Q: Wha?

A: I’ve wanted to begin a project with blogy qualities for quite some time but always felt intimidated once I began to put pen to paper, or more accurately, greasy fingers to laptop.

I struggled to avoid being pigeonholed into a string of strictly literary or musical analyses, but also avoided a scattershot project that was a desultory whatever, as unfocused as any of our unhinged brains. What I’ve settled on had to do with a journey I had been taking for quite some time. I’ve just finished a ten-year off and on stint in undergrad and grad programs that promoted critical analysis, a strictly literary perspective, and the sort of elevated diction that when implemented in casual conversation justifiably makes people resent English grads all the more. But what I also realized was I hadn’t lost my idée fixe with a contemporary culture that I treated with flippancy or self-disgust - as a mere lark, an escape, a distraction. Television, video games, and viral culture in general were not worthy of breaking the surface of the theoretical seas I cruised. But were the novels I emphasized just as much of a pointless distraction from the pain of being a human as an episode of Friends? Like the answer to almost everything - yes and no.

What I want to emphasize in this blog is a continuation of a tired but necessary loosening between high and low culture. We need to reconsider how literary popular culture is, letting The Sopranos stand alongside the greatest of Homeric epics and how certain video games can teach us about capitalism, colonialism, or gender. If Barthes can analyze an advertisement of soap as being textual, then why can’t Mario Kart be seen as a critique of capitalism?

But why talk about the greatest or the literary at all? Simply because good art/works are better than others because of the way they promote multiple types of thinking. It applies to all mediums in different forms: in literature we see it in the way a text promotes what Barthes called writerly reading instead of readerly reading, the latter a passive surface level engagement with a text vs. a writerly reading where the text eludes a singular meaning and can represent several unified readings that persist throughout the work. In other words some works follow a rigid structure that privileges a singular reading of it, while preferred works are those that privilege multiplicity and change for creating meaning, polyvocal rather than monovocal. Barthes also uses the binary of doxa and para-doxa, the doxa being a pleasure in finding socially dominant beliefs reaffirmed, the para-doxa propelled by a pleasure of things pulling apart but still maintaining unity, contrast contained.

We see this same difference in quality in mediums like video-games where games can be unethical because of the way it manipulates players to continue playing for the wrong reasons: Jonathan Blow’s (gamemaker of The Witness) criticisms of Farmville as being “inherently evil” because of the way it makes players exploit their Facebook friends to accelerate their farm’s growth, while preferred games reward players through careful attention to mechanics and systems. Video games are different from texts but both have preferential pleasures, pleasures that are obtained through the rewards of understanding a system’s complexities and inner workings, rather than the facile pleasure of endorphin release from a work that hegemony implements in order to wrest the remaining agency from the already disenfranchised.

But I emphasize the literary not just because it’s my analytical background but it seems to be the most deeply rooted and widely felt method of interpreting something - it interprets an elaborate organization of signs. All the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics, the idea of a piece of work or art as being unified is what draws me to this literary method of understanding a thing’s anatomy. Much is subjective in our postmodern, God Is Dead, nihilistic, late capitalism, blah, blah, blah, but I fail to find it untenable to claim that a piece of work/art objectively functions in how it refers to itself, how it draws attention or pulls apart via references to itself tropologically, by its organization of tropes. This identification of patterns seems to me to be one of the only truly objective foundations of studying how things work, noticing repetition, deviations from repetition, new juxtapositions alongside repeated things. From this you can start creating subjective meaning from these unequivocal patterns regardless of their intention. The more meaning you can create because of the way patterns and signs are organized makes a work a more interesting and thus better work of art. If Harold Bloom is really arguing for a canon, it consists of works that elude our desire to interpret them - but also demand to be interpreted. Think Twin Peaks or 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can say a paperback romance novel could be read in such a way to make it contend with Moby Dick, but on examination, the inflexibility of the plot and characters (not to mention that much of these types of work are read for plot-twists rather than dynamic personalities and existential themes) make this impossible. Of course, what’s good and what’s not is always open to interpretation and certain works once thought canonical can be swept to the dustheap of history. What I’m excusing in this differentiation between preferred and lesser works is a way of escaping the radical subjectivity that says no claims can be and privileging certain works while discouraging other works for appearing anodyne, flat, or plainly irresponsible.

I want to examine how certain games, books, shows, albums, and poems function as little machines with tiny moving parts that make us feel good whether the audience is in an ivory tower or a grungy living room. The problem with review culture is how it doesn’t work with the cultish or campy and it usually hierarchizes things that morph too often. Yes, Bloom’s canon has a place in orienting us to our forebearers, hallmarking those that influence more than others due to the quality and range of their writing, but it’s almost impossible not to sound pompous with this tone, regardless of how much I agree with Bloom’s categorizing and purpose.

Instead, I want to focus on how fun works. Not how art works, but how fun works. Ian Bogost makes the claim that arguing about whether or not video games are art is a silly one because the difference between art and not art is too vague to distinguish. He argues that it would be more beneficial to simply avoid the question altogether. I extend this to much of the recent discussion on whether TV is an art alongside a number of other mediums.

The value of art/works is this: they operate as patterned signs rooted in the interplay (or dialectic) between symbols and readers, heightening the relationship between the extreme isolation of self/subject and the looming omnipresence of the other/object/environment which are often hostile and overpowering. Barthes’ writings in The Pleasure of the Text regard works that acknowledge the other by challenging the subject’s sense of reality as examples of preferred or more important works. If a work makes you rethink something rather than validating previous beliefs/dominant beliefs, then it’s also changing how you think, opening you up to the different beliefs of other people in the process.

What my babbling all comes down to is reevaluating what literature really is, what art really is, how language and symbols are arranged in other non-”literary” mediums, and how those mediums are far more valuable than we’d like to give them credit. Ideally, what this blog deconstructs is not just how underappreciated these ancillary mediums are in our century but how over-appreciated literature is as well. If we actually suppose literature as something not as lofty and different as we give it credit for I think it’ll help us reclaim what literature sought out to do and what a lot of other mediums do better now - get us lost in our heads and recognize things in ourselves through these works, a work that allows us to have a relationship with an object and other people. None of this is original and I do not intend for it to be. It’s a way for me to dive headfirst in a mutating culture that negates tomorrow before it’s even here and rushes confidently into the past as if it were stable enough to lean on, a crutch for the ages.

And finally, I want to take my (and our) quote-unquote, unintellectual habits as opportunities to make our more banal experiences artful. Maybe if we take this frame of mind into binge-watching, video games, streaming, scrolling, and marathon-length playlists we can accept our sometimes unhealthy habits as opportunities to be more critical of the world, ourselves, and what we consume. Too often when we participate in these habits the guilt we feel numbs our attention to the activity. When we identify it as saccharine comfort-food we block out any serious analysis of our habits. High-art traditionally rejects popular mediums, but the bible of modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses is really a novel about evaluating the dullness of the quotidian with the same seriousness that we deploy in interpreting paintings, poems, and stories revealing that the hodrum and epic are equally interesting if you know how to frame it. All I hope this project will do is to dive into habits we participate in passively and see how deep the rabbit-hole of their meaning can go, depths that when plummed evince how the prosaic is as multi-layered as The Great American Novel, whatever that means...

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Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.