FFXII

Lately, I've been indulging in Final Fantasy XII. I don't normally venture into Japanese Role-Playing Game territory for the simple reason that the signification of homoeroticism is impishly lampooned as though it's necessary to pass some sort of heterosexist censorship board. Oh, and there's also the poor translation and confusing mix of hyper-sexualisation and mega-cuteness. FFXII is no stranger to this dyad.

Video Games - E3 2009 - X-Play

The absence of a "sappy love story" allows the narrative to unfurl around a political intrigue, which leaves one feeling slightly less perverse. But the homoeroticism of the game is coupled with a carnivalesque aesthetic that lets the characters and storyline firmly square off against a reading of it as merely Japanese camp. Sure, the seventeen year old protagonist Vaan has scripted lines that get on your nerves through their idiotic vanity and pettiness; but we were all seventeen once.

Perhaps the strangest feature of the game as a whole is the way that the class struggle/caste system unimaginatively conforms to a conservative Marxist reading. The aristocratic men are all mystics and perverts, the women are precocious hysterics; the working class city-dwellers' commentary seems strangely void of gender for most of the game (if ever a Maoist population there was), while the charismatic rogues are aloof and perform like knaves. No one really seems to want to change their position, and the 'struggle' of class and status is hegemonised by whatever ruling authority happens to be in power, i.e. early on in the game, when the king of Dalmasca is killed and the invading empire send their new consul, Lord Vayne, to rule the occupied capital of Dalmasca, Rabinastre, a scene ensues wherein Vayne 'charismatically' turns a potentially violent crowd into his allies with an oration lasting a few short minutes. Thucydides couldn't have wished a better oration. But what it signals is that this game is about changing the world, it's about keeping it going through its dysfunctionality. The more dysfunctional an in-game character is, the more typical they become.

And, just like capitalism, you must labour in service of the game to gain sufficient capital to spend on various lisences, elixirs, and equipment to advance in the narrative.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic

The Star Wars franchise is one of the largest pieces of cultural imagery available today. Alongside Doctor Who and Star Trek, Star Wars has garnered its fair share of cult and mass audiences. It is interesting to see the latest development: making a (another) Star Wars Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMO) in collaboration with the Electronic Arts-owned gaming industry heavyweight Bioware, of Bioshock and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic fame. The story-intensive style of Bioware games means that the Star Wars MMO has a lot of narrative emphasis. But in a gaming genre like an MMO, where many players grind away their lives, one has to wonder whether this game will do more than stop the MMO genre from amputing plot driven storylines altogether.

MMOs have been a social media space for some time now. But with the Star Wars narrative comes a new type of challenge: audience identification and sexuality. As was made infamous by the 'Mr Bungle rape' within an Multiple User Domain (MUD) context, sexuality poses a sticky issue for Bioware and Lucas Arts (owners of the Star Wars franchise rights). As one can observe in the Star Wars films, not to mention the novels and comics and wealth of other media, the Star Wars cosmology is a heterodoxic structure that errs on the side of patriarchy's underbelly: scantily clad women are paraded around while warrior-priests called "Jedi" become effectively sexless, suggesting that taboo on sex is equivalent to an erasing of gender. These are old issues for the Star Wars franchise, and hopefully we will see some progressive thought on Bioware's part in how to deal with them.

Toolbar Link

For the simplest way to blog a page or the like, make sure you read this page.

NCT

Some disruption to the 'blog this semester while I teach New Comm Tech. Prepare for some strange media.

Turing.

The one and only Alan Turing. Lost father of computer science.

Cocaine, Jesus?

The deferral of meaning in the video clearly shows comedy as a kind of social construction, wherein the truth of the matter is subverted by laughter.

The Multitude Criticism of Meillassoux, half-baked edition

I'm halfway through Meillassoux's After Finitude and the style of argument is starting to wear a bit. The deferral of the purpose of the discussion until its finale in each chapter seems at odds with the discussion itself, and its self-confessed 'fanaticism' perhaps. The dissection of corelationalism by Meillassoux is brilliant, and treads a very fine analytical line between solution and problem. The two branches of corelational thinking that so dominate contemporary thought which Meillassoux identifies, transcendental idealism (Kant) and speculative idealism (Hegel), are rigorously put through their paces. And it leaves one wondering where exactly we are to go to consider the un-thought afresh, which appears to be Meillassoux's provocation to his readers.

At the same time I'm dipping into Malabou's The Future of Hegel. The polymorphous abundance of end of semester marking has kept me from fulling appreciating Malabou's work, but I wonder if her rendering of "to see (what is) coming" might offer a marked reappraisal of the speculative idealism critiqued by Meillassoux. Were being to find itself in its becoming towards the future of itself without committing itself to the hypostatisation of 'being-in-itself' might the speculative identity of being, its future, be un-thought? At least by Meillassoux's criteria for corelationalism (the observer counts, literally) it seems that Malabou's reading of 'time' in Hegel stymies something of the logical concision at the end of Chapter Two in After Finitude where Meillassoux drives home the fanaticism of post-secular philosophy with its fidelity counterpart, religion. The move by Meillassoux, though extremely concise and cutting, nonetheless opens itself to the aporia diagnosed by Malabou by committing itself to a negation of the disclosure of thought.

A tangential question to all of this is: which Hegel is Meillassoux reading? or, for that matter, which Kant? Zizek's reading of Hegel particularly comes to mind here because the dialectics of Zizek's style make 'reflection' seem to shift in the very gaps between its apprehension. Meillassoux's critique of Schellingian Nature also troubles me because, as the redrafts of the Ages of the World shows us, the aesthetic sensibility with regard to Ugliness and Beauty is reworked to unearth the unthought primordiality of the Ugly. Perhaps, from a Schellingian perspective, Meillassoux's skeptical critique (?) of corelationalism is simply Ugly for its devotion to the unthought... Or worse, Meillassoux is leading us to an a priori Necessity already present in the 'mad nothingness' of Democritus.

Nausea? What nausea?

In Levinas, Law, and Politics (2007) Marinos Diamantides describes a curious situation that almost seems like the normative condition of an 'idiot':

Speaking -- as if one had voice -- feels like ventriloquism. Can the sensibility of such nausea be transformed into enjoyment and play? In fact the post-modern subject still has pretensions of innocent playfulness -- it does 'spend time' playing those mindless computer games but, at the end of each satisfying game the 'player' is reduced to an extension of the game and the time of 'playing the game' is indistinguishable from the monotonous, synchronic, time of the inauthentic, pseudo-work of performing one's functions. Nausea returns. Caught between being a cyborg and the persistent feeling that one has to be a cyborg, the Beckettian post-modern being seems, therefore, neither individual nor (yet?) a fully desubjectified existence, but an existent who still suffers alone the nausea attached to having to perform its abstract functions within the impersonal processes of our technological universe.

The problem with theorising a situation like this is that it entails an ontology of the subject, a certain psychical disposition that allows the specific social link entailed to function within a symbolic economy of desires, meanings, etc. Clearly though, what Diamantides is elaborating here is not a social relation but a naïvely mystical experience, searching for some Good at one remove which structurally entails the running together of 'meaning' and 'nonsense' such that nonsense itself becomes meaningful. The problem with evoking Beckett is that you are always going to be between mysticism and psychoses when you present a human subject. And this is a lesson that commits a delicate, but nonetheless important, revision of Diamantides' position: the exteriorisation of my 'inner states' (subjectivity) so that the discourse of technology can articulate my 'self' for all to see is my subjectivisation -- the subjectification of a subject relies on this subjectivisation to first 'dot the I' of the subject, but because this introduces a minimum of symbolic content the disintegration of discursive relations (the conflation of in/authentic time) necessarily entails a mystical experience. Were there no symbolic content, then the 'subject' would not exist (by the rules of the discourse) and technically stands outside being. When one has a claim to some minimum of symbolic structure that defines them, e.g. identification, then the abstraction of 'technology' rely just seems like an inability to cope with being actively engaged with oneself.

Streetwise

This Google Street View thingy is getting more and more Gibsonian by the minute. And by 'Gibsonian' I don't mean that protean novel Neuromancer either. It's much more of an Idoru, Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country sort of an affair; an unseemly artificiality that seems like a natural technological innovation. But what are we seeing on 'street view' exactly? I'm not sure. It makes me think of the way the top-down satellite imagery is always out of sync with the present in which you view it. This means, for example, that the dead can walk again!

What I find curious about this are the parallel events, like the guy who got arrested for using a free wi-fi network because a self-absorbed hairdresser suspected him of stalking her when he parked outside the café across the street offering free wi-fi and pulled out his laptop. So on the one hand we have a weird nexus of surveillance culture 'innocently' parading under Google's banners where at the same time we have people becoming suspicious of those who are not equally nervous of surveillance.

Obviously we are simply not alienated enough from each other... Bring back that polite edifice of congenial civility!

Empires in World History

CPCI Public Lecture on EMPIRES IN WORLD HISTORY
Queensland College of Art
Griffith Graduate Centre Lecture Theatre (S07 Bldg, Room 1.23)
South Bank Campus
Tuesday 5 June
5.00 Drinks for 5.30 - 7.00 pm Lecture
RSVP: By 29 May to j.jones@griffith.edu.au or (07) 373 57338


Frederick Cooper, Professor of History, and
Jane Burbank, Professor of History and Russian and Slavic Studies,
New York University


EMPIRE, RIGHTS, and CITIZENSHIP


Abstract

This paper explores the idea of citizenship and rights in empires, looking beyond the conventional linkage of citizenship to the nation-state and of rights to popular sovereignty. We look at two different kinds of imperial regimes – the Russian and the French. Russian rulers explicitly recognized that the polity consisted of different people who would be governed differently, while in "Greater France," especially under the republics, the supposedly republican idea of a unitary state with a single, homogeneous, national citizenship was in fact unstable and contested. The notion of "imperial citizenship" surfaced repeatedly, notably during the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 and again after World War II, when leaders from African colonies as well as European France debated ways of conjugating difference and equality. Reading across these two histories, we investigate both the possibilities and the limits of ways in which citizenship and rights could be conceptualized within the context of empire.

Speakers

Frederick Cooper’s research and writing focuses on 20th-century African history, empires in world history, and colonization and decolonization. His books include Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). He is also co-author of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies (2000), and co-editor of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), of International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (1997), and of Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (2006).

Jane Burbank is the author of Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 and Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917, and co-editor of Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, and Russian Empire: Space, People, Power 1700-1930, to be published in 2007. At present she is writing, with Frederick Cooper, a study of empires in world history. Her current research addresses the intersections of empire, law and political practices in Eurasia.