Here's a good game: "stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, definitely be aware of." Some of my go-tos include:
John Updike, William Gibson, bongs, Russel Hoban, magical realism, trance parties, Crystal Maze, Charles Bukowski, Joy Division, Jack Kerouac, Italo Calvino, Guy Debord, The Mighty Boosh, Doctor Who apart from NuWho, Cory Doctorow, self-explanatory portmanteau neologizing, Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Jobs, William Burroughs, Brighton, Hegel, Rihanna, zombies (be aware of the word, but conflate with vampire), The Matrix, Bernie Sanders, The Big Lebowski, Stewart Lee, the word “hipster” (conflate with “hippie”), John le Carré, Alan Partridge, Glasto, Owen Jones, Margaret Atwood, Banksy, Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, the expression “grammar Nazi,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, Drake, millennials, Ursula le Guin, Vladimir Nabokov, Fight Club, Terry Pratchett, the expression “garbage person,” anything with "utopia" in the title, Girls, Gilmore Girls, Christmas jumpers, Blur, dubstep, Thomas Pynchon, The Green Party, Father Jack, Samuel L. Jackson, Cards Against Humanity, The “Žižek Game,” Common, Samuel Beckett, taxidermy, Just Jinjer, Theodor Adorno, insulin, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmitt, search engines other than Google, burlesque, Wallace & Gromit, Jorge Luis Borges, social media other than Facebook and LinkedIn, stepcore, Lee-Ann Perrins, the transformative use exception in IP law, Prince, Verity Spott, Jay-Z, Muhammad Ali, the medical/health humanities, Terry Wogan, J.G. Ballard, Cilla Black, Monty Python, any Pokémon before Pokémon GO, Flann O’Brien, CrossFit, Slajov Žižek, Charles Kennedy, Francis Crot, Withnail and I, The God Delusion, Alasdair Gray, David Bowie (except that he died), Alan Hay, Inception, Radiohead, Maya Angelou, memes (always be more specific: “image macros”; “photoshopped images shared on Facebook”), the expression “grammar nerd,” Rosa Lyster, veganism, David Lynch, Jackie Chan, Morrisey, Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon, CPR, The Toast, Salvador Dali, The Wire, Ernest Hemingway, The NHS, David Cronenberg, Afrika Burn, anarchism, steampunk, Nicolas Cage, Don DeLillo, bunting (this one’s good), China Mieville, Dungeons & Dragons, A Clockwork Orange. And the EU.
Showing posts with label sensus communis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sensus communis. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Saturday, September 6, 2014
From "Invasion of the Space Invaders" (1982)
By Martis Amis.
Lunar Lander is a game for owlish adolescents and gentle old hippies. It is qualitatively different from any other game. Most video creations stress a certain sort of game-activity. Missile Command is a game of interception, Lunar Rescue of dodging, PacMan of munch-accumulation (which perhaps explains why it is the only video game with any kind of following among women). Most games, of course, are games of blasting, wasting, creaming, smashing. Lunar Lander, on the other hand, is simply a game of landing.
No ghouls or hellcats lurk on the rocky moon where Lander lands; no rockets, photons or zipships buzz its slow descent. This is a game without aliens, without adversaries. The only enemy is the player’s own hamfistedness.
Like Asteroids, the Lunar screen is simply a matter of outline, white on black. The effect is well-defined, pristine, classy: it makes many of the more colourful games look like an infant’s paintbox or a cutprice carpet. The Lander’s module comes bleeping in over the spiky terrain. Various landing sites are indicated – graded according to difficulty (though I confess that I’ve never really seen the difference: once you get down to Landing, they’re all pretty much the same). Rotating right or left, and steadying the pod with deft surges on the reverse-thrust console, the Lander picks his spot and gingerly / descends, counteracting the simulated gravitational pull, friction and momentum.
As you home in on the flat landing-pad, the game pulls its best stunt: you switch to close-up. The landing then becomes a question of ticklish fine-tuning, as you adjust and correct and over-correct and re-adjust for touchdown. There are several grades of landing (good, hard, crash), as indeed there are four grades of ‘mission’ (Training, Cadet, Prime and Command – selectable at the beginning of the game), and points are awarded accordingly. The controls are beautifully responsive, though on any mission more advanced than Training you are going to have frequent recourse to the Abort button, which gives you escape thrust and resets the display for a fresh attempt. That little pod goes twirling out of control very easily, and no amount of thrust will tame it back into line. The top of the screen is adorned with altimeters and speedos and fuel readings, most of which can be safely ignored. Don’t bother with the readouts: just put more money in the slot.
Elsewhere: Mark O'Connell, "The Arcades Project."
Lunar Lander is a game for owlish adolescents and gentle old hippies. It is qualitatively different from any other game. Most video creations stress a certain sort of game-activity. Missile Command is a game of interception, Lunar Rescue of dodging, PacMan of munch-accumulation (which perhaps explains why it is the only video game with any kind of following among women). Most games, of course, are games of blasting, wasting, creaming, smashing. Lunar Lander, on the other hand, is simply a game of landing.
No ghouls or hellcats lurk on the rocky moon where Lander lands; no rockets, photons or zipships buzz its slow descent. This is a game without aliens, without adversaries. The only enemy is the player’s own hamfistedness.
Like Asteroids, the Lunar screen is simply a matter of outline, white on black. The effect is well-defined, pristine, classy: it makes many of the more colourful games look like an infant’s paintbox or a cutprice carpet. The Lander’s module comes bleeping in over the spiky terrain. Various landing sites are indicated – graded according to difficulty (though I confess that I’ve never really seen the difference: once you get down to Landing, they’re all pretty much the same). Rotating right or left, and steadying the pod with deft surges on the reverse-thrust console, the Lander picks his spot and gingerly / descends, counteracting the simulated gravitational pull, friction and momentum.
As you home in on the flat landing-pad, the game pulls its best stunt: you switch to close-up. The landing then becomes a question of ticklish fine-tuning, as you adjust and correct and over-correct and re-adjust for touchdown. There are several grades of landing (good, hard, crash), as indeed there are four grades of ‘mission’ (Training, Cadet, Prime and Command – selectable at the beginning of the game), and points are awarded accordingly. The controls are beautifully responsive, though on any mission more advanced than Training you are going to have frequent recourse to the Abort button, which gives you escape thrust and resets the display for a fresh attempt. That little pod goes twirling out of control very easily, and no amount of thrust will tame it back into line. The top of the screen is adorned with altimeters and speedos and fuel readings, most of which can be safely ignored. Don’t bother with the readouts: just put more money in the slot.
Elsewhere: Mark O'Connell, "The Arcades Project."
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
The Ends of Humanity
"Now, with the death of communism and social democracy's struggle to sustain its postwar gains, the idea of the whole of humanity as a potential political subject barely exists. Socialism is dead, and its death — as Nietzsche observed of God’s — has had unexpected effects. One of the less happy consequences of the end of socialism as a mass ideology is the end of humanity as an imagined community. This has consequences in our real communities; the rise of far-right parties across Europe is one of them." Ken MacLeod on socialism and transhumanism at Aeon.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière
Some consequences can be drawn from this regarding the mode of existence of the demos. On the one hand, the power of the demos is nothing but the inner difference that both legitimizes and delegitimizes any state institution or practice of power.
As such it is a vanishing difference that is ceaselessly annulled by the oligarchic functioning of institutions.
This is why, on the other hand, this power must be continuously reenacted by political subjects. A political subject is a subject constituted through a process of enunciation and manifestation that plays the part of the demos.
What does it mean to play the part of the demos? It means to challenge the distribution of parts, places, and competences by linking a particular wrong done to a specific group with the wrong done to anyone by the police distribution—the police’s denial of the capacity of the anyone.
This is what a political dissensus means. A dissensus puts two worlds—two heterogeneous logics—on the same stage, in the same world. It is a commensurability of incommensurables.
As such it is a vanishing difference that is ceaselessly annulled by the oligarchic functioning of institutions.
This is why, on the other hand, this power must be continuously reenacted by political subjects. A political subject is a subject constituted through a process of enunciation and manifestation that plays the part of the demos.
What does it mean to play the part of the demos? It means to challenge the distribution of parts, places, and competences by linking a particular wrong done to a specific group with the wrong done to anyone by the police distribution—the police’s denial of the capacity of the anyone.
This is what a political dissensus means. A dissensus puts two worlds—two heterogeneous logics—on the same stage, in the same world. It is a commensurability of incommensurables.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière
Let us summarize the three points. First, a distribution of the sensible means a certain configuration of the given. Second, this configuration of the given entails a certain relation of sense and sense. That may be conjunctive or disjunctive. The relation is conjunctive when it obeys a certain order of subordination between faculties, a certain manner of playing the game according to established rules. It is disjunctive when the relationship between faculties has no rule. Third, the conjunction or disjunction is also a matter of hierarchy. Either there is a hierarchy between the faculties, which may be overturned, or there is no hierarchy, in which case there is a faculty whose proper power stems from the rejection of the hierarchical relation.
This rejection of the hierarchical relation between the faculties that make sense involves a certain neutralization of the social hierarchy. This is suggested in the second section of Critique of Judgment through the example of the palace. It is underlined later in the sixtieth section, which attributes to the aesthetic sensus communis a power of reconciliation between principles and classes.
It is also spelled out a few years later in Schiller’s political interpretation of the aesthetic experience as the neutralization of the opposition between the formal drive and the sensible drive. By translating the play between the faculties into a tension between drives, Schiller reminds Kant’s readers of what is at stake. Before becoming faculties that cooperate to form judgments, understanding and sensibility designated parts of the soul, the better part, the leading part of intelligence that has the power to measure, and the subordinated or rebellious part of sensibility that knows only the shock of sensation and the stimuli of desire. As Plato emphasized, the partitioning of the individual soul was a partition of the collective soul, which also was a partition of the classes in the city; there was the class of intelligence and measure that was destined to rule and the class of sensation, desire, and unlimitedness that is naturally rebellious toward the order of intelligence that it must be subjected to. The aesthetic experience is a supplementation of this partition—a third term that cannot be described as a part but as an activity of redistribution, an activity that takes the form of a neutralization.
This rejection of the hierarchical relation between the faculties that make sense involves a certain neutralization of the social hierarchy. This is suggested in the second section of Critique of Judgment through the example of the palace. It is underlined later in the sixtieth section, which attributes to the aesthetic sensus communis a power of reconciliation between principles and classes.
It is also spelled out a few years later in Schiller’s political interpretation of the aesthetic experience as the neutralization of the opposition between the formal drive and the sensible drive. By translating the play between the faculties into a tension between drives, Schiller reminds Kant’s readers of what is at stake. Before becoming faculties that cooperate to form judgments, understanding and sensibility designated parts of the soul, the better part, the leading part of intelligence that has the power to measure, and the subordinated or rebellious part of sensibility that knows only the shock of sensation and the stimuli of desire. As Plato emphasized, the partitioning of the individual soul was a partition of the collective soul, which also was a partition of the classes in the city; there was the class of intelligence and measure that was destined to rule and the class of sensation, desire, and unlimitedness that is naturally rebellious toward the order of intelligence that it must be subjected to. The aesthetic experience is a supplementation of this partition—a third term that cannot be described as a part but as an activity of redistribution, an activity that takes the form of a neutralization.
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