Show Them Our Screens: Live Coding, Digital Humanities, and the Obscurantism of Close Reading

After watching Stephen Ramsay's video essay on musical "live coding," I had what I can only describe as a small ecstatic moment.This, I felt, was truly interesting, truly hybrid. If many aspects of Digital Humanities that I have commented on in this blog are strained with competing interests from the sciences, the humanities, and the many, many populations outside the academy, the work of Andrew Sorensen, the "live coder" whose performance Stephen Ramsay annotates in the video to which I've linked, offers a refreshing panacea to that ideological strife. Sorensen's performance is wholly at peace (what other language to use? at one? comfortable? self aware?) with its own hybridity. To my eyes, the practice of live coding holds together at its core the threads of performance, computation, language, sensual aesthetic experience, and critical awareness,all in a beautifully layered lump of sound. This is no McGannian deformance, nor is it a Morettian reduction or abstraction. This is composition.

In reading the blogs of some of my fellow DH students over at Northeastern University I came across a discussion of Alan Liu's essay "Where is Cultural Criticism in the Humanities?" He, like many other scholars laboring in the (sub)field of Digital Humanities takes as his subject the disconcerting relationship between DH and the broader field of humanities (whatever that is). Some of this essay reads like a temporally dislocated continuation of C.P. Snow's old treatise on the two academic culture, but on the whole. Liu's take remains fresh to my eyes. My sense of his argument is that what DH has lacked since the very beginning is a strong critical voice. The few exceptions - Liu points to Moretti as one example, I would also suggest Wilkens and McGann as two others - reserve their perspective of cultural criticism by remaining firmly rooted in what is in the end a rather traditional mode of textual analysis. Liu connects the dearth of cultural criticism in DH to the growing cultural irrelevance of many university humanities programs. Though again, the "humanities" remains vague here, Liu's argument seems clear enough: DH can lead the humanities back to a STEM-like relevance again if only it will recover its voice for cultural criticism.

I, like fellow grad blogger dherdoyle, feel somewhat dubious about reorienting our perception of the humanities around the rather instrumental, cultural-relevance bellwether that Liu's essay seems to suggest. On the same token, what good is cultural criticism that no one outside of the academy pays attention to? I'm reminded here of TOPLAP's manifesto as it is cited in Ramsay's video. The second demand made by TOPLAP (an organization for support and promotion of live coding artists) in its manifesto is thus:

Obscurantism is dangerous. Show us your screens.

The motion of the live coder is to lay bare the language, the syntax of electronic composition. It is the quintessentially self-critical work. Its agenda? Commitment to clarity and computation. In his commentary on Sorensen's live coding, Ramsay necessarily resorts to mixed metaphors and hastily constructed portmanteaus to describe the performance. He uses phrases like "playing the comments" to describe the bizarrely naked collusion between raw LISP (the coding language that Sorensen uses) and musical theory. It is this very nakedness that, to my mind, suggests the kind of contribution that the so-called Digital Humanities can make to not only the academy, but the socio-intellectual discourse field (ha) at large.

To translate an aesthetic work into computation is to the humanist the ultimate abstraction. When we look at a document like House Of Seven Gables that has been rendered newly byzantinian by TEI markup, it is easy to feel as though the soul has been stripped. With the advent of data the age of intuition and close reading walks out the door. And yet it may be the very nakedness of computational languages that, upon translating the aesthetic work, lays bare the many intimate interfaces between artist and art, performer and performance, player and game. When TOPLAP demands we show them our screens, they are demanding that we no longer pretend to know what we do not.

This is the threat of DH to the rest of the humanities. Committing to DH is the humanities' concession that the broad claims it has made from the staggeringly small canon that it studies are in some very important way, quite inadequate. We have been hiding our screens from view, and the decline of the humanities stature in the university, let alone public opinion, has suffered because of it. If Liu is right - and he is at the very least not at all alone - in suggesting that STEM fields have far outpaced us in terms of cultural relevance and that that is in fact a bad thing, then it seems quite natural to look to the STEM fields and find out what it is that they are doing right. To that end, Manovich's work on visualization, Moretti's graphs, maps, and trees, McGann's acts of deformance, and Wilkens' cartography all adopt some aspect of data-based investigation. These are, I'm becoming more and more convinced, valuable in their own right. However, perhaps they are each barking up, if not the wrong tree, then not quite the right one. The live coders show us what our lesson from STEM ought to be: down with obscurantism.

Deformity, Praxis, and the Digital Aesthetic Work

Finding a single thing to respond to in Jerome McGann's Radiant Textuality feels like a Sisyphean task - as soon as I think of one topic to criticize (the wanton abuse of the word "quantum" in chapter 7, for instance) or an idea to pick up and push farther (McGann's interesting approach to the development of new critical tools comes to mind) another tangentially related boulder tumbles back down the hill, taking me with it back to square one.On some level, Radiant Textuality's sprawl is a performative product of the subject matter. There's something wry about McGann's shifty text given its conclusions about the limits of the book and the potential of "deformance" to unlock new critical perspectives. Perhaps, in the same sense that it has already been "marked up," Radiant Textuality has already begun to deform under my readerly eye. McGann's multigeneric approach to this text is in and of itself a form of the deformance that he suggests in chapter 4. Radiant Textuality is rife with addendums, appendices, notes, digressions, introductions, prefaces, close readings, dramas, and criticism. It slips with startling fluidity from one form to another, loosening the reader's demands for linear argumentation. It suggests, rather, an internal logic which it describes as it deploys. In other words, Radiant Textuality is the performative enactment of what I take to be one of McGann's central arguments. The lesson we learn from digital humanities projects is not that computational logic displaces the book. Rather, computational logic shows us what was true all along about the books we thought we knew: they were already algorithmic to the core.

Though this implication is potentially interesting, I'm doubtful that it's a terribly revolutionary. It seems the two primary insights to garner from McGann's wandering tour through his quasi-biographical research journal are rather less sexy, but still, I think, quite important. On the one hand, McGann's preference for digital tools for literary criticism seems to rest on his belief that books are in some way an informational subset of computational archival. The book, argues McGann' is a specific kind of informational engine which inscribes its own instructions for consumption in its corpus. Computers are much much better at encoding informational at the indexical level, and therefore, at least when it comes to the marking-up of structural and semantic information (a process which Mcgann seems to equate to criticism) and therefore offer us a new critical vantage point on the books we've always loved. The critic who criticizes using a set of tools that is made of the same stuff as his critical subject, argues McGann, necessarily starts at his task with a significant impairment. Computerization grants the critic the new tools he needs to adequately account for the structural and semantic complexity of bookish algorithm.

The second insight which I take to be particularly interesting is McGann's is his view of deformance as the specific mode of criticism which computational logic unlocks. Beginning from Dickinson, McGann looks to the efficacy of techniques of erasure, isolation, and arbitrary but physical reworkings of texts themselves as textual, typographical objects. Rhymes which were otherwise hidden (think here of Keats) suddenly spring out to digital humanist. Photoshop yields a newly chromatic Blessed Damozel. Herein I find the potential for genuinely illuminating self-reflexivity. It seems that despite all the apparent scientific rigor of digital experimentation, there is something delightful, almost Proustian, about the kinds of accidental aesthetic discoveries that newly mechanized recombinations of analog works, whether literary or otherwise, might enable. There is something refreshingly serendipitous about the whole affair.

I also find McGann's focus on generating a praxis out of his longsuffering sojourn with The Rosetti Archive and then the Ivanhoe Game to be refreshing as well. In his calls for critical praxis he reminds me of his compatriots in OOO who also lament the lack of what Ian Bogost calls philosophical "carpentry" in his book Alien Phenomenology. If some of McGann's formulations are lacking in precision (I'm still not sure why TEI or the OHCO thesis are regarded as important to the digital humanist) or reserve (say quantum one more time...) they make up for it in their self-consciousness. McGann seems genuinely invested in a constant reciprocation between his ideas, their implementations, their results, and the new ideas those results generate. This kind of scholarship seems to be particularly needed in a field which all too often falls into screechy optimism.

Having finished Radiant Textuality, I couldn't help but feel, however, that McGann had left it unfinished. Perhaps that is part of the book's own deformity, but I'd like to push for a moment at what I take to be an enormous oversight in McGann's conceptualization of digital-logic-as-critical-tool. If indeed editing is a critical activity (a proposition I find wholly agreeable) and if the power of the computer to illumine the book lies in its greater efficacy in processing the algorithmic logic which already inheres in its pages, what happens when we turn these critical apparatuses back onto the digital object? Nowhere in Radiant Textuality does McGann seem willing to admit the existence or even the possibility of a rich, wholly digital aesthetic text. I'm left wondering if his particular view of digital humanities could accommodate the relatively straightforward e-reader, let alone the meticulously crafted fictions of Heavy Rain and Spec Ops: The Line, or the vibrant simulated societies and economies of EVE Online. Indeed, the decidedly un-fun structure and implementation of the Ivanhoe Game lead me to believe that McGann, at least at the time of this book's publication has very little experience with the rich world of video games. Given that these objects (aesthetic works that I take to be thoroughly textual) exist on the same logical plane as the computerized critical tools which McGann advocates for deploying upon the analog book, I wonder what kind of critical apparatus McGann would imagine for them if he was given the opportunity. If one of the worthwhile products of the many projects in Radiant Textuality was an uncovering of the computerization's critical power as a deforming agent, how might we begin to imagine a deformed video game? A deformed Kindle? A deformed app? Would McGann even consider these things texts? At the very least McGann gives us some ground on which to start asking these questions, or as McGann might say, to imagine what we don't know.

Space for Empathy: Gender in Video Games

That video games have been built by men and for men for the majority of the medium's existence is virtually a given. Space War, Tennis for Two, Odyssey: virtually all of the first video games that this world has known were programmed by men within communities of men and for audiences composed nearly entirely of men. This boys club of lab coats and science fiction merged with the equally male and equally powerful society of suits that ran the technology business in the seventies and eighties. The programs that defined these early, first generations of gaming look like a feminist paradise of distilled male behavioral caricatures: everything is a battle, a quest, a monster. The titles themselves are monolithic. Think back to your Atari collection; how many games did you have with a title containing more than one or two words? Indeed, in this early stage, language seems to function in gaming as a semi-necessary accessory to the premise of whichever game it has been attached to.

     Of course, it isn't quite fair to video game creators to fault them for design choices that have merely been borrowed from existing leisure cultures. Our board games, in that they function primarily as arenas for competitive elimination, are generally centered on the either/or binary which always provides a clear winner and a clear loser. Look to chess, look to Monopoly, look to battleship. Where a game isn't a metaphor for combat it's a metaphor for economic contention or political power. The games of twentieth century America have always come out of male concern, have always sought to replicate the competitive worlds from which women are excluded or discouraged. I can think of all the times my own mom and sisters have refused to play monopoly simply on the grounds that my dad and I are insufferable to be around as we stake out our pretend properties and rob our competitors blind. And who can blame them?

     Think too of how leisure has been gendered so heavily in our society. This gendering may seem less obvious now, but consider the hobbies we encounter the most as either males or females. Think of craft nights, sewing societies, knitting groups, cooking and book clubs, and realize that you are imagining groups of women. Now think of golf, bowling alleys, hunting parties, smoking parlors, pub scenes, and realize that you are imagining men.

     Of course, I'm generalizing. No one person conforms to gender expectations perfectly, and the suggestion that there are codified expectations of gender at all is a tenuous one at best. But we know they exist, these expectations, in some shape in every culture. They shape our fairy tales just as surely as they shape our workplace. Thus, it stands to reason that our gamespace would contain the same expectations.

     Unlike their more strictly competitive table top cousins, video games don't absolutely require the either/or binary of winning and losing in order to function. Or at the very least, this binary can be displaced onto digitally rendered stand-ins for actual human competitors, and the binary can thus be rendered somewhat more complex, more ambiguous. Sure, monopoly has a narrative premise rooted in the early corporate capitalism of Depression-era America, but in this case the narrative is mere parameter, not propulsion. The video game combines the ludic (play-like) nature of binary driven board games with the empathic potential of actual honest-to-goodness story. In the video game, story can become our reason for playing, we join in solidarity with a character's concerns, we contribute to the authorial process by playing within the branching narrative the developers have opened up to us.

      This combination of ludic and narrative has been recognized as critical to the identity of video games for years now. We've come a long way since the days of Centipede. Games that exist primarily to tell stories have been with us even before the first Final Fantasy game. What has yet to be fully appreciated or even explored as an attractive possibility is the  potential of this particular medium for generating cross-gender empathy. Game stories require the participation of a player, just as literature requires the participation of a reader. The nature of sympathy generated for a given set of video game characters is also analogous to the identification which takes place between a reader and his book's protagonist. The difference lies (at least in part) in the gamer's physical and virtual performance of the protagonist's actions. The bonds of sympathy are enacted through both imagination and physical force. That the video game can create a visual environment full of interesting characters and scenarios to explore is really cool, but in the end not terribly important. What makes the game special is its ability to incentivize performative action within situations that the gamer would ordinarily never have the opportunity to enact or experience.

     Feminists have long pointed to the lack of empathy from one gender for the other as a primary barrier to gender equality. This is what we really mean when we say that someone has "objectified" someone else. That "objectified" person has been rendered an inadequate target for sympathy. We don't empathize with tables, volcanoes, or bullets specifically because of their object-ness. The first project in any agenda of violence or oppression is to render the enemy, the insurgent, or the other into an object unworthy of empathy. When a culture understands women primarily in terms of their breasts, or their domestic skill, or their status as princesses, it objectifies them in this very sense. It's not that men suddenly stop believing women are people. It just becomes really difficult for the male mind to imaginatively occupy the social space which has been left for women. Of course this dynamic works the same in any oppressive context. Being unable to imaginatively occupy the space of illegal immigrants, or Muslims, or discontented suburban men inevitably results in the degradation of cross class empathy, a necessary component for the commission of interpersonal or institutional violence. But in our "post-feminist" climate, it's easy to forget that the empathy barrier exists as strong as ever between the genders.

     And here is exactly where I believe that video games have the societal potential to function not only as innocuous purveyors of entertainment, but as loci of cross-gender empathy. The performative nature of character identification in video games allow gamers to experience the kinds of gendered experiences which construct our ideas of what it means to be a woman or a man. In fact, games already do this, but most do so unconsciously, defaulting to the old "boy's club" of late sixties technoculture. Why else would the majority of game heroes consist of nothing more complex than a collection of fantastic male amplifications in the form of the gun, the team, or the super power? Sure these are fun, and i love games with these features just as much as the next guy. In the end, gamespace is certainly a place to experience fantasies of self-efficacy that we would otherwise never get to experience. But perhaps the dependency on amplifying traditionally male forms of social expression explains why video games (at least those played by the "hardcore" crowd) have such difficulty creating appeal across the genders. They specifically appeal to a cultural narrative which was crafted by and for only half the population. What's worse, many games, due to their propensity for amplifying fantasy, appear to uncritically offer men and women alike the ability to occupy the most unseemly corners of the male psyche, thus generating disgust rather than empathy in those who do wish to play games critically.

      The current situation is by no means inherent to the medium. Just as games can generate barriers to sympathy by way of performative identification, so they can break them down. Let me give you an example. Several months ago I finally got around to picking up a copy of Dragon Age: Origins. One of its most marketed features was the six completely different beginnings that were available to the gamer. These beginnings depended on the player's selection of race, class, and gender for their protagonist. Wanting to explore the experience of a race which in the world of Dragon Age was routinely discriminated against, I chose to play as a female elf living in the ghetto of a human city. The elves were basically treated as second rate citizens having only recently been liberated from enforced servitude to humans by royal edict. I therefore expected a game experience that would allow me to play the role of an unlikely hero who had to first triumph over a racist environment in order to lead Ferelden's armies to victory over the Orc-like Darkspawn. In most games of is sort, gender plays very little role in the gamer's experience except in terms of which non-player characters are available for romantic interludes. However, very early in my time with Dragon Age I realized that my character's identity as a woman would prove more formative than even her elfish-ness. While all the elves in the ghetto were oppressed economically and abused physically by the humans of the city, the women were threatened with rape. As a female elf, the son of the city's prince actually tried to force himself on "me." The prince was big, scary, smelly, and brutal. When he turned toward my character he had just finished brutalizing her (my!) best friend since childhood.

     In that moment, I realized I was playing a game unlike any I had played before.

     To be placed in a social position where the threat of sexual violence is real and palpable is extremely unusual for me, a middle class white male. I've really never even conceived the idea of being a rape victim, in large part because our culture (through the news, movie tropes, and Disney films) refuses to ever allow the male to be the passive victim in an important narrative. Thus, my shock and unease at being sexually threatened as an elf-woman in Dragon Age. The threat from the prince wasn't anything i hadn't heard before from a variety of encounters in movies, books, or news stories. The language wasn't particularly vulgar or brutal in a way that was in and of itself shocking. It was the fact that I, through the performative identification provided by the video game, was being threatened as a woman.

      Is it unfortunate that Dragon Age perhaps too easily relied on the sexual violence trope for its narrative propulsion? Sure. Was the experience a shallow approximation of the possibility and reality of sexual of violence for millions of women all over the world? Probably so. Is Dragon Age as a whole such a collection of gaming and fantasy clichés that transformative empathy for the other gender is a bit of a tall order for it to accomplish? Absolutely. Even so, this moment in my experience with Dragon Age seems to at least point toward the power of video games as a locus of cross gendered sympathy. In the world of gaming, a world which has never really stopped building upon the boy's club model from the sixties and seventies, moments like that might be the key to making games that don't rely on rom-com, Disney princess conceptions of gender for their characterization.  Moments like that might be the key to making games that refuse to simply reflect the gendered conditions of our world. We might begin to make games that extend past their own algorithmic gamespace and generate actual empathy between real individuals.

     We might begin to make games that matter.