Defining the phenomenon…

As I wrack my brain trying to understand this fascination, I come to the conclusion that I better define what I’m talking about first, so here goes:

1. I think that I first thought about this from a textual perspective when I read The Lord of the Rings, and I worked my way through everything, all the appendices, The Silmarillion, and all that. I’m not sure what or if I thought about the Ancient before, but I definitely remember picturing the cartoonish aspects of Feanor’s march on Morgoth (I might be remembering that wrong) as a wide-open valley with larger than life elves and orcs and some men running around. The primevality of it (yep, that’s not a word) struck me, the idea that the landscape had not been drawn upon (or, more accurately, marked by humans) or their idealized selves.
2. In games, there are reasons for so much use of swords and cross-bows and ‘ancient’ weapons, from a game design perspective. The main one that I can think of is the value of melee, one-on-one fighting that doesn’t kill instantly (like in the COD and other first-person shooter series).  Hell, Doom let us kill things with chainsaws and fists – although not very well.  Of course, since most of the original players were boys, wielding these huge e-peeenises might also have had something to do with the prevalence of swords.
3. So, Mortal Kombat and Doom and the Final Fantasies and a host of others include melee combat, but what about the RTS games featuring Rome and the Middle Ages?  What about Sid Meier and starting a civilization from the ground up? Do these figure into the equation (technology might be > the ancient, but maybe not)?
4. Science fiction is what I keep coming back to, but maybe horror is a place for this as well? Fantasy obviously is, and its connection to science fiction, but the science fiction that most strikes me as being important to this context is stuff like Silverberg’s or Wolfe’s, where what seems like a medieval society is actually one so old that it can’t be reckoned with, one that has fallen from far loftier heights to be what we consider primitive, even if there are odd remaining artifacts hanging about. I can still feel the shiver of recognition I got when I finally realized that Severian’s guild lived in a decrepit spaceship that was stuck on the planet, or when Silverberg provided us a spark of contemporary perspective by looking at the world we’ve been viewing for hundreds of pages through Western, often scientific and even anthropological, eyes.  Hell, Mitchell did that in Cloud Atlas with the links of characters between vignettes or novellas or whatever the hell we call them: ‘ohmigod, look at how old that seems when it is really old it’s actually in the future holy shit.’
5. Finally, I need to think of the Ancient in the context of a couple of other terms:  primitive, primeval, traditional, primordial.

What is my fascination?

Who can say?

As I try to puzzle out why science fiction games seem fascinated with the Ancient, I’m listening to Barn Owl, and I must say I enjoy it.  After all, who doesn’t want to be a wolf/panther/cougar/coyote, or someone able to transgress all those borders and slip into any of those skins?

Who knew that Lacan and Zizek would show up?

As I plan my submission for Albecracky, I keep running through iterations of my obsession with the Ancient in science fiction, and as so often happens when I’m in this frame of mind everything comes up Ancient…sometimes it’s obvious (the trailer for Halo 4 – “An ancient Evil arises”) and sometimes it’s not (raking leaves is Ancient with a capital ‘a’?), but the cultural thread seems to be everywhere.

I’m well aware that anything that seems to be, when talking about Lacan or any of those who argue with him, is somewhat problematic, but I have trouble (or am not smart enough) avoiding that construction: a failure, perhaps, in my own sense of the Symbolic vs. my knowledge of the Real.

Still, despite my obsession, Zizek seems particularly appropriate here (despite his defense of Lacan’s misogyny, which I’ll need to deal with seriously at some point). He argues that the interplay between the Real and the Imaginary (and the way that interplay affects our concept of the Other) is critical for understanding our own identities:

of ‘reality’ as opposed to the play of my imagination – Lacan’s point is not that, behind the multiplicity of phantasmatic identities, there is a hard core of some “real Self”, we are dealing with a symbolic fiction, but a fiction which, for contingent reasons that have nothing to do with its inherent structure, possesses performative power – is socially operative, structures the socio-symbolic reality in which I participate. The status of the same person, inclusive of his/her very “real” features, can appear in an entirely different light the moment the modality of his/her relationship to the big Other changes. (The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Center of Political Ideology)

Zizek has introduced the concept of the big Other elsewhere – in the situation that I’m trying to understand he’s using the term as a grand narrative of sorts, something used to explain all kinds of contradictions in ways that might be better understood as making an apology for the realm rather than for describing a real subject – and this emphasis on little Others, I think, and their ‘performative power’ explains the resonance of the Ancient in science fiction, a place where it really shouldn’t be.

Zizek’s reformulation of Lacan powerfully explains this fascination with the Ancient in another way, methinks:

When faced with such a paranoid construction, we must not forget Freud’s warning and mistake it for the “illness” itself: the paranoid construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real “illness”, the “end of the world”, the breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of this substitute formation. (Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)

Zizek speaks here of the ‘typical’ postmodern subject position, a position that I’m not willing to grant him mostly because I can’t quite grasp what he means by ‘typical,’ but this desire for healing – through a ‘substitute formation’ of a world in which (science fictionally) the Ancient becomes some sort of malevolent power bent on destroying the clean, chaste, perfect world (almost utopic, eh?) seen as the end product of a science fictional vision – fits somehow as an explanation for the desire to destroy that Ancient evil that sells units of Halo 4.

Dystopia!

Tolstaya is the great granddaughter of Tolstoy (I’ll bet she never gets tired of hearing that), and thus I find myself thinking of The Slynx in ways that I don’t like…shows that Russian literary sense…exhibits a prosaic style reminiscent of Tolstoy himself…yadayadayada…

What I should be focusing on is how she creates her own version of dystopia.  I don’t know of any other Russian dystopias – I guess Koestler might count, if he was Russian, and the game Metro 2033 is brilliant but literary in a far different way than I’m used to thinking about, and the novel hasn’t been translated into English – but this one is strange no matter how we think of dystopia, as it features a protagonist who seemingly has wild mood swings between giddiness and despair, triggered by the fear of anything outside the city walls (although that’s an optimistic description of their village). The novel doesn’t really end – our narrator, Benedikt, marries into the patrician class, and doesn’t even really need his job as a transcriber of pre-Blast fiction and poetry, done in order to find material for their new warlord to claim as his own.  It doesn’t really begin, as we sort of jump right into post-Blast life in media res, with no markers as to where we are except for the preview blurbs.

Tolstoya also reveals information gradually – we find out that Benedikt has a tail halfway through the novel, and that his powerful in-laws breathe fire, allowing them to control the population.  We get glimpses of what the world has become (the New York Review of Books called it ‘degraded,’ a description that makes perfect sense),  and Tolstoya cleverly reveals some of the horrors by having everyone who was alive pre-Blast (and survived the actual war itself) granted immortality of a sort, perhaps based on radiation. She also cleverly evokes the elements of both Soviet and serf-based Russian governance with a whole series of references, ranging from the crime of ‘freethinking’ to the mounts that folks use to pull their sleigh, degraded humans who smoke and talk smack about their masters.

The most striking feature of the novel to me was its blend of languages, and the use of language to reveal what life post-Blast is like. She uses homonyms as revelatory tools (once again confirming to me just how amazing good translators are), and the veneration of books from pre-Blast times becomes a joke, as denizens of Benedikt’s village hoard cook books and tech manuals.  The degradation of language marks the larger degradation in the world, and it’s both a source of ironic humor and despair.

Heh…

Just remembered a professor from a rival school of ours who had lunch with us in Castel Gandolfo last year.  He has worked hard to put together this university’s study abroad program, but I found him a bit full of himself.

Why this matters, I guess, is that I have been thinking a lot lately about management and leadership. I often exist in this bubble in which I want to believe that leadership comes about from sheer competence, nothing else, and that human mentors and leaders mentor and lead in ways of which I approve – collegially, humbly, rationally, empathetically.  I’m getting better at *not* being disappointed when the folks who I think should be leaders and mentors don’t act this way, but I still wonder at the possibilities.

Thus my example above – the guy simply liked to hear himself talk, and didn’t seem much interested in listening. He also wanted to be the most adventurous male in the room, posturing that to me seems sort of ridiculous, and not at all indicative of what actual leadership and mentoring entails.

I’ll have to explore later why I can’t seem to write the word ‘leadership’ without closely following it with ‘mentoring’…

 

 

Reading on a cloudy afternoon…

…is part of what I do for a living…wow…

Defining ‘business’

Sorry to go all rhetorician on your ass, but one of the most misused terms in this past election was ‘businessman.’  I’m not Arthur Miller, believing sad tales of soulless good guy salespeople to be the whole sum of executive level experience in American business, but the unexamined zeal with which many wanted to give Romney the presidency because of his business background was disturbing, and the Obama folks’ plans to swiftboat that idea was smart (even if it borrowed heavily from an earlier campaign by Ted Kennedy).

We tend to have one enduring image of a businessperson. While that image might well change form a bit based     upon the individual’s ideological leanings and experience, there are a couple of traits that cross these boundaries:  businesspeople are viewed as being relentlessly efficient, organized, cut-to-the-chase types who have a far better understanding of organizations than the rest of us lowlifes. Those on the left we might view these characteristics angrily or with disgust (those ruthless, inhuman capitalists), while those on the right might view these favorably (that so-and-so really knows how to get things done), but in either case we tend to view these traits as key components of the Platonic ideal of businessperson.

This election hopefully helps us challenge those notions, and perhaps put to rest the idea that somehow Obama is an anti-free enterprise President, or that being pro-business means simply that we eliminate all regulations and laws. These two campaigns offered different visions of American corporatism, ones that I think defy some of the stereotypes that each of the two campaigns’ supporters have, and that definitely challenge the most cherished beliefs about what we think businesspeople are.

The best example of this vision came in the organization of the two Get Out The Vote (GOTV) movements. Governor Romney was hypothetically the candidate of small government, a corollary of which is a loathing of big bureaucracies, which are almost invariably portrayed as governmental. There’s a lot of truth to that connection – stories of inept, unresponsive government bureaucracies are not just apocryphal urban myths, despite Al Gore’s solid efforts to streamline them under the Clinton administration – but the idea that bureaucracies could exist outside of government seems to be impossible to the ‘drown government in a bathtub’ hardliners.

Additionally, the idea that someone whose experience is mostly in government could create a small, streamlined, decentralized, responsible organization was inconceivable to opponents of the Obama administration. Obama’s personal experience as a community organizer was mocked, when in reality that experience seems to have fostered a push out the power approach to creating a big organization that took the best aspects of what Karl Rove did for George W. Bush (get your friends to the polls, whether they be from your children’s school, from your church, from work, or whatever) with a penchant for technological expertise. Obama’s campaign team thoroughly vetted an open-source, decentralized approach to getting volunteers information that would have been the envy of many small tech companies, an approach that is entrepreneurial in all the best senses of that word. Obama’s GOTV system was vetted and tested and pounded and tested again and realistically and meaningfully explained and designed to have multiple points of failure, all hallmarks of a very specific approach to technology that is far more Google and Reddit (and Amazon) than it is Microsoft or Apple.

The Romney campaign took the opposite approach, which fits Romney’s personal predilections and executive, managerial, and leadership styles. From reports that came out quickly after the election, mostly drawn from volunteers who tried to work for the campaign, the software was untested, clunky, came with useless training materials that were more sales-oriented than devoted to actual utilization of the software, and centered exclusively in Boston. The software was top-down management at its worst: a system developed with generic software that wasn’t tailored at all, with a consulting firm calling that shots that had no proven track record of developing this type of system. Management got bonuses, and those on the ground – there because they believed in his candidacy and wanted to participate in the political process, about the most American ideals I can imagine – spent the day in frustration, unable to help.

When the candidates talked about two competing visions of America, they left out the details as to how those visions competed, but this Romney campaign clusterfuck (and corresponding home run by Obama’s group) perfectly characterizes the two. Romney’s group was full of bluster – they bragged about how powerful the system was on the day it started to explode – and light on actual work, while Obama’s was quietly deadly, working below the scenes at a highly decentralized level to powerfully work with where people are at.

As a Romney volunteer notes, their campaign software reveals just how far from the ideal Romney’s version of business actually is: “one of the most basic tenets of conservatism is a loathing and mistrust of big government and bureaucracy. Project ORCA was the embodiment of big government, top-down management” (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/11/09/romneys-get-out-the-vote-fiasco/).  That vision is not Romney’s – his Bain style of business is not to build working systems that meet people’s needs, which is how Adam Smith envisioned the invisible hand working – but instead it’s designed to enrich his friends, and himself, without much concern for what people actually need.

As blogger Wonkette noted, “thank goodness the Republicans nominated a savvy businessman with so much private sector management experience to run this thing. Just imagine how badly it would’ve gone under the direction of some hippie community organizer!” (retrieved from http://wonkette.com/489423/romneys-expensive-computer-get-out-the-vote-effort-explodes-miserably-like-rest-of-romney-campaign)  Wonkette’s description clues us into just how different the two campaigns are, and the true competing visions:  not between pure capitalism and communism, but between visions of how the free market works best, and how it works best for people. Obama’s bailing out Wall Street doesn’t meet that vision, and his bail out of the car companies (actually, they were both Bush’s, but the right-wingers seem to forget that) only fits into this equation if we look at the changes that they subsequently made, but the campaigns speak volumes to the two campaigns’ abilities to function in the real world, and the way they responded to the challenges of big organizational movements.

My hope is that Republicans take an honest look at what failed, and change their definition to one that fits with what I believe is the best of America, our ability to problem-solve despite our ideological biases.  That’s what the free market is supposedly about, right?  In that context, Obama’s election was a triumph of the free market.