Modes of Existence - Chapter 4

In the previous posts, I have talked about defining our object of inquiry as well as a little on what documents matter. I also wrote about how defining is actually a bit more tricky but easier within this method because it allows researchers to learn. More recently, I wrote a bit about how definitions of charisma exist in tandem and sometimes overlap.

So we found what we wanted to study, defined it, and then heard a little more about what documents are important. We then took some time to think about how a concept exists in concert with every other iteration of that concept. For example, Charisma as a way for shops to have different prices in video games exists in tandem with Wizardry using it as a way for magical classes to use to as a designation of power or religious fervor. Still other games like Dungeons and Dragons use it for altogether different, yet nearly similar reasons in tabletop spaces. And other games use this as well to offset for internal power, capacity to attract lovers, to get their way, and to instill absolute terror.

This chapter focuses on something that is often overlooked in social science, space. For the most part, in the list of approaches to charisma, there is all the space taken up. We can see that lack of space in the confines of definitions.

1. Theology. A free gift or favour specially vouchsafed by God; a grace, a talent.
2. A gift or power of leadership or authority; aura. Hence, the capacity to inspire devotion or enthusiasm. - Oxford English Dictionary

Literally nothing else can exist or will. There may be some colloquialisms but this is…it. This is a bit of an esoteric issue in the social sciences that has lasted for hundreds of years at this point (which is partially why it’s invisible). What connects things?

Originally, it was felt that god connected things. But as we began to manifest secular science, nothing actually replaced that. The space between objects was filled in by god. And so as a result, actually considering what might connect things was never truly a topic of conversation.

What Actor-Network-Theory did was remove this understanding and replace it with the apocryphal discussion via Leibniz and eventually Tardè followed by Latour himself. What this discussion allows is for us to dispense with the murky fog of war that connects objects, the angonistic nature of ideas, with something we can actually view. To wit, by dispensing with this ontological paradox, we can undo epistemological issues and actually begin to unravel the nature of reference that has manifested post-computer.

That paradox of reference is responsible for a lot of what we tend to label under tech-bro-ness, tech dude, and the various concepts under this. While there is a lot for those folks to answer to due to the lack of criticality associated with adhering to such a naïve viewpoint, we too in the social sciences, humanities, and various human-focused disciplines commit the same fallacy, though at a much slower, much less destructive pace.

So how does that manifest in the study of things?

That has been covered quite a bit in Latour’s work, Harman’s work, and the various components of Object Oriented Ontology. But I want to approach this in terms of method rather than mindset. The point of this work on charisma is itself method-based, nothing else. In essence, I want to deploy this viewpoint in a method not called ANT or OOO, but something more useful. But that name is far off. What it is and how it does is far more importance at the moment. Let’s take this sentence from Modes of Existence, for example.

Map and territory are the same thing, or rather have the same form, because things are basically forms.

Charisma is the “thing” I want to study. While it is part of other “things”, the issue here is that I want to separate one out from the masses because it is unlike the others. If I stick with just Dungeons and Dragons, we have: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, and Wisdom to also consider. And yet, the numeric quantities of those other values make sense. I can test my strength with weights. I can test my dexterity in obstacle courses. I can test my constitution in various tests of longevity. Intelligence and Wisdom are a bit harder but at the moment we have standardized testing (with absolute controversy, of course) which measures these things.

And yet Charisma is…what? It is the odd duck that sits out the party at first when these values are translated to a new medium. When they do show up, they are partially displacing both definition 1 and 2 and are simply used as a way to conduct commerce. The creation of a 3rd definition, despite its colloquial usage, is as real in its consequence than others.

In essence, the concept of charisma in language and the concept of charisma in games are in concert despite being in conflict. And through this, we can find a whole series of controversies, translations, and displacements to study and manifest their shape.

But the issue here is not Charisma, its definition, or anything else, it’s the issue of the concept existing in conflict with computation. It is an unmeasurable concept, or at least not easily so in modern life. That same modern life that, until recently, was accepted without hearing the minority opinion that perhaps things could be better for some.

This is perhaps one of my favorite moments in this text so far. Latour actually defines Moderns with some relatively straight forwardness that is unlike him. This passage has stuck with me:

We could give a more precise definition even now by saying that a Modern is someone who thinks he lives in a world of 3 + 1 dimensions. Provided that we add: and who then wonders with increasing anxiety where he is going to be able to localize the set of values to which he holds. In other words, a Modern is someone who, believing himself to be submerged in a world of 3 + 1 dimensions, is distressed to see that it literally no longer has any room, anywhere, for him to deploy his values. He considers the importance of law, morality, fiction, politics, the economy, organizations, perhaps religion, even psyches, collective actions, seeking to anchor them somewhere, all in vain: there is no longer any place to put them. He is groping in the dark. “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” - 104

The addition of a 4th dimension time is something that has been obscene to deal with for quite a while (I used the thing I am writing about as a reference, sorry). Time is this thing we’ve created based on our natural world and how we understand it. Through it, we see a clock and through that clock, we manifest a weird moment in that the only measure of a clock is another clock. To call this a dimension is in and of itself a unique manifestation of space connecting us given just how much work has to be done to make it useful. That time and space are so intimately connected, especially within the confines of our base12 past, it is maybe the sole historical development that remains undiscussed, unreferenced, and unbroken in thousands of years. To wit, it may itself pre-date Newton, predate Spinoza, predate even the fall of ancient Egypt.

And yet, this dimensionality is itself the thing we tend to attach to concepts like progress, advancement, or next gen. This is the issue at hand when considering that of tech and it remains a curiosity at the core of this project which we could state as a research question. For example, “Does the constant translation of charisma reflect the progress of technology?”

And this is where I think a method based on this text can be useful. We need something that can simultaneously care and not care about technological progress or advancement. We need something that can completely ignore time. To that end, there’s a neat quote here that I have been thinking about.

Matter is a composite arrangement that amalgamates, to the point of indistinguishability, the requirement of knowledge–a transfer of constants, or, to use the technical term, of immutable mobiles–and the requirements of subsistence–maintenance in existence through the leap of reproduction. –106

For charisma to exist, it must constantly be under negotiation to the point where there are certain aspects of it that are manifest as matter. From this passage, there is a presumption that we must create and form things under constant negotiation. While this is the reason for the blog entry as I need to work through these ideas, it is also part and parcel of the usefulness of this method. Charisma has 2 immutable mobiles in the form of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions which represents not the basis upon which the concept is built, but as a publication of the constants formed through the processes of negotiation.

And this is essentially what this method affords for, to manifest the chains of reference and reproduction of a concept across time, space, and medium. Latour notes that:

the work of reference as we now know relies on the establishment of a series of transformations that ensure the discovery and the maintenance of constants: continuity of access depend on discontinuities. This is the only means–but a means whose practical discovery is always perilous and fragile–to ensure the back-and-forth movement, the coming and going owing to which one can start from a given point…and reach another, more or less remote…Form is what is maintained through a series of transformations. - 107

While this is useful to consider, there is a trap here and it is through this that we tend to see social science, the humanities, and really most of the sciences that touch humanity and their objects. While we know that time is a dimension forced on us by the nature of how we’ve decided to perceive technology, we rarely will include that dimension as a facet of our analysis. The moment we study is a moment within which something is stable. That stability is rarely more than force, the force of a researcher’s fingers clicking keys on a keyboard followed by a report that itself is often negotiated in the same agonistic way that their object of study was. To this, Latour notes:

The key point is that each of these shapings, these putting-into-form events, has meaning only through the stage n-1 that precedes it and the stage n+1 that follows; only the set of successive embeddings allows this highly paradoxical back-and-forth movement that obtains continuity of reference (the runner) through the discontinuity of stages (the hurdles, the passing of the baton). When we speak of form in the concrete sense of the term, then we are designating the framework and the chain of all reference networks.

From this, we can essentially say that we can look at the history of an idea, its various ways and forms and controversies. We can describe these things, catalog a brief moment in time, we can uncover associations, negotiations, and even account for shifts of consumption, shifts of focus, shifts of use, and even new meanings through their appearance and processes. These are the discontinuity of stages that he references above.

For Charisma, we have common use as a religious concept. We have its various forms, its various manifestations, and its various uses across time all the way back to ancient Greece. For its newest form, we have the usages in games like Kriegspiel which understood it was a concept but did not have a name for it. We saw it in Braustein, Little Wars, and a number of other games across history up until it became a leadership component in both Chainmail and the original Dungeons and Dragons.

We have the negotiations that follow in the form of its various components. Above all, we have the space for all of these things to co-exist, we have space to be wrong, we have space to be surprised, attacked, or otherwise led astray.

But this is all relatively elementary and filled (despite the space) with potential hypocrisies, problems, and tiny details. From looking at the TOC, we’re about to head into some super fun moments. Next up: Speech Impediments!