There are only two people who have kindly sat through this lecture/rant (rant-ure), and I feel bad for both of them. I occasionally get excited when I see a way to conceptually bridge two seemingly opposite structures. It's the diplomat in me.I was quite excited by the numerous nods to physics throughout the first two chapters of Gee. I believe that Gee was utilizing a powerful and important series of appeals. For some time I have talked about how these appeals are particularly persuasive, especially in contexts where the premise is "It is important to study X" when "X" represents a particularly abstract concept. What follows are glimpses of the metaphorical, pedagogical, and disciplinary considerations towards rhetoric
via physics, followed by a few biblettes on why this works particularly well in the case of Gee.
As the title suggests, what follows is my attempt to muddle through. I don't claim to be a physicist, a physics student, or any good at physics at all. But learning about physics helped me think about rhetoric, and I found that very interesting. Later, I hope to discuss the concepts beyond classical physics, and hopefully get to talk about graphics in non-linear physics. I would also like to discuss poetics in nonlinear physics.
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I took a few physics classes in undergrad, one was classical, the other branched into the non-classical. The non-classical one was called: "The Physics of Chaos and Complexity." I left the class with a strange set of new connections, a set of connections that dealt with connecting different cultural metaphors back to their roots in the physical world. Most of the time I would find the cultural implications of something like light or vertical orientation, and I would connect what we think of as inherently human value systems to the way the world was value-laden before we got here.
Alright, so the last couple sentences might feel a little cloudy, so let me put it this way: I might have thought about how "up" is usually labeled as good, and how "down" is usually labeled as bad. We might think about this in terms of everyday sayings, like "I got turned down for the job" or "things are looking up." We might think of this in terms of the prestige of having a high-rise apartment. We might even think about this in terms of Heaven=Up and Hell=Down. This bias towards "up" can be explained in a vast multitude of bio-historical ways (for example, the sun is inherently good and up high, it is gravitationally more difficult to up than down, that being up high gives a better vantage-point against predators, etc.). It's not that the concept of "up" is inherently better than the concept of "down," just that we've grown to see it that way overtime, because it rests on one of the only ways we are physically able to see.
So, like a good nerd should, I liked to think about all kinds of seemingly commonplace sayings and imagine how they might have become that way because of how we perceive physical processes. And, following from that, I started to think about how I could actively use these metaphors as a useful tool in describing abstract material.
You see, in when studying rhetoric you often come across some pretty heady material, material that talks about things like "being" or "truth" or "politics." And, while it presents a bugger of a thing to teach or to learn, I have seen a countless number of fellow students who can (for the most part) understand the material, but when they go to write about it, it turns into a mess. This is because writing with theory takes a whole new bag of tricks, and one of those tricks, as you often get in Heidegger, is to return to the simplest form of action. And a very current conception of "simple action" can be translated into physics in important ways.
Or another way...
When I engage uninitiated ("lay") people to talk about rhetoric, the conversation takes a series of excitably predictable turns. Where it ends, as it did on episode 19 of ethics talk, is at the subject of physics. People are able to buy social construction of almost anything in the liberal arts, and they can even follow the argument up to the point of many other academic fields. The trouble is when they hit science. At least, they think they hit science. They don't talk about the scientific method, or about what scientists do, or even the societal value of science as a vague, overruling idea. They go to physics.
I can't remember a rhetoric class that didn't have to talk about gravity.
Inevitably, someone will raise their hand to ask, "This social constructed-ness is all well and good, but when I drop something, I know it's going to fall. Persuasion has nothing to do with gravity."
It's not that this is a stopping point in the discussion. I have had the honor of some very intelligent professors who are just as good at research as they are at teaching. My point is not to say that physics is the kryptonite of rhetoric, but to point out that physics is so often one of the last lines of reasoning that a student will use. The call to gravity is made in the name of science, in the name of common sense, and in the name of the human powers of observation. I often fear that the question takes longer to answer than it does to ask, so the student who asked the question might be satisfied by the answer while the other students have long tuned out. I don't have a good "stock" answer for that question (which might be for the best!), though I have come closer to one (ah!).
Or another way...
In talking to two friends, both grad students in chemical engineering, I brought up this diagram as a point of conversation:
As we talked, my friends verified that the model above is a very real concept in the scientific community (though they also said that there should be a level for chemical engineers that was closer to physicists than mere chemists). I started to wonder about how to modify this diagram in order to include subjects in liberal arts. But, in a more related matter, I started to think about the blank space between the physicists and the mathematicians. In the sciences, mathematics can be seen as the most "pure," because it is so abstracted from the practical. But the everyday person, I would imagine, would see the mathematician as too abstract, almost the same way someone would view a person with enough audacity to call herself a philosopher. So then, in the public mind, the physicist has the most social power, since he/she owns the highest rung on the "purity" meter while still remaining practical.
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At the level of metaphors, there is a deep connection between our language and the physical world. At the level of pedagogy, physics is one of the more ingrained stumbling block for students. At the level of interdisciplinary considerations, physics is the gatekeeper to the public imagination of a futuristic sci-fi (sci-phi?) wonderland. Which brings me back to Gee, and his argument that playing videogames can be more than a waste of time.
On p. 22, 25, and to an extent on p. 5, Gee mentions physics. In the later pages, Gee talks about students learning Newtonian Physics-the big 3 laws of motion. The students, so it goes, regressed after the class because of an inability to learn physics actively or critically. When asked a simple question, students revert back to their "natural" understanding of the physical world (and I would like to note hear that previous discussion of physics depends less on physics proper as it does with the generalized idea of physics). Gee also discusses how subjects "even in the rigorous domain of physics" must be constructed within a specific semiotic domain.
This is a smart move. Gee is tying his goals in with physicists, so that to argue against the importance of studying video games is to argue against the importance of studying physics. Or rather, to argue against the importance of virtual worlds, one must argue against the importance of the "real" world. Gee does this long before he brings up the concept of Lifeworlds, which is abstract, heady, and likely to lose the skeptical reader. Not only that, but even earlier in the text, page 5, Gee mentions a casual joke with a plasma physicist, further coloring his endeavors as physics-friendly. While Gee's other two main connections, the basketball game and modernist architecture, are more likely to turn up in a rhetorically framed reading, the physics references were a different kind of move.
This move (consciously or unconsciously) deals with a deep logical backlash against liberal arts, theoretical research, and the academy itself. Each of these areas is often judged for its
applicability for the "real world," the practical, unquestioned lifeworld which assumes an overriding position. By discussing videogames even in conjunction with physics, Gee is able to begin on the note that even one of the most revered subject areas starts from, in his terminology, a specific semiotic domain.
Hopefully, later in the class, I'll be able to write more on this subject. I want to talk about "real" vs. game physics, and about bifurcation mapping, and about the implicit science-bias of the distinction between "sci-fi" and "fantasy." But, at the very least, I hope I was able to convey that physics is not "the real world + arrows" and that that very joke reeks of the misconception that "g=9.81m/s/s" is any more real than the programming language for in-game gravitational force.
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