Now this moment of language use [as uptaking the writerly attitude] is, as we have already considered, philosophical. We are lost. We reflect so that we might be found. We seek to represent ourselves, but also, so that we may free ourselves from all the ways in which mere habit and automaticity hold sway over us. The writerly attitude […] is a philosophical attitude.
Philosophy […] is quite literally bent on the invention of writing, that is, on finding ways to use marks and mark-making to represent us to ourselves with the end in view of clearing up our confusions, enabling a better self-understanding.
From Alva Noë, The Entanglement (Princeton University Press 2023) p92
Video games as a kind of mark-making (literal recording of bytes; data streams). But more importantly, philosophy as an aesthetic activity. And thus aesthetic activity as meaning-making, as orienting, and habit-breaking.
And what better time and place for philosophy but in the rupture of trauma?
The traumatic moment is a moment of rupture, of a break with traditional, normalized modes of being. It is precisely in this moment when the philosophical attitude, the re-orienting attitude, is required. And it is an aesthetic phenomenon that is required. This is why art is so healing: it is a matter of changing perspective. This is why conceptual art is so close to philosophy: all art is conceptual, all philosophy is aesthetic.
Philosophy aims to heal the traumatic moment, or at the least to provide solace and direction to the disoriented. At the same time it offers to disrupt, to reorient. It is a violent force, but it is a healing one as well. Socrates the gadfly, forcing people to rethink their perspectives. It’s a painful thing to do. But it is essential. Philosophy as therapoiea: as an exercise in re-normativizing our behavior, especially language use and thought patterns; the process for this begins in imagining alternate worlds, or seeing in alternate ways. Simulations do an excellent job of this - thus the novel, the play, the video game, all rife with philosophical potential. Plato’s Socrates was, after all, a character in a series of dialogues.
Buddhist philosophy teaches us to take on the perspective of the witness-consciousness in order to reduce suffering. Similar for the stoics, the skeptics, even the positivists with their disinterested approach to science. Once the world has been established through an aesthetic lens, the logic can take place - the enumeration of possibilities within a predetermined worldview. But the work to establish that view is aesthetic in nature.
It’s worth recapping Noë’s point in the point (up to the end of section I, which is all I’ve read so far). Anthropolical evidence suggests that the evolution of anatomically modern humans predates language use, which itself predates writing. But language use, the usage of fire, and the invention of clothing are all coeval with the invention of mark-marking, specifically mark-making for tallying up herds of animals and children. Noë argues that the evidence points toward mark-making as an inherent part of the linguistic framework, similar to how pictorial sight is an inherent part of vision. (This is an argument to itself, which Noë spends time discussing earlier in the book). Pictorial sight is a kind of meaning-making, where certain visual stimuli are interpreted as signifiers. This opens up the whole field of semiotics, and with it, semantics. There is no distinction between a graphical signifier and a written word. They just are the same thing. And both are technological.
One of the main points of the book is that there is no distinction between the technological and the natural. We evolved over tens of thousands of years with our technology. The way we conceptualize language is inherently shaped by the way we utilize writing, similar to the way that our sexualities are tied up with historical-cultural contingencies.
Drawing on D&G here, what is needed for a philosophical perspective is a kind of schizophrenizing, an opening-up to a disjunctive synthesis which takes each possibility in its value, as coequal, as coevaluative, and uses them then to forge new worlds. This sort of schizophrenizing is itself an aesthetic activity. D&G make this point themselves by drawing on the art of the schizophrenic, so full of meanings as to burst out of its seams, to overburden the table with so many meanings and surfaces that it ceases to serve its function as table, and becomes instead a conceptually distinct entity; table-as-possibility-space.
I am personally most interested in the ways that video games, broadly construed, can utilize digital media’s remarkable recording potential to create new forms of aesthetic experience and thus of schizophrenized world-building. Video games provide the opportunity to create a space, in addition to a narrative. Video games are experience machines. They are ways to embody a virtual space, thus enacting new, possibly radical ways of being. I would term this property of interactive digital media a form of radical sympathy, one in which a player is literally placed in somebody else’s shoes, using whatever forms of interaction we can provide as an extension of our existing physical sense-making modalities (another wonderful feature of our elastic neurochemistry). Thus, video games provide a smooth means for learning philosophical concepts through an enacted, existential, and aesthetic interface capable of lifting one out of their existing habits and reorienting them.
Cognitive-first model of epistemology get it wrong. It’s all about affect. It’s all about how the media hits you, how it moves you, how it reorients you. The affect is itself the argument: the logic is built on top of it. In other words: the unconscious precedes the conscious.