Dungeons, Dragons and Philosophy

There are few things more powerful than nostalgia. Despite the weight of admin, marking and child induced sleep deprivation, that has kept me away from blogging for some time, Graham Harman's recent posts on Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy have stirred me to emerge. Along with many others, I can confidently say that few things exerted such a profound influence on my adolescent, teenage and later intellectual development as roleplaying games. Discovering D&D in 1977, with the Basic Boxed Set, opened a whole world of imagination, creativity and socialisation to me. I had recently read Lord of the Rings and my favourite section therein was the Fellowship’s journey through the mines of Moria; the discovery of D&D a few weeks later, via a miniscule advert in the Model Soldier magazine, seemed fated. There followed many years of making friends with people I would certainly never have met otherwise (plus probably fifteen plus hours per week of social gaming for many years), discovering countless other role playing systems and games (including that RPG of SR’s favoured fantasy genre: Call of Cthulhu) and an exploration of the joys and frustrations of writing and world-making. It is the latter two of these that are probably the most philosophically significant.

The writing is the easiest. I probably wrote hundreds of thousands of words through my teenage years for role playing games such as D&D. The work I produced for school was minimalistic at best, but D&D and other RPGs motivated me to write, and write extensively; a source of some despair for my teachers when my parents revealed this fact to them. For this alone I owe the game a considerable debt of gratitude with regard to my subsequent academic life.

The world-making, though, seems to have been a vital developmental step in my movement into philosophy, religious studies and – specifically – metaphysics. World-making in RPGs seems to demand certain philosophical virtues and I can, for example, still very clearly remember obsessing over such diverse topics as cosmology, economics, history, geography, politics and theology in an effort to create comprehensive and coherent fantasy worlds. Indeed I can think of very few other activities that converge with the commitments of the philosopher qua metaphysician as closely as those of the gamesmaster of a role-playing game. While I have heard the argument that all RPG GMs are frustrated authors and novelists, I suspect that many of them are would-be philosophers too. A corrolary of this is probably also apparent in the gamer's critical stance towards the RPG systems themselves. Debates over “realism” versus “fun” and “playability” circulated in many of the RPG support magazines during the 1980s (and probably continue to do so today), and I can remember grappling with those issues for some time. The alignment system in D&D, for example, worried and irritated me. The idea that personalities and characters could be essentialised along the lines of lawful, chaotic, good and evil always seemed, to cite Mackie, “queer” to me - and this was one of the first things that I eventually felt confident enough to move beyond.

There was also something distinctly object-oriented about early Dungeons and Dragons, albeit in a rather worrying sense, that is the whole emphasis on acquiring objects/things (e.g. wealth, artefacts, experience points) by encountering and overcoming other objects/things (e.g. monsters, traps, dungeons), all of which was enabled with the help of other objects (e.g. miniatures, the wonderful dice (Platonc forms anyone?), maps, rule books, character sheets), and intentionally contained with the imaginations of the particpants.

Perhaps more later, time to go and teach now, although appropriately the seminar topic is: Are Pratchett, Rowling and Tolkien religiously significant?

Haraway and Object Oriented Ontology

I’m pasting some elements of Levi Bryant’s response to my proposed paper on Feminist Metaphysics as Object Oriented Ontology below.

In the world of cultural studies and the humanities, I think there have been a number of privileged sites that have been directed towards bucking the primacy of anti-realist or correlationist thought than other disciplines by virtue of the nature of the objects that constitute their object of investigation. These theorists have not, of course, in most cases baldly stated their work as a debate between realism and anti-realism, but their work has nonetheless inevitably led them to thinking being in such a way that it is not simply a discourse, language, or a correlation with the human.
Paradoxically, these privileged sites have largely been marginalized in the world of academia and the humanities; no doubt because of the hegemony of anti-realist thought or the status of correlationism as the establishment position. Among these privileged sites I would include environmental philosophy and thought, science and technology studies, critical animal theory, geographical studies, writing technology studies, media studies, queer theory, and, of course, feminist philosophy and thought. I am sure that there are many others that don’t immediately come to mind for me. If these have been privileged sites for the development of significant conceptual innovations in the field of realist ontology, then this is because all of these sites of investigation force encounters with real and nonhuman objects and actors that cannot be reduced to correlates of human thought, language, perception, or use but that have to be approached in their own autonomous being to properly be thought.
...
The point here, then, is that these privileged yet marginalized sites of realist thought are, in so many respects, ground-zero for object-oriented ontology. The conceptual innovations and creations, the ontological discoveries, that inhabit these sites require, demand, from object-oriented ontologists the most careful scrutiny and attention for there is a wealth of ontological riches to be found in these sites. Here OOO/OOP learns from these sites of research and engagement, not the reverse. For these thinkers were all object-oriented ontologists before anyone thought to name themselves “object-oriented ontologists”.

To the above points I must simply agree. Moreover, Levi’s words here and elsewhere reminded me where some of my positive predispositions towards a future “Object-Oriented” and anti-correlationist stance probably began. Specifically, it was sometime in the mid/late 1990s when I encountered the writings of Donna Haraway and was particularly interested in the manner in which her ecofeminist and cyborg manifesto commitments converged. It was definitely one of those rare eureka moments when you discover someone who is saying something that you have been struggling to articulate for some time yourself. Looking back on her work now - that is, following my recent encounters with OOO and SR - it is quite amazing how many parallels and resources there are that need revisiting (as Levi notes, ‘these people were ... object-oriented ontologists before anyone thought to name themselves “object-oriented ontologists”). I can’t lay my hands on my copy of Penley and Ross’s (1991) Technoculture, where Haraway makes some of these intriguing claims, so I'm using a segment from Jim Cheney’s exellent article ‘Nature/Theory/ Difference’. He begins by noting Haraway’s

idea that we reconceive the object of knowledge (the world – not just humans) as “agent in the productions of knowledge.” Pointing out that Western conceptions of objectivity and the object of knowledge are historically constructed and “can seem to be either appropriations of a fixed and determined world reduced to resources for instrrumentalist projects of destructive Western societies, or ... masks for interests, usually dominating interests,” Haraway argues that objectivity in our accounts of the natural world require that we understand the “objects” of the world as actors and agents to be understood, not through a “logic of discovery,’” but through a “power-charged social relation of ‘conversation.’” She envisions “feminist theory as a reinvented coyote discourse” with actors who “come in many and wonderful forms” ...
She stresses that in speaking of the “objects” of the natural world as actors/agents she is not thereby characterizing them as subjects with languages. Hers is the “project of finding the metaphors [e.g. coyote and trickster] that allow you to imagine a knowledge situation that does not set up an active/passive split” ... What she is searching for is “a concept of agency that opens up possibilities for figuring relationality within social worlds where actors fit oddly, at best, into previous taxa of the human, the natural, or the constructed.”

Now anyone reading this who has some familiarity with the current state of Object Oriented Ontology is probably thinking of points of cross-over and similarities that warrant closer examination. Indeed, this is something I’m starting to do myself, specifically with regard to publication. One of my recent thoughts was, ‘Did Haraway read or draw upon Latour?’ A quick check of the bibliography of Simians, Cyborgs and Women reveals a couple of Latour endnotes. I copy one of them here, emphasis is mine:

Latour’s brilliant and maddening aphoristic polemic against all forms of reductionism makes the essential point for feminists: ‘Mefiez-vous de la purete: c’est le vitriol de l’ame’. ... Latour is not otherwise a notable feminist theorist, but he might be made into one by readings as perverse as those he makes of the laboratory, that great machine for making significant mistakes faster than anyone else can, and so gaining world-changing power.

This is from her 1988 paper ‘Situated Knowledges’, I will be checking her later works in due course. Interesting material for anyone searching out allies for Object Oriented Ontology, though.

IOC Sexual Objectification Madness

On the subject of treating persons as irreducible and not objectifying them, I would draw your attention to the move by the International Olympic Committee to consider mandatory gender testing and therapies in response to cases such as that of Caster Semenya. See Sentient Developments post here. A genuine case of medicalization and biological reductionism imposing itself on the world once again in the most invidious way.

Harman on Objectification

Just a quick note that Graham has responded to Levi's response to my post here (apologies for the painful circle through blogspace). Usefully he is clarifying what was one of the concerns in my paper, namely that "the objects of object-oriented philosophy have nothing to do with objectification. In fact, they are what resist all objectification." This is rather obvious when one reads some OOO, but probably far less so if one doesn't. In terms of PR, it is one thing to claim that pepsi bottles, cacti and snow flakes are objects, but claiming that people are objects will frequently cause "objectification alert" alarm bells to start ringing. Unfortunately, if OOO wants to build alliances with the Humanities, this topic will need to be tackled with some regularity. Indeed, when I thought about introducing OOO to a feminist journal a couple of months ago, this seemed to be the problem or misconception that would need to be addressed first and foremost.

Foreshadowing Dundee

Interesting to see Paul Ennis mentioning the 'Real Objects and Material Subjects' Conference here and some of the content of Levi Bryant's post on Inhuman Ethics here. I'm aiming to attend the conference and have submitted a paper that will be touching on some of Levi's claims about the need for a re-engagement with Haraway . I think that her work can be productively read as ontology, notably OOO, and - as Levi suggests - it was perhaps unfortunate that her work was located precisely when it was in history.

My abstract for the conference reads as follows, not sure how closely I can stay to it, but it is vague enough to allow me to formulate some ideas over the next couple of months.

Thinking Sex(es)/Object(s): Feminist Metaphysics as Object Oriented Ontology
Three main claims are advanced and defended in this paper, albeit with some brevity and increasing gradations of tentativeness. First, it is noted that feminist philosophers, in both analytic and continental traditions, have been reluctant to engage with metaphysics, or, far more commonly, they have been active critics and opponents of it. This attitude may be explained, in part, by the masculinist and misogynist use of “essentialism” in the history of women’s oppression, although a number of other reasons can be mobilised with relative ease. Second, contra these considerations, I propose that the marginalisation of metaphysics by feminists has been overly hasty. Indeed there are good reasons to move the discipline of metaphysics towards the centre of feminist philosophy. Third, I identify some feminist philosophers whose work may be read as metaphysics and whose commitments mark them out as holding realist ontologies (e.g. Christine Battersby, Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray). I then bring to the table of continental metaphysics some concepts developed by those selfsame philosophers and propose that an Object Oriented Ontology may be the most appropriate means of developing and exploring these ideas. The irony and/or perversity of proposing this alliance, given the history and weight of feminist analyses of sexual objectification, is not lost on me. However, I contend that an Object Oriented Ontology does not run afoul of ethical, political and social feminist critiques of objectification; rather, it delivers fertile resources and research possibilities for tackling a pre-existent feminist interest in the status of objects.

[ADDENDUM: Just been informed that my paper hasn't been accepted, so it is likely to be worked up in a more developed form for Speculations or Hypatia. I'll still probably be attending Dundee and soaking up the SR and OOO atmosphere, although it will depend on how my institution feels about funding the trip].

Circus Philosophicus trailer

Graham Harman gives some tempting insights into his Circus Philosophicus here. Amongst many carnivalesque spectacles you will encounter Graham in "verbal dispute with China Miéville on a Gulf of Mexico drilling platform, leading to [their] discussion of the horrific model of an occasionalist polytheism, in which oil rigs embody the countless deities of the cosmos."

Where do I buy my entry ticket. Yowza, yowza, roll up, roll up ... see the performing idealists, stare at the contortions of the folded Deleuzians.

The contradictions of the modern university

Just read this by Nina Power at Infinite Thought and nearly choked on my drink, unfortunate for the undergraduate essay I was marking at the time, I really shouldn't multi-task too much, but the tea stains aren't too noticeable. Very funny, I really should read her blog more often. This is taken from an interview that she did with the German newsaper Taz.

Has the introduction of the RAE affected your capacity to publish outside academia? How?

Not really. Universities want you to demonstrate all kinds of contradictory things at once – in-depth scholarship yet accessibility, value-for-money yet long-term outcomes, and so on. The contradictions of the modern university are simply a microcosmic version of the bastardised form of neo-liberalism fused with state bureaucracy that characterises contemporary life. In this sense, universities love academics who can at once be ‘scholars’ and ‘populists’. They don’t even seem to mind if you write scornful pieces about the very nature of academia itself, so long as the journal you publish in has a high enough rating. The thing that should take up most time is teaching – yet this is the one area (unless it involves getting overseas or postgraduate fees) that universities are not really interested in. When the students find this out, they can’t believe it. We shouldn’t either.

I won't add much comment on this, suffice it to say that my university has identified itself as teaching led for some time, albeit while emphasising all the other things too.