| I'm on much less familiar ground thinking about games than about "conventional" textuality, and it's been slow going through Cybertext for me. So it's with some trepidation that I register dissatisfaction with Aarseth's book. It may be that I'm just not getting it, and in any case I really do need to spend some more quality time with Espen. But just for the sake of argument, if nothing else, I want to whine a bit. And in an attempt to stay halfway coherent, let me concentrate my complaints on the first few pages of Chapter 3, "Textonomy."
- Aarseth's impatience with any fuzziness of nomenclature is near the surface throughout the book, but here it's especially apparent; he laments the "lack of formal clarity" and "lack of rigorous terminology" in reader-response theory, poststructuralism, and discussion of "computer media" in general (58-59). What's needed is "a terminology that has distinctive power as well as unproblematic connotations." Like C.S. Peirce, Aarseth feels compelled to create a new semiotic vocabulary, partly because he is convinced that certain assumptions about the binary nature of the signifier-signified simply compromise everything and so need to be discarded, not modified; in this Aarseth recalls (to me, anyway) Derrida's grammatology, and so far so good. But he's also simply disdainful of that whole penumbra of meanings that inevitably evolve around any term used in different contexts, and that disdain seems to me to often veer dangerously close to a fixation. It's not just sloppy thinking that bothers him. Any kind of instability in nomenclature just drives Espen nuts -- unless it happens to be an instability created or sanctioned by him.
I'm thinking here of his model of scriptons and textons as "strings of signs" (62), and I'm interested in what happens to the idea of the sign here as it is pressed into the service of this new nomenclature: It becomes an atom of "information," simple and unproblematic, which is combined with other signs to produce "strings" whose meanings are "constant" in a "static" text. It turns out, however, that Aarseth's "string" is very much like Barthes's "lexia" or others' "node" -- a provisionally discrete chunk of text that can be juxtaposed (or not) to other strings. Talking about a textual element of that complexity -- whatever the medium or genre -- as an inert composite of signs is a little like learning to drive by studying the thermodynamics of the internal combustion engine. It doesn't account for any sort of critical mass among signs that allows for the production of meaning on intermediate levels. And in effect, it just moves that whole cluster of dismissive metaphors that usually congregate around "linearity" -- fixity of meaning, reader passivity, authorial dominance -- to another spot on the playing board.
- This redistribution of problems also waxes Aarseth into the most troubling corner of all for someone who argues from a strongly materialist position. He has to create that most evanescent of creatures, the "ideal reader," to bring the most basic element of his taxonomy --excuse me, textonomy -- into being: "Scriptons are not necessarily identical to what readers actually read ... scriptons are what an 'ideal reader' reads by strictly following the linear structure of the textual output" (62). Having just deconstructed and discarded reader-response concepts as so much vague metaphysics, Aarseth immediately races back to retrieve one of their key models. And apart from the considerable contradictions in this, I have to scratch my head at the thinking of any theorist whose "ideal reader" -- in any context -- is a completely passive vessel for information who obediently processes every textual cue in the intended manner. Aarseth is usually quick to dismiss ideological baggage as so much obfuscation; what are the ideological implications here?
- Remember the old cliche about scratching a satirist and finding a moralist underneath? I keep sensing an old-fashioned formalist lurking behind Cybertext. Aarseth's insistence on as purely denotative a language as possible; his need to construct a closed and logically self-coherent model of cybertext; and, especially, his casual conflation of the "ideological" and the "political" with the confused and the blindly self-serving dimensions of the conversation about electronic text suggest to me that he is working toward a larger formalism that includes a materialist understanding of the text.
None of which is to say that a neoformalist approach can't be useful. So far for me, Cybertext is illuminating as a corrective. While I believe that Aarseth is overly concerned with pristine, perfect definitions and an absolutely stable nomenclature, I do think that postmodern theory needs to be constantly challenged regarding its tendency to dilute concepts -- one is rhetoric itself -- beyond decipherability. In a related manner, Aarseth sometimes simply nails things. The insight that hypertext is more linear than the codex book is one of those bits of logic that is revelatory and self-evident at the same time; it changes the scope of the conversation in a fundamental way. Perhaps less dramatically, the discussion of perspective (63) as a textual variable -- which later becomes an intriguing exploration of the intriguee -- lends nuances to the idea of the interactive reader that perhaps we haven't found in earlier texts.
But at this point I find myself unable to embrace the larger model of textuality that Aarseth is selling. I'm concerned with its implications. Maybe I need to head down to the arcade for a few hours.
|