Convergent Divergence (Divergent Convergence): Doodling Moretti's Trees

In his thorough and quite civil response to Franco Moretti's Graphs Maps Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, Cristopher Prendergast returns (ironically?) to a critique of Moretti's circularity. Though this critique appears in a number of different locations throughout his essay, I take its most concrete manifestation to be in Prendergrast's discussion of the reciprocal relationship between convergence and divergence among the branches of Moretti's trees. In Moretti's text, the convergence is the precondition for the divergence, and divergence provides ever more opportunities for convergence as well. Prednergast seems to take this as a "chicken-egg" problem. He says,

These are however strictly reversible propositions: if convergence preupposes divergence, then divergence presupposes convergence. We are back in the chicken-and-egg world, yet again opening onto the infinite regress that leads back to a hypothetical First Cause. It is best to avoid this morass. (57)

Though Tsuda counters many of Prendergast's arguments against Moretti more effectively than I could, I want to take a bit of time to examine this particular hang up, this concern with circularity and convergence as it relates to divergence and vice versa.

I object, first, to this notion of circularity, and instead want to reaffirm along with what I think Moretti would call reciprocality. There is nothing to my eyes in Graphs Maps Trees that suggests a search for whichever came first. Moretti's goal in outlining the give and take of divergence and convergence is conjoined to his attempt to combine the wave with the tree. The point in that combination is the perpetual preexistence of the one over the other. The effect of Moretti's divergent convergence (convergent divergence) is one of entanglement, not linear causation. He simply has the good sense to not append "quantum" as an adjective. Prendergast is sensing in this entanglement a question which isn't there. Moretti has no need to answer which came first, divergence or convergence. Neil Degrasse Tyson once said in response to the chicken-egg question: "The egg, but it wasn't laid by a chicken." In much the same way, Moretti's divergence and convergence morph and change, creating a heritage with as many conjunctions as disjunctions.

In Moretti's discussion I was reminded once again of the similarities between the models that DH theorists generate in an attempt to chart literary history and the decision-making trees that form the backbone of simulated experiences. Moretti's tree of clues is certainly of the same structural family as the reader's progress through a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. This is evolution written as OHCO. Here I wonder at the possibilities of McGann's deformance and Drucker's speculative computing as they apply to a simulated, computer generated representation of divergence and convergence. How might someone play through literary history, utilizing data from the other 99.5%, the unread, and as a result generate new divergences and convergences that would otherwise be invisible?

Last year I became briefly addicted to a small mobile game called Doodle God developed by JoyBits. It is, in a few important ways, a possible resolution to Prendergast's concerns about circularity as well as possible imaginative platform for playing in Moretti's trees. In Doodle God, the player starts with four basic elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. From these elements, players combine and recombine them in different arrangements, generating new elements along the way. As each combination yields yet more elements, the game creates a tree of equations, tracking the heritage of each new convergence. Here again we encounter the fecundity of a text. Doodle God is a small, simulated example of numerous discourses in DH which have come to a head in Moretti's text. It conjoins the concept of convergence and divergence to Latour's fecundity as well as McGann and Drucker's speculations. The results of these combinations are often quite unpredictable, though in hindsight, always explicable. This seems to me to be the logic of divergent convergence (convergent divergence). It is progressive yet reciprocal. The question I would like to ask is this: How can we doodle literary history?

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.

You've Been Fabled

I can't help but love the Fable games. Fable was one of the first games that I ever truly anticipated. I read about it in the old Electronic Gaming Monthly, well before I had an Xbox of my own, back when Lioinhead Studios was still calling it Project Ego. I, like many gamers, still naive about the heady technology of last generation's consoles, fell hard for the old "drop an acorn, get an oak," line. When I finally did get my hands on a copy of Fable, the game wasn't a shadow of the wonderland that Peter Molyneux had promised. I knew it, and so did everyone else. The world of Albion was almost tiny compared to the environments of some other RPGs that had preceded it. The character work was sketchy at best, the npc's weren't nearly as responsive as I'd hoped they'd be, and the length! Well, let's just say I beat the entire game in one evening while recovering from the extraction of a few wisdom teeth.

And none of that mattered to me. Not even a bit. In fact, when I'd read about these criticisms in the game magazines I'd feel a bit defensive. I would hear myself saying to friends that Molyneux wasn't a liar or a blowhard. He was just a guy who was excited about the possibilities of gaming, of the dynamic fiction he got to help create. I played and replayed that game, shaping my heroes into bold archers, fearsome mages, and bloodthirsty warriors. I did what pretty much everyone else who loved that game did: I played the crap out of it. I knew the experience was imperfect, but Albion really did feel like a different kind of place than many of the locales I had visited in other games. It was greener, friendlier, more colorful, more frightening, even a bit more unpredictable. There was something magical that happened in the liminality between me and my Hero. Even if, in the end, nothing terribly profound had been achieved outside of the typical save-the-world schtick one often runs into with these games, I still felt my time had been well spent. I knew that with work and creativity, my Hero could be unique, and I loved that.

Fast forward six years. It is now the weekend before grad classes start up for the second semester, and, as the newly crowned king of Albion, I'm desperately trying to amass as much wealth as possible before the darkness comes sweeping in. My wife, who bought me Fable III for Christmas is sitting next to me and watching the screen with attention nearly as rapt as my own. Two thirds of the year that the blind seeress (read: purposefully vague, token fantasy-setting old woman) has given me to prepare my kingdom for the coming supernatural assault has already flown by, and my treasury is running low. I played the game as a benevolent adventurer, and nothing had changed in that respect when I became king. I genuinely wanted to save all those orphans, kick Reaver's exploitative ways to the curb, and keep my promise to the Auroran people. Yet each benevolent action as a king came at the inevitable cost of my subjects' lives. And so in some instances I had to bite the legislative bullet and do a little destructive strip mining, raise the taxes on the lower classes, etc. But still, I did what I could to preserve the unstained soul of my newly minted monarch. And now I was faced with 121 days until doomsday and a five million old piece gap to fill if I wanted to save my people.

The plan was to keep buying real estate, collecting shop fees and rent until I achieved three million gold. Then, once I was halfway to the total I needed i would liquidate my entire empire, thereby raking in another cool three mil. The plan was solid. I was already near the two million mark, and after twenty-one hours of gameplay I was nearing a state of gaming nirvana that very few games had ever brought me to before. Not even my first, blissful encounters with the original Fable held a candle to the monumental achievement I was about to accomplish for the sake of my Hero's integrity.

121 days to go. Just a few more decisions to make as king before the day of reckoning came. I knew I would be cutting it close, so I wanted to see if any of the next batch of decisions would hold the possibility for earning money. I already went on a couple fetch quests which earned me several hundred thousand gold pieces, so who knows, maybe another one would pop up.

121 days to go. Was it possible that the next jump in time would bring me all the way to the day of death? I thought, probably not. My wife agreed. "It has never jumped that far before."

The screen brought me to the end. All my work, all the glory of shaping my monarch, gone. The people of Albion were lost, and for perhaps the first time ever, I felt like I had wasted my time playing a video game. I put my controller down in disgust.

More than any omitted feature, any abbreviated story line, any two dimensional character, this warning-less advance through 121 days crushed my experience of Fable III. Of all the things you left out in your games Peter, this one is by far the worst.

And the thing is: why? There's no constraint from the world of the game that the arrival of the darkness to Albion's shores should somehow have caught the King by surprise. In fact, quite the contrary. The entire coda of Fable III is based on the concept of a countdown! How stark the separation between myself and my Hero became when I was completely blindsided by an event which my avatar was clearly aware of. It felt like betrayal, but I couldn't figure out by whom. Was it by the designers of this game, who in crafting this end failed to include what might be the single most important piece of information that someone playing the game could want? Was it by my own expectations which had been growing almost wildly as I grew to like the game more and more? Or was it by the Hero and the world of Albion itself? Had the liminality closed? Had I been duped by the digital representation of myself?

In the end, though the game might not be permanently ruined for me, I've yet to pick the controller back up. For now, I'm going to direct my frustration toward Molyneux and his team of designers who crafted this final deception. Against my better judgement, I'm sure all will be forgiven come Fable IV.