The New York Sophist

Pretty Excited about the New Stuff Coming Soon

Animal Crossing came out at the perfect time – right in the middle of the lockdown. Being able to totally control an island down to the ground level or below gave us all the feeling of control that we really needed in a time when there was little control around. 

I played hundreds of hours of this game in the pandemic, spending most of my mornings fishing, chopping wood, collecting fruit, and delivering various insects to the Owl that runs the museum. Everything had a place, a category, a value. The animal neighbors were eccentric, but peaceful. They made demands in a dream logic form, easy to accept and dismiss since they would not be detached from the animals. Once in a while you could deliver something for one of them or get them a fish, and they would be happy for a brief second. For the neighbors, time was an eternal present of desire – whatever was on their mind, they’d say it, and that would be it. 

There’s a big update for the game coming in a few days and I’m more than excited although with my schedule I am not sure I’ll be able to play it. I’ve been getting on Animal Crossing from time to time, when I can, in order to sort of “get ready” for all the changes coming – farming, cooking, new neighbors, a coffeehouse, and most importantly the Gyroids – strange musical clay pots with faces that I believe are the ancient gods of the Animal Crossing universe (this is a minority opinion). 

Years ago, my dad encountered animal crossing when my youngest sister was playing it on the Game Cube and remarked that the game was overwhelmingly and surprisingly capitalist. This is not unique to Animal Crossing; most games have some sort of mechanism for making money and then making more, but Animal Crossing does have a bank, public projects, and many vendors. I would say that instead of being capitalist alone – that is valorizing the accumulation of the means of exchange as a game object – Animal Crossing is a fantasy representation of colonization, where there is no downside whatsoever except for regret.

Let’s deal with the downside first. Regret – I have heard this expressed from my friends who overdeveloped their islands to the point where they are unrecognizable as such, where there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Every part of the island is perfectly curated in the modality of a shopping mall – the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside. Every part of the island is a room, making the house a palace where the value is the representation of non-indoor spaces, or rooms that could not take place at all. 

The upsides are many – you can be altruistic and create bridges and other structures, you can plant trees or cut them down, you can grow whatever fruits you like (assuming you can find other fruits than your native ones), and you can either sell or donate the animals you catch. After donating one to the museum, the scientific community is satisfied, and you may do what you will with other specimens. You can also collect fine art and donate that to the museum, but some of it could be fake – so you should do a little research before buying. 

The game is a model of progress and knowledge that is right at home pre-19th century, that of the collection, or the table. You collect various insects and fish and account for them by placing them in the museum. 

So what kind of game is Animal Crossing? I’m still thinking about this. Perhaps it’s its own genre of game. Is it even really a game? I guess there are conditions for play – rules and such. There are limits. But you are free to move around in those limits and do what you like. You are pushed toward pursuing the satisfaction of the neighbors, the museum, and your own desires to buy and display particular sets of furniture. Is this really capitalist? Or does it just naturalize forms of exchange and knowledge as part of the basis of setting out to develop a new community? Or perhaps, is it a fantasy of control – where all the decisions are yours and the stakes are low – so that we can stay somewhat together in the larger world of exchange, accumulation, and community. Perhaps there’s another level, where games teach us that the rules don’t have to be a certain way, and very much like some sort of Frankfurt School theory of resistance, we recognize what we don’t have when we step away from Animal Crossing and enter our daily lives, hungry for change. 

I teach an art, a field that for much of its history has been exclusively about orality and speech.

My entire time as a graduate student and professional, my value in the field has been determined through how I write very particular formal essays.

It seems odd to me, it always has, how there’s little to no interest in oral rhetoric as a way of sharing serious ideas. The closest we ever get is reading conference papers to one another in small groups in Midwestern hotel ballrooms.

I think that giving a presentation on video and uploading it to the internet has a lot of advantages over traditional academic publishing and should be something that is encouraged in the field. I think this might be the way to solve a lot of old issues with the field of speech-comm derived rhetoric and provide some nice new advantages for the interesting things we have to say and share about research.

Things it would create: A public appetite and interest for rhetorical theory as such (I mean, they already have this appetite; professional scholars choose to ignore it or worse, consider it too pedestrian to bother with) a conversation among a number of figures about ideas that the public can be involved in through comments and responses on the same level as the initial interventions, and the human behind the ideas would be present in all its expressive, emotive glory.

What about the peer reviewed research journal? I am afraid we’ve been performing CPR so long on it we don’t even notice it’s hardly a body. Kept alive by dark means bordering on necromancy, the peer-reviewed journal is not even meeting that basic requirement of being a journal – being read as such. It’s a filing cabinet.

Alternatively peer review standards for online video and audio content should be developed. There’s a market standard now, but that’s hardly fitting. What sort of peer review would be needed for a podcast? For a video? Are there things we can borrow from journalism or documentary filmmaking here to build something for us?

There’s a lot to be considered and it will be difficult to get buy in, but the possibilities of creating a sentiment for what we do, what we think about, and what we make among the general internet-using public is hard to buy. More exposure to what faculty think about and create will only increase interest and understanding, if it’s done well – that is to say, done appropriately for the audience you want to reach.

It only took one episode before we had a guest show up to the lonely office hour. This episode is about perception in the classroom and how to use it as a resource – if you can?

A Foray into Vlogging

I have been interested in vlogging for quite a while now but never thought about really committing to it till this past week. I’m a bit overloaded with teaching responsibilities (hence the lack of updates here) but focusing on teaching only makes mental ground more fertile. That would make teaching a wonderful source of energy, but at the same time teaching drains you in weird ways. So it’s the frustration of having a lot of things to write and speak about but no energy or time to really get anything going.

This is a gift to myself. I have already made detailed plans about the spring term and what I’ll do with my “extra time” I willed into existence by taking advantage of the opportunity to teach so much. More on that in a later post.

For now, here’s the first installment of the Lonely Office Hour, my vlog about professor stuff. I hope to make one regularly, so if you are interested subscribe here or at YouTube to be notified when new episodes appear.

Democracy versus Accuracy

Democracy functions on the basis of opinion sharing. These opinions are perspectives based on life experiences, orientations, and attitudes (lots of Kenneth Burke language here). What makes democracy work well is a swirling of shared opinions with the intent to persuade. We can’t do much else other than file in and vote for who we like without some pressure or pushback on our personal thoughts. Humans came to be what we are today through developing communication not as a tool, but as a place to live. We have to share points of view with one another that are ours. Democracy suffers because we now do not share our views. We share the views of endless media outlets, podcasts, and other consumptive media and repeat those views. So many opinions turn into a few, and those few are amplified through repetition.

The most damaging legacy from Trump, at least rhetorically, is that now anyone who reinforces terrible American policy that was pre-Trump will be viewed as some liberating or open-minded force. The political good has been conflated with the politically expedient, comfortable, and normal, leaving people feeling happy and comfortable that the United States does nothing to help with postcolonial issues of their own making, global market hegemony, militarization, unfair and unjust labor, and so much more.

Herbert Marcuse put out a great warning about this in his book One Dimensional Man where he talked about capitalism and capitalist-oriented authority trying to eliminate the difference between the “ought” and the “is.” The post-Trump legacy is a very seamless conflation of the two. Biden is not the only choice, but a good choice; his election was a good thing not an emergency measure. This kind of thinking is exceedingly dangerous as anyone who is hyper-critical of Joe Biden will be associated with being pro-Trump. I find this to be the case any time I criticize Biden – I am then subjected to hearing about how bad Trump was. This is not a problem, as Trump is easy to critique. However, what’s missing is any sort of political imaginary for a better system. Instead of re-imagining the kind of immigration system we’d want, or the sort of foreign aid we should provide, we endlessly talk about how destructive Trump was to both systems and how happy we are that he is no longer running those systems. This allows us to uncritically praise oppressive capitalist policies that the United States often employs.

It’s hard to find the rhetorical strategy to allow people to imagine. But this is why the Democrats love Donald Trump. They no longer have to defend or justify anything they do – they can just gesture toward Trump. “Would you rather have that?” they ask. It’s a no-brainer. Of course we don’t want someone as thinly-sighted as Trump with that much authority over U.S. policy. But we don’t want Joe Biden either. What is needed is a complete wipe of such incremental politics and a fundamental grappling, and re-imagining of the United States, a coming to terms – possibly new terms – with what role the country should play for itself and others in the world. First we should recognize that much of the current world is an effect or result of American policy in the first place – are we happy with the bed we’ve made?

Returning to a creative approach to the political – what do I believe and how does it relate to everything I’ve heard and seen – is what should be taught as critical thinking, not “evaluate the source so you can repeat the facts.” Such an approach isn’t teaching anything except how to be a passive consumer of thought versus a thinker.