In the fall of my third year as a new professor, the dizzy spells started. Spiraling up the floors of the university garage got me woozy and I’d have to pull over. Flickering fluorescents and wobbly ceiling fans made me queasy. And then, in the middle of a class on David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity, I started to faint. My loyal graduate assistants drove me to the emergency room, where I was diagnosed with vertigo.

I’d lost my bearings, not only physically, but also intellectually and spiritually. In grad school, I’d imbibed a heady brew of postmodern theory. But as I struggled to define myself on my own, away from my classmates and professors, I realized I didn’t really know what I stood for. I’d learned to talk the talk, but how much of it was really important to me? Dizzy, disoriented, I turned to my intellectual commitments to find solid ground. But in the disavowals of poststructuralism – antiessentialism, antihumanism, antimetanarrativity – I found nothing to believe in.

A battery of tests and medications followed my stint in the ER, but what ended up working was a new regime of yoga and meditation. Sitting cross-legged on my zafu, I’d try to stay mindful of my body, my breath, my frenetic “monkey mind.” Slowly, my agitation would lessen, and the world would stop spinning.1

Meditation and media criticism, I discovered, have a lot in common. Both demand close observation. And a good critic is a careful reader not only of texts in themselves, but of his own reactions to texts. The best interpretation requires sustained attention to the thoughts, feelings, and physiological sensations produced in the mind and body by the artwork.

As I started to learn more about the ideas behind the practice of meditation, I was struck by the parallels between Buddhist philosophy and postmodern theory. But more than that, I found that Buddhist ideas addressed many of the frustrations I had found with the limits of my grad school training.

Three Buddhist concepts particularly resonate with critical theory: impermanence, interdependence, and emptiness.

Impermanence recognizes that everything changes. Economic systems, ideologies, art forms – they all have histories, and nothing lasts forever. The idea that anything exists “always already” is a myth.

Interdependence tells us that all things are connected. No person, no product, no moment is an island. Subjectivity is socially constructed. The ego is an illusion.

Emptiness suggests that the world arises out of nothing. But this is not a hollow, nihilistic vision of nothing. It’s a vision of absolute peace, stillness, and oneness.

There’s a Zen saying formulated by Quingyuan Weixen:

“Before I studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.”2

In our ordinary, everyday consciousness, we take the material world for granted. As we grow more sophisticated, we realize that the material world is far more nebulous and contingent than we’d ever imagined. We’re trapped in the prison-house of language. Mountains are not mountains. But, with mindfulness, we come to a renewed appreciation of the material world. We recognize both the constructedness and the there-ness of the material world. We stop taking the world for granted, and watch as it arises anew at every moment. We see mountains once again as mountains.

The hermeneutics of suspicion I studied in grad school – psychoanalysis, ideology critique, deconstruction – are very good at demonstrating that there is no mountain. But where do we go from there?

The appeal of Buddhist philosophy for a recovering poststructuralist like me – at least the nontheistic version that Zen monk Stephen Batchelor calls “Buddhism Without Beliefs”3 – is that it grounds itself in groundlessness. The only transcendental signified Buddhism offers is emptiness – but an emptiness of great power and beauty. For me, that turns out to be enough.

My turn to Buddhism persuaded me that what’s been missing in poststructural theory is an engagement with spirituality. As my vertigo faded, I began to read back through my intellectual lineage, trying to understand how it had come to diverge so sharply from the ideas that now spoke to me so insistently. The key moment I found was the split between Freud and Jung, and the subsequent rejection of Jungian ideas from critical theory.4 Jung, as I’ve written in earlier columns,5 offers an alternative model of the psyche with room for the soul. He also pursued a lifelong interest in Buddhism and other Eastern systems of thought, providing a model for scholars attempting to bridge the gap between East and West.6

In their iconoclastic Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film , Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas A. Frenz offer a Jungian rethinking of modernism and postmodernism. They propose a new model: transmodernism. “A transmodern perspective accepts the postmodern critique of the fragmented self, but posits a larger whole from which the pieces have atomized. It faces how we have degraded out existence, and yet provides direction and hope for the future.”7

I no longer can believe that meaning is simply a supplement inevitably produced by any signifying system. It’s a hunger in my soul I can’t deny. I tried, and my body eventually rebelled. In Jungian terms, my shadow sensing function erupted from the unconscious to balance my dominant thinking function. Thankfully, I listened.

Image Credits:
1. Vertigo
2. Sitting Postures
3. Zion National Park
4. Freud and Jung with colleagues. Freud is front left, Jung front right

Please feel free to comment.

1. Recommended meditation audiobooks include Jack Kornfield’s Meditation for Beginners (Sounds True, 2000), Pema Chodron’s Pure Meditation (Sounds True, 2000), and Shinzen Young’s The Science of Enlightenment (Sounds True, 1997)
2. Qingyuan Weixen, translated by D.T. Suzuki in Essays in Zen Buddhism (Rider, 1958). See Donald S. Lopez, Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 227. The koan is paraphrased on the Donovan single “There Is a Mountain” (Epic Records, 1967). See also Robert Johnson, Transformation (HarperOne, 1993)
3. Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs (Riverhead Trade, 1998)
4. See Christine Gallant, Tabooed Jung: Marginalization and Influence (NYU Press, 1996)
5. Ted Friedman, “Jung and Lost,” Flow 9.12, http://flowtv.org/?p=3865; Ted Friedman, “Myth, the Numinous, and Cultural Studies,” Flow 10.05, http://flowtv.org/?p=4161, Ted Friedman, “Strat-O-Matic and the Baseball Tarot: Sense and Synchronicity in Sports and Games,” Flow 9.07, http://flowtv.org/?p=2439
6. See Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (Princeton University Press, 1975); Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga (Princeton University Press, 1999).
7. Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 30

For the last few years, I’ve been preoccupied with a concept that hasn’t received much academic attention lately: myth. Specifically, the idea that popular culture narratives are forms of myth.

The heyday for this turn of thinking was the 1960s and 1970s. That was when literary and film scholars influenced by Carl Jung and Northrop Frye formed the “myth and symbol” school, looking for transcendental archetypes in modern narratives.1 At the same time, structuralists inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss studied media myths as self-contained signifying systems.2 Those more suspicious of myth nonetheless accepted it as a useful conceptual apparatus: Roland Barthes‘ Mythologies (translated into English in 1972) inspired Marxist critics to demystify the stories we live by.3

In the 1980s, myth lost its currency as a category of analysis in media studies. Postmodernists grew wary of myth critics’ tendency to find the same archetypal metanarrative wherever they looked.4 Anthropologists critiqued the ahistorical urge to equate mass media storytelling with ancient systems of belief. And post-Marxists began to question drawing easy distinctions between myth and reality.

But as myth as a keyword drifted out of the academy, it emerged as a hugely influential concept in popular culture. Joseph Campbell, the most influential popularizer of Jung’s ideas, became first a crossover success as an author, then a posthumous celebrity as the star of the 1988 PBS series with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth.5

Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, argued that all hero myths are versions of one, universal “monomyth.”6 His book was an inspiration to filmmaker George Lucas, who used Campbell’s monomyth as his model for Star Wars. With the success of that film, many other Hollywood screenwriters began turning to Campbell’s ideas.

In 1985 Christopher Vogler, a newly hired story analyst for Disney’s animation division, distributed a memo outlining Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. 7 Vogler’s memo became a touchstone at Disney and other firms, forming the basis for films such as 1994’s The Lion King, one of the top-grossing movies of all time. Vogler subsequently left Disney to become a freelance screenwriting teacher and consultant, and turned his memo into The Writer’s Journey, a step-by-step how-to for applying Campbell’s ideas to screenplays.8 Vogler boils down the seventeen stages of Campbell’s Journey to a tidier twelve steps:

The Writer’s Journey, now in its third edition, is one of the most successful screenwriting manuals ever published, and Vogler is one of the most in-demand of screenwriting teachers and consultants. Vogler’s influence is so great that today screenplay outlining software programs such as Power Structure give writers the option of organizing their screenplays around Vogler’s 12 steps, as an alternative to the traditional three-act structure popularized in Syd Field’s canonical text, Screenplay.

At the same time that myth has become a touchstone for screenwriters, it’s also become a keyword for the New Age movement, inspired by Campbell’s injunction to “follow your bliss.” The very ubiquity of the concept of myth in American popular culture may help explain its absence from academic discourse – a term which once held a lot of academic cachet has become awfully déclassé. But as scholars of popular culture we ought to take vernacular theory seriously, and to try to understand the continuing resonance of a concept we’d thought we’d left behind.10

Most attempts that have been made by critics to explain the appeal of Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” have emphasized his convenient formula. Thus, Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture concludes that it functions as a narrative shorthand: “Audience familiarity with this basic plot structure allows script writers to skip over transitional or expository sequences, throwing us directly into the heart of the action.”11 In this vein, Jenkins promotes a limited return to the concept of myth, as a way to recognize certain parallels between the influence of canonical texts of the past such as The Odyssey and contemporary “transmedia storytelling” in the Matrix and Star Wars universes (while being quick to recognize the substantial differences between how folk tales were once produced and consumed, compared to today’s mass media system).

But in highlighting Campbell’s structuralism, Jenkins tellingly ignores the greater half of his appeal: his mysticism. For Campbell, myth is important not simply because it organizes familiar narrative structures, but because it an avenue towards engaging the unconscious and finding spiritual meaning. To use Carl Jung’s language, it is about the numinous.12

As Andrew Von Hendy explains in The Modern Construction of Myth, the spiritual dimension is at the heart of the origin of the concept.13 The term emerged in the Romantic era, in response to the Enlightenment’s fraying of religious certainty. It from the beginning had a dual resonance: it reflected a yearning for transcendent meaning, but already a nostalgia for a time when such meaning could be taken for granted. All myth, in this sense, is “modern myth,” since the very invention of the concept of myth was a reaction to what Max Weber described as modernity’s dis-enchantment of the world.14

It is this numinous aspect of myth which has made it both compelling and discomfiting for critical theory. For intellectual traditions rooted in Freud’s and Marx’s hermeneutics of suspicion, there’s no independent human capacity for spirituality. The yearning for transcendental meaning is only a symptom of the fear of death or an outlet for class antagonism. But perhaps our postmodern skepticism could extend to questioning the limits of scientific materialism. The survival of the concept of myth may represent not the tenacity of an illusion, but the return of the repressed in a world outwardly more disenchanted than ever. As Jung argues, myths tend to compensate for those aspects of personality most neglected in a society.15

Take Star Wars. The franchise has inspired innumerable academic studies of fan culture, celebrating the creativity and autonomy of its audiences.16 But scholars’ emphasis on fan creativity, I’d suggest, evades a more fundamental question: why Star Wars? Why is it this world, in particular, which has inspired such energy and loyalty? The answer, I’d suggest, is in The Force: the mystical system of energy that powers the Jedi Knights and governs Lucas’s universe. The Force is not exactly a religious concept: while a handful of fans mark “Jedi” down as their religion on census forms, most recognize that it’s a fictional conceit. But it’s nonetheless central to a story that resonates – a myth that captures the imagination and often won’t let go. It’s perhaps not surprising that the most devoted Star Wars fans – myself included – tend to be “geeks” who work and play in the most highly technologized sectors of the global economy. In that most postmodern of contexts, the myth of The Force has taken the place, at least in fantasy, of more familiar forms of faith.17

Image Credits:

1. Roland Barthes’ Mythologies marked the heyday of Marxist myth criticism
2. Joseph Campbell became a posthumous star on the PBS series The Power of Myth
3. Christopher Vogler’s version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, as visualized in Stuart Voytilla’s Myth and the Movies: Author’s image
4. The program Power Structure allows writers to organize their screenplays according to Campbell’s and Vogler’s “Hero’s Journey” structure: Author’s image
5. The Passing of the Elves in The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien’s image of the disenchantment of the world: Author’s image
6. Faith in the force

Please feel free to comment.

1. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Northrop Frye and L.C. Knights, eds., Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); Charles Eric Reeves, “Myth Theory and Criticism,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, eds. Michael Groden, Martin Kreisworth, and Imre Szeman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)
2. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977)
3. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1972)
4. Terence Dawson terms this reductive tendency in too much Jungian criticism, “Instant Jung.” Terence Dawson, “Literary Criticism and Analytical Psychology,” The Cambridge Companion to Jung, eds. Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
5. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Public Broadcasting Service, 1988.
6. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1949)
7. See Maria C. Iacobo, “The Biz: A Memo’s Journey,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, November 13, 1994. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-13/magazine/tm-61952_1_disney-memo
8. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Studio City, CA: Michael Weise Productions, 1998)
9. Stuart Voytilla, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films (Studio City, CA: Michael Weise Productions, 1999). Voytilla, building on Vogler’s adaptation of Campbell, concludes that almost every classic film follows the Hero’s Journey structure
10. On New Age discourse as vernacular theory, see Thomas McLaughlin’s Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to the Vernacular (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). See also Andrew Ross, “New Age – A Kinder, Gentler Science?,” Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York, NY: Verso, 1991)
11. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006), p. 120
12. See Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by R.F.C. Hull. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959)
13. Andrew Von Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth (Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press, 2002)
14. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). For more on fantasy media as a response to the disenchantment of the world, see Ted Friedman, “The Politics of Magic: Fantasy Media, Technology, and Nature in the 21st Century,” Scope 14 (June 2009), http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=14&id=1138
15. See Carl Jung, “Two Kinds of Thinking,” Symbols of Transformation, translated by R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956)
16. See, in addition to Jenkins, Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community, and Star Wars Fans (New York, NY: Continuum, 2003); Matthew Wilhelm Capell and John Shelton Lawrence, eds., Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006)
17. For more on Star Wars, myth, and ideology, see Ted Friedman, “Star Wars and the Dialectics of Myth,” a work in progress at http://www.tedfriedman.com/essays/2005/03/star_wars_and_t.html

The ongoing protests in Iran over its apparently stolen Presidential election are riveting, inspiring spectacle. In particular, activists’ use of new media to organize and publicize their efforts has captivated the imaginations of the American media. With reporters’ movements inside Iran restricted, CNN and other news networks have taken to passing along YouTube videos, Facebook pages and Twitter posts directly to their viewers – most shockingly, the murder of Neda Agha Sultan, captured by cellphone video cameras.

Influential blogger Andrew Sullivan has declared the events in Iraq “The Twitter Revolution.”1 Likewise, his Atlantic colleague Marc Ambinder writes, “The Revolution Will Be Twittered.” 2 Technopundit Clay Shirky says, “it seems pretty clear that . . . this is it. This is the big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”3

But reporters and scholars closer to the scene have expressed skepticism over the influence of Twitter and other social networking technologies in organizing the protests. Gaurava Mishra points out, “there are less than 10,000 Twitter users in Iran and less than 100 of them seem to be active. . . . [T]he on-ground organizing in Iran is probably happening via mobile phones and offline networks, the same networks that were previously used to mobilize Mousavi’s supporters to go out and vote for him.”4 Mishra concludes, “Calling the Iran protests a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche . . .”5

Likewise, Evgeny Morozov writes, “we may be prone to embrace the thesis that the ‘Twitter revolution’ is shaking down the authoritarian fixtures of Iran simply because we know so much about the online activities of Mousavi’s supporters – and almost nothing about those of conservative hard-liners. That their voices are missing from Twitter does not mean they are not relying on the same new media tools to mobilize their own supporters; they simply do it in Farsi and on local sites – we simply do not know where to look. . . . By sticking labels like ‘cyber-revolution’ on events in Tehran, we overstate the power of social media and make it look much more threatening that it really is.”6

The American media’s enthusiasm for the new media elements of the Iran story, then, may have less to say about what’s going on in Iran than it does about the United States. The “Twitter Revolution” rhetoric fits a familiar American narrative of technological utopianism, in which hopes for social and political transformation become attached to the promise of new technologies.

But if cybertopianism offers a distorted lens for understanding the complexities of political struggles, its virtue lies in opening up the possibility to imagine new and different futures beyond the ideological constraints of conventional wisdom. This is the dynamic I describe in my book Electric Dreams: Computers and American Culture as the dialectic of technological determinism.7 On the one hand, technological determinism reifies complex social phenomena, minimizing the role of human agents by ascribing change to the impersonal, inevitable force of technological “progress.” On the other hand, the rhetoric of technological determinism opens up a utopian sphere where we can momentarily transcend immediate pragmatic concerns – since the magic of technology will take care of the “how” – and imagine a more radically different future.

A powerful recent example of the dialectic of technological determinism in action was the 2008 Presidential election. Obama’s campaign was celebrated for its new media strategy. On the one hand, claims that new media technologies produced Obama’s victory were likely overhyped. While Obama certainly used new media masterfully, he also spent more money than McCain on traditional television advertising8 and built his “ground game” around the kind of labor-intensive canvassing that political movements have employed for generations.9 On the other hand, Obama’s message of “hope” and “change” relied on persuading voters that political transformation was possible after decades of increasing cynicism. Obama’s savvy exploitation of new media technologies was a key part of convincing his supporters that they were riding the wave of the future. As infrastructure, then, new media may not have been essential to Obama’s success. But as ideology, it was crucial.

Likewise, while the “Twitter Revolution” is surely an inadequate explanation for what’s going on in Iran, it’s served a valuable purpose in inspiring Americans to become invested in the struggle, as many Twitter users “retweeted” messages directly from the streets of Iran, while others pressured news organizations to bring their full resources to bear on the story.10

The downside of the dialectic of technological determinism, however, is that risks distorting our understanding of the possible. Inspired by the cybertopians, many politicians have called for the Obama Administration to more forcefully support the Iranian dissidents. But the United States has limited influence over Iran, and as many commentators have pointed out, appearing to become too engaged in Iran’s internal affairs is likely to provoke a backlash from a population long suspicious of American actions in the region.11 In any case, many of the most vocal critics of Obama on this point are the same neoconservatives who similarly promised that the invasion of Iraq would produce an outpouring of democracy in the region. For these politicians, technological utopianism has simply replaced military utopianism as a self-serving imperial fantasy.

The task for critics of technology, then, is to distinguish cybertopian hopes from the messier reality, without giving short shrift to either. The sense of world-wide engagement with the protesters in Iran is real and inspiring, and points to the utopian possibility of a true global village of democratized discourse. But cool web tools alone will not be enough to achieve that goal, however the events in Iran play out.

Image Credits:
1. Iranian Fail Whale: Illustration by Twitter user Iridium24
2. Widely Shared Video of Neda Agha Sultan
3. Mousavi’s Facebook Page
4. The Star Trek Future, Brought To You By Replicator Technology
5. Obama’s Technological Optimism
6. CNNFail: Image Created by Blogger Olliver Willis

Please feel free to comment.

1. Andrew Sullivan, “The Twitter Revolution,” The Daily Dish, June 19, 2009, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/the-twitter-revolution.html
2. Marc Ambinder, “The Revolution Will Be Twittered,” Washington with Marc Ambinder, June 15, 2009, http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/06/its_too_easy_to_call.php
3. Clay Shirky, quoted in Chris Anderson, “Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran,” TEDBlog, June 16, 2009, http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=14&id=1138
4. Gaurava Mishra, “Updated: The Irony of Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution,’” Gauravnomics Blog, June 17, 2009, http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-irony-of-irans-twitter-revolution/. As the sources of the statistic on Iraqui Twitter users, Mishra cites Alex Cheng and Mark Evans, “Inside Twitter,” Sysmos Resource Library, June 2009, http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/, and Joel Schectman, “Iran’s Twitter Revolution? Maybe Not Yet,” Business Week, June 17, 2009, http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc20090617_803990.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_news+%2B+analysis
5. Mishra
6. Evgeny Morozov, “The Repercussions of a ‘Twitter Revolution,’ The Boston Globe, June 20, 2009, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/06/20/the_repercussions_of_a_twitter_revolution/?page=2
7. Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams: Computers and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005)
8. Michael Luo and Mike McIntire, “With Ambitious Campaign, Obama Is Both Big Spender and Penny Pincher,” New York Times, October 30, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/politics/31spend.html
9. See Tim Dickinson, “The Machinery of Hope,” Rolling Stone, March 20, 2008, http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/19106326
10. See #CNNfail & The Social WEdia Revolution, http://cnnfail.com/
11. See, for example, Juan Cole, “Washington and the Iran Protests: Would They Be Allowed in the US?” Informed Comment, June 24, 2009, http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/washington-and-iran-protests-would-they.html

In my last column’s discussion of synchronicity in sports and games, I mentioned my interest in bringing the ideas of Carl Jung into dialogue with cultural studies. Jung’s psychology has a poor reputation in contemporary cultural theory. It’s widely thought to be essentialist, anti-materialist, and politically conservative. Theories of ideology searching for models of subjectivity have long bypassed Jung, turning instead to Freud via Althusser and Lacan. But the dismissive caricature of Jung distorts his ideas and rejects a model of the unconscious that could be of great use to understanding the psychodynamics of twenty-first century culture. In this essay, I’d like to begin demonstrating the value of Jung’s ideas for understanding one of the most resonant contemporary representations of the terrain of the unconscious: Lost.

Jung is perhaps best known, to non-Jungians, for his split with Freud in the early twentieth century over the nature of the unconscious. Freud conceived of the unconscious as the repository of the individual’s repressed fears and urges. Jung, while acknowledging this aspect, argued that the unconscious is also a source of wisdom and power. He postulated the existence of a second layer beneath the personal unconscious, a collective unconscious, which houses “archetypes” – primal structures of energy transcending social and cultural circumstances.

It is this emphasis on transhistorical archetypes which gets Jung labeled an essentialist, which is about the worst thing a theorist can be called these days. And indeed, over the years many Jungians have drawn on his theories to claim an archetypal basis for “traditional” relations of class, gender and sexuality.1 But as a newer generation of “post-Jungian” scholars has pointed out, Jung’s actual theory is much more fluid – and radical – than this rigid application presumes.2

Jung distinguishes between “archetypes” and “archetypal images.” Archetypes per se are inaccessible to consciousness and unrepresentable. They can only be glimpsed through specific archetypal images. These images are always culturally contingent, inflected differently in each different historical and cultural context. Archetypal images, then, are where archetype meets ideology.

In addition, in Jung’s model of the psyche, archetypes function not to stabilize identity, but to disrupt it in order to bring about change, healing, and ultimately transformation through the process Jung called “individuation.” For example, Jung’s archetype of the anima/animus, the contrasexual “soul-image” within the psyche, prods and challenges fixed gender identity, introducing the feminine within masculine men, and the masculine within feminine women. While Jung himself was not above recourse to the gender stereotyping of his era, in this model of a fragmented, androgynous psyche, he was well ahead of his time.3

One reason to turn to Jung’s ideas today is because popular culture seems to be growing more and more Jungian. Film studies emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, when the ideas of Sigmund Freud caught hold of the imaginations of scholars of film and literature, as well as artists such as Alfred Hitchcock. The Freudian emphasis on Oedipal dynamics, and the Freudian model of the ego keeping a tight lid on the seething id, seemed a clear fit with influential Hollywood genres such as melodrama, horror, the thriller, and film noir. Lacanian Screen theory updated Freud with a poststructuralist twist, and cultural studies has largely followed suit.

But today it is Jung’s shadow which looms over much of American culture. The most commercially successful Hollywood genres of this decade are fantasy and superhero movies, subjects which in previous generations were viewed as kids’ stuff, but today claim a larger portion of culture than ever before. These genres reject conventional models of realism and psychological depth. Instead, they embrace magical storytelling and characters of outsized dimensions and godlike powers. These qualities have led them to be largely dismissed by conventional cultural critics (beyond fan studies scholars who have tended to emphasize audience reception over the textual properties of the stories themselves). But these same qualities are well described by the Jungian language of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Their roots are in the storytelling traditions of myth and fairy tale – exactly the genres Jungian analysts have always most valued.4

The gap between Jungian and Freudian models of the unconscious can be seen in the difference between Lost and its 1950s antecedent, the science fiction film Forbidden Planet. (Both stories, in turn, owe clear debts to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.) Each narrative follows heroes who explore a mysterious, isolated location – a lost space colony in the case of Forbidden Planet, a hidden island in the case of Lost. In both stories, the visitors are threatened by an amorphous monster, representing the depths of the unconscious (and reworking Shakespeare’s Caliban).

In Forbidden Planet, following the pop-Freudianism of the era, we are explicitly told that the villain is a “monster of the id,” produced by alien technology which channels the “subconscious hate and lust for destruction” of its users. The Id Monster is pure threat: the repressed, dangerous, irrational side of civilization, “the secret devil of every soul on the planet.” We learn that the monster destroyed the Krell, the planet’s original inhabitants. It is reawakened by scientist Morbius’s repressed sexual jealousy over the visitors’ interest in his daughter. The monster is only vanquished when the planet is blown up.

In Lost, the “smoke monster” is a powerful force which appears to be at the center of the island’s many mysteries (most of which have yet to be revealed at this writing). It destroys some people it encounters, such as Mr. Eko, a former drug lord who refuses to admit remorse. It spares others, most recently Benjamin Linus, a leader responsible for many deaths who promises to follow its instructions. It appears to even have the power to resurrect the dead, bringing John Locke back to life when his corpse is returned to the island.

The smoke monster, and the magic it represents, is not exactly Forbidden Planet’s image of the indiscriminately vengeful Freudian unconscious. But neither is it the model of the unconscious idealized by some of the more starry-eyed New Age descendants of the Jungian tradition.5 It is dangerous, unpredictable, and unwilling to subordinate itself to conscious intention. But it is also a source of immense strength and transformation for those who engage it.

The smoke monster is clearly a source of archetypal energy, but it must express itself through specific archetypal images. It tends to instantiate itself in deceased figures from characters’ pasts – Mr. Eko’s brother Yumi, Ben’s daughter Alex, Jack Shepherd’s father Christian. In this interest in family history (and particularly Oedipal conflict), the monster might seem to reflect a Freudian sensibility. But as Robert Segal puts it, “for Freudians, gods symbolize parents. For Jungians, parents symbolize gods, who in turn symbolize father and mother archetypes, which are components of the hero’s unconscious.”6 We have recently learned that the smoke monster is housed in the ruins of an ancient temple amid hieroglyphics and drawings of Egyptian gods. The families of the host characters are clearly only the most recent of the many guises the “monster,” an ancient source of power, has taken.

Image Credits:

1. Carl Jung
2. Spirited Away
3. Psycho
4. The Grail Legend
5. Id Monster
6. Smoke Monster

Please feel free to comment.

1. David Tacey levels this critique at Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell, among others, in Remaking Men (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Jung and the New Age (New York: Routledge, 2001). See Robert Bly, Iron John (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990); Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
2. See Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (New York: Routledge, 1985) and The Political Psyche (New York: Routledge, 1993); Christine Gallant, Tabooed Jung (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Christopher Hauke, Jung and the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 2000); Susan Rowland, Jung: A Feminist Revision (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a rare, intriguing attempt to bring Jung and post-Marxist theory into dialogue, see Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, “Integrating Ideology and Archetype in Rhetorical Criticism,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 385-406. See also their Jungian study of American film, Rushing and Frenz, Projecting the Shadow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
3. For feminist perspectives on Jung, see Rowland, Jung: A Feminist Revision and Tacey, Remaking Men.
4. See, for example, Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Marie-Louise von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (Boston, MA: Shambhala Press, 1996). For contemporary Jungian perspectives on myth, see Lucy Huskinson, ed., Dreaming the Myth Onwards (New York: Routledge, 2008).
5. See Tacey, Jung and the New Age.
6. Robert Segal, “Introduction,” in Robert Segal, ed., Hero Myths: A Reader (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).

My last column addressed the role of game studies in media studies. In this column, I’d like to dig deeper into game analysis by looking at the role of chance in gameplay.

Thirty years ago, over the summer between fourth and fifth grades, I fell in love with a game called Strat-O-Matic Baseball.1 In Strat, every player is represented by a cardboard card listing three columns full of possible results of an at bat. For each at bat, you roll three dice – one red and two white – and look up the results on the players’ cards. For 1-3 on the red, you look on the batter’s card, for 4-6 the pitcher’s. You total the two white dice to determine where down the column you find the result.

The game held many pleasures: the fantasy of control over the ballplayers, the social interaction with the kids with whom I played games and swapped cards, the tactile thrill of holding the cards and rolling the dice. But at the core was my fascination with the game’s numbers. The combination of three dice led to 216 possible outcomes. (6×6x6). That meant you had 1 in 216 chance of rolling, say, a 1-12 (often resulting in a player injury, the duration of which was determined by generating another random number), and a 6 in 216 chance of rolling a 3-7 (since, as in craps, 6 different combinations of white dice would total 7). I quickly memorized the odds of each combination (aided by a chart I found in a book on Monopoly2 ), and learned to add up the probabilities on each player’s card at a glance.

Learning these probabilities gave me a sense of mastery over these cardboard ballplayers, which compensated for my limitations on the physical ball field. Through junior high, I grew fairly obsessed with Strat. In addition to playing with friends, I would organize solitaire all-star games, tournaments, and simulated leagues. I once reran the 1979 New York Yankees season to see how it might have turned out if the great platoon lefty slugger Oscar Gamble, who was acquired at midseason, had played for them all year, every day. (They won the pennant.)

Strat also introduced me to the quantitative study of baseball pioneered by Bill James – a movement which would go on to revolutionize the way the game today is played, managed, and enjoyed. The worldview of sabermetrics (a term derived from SABR, the Society of American Baseball Research) celebrated rational inquiry, empirical research, and skepticism for the received wisdom of the baseball establishment. James regularly published research suggesting that such shibboleths as batting order protection and clutch hitting were simply old managers’ tales.3 Reading Bill James and playing Strat-O-Matic made me feel like one of the cognoscenti who understood how baseball really worked.

Strat-O-Matic reifies the complexity of a real-life game of baseball. It takes all the messiness of a social institution involving the interactions of 18 players and thousands of fans in a three-dimensional physical space, and boils it down to dice and cardboard. Left out is the poetry of the double-play pivot, the smell of the grass, and everything else that can’t fit into a box score.

That’s OK. That’s what games do: they’re forms of “world reduction,” simulations designed to model and interpret a more complex whole.4 Baseball itself is already world reduction, reducing human interaction to a series of balls and strikes, outs and runs, winners and losers. Strat just takes that minimalism one step further.

But what I’ve come to recognize is that in my romance with mathematical rationality, I had repressed my attraction to the other half of Strat-O-Matic’s – and almost all games’ – allure: the role of random chance. I carefully collated my statistics, ran my percentages – then played the game by rolling dice, over and over. Where reason ended and luck began was exactly where work became play. It was chance which produced the excitement of the games – the improbable rallies, the no-hitters, the walk-off home runs.

What sparked the return of this repressed thought was something I found in a New Age bookstore recently: The Baseball Tarot.5 Tarot cards, one might think, are the antithesis of what the sabermetrician stands for: pure superstition, untethered to any system of rational logic. Yet, I couldn’t get over the similarities between my Strat cards and that Tarot deck, which replaces the traditional Rider-Waite cards such as the Fool, the Hierophant, and the World with baseball equivalents the Rookie, the Manager, and the World Series. The accompanying book offers alternatives to the traditional Celtic Cross layout such as, you guessed it, the baseball diamond.

The Tarot works through what Carl Jung called synchronicity: the tendency of the mind to find meaning in apparent coincidence.6 The reader shuffles the cards, lays them out, then relies on the juxtaposition of archetypal images to stir unpredictable associations out of the unconscious and into consciousness. It’s the same alchemy explored by William S. Burroughs in his “cut-up” experiments in randomly generated prose, and by John Cage in his compositions produced through throws of the I Ching. And it’s what produces meaning in any game involving chance, including not only Strat-O-Matic but real-life sports as well, which so often turn on luck as much as skill.

Sports and games are story-generating machines. Out of a series of unpredictable moments spins an idiosyncratic narrative, familiar in its shape yet different every time, thanks to the role of chance. Once each tale has been told, we can’t help but ascribe the result to more than luck, because narrative always produces meaning.

The sabermetrician in me likes to think that I know how to separate skill from luck: to treat skill as signal, and luck as noise. But the narratologist in me recognizes that I’ve had it backwards. All that statistical analysis just allows me to rationalize and compartmentalize my fascination with synchronicity. That tarot deck forced me to recognize that playing Strat-O-Matic, all along, had been a form of divination.

Image Credits:

1. Strat-O-Matic Cards
2. Oscar Gamble
3. Slide
4. Dice
5. The Fool
6. The Rookie

Please feel free to comment.

1. For a history of Strat, see Glenn Guzzo, Strat-O-Matic Fanatics (Skokie, IL: ACTA Sports, 2005)
2. I’m pretty sure it was Maxine Brady, Monopoly Book: Strategy and Tactics of the World’s Most Popular Game (New York: Pan Macmillan, 1980)
3. For a good overview of his research, see Bill James, This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones: Bill James Without the Numbers (New York: Villard, 1989). For an overview of James’s influence on the game, see Gregory F. Augustine Pierce, ed., How Bill James Changed Our View of the Game of Baseball (Skokie, IL: ACTA Sports, 2007). See also Ted Friedman, “Bill James on Clutch Hitting”
4. I’m borrowing the phrase “world reduction” from Fredric Jameson’s essay, “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative,” Science Fiction Studies 7 (November 1975): 23-39. Jameson is spinning off the concept in science fiction and fantasy of “world building” to describe the creation of elaborate alternate universes with rich back stories. For more on world reduction, see Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 154-7
5. Mark Lerner and Laura Phillips, The Baseball Tarot: Book & Card Set. (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 1999)
6. Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). See also Maria von Franz, Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance. (Toronto, ON: Inner City Books, 1980)

The Royal Game of Ur, one of the oldest known boardgames.

Game studies is a new academic field with some very old roots. Archeologists have found the remains of games dating back as far as 3500 BC. Scholars from a range of disciplines have long studied the history, culture, and design of games. But the rise of video and computer games in the last few decades has produced an explosion of interest in the area, leading to the formation of new journals (Game Studies, Games and Culture, Game Journal, Eludamos, International Journal of Role-Playing, Loading…), organizations (the Digital Games Research Association, the Canadian Games Studies Association), and the inevitable scholarly infighting (the “narratology/ludology debate,” about which more below).

Historically, academic interest in games and, more broadly, play has centered in the disciplines of anthropology (play as culture)1 and child psychology (play as learning).2 But this new interest in games has largely emerged out of the field of media studies (games as texts). Scholars trained in cinematic and televisual textual analysis began to ask, what about this new form of entertainment on our screens? As the game industry has continued to grow, pulling eyeballs away from more traditional media, the question has become impossible to ignore.

Today, game studies, as the baby of the media studies family, has a vexed relationship with its parents. On the one hand, it seeks the approval of more traditional media scholarship. On the other, it wishes to demonstrate its independence. Thus, the aforementioned “narratology/ludology debate.” Game narratologists consider games as new forms of storytelling. Ludologists prioritize games qua games – the formal aspects that make games different from story-based media.3

Myst: story or puzzle?

The rise of ludology as an alternative to narratology marked game studies’ first attempt at an Oedipal break with media studies. But to my mind, game studies has remained too timid in this family romance. Reined in, perhaps, by academic etiquette, game studies has begun to declare its independence from its parents, but it hasn’t yet attempted to usurp their authority. That’s a shame, because film and television studies could use some fresh perspectives. In its explorations in the interdisciplinary wilderness, game studies has picked up some concepts that could help us rethink the paradigms of media studies as a whole.

A good place to start is with the concept of play. Game scholars have turned to play to pinpoint what’s distinctive about gaming.4 We tend to assume that games require active participation, whereas other media require only a passive audience: you watch TV and movies, but you play games. However, upon further examination, this distinction begins to break down. In its broadest terms, we can describe play as any time we lower the stakes on reality to create the safe space for experimentation in the pretend world of imagination. In this sense, the concept of play can expand in all directions. On one hand, to the extent all social encounters are performances, we can describe everyday life as a constant process of play.5 On the other hand, even solitary activities such as watching film or television allow us to dive into imaginary worlds where we can try out different subject positions and social realities.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…

Rethinking media as a form of play offers several promising avenues for us to reexamine some of the core concepts of contemporary media theory, such as the following:

Interactivity. Play transcends debates over how “passive” or “active” spectators are. The model of play takes for granted that all forms of media engagement are inherently interactive, and that meaning is only produced through the imaginative participation of the viewer.

Intertextuality. Play takes for granted the fluidity of multiple media forms. We may transition from watching a movie, to acting it out in front of friends, to re-enacting it in video games, to dreaming about it. These may be different forms of media consumption, but they are all aspects of the same circuit of play, imaginatively reworking the raw materials of story and character.

Aesthetics. Play sidesteps questions of artistic quality, replacing them with questions of usefulness for the imagination, or, simply, fun.6

Realism. Play recognizes that however great the verisimilitude of a text, its ultimate role is to be transformed in the imagination of the player.

Learning. Play is inherently impractical; that’s why it’s not work. But at the same time, play is a dry run on reality. As many educators put it, “play is the work of children.”7 It makes sense that in freelance economy increasingly reliant on life-long learning that not only children but adults find continued value in the challenges of play.

History. The play paradigm allows us to look back on cultural history through a new lens. At a panel on “Televised Sports and its Contexts” at the 2008 Flow conference, Doug Battema suggested that sports programming is at the center of the history of American broadcasting, but is consistently overlooked in scholarly discourse.8 Methodologies designed to study news and fiction have had a blind spot when it comes to more playful genres like sports and game shows.

Narrative. Viewing all media as play upends the narratology/ludology debate. How might it transform our understanding of film structure to see it as just one example of what gamers call “mechanics”—rules designed to structure interactions and frame outcomes? What might a ludology of narrative look like?

Casablanca: One outcome of the game we call classical Hollywood narrative?

Ideology. What are the politics of play? To the Situationists, play was a utopian alternative to the alienated sphere of work. Edward Castranova gives that vision a Web 2.0 spin in Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality, arguing that a generation brought up on games will demand that “real life” be just as fun.9 McKenzie Wark in Gamer Theory offers a gloomy counterpoint, suggesting that play has already become work and work, play, as the gamer jumps through the designer’s hoops to gain a high score in a Sisyphian pursuit indistinguishable from technologized labor.10 Rethinking spectatorship as play, then, offers no immediate ideological answers. But it does reframe the questions in valuable ways, engaging work as play’s implicit other, and then offering the opportunity for each to interrogate the other.

Diner Dash: Playing at work or working at play?

Image Credits:

1. The Royal Game of Ur
2. Myst:Story or puzzle?
3. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…
4. Casablanca: One outcome of the game we call classical Hollywood narrative?
5. Diner Dash: Playing at work or working at play

Please feel free to comment.

1. See, for example, Roger Callois, Man, Play and Games (Free Press, 1961); Johan Huizenga, Homo Ludens (Beacon Press, 1955)
2. See D. A. Winnicott, Play and Reality (Tavistock Publications, 1971)
3. For an overview of this debate, see the collection First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (MIT Press, 2004)
4. See Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004)
5. Along these lines, see Ludwig Wittgenstein’s model of communication as a series of “language-games,” Ludwig Wittegenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 2001)
6. See Ralph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Paraglyph Press, 2005)
7. Vivian Gussin Paley, A Child’s Work (U Chicago Press, 2004): 1
8. Doug Battema, “Televised Sports and Its Contexts,” Flow Conference 2008, Austin, TX, October 10, 2008
9. Edward Castranova, Exodus to the Virtual World (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). See also Pat Keane, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living (Pan Books, 2004)
10. MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Harvard U Press, 2007)