The rhythm of anti-fascist protest: author’s own photo taken during fieldwork at a demonstration against Le Front national in Aubervilliers in 2017. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Deconstruction’s Hemiolas

Naomi Waltham-Smith

I

Steve McQueen’s 2020 film Mangrove is an historical drama about the racism of the criminal justice system and Black resistance against police repression in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through the prism of the trial of a group of demonstrators known as the Mangrove Nine. One scene set in April 1970 shows a young Darcus Howe, recently returned from Trinidad, trying to educate a distracted Frank Crichlow, the owner of the eponymous Caribbean community restaurant in Notting Hill that was subjected to a dozen police raids in the period January 1969 to July 1970: “Trinidad has been remade, Frank. I saw it. I heard it. The revolution has changed the very rhythm of the people’s speech, talking with greater deliberation, pausing before speaking and such. As if it has provoked an unconscious social patience. It was truly something to behold” (Siddons and McQueen n. d.: 34). It was fitting to cite this passage in a paper given in the city of Montréal.[1] The immediate spark for the Black power revolution in Trinidad was a demonstration against the visit of the Canadian Governor-General in solidarity with students from the West Indies at Sir George Williams University in Montréal who had been singled out for arrest after an occupation on campus protesting a professor’s racial prejudice.

Before he can invoke C. L. R. James, Howe is interrupted by the phone ringing. Crichlow’s speech, as he complains in vain to his local MP about police harassment of a Black business, is hurried and marked by increasing exasperation, cutting across the measured rhythm delivered by revolutionary action that Howe extols. Frustrated by the impunity with which the police engaged in racial targeting and violence, members of local community, together with Black Panther activists, organized a demonstration on August 9, 1970 at which the Mangrove Nine were arrested. They were later charged with incitement to riot in what was widely seen among Black communities and leftwing allies as a deliberate strategic attempt to put a halt to the emerging Black power movement in Britain. One of the striking features of the trial was that Howe, who would become a prominent anti-racist campaigner, writer, and broadcaster, and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, who was the leader of the Black Panther Movement, would choose—against the advice of the majority of the defendants’ white lawyers—the radical tactic of self-representation. Toward the end of the film, Howe, played by the British second-generation Jamaican actor Malachi Kirby, delivers what a newspaper at the time described as a “‘blockbuster’ defence closing speech” at the Old Bailey (Post Mercury 1971).

In the absence of surviving court transcripts, the screenplay drew on extensive documentary research: a newspaper that serialized the proceedings, other publications at the time, and the files of the radical white lawyer Ian Macdonald representing one of the other defendants which contained a copy of Howe’s closing statement (Siddons 2020). The screenwriters punctuate Howe’s speech with iterations of the phrase “it’s closing time” to signify that, while the case may be coming to an end, it marks the opening up not only of specific issues but also, irreparably, of British history as a whole to Black consciousness. It marks, in short, the necessary possibility that any closure or teleology be interrupted. This is what brings the rhythm of speech into critical dialogue with the rhythm of history’s unfolding and of the metaphysical unfolding of the concept of history. As if to analyze this asynchronicity, Howe prefaces his rhetorical triple strike with a reference to Hamlet, scribbled by his co-defendant and partner Barbara Beese on the top of his script and itself a syncopated repetition in that it displaces the white sovereign subject of politics and thereby disrupts the rhythm of Shakespeare’s line, itself an interruption of verse by prose: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever a Black people were born to set it right” (Siddons and McQueen n.d.: 87; emphasis mine).

This is a film in part about rhythm and its syncopation. A letter from 1946 to his second wife Constance Webb shows that Howe’s hero, C. L. R. James, is very much attuned to rhythm. While James is more interested in Shakespeare and other European examples, he shares with Caribbean musicians an awareness of how rhythm can not only materialize racial and class oppressions but also analyze them critically and express the struggle for liberation (James 1992: 151–52).[2] This may seem paradoxical for a close reader of Hegel such as James. The German philosopher reserves the radical capacity for openness to the other and for negativity to the white European, leaving Africa without relation and without history, as Rei Terada (2023) has argued. And yet James continues to think the syncopated rhythm of revolutionary history with, not against, speculative logic. His idiosyncratic reading of Hegel and its ramifications for his politics are beyond the scope of this article, except to note that, in his close readings of the Logic in his Notes on Dialectics, the self-movement of the dialectic in the mutual implication of subjective consciousness and object—what in the Preface to the Phenomenology is figured as “the immanent rhythm of the concept” (1977 [1807]: 36; trans. modified)—lies at the heart of James’s theory of historical development and working-class emancipation (1980 [1948]).[3] What I will, however, suggest is that the radical rhythmic action of the Mangrove Nine, on the streets and in court, participates in a heterodox syncopation of Hegel that has affinities with deconstruction, without collapsing into or being exhausted by it. There are, if you like, syncopated deconstructions.

In what follows, I will analyze the key sections from the Phenomenology’s Preface and then, with reference to a few passages where Derrida speaks to the notion of rhythm, I will assess to what extent the self-differentiation of Hegel’s speculative proposition might be said to anticipate or even already to march in step with deconstruction’s law of spacing. Baart Zandvoort (2020), for example, summarizes the issue at stake—namely, whether there is another difference whose contradiction would not be merely a moment on the way to self-identity—while also questioning whether Hegel and Derrida can be so cleanly distinguished on this point.

Where is the point where arrhythmia breaks away from rhythm to be located? How can we be sure the arrhythmic pulsation of the arrest will not be resolved once again in a more rhythmic rhythm? The impossibility of deciding on such a point, which Derrida elaborates again and again, is already fully prefigured in all its baffling complexity in Hegel (Zandvoort 2020: 368).

Especially given Derrida’s idea of the trace as re-marking, as a double strike, the thought would be that that a genuinely radical rhythm necessarily remains at least somewhat arrhythmic, that it would always already have to have interrupted even itself and have ruined any teleology—and, with it, any Eurocentrism—in advance. The idea that the concept is irreducibly syncopated is not unique to deconstruction. But deconstruction may nonetheless be the movement of philosophical thought that is most passionately moved by, even finds its own engine in, the rhythming of the concept—in its beating, spasming, jerking, pulsating, vibrating. In its syncopated re-marking, rhythm resists being subsumed by the totalizing and exclusionary point of the concept. This gives deconstruction an affinity with other heterodox modes of conceptualization—decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, queer thought that is inextricably rhythmed with practice and syncopated against Hegel.

II

Hegel invokes the metaphor of rhythm as a way to distinguish two ways of thinking or reading. The difference between speculative and ordinary proposition is likened in §61 to “to the conflict that occurs in rhythm between meter and accent” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38).[4] The notion of rhythm had been introduced in §56, which asserts that logical necessity just is the “self-moving” and “self-differentiation” of the subject in its being its own concept (34), and in §60 the concept is said to “present itself as the coming-to-be of the object” (37). This “rhythm of the organic whole” is characterized as an interruption of what Hegel calls “picture-thinking [Vorstellung],” as well as of formalism. In each of those kinds of thinking there is a degree of stasis or stability. In the ordinary propositions of representational thinking, the subject relates to the content as predicate or accident, “remaining inertly over against it” as a “fixed self,” “passive” in the face of a multiplicity of passing predicates (37–38). Formalist argumentation, in §58 meanwhile, is “freedom from all content, and a sense of vanity towards it” (35), turning its presentation into the “principle of the content” (36).

Speculative thinking and reading, Hegel contends in §60, leaves this “solid ground” “shaken” (37). Once the subject has passed over into the predicate, it finds there is not a predicate as such but the substance of the concept and that, instead of being able to float freely above, it has entered and is absorbed into the content. As the predicate becomes the organic whole, it has the effect of weighing down thinking, depriving it of a sovereign liberty. The effect is akin to a rhythmic jolt. Thinking, which at the same time “in reality feels itself checked by the loss of the Subject” as something that is not already implicated in its own otherness, “missing it, is thrown back on the thought of the subject” (38). In §62, Hegel repeats the same propulsive metaphor in conclusion: “Thinking therefore loses the firm objective basis it had in the subject when, in the predicate, it is thrown back on to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it does not return into itself, but into the subject of the content” (38).

The speculative proposition is said to “destroy” the ordinary proposition in a “counterthrust [Gegenstoß]” against the distinction between subject and predicate that it presupposes (37–38). Katrin Pahl expressly reads speculative logic as a syncopation of ordinary representational thinking, disrupting its grammar’s triple strike of “A is B” by failing to deliver the predicate’s expected third-beat accent (2012: 111–12). Figured as a dance in Pahl’s analysis, speculative logic leaves the choreography tottering by throwing the subject back on the other foot, only for it to miss its own first-beat accent in an “awkward pirouette.” Pahl wants to read Hegel as a deconstructionist avant la lettre.

To assess the extent to which Hegel’s rhythm is already arrhythmic, let us read closely what he says in §61 about the rhythm of the concept and the conflict between meter and accent:

Rhythm results from the oscillating midpoint and the unification of the two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identification of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that distinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance, and that the Subject itself falls into the universal, this is the unity in which the accent dies away. (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38)

Translating Hegel’s “schwebende Mitte” as “juggle,” Pahl contends that “this harmony, to be sure, amplifies dissonance, interference, and syncopation” and that “for Hegel, this conflict [between identity and difference] does not have to be (dis)solved but can be made productive as a harmonic disunity in oscillating motion” (2012: 109–10). On this interpretation, speculative logic balances the two rhythms by treating syncopation as a kind of counterbalancing act. And yet, Hegel openly concedes, this unifying harmony results in accent dying away. Notwithstanding the argument she wants to make about the priority of syncopation in Hegel’s conception of rhythm, Pahl’s metaphorical footwork illustrates precisely this point: that, far from creating, say, a hemiola, any off-beat accentuation actually falls away in the harmonious unity of a vibration. This raises an interesting question about the rhythm of reading—one which preoccupies Derrida in Geschlecht III (2020b) where he employs a tactic of leaping and zigzagging when reading Heidegger so as to head off the risk of collapsing its different and sometimes conflicting beats into consonance. When a text declares A to mean B, not simply does it allow for a strong reading “C” that it says without meaning to; it has perhaps already gone so far as to declare that A is C. Does this rhythm of reading Hegel itself exhibit the juggle that Pahl attributes to Hegel?

III

Writing in the left-hand column of Glas about the “ternary rhythm of the ‘potencies’” in Hegel’s philosophy of nature, Derrida takes a different view:

What Hegel says about the structure of the Potenz—which will also be true of the dialectical moment—explains to us how he, Hegel, intended to be read. One can transpose what he states about each Potenz to each organized totality of his text, which both repeats and anticipates, and yet marks a leap, a jump, a rupture in repetition, all the while ensuring the continuity of the passage and the homogeneity of a development. A plurality of continuous jolts, of uninterrupted jerks: such would be the rhythm. (Derrida 2020a: 121b)

Derrida’s reading depends on the way in which “the absolute totality arrests itself,” much as, in §58 of the Phenomenology, Hegel describes how the subject, in order to “sink [its] freedom in the content,” in a “refusal to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the concept,” must exercise a measure of restraint “which is itself an essential moment of the concept” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 36).

Derrida analyzes the way in which the concept holds itself back under the heading of what he calls here and elsewhere “stricture,” a self-strangulation that makes the gl catch in the throat and which logic, he claims, “organizes Hegel’s text”:

Any commentary would disqualify itself that, qua commentary, did not follow its prescription or that dragged its feet hesitating between explication and rupture, within all the oppositional couples that sustain in general the history of the historians of philosophy. There is no possible displacement of this history without displacement . . . of what in Hegel’s text imposes this rule of reading, i.e. a displacement that itself would escape the dialectical law and its strict rhythm. It seems like we are not there yet; and this can no more be done in one blow than by continuous approach. The event cannot be as noisy as a bomb, as flashy or burning hot as metal placed in the fire. Even if it were an event it would here be—stricture against stricture—unobtrusive and marginal. (Derrida 2020a: 123–24a)

In the right-hand column, Derrida glosses the gl as

a voiceless voice stifling a sob or clot of milk in the throat, tickled laugh or gluey vomit of a gluttonous baby, the imperial flight of a bird of prey swooping down all of a sudden on the back of your neck, the sticky, frozen, cold piss name of an impassive Teutonic philosopher, with his well-known stammer, sometimes liquid and sometimes guttural and tetanic, with swollen or cooing goiter, everything that rings strange in the tympanic pit or canal, spit or paste on the soft palate, orgasm of the glottis or uvula, clitoral glue, abortion cloaca, spermchoke, rhythmic hiatus of an occlusion, staccatodance spasm of an eruptojaculation, syncopated valve of the tongue and lips, or a nail falling in the silence of the milky voice” (137–39b).

The displacement of Hegel’s rhythm would entail neither continuous transformation nor rupture but stricture against stricture, the syncopation of stricture. Instead of one rhythm against another, there would be arrhythmia against arrhythmia, and a redoubling of speculative logic. Or as he puts it in his introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography, if rhythm’s double bind “is still too linked to opposition, contradiction, dialectic . . .  to that kind of undecidable that derives from calculation and from a nervous dialectical contraction . . . it would be necessary to think an other undecidable, to interrupt this double bind with a gap or a hiatus—and recognize in an arrhythmic caesura the respiration of rhythm” (Derrida 1989: 34–35). The “antirhythmic” rhythm that Derrida thinks with Hölderlin and Lacoue-Labarthe interrupts interruption as oppositionality (1989: 42).

Glas is replete with references with spasmodic rhythms. In a key passage it refers back to one of Derrida’s earliest and most extensive discussions of rhythm in “The Double Session,” which I am proposing to read as elaborating a way of breathing rhythm into arrhythmia, less as a transcription of the voice than of a machinic pneumatics. Rhythm is involved early on with a footnote to Émile Benveniste, who emphasizes its pre-Socratic conception as movement rather than form: “what . . . works toward the decapitation or ungluing of the text is the regular intervention of the blanks, the ordered return of the white spaces, the measure and order of dissemination, the law of spacing, the rhuthmos” (Derrida 1981: 171). Rejecting the hypothesis of an infinite undifferentiated polysemia, Derrida speaks of “a kind of poverty, I would even call it a very singular and very regular monotony,” which is rigorously distinguished from the totalizing power of the concept to pin down multiplicity to a single point (251). Rather, the blank folds back upon or re-marks the play of meaning. This mark, imprint, or strike belongs to the series that it might be added to or subtracted from without being its transcendental origin or end while pointing to the blanks, gaps, or spacing between the terms in the series (252–254). It thus “re-marks” the syncopations that make the series possible through the relations among the elements that unite them in their dispersion—syncopations on account of which seriality, as identity, is impossible.

Rhythm is also at the front of Derrida’s mind in Geschlecht III where his theme is, as already mentioned, reading “in abrupt jumps, leaps, and [this time—NWS] zigzags” (2020b: 1).  Setting deconstruction against the rhythm of metaphysics, he upbraids Heidegger for gathering the plurality of poetic tones into the harmonious resonance of the fundamental tone or Einklang, which literally means sounding as one (71). Analyzing the distinction that Geschlecht III draws between polysemia and dissémination, Geoffrey Bennington provocatively suggests that deconstruction’s rhythmic re-marking or re-striking may yet invite a closer comparison than Derrida might want with the harmony of metaphysical logic.

We might still wonder if the monos of the monotonous re-mark does not invite a more generous re-reading against all the unifying or gathering motifs that Derrida is so suspicious of in Heidegger, and even whether that kind of monotony (or writing, textuality, trace, dissemination, différance . . . ) is really so clearly distinguishable from what Heidegger repeatedly characterizes in terms of oneness, unity, uniqueness, Einklang, and so on. (Bennington 2020: 435)

IV

Is there, though, a political urgency to syncopate monotonies? For Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda (2018), the syncope in the speculative dialectic is re-marked by a mark—the dash that comes at the Phenomenology’s closing time, signaling, if not a lapse of consciousness, then digression and also propulsion. But one ought not be seduced by its monotonous regularity into reducing the Derridean blank to the simplicity of self-propelling speculative thought, “having its otherness within itself” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 34). One consequence of Derrida’s rhythming of arrhythmia, his syncopated stricture, is that there is no “the” deconstruction that would march to the same beat but rather multiple deconstructions each choreographed to rhythms out of step with one another and even with themselves, a series of deconstructions only by virtue of the spacings that separate them. Every other is every bit other.

These multiple, syncopated deconstruction give rise to a vertiginous precipitation, as Derrida might put it—as the kind of accelerated rush to close embodied in the hemiola as we approach a cadence. Rushing headlong into these syncopations, then, Jean-Luc Nancy’s rhythm of the senses—which must also be understood as the syncopations that disjoin them—and his deconstruction of Hegelian dialectic do not coincide with Derridean dissémination but tend more toward an “archaic propulsion” or primordial recitative that opens up the space of the subject (Nancy 2013: 254–55). Nancy’s transcendental vibration is rhythmed, Bennington suggests, even to the point of noise—“rhythm’s scum,” he quips (Bennington 2011: 19). Even Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s twin embraces of rhythm as condition of possibility subtly beat against each other, one drawn toward haptocentrism, the other psychoanalysis.

Then there is Hélène Cixous’s virtuosic meditation on the rhythms of puppetry, in which every person and object involved in the theatre is imagined as being “put into movement by . . . the gentle shocks of the puppeteer” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 66). Puppetry is a metaphor not only for writing, reading, and staging but further, I am suggesting, for speculative rhythm. The playwright dreams of being a drumskin on which characters stamp out a rhythm with puppet steps (64). The movement of the puppet, “so abandoned to the motilities and movements of its puppeteer that it no longer bangs at the edges,” enjoys a suspended freedom, not weighed down by having to tap its feet on the ground (68). Equally, on its immobile face there is “a scrolling through of all the great tragic grimaces” (72). The puppet must be “two-but-one” in a simple, exact unfolding of the dance, without jerking (70–72). But it also has a double rhythm that evokes the blanks of “The Double Session” without collapsing into them: “The puppet writes with time, in full intervals, in (invisible) whites [blancs], separating and tying together the regular full stops, the sentences, the lines, the bonds of passion, drawing the space from which will burst forth the shout, the crisis, the access, disjoining, cutting” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 72).

Cixous’s description of punctuation as outburst, as the release of vibrational anticipation, like “the leap of the cat crouching for a long time in the vibrating body” (72), brings me to my final example. Fred Moten’s explicitly political filtering of the Derridean deconstruction of dialectical oscillation as a “deconstruction of the machinery of exclusion” in his reading of Amiri Baraka’s essay “The Burton Greene Affair” (Moten 2003: 125). In Moten’s reading, Baraka’s essay is all cross-rhythm, syncopation, and stammering in a recalibration of the “rhythmic marking of racial difference” (127). In turn, the vibration of improvisation and Black aesthetics in Moten’s thought is set—in syncopated resonance with and resistance to Derridean deconstruction—against the “interminable and systematic opposition and oscillation” of European metaphysics between identity and difference, collection and division (132), which, he reminds us, “begins and ends at the illusion of the originary” (130). In an interesting re-punctuation of Derrida’s assault on the gathering power of the logos, Moten’s focus is the question of “ensemble.” Via this concept, he reminds us of the political stakes of rhythm and its deconstruction: that the question of rhythm and its interruption is also that of community and belonging, of being together. Situating Baraka’s particular variant of nationalism amid the neocolonial capture of Third World liberation movements, amid “a certain economic world picture in which the dual motion of fragmentation and homogenization, exclusionary differentiation and metaphysical sameness, are evident” (130), Moten underscores the possibility of “obfuscate[ing] the ensemble in the spirit of an other tradition, one that would read, reflect, and transcend the interinanimation of being, language, race, and (the crisis of European) humanity” (131).  This ensemble, he exhorts, “will have been given in the cut between rhythms . . . in the arrhythmia that separates these rhythms” (127).

The ensemble of hemiolas that I have enumerated—more in precipitous haste toward closing time than measured rhetorical strikes—likewise resists any unity or gathering into a harmonious resonance. There is no “the” deconstruction of Hegelian rhythm. And deconstruction and Black radical thought, if they make an alliance, it is not in a traditional convergence of struggles under a single banner or a unity of tactics. Rather, it comes only in the negotiations, the tension of one thread or string beating against the other, even as they become more or less tightly entangled. If there is any single strike, any monotony, among this scattered or shattered set of arrhythmias, it is found only in the syncopations that separate their deconstructions. And politics perhaps just is the insistent sustaining of these hemiolas.

References

“Why I’ll fight the heavy mob.” 1971. Post Mercury, December 17. The National Archives, catalogue ref: MEPO 31/21. Accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/mangrove-nine-protest/source-eight/.

Bennington, Geoffrey. 2011. “In Rhythm: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy,” SubStance 40, no. 3: 18–19.

Bennington, Geoffrey. 2020. “Geschlecht pollachos legetai: Translation, Polysemia, Dissemination,” Philosophy Today 64, no. 2: 423–39.

Cixous, Hélène. 2016 [1999]. “Theatre Surprised by Puppets” [Le Théâtre surpris par les marionettes].” In Cixous, Politics, Ethics and Performance: Hélène Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil, bilingual edition, edited and translated by Lara Stevens, 64–79.Melbourne: re.press.

Comay, Rebecca and Frank Ruda. 2018. The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1981. “The Double Session.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 176–285. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “Désistance.” In Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, translated by Christopher Fynsk, 1–42. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2020a. Clang. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2020b. Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo, translated by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ilieva, Evgenia. 2024. “Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James’s Hegel.” Hegel Bulletin 45, no. 1: 144–65.

James, C. L. R. 1980 [1948]. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Westport CT: Lawrence Hill & Co.

James, C. L. R. 1992. “Letters to Constance Webb.” In The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw, 151–152. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mahabir Joy A. I. 2002. “Rhythm and Class Struggle: The Calypsoes of David Rudder.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 3: 1–22.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013. “Récit Recitation Recitative.” In Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, edited by Keith Chapin and Andrew T. Clark, 242–55. New York: Fordham University Press.

Pahl, Katrin. 2012. Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Siddons, Alastair. 2020. “How Research Allowed Co-Writer Alastair Siddons to Nail Every Detail for Steve McQueen’s ‘Mangrove.’” Interview with Joey Moser. Awards Daily, November 25. Accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.awardsdaily.com/2020/11/20/how-research-allowed-to-alastair-siddons-to-nail-every-detail-for-steve-mcqueens-mangrove/.

Siddons, Alastair and Steve McQueen. n.d. Mangrove screenplay (Small Axe Films Ltd.). Accessed March 1, 2024. http://tvwriting.co.uk/tv_scripts/2020/Drama/Small_Axe_1x01_-_Mangrove.pdf.

Terada, Rei. 2023. Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Zantvoort, Bart. 2020. “Arrested Development: On Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28, no. 3: 350–69.

Notes

[1]   I first presented this essay at the 2024 Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association as part of a seminar, organized by Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal, on “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm.” I am most grateful to the comments and questions made by participants and auditors.

[2]   On the political significance of rhythm in Caribbean music, especially Trinidadian calypso, see Mahabir 2002.

[3]   For a discussion of James’s reading of Hegel’s Logic, see Ilieva 2024.

[4]   Throughout I have modified the translation of this text in various places for clarity.

Overlooking the Sierra Gorda Queretana. Photo Credit: Alex E. Chávez.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

Sonorous Present

Alex E. Chávez

Often, we think of elegies as commemorations, as moments of sadness.

But really, an elegy is about the praise of something.

You can’t mourn something you don’t love.

— Roger Reeves

break

Art both feels and is witness to how life unfolds as a relational universe of individuated and collective experiences that together form the political subject. Art can intervene across this social surround, across literal and figurative borders—the divides of nation-states, the threshold between life and death. Art bears witness. Art bears witness. Art takes up the call to elevate the seemingly ordinary—like mourning and grief—those moments when we all feel that lump in the throat. Knot in the chest. Knees buckle. Chin trembles. Hollow stomach—an emotive and cognitive stream that flows, empties out, elsewhere, beyond “here,” leaving only tracings of its own imaginings.

Like many, a fair amount of trauma lives in me. Most of it concerns death and dying. My sister—a fatal victim of domestic violence, gunned down in our home when I was eleven. My mother—died suddenly in Mexico fifteen years ago. My father also died suddenly two years ago. This, it seems, has shaped much of what I have created over the years as an artist and musician, for nothing is quite what it seems when you are mourning. This is often so because the proper space to grieve escapes you. Such has been my experience. In those moments, I found myself taking care of and being strong for those around me, keeping it together for them. Thus, I’ve held space for myself elsewhere—creating through loss, through the disturbance, at the prophetic edge of wreckage, when things aren’t quite right. Truth be told, we all move through loss in our own way. This struggle takes on many forms.

And so, over these past few years—particularly in the wake of COVID-19 and the death of my father—I crafted a suite of compositions attuned to my own grief; songs of border-crossings, sunrises, and mournings: Sonorous Present. This was/is a mediation,

a eulogy

an apology

a conversation

provocation

oral history

fiction

confession

testimonio

an offering

an attempt, an urge, an inclination

 

A center

An edge

A Border

A Break

Thinker, writer, and philosopher Fred Moten (2003) speaks to us about the break, the unique epistemological standpoint where we construct other possible worlds through art, worlds that perform the necessary work of amplifying presence and choreographed collective memory that offers political possibility. The break in which broken bodies and broken memories dwell, defy, endure, refuse, bear witness, and heal. These compositions broke my heart. Yet, I believe we all need to dwell in heartache sometimes. It has the capacity to open a space for healing. And so, Sonorous Present invites listeners into this space, this break—to meditate, to mourn, to celebrate a memory.

Indeed, aesthetic enactments put on display lived-in worlds of attunements—interpretive, imaginative, relational, contingent, improvisational experiments that louden the resonance of memories (Berlant and Stewart 2019). In this instance, my memories of music, migration, rhythms, scenes, encounters, and grief have come to form and inform my creative process. This is what Gloria Anzaldúa (2015) elsewhere describes as conocimiento:

Skeptical of reason and rationality, conocimiento questions conventional knowledge’s current categories, classifications, and contents … . A form of spiritual inquiry, conocimiento is reached via creative acts—writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism—both mental and somatic (the body, too, is a form as well as a site of creativity). (119)

As epistemic practice, conocimiento grounds theory in everyday life, interweaving history, art, culture, the compositional, world-making, and the self, forming the basis of what she terms autohistoria-teoría. She continues:

Autohistoria is a term I use to describe the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir; and autohistoria-teoría is a personal essay that theorizes (Anzaldúa 2009b: 578).

This set of approaches is in dialogue with the adjacent scholarly project of ethnography, in particular auto-ethnography, wherein the present-tense social entanglement of our storied selves and others’ stories is the space where ethnography becomes “a point of impact, curiosity, encounter” (Stewart 2007: 5). However, autohistoria-teoría includes and expands beyond autobiography and cultural narratives: theorizing from the margins of scholarly convention, opening up a bridge between art and scholarship, voicing knowledges and experiences that open up sites of struggle and connection. Sonorous Present is inspired by these ideas.

More broadly, my ethnographic engagements concern regimes and practices of amplifying, surveilling, and displacing sound, particularly as these intersect with histories of migration and racialization of Latinxs in the United States. I’ve approached these topics with an interest in sound and aurality in the borderlands to consider: what sonorous phenomena abound/resonate as you move through/across borders? And as we listen, what assumptions are we making, what aural connections? And how are these evaluative processes shaped by social relations? What histories undergird them? And how might all of this evidence the way “sound appears simultaneously as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for constructing knowledge about it” (Ochoa 2014, 3).

These questions are quite prescient, particularly given the intensified attacks on asylum seekers and migrant communities amidst the challenges of transnational migration. Most recently, we are bearing witness to mass deportation efforts pulling children out of schools, families from their homes, and people from their places of work; the stationing of federal troops along the U.S.-Mexico border; and assaults on sanctuary cities. All of this currently made possible by a series of unlawful gambits and the hostile takeover of the administrative state in the service of “totalitarian fantasies of racial, gendered, and sexual purification” in which, for instance, shipping migrants to Guantanamo Bay and rescinding the birthright citizenship clause of the 14^th amendment are key components (Rosas 2022: 184). Relatedly, the discourses that brace these extreme actions, I’ve argued elsewhere, are part of a long-standing rhetorical project, or a well-worn genre in US-American racial talk, evincing a deep-seated discursive enterprise that has produced “the savage” or “illegal” in the American racial imagination as necessary to the project of white supremacy. In Aurality, Ana María Ochoa explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, sound, and the voice—determining the politics of life at the juncture of the human and nonhuman and in service of the construction of notions of personhood. Here, I am also reminded of Sylvia Wynter’s writings concerning the violence that the genre of the human as man performs as ontological ethno-class index for the species. These works help particularize Western-centric voice studies’ ostensibly universal claims; that is, they provincialize Western ontologies regarding the voice in order to understand how both race and language are situated enactments within specific histories of European colonialism and its various modes of governance. Returning to migration and the U.S.-Mexico border, anti-immigrant rhetoric performs the cultural work of perpetually positioning migrants—particularly from Latin America and the global south—outside the boundaries of national belonging, a type of linguistic violence that goes hand-in-hand with the US-Mexico border as a physical site, as a literal theater of violence.

My ethnographic work has born witness to this spectacular terror, yet beyond telling the story of suffering in a country that outstrips (Robbins 2013), I’ve loudly voiced stories of intimacy, of struggle, of refusal. For a critical aurality is necessary—an always urgent listening to the whole of America amid the deafening swell of a lethal white supremacy, a critical aurality that beckons us to situate necro-subjection to the center of analysis. Or as Gilberto Rosas (2022) describes:

Making dead in order to live is part of a project of documenting and expressing contemporary brutalities without exacerbating the obscene suffering of border crossers and demands to revictimize them both in legal proceedings and engaged traditions of scholarship, so that we analyze, recognize, and ultimately struggle against violence and oppression, both spectacular and mundane. (177)

Making dead to let live is attuned to conditions of existence at the margins wherein those subjected as illegal, criminal, etc. “are situated socially, materially, discursively, and ideologically closer and closer to death” in order that they may live (190).

 Although most of my immediate family—my mother, my father, and older sister—are now dead, they lived. They survived the border. Their stories of crossing always seemed impossible to me: my mother crossed Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas in the trunk of a car; my father survived the crossing in Ojinaga, Chihuahua and a week-long trek across West Texas in the dead of winter. They lived. These stories defined much of who my mother and father were. They’ve long become a part of me. And over the years, sounds have attached themselves to them. Sonorous Present is the culmination of these memories, it chronicles this universe of story, of family, of borders, of trauma, of migration—through sound, lyric, poetry, theory, verse, ethnography, autohistoria, and rhythm. A break to remember, mourn, and heal.

qualia

Ethnography is an affective experience, always in tension with the seemingly elusive attempt to render the feeling of being there in textual form. Songwriting is not too dissimilar, yet in being less script-centric, it opens up the possibility of translating and expressing experience through sonic and performative registers. Ultimately, Sonorous Present is an album—an aesthetic statement that integrates my experience and talents as an artist, educator, musician, and scholar in order to reimagine what a studio recording should sound like and the forms scholarship should take. While artistic and scholarly practices are often treated as discrete domains, Sonorous Present manifests robust articulations between heterogeneous modalities with little regard to disciplinary distinctions. In this way, it puts on display the possibilities of multi-modal scholarship and ethnographic songwriting to expand our understanding of what arts-based methodologies can achieve.

Similar to a conventional ethnography, an album requires refinement and attention to production. Further, “if ethnography is understood not as a science but as an interpretive art,” to quote Kristina Jacobsen (2017), “then it is in the interpretation and the craft of writing about a lifeworld with compassion, depth, and nuance where the greatest skill—and challenge—arguable lies” (116). In my case, my ethnographic songwriting was an attempt to honor the memories of family members that have passed, touch on the topic and politics of immigration, source the sounds of Mexican folk traditions, and connect this world of personal story and sound to my long-standing research on both sides of the border. And so, what began as an experimental, collaborative, and improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of my book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (2017)—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores. Recorded in Los Angeles and Chicago, dynamic explorations of Mexican Regional and Latin American sounds and traditions are deepened on Sonorous Present by avant-garde jazz arrangements and field recordings, alongside poems written and recited by renowned author and poet Roger Reeves. Featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, jazz, and R&B—including, Martha González, Aloe Blacc, Matt Ulery, Ramón Gutiérrez, and Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso, among many others—this suite explores an aesthetic terrain that is worlds away from the projects I am most known for. Nevertheless, I source the sounds of Mexican musical traditions I am familiar with and have been a student of for years, including huapango huasteco, huapango arribeño, and son jarocho. These sounds are rooted in communities of practice that have long utilized music as a form of healing in the face of brutal circumstances. In the end, to honor and grieve—for me—was to fully, honestly, and vulnerably engage in a process of elevating the seemingly ordinary—like grief—through music, rhythm, and verse; that is, to lend sounded significance to the everyday of migration and amplify the desire to mourn through “dramaturgical voice” (Ihde 2007: 167). 

Writing and recording Sonorous Present provided an avenue to deeply explore co-creative methods alongside producer Quetzal Flores. While I have worked with producers in the past and have recorded with countless other music projects, Sonorous Present is the first to solely feature my music and my stories. Beneath the surface of what we were able to craft exists a well of musical and cultural reference that—with the aid of Flores—was always in play, as we both pushed at the edges of traditional sounds and ethnography. We electrified traditional instruments like the guiarra de son; recorded, sampled, and looped the zapateado dance footwork directly from the wooden tarima stomp box; incorporated field-recordings from my research into the sonic and compositional scaffolding of several songs; re-interpreted Mexican son rhythms in asymmetrical time signatures; and combined traditional instruments with seemingly disparate elements. These strategies were integral to our multi-modal approach to songwriting as ethnographic and ethnography as aesthetic—all part of a sonic border-crossing methodology through which we explored a world of sonic possibility unachievable through conventional ethnographic means alone.

cómplices de luto (accomplices in mourning)

In my writing and songcraft, one question remains constant, a concern that continues to shape my thinking: what makes this sound possible? An adjacent query emerges in response: what are the possibilities of (this) sound? Sonorous Present crosses the emotional landscape of these ideas, telling of migrant lives across seemingly disparate places through sound, song, poetry, rhythm, and lyric. And indeed, as Claudia Rankine (2014) reminds us, America’s lyric is racism, and so we must continue to grapple with it in the face of being told to accept brutality as the condition of “how you are a citizen” and to “Let it go. Move on” (151). Sonorous Present refuses to move on.

Sonorous: capable of sound; in the offing.

Present: occurring now; impermanent; gift.

Sound must exist in time. “Acoustic feedback in the process of auditory inscription” (Ochoa 2014: 82) is constituted by the interdiscursive temporal movement and interplay between repetition, replay, and relay. Yet, in inviting listeners into the space of “lasting presence” (Chion 2016: 29), Sonorous Present asks us to stay put (in space) and to be still (in time) in order to honor the process and possibility of (sonic) mourning in a bordered world. For amid the repeating violences and numbing political rhythms so much a part of life in the United States of America, we must pursue conceptual, political, and artistic breaks in order to get free. Resting in the break to heal, to mourn, to remember, enacts an analytical push away from normative analysis of what counts as research within dominant knowledge formations. Resting in the break is an attempt at sounding out the possibilities of the unrecognized, of the unheard and thus carries with it longstanding “legacies as minoritarian subjects of/with the dead in constant acts of mourning (Ruiz 2024: 5).

My dead. Personal, political, unconventional, communal, past, present, and future-oriented, Sonorous Present seeks to mourn in common.

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2009. “now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner works, public acts.” In The Gloria Anzaldua reader, ed. Ana Louise Keating. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity,  Spirituality, Reality.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The Hundreds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chávez, Alex E. 2017. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chávez, Alex E., and Gina M. Pérez. 2022. Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades.Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.

Chion, Michael. 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Jacobsen, Kristina. 2017. “Songwriting as Ethnographic Practice: How Stories Humanize”. In Arts-Based Research Education: Foundations for Practice, Second Edition, ed. Melissa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund. London: Routledge.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth- Century Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447–462.

Rosas, Gliberto: 2022. “Witnessing in Brown: On Making Dead to Let Live” In Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades, ed. Alex E. Chávez and Gina M. Pérez. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.

Ruiz, Sandra. 2024. Left Turns in Brown Study. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.”  The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257-337.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound – A Conversation

Michael Gallope and Edwin Hill

May 9, 2024

USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab/Art Share LA

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. 

Edwin Hill: Thank you. That was beautiful, powerful. I’m not sure beautiful is too simple of a word—unless we think about also the expansiveness of beauty that Maya [Kronfeld] brought up with respect to avant-garde experimental music practice, which is definitely something you’re engaged in. I had a couple of questions that I wanted to start with and then open it up for discussion. And the questions are really built from the discussion that we’ve already been having—really all semester—as we engaged with all of your work, but also, today, with different topics that came up. And in a lot of this, I’m borrowing the language [from the] the words that have been coming up.

I wanted to start asking you to talk more about what it means to perform in an academic space, which, on one level is a surface question: Why is it meaningful to you? What sorts of things does it allow for? And why do you think it’s typically so difficult to do? But beyond the surface level, of course, as we got a chance to think about reading your work and the work of others—it relates to a “deep refrain”—and your thought that has to do with the interrogation of the paradoxes—or impasses or seeming irreconcilable relations—between musical praxis, the limits of language, ineffability, and the production of knowledge. And that’s what we’ve been talking about a lot. As Erin [Graff Zivin] was summarizing our discussions from this morning, she talked about the question of what’s legible or audible, or what is otherwise able to be registered—maybe not always in expressible and satisfying ways. But what do we do with the break, between what’s registered in hearing and playing and what’s registered in discourse? I see this performance as engaging with this, so I want to note, also for all of you—that at one point Michael said—I don’t want to talk. I was like, oh, he’s really struggling with this thing right now, you know what I mean? At one point you wanted to make a point not to speak, as maybe a continuation of this interrogation that you’re doing in written words, [as a] kind of performance strategy, with what you shared and how we experienced. So, what does it mean to perform in an academic space and what can you say about it?

Michael Gallope: Thanks so much, Edwin. I think it’s a really tricky question. From the most sociological level, music departments are not places where there’s a lot of creative work, right? It is mostly a kind of cultural industry for music education and classical music—training musicians in a professional context. There are some institutions that do jazz extremely well in different kinds of ways. It’s interesting—Why is that the case? Why could you get an MFA in poetry and do avant-garde poetry in an academic context in the 60s and 70s, but in music, the institutions were based in an academic style of composition, and this was racialized in a very particular way in the United States to exclude figures like Ornette Coleman who probably could have worked as professors—or Alice Coltrane—but would not have been hired [at the time]. So, when we think about music and the production of knowledge, there are very specific historical questions about the way these institutions have been built that have made certain kinds of legitimacy—and again, in a way that is deeply racialized—that made that [legitimacy] complicated and difficult and unequal. It’s an ideological question, in an institutional sense.

And me being the dialectician I am, I think, okay—so what about me personally? How do I feel about that? Michael [Love] and Maya and I were talking about this outside. I had become very used to doing my music in another context and doing my creative work in another context at Zebulon over here [in Los Angeles], or at cultural institutions, or clubs, or whatever, in places where the whole semiosis of the scene and the situation makes sense. And the kind of music I play is not going to support me, so I never looked at it as something that I could commit myself to, but it always existed in a separate space for me and in a separate social space for me. One of the things I couldn’t help reflect on, seeing the incredibly powerful performances [over the past two days], is first of all, all the work and the artistry that Maya and Michael did to synthesize that duet, and to have their work speak to each other. But just the techne and the existential intensity of presenting work in a context where—maybe this is just me being the grizzled academic that I’ve become—but it is very easy to sit here and give a paper and talk about ideas, and it is very challenging to present work in a context that doesn’t historically seem to square with what that object is.

That’s been an instructive lesson for me in terms of just thinking about music. Because the fear and anxiety and intensity of just doing it, that is, to me, the ontology of the medium. If you take that out, if you take the risk that one puts in—the risk of humiliation, the sense that you’re going to totally fuck your life up by committing to music—if you’re going to go down that road, you’re being honest with what music is—which is this thing that reveals Being, right? It reveals the deepest pain, and it’s trauma and it’s inequity, and it’s utopia, and it’s ecstasy, and it’s these things layered together in all kinds of uncomfortable ways that we don’t even—we’re not very good at even interpreting it most of the time. And I think maybe there is something about the way academic spaces have been set up that are just—it’s easier to domesticate the art form than it is to live with some of the political, social, [and] erotic intensity of [music’s ineffability] that is just part of the production of the art. And so, I think, in all my work, I’m trying to recall that. And in this most recent book [The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–78] I’m trying to think like that when I go through the archive. I try to listen for those traces of people feeling like their life is at stake in order to get their thing out there.

Hill: I think that’s really powerful. Sometimes I wonder if, on the one hand, we’re thinking about, bringing the academic and this other space together, and then sometimes there’s part of me that’s thinking—but maybe it’s nice if they’re not [together]. Maybe this other place is this safer place or allows me room to do things I couldn’t do and I kind of like that. And maybe I don’t want to introduce myself as a professor, you know, because that will mess the vibe up, you know what I mean? And I don’t want people to think I know things, for example. Do you struggle or think about that aspect also? That’s part of the risk of bringing these together is that maybe that other world is now your world, and therefore it doesn’t serve as a refuge in the same way as before.

Gallope: This is interesting; it has changed for me over the last ten years. When I first started, I had this very paranoid [impulse]—okay, I’m not going to tell anybody if I go on tour or do something. And at the time I was playing with this Sierra Leonean musician, Janka Nabay, and I was managing. And it was an intense kind of West African, Afro-beat style of electronic dance music, and I was playing keyboards in it. And it was just as far away from the academic world as you could imagine in terms of the situations that we were in, and so I had become very used to separating them. And then, maybe it is something about being in a state university, the University of Minnesota, and also being in a department community who all have different perspectives on what means to be, a lefty, right? And there are a lot of students that actually don’t see a distinction [between the academic and non-academic world]. They do creative work. They live praxis in all these different ways. And so, when they meet you and they’re in a teaching space and then they see you in a show, they’re like—this is great. So, part of it was the community wore down some of those boundaries in Minneapolis, where the public institution—my attitude became that it’s less of a distinctive realm. It’s more like a public good. And in order for it to remain a public good, it should be available in many ways as possible, and I don’t want to draw boundaries around it. And but it took me a while to come to that.

Hill: I’m glad you are talking about your other experiences too, and just like the programming of this event has been kind of interesting—the musical playlists that’ve gotten put together and I feel like there is a logic or coherence that maybe is coming after the fact. I want to talk about groove. Can we talk about groove? And grooves? I was thinking about the talks this morning about fragments and shattered pieces, and I started wondering about grooves as sites of a kind of cut, but that are also where and how things might fit together. And Maya was talking a little bit about groove also in that presentation. We can think of course, along with Alex Weheliye about the imbrication of rhythm and grooves of history and sound technologies and we can ask how rhythmic feeling good can serve in the suturing of historic trauma, the suturing of the body as was mentioned this morning, and some of the comments are of an aesthetic, but also maybe suturing the human and the machine. So that’s a general question I wanted to ask. Since we’ve been discussing repair, how do grooves do reparative work, how they afford possibilities of reconciliation or perhaps open possibilities for reincarnation after death? And more specifically, I would love to hear you talk about how groove, rhythmic feeling, a certain kind of way, how grooves manifest and work within the aesthetic, temporal, and spatial contexts of drone music, experience, and performing. I am also curious about the performance of the music. How does your music put you in a groove, a groove of Being, a groove of feeling, and also speculation? But take it wherever you want.

Gallope: What I played today didn’t have much groove obviously. It is sort of anti-groove. There is a lot of emptiness, and something happens, and you don’t really know what it is. And there’s language-like stuff, maybe. I don’t know if it is a conversation. I want to create something that I don’t understand. So that’s what I’m searching for, and it’s very much about reincarnation. I’m searching for—Michael [Love] and I were talking about creating metaphysics. Sometimes it’s not going to happen, you know? Otherwise, it wouldn’t… that’s what music is—trying to find that. I think there is a parallel to groove. I find groove very hard. I have played a lot of dance music. And I am the kind of person—after I’ve recorded, I’m doing little edits, and pushing stuff behind the beat just because I can’t [play it the way I’d like]—[so] I [edit it in the way I] want it to be—[and, when I listen, I think] oh my gosh, I wish I could do that live. [I want to] just have that kind of—whatever it is. Maybe if I had a bigger body and I had more [of a sense of] relaxation or something, I could find that side of the groove that was a little behind the beat, and I just can’t do it. But when it works—it’s like, you know, consciousness is open or something. There is this disclosure when it’s happening and when it’s dancing. I was feeling that a lot, you know, during various moments like of this collaboration [with Janka Nabay]. And it’s about volume and there’s a fragility to it. And then when it’s locked in, it’s like—I don’t know—there’s the historicity in terms of forms, in terms of the break, in terms of Blackness and the way we were talking about Michael Sawyer’s talk earlier, with respect to [Fred] Moten and all of these metaphors of formal displacement and thinking. When that groove is truly alive, that thinking is suddenly three-dimensional to me and there’s a whole lot happening. But it’s very tricky to put it into shape. I guess I’m very respectful of people that specialize in it because it’s an incredible thing to find that attunement, and to be able to be with it. There’s a certain, almost passivity to it—like letting it happen.

Hill: After you performed, I almost wanted to say that it was glorious, but then I was remembering… Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman… it could make you hear a musical history, when you listen to electronic music and its experimental dimensions and you think about the play of tone that’s happening with artists that you’re citing, and it was really interesting to think about these kind of genealogies. But I also know that you push back against a utopian notion of music, or an essentializing of music. One way I read your work is that it’s kind of a critique of the audio-visual litany that Jonathan Sterne talks about and the way the music is kind of figured in a certain way with respect to Judeo-Christian philosophies and histories. Before we turn it over, I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the notion of paradox within this.

Gallope: I’ve been accused of being a sonic or a musical exceptionalist—maybe I am sort of—but I don’t even know what that means. I think, in my work, I am trying to [respond to my past experience] going to school and learning about semiotics and being a part of this “linguistic turn” and using language as a metaphor and model for everything. I think part of me was trying to push against that and understand the specificity of sound in its inconsistency—how it operates. Because it’s obviously filled with all kinds of language-like things, but there’s also a difficulty that one has—I always say it’s like an embarrassment. Okay, you could talk about music for a while, but when you press play, or Maya goes and sits at the piano, or Michael turns on the [iPad], there’s just pppshhhhh—just this surplus. It’s impossible to remember, you know? It’s just like, oh, I forgot how complicated that groove is when we were breaking down. Just looping this single thing [as Alex Chávez asked us to do yesterday] and finding the multidimensionality in it. I think in my work I am trying to sustain attention—not like I’m some sort of theologian for music that believes it exists in some totally separate space—but [I am] just trying to call attention to the character of the depth of it, and the oddity of it, and the multidimensional inexhaustibility of it. You sit down and you find that magnetic groove or a loop of something, and you could sit there and listen to it for—Alex [Chávez] was talking about what, 16 hours? Until 5 a.m.? How does that happen, right? That’s a kind of fascination.

Hill: Let’s open it up for questions.

Q1: Thank you so much. That performance for me really expanded a lot of categories. I wanted to ask you, Michael, what is it like to play music where overtones are—it’s hard to call it overtones—are the primary thing? I was really struck with the care with which you set up what then became a drone. There were so many choices you made in the beginning to support what was to come in terms of how you were honing those opening tones that then became the basis for more playing. To me, that’s where the groove really resided, is in that whirring—what would erroneously be taken as a single tone. And all the movement in the groove, it seemed like you had so much patience in really not proceeding to the next phase until you had kind of laid that kind of groundwork. And so, I was just wondering what it’s like to hear and prepare in that way.

Gallope: That’s helpful. This keyboard is the drone keyboard. And it’s a Casiotone from the 80s, but—this is one of the things where 90% of the sounds [on the keyboard] I don’t like, but there’s a few things that are just magic. You know, there’s metaphysics on a couple of these buttons for some reason. And these only cost $100, and they’re made like toys; you can just throw them around and they don’t break. But it’s an 80s keyboard, and then you put it on top of the Yamaha organ drone, and then suddenly you just see this instability, right? And then you can kind of just take a few variables and play with that. There’s a lot of drone music that—in the scene in the Twin Cities you have laptop-based stuff, you have modular synthesis—which is a whole other can of worms in terms of indeterminacy—you have live performance, you have homemade instruments. I was interested in the idea of—a keyboard like an organ is going to make one sound and then, you can layer drones and do things. And people kind of hear your decisions, and maybe they’re listening with you, or you want them to listen with you. And that became an interesting thing for me, to find a way to move through it and build it and make it—I think of it as a kind of sculpture.

Q2: The Brazilian scholar and musician José Miguel Wisnik’s book O som e o sentido (1989) [Sound and sense] has this wonderful moment at the beginning where he derives pitch, and then harmony, from rhythm, right? An oscillation. And this also goes to what Maya was mentioning in terms of beats. But I also noticed that just before the sort of ending if you wanted to call it when the car alarm took over, your piece entered into what we might call a rhythm section, right? Pitch sort of fell away, and you’re really asking us to focus on that more oscillatory part that’s no longer pitched. So, I was wondering, not necessarily just that moment—How does this allow you to think through rhythm, given that that’s one of the focuses today? This is also ostensibly arrhythmic—I mean, it isn’t but, right?

Gallope: At the end, I am doing what are referred to as “difference tones.” When you [have] low frequencies where the frequency is not that fast, when you have two dissonant frequencies, they phase with each other, and you start hearing this prrrrrrrrr. You never know how it’s going to sound; it is all dependent on the system. If there are sub[woofers], it could make the whole floor [vibrate], and also the resonance of the room. So, there’s a lot of indeterminacy there. But it’s a little bit like—I know, in the 80s, you know those old TVs, where you’d turn the channel, and it would be static? I’m very into those kinds of things where you just turn it and there’s some weird thing on the television. So, they’re kind of cuts, in a way.

Hill: There’s shapes, right? There’s contours in the sound.

Gallope: Yeah. Just to make sure, in case you were confused that I was trying to express something, this makes it clear I wasn’t, you know, it’s crrrrrr—the TV’s off.

Q3: This was super interesting in terms of how there seemed to be a narrative without this stable temporal architecture. And especially this last part that I perceived it as a narrative through some kind of mimicry, let’s say the sound of shotguns or helicopters or something like that, so how there was a sense of suspense building up, but how that is usually these specific affects of uneasiness and anxiety are usually attached through Hollywood representations, these kind of tones that follow, let’s say, police chasing or something like that, or shot guns. So, how that sense of in a way that it was—you said empty space, but how much that empty space creates affect and what it does to our bodies. I just felt my hormonal oscillations kind of attuning to what you were trying to say or express but also shaped by these other cultural notions that we had attached to these particular notions of suspense or sound. What do you think that your music does, for you, or for your audience?

Gallope: It is a kind of terrifying way to end it. It’s like being caught between two big fans or something like that. But what I’m interested in a sequencing, you use the word narrative, and I think, there’s no causality, right? If we take Aristotle’s definition of narrative that has causality—right, a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you change the TV, there’s no causality, other than you switching it so there is a cut. I’m interested in the way that affects your memory of what you heard before you know. So, it’s like: Oh, what was that? That was excessive and weird and then, after this happens, what was that thing? That’s where maybe the language-like stuff comes into the fore, because these things are obviously not related to each other, but they also are related to each other—and you don’t want to solve that, you know?

Q4: From a different angle, one thing that strikes me about understanding drone and various types of ambient music in general is that it works around temporal dilation and makes us sit with maybe that discomfort right? There’s usually a kind of acclamation period like in the first minute or two—are we really doing this? Two or three minutes after that, yeah we are. And I think about something like the temporal dilation in the moment. And then I think about your other main profession on the page, on the various types of temporal compression and dilation that are required in either narrative or argumentative discourse. On one side you can have the story of [Gabriel García Márquez’s] 100 Years of Solitude compressed into 400 pages—a whole century. Or you could have the Joycean Ulysses story of a single day sprawling over hundreds of pages. I’m just curious, to boil down the question for you, given [where] your musical and aesthetic sensibilities are taking you: Do you feel like you write slower? Are your sentences doing different things with time because of the way you’re playing?

Gallope: That’s a great question. I don’t think so. Now I’m thinking about Aristotle for some reason—thinking about narrative—but my teaching is really Aristotelian. It’s organized. And my writing—when I write it’s just like—shhhhhhhh—I am just editing. I don’t know if other musicians feel this way—the music/writing difference—which is that for my writing I can sit there and keep working on it and I can trust that it’ll always be getting better the more hours I put in on it. I’m finding more things and fixing little sentences. But music—you can go down a hole and make it a lot worse. And all the best music that you write is the stuff that happens by accident. It’s like: oh yeah that was the throwaway tune and then we took the beat out and it was actually great. [When writing a] lot of music, I choose not to play for a while in order not to listen. I can’t listen to a lot of music especially in the age of streaming. I actually have listened to less just because—I just can’t do it. It kind of crowds me out. So [music and writing] have two different economies for me in a weird way but that doesn’t mean they don’t affect one another. What [music] really has affected are the things I pay attention to as a writer. It’s like—what is the that surreal unconscious depth of why someone would come out to hear music? The strangeness of that and the metaphysics that people are trying to incarnate. If I am going to write about music, I need to make sure that particularity is alive in some way, that I’m listening to the archive in a way that’s attentive to and affected by what I pay attention to. I am not spending as much time like labeling chords like a music theorist would. There are lots of biographies in my book, and there is lots of history and backdrop, but when I talk about the object, I’m trying to recover those [musical] decisions and those moments that my practice is helping me think about.

This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.

Toll Roads and Gated Communities:
How Private Commerce Took Over the Public Internet

Adam Dean

“The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation” (Katz 2012).

When the Internet went private with the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, it was the metaphorical Wild West—the land-grab decade, where unknown companies popped up to claim untapped real estate in the form of domain names, and prospecting users invented pathways to share unlimited unlegislated copyrighted material. It was in this period that long-established telecommunications companies grew their existing infrastructure to deliver faster Internet to our homes, and a new generation of hosting companies were born. Those companies that got in early parceled out the Internet into what it is today—high-speed toll roads leading to gated communities. Decades later, when the problems with this model became noticeable to the everyday user, the FCC began to assert itself as regulator by establishing Net Neutrality, which limited the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) legal right to control the direction and speed of Internet traffic for the everyday user. President Barack Obama called it, “…a victory for the millions of Americans who made their voices heard in support of a free and fair Internet” (2016).

That victory was short-lived. When those regulations were rolled back by the FCC in 2017, it was done under the banner of freedom as well. The title of the press release that introduced the rollbacks read: “CHAIRMAN PAI CIRCULATES DRAFT ORDER TO RESTORE INTERNET FREEDOM AND ELIMINATE HEAVY-HANDED INTERNET REGULATIONS” (Pelkey 2017). Then, in 2022, the FCC announced plans to support legislation to make Net Neutrality regulations law. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “…everyone should be able to go where they want and do what they want online without their broadband provider making choices for them. I support Net Neutrality because it fosters this openness and accountability” (Perez 2022). That legislation, introduced that year in the House (H.R. 8573) and Senate (S.4676), which “expressly classifies broadband internet as a telecommunications service rather than an information service for purposes of regulation by the Federal Communications Commission,” never advanced in either chamber (Markey and Matsui 2021). As a result of this stall, the FCC under Rosenworcel’s Chairship voted to regulate the ISPs in three specific ways: 1) By prohibiting ISPs from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization of lawful content, 2) By empowering the FCC with the discretion and ability to revoke the authorizations of foreign-owned broadband operators, and 3) By empowering the FCC to monitor and intervene in service outages (FCC 2024). Of course, the battle for a free internet didn’t end there. In January, 2025, the FCC’s jurisdiction of oversight was struck down in federal court (Bowman 2025).

Through all of this, the battle over Net Neutrality has been defended and opposed under the banner of freedom—on one side the freedom banner protects the everyday consumer/end user so that they can visit any law-abiding website without restrictions or throttling, and on the other the freedom banner protects the ISP’s interests to compete in an open marketplace, where, as traffic controller, the ISP can direct end users and restrict or promote sites and content in their business interest. But the Net Neutrality battle isn’t actually limited to these two sides—the FCC v. the ISPs—and at risk of defending those should-be telecommunications companies that deliver the Internet to our homes, this simplified two-sided battle distracts from another group of traffic controllers who have been given a pass. In caring for our public Internet, the deeper critique in this essay is of the true winners of the Internet land grab. Content curators like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) are not, by the strict definition, ISPs, nor are they telecommunications companies, and so they would not have answered to the FCC even if the 2024 order had been upheld by the federal court. Instead, these commerce companies abide by the regulations set by the FTC despite their role as the replacement for traditional radio and television broadcast stations, charged with the responsibility to curate the daily news and entertainment options for 5.5 billion users each day while restricting access to those that do not pay with their personal data (Statista 2022).

In caring for the public Internet, this essay critiques precisely how the Internet was built with tax dollars and then given away to private content curators from whom the public now must rent. References made to the Internet throughout this essay are not meant to indicate published content in/on/across the Internet, but there should be some understanding that freedom of access to the Internet and freedom to access the information therein are coupled. While it is intuitive to assume access applies to both the same, there are different public and private partnerships with stakes in one or the other, and sometimes both, so their access challenges often differ. For example, Google does not have the ability to restrict access to a URL on the World Wide Web. A user can navigate directly to a website; however, most users search, even using the address bar to do so, and are subject to omissions made by the search engine in the result. On the other hand, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the international governing body of the domain names and has the technical power to revoke a website name from public access through its Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. However, its regulatory power is restricted to enforcing the basic rules of the registry, such as cybersquatting and trademark violations (ICANN 2016). As an international governing body, ICANN is one example of the existing structure already in place to enforce Internet regulation, but apart from the FCC’s push for Net Neutrality, there is no U.S. regulation for how companies, such as Alphabet or the ISP, direct, divert, dissuade and restrict users as they navigate.

The Public’s Internet

“The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. … Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them” (Hertzfield 2019).

Much has been published on the Internet’s roots, through amusing intra-government memos on over-the-network etiquette, its truncated first transmission message “LO”^[i], and its ties to the U.S. Military’s first air defense system S.A.G.E. Despite its establishment by the U.S. Department of Defense, the original Internet known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was a means to tie together the nation’s most powerful computers at various research institutions. In short, in its origin, the Internet had no commercial appeal:

It is considered illegal to use the ARPANet for anything which is not in direct support of Government business … Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the Government agencies which manage the ARPANet (Stacy 1982).

While ARPA held oversight over its own network, it did not deter private companies from copying the technology, and copy they did:

A number of U.S. companies have also procured or are procuring private corporate networks utilizing many of the techniques developed for ARPANET. For instance, it was recently announced that Citibank of New York City has constructed (by contract to BBN) a private network very similar to the ARPANET. …A number of companies have taken advantage of the fact that the ARPANET technology is in the public domain to obtain the listings of the ARPANET software. (Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc. 1981).

By 1980 taxpayers had invested billions of dollars in the Internet’s infrastructure, through research grants to public universities and the RAND Corporation from ARPA, the National Science Foundation and other government entities, but the handoff to private corporations was not formalized for another decade. In 1991 the High Performance Computing Act appropriated more than $1.5 billion from the National Science Foundation to “serve as the primary source of information on access to and use of the Network” (Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and Gore 1991). With the research directive still prevalent, computer science programs at UCLA, MIT, Stanford, Wisconsin and others received substantial funding toward the collective goal to provide high speed internet to the public. ISPs emerged and remained attached to the regulatory structure that came with the funding. But there were pockets of research that fell beyond the scope of ARPA—namely the organization and curation of the content published on the Internet and the potential profits in collecting and selling user data that were still untapped. While private ISPs worked closely with government partners to make the internet accessible to the everyday user, another group developed websites to host the traffic that was coming.

Google: Popularity is not Accuracy

Google began its success nearly two decades ago with this now infamous public promise to itself: “Don’t be Evil”—a mantra that helped the company become the most trusted search engine in the world. But what on earth did it mean? The phrase floated around Google in its early days, where buzzwords like accuracy, transparency and democracy were thrown around in every meeting. The phrase gained enough traction to be included in the young company’s code of conduct until 2015 when it restructured under Alphabet, Inc. Eric Schmidt attributes the phrase as “invented by Larry and Sergey” and talks about it often, including in his book, How Google Works, co-authored with Jonathan Rosenberg. Schmidt makes a strong case that it was perhaps a legitimate foundation for a code of conduct still in place at Google, or maybe not. As a guest on NPR’s quiz show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!” in 2013, Schmidt remembers a conversation with an engineer, as an example of this sincerity:

Well, it was invented by Larry and Sergey. And the idea was that we don’t quite know what evil is, but if we have a rule that says don’t be evil, then employees can say, I think that’s evil. Now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there’s no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something. So what happens is, I’m sitting in this meeting, and we’re having this debate about an advertising product. And one of the engineers pounds his fists on the table and says, that’s evil. And then the whole conversation stops, everyone goes into conniptions, and eventually we stopped the project. So it did work (NPR.org 2013).

So it did work, says Schmidt. And perhaps it did in some way create a subtle check at the brainstorming sessions, or perhaps it could have even been internalized by programmers and designers, who may have resisted subtle changes pressed by their sales wing. Perhaps. We can only know anecdotally what Google chose not to do, yet we can take a careful look at what it has done. In an interview for Logic magazine, Fred Turner, a prolific critic of cyberlibertarianism and tech utopianism, said:

About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don’t be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what’s good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what’s good for people is what’s good for Google, and vice versa (Turner and Weigel 2017).

At the heart of the mantra is not whether Google is good or evil in abstraction, but that they curate what is good and evil for their users. Looking back at the company’s foundation, Brin and Page wrote in their famous paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, that PageRank would improve search quality, which is described really as keyword accuracy:

“Junk results” often wash out any results that a user is interested in. In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results). … Indeed, we want our notion of “relevant” to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents. This very high precision is important even at the expense of recall (the total number of relevant documents the system is able to return) (Brin and Page 2012).

The notion of “quality” is the first hint in the original writings that PageRank could quickly get caught between two competing goals: most accurate and most popular. The word “accurate” appears only twice in the document (and accuracy does not appear). First in reference to anchor text as providing more accurate descriptions than the pages themselves, and second to criticize a web user’s lack of specificity in keyword searches (“some argue that on the web, users should specify more accurately what they want and add more words to their query”) (Brin and Page 2012). Neither of these address the question, is quality accuracy, and is accuracy quality? But Brin and Page did not seek to answer this question in the original document, perhaps relying on a public trust—whatever their answer, it won’t be evil.

At the heart of Brin and Page’s famous paper is the argument that PageRank will bring order to the Web, and certainly it has done that if the public consensus is the indicator. Google’s search engine is the most popular in the world, with 80% of the desktop market share (Statistica Research Department 2022). Credit is due to the Internet pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee and John Postel, who organized the underlying system upon which Brin and Page could organize, and credit is due to Brin and Page for discovering that hyperlinks are the lexicon of the web and can be used not just as a map of the entire globe, but to create a hierarchy for all pages. What PageRank did that had not been accomplished previously, was determining the value of pages on the web by how they relate to one another. In essence, this is the voting system that determines which webpages are “the best”. As Brin and Page explain it in their paper,

These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page’s “PageRank”, an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results (demo available at google.stanford.edu). For the type of full text searches in the main Google system, PageRank also helps a great deal (Brin and Page 2012).

They go on to explain the algorithm, which weighs and thus ranks pages according to not only the amount of links to the page but again the quality. This is the root of the democracy, as each page is a voter and is also in the pool to be voted for, and this is objective somehow. An earlier paper Brin and Page wrote with their advisor at Stanford, Terry Winograd, places this idea of PageRank’s inherent objectivity in the abstract, placing all subjective interpretation on users alone. It reads:

The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the reader’s interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a method for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them (Brin et al. 1998).

Their very idea of a popularity ranking metric, which is measured in a way that “corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance” really means that each page has been cited by another page in the form of a hyperlink. And if we take a step back and consider that a person created the hyperlink, we are now in the loop that Fred Turner described. Who made the link? Someone that knows how to make links. Who decided how important that link was? Google. But the question this essay seeks to answer is not whether Google’s own judgment of evil is a proper measure, or even whether there is a notion of good and bad on which we’d settle. Making an argument for Google as good or evil would have to include their lesser-known contributions, like DeepMind, or the mobile Wi-Fi surveillance probe built into the Google Maps car, or lawsuits that charge the company with giving “unfair preference” to their own services and subsidiaries over those of their rivals. And we would have to talk about censorship and surveillance, both at the company’s own discretion and in cooperation with its regulators and partnership. All that, including the ethics of simultaneously controlling the information hierarchy and the ad revenue—AdWords and AdSense, which work hand-in-hand with PageRank—would be a long discussion of what is good, and what is evil, indeed. There is already a great deal of opinion on “Don’t be Evil” in popular media as well, so it’s safe to say that testing the morality of the mantra has been covered. What has hardly been touched, though, is the public trust in which Google is deeply embedded. Despite the widespread exposure of “Don’t be Evil”, there is some agreement, as indicated in number of users, that Google is trustworthy. It may be trust in accuracy, speed, convenience, or something else, but trust is the right word. The democracy that it is founded on, according to the original workings of PageRank, might even be a symbol of U.S. citizen trust in democracy itself. Many users may not know or consider the implications of the PageRank’s dependence, but there is significant implicit trust in its democracy, if the market share is the indicator.

But it’s important to note here that at best it’s a misunderstanding that Google is democratic, and it is not entirely clear that this was ever its purpose. It was certainly its key to the success of PageRank, but it was only the foundation. In addition to targeted search results weighing heavily on top of PageRank, the myth of the “objective” voting system has been trusted for two decades. Only in the wake of the 2016 election did the public really begin to take seriously the question: is the democracy rigged? Carole Cadwalladr reports on an ad hoc test in The Guardian, allowing Google’s autocomplete function to guide her in toward the most popular/accurate/quality results. She started with a simple keyword and allowed autocomplete to choose for her, and the results are shocking. She writes:

Google is knowledge. It’s where you go to find things out. And evil Jews are just the start of it. There are also evil women. I didn’t go looking for them either. This is what I type: “a-r-e w-o-m-e-n”. And Google offers me just two choices, the first of which is: “Are women evil?” I press return. Yes, they are. Every one of the 10 results “confirms” that they are, including the top one, from a site called sheddingoftheego.com, which is boxed out and highlighted: “Every woman has some degree of prostitute in her. Every woman has a little evil in her… Women don’t love men, they love what they can do for them. It is within reason to say women feel attraction but they cannot love men” (Cadwalladr 2016).

Cadwalladr hoped these were not the most popular/accurate/quality results, so she contacted Google and received the following response.

Our search results are a reflection of the content across the web. This means that sometimes unpleasant portrayals of sensitive subject matter online can affect what search results appear for a given query. These results don’t reflect Google’s own opinions or beliefs – as a company, we strongly value a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures (Cadwalladr 2016).

Jonathan Albright, Director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, studied this too. He created a list of 306 widely circulated fake news sites and followed the lexica, just as PageRank was designed to do (Albright et al. 2017). Essentially Albright revealed through the hyperlinks that there had been a vast movement to manipulate PageRank’s popularity-based results to favor this subset of pages. Understanding how this is done is the key to breaking any illusion that the PageRank democracy is representative of popular opinion. Pages vote for one another by the amount and quality of hyperlinks, which means, in oversimplified terms, the creator of the link submits the vote. Albright’s experiment shows clearly that democracy can be rigged, or even automated. This subset contained 23,000 pages and 1.3 million hyperlinks. It is very unlikely these represent the popular vote of people making the pages, and even more unlikely that it resembles the popular opinion of the searching public. Add to this the more recent and increasing deployment of Artificial Intelligence to aid in content curation and the immediate creation of webpages that are included in search results, and it is clear that Brin’s and Page’s original ideas about organizing the Internet by either popularity or democracy are dead.

Facebook: Move Fast and Break Things

Hierarchies of information are big business, as Google has proven. Like traveling, the business of digital information is not in the destination. It’s the journey. Page visits are the blue ribbon for the web. The almighty click has stripped away any attention to content itself. Facebook has a famous sign that hangs in its office. It is big red lettering that says, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Indeed, the symbol of the company’s take on “Don’t be Evil.” Facebook was, for at least the four years following its launch, a community closed to advertisers. This meant that content circulated within the community by account holders, posting on their own behalf more or less. Sharing information this way, whether it was news articles, cat pictures, or political opinions, could be traced back to a user. When Facebook launched its Initial Public Stock Offering on May 18, 2012, the community-curated content dynamic broke. Facebook transformed its entire platform and mission from giving “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” into an advertising company “making the world more open and connected.” Under Meta, Facebook logs more than 2 billion daily active users (Dixon 2022). Facebook is popular for reasons that should be obvious by now; a cult of personality that so effectively brings like minds together with individualized pseudo-authority to “friend”, “like”, “unfollow”, “block.” This may be the source of the widespread success of content curation that has seated Meta among the top 10 most valuable companies in the world, but the content is no longer managed by the community of active users any more than the search results over at Google. The newsfeed now contains ads from outside the friend circle, and the ever-changing “Trending” section consists of popular news, selected by a concoction of user likes and shares, and Meta’s magic dust. What was once an exclusive friends network, with the “.edu” email address as its user criterion origin story, is now an advertiser-consumer matchmaking app. It is spelled out plainly in Meta’s Transparency Center:

Facebook’s goal is to make sure you see posts from the people, interests, and ideas that you find valuable, whether that content comes from people you’re already connected to or from those you may not yet know. When you open Facebook and see Feed in your Home tab, you experience a mix of “connected content” (e.g., content from the people you’re friends with or are following, Groups you’ve joined, and Pages you’ve liked) as well as “recommended content” (e.g., content we think you’ll be interested in from those you may want to know). We also show you ads that are tailored to you (Meta Platforms 2024).

As an aside, when auto-generating a citation for this webpage, the result is on point: “‘Log in or Sign up to View.’ n.d. Transparency.meta.com.”‌ In short, the introduction of advertisers into the closed community of Facebook has sparked the downward spiral that we are struggling to reverse. Advertisers inside the social circle means an exchange of data, but it is not a free exchange. The data flows overwhelmingly in one direction. As we converse, like and share, the advertiser listens. 

The Gated Community

As the leading two aggregators of unprecedented amounts of market research, these two companies effectively direct and manage what is accessible on the World Wide Web without having to take part in the ongoing battle for a neutral net. And, while the two companies gained credibility and user loyalty through long held outspoken advocacy of free and accessible information, their business models are now based almost exclusively on restriction. Users are contractually restricted to access only curated monetized content through their services, in exchange for opting in to a vast digital infrastructure of behavioral analytics. Most of the world accesses the Internet through Alphabet and Meta, having opted-in to participate as subjects of for-profit behavioral analytics, and we have been lured through their gateways on foundational promises of democracy and free information.

Despite these false promises, younger generations on social media may have never experienced a free Internet, where their clicks were not tracked, and we see the window for such a freedom actually shrinking further. ISPs have always been privy to our data, but have not been allowed to monetize it as the curators have. With the rollbacks on Net Neutrality protections, the ISPs could join the data free-for-all, but their entry is late in the game. Alphabet and Meta continue to expand the transactional design of their Internet, tightening the terms under which we all surf, and locking off the information they curate behind a login screen—the gated community.

Putting this together, everyday users must pay an ISP to access the Internet, then exchange personal data to search it, then log in to view and interact with one another on the most popular social media websites. There are still niche social and search companies that allow users to interact without the paywall, but the majority of users choose to pay the toll road to enter the gated community. Users still can choose to rent or purchase a domain in order to share their own intellectual property without having to grant permissions for the hosting party to monetize it, but so many users instead choose to post original content through their social media accounts, where the owners of those servers are within their users agreements to harvest and sell it.

The question of free space is just part of it. There is also the question of free information, which has been the main subject of this essay. When posting on social media, for example, we are led to believe that what we write is sent out to our friends, but we know that the property owner will decide that for us. Having a personal account on a social site is comparable to renting a house because it lets you be with your friends, but the landlord prohibits curtains, enters without asking, and sometimes takes your stuff. The restriction of information is at the discretion of the landlord, and there is no obligation, implied or written, that we have a role in this decision process. All information has restriction inherently, too. We know that if we click on a news essay, for instance, that publisher is under similar constraints. They must pay to let you enter their gate, come in their home and eat their food. A paywall is often how they do that, or agreeing to the cookies statement that pops up, or whitelisting to allow ads on your screen. The question emerges, if the information wasn’t free in newspapers, why do we expect it to become free on the Internet? In some ways, that’s a fair question, but what is unfair is the introduction of new gates to the community, each with their own tolls and taxes. It is not only the access point at which we arrive at the information. It is the service-oriented process of finding it. At one of the gates to the Internet community, you are asked, “what are you looking for?” The answer we give is the search query. You are not only given directions to the content (that would be the URL). We are given the door itself…the link directly to the information. The search engines do not promise to help us find the information. They promise that they have already found it for us. This has the makings of a utopia indeed, the world at our fingertips! But the search transaction is the exact opposite really. The queries deliver us to the information, not the information to us. The choice is narrowed down, organically we are told, so that we can choose from the very best sources related to our search. This is the trust we have in search. It is not that we used their service to find what we’re looking for within a myriad of information, it is that we were delivered to their preferred information based on the words we typed. That’s what targeting is.

It is safe to say that these companies have made the rules that suit their needs, and our choice is between their way or the highway. Opt-in culture is comparable to an entry fee at a movie theater, but you have to keep paying while you’re watching the movie. Given the backward progress of Net Neutrality, which may be an idea of the past, it is difficult to see a path that puts the freedoms of the everyday user over those of the ISPs and content curators. Though a solution that protects the everyday user’s freedom to use their public Internet feels quite out of reach at this time, it is at least worth declaring that there is one, and it is attainable, if only on the technical side. The solution to the problem is two-fold: First, the FCC can restore and extend privacy protections that were approved by the FCC in October 2016 but repealed under then chairman, Ajit Pai, in March 2017, however the cycle could continue if future chairpersons choose to roll them back again. Instead of limiting oversight power to the FCC, Congress can revisit The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act of 2022, and this has the potential to solidify Net Neutrality into law. Second, Net Neutrality should go beyond the ISP, into the domains, where the content curators monetize the clicks. ICANN already acts as a licenser in assigning domains, and so it can enforce as licenser in accordance with Net Neutrality law, which should include a standard for “basic service” for companies in the business of mass information dissemination.

For the first solution, it’s important to make a distinction between the end-user license agreements (EULA) and privacy policies. EULA are not mandatory by law, and terms of service are fairly broad and unregulated. The most common types are explicit (clickwrap) and implicit (browser wrap). EULAs are common on the web and ubiquitous in OS software and mobile apps. While equally hostile and unreadable to the end-user, it is more pressing that a solution be found within the privacy policy documents, as they must by law directly address data collection and use. Privacy laws are already subject to federal regulations, however there is almost no regulation in effect at this time. Further, a user has no option to opt-out. That option would mean that you choose not to use the service in any capacity. Considering the requirements from employers for e-mail, as the most obvious example, the forceful nature of opting-in to keep your job or do your homework reveals the high costs of the information access hierarchy. As mentioned, a gradual step toward protecting individual privacy was made by the FCC in 2016, and should be expanded. The Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules, (approved October 2016 then repealed 2017) separated the standard all-or-nothing Opt-in agreement into the following:

• Opt-in: ISPs are required to obtain affirmative “opt-in” consent from consumers to use and share sensitive information. The rules specify categories of information that are considered sensitive, which include precise geo-location, financial information, health information, children’s information, social security numbers, web browsing history, app usage history and the content of communications.
• Opt-out: ISPs would be allowed to use and share non-sensitive information unless a customer “opts-out.” All other individually identifiable customer information – for example, email address or service tier information – would be considered non-sensitive and the use and sharing of that information would be subject to opt-out consent, consistent with consumer expectations.
• Exceptions to consent requirements: Customer consent is inferred for certain purposes specified in the statute, including the provision of broadband service or billing and collection. For the use of this information, no additional customer consent is required beyond the creation of the customer-ISP relationship.

Obviously, these rules aren’t broad enough to shake us free from Alphabet’s and Meta’s information headlock, but it is the place to start. The ability to select from tiers of service might sound problematic, since it is actually adding another hierarchy on top of the hyperlink hierarchy Google has put in place for us. However, the tiers of service has an immediate and measurable improvement to all-or-nothing opt-in privacy agreements because, like initialing each page of a legal document to indicate it has been read, incremental agreement options mean more opportunities to stop and think. Alphabet and Meta have made improvements to their privacy policies, at least in transparency, but both companies retain full power to restrict content from those that will not allow their personal data to be sold. It is still, in essence, a strong-arm agreement. Regulation could ensure that access to any site is independent of that site’s own policy document. In other words, a universal agreement that grants access to all sites on the World Wide Web.

For the second solution we must create and enforce a standard for “basic service” for companies in the business of mass information dissemination. Given that the underlying infrastructure of the World Wide Web has always depended on public funding, it would be consistent with the investment to regulate mass information disseminators that utilize the infrastructure for private profits. There is precedent for this. Newton Minow proposed that networks have an obligation to serve the public interest in his famous “Vast Wasteland” speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961. Specifically, a universal set of “basic services” must be publicly accessible with a default “opt-out” privacy agreement. For example, a person not logged in to any account could utilize Google’s search engine with the inherent agreement that their search habits may not be shared or sold. Some may argue further, that under a default opt-out agreement the data should not even be logged.

The enforcement model, too, is in place. Indirectly, the FCC must establish “basic services” for mass information disseminators and work directly with ICANN to enforce it. In simplest terms, the information contained behind the gates of these companies must be accessible without entering. Facebook’s login page is the most striking example. It is a moat around a castle, and the only drawbridge is your login. ICANN, which has the authority to restrict domains for registration violations, can be expanded beyond trademark and general uniformity of the domain names. The organization’s internal governance structure needs modification if it is to become an enforcing body. It currently consists of “governments and international treaty organizations, root server operators, groups concerned with the Internet’s security and the ‘at large’ community, meaning average Internet users” (ICANN 2014). When it was established in partnership with the U.S. government, it included a mandate that it must operate in a bottom-up and democratic manner. However, ICANN has stated repeatedly in public meetings that input from a global community is not amenable to the Board. In addition, ICANN has not conducted its “Conflicts of Interest and Ethics Practices Review” since 2012, and gives no indication that it intends to schedule another review (ICANN 2023).

Due to its impartial governance structure, under the proposed solution ICANN should remain limited to the management of the domain register, but could be directed by the FCC to restrict domains when for-profit mass information disseminators would violate a “basic services” mandate. It should be said, at this time, that this proposal does not take lightly the role of FCC oversight historically and looking to the future. It is crucial that the FCC return to its charge of regulating the venues of public information, far from which it has strayed.

Dr. Adam Dean is the Program Director for Communication and Media at LMU. He holds a BA in Media Studies from Penn State University, an MA in Radio, Television and Film from the University of North Texas, and a PhD in Media, Art and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University. Before joining the faculty at LMU Dr. Dean taught Digital Media Arts at Barry University in Miami while working professionally as an Adobe Certified Expert for CBS and Univision. His research and professional work focus on digital democracy and include creative projects that bring students and community partners together to produce documentaries, podcasts and other educational media.

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[i]                 On October 29, 1969, Leonard Kleinrock successfully transmitted the first message over the ARPANET from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute. The message was “LO” while the intended message was “LOGIN”, interrupted by a computer crash.

This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.

There Are No Good Games: Dismantling Canonicity in Videogame Studies

Rian C. Johnson

Broken Machines: An Ugly Ontology of the Videogame 

Videogames are bad objects.^[1] They proliferate hidden structures of control, concentrated power, and inequity (Golumbia 2009b, 154). They are vehicles for the ideology of neoliberal capitalism (Jagoda 2020, 44). They are the “paradigmatic media of empire,” and they operate as the “ideological avatar of play,” insisting on a correct way to play that isn’t even really play at all (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009; Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 281). They promulgate rhetorics of destruction, conquest, exploitation, colonization, and violence (Mukherjee 2018; Harrer 2018; Dooghan 2019). They are a medium steeped in misogyny and the objectification and aestheticization of women (Gray, Voorhees, and Vossen 2018; D. J. Leonard and Kishonna L. Gray 2018; DeWinter and Kocurek 2017). They minstrelize people of color when not erasing them entirely (Everett and Watkins 2008; D. J. Leonard and Kishonna L. Gray 2018; D. Leonard 2003). And they are inextricably embedded in the American military-industrial complex (Ivory 2015).

Videogame culture is bad; it is “dark” and always has been (Paul 2018, 2). Popular videogame culture proselytizes the most toxic logic of the videogame in all its noxious glory. From booth babes to in-game harassment to eSports to GamerGate to the racist frenzy that forced a Japanese politician to declare official neutrality towards a Canadian-produced Samurai game in the Summer of 2024, videogame culture is toxic to everyone who sets foot outside of its punitive magic circle (Cryer 2024). The culture is the circle, and the circle is toxic. The magic circle of popular videogame culture is the proverbial embodiment of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s poisonous swamp, and like “hardcore” logic of Miyazaki’s Souls-like games, it reproduces the hidden hierarchy created through pseudo-meritocracy that ensures those who begin on top remain on top (Paul 2018, 13).

The videogame industry is very, very bad. Born in the laboratories of Brookhaven and MIT, it reached maturity amid the capitalist parable of Atari that began with dorm room piracy, snowballed into the Magnavox vs. Atari lawsuit, and ended under concrete in the New Mexico desert. From Atari to Nintendo to Blizzard, the development of videogames has been inseparable from the exploitation, harassment, and abuse of workers: fan laborers, outsourced grunt coders, and white-collar American women in Irvine, California, alike (Bulut 2020). The videogame industry is both an arm of the American military entertainment complex and an agent of warfare in its own right (Milburn 2018, 173; Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009, 98–105).

Even videogame scholarship has its problems. The gendered undertones of the Narratology vs. Ludology debates, a tendency to smooth over unseemly edges, a longstanding aversion to politics, ludo-orientalist and techno-orientalist tendencies, the murky conflation of game development and critical game studies, even a cursory survey of the field indicates that it is far from tidy. Despite this mire, the field is also always attempting perpetual normalizations in the form of theories, methods, actions, and, indeed, canons. And yet, lest negativity be misconstrued as hatred, as I write this critique, like so many others, I am simultaneously producing works arguing for the liberatory, radical, anamorphic, ameliorative, or at the very least, harmless potential in videogames. I argue, however, that if videogames offer us any chance or experience of liberation from the oppressive weight of late capitalism, it is as a glitch, a bug, a tactical action informed either by hybridity, a reparative reading, or an oppositional gaze. Left to their own devices, videogames will not bring about a revolution; they will dehumanize global workforces through a simulation fever of ludic optimization.

By nature, videogames are part and parcel of computation. Videogames are, after all, just software. If, as Tara Fickle poses in the Race Card, Eurocentrist and white supremacist cultural frameworks position Eastern cultures as ludic mirrors of Western culture, then videogames are the ludic mirror of functionalist software (Fickle 2019, 113–37). They are one and the same, operating under different mythologies. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux suggest that if one gets close enough to the game, it ceases to be one (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 287). Up close, all is reduced to computation.

David Golumbia wrote that “computation is not a neutral technology; it is a means for expanding top-down, hierarchical power, for concentrating rather than distributing” (Golumbia 2009b, 151). It is perhaps easy to imagine macro-level computational infrastructures striating and concentrating power through systemic mechanisms of economic, political, and social control. However, it’s harder to imagine the logic of computationalism at play in our everyday micro-encounters with computer technology, especially the kind disguised as play. If I was once told that Golumbia was not really a videogames scholar, it is because he was a scholar of computation and software, the latter of which videogames are but one variety, like word processors, web browsers, and media players.

As software, videogames operate as mechanisms for organizing power (and often towards the end of producing labor).^[2] On games, Golumbia wrote that “within a wide variety of computer games, one can see a process exactly isomorphic to such software applications, in which quantified resources are maximized so that the player can win the game.” These games, he contended, “reveal exactly the oligarchical-monopolist, Statist, even fascist politics at issue throughout the computerized world” (Golumbia 2009b, 135). Videogames both materially concentrate their operational powers at the hidden level of the code and offer a simulation of power concentration to players through an interface essentialism that obscures everything that the player does not control. Like computers, videogames are inherently ideological objects. They are immersive, interactive, fictional worlds that invite simulational, speculative, and parasocial thinking on the part of players and, at the same time, mask the mechanics of their own functionality and material composition, projecting outward to the surface only that which is desirable, accessible, pleasurable, fun, interesting, exciting, or entertaining when what lies beneath is always, and only, binary code.

If videogames are indeed bad, can they be fixed and made better? Can the videogame be redeemed? Can it be reborn anew, as it should have been, as factions of the independent and avant-garde games movements strive towards? No, nor should they be. Every attempt to reform the videogame reproduces in some other iteration what was problematic to begin with, simply shuffling its contents around and forcing the form’s most toxic ooze out of a different orifice. All we can do as game scholars and game players is confront them as they are and accept them for it. This is, of course, a monumental undertaking. Within the scope of this work, however, is one argument that I hope will serve as a small but necessary cog in the greater mechanism of critical videogame studies.

If we are to acknowledge videogames as bad objects, we must stop trying to salvage our favorites among them, imbuing them with the nullifying powers of aestheticization in the market economy of cultural capital. We must cease construction on and dismantle the foundations that have already been laid for the “canon” of videogames that implicitly shapes videogame studies. Multiple scholars warn of the increasing stagnation, narrowness, and coalescence of game studies (Gekker 2021; Deterding 2017; Murray 2018; Phillips 2020; Paul 2018). They are correct. To begin to remedy this pressing threat, we must surrender our attempts at mimicking the cohesion of other fields of textual study in desperate attempts at legitimization or separatism. Despite the best efforts of videogame studies’ most prominent scholars to prevent the field’s “colonization” by literature, film, or visual studies, it has ultimately colonized itself anyway (E. Aarseth 2001).

Almost twenty-five years after the discipline’s formal opening ceremony, videogame studies has colonized itself by promoting the hierarchical, bourgeois, and ultimately counterproductive economic logic of cultural capital. By arguing fervently for the legitimization of the videogame as an artistic, aesthetic object imbued with cultural capital, the videogame has been not only divorced from its origin as software but from the problematics of computationalism writ large. The result is the implementation of a logic of canonicity within videogame studies, culminating in the uneven allocation of cultural capital and the imposition of yet another layer of hierarchy upon objects that are always already incarnations of concentrated, hierarchical power.

I contend that this hyperconcentration of hierarchy has created an intellectual choke point. Only the deconstruction, dismantling, and destruction of the extant canon of videogames can correct already-established trajectories of concern within videogame studies and cultivate a freer, more diverse, and more productive future for the study of videogames. A game studies discourse grounded in the deeply flawed nature of all videogames, can more easily describe their reparative potential than one couched in terms of “good” games, “bad” games, “real” games, and “junk” games.

Culture, industry, and scholarly toxicity aside, videogames are still tricky, “grotesque” objects. They are profoundly unstable commodities and objects.  Like all new media, particularly those associated with analog gaming (and thus also with gambling), the videogame was born into a marginalized and subordinate status within the popular media landscape (Kocurek 2016). Outside of their hegemonic origins in the political and technological realms, videogames have an infamously low standing in the social and cultural hierarchy. Even if, as so many critics have argued, the videogame has or will soon achieve cultural and artistic legitimacy, this legitimacy is still largely meaningless outside of academic, industry, and entertainment gaming cultures. It should, moreover, already be clear that we cannot expect videogame culture to improve the medium’s standing in general culture.

Dismissal, denigration, and disinterest in videogames as a medium still pervades Western cultural sentiment. In 2023, 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first human recorded to “beat” Tetris, a typically unending and thus unbeatable game (Mohtasham 2024). This accomplishment is remarkable in terms of gaming as a hobby, sport, practice, and field of study and made more so by the roughly forty years between the game’s creation and the event. One would be hard-pressed to think of many other games, particularly as ubiquitous as Tetris, that required forty years of global effort to beat. And yet, Gibson’s accomplishment was overshadowed in the news cycle by a single snide remark from a Sky News anchor three weeks later (Rogers 2024).^[3] John Walker’s Kotaku article from October of 2024 also iterates this point: Walker asks one simple and critical question about the failure of a 400-million-dollar game, “Sony’s Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn’t it news?” (Walker 2024). Indeed, outside of Kotaku and other popular gaming presses, it wasn’t. However, the news cycle at that same moment in time did focus on a 200-million-dollar box office flop. ^[4]

A lack of cultural capital is not the only way videogames have a unique relationship to the dominant culture. Like film, the history of videogames is filled with legends of lost, damaged, or unfinished games. Lost media is a feature rather than a bug in the production and circulation of the videogame, which is native to digitized late capitalism. From development to production, games have a “limited lifespan” enforced by interindustry apathy towards data preservation, techno-industrial practices of planned obsolescence, and the generational cycle of console development (Newman 2012). This ephemerality is reinforced by economic systems of release, trade-in and used sales, intellectual property laws, region-locking, digitally native releases and updates, the politics of backward compatibility, and finally (outside even of the control of publishers, manufacturers, or capitalism itself) bit rot. While bit rot and data discarding may be the only empirically objective factors currently contributing to the lifespan of the videogame, their effect is exacerbated by the industry. Videogames are a mortal medium.

I am not arguing that this dismissal, disinterest, or resignation to decay is correct, good, or culturally beneficial. I am in firm agreement with Shira Chess and Mia Consalvo’s sentiment that “the future of media studies is game studies,” not because of some unique, essential power of the videogame to eclipse and supplant all other media, but because “as convergence culture becomes less of a special case and more of an everyday reality, the medium itself matters less” (Chess and Consalvo 2022, 160). Rather, I argue that the marginalization of video games as a form has not ended in mainstream culture, at least not yet. No matter how many canons have been constructed by games scholars, journalists, developers, or archivists, and how many treatises on games-as-art those same demographics publish, the game has not been elevated to an equal cultural evaluation as other, older mediums, including those that historically faced the same hurdles such as the novel, the film, or the television series. As such, these processes have accomplished little and have only limited knowledge production within game studies.

I can’t deny that, in my day-to-day life, a videogame canon is appealing. Subjectively, perhaps the driving impetus of this article stems from my own disagreement with those games that have been deemed canonical within videogame studies. However, it is by being earnest about such sentiments that the more significant issue becomes visible. As John Vanderhoef argues, following Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital, videogame canons are the product of “taste cultures,” in which the taste of dominant groups shapes the perceived importance, legitimacy, and material value of individual cultural artifacts characterized as videogames (Vanderhoef 2012). Moreover, as Glas and Von Vught demonstrate through practical experience, these dominant groups are almost always white, male, cis-gendered, and heterosexual (Glas and van Vught 2019, 9). While I do not meet all of these criteria, I meet most of them. Thus, I must also recognize that the imposition of my own fantasy canon on the field at large would be nothing more than the slightest alteration of who exactly the dominant party is. Instead of canon reformation, I argue for self-awareness. I argue for the acknowledgment that it is not the current canon that is bad or even current games that are bad, but that these problematics or “badness” are inherent attributes of the videogame. We must instead work with them rather than fruitlessly attempt to breed out these sine qua non traits.

In short, this negativity is not an argument for the obliteration of the videogame in some formalist eugenics any more than it is a call for the obliteration of any and all media that bear some problematic origin (as so many do). Rather, it is a reminder that the videogame was born in a network of power, politics, economics, and Empire, and acts of reclamation, redemption, subversion, or even radical liberation attempted with or through the videogame must neither set aside nor willfully ignore that origin. If we are to continue to study videogames, and if they are to be recovered, redeemed, or even simply neutralized, we must acknowledge their faults.

The Invisible (Master) Hand: Of Canons and Videogames

The current videogame studies canon is a fluid collection of works imbued with exceptional levels of cultural capital, and, like all canons, it does not really exist. There is no stone tablet engraved with the words World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, EverQuest, Tetris, or the Sims preserved in the basement of the Strong Museum of Play, nor even the Library of Congress. The videogame canon is, as John Guillory wrote of the literary canon, “an imaginary totality of works” (Guillory 1993, 30). And yet, “what does have a concrete location as a list…is not the canon, but the syllabus,” and “every construction of a syllabus institutes once again the process of canon formation” (Guillory 1993, 30–31). Like literary syllabi, game studies syllabi certainly exist, and the games on them are, more often than not, canonical games by virtue of their citational, instructional, and analytic repetition. Game studies, like film and literature, shapes its canon through material acts of scholarship, research, theorization, and dissemination. Jonathan Frome and Paul Martin consider the five games listed above canonical through a disproportionately high citation frequency in the two most prominent game studies journals (Frome and Martin 2019, 6). Published in 2019, Frome and Martin’s study is profoundly limited in that it only surveys two journals, disregarding published monographs, edited volumes, and not exclusively game-focused journals. However, even in this microcosmic analysis, evidence of disproportionate citation and, thus, canonization is immediately evident. In 2017, two years before Frome and Martin put the word “canon” to print, Coavoux, Boutet, and Zabban gestured towards the presence of a canon in videogame studies. Yet, they argued against it without ever actually using the word, instead decrying the harmful limitations of “selective focus on a few particular games” (Coavoux, Boutet, and Zabban 2017, 573). While I agree with Coavoux et al. in positionality, I insist on calling a canon a canon, because only by doing so can we access the depths of its potential harm.

If videogames are inherently problematic, so are cultural canons. Canons are hegemonies that confer cultural dominance upon a particular collection of artifacts. Hegemonies, however, are not static. Canons are lived hegemonies, and “a lived hegemony is always a process…it is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities with specific changing pressures and limits” (Williams 2009, 112). They necessitate relationships of domination and subordination, and the dominant, in this case, is manifest in what is culturally accorded the status of art or literature, creating the familiar dichotomy of high and low culture or the distinction between art and culture (Williams 2009, 110). As Williams suggests and Liam Dee expands on in Against Art and Culture, “art and culture are thus clearly the concepts of human expression, transcending rational or natural dictates, but they have an important distinction. One makes this expression extraordinary [art]. The other makes it ordinary [culture]” (Williams 2009, 145; Dee 2018, 15). That is, art and culture are the same thing inside different rhetorical frames, and thus why Dee refuses the separation between them and instead writes against “art/culture” as a dyad “to make explicit the shared qualities of ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’…and make clear that I am not referring to ‘skill’…nor an amorphous ‘way of life’” (Dee 2018, 17).

One of the cultural frames that enforces this false dichotomy and hegemonic relationship is that of the canon. For John Guillory, “the problem of what is called canon formation is best understood as a problem in the constitution and distribution of cultural capital, or more specifically, a problem of access to the means of literary production and consumption” (Guillory 1993, ix). This is simply another means of describing Williams’ hegemony in which certain objects are attributed higher values of cultural capital than others and accordingly venerated, elevated, and distributed in controlled or institutional contexts. Ultimately, canonicity is intrinsically a problem of inclusivity and diversity, for “canonization of a work is nothing but the affirmation of the social values expressed in the work” even when that affirmation is hidden beneath a veneer of artistic aestheticization. As such, the social values expressed in canonical videogames (and indeed all videogames as pieces of software) are hierarchy, exclusion, and dominance (Guillory 1993, 270).

While Guillory is not explicit in attributing the intentionality of canon formation to any individual or system, I would like to posit here that the process of canonization that has been churning in game studies for the last twenty years has been enacted through what Simone Winko theorizes as an “invisible hand.” Hans-Joachim Backe translates and synthesizes Winko’s theory as “a process in which countless individual (micro-level) actions—which may have altogether different goals—will result, in conjunction, in the (macro-level) phenomenon of canon formation” (Backe 2015, 11). In this light, canon formation is not enacted singularly or with necessary intentionality. Certainly, scholars’ selection and valuation of texts are intentional, but their usage in the canonization process is not. Canons are constructed through evaluation, and for literature, “evaluations can influence the act of writing either beforehand…or during the writing process” and are made by “literary mediators…television and radio producers…literary critics, scholars, and teachers” with the latter operating in the mode described above by the decision “to give the text more or less space” or “other works whose values have already been defined are used as points of comparison” (von Heydebrand and Winko 2010, 225). In what follows, I would like to briefly survey three significant moments of interaction between this invisible hand and the game studies canon that served to establish, legitimize, and reformat it over the nearly four decades since the field’s foundation. These moments are, chronologically, the beginning of videogame studies, the height of the videogame legitimation debate, and the recent (ironic) dominance of “independently developed” games. 

In the primordial moment, 1985 and 1986, respectively, Mary Ann Buckles and Brenda Laurel separately and coincidentally completed the first videogame studies dissertations long before videogame studies existed. When Buckles and Laurel were researching and writing about interactive narratives within videogames, they were doing so within the German Literature and Theatre departments, respectively. Working without precedent, they established the first approaches to videogame analysis, and, with them, which videogames provided the most productive analytical fodder. Thus, they also established which games would become early canonical texts.

Buckles’ dissertation is a close reading of the storied text-based role-playing game Adventure. In her introduction, Buckles delineates her area of study, distinguishing Adventure from contemporary arcade games: “Let me first emphasize what Adventure and other works of interactive fiction are not: they are not video arcade games. They do not resemble games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, or Pac-Man, which require good hand-eye co-ordination and quick physical reactions” (Buckles 1985, 6). Notably, Buckles does not disvalue “video arcade games” or place them in a value hierarchy with “interactive fiction” but rather creates a taxonomy based on the skills and actions required to play.

Laurel creates a different taxonomy that, while divided along similar lines as Buckles’, introduces an element of hierarchy in its teleological orientation. Laurel’s primary area of study is what she calls “interactive fantasy systems,” which produce “interactive dramas,” a “first-person experience within a fantasy world, in which the user may create, enact, and observe a character whose choices and actions affect the course of events just as they might in a play” (Laurel 1986, 10–11). Her two primary examples are Zork! and Star Raiders, which both allow “the user to participate in the fantasy world as an active character” (Laurel 1986, 86). Arcade games are characterized as “antecedents to interactive fantasy” or “poetic interactive works” that generate affective experiences for the player but do not integrate the player into the world (Laurel 1986, 19–20). While Laurel does not position this class of “poetic interactive works” as oppositional to or less than “interactive dramas,” the connotation of antecedent implicitly argues for an evolutionary view of games in which the latter represent the more evolved, more complex and more capable (and thus more valuable) form of the former, creating a hierarchy between them.

The establishment of both systems of taxonomy fragmented the vast body of media called video or computer games. From the starting point of Buckles’ analysis, Adventure has become a canonical text, representative of the literary qualities of the videogame.^[5] As videogame studies, videogame history, videogame culture, and videogame development influence one another in a digital feedback loop, Adventure has remained relevant and briefly achieved prominence once again with the release and subsequent studies of the serially released 2012-2020 and acclaimed game Kentucky Route Zero which directly references and indirectly alludes to Adventure.^[6] Conversely, while Buckles and Laurel may have purposefully omitted (and articulated their reasons for doing so) Space Invaders from their studies, it has hardly been omitted from the subsequent forty years of game studies. Returning to Frome and Martin’s survey, Space Invaders was cited 34 times, ranking 20^th out of 38 in 2019 (Frome and Martin 2019, 6). In this, the game has come to stand as synonymous with both the arcade genre and a particular moment in video game history.^[7] Moreover, the ludic turn in videogame studies in the early 2000s emphasized exactly the kind of highly structured, ludus games that Space Invaders represent as if in direct response to Buckles and Laurel’s emphasis on gamic fiction.^[8] A direct correlation between Adventure and contemporary videogame studies is as clearly recognizable as its inverse: the omission of arcade games from these original studies, and the ludic fixation in early organized game studies.

What I hope to bring attention to here in this first moment is the process through which games assume and maintain prolonged and disproportionate relevance within game studies over the course of decades, rather than Mary Ann Buckles and Brenda Laurel’s personal responsibility for the field’s subsequent trajectory. It matters that these games still receive citations in game studies survey texts when innumerable other early, influential, or impactful games do not.^[9] However, no two games are alike, and this delicate negotiation of relevance shapes the ways we play, think about, study, analyze, and promulgate videogames and their study. There is a parallel universe in which the team at Cardboard Computer who developed Kentucky Route Zero made a game that takes place not around the Mammoth Cave National Park on which the world of Adventure was based, but in and around the highly fantastic Great Underground Empire of Zork! This is the power of the invisible hand that shapes canonization through individual evaluations.

A second crucial moment in the formulation of a videogame studies canon comes in the late 2000s and early 2010s in the form of popular and scholarly legitimation discourse. In Felan Parker’s 2017 article for Games and Culture, “Canonizing Bioshock,” Parker untangles the structural and rhetorical actions that made 2K’s 2007 first-person shooter Bioshock the quintessential entry in the game studies canon. Parker argues that Bioshock’s rapid incorporation into the canon of videogame studies coincided with a different moment in videogame culture: the apex of the legitimization discourse, a discourse that has plagued videogame studies to various degrees since Laurel and Buckles’ time as doctoral students (Parker 2018, 83).^[10] This discourse has always been predicated on the artificial dichotomy between “art” and “culture.” Were videogames doomed to be forever considered popular or “low” culture? Could they be art? Should they be art? Which games are art? And which games definitely are not art? These questions were voiced loudly by oft-cited works like Aaron Smuts’ “Are Videogames Art?” and Grant Tavinor’s The Art of Videogames. In both scholarly and popular culture, this phenomenon was most evident in what Parker called “Ebert versus Games,” in which, between 2005 and 2010, film critic Roger Ebert became the representative of “the prejudice against digital games as art,” disparaging the artistic legitimacy of videogames in his film reviews and on his personal blog (Parker 2018, 80).

The question of whether videogames were or could be art inspired a moment of mutual panic for scholarly and popular videogame critics. This duality is a process accounted for by Winko and von Heydebrand’s schema and is evident in the canonization of Bioshock as described by Parker. Bioshock was used to produce a “special class of AAA game that is expected to excel commercially but has a distinction from other popular favorites and best sellers by the grace of its supposed artistic quality and canonical status,” known familiarly as the prestige game (Parker 2017, 740).^[11] This definition purposefully conflates popular and scholarly consumers because, for these games to achieve the status of prestige and warrant canonization, they must be commercially, culturally, and critically successful. This formula produces games that feature dense textual experiences and raise philosophical, ethical, political, social, or cultural questions without limiting market shares by remaining “neutral enough in…politics to be widely marketable” (Parker 2017, 747). “Attractive, marketable gameplay is seen as a kind of delivery mechanism for the game’s highfalutin subject matter, and in this sense, the prestige game purports to be both more entertaining and more effective than other ‘message’ games” (Parker 2017, 748). That is, Bioshock and other prestige games juggle accessibility, entertainment, “literary” value, and novelty, culminating in an experience that Parker argues “is designed from the ground up to invite sustained reflection, debate, and criticism” and thus operates as a justification for “the whole enterprise of games criticism and scholarship” (Parker 2017, 751–52).

The traits that render Bioshock legitimate art and warrant its canonization skew strongly to the technological and economic. The game includes “attractive, marketable gameplay” and requires the newly evolved technological capabilities of the seventh generation of videogame consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as the ability of developers to anticipate and respond to the needs of broad audiences. As Grant Tavinor writes in The Art of Videogames, “the stunning representational advances may also provide one of the most compelling reasons to see videogames as a form of art” (Tavinor 2009, 70). Similarly, Smuts considers art to be those games that meet the following conditions: “integrated narratives, graphics, nearing photo-realism and elaborate three-dimensional worlds with rich and detailed textures” (Smuts 2005). We can see a clear correlation between technological capability and perceived artistic legitimacy. Notably, the games chosen as art by both Tavinor and Smuts, Grand Theft Auto IV, Max Payne, Halo, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and, of course, Bioshock, are all games that, while demonstrating cutting-edge technological capabilities, were also exceedingly successful on the commercial market. It should come as no surprise that these are hardly attributes that legitimize other cultural artifacts as “art.” After all, art films are collectively imagined to be the most inaccessible (and often unappealing) of films, and literary fiction is much less often profitable in the book and adaptation market than genre fiction. It matters that the attributes of “prestige videogames” are counterintuitive to other mediums’ conceptions of prestige. That these attributes are promoted and valued by popular videogame culture should be a point of, if not worry, then inquiry to videogame studies.

These prestige games, as marked by their success in the marketplace and culture, are ideologically aligned with the dominant logic of computation and the oozing toxicity it produces within popular “hardcore” videogame culture. It is also these games that were used within academic and popular contexts to nullify any lingering arguments for the potential illegitimacy of videogames as art. Scholars arguing for the artistic legitimacy of videogames positioned themselves in opposition to social sciences research on potential correlations between videogames and violent or antisocial behavior, put succinctly by Liam Dee in Against Art and Culture, in that “the pathology of the obsessive gamer is such that computer game addiction is recognized as a mental addiction, while poetry addiction is not” (Dee 2018, 206). To finally move beyond this discourse, videogames must be legitimized as art, for as Dee argues, “once an image is deemed aesthetic, it is abstracted from the representational hurley-burley, no longer treated as a document of reality,” which permits the aesthetic image as art to bypass sociological concerns and discourses of obscenity (Dee 2018, 68). This is not to say that I believe in a narrow or reductive relationship between videogames, violence, or addiction as the social scientists of the day were investiating or that games scholars should not play or study Bioshock because it happens to be a favorite title of “hardcore” gaming culture and the reactionary Internet bigots and trolls “hardcore” gaming culture contains. Rather, I argue that the conversion of culture to art is an established remedy to such concerns. As art, neither a text’s content nor popular fandom can be used against it. This remedy is made all the more appealing by the fact that so many videogame scholars can be described, as Simon Deterding does, “as aca/fans who turn their passion into a research profession, defending their lifestyle through research that defuses moral panics and elevates gaming as a valuable cultural practice”(Deterding 2017, 525). Yet, this solution to the crisis of legitimation is ultimately harmful, concretizing and reduplicating some of video games’ worst aspects.

But, is it possible these problems are exclusive to AAA games? Is there a form of game that has separated itself from the poisonous swamp of the mainstream games industry?  Perhaps the solution is simply to canonize different games as the “ludologists” once did to avoid the domination of the field by narrative and text heavy games like Adventure and Myst. Perhaps upon the release of Bioshock: Infinite, with its ludic stagnancy, implicit racism, and questionable political commentary, the problems in these new canonical texts, like those before them, would float to the discursive surface. This scenario could then allow for corrective actions without sacrificing the newfound artistic legitimacy of the videogame (Parker 2017, 753–55). This has happened over the last decade or so in game studies, in which a new dichotomy rivaling that of ludology and narratology has emerged: that of mainstream and independent (indie) gaming. It is this confrontation that emerges as the third and most recent moment of canonization.

The advent of indie games has come with benefits, including greater insight into abstract procedural rhetorics, the trickle-down ideological effects of binary logic in computing, increased probes into and criticism of dominant gaming cultures, and a more welcoming venue for marginalized scholars to enter and thrive within game studies. That indie games offer salvation from the hellish mire of mainstream gaming is an explicit sentiment, unlike the presence of a canon. In the 2022 special edition of Critical Studies in Media and Communications dedicated to the future of game studies, Amanda L. L. Cullen et al. argues that “it is also the role of game studies to fight for the legitimization of creators who do not engage with the games industry in normative fashions,” ultimately working towards “making queer games a sustainable alternative” to mainstream gaming (Cullen et al. 2022, 203). In this scenario, we see queer used almost synonymously for independent, for it is posed as oppositional to the mainstream. The reader must assume Cullen’s “queer” games are not merely the inclusion of diverse identities in the newest $250 million Dragon Age game but the independent. In videogame studies, the subaltern speaks through itch.io.

The veneration of the indie game as an alternative to mainstream AAA games imbues the indie game itself with a level of ontological benevolence that should immediately set off alarms. In fixating on indie games as a social good, one sees metaphysical reorientation that extrapolates more from legitimate art’s cultural function than gamers’ potential to accumulate cultural capital. As Cullen et al. conclude their argument for non-normative creators, their definition becomes apparent in their desire to look towards “creators who are making games and content for non-monetary practices” (Cullen et al. 2022, 203). Despite this, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux      rightly characterize indie games as a concretized “genre” of videogames that are “games about games” (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 28–29). And the games these indie games are about are, more often than not, the “mainstream” games to which they are positioned as alternatives (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 31–32). On the level of creative production, indie games are created through the cannibalization and regurgitation of the mainstream, not its opposite regardless of the intentionality of their production.

This is, in effect, the sort of “mystical bullshit” that Liam Dee argues still “dominates” the concept of art itself, in which “creative expression is seen as special and wonderful precisely because there is a non-creative quotidian for it to be contrasted with” (Dee 2018, 3; 24). The quotidian in question is, of course, day-to-day existence under capitalism. In art, however, “even when commercial relationships are explicit, there are many strategies that are undertaken to make it seem that commerce is not what our culture is really about and that, in fact, it is anti-commercial” (Dee 2018, 114).  When Cullen et al. and others praise the indie game for its ability to shirk the economics of the marketplace and instead free the artistic vision of the creator, they transpose onto videogames the bourgeois logic of literary hierarchy that begets canons in the first place. As Raymond Williams explained,

Art is a kind of production which has to be seen as separate from the dominant bourgeois productive norm: the making of commodities. It has, then, in fantasy, to be separated from ‘production’ altogether, described by the new term ‘creation’; distinguished from its own material processes; distinguished, finally, from other products of its own kind or closely related kinds—‘art’ from ‘non-art’; ‘literature’ from ‘para-literature’ or ‘popular literature; ‘culture’ from mass ‘culture’ (Williams 2009, 154).

Or, perhaps, Indie Game from AAA Game.

Little exemplifies this problem better than Melissa Kagen’s resounding critique of the production and representational logic of the former indie darling Eastshade. Kagen argues that the game’s creator, Danny Weinbaum, “threads the needle between presenting himself as the visionary artist he is…and humble laborer” and that Weinbaum is not alone in this rhetoric of self-sacrifice for artistry amongst indie developers (Kagen 2022, 60). What is really happening “in this paradigm [in which] successful independent game development consists of a complicated cocktail of work, luck, and affect” is the possession of “enough privilege to survive precarity and the promise of overcoming it through hard work, patience, and (crucially) the subjugation of both personal needs and artistic vision in deference to player/consumers” (Kagen 2022, 62-63). In totality, Eastshade is “a fairy tale of late capitalist precarity,” in which “twenty-first-century ideologies and prejudices…make sense to have and do no harm. They aren’t underhanded, racist, or backstabbing, and they result in a gorgeous experience where everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts” (Kagen 2022, 63; 56).

“Everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts” just as easily describes the now-canonical indie game Stardew Valley, which possesses a similar production narrative of the bootstrapping auteur in developer Eric Barone.^[12] In Stardew Valley, the player experiences the quotidian of small-scale agriculture in a contemporary village in a simulacral Euramerica, farming, managing livestock, retailing crops, and marrying townsfolk. The game has been nearly universally acclaimed and ushered in a new wave of non-mimetic farming simulators, which are indeed the games that, as an indie game, Stardew Valley is about on a metatextual level.

Stardew Valley is a quintessential indie game. It is emblematic of the manner in which “indie games circulate as a form of cultural imperialism that both colonizes profitable forms of independent production and sanitizes them for mass consumption” and which “reduces all independent development to this particular aesthetic and mechanic genre of videogames and also reduces all independent developers to those white, Noth American men able to make a living developing games” (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 33). Like Eastshade, “Stardew Valley may appear anti-capitalist and environmentalist in its invocation of a slow, community-oriented life that leaves the office cubicle behind. The gameplay…suggests a different attitude” (Jagoda 2020, 68). Patrick Jagoda argues that this different attitude is the neoliberal ideology underpinning all videogames, indie or mainstream, problematic or ameliorative. For Jagoda, “Stardew Valley is something more than a representation of neoliberal life: it is a participatory training ground for the types of processes, modes of thinking, and habits necessary to survive and thrive within—and in many active senses to build—a neoliberal lifeworld” (Jagoda 2020, 69). And, as Golumbia once wrote, “a more apt name,” for the state of the contemporary world under computationalism itself “might be ‘neoliberalism” (Golumbia 2009b, 144; Jagoda 2020, 13).

Indie games may appear to provide a break from the dominant concerns of mainstream gaming, such as technological development, homogeneity, conquest, and heroics, and that delicate balance of difficulty and accessibility that makes for a respectable prestige title. However, on a sublimated level, they replicate the same underlying ideologies of pseudo-meritocratic neoliberalism, bourgeois cultural hierarchy, and artistry while obscuring the harmful realities of the videogame as a medium. Even when the invisible hand attempts to correct itself, it cannot escape the systems that animate it in the first place. The only way out of the double bind is to get outside of it. To do so, we must acknowledge that the issues we take with some games are present at some level in all. This is to say, Stardew Valley is not special. It is not special either as a beacon of cozy comfort amidst the dominance of the epic and brutal conquests of mainstream gaming or as a reaffirmation of the neoliberal capitalist world order. Under a system of canonicity in scholarship, when only touchstone texts are ever given complete critical treatment, both our praise and critique of Stardew Valley have the same effect: reinforcing its canonical status and unrivaled cultural importance.

The prominence of indie games brings forth one peripheral problem that haunts the videogame canon and the maneuvers of the hand itself. This is the specter of a stubborn, implicit Orientalism. That is to say, for all of the influx of interest in Stardew Valley within popular and scholarly gaming cultures, there has been little interest in uncovering, addressing, and analyzing the game’s immediate East Asian ancestor, the storied and still in production, Harvest Moon series.^[13] Christopher B. Patterson argues that “videogames are Asiatic even when they contain no explicit racial representations, as they are manufactured and innovated upon in Asian contexts and remain colored by Asian associations as new media products” (Patterson 2020, 27). Meanwhile, the list of 38 canonical games compiled by Frome and Martin features only seven games developed in East Asia, and if we discount arcade cabinets which carry loose regional associations despite their origins, only five remain: Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, the Legend of Zelda, and Metal Gear Solid. Much like the conversation around issues of inclusion and diversification in the Western canon, the canonical texts of game studies are remarkably homogenous despite the fact that East Asian products overwhelmingly dominate the global videogame marketplace. We must ask if the videogame is indeed Asiatic in the collective cultural imagination, how can a canon of videogames be no more than 13-18% East Asian in origin? The pivot to indie games over AAA titles has made no more room for a discussion of these regional biases. As Stardew Valley’s cannibalization of Harvest Moon demonstrates, the games that indie games are so often about are East Asian. An uneven distribution of cultural capital is visible, and it is predicated upon a reductive conception of regional origin. Geographically and racially coded exclusion is a profound consequence of sheer inattention to the systemic mechanisms at play in the discursive formation of a games canon.

 As the three moments detailed above demonstrate, the academy’s structural conditions empower the invisible hand of canonicity to propagate the generation, maintenance, and dissemination of cultural capital embodied through canon formation and organization. In this way, canonicity operates in a manner equivocal to computation by obscuring the operations of already-established systems that constantly accumulate, condense, and employ power. The presence of a canon in game studies doubles the relationship between the game and hierarchical power, manifest in both games themselves as software and in canons as creations of institutionalized cultural capital. When we write about games only because other scholars have discussed them, ignored them, undervalued them, or overvalued them, we replicate the binary logic of value judgments predicated on the individual tastes of others. When we endlessly discuss the merits and demerits of the same AAA games, we reproduce them and all that comes with them. When we value games made by individual creators or studios because of their relationship to an authorial or artistic presence, we reinforce the bourgeois ideology of art as a metaphysical product of genius, discrete from the material production of commodities. When we write about only those games we think other people want to read about, we allow imagined demographics to shape material knowledge production. Each of these moments arose because of the implicit presence, fluid though it may be, of a canon of games deemed worthy of research, which shapes the how, why, and for whom we research games at the cost of all possible alternatives. When we replicate and reinforce the shadow canon of videogame studies, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by an invisible, immaterial, and unnecessary presence created by and for institutions and cultural ecosystems very incongruent with the videogame.

Player 3, Select Name, Double A: On Becoming the Hand

Like many scholars working in and around the field right now, I am concerned for the future of videogame studies. Following Alex Gekker, I am concerned that “the emphasis on certain types of (commercial) gaming phenomena” within the field, e.g. canonicity, “leads to a path of dependence that pushes game scholars to focus on a limited number of highly visible games, genres, and related practices, limiting publishing opportunities to those lacking in certain gaming capital” (Gekker 2021, 74). These limitations are what Kelly Bergstrom worries are a defining reason for the lack of diversity within videogame development and videogame studies, encapsulated by young scholars’ (including my own) worry that “their work [is] too niche, too concerned with edge cases, and too far afield to be considered within the boundaries of game studies” (Bergstrom 2022, 178). Gekker suggests a solution grounded in reframing game studies as a post-humanities field in which scholars intermix “various forms of humanities and social sciences analyses to better account for the material shift in media technologies,” or essentially, an opening up of the boundaries of game studies to include all scholars who work on, around, with, or even in videogames (Gekker 2021, 78). Bergstrom’s suggestion is similar. She asks that “we reframe our field’s genesis point,” positioning issues of identity and culture at the forefront (Bergstrom 2022, 178).

While I do not disagree with either of these suggestions, and attempt to uphold them in my own work, I question whether the amount of coalescent organization required from the field of game studies to make an organized and concerted effort of reform is not simply a reproduction of the problem itself. An organized game studies that can make a majority decision to correct its own course is a narrow game studies. This narrow game studies then once again excludes those who, Gekker writes “might be participating in game studies but not defining themselves according to their affinity with the field” (Gekker 2021, 75). Simon Deterding has already pointed out that game studies is an “increasingly narrow inter-discipline” intellectually dominated by humanities scholars and game developers within the field, and as such, an orchestrated reorientation of the field predicated on identification with the extant field only replicates the same omissions (Deterding 2017, 532).

I am also concerned that taking on any actions at the strategic level reinforce Soraya Murray’s worries about the effects of neoliberalism in the university. Like Gekker and Bergstrom, Murray is troubled about the state of game studies, emphasizing “the residue” of game studies’ origins in “entertainment writing” and “the overwhelming priority given within the academy” to “technical, training, development, and interaction” (Murray 2018, 9; 12). However, as a post-colonialist scholar, Murray is also concerned that “the neoliberalism of the university has resulted in an environment in which the critical cultural theorist of technological forms is often made to feel that, as they are not ‘making’ something, what they are doing is not productive” (Murray 2018, 17). That is to say, we do not need to make videogames, make things from video games, or (re-)make the field of videogame studies to produce insight into the cultural functions of the videogame. And yet, because videogames as objects and videogame studies are closely tethered to production, both in the material production of games themselves or the theorized production of new skills, affinities, attitudes, and information through interaction with them, it is often especially difficult to escape the logic of productivity when dealing with them in any capacity. This potential to lapse into the whims of neoliberal capitalism is especially worrisome, considering that, as we have already seen, the videogame can often double as a rhetorical instrument of neoliberalism itself. As such, instituting a post-humanities turn, reframing our field’s genesis, the promotion of specific creators, or even Christopher A. Paul’s “obligation” to address problems within videogame studies, while noble and beneficial projects, verge on simply other ways to “make” things, to prove productivity under neoliberalism (Paul 2018, 2).

What I suggest here, then, is tactical action, attention, and inattention to the field in tandem so as to produce scholarship that responds to inquiry and need. The implicit production of a canon that results in numerous chapters on Bioshock, treatises on Stardew Valley, and conference panels on The Last of Us is simply one of many components that maintain and limit the purview of game studies. It is one boundary spurring on an “increasing coalescence” of game studies “into a relatively closed community” (Deterding 2017, 536–37). Despite the depth to which canonicity is ingrained in Western scholastic culture and textual studies, de-canonization seems to be one of the easiest reparative projects to initiate within game studies. When players over 100,000 players gather in the subreddit for Palia or when Splendid Land, the working name for developer and artist Samanthuel Louise Gillson, publishes simple, short, metatextual games like Franken which comment on and promote the consumption of other niche or dying genres, they are doing de-canonization through the selection and rendering visible of these works. For, if the canon is crafted in the shadows by an invisible hand who picks and chooses, values and devalues, remembers and forgets, includes and excludes, and if we can agree that the presence of a canon in game studies is as, if not more, problematic than the existence of a canon in literary or film studies, then we must render the hand visible in game studies, as well.

The title of this subsection refers to the glitch through which the final boss of Super Smash Brothers Melee, Master Hand, a hostile, disembodied, gloved hand, can become a playable character. By plugging in two controllers, one in the 3^rd slot of a Nintendo Gamecube, loading the character select screen, lingering over the select name option on Player 3’s character slot, and pressing A on both controllers simultaneously, the player can enter battle as Master Hand. As neat as access to an otherwise forbidden character may be, playing as Master Hand is less than fun. It freezes frequently in battle and is unusable in certain game scenarios. The Super Smash Brothers fan wiki describes the pros and cons of utilizing Master Hand succinctly: “if Master Hand is allowed in a game, he may at first appear to have a considerable advantage, as he does not take knockback and thus cannot be KOed at all,” but “since the Master Hand glitch most often causes a major disadvantage to the player using it, few players even consider the option, preventing the situation from being a competitive issue” (“Master Hand Glitch” 2024). As a boss, Master Hand is a hostile NPC and a part of the encoded structures of the game itself, an unchangeable, essential quality of it. With the glitch, however, Master Hand becomes interactive, controllable, and strategically deployable as a broken character capable of breaking itself, others, and the game it inhabits. I suggest here that the system of canonization that has taken place over the last forty years of game studies has occurred through an invisible hand that we, as games scholars, might do well to think of as Master Hand. To ameliorate some of the harm it has enacted on the field, we might consider using the glitch and becoming Master Hand.

 To become Master Hand, we must become aware of our own actions in the field and how they shape it. If we want to see it changed, we must be willing to make those changes on an individual, tactical level in our own scholarship. This could mean anything from a fundamental refusal to acknowledge the existence of Bioshock to a persistent, granular inquiry into those games that are neither prestigious nor subversive like Madden ’13, Cat Quest, or The Sims: Medieval. If we desire not only the survival of game studies but the realization of its transformative power, we must accept games as they are: as a diverse array of commodified software. Eventually, if the structural logic of canonicity is left in place, the field will be reduced to a true echo chamber, appraising and sponsoring the same games, the same types of games, the same players, and the same game cultures. We cannot kill our personal Master Hand any more than we can kill the one that lives inside a tiny disc for the Nintendo Gamecube; attempting to do so will only cause it to respawn, perhaps a bit wilder this time, as Crazy Hand. Rather, we must control the Hand. Before this sounds too much like the neoliberal reforms suggested above, I want to clarify that the control I imagine is that of small, imprecise, and often ineffective gestures, just as controlling Master Hand for a round of Smash feels.

To control the Hand, we must become it and simultaneously ignore it. And as the Master Hand, we could study and theorize those games that we are interested in, that our students (all of them) are interested in, that the world at large is interested in, and those games that carry meaning for us, for others, or no one. We could study games broadly, diffusely, and carefully. We could contradict ourselves and others within our field and allow those contradictions to hold without the easy answers of reform or replacement. We could both continue to write, as we have, about the ways in which Stardew Valley offers the image of liberation from the oppression of late-stage techno-capitalism and simultaneously reinforces it under a more quaint, rural veneer. We could also write about the way the game plays, the way it was created, the way it was received culturally, its lineage as a Western descendent of East Asian non-mimetic farming simulators, and its relationship to ultra-realistic Western-produced farming simulators, and who plays it, why they play it, where they play it, and why they enjoy playing. We are also able to ask and answer all the same questions for those quaint, cozy, lightly fantastic farming games that came before it and the genre of “cozy” indie games that have come after it, and finally, we must compare our answers. We could ask if Stardew Valley is exceptional amongst its peers, and if so, try to articulate why, even if that answer turns out to be, disappointingly, nothing more than a matter of historical timing. We could acknowledge that videogames as objects are computational commodities, born in the military-industrial complex and nurtured to maturity on the sustenance of exploited labor, resource extraction, abuse, hate, and profound misogyny just as often as we rightfully acknowledge the radical, liberatory, speculative, ameliorative, healing, and educational possibilities equally embedded within the medium. Acknowledging these things means choosing not only what we say about games but also what games we say things about and why. Even when Master Hand freezes up and cancels out the game, we could always continue to try to control it to prevent it from controlling us.

Rian C. Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is also an adjunct instructor in the English department. His primary areas of interest are critical video game studies, speculative fiction studies, and cultural studies. Rian is currently in the process of completing a dissertation exploring representations of the mundane, the quotidian, and the everyday in high-fantasy single-player Japanese role-playing games.

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[1] No matter how hyperbolic, provocative, or subjective it may sound to call videogames bad objects, I am not the first. Ian Bogost once characterized games as “gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish” in which players engage in a desperate, unnecessary “attempt to get a broken machine to work again” (Bogost 2015, 1). Videogames are, Bogost claimed, “grotesque” (Bogost 2015, 1). As the theorist behind procedural rhetoric, Bogost’s orientation towards games has always been markedly more computational than most of the field and equally hyperbolic. While Bogost was referring to Flappy Bird in the above quotation, his descriptors apply to videogames in general and should do so explicitly.

[2] See Golumbia’s “Games without Play” for more on the inextricable relationship between games and labor (Golumbia 2009a). 

[3] The anchor, Jayne Secker, received substantial online blowback, including demands for an apology from anonymous netizens. Yet, an apology was never issued, nor was the comment acknowledged by the anchor or the network which in and of itself demonstrates a pervasive cultural, if not dismissal of, or at least disinterest in videogames as valuable artifacts.

[4] Unlike Concord’s simultaneous flop, publications ranging from film news to entertainment news more broadly and to mainstream general news platforms like CNBC, NPR, BBC News, and the Guardian were all invested in the post-mortem of Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie a Deux (Kim 2024; Barber 2024; Whitten 2024; Hoad 2024).

[5] On Adventure’s equivocation with storytelling and literary textuality in early game studies see Espen Aarseth’s 1997 monograph, Cybertext, which takes the game as a primary case study, Chris Crawford’s 2003 chapter “Interactive Storytelling” which names Adventure as a sort of videogamic proto-narrative, Aarseth’s 2004 chapter “Genre Trouble” in which he does much the same, taking Adventure’s narrative identity as a priori, Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, in which Adventure is used again as an early prototype of Juul’s category of “progression” games in which linear, teleological ludic and narrative progression is valued above freeplay or exploration, and finally, Nick Montfort’s 2003 Twisty Little Passages, named after a quotation from the game itself. (E. J. Aarseth 1997; E. Aarseth 2004, 51; Crawford 2003, 259–60; Juul 2005, 76; Montfort 2003)

[6] For more recent research on or around Adventure, see Reed, Murray, and Salter’s 2020 Adventure Games, which encapsulates both Adventure and Kentucky Route Zero, Stuart Moulthrop’s 2021 chapter on the legacy of hypertext fiction, “Hypertext Fiction Ever After,” Andrew Reinhard’s 2021 archaeological investigation of the game, Jérémie LeClerc’s work on race, Adventure, and Kentucky Route Zero, Dennis G. Jerz, Tiffany Funk, and Jesse Snider’s work on the relationship between the in-game world and the real Mammoth Cave complex, and finally, Aubrey Anable’s phenomenal affective reading of the metatextuality between both games in Playing with Feelings (Reed, Salter, and Murray 2020; Moulthrop 2021; Reinhard 2021; LeClerc 2024; Jerz 2007; Funk 2022; Snider 2023; Anable 2018, 1–37). 

[7] A few exceptional examples are Mark J.P. Wolf’s early article on video game spatiality utilizing Space Invaders as a primary example, King and Krzywinska’s formal analyses of Space Invaders, Raiford Guins’ discussion of the Space Invaders cabinet, Jaroslav Svlech’s semiotic reading of the depiction of enemies within Space Invaders, and works from within popular video game culture like Steve Bloom’s Video Invaders or Martin Amis’ Invasion of the Space Invaders. (Wolf 1997; King and Krzywinska 2006; Guins 2014; Švelch 2023; Bloom 1982; Amis 1982)

[8] The most glaring relation between this turn and Space Invaders as an early “non-canonical” text that was then incorporated into the canon is Jesper Juul’s “Games Telling Stories?” which uses the game as a primary example in investigating the existence and presentation of narratives within videogames, but the phenomenon is what Sky LaRell Anderson considers “ludic anxiety” and provides a discursive summary in “Start, Select, Continue,” (Juul 2001; Anderson 2013)

[9] Consider the fundamental relation between texts like Ultima IV, Dragon Quest, Missile Command, Mystery House, or even Puyo Puyo and contemporary, canonical video games as well as their relative absence from anglophone video game scholarship.

[10] For insight into Mary Ann Buckles’ time as a graduate student, see Michael Erard’s 2004 profile (Erard 2004).

[11] AAA games are those games produced by major video game studies which receive the largest investment of resources, including economic, creative and skilled labor, manufacturing and distribution, and the most popular attention within and without gaming culture.

[12] For a particularly succinct and ostentatious example of this, see GQ’s 2018 photoshoot-accompanied feature on Barone as the “alchemist” of gaming (White 2018).

[13] The series’ first iteration was released in 1996, and new installments have been released regularly since then. However, in 2015, the series changed its title in the Anglosphere from Harvest Moon to Story of Seasons due to changes in licensing, localization, and publication deals. Despite this, the Japanese title, Bokujō Monogatari, and the series continuity have remained unchanged.