, so I can't comment on the credibility of the literature in question. At least not at the level of methodology. But I can comment on those rhetorical constructs that antedate those studies and that thus provide the interpretive framework. In order to make just a cursory remark, let me take one of the big meta-studies out there as a guide. In a comprehensive review of the literature concerning the effects of media violence, W. James Potter summarized the major findings regarding the relationship between violent portrayals and violent behavior, arguing that there are ten “empirically established laws” of media violence. These laws are: (1)exposure to violent portrayals in the media can lead to subsequent viewer aggression through disinhibition; (2) the immediate disinhibition effect is influenced by viewer demographics, viewer traits, viewer states, characteristics in the portrayals, and situational cues; (3)exposure to violence in the media can lead to fear effects; (4) an immediate fear effect is influenced by a set of key factors about viewers and the portrayals; (5) exposure to violence in the media can lead to desensitization; (6) an immediate desensitization effect is influenced by a set of key factors about viewers and the portrayals; (7) long-term exposure to media violence is related to aggression in a person’s life; (8) media violence is related to subsequent violence in society; (9) people exposed to many violent portrayals over a long period of time will come to exaggerate their chances of being victimized; and (10) people exposed to many violent portrayals over a long time will come to be more accepting of violence (see p. 26). While Potter argues that “after more than five decades of research . . . [we learn] that the strongest immediate effect is [that] exposure to violent portrayals in the media increases subsequent viewer aggression,” his review suggests that these “laws” highlight the vast complexity at work much more than they establish any simple set of causal relationships (see p. 42).

Research shows that while there may be an immediate effect of aggressive behavior after a single exposure to mass mediated violence, people who expose themselves to violent portrayals have more aggressive tendencies (Potter, 1999, 27-8). Similarly, some of the outside “key factors” which mediate the effects of violence in the media include: viewer demographics (including intelligence, ethnicity, and personality type), aroused states of the viewer, degree of identification with a character, the amount of punishment and reward in the portrayal, level of justification in the portrayal for the violence, the realistic nature of the violence, prior real-life experience, humor, and the list goes on (Potter, 1999, pp. 29-39). In short, while these laws may seem to conclude that violence in the media does in fact cause many negative and positive effects, there are many mediating circumstances which makes this causal relationship more complex. Due to the complexity of many of these findings, we need to pay pretty careful attention to the rhetorical understanding of violence, of behavior, and of what, precisely, constitutes a violent portrayal. Individuals who, after looking at the studies identifying a link between violent portrayals and subsequent violent behavior are not only mapping causality onto a particularly difficult-to-chart terrain, they are also relying on some initial assumptions that may not withstand interrogation.

Ian Vine warns, for example, that while media’s influence is undeniable, “the ghost of Behaviourism which still haunts the laboratories of media psychologists can be blamed for mechanistic fairy-tales about how audiences process messages. . . . [T]heir methodologies reveal assumptions which are both obsolete and deeply insulting to the intelligence of the ‘subjects’ who participate in their investigations” (Vine, 1997, p. 125). Vine argues that cause and effect relationships are more dynamic than those posed by media violence pessimists, and emphasizes the need for research to establish whether media’s influence on aggressive behavior is a result of a viewer’s “real inability to resist some potent powers of peripheral persuasion” or in poor media literacy skills (p. 143). As Vine asks it, the most fundamental question is this: does “the fault [lie] in our living rooms and classrooms, rather than on our television screens” (Vine, p. 143)?

One potential answer is, quite stubbornly, yes. It's not an eithor/or; the answer doesn't rest with one or the other, but rather with the articulatory practices of both (and more) of these environments. The point isn't to negate the potential relationship between the viewer and the depiction of a violent act, but rather that this question is not as interesting or as pertinent to scholars interested in the potential impact of violent media portrayals, since these sociological discourses already function so as to articulate the meaning of a violent act. In other words, if there wasn't already an agreement as to what qualifies as a violent act, there could be no potential agreement as to a relationship between an initial portrayal and a subsequent behavior. This linkage, which is always a negotiation based on study assumptions and the workers who code the data sets, may explain some the complexity that makes drawing any conclusion regarding a causal connection so difficult. This is a rhetorical problem, or at least a gap in what communication scholars call the "co-ordinated management of meaning," and it's not something that gets solved easily.

There is another, larger problem with these debates though, this one also rhetorical, and also explicitly comparative. It is the problem of mimesis, a problem that underlies all of these "video game violence is bad" narratives, and yet receives far too little attention. I'll try to get to that tomorrow.

To approach the mimetic connection between video games and violence, I want to cheat a bit, or at least use a bit of indirection. I want to consider not what video game violence tells us about the propensity for subsequent violent behaviors, but rather what the concern over violent video games tells us about how we view and negotiate new media. In other words, if violent video games are problematic because they promote violence, we should inquire as to what makes video games distinct enough to merit the sort of sustained attention they receive in the media and in scholarly study. For example, one issue that Steven raised in response to a study noted by one of commentors is that of comparison. Sure, studies may indicate a connection between unsupervised violent video game time and subsequent violent or antisocial behaviors, but what of other activities and their connection to these same behaviors? In his words, "And as always, the authors [of the study] don't tell us what other forms of aggressive recreation -- football, cops and robbers, hockey -- would look like if they were subjected to the same scrutiny."

This is an absolutely critical point, both for its obviousness - football is, from its tactics to its vocabulary, one of the most violent activities imaginable for youth, and yet it receives little to no moral outrage, much less letters from Senator Clinton - and for what it tells us about the reasons why people are studying video games. Suffice it to say that much of the concern over video games stems from their novelty, from their status as one of the newest media and one no doubt destined for significant cultural standing. It is, at this point, common knowledge among that the video game is quickly emerging as dominant social and rhetorical force: the average video gamer is in their mid 20s, the average high school student would rather play video games than watch television, and all this while games become steadily more sophisticated, more immersive, and more potent. With this increasingly dominant social role, the video game has inspired its own oppositon, and now various ideologues have lined up their ducks, and are using research studies that measure positive correlation as proof that we should be blaming games for violent juvenile behavior, providing ammunition for calls to monitor the kinds of content that video games can or should present.

I want to suggest a response to the question of violence in video games along lines slightly less common. Rather than begin with the question, implicitly or explicitly, of what rhetorical and/or psychological study can tell us about video games, I want to begin with a reversal and ask instead, what can video games tell us about rhetorical and/or psychological studies? In other words, why do politicians, the press, and even academics focus so much of their attention on the role that video games play in producing social violence?

Recently, a number of my favorite bloggers (Collin Brooke, John Walter and Jeff Rice, among others) reacted to a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a piece called "Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain," by Michael Bugeja. The article promotes what Bugeja terms "academic branding," the use of the web to promote one's academic pursuits by using the marketing and outreach potential of the Internet. This branding is, as Collin has noted, already going on, though it seems to be happening in a different way than Bugeja describes. I don't have much to add in that regard, as I think the many takedowns and/or cautionary assessments of Bugeja's piece are worth agreeing with and leaving alone.

But I do want to raise one objection. Bugeja celebrates his model of branding because it preaches what he practices. His first example, in fact, is his current website, a site that promotes his new book, Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age. According to the website's marketing efforts, the book argues, as so many others have (yawn) that the Internet is a harsh mistress, yada yada, and a danger to the value of community. I haven't read the book - I might at some point, as I often like highlighting these sorts of arguments in order to demonstrate the current limitations when it comes to thinking mediation and technics - but I have read the website. And having done so, here's my objection: The website sucks.. No, I'm serious, the design looks like something put together circa 1996, not something put together to sell a book published nearly a decade later. It's almost entirely built around antiquated tables, the number of span tags are almost blinding, and it still uses the deprecated tags <i> and <b> rather than the correct markup tags <em> and <strong>. If this is an example of successful, well-done academic branding on the web, I weep for the future of academia's brand potential. And for a book dealing with the destructiveness of the Internet, in which the author theoretically demonstrates that his unique knowledge and insight helps us understand how the Internet works in deleterious ways, the web site couldn't be more at cross purposes, as it demonstrates that the author in fact has very little knowledge of the web as a technology, and doesn't even take the time to learn more before writing about it.

Thankfully for Bugeja, I may still grab a copy of the book for the reason noted above, but had I serious interest in the subject matter, that interest would have vanished by the time I finished skimming his front page.

You can't peruse academic blogs of late without having been either hit over the head with the discussion of the new/retro text Theory's Empire or without having been sucked into the maelstrom that is the Valve, self-proclaimed literary organ. So many participants are engaged in this "conversation" (I use the term very loosely) that it's impossible to begin a round-up of all the valuable contributions, but to make a very long dialogue very short, suffice it to say that the debate centers around whether theory (whatever that is) has come, gone, and died, and whether or not those left at its wake should be celebrating their new freedom or mourning its passing.

I'm not sure what to say about this sort of debate. I have always been what folks like to call a "theory boy," someone interested in those names that often get listed under the moniker "French Theory" or "Poststructuralism" (this doesn't always work, given the folks I read and reference with regularity, but it comes close enough), or as someone who is just more interested in abstraction than in practice. Personally I never understood the distinction. Derrida, Nancy, Foucault, Agamben, etc. - these people have always treated thinking as innately practical, intimately bonded with the practices of everyday life. For me if any split exists, it's not the one supposedly at work between theory and practice, but between "reading" and what might be called "philosophizing." Derrida, for example, hardly ever postulates or pontificates in the absence of a text'; his work is grounded in the practice of reading, and if the texts he chooses are not ones most folks would consider practical, he chooses them nevertheless because of their particular practices. Nancy, on the other hand, spends most of his time elaborating a position grounded on a thinking through (or beyond) certain concepts in the philosophical tradition, and he rarely uses specific texts as direct sources of invention.

But that split isn't what matters in the debate over Theory's Empire, nor does it mark the stakes of that debate. Taken in the debate's own terms, what matters is whether or not humanities scholarship should continue to fall prey to a certain seductiveness of abstract, esoteric, and purposefully difficult thinking. I don't personally agree with this assessment of "theory," but let's just accept it as a common, if disparaging, characterization and take it for what it's worth. It's a caricature that has more currency in my particular field (rhetorical studies originating from a public address perspective, NCA style) than it might in, say, rhetoric and composition circles. So, leaving aside all the politics already at work in the characterization, let's consider this reception, and its triumph in light of its effects, which is to say, as a question of pedagogy.

Speaking of "the maelstrom that is The Valve," I got sucked in more than I expected recently, after John Holbo decided that my previous post was, shall we say, plain wrong. John seemed to take objection to the idea that "theory" provides a valuable bulwark against the empiricism and data-heavy model of education offered under No Child Left Behind. Seemed to, but he didn't really. His actual objection was to "Theory," a capitalized and more delimited version of theory, that is miraculously both very dangerous and very ineffectual at the same time.

I don't need to spend too much time on this, as my inclusion in the debate was for straw-person purposes only, and my responses to my inclusion are already available in the Valve's comments. But I do want to stress an argument I made there: the real political stakes have nothing to do with capitalized "Theory's" success or lack thereof; rather, they have everything to do with the authority and mechanisms by which Theory is homogenized and defined as something distinct from theory itself.

As a lower-case concept, theory is simply the name we assign to the practice of reflecting on our own practices, be they writing, or reading, or watching, or playing, or whatever. To write of a need for a definition, to proffer that definition, and then to castigate the object that you yourself have defined is precisely the sort of theoretical maneuver that should be subject to rigorous questioning. To dismiss the need for a definition, to negate or devalue some extant definitional claim, or to malign those that would attempt otherwise - these moves also demand interrogation. What makes theory so important, so essential, to pedagogy and to politics is precisely that it refuses to accept as a given the sorts of practices that obtain in everyday life. In so doing, theoretical investigation forces us to move, even if only to reaffirm our beliefs, rather than letting us sediment and presume the existence of fact when all we have is facticity.

Now, can theory be reified as something like an aggregate or a subject in ways that are maladaptive to the contexts in which theory is needed? Absolutely. But no one who does "theory" worth their salt would ever speak of "Theory" in this way, and so to read Holbo's constant anti-Theory rallying cry as a proactive defense against the imposition of oh-so tyrannical "Theory" is laughable, since he is himself producing the very gesture he finds so problematic. Instead, let us simply note, as Michael Bérubé did about Ward Churchill, that we can agree that we all have the ability to write and read what we want, just as we have the ability to dismiss what is written and read as being not worthy of our intellectual affirmation.

More goodness regarding the issue can be found courtesy of Mark Kaplan and Michael Bérubé.

If I can risk a so-far uncharacteristic departure into theological territory, I would like to suggest that the problem with Intelligent Design isn't that it sidesteps a century of scientific data allegedly proving the viability of evolutionary theory. With my theoretical proclivities, I am much less concerned about the explanatory accuracy of evolution, ID, or even creationism, and much more concerned with what any of those origin stories (and the debates we have about them) tell us about the possibilities and potential of human beings and the concomitant human condition.

This isn't to say that the veracity of any of those belief systems is entirely unimportant, but rather to say that I'm a dog without a bone as far as that question is concerned. But I do know of a couple other bones I do care about: the rhetoric that attends either debate, especially when it comes to the articulation of subjects and subject-positions, and as a lapsed Catholic, the theological consequences of the debate. The combination of the two, in my humble opinion, are not something that I would think Christians would want to accept.

See, the fundamental issue is that of theodicy - how does evil and tragedy exist in a world governed by an all-good, all-powerful god. Now typically, in a world in which Christians espouse creationism, the Lord creates all living beings as they are, and each life - well, each human life - is the reflection of the divine creator and so each life is infinitely precious, and each loss of life infinitely tragic. In the Creationist mythos, all beings are endowed with a "heart" so that they will know the will and the word of the Lord (we would think of this concept through the Latinate word "conscience", a word that obviously didn't exist during the writing of the Hebrew Testament), but they are also given free will, through which they can determine how they choose to respond to the Lord's commands. Choose wisely, you get to go up to the great white cloud kingdom; choose poorly, into the flame-ridden and/or icy pits of Hell. In this mythos, at least sterotypically, God is active and omnipotent, but given the taxing hands-off demands required by the instantiation of free will, he often chooses not to use his power to influence the world.

I'm working on an outline of a position paper regarding the work of Ernesto Laclau, and in part, its relation to the work of Jacques Lacan. Here's my premise: Laclau's notion of the political either presupposes an ethics not entirely unlike that of Levinas, or it should presuppose that ethics if it is to remain conceptually relevant in an age when politics is increasingly and exclusively governed my mass media.

By way of explanation, here are four points:

1. Laclau expressly breaks from a deconstruction that finds itself associated with or motivated by an ethical injunction that flows from the other (an injunction present in Derrida, Critchley, and Caputo, to name a few), arguing that such an ethical injunction sneaks a universal rule through the back door of what would otherwise be, properly speaking, an attention to the moment or the decision as a singularity, i.e., as a moment predicated on a radical sense of contingency. Instead, Laclau contends that what is political about the space of the decision is precisely that the act of the decision articulates the subject as such, and in so doing provides the possibility for an agency that any universality, no matter how unintentional its purchase, ultimately would thwart. This agency is possible precisely because the subject articulates him/herself in the decision because of a constitutive lack, a structural and constitutive incompleteness at the heart of identification. This incompleteness means that no external social construction or hegemonic attribution can properly enclose the subject, and so the process of identification (which is always an articulation), whereby a decision is made regarding the "institution of the social," is what deconstruction reveals at the heart of the political.
2. This claim has one of its most compelling demonstrations in Laclau's critique of representation, wherein he challenges the conventional assumption that a good representation is marked by a transparent transfer of will - politically speaking, a transfer from the will of the represented to the will/act of the representative. This presupposes, according to Laclau, that something like a full identification is possible, something he argues strenuously against, citing the same dynamic of decidability and incompleteness outlined above. As such, there must be something in representation that operates beyond the level of identification or transparency; this something is of course what Laclau terms "articulation" and it implies that the relationship between represented and representative cannot be simply neutral or unidirectional. One might be tempted to view this lack of neutrality as a structural deficit, and to rationalize it as natural or given or necessary, but this is precisely what deconstruction undoes by untying the presumption of unity at work in the logic of representation. By opening up the space between the structure that determines the decision and the act of the decision itself, deconstruction enriches the possibility of agency, antagonizing the discourses that produce the structure itself.
3. The problem is that this process of antagonism, the very exploration that explodes the more sedimented and rigid conventions of something like (political) re-presentation is itself devoid of contingency, as it lacks both context and motivation. Assuming that lack is constitutive of the social precisely because of the requisite failure of identity (which Laclau does), it does not follow that this lack is self-evident, and in fact, hegemony is at its best when it is assumed to be natural, which is to say, when it thwarts its own apperception. Hence the reason why an antagonism is politically necessary or warranted, since antagonisms problematize the presumed self-sufficiency and closure of one's subject-position and the concomitant institution of the social. But why antagonize, and before whom and to whom does this antagonism address itself? Derrida's response, which is not his alone, is that this deconstruction always already begins with the assumption of responsibility for and before the other. Lacan may not be entirely comfortable with this formulation, but one cannot entirely divorce the constitutive lack from Lacan's repeated proclamation that the unconscious is the language of the other, and indeed, it may be productive to do the work necessary to make the connections between these two Lacanian formulations more explicit, at least so far as in thinking the political. Why think the political otherwise, if not, in other words, because the other calls for it?
4. This call is particularly acute for a separate reason. The critique of representation referenced above prefigures a certain political formation - that of liberal democracy. Today, thanks in no small part to our contemporary "technologies of circulation," representation has itself been refigured, and the political representative is as much a figure of mass communication, teletechnologies, and mediation as he/she is a synecdoche or producer of the represented. Unlike the classical political schema by which the represented and the representative can claim purchase as some sort of ontological figure, today representation is increasingly spectral, its modalities - and thus its resistances to antagonism - fundamentally different. We have seen this shift in recent additions to rhetorical theory, most notably with Michael Warner's sustained case for a sense of the public no longer defined by access to a particular argumentative space and instead demarcated by a public constituted by the shared circulation of texts. This circulation, governed by political economies that are painfully limited in obvious and essential ways, and influenced by the production values of media - values and aesthetics of which most consumers are critically unaware - further distances the represented, and further displaces those figures posited as outsides to a social formation that has none (Arabs being the obvious example). These different rhythms demand, more than ever, that political engagement be grounded in an openness to the call of the other, and if this call does indeed sneak a universal through the back door, it is a universal whose spectral presence can only help advance the radical democracy that Laclau - and many of us - hold so dear.

Thoughts?

Sigh.