So, FWIW
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: kb-bounces at lists.purdue.edu [mailto:kb-bounces at lists.purdue.edu] On Behalf Of Jason Thompson Sent: Friday, May 31, 2013 11:45 AM To: Stan Lindsay Cc: kb at lists.purdue.edu Subject: Re: [KB] Ghent Conference/Labyrinthine
Hello Ed,
I’m sorry—I don’t think that we’ve met, but I thought that, in addition to seconding the praise already mentioned in this thread, I might offer a slightly different perspective as someone who’s been studying video games and Burke for a little while now.
The convergence of Burke and video games/technology was reflected in the second day, and we heard evocative keynotes from two young scholars on some commonalities between Burke (identification, pentad, etc.) and Game Studies (with an emphasis on Ian Bogost, who proposes “procedural rhetoric” as a way to understand the relations among computer, game, and cultural scene). Barry Brummett brought up several immediate questions: how do we understand the structure of motivations within games, and what are some consistent motivations across games? With regard to violence, is there scapegoating, sin, transgression?
I saw wonderful presentations by graduate students and post-docs that interrogated war games, gamification for social good, online discourses for change, and game design for users with disease/disability.
It strikes me that the technology/games talks took up the difficulty of analyzing texts that are never discrete and never strictly verbal. New media/digital humanities scholars in general and Game Studies scholars in particular struggle with their own critical positionality when facing such complicated objects: do I “read” a first-person shooter like Medal of Honor as a narrative of WWII and, if so, do I include all 16 franchise titles, or only those that simulate WWII, or only the 2 that simulate the Pacific theatre? How do I account for the gameplay on its own terms? When presented with an in-game challenge that requires action, do I take this moment of interactivity as an example of Aarseth’s “ergotic literature” (aporia/epiphany) and/or its opposite, the illusion of interactivity (the game’s code predetermining all possible choices, an example of Burke’s “cow path”)? These question scratch the surface, as they don’t account for what McAllister terms “the computer game complex”: “the combination of computer games, gamers, and the industries that support them.”
I look forward to reading more from the scholars that I heard at the conference, and I anticipate learning a lot about Burke and the body, and Burke and technology. When a single video game (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2) grosses 500 million dollars in 24 hours, 1 billion in 15 days, and hundreds of millions of online multiplayer hours, our “naïve verbal realism” seems changed to “naïve media realism” or “naïve ludic realism.”
Just my two cents,
Jason
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 6:46 AM, Stan Lindsay <slindsa at yahoo.com> wrote:
Burkeans,
So, Ed Appel asks a simple, straightforward question, and last night, it causes me to experience some Burkean insomnia, myself. (Or, perhaps, the insomnia is related to changing back into an American time zone.) There is no simple, straightforward answer to Ed's question. If I could choose one Burkean term, however, it might be "labyrinthine" [(as in "city of a terminology") ATH vi*, 143*; CS 2, 12; Lindsay, Revelation 67, 75, 99; LSA 135; P&C 401, 410 (= entelechy); PLF 10 (mind of Coleridge)*, 83*, 308; RM 117; RR 229; TBL vii, 160;]. Kris Rutten and his colleagues have opened up a (positive) Burkean can of worms. Clarke Rountree points to the clear fact that Pentadic analysis cannot be simple, because there are innumerable acts being interconnectedly performed at any given time. This, of course, means that there are innumerable entelechies operative in every situation (even within the mind of a single individual), and the Ghent Conference was a microcosm of that precise point. Dave Blakesley may need to pluralize his "Parlor Press." There are multiple Parlors and multiple "unending conversations" that are occurring, now world-wide, that intersect at various Burkean crossroads. The Ghent Conference brought together linguists, anthropologists, pop culture analysts, ethnographers, philosophers, psychologists, media technologists, theologians, politicians, educators, literary scholars, biblical scholars, rhetorical scholars, and more--to consider the role of Burkology in their various disciplines. Burke observes in his "Tautological Dog" example that a single term engenders a whole range of other terms associated with that single term. But then, each of these other terms will carry with them their own tautologies--their own range of associated terms--and so on, and so on. Each term thus derived is capable of generating its own multiple sets of entelechies, each of which can be analyzed using innumerable Pentadic analyses. Of course, this multiplication occurs within the context of a single individual, so what happens when we now consider the innumerable individuals who are interconnected in this labyrinthine fashion? I was, frankly, struck by the various attempts to block certain labyrinthine streets more than by the overwhelming number of street options available to Burkeans. For example, Steven Malloux was introduced, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but with a definite thread of truth that made the humor work. It was pointed out that the University of Ghent was established as a secular university, separate and opposite from the theological universities in Belgium. Therefore, it was (humorously) embarrassing to have a keynote speaker from Loyola Marymount University, speaking about Theology and Burke, at the University of Ghent. I noticed in the Q and A of my own presentation that a couple of individuals wanted to take pot shots at Biblical Studies. Others wanted to avoid certain Burkean streets, because they considered Burke to have borrowed those certain concepts from other thinkers. I noticed that there was scarce mention of classical rhetoric. But why? The term "perspective" is not really large enough to express the labyrinthine nature of any given terminology. Nevertheless, I cannot possibly pursue all of the labyrinthine streets available to Burkeans. So, I must choose those streets I will travel. My perspectives will be limited, but my options are unlimited. We will cross paths with each other as our various streets intersect. Frequently, that will happen at conferences such as this.
As a representative anecdote, I think of my arrival at the Brussels airport. I rented a car and opted not to purchase GPS. Then, I proceeded to follow some very general road signs in Dutch and/or French to attempt to find the city Centrum. I knew neither Dutch nor French, but my wife who was travelling with me and engaging in her own research knew a little French. My daughter who traveled with us, pursuing music research, and I both knew a moderate amount of German. The French and Dutch languages intersected occasionally with the German language, and English also sometimes intersected, so we could make some sense out of the signage. However, the labyrinthine streets of Brussels (and Paris and Ghent, for that matter) were laid out in the Middle Ages, and followed few American norms of street layout. Invariably, we wound up on one-way streets with no clear counterpart for heading in the opposite direction. Certain streets that might have returned us to our paths were closed or became dead ends. After driving through the labyrinthine city for about 6 hours, we finally became familiar enough with the layout and the lousy cartography of the maps we were given that we located our hotel. We criss-crossed the city, sometimes running back across streets and routes we had already visited. This is Burkology. It is a small world, after all, and with Burkean terminology supplying something of a road map, we will continue to bump into one another in our various travels. As Carrol Cox suggests, the good news will be brought to its various destinations from Ghent--albeit through various labyrinthine pathways.
That's my take, Ed.
Stan A. Lindsay, Ph.D.
Department of Communication
Florida State University
________________________________
From: Kris Rutten <Kris.Rutten at UGent.be>
To: David Blakesley <david.blakesley at gmail.com>
Cc: "kb at lists.purdue.edu" <KB at lists.purdue.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 2:12 PM
Subject: Re: [KB] Ghent Conference
Dear colleagues,
Thank you very much for these very kind words. Of course, a conference can only succeed thanks to its participants and the papers they present. We were very happy that so many Burke scholars were willing to come all the way to Ghent.
This link re-directs you to the full version of the final program: http://www.cultureeducation.ugent.be/kennethburke/ProgrammeBook.pdf <http://www.cultureeducation.ugent.be/kennethburke/ProgrammeBook.pdf>
For those who were not able to come to the conference this can give a taste of the different perspectives and nationalities that were (re)presented at the conference. Unfortunately, it cannot give you a taste of the Belgian beers...
As Dave already mentioned, we do hope that there will be other possibilities for collaborations in the future.
Best regards,
Kris
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. Kris Rutten
Ghent University
Department of Educational Studies
Henri Dunantlaan 2
9000 Ghent – Belgium
T: +32(0)9/264.62.53 <tel:%2B32%280%299%2F264.62.53>
F: +32(0)9/264.86.88 <tel:%2B32%280%299%2F264.86.88>
W: http://www.cultureeducation.ugent.be/
Op 28-mei-2013, om 17:53 heeft David Blakesley het volgende geschreven:
> I would second Herb's account (and appreciation for our hosts and European colleagues, all of whom are doing fine work and eager to collaborate in the months and years ahead). For a Twitter version of the events, you could search on the #kennethburke hashtag at http://twitter.com or look in the sidebar at http://kbjournal.org (click on that hashtag for all the tweets).
>
> There will be a large number of new KB discussion list members in a few weeks once I return (early June). I'll introduce them to the list at that time so that discussions may begin anew . . .
>
> Ciao (from Bellagio, Italy),
> Dave
>
>
> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 5:47 PM, HERBERT W. SIMONS <hsimons at temple.edu> wrote:
> Ed and all:
>
> You'll get different accounts depending on the perspective of the participant.
>
> I found it thrilling to be part of the conference, which brought together us KBS folks with Europeans in various fields and from various countries in Europe, along with a small number of Africans and Asians.
>
> The conference was very well run by the Ghent (Gent) organizers, most of them in Education, broadly defined.
>
> I was surprised and delighted to learn that interest in rhetoric, and not just Burkeian rhetorical scholarship, has mushroomed in Europe. A European rhetoric society has been formed and there are programmes, if not departments, at a number of universities.
>
> The Europeans sought to understand Burke in relation to the Europeans they'd read, including Vico, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Perelman. Foucault, Derrida and De Man.
>
> I am attaching a copy of my paper, which led off the conference, but which I presented conversationally and in abbreviated form.
>
>
> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 10:19 AM, <edappel8 at cs.com> wrote:
> Would any participant or participants in the Burke Conference at Ghent University please fill us stay-at-homes in on what happened? Tell your story? Give your impressions? We wait with baited breath.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
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> --
> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of Communication
> Dep't of Strategic Communication, Weiss Hall 215
> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
> Home phone: 215 844 5969 <tel:215%20844%205969>
> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
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-- Jason C. Thompson, PhD English Department, Hoyt Hall University of Wyoming Dept. 3353. 1000 E. University Ave. Laramie, WY 82071
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