on good writing

José Ortega y Gasset is one of the finest literary stylists among philosophers. Over time I’ve even come to think that his style is a bit too user-friendly. That is to say, I think people actually want a certain minimal density when they pick up a philosophy book. Just as it it’s helpful to have nuclei in atoms, so that we can fire things at them and the nuclei will bounce them back, so too do readers need “nuclei” of difficult points in philosophical prose, but surrounded by plenty of assistance and cajoling to help attack those difficult nuclei. Too much density is draining and wearying. But too little density leaves the reader confused about which ideas are the central ones.

Be that as it may, you can learn a lot about how to write philosophy well by reading Ortega’s books. I like this passage about clear philosophical writing (and by clear he means what I mean by “vivid”). It comes from pages 19-20 of What is Philosophy?

“I have always thought that clarity is the form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds and porous for their probing. This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly impose between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology. I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodical strictness to an extreme wen he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to communicate them and to give them out, he ought to avoid that cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique.”

new campus sample

This is a sample of what I mean by “postmodern Islamic architecture.” Some hate it, I’m quite fond of it. It’s spectacular by night, even a bit spooky.

That’s the Performing and Visual Arts Building, as seen from an outdoor corridor near my office in Humanities and Social Sciences.

office photo

the next best thing

No, it wasn`t Prince of Networks I saw through the window in mailroom shadow last night. But it was the next best thing… the copies of my McLuhan article from a 2007 [sic] issue of Explorations in Media Ecology. I’ve been waiting for that for even longer than the book. So, Ian Bogost, you’ll be bringing me my first copy after all. Perfect timing.

the Japan question

One of the most interesting facts in the Montfort/Bogost Atari book is that Pac-Man was by no means a wild success in Japan, its country of origin.

This will come as a huge surprise to anyone who was alive in the United States at the time that Pac-Man appeared. To call it wildly popular would be an understatement. I still remember the fever-like atmosphere in the arcade in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where I first encountered the game. (Not sure what year this was, but it was within a few weeks after the game debuted.) I had not heard of Pac-Man ahead of time, I just saw the massive, unprecedented crowd assembled around the machine, electrified in a way I had never encountered before.

The crowd was of all ages, too, from about 7 to 25. I was with my brothers and my mother at the time, and my mother was just as excited by the game as all of us were (and she was never a videogame player, as most adult women have not regularly been). A genuine pop culture craze, then– quite possibly the biggest I have ever seen.

The question is why this very obviously Japanese-seeming game became such an explosive hit in the United States, but not in its homeland Japan, a country famed for its crazed fads for relatively minor American cultural products.

I thought of the Japan problem again a few days ago when reading the latest Michael Jackson data… Jackson’s death, of course, has propelled many of his songs and albums to the top of the sales charts. (If Billboard allowed old albums to appear on the charts, the top three albums right now would all be old Michael Jackson albums.)

iTunes also reports skyrocketing downloads of Michael Jackson songs in all countries… except Japan.

It is a country that shares and even exceeds Western trends toward waves of consumerist fads. Yet those fads run at a rhythm that are somehow disconnected from the Western ones. I would have expected a big Michael Jackson craze in Japan more than anywhere else right now.

Also interesting in the sales figures was the differing popularity of different songs in different countries. (This can even be seen with The Beatles… “She Loves You” is much more popular in the UK than “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” whereas the reverse is true in the USA. But I’m with the Brits on that one.)

We see this in philosophy as well. Some philosophers are hailed in certain countries while ignored in others. In the Balkans I was informed that some German thinkers who have passed entirely from the scene in the USA and UK are still considered forces to reckon with in the Balkans. The Dutch shelve Latour in philosophy sections, a practice unknown elsewhere.

And speaking of Japan, someone once told me that the continental philosophy crowd in that country has a voracious appetite for American products in the field, such that even minor secondary works published by SUNY Press are often moderately famous on the Japanese (and Korean) philosophical scene. I know that only by hearsay; on my one trip to Japan/Korea in 2007 I spent no time with philosophy professors and so have no idea what they read these days.

videogames

I’ve been promising another brief post on the work of IAN BOGOST of Georgia Tech, whose books I have greatly enjoyed in recent years. He is one of the leading academic writers on videogames, as well as a game designer in his own right. (And happens to be coming to Cairo today to judge a student competition, and was kind enough to offer to bring an extra copy of Prince of Networks along.)

In the last few days I read his Racing the Beam (co-authored with Nick Montfort), a study of the Atari VCS platform, which is a delight to read for anyone who remembers the Atari heyday of the early 1980’s.

His first book was entitled Unit Operations, and it reads as much like a philosophical treatise as a study of Grand Theft Auto. “Unit” is the Latin for “monad,” after all, and the book is steeped in references to the philosophical tradition, which Bogost clearly knows well.

The same holds for his second book Persuasive Games (which also happens to be the name of Bogost’s own game design company). This book treats videogames in terms of what he calls “procedural rhetoric,” and here again the concept has value well beyond the realm of games.

Early videogames, with their high abstraction combined with their great mythical power, could not have failed to make a deep impression on anyone who was in their formative years in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. I doubt they would have affected me quite as deeply if they had been more technologically advanced and hence more “realistic.” In fact, I remember feeling depressed the first time I encountered Mortal Kombat, less because of the violence than because of the realism of it… Immediately I saw that the era of abstract airplanes, dragons, and pylons was at an end. The more realistic the games became, the more they started to resemble everyday experience in perceptual terms, and the less power they had to decompose that experience into more interesting elements.

As Bogost’s phrase “unit operations” indicates, a videogame entity acts like a sort of monad with a limited number of tangible powers, encountering a limited number of enemies and obstacles. The stark simplicity of each of these elements made early videogames good examples of what McLuhan calls “cold media”– low-information media, which tend to have great hypnotic power. The more detailed they become, the “hotter” they become, and according to McLuhan overheated media eventually reverse or flip into their opposites. (I happen to think this is one of the most fruitful ideas of the 20th century, with so many ramifications for all the humanities, including ontology, and I do plan a full book on McLuhan in the very near future. Philosophy has just barely begun to exploit McLuhan’s insights. I’ve published two articles on him, but that’s just the beginning.)

When videogames were in their Atari “cold medium” stage, with dragons that looked more like ducks, and charmingly simplistic sound effects, the usual complicated everyday objects we encounter were stripped bare of extraneous detail and exposed in a sense as naked metaphysical actors with a very limited number of properties and obstructions. And yes, this is what first got me thinking about objects, even in pre-philosophy days.

In a sense, metaphysics is a way of conceiving the world as a giant videogame, attempting to define the range of ways in which entities as diverse as hospitals, factories, scorpions, quicksand, and planets act and withhold from acting.

But to return to Bogost… He has a great talent for balancing general speculation with highly concrete examples, and his writing style is lucid and lacking in all affectation. I’m looking forward to meeting him in Cairo after several years of correspondence.