Well, I nearly did buy the Official Guide to Pokemon the other night,
before reading this thread, and despite knowing no one caught up in the
enabling tentacles of this cross-cultural 'tertiary' artifact (not that I
quite believe in hierarchies of semiotic artifacts).
Perhaps mostly for reasons of the sort given by Eugene: whatever its
designers intentions, it is being appropriated and remade in the meaning
system of kids, an alien meaning system, partly oblique to and partly
opposed to, that of adults. The fact that kids love it and adults
hate/fear/disdain it makes it interesting. There is a sense in which the
culture of childhood is more alien than that of another adult culture, even
if it is made out of bits and pieces of the same cloth we also wear. It
therefore gives us 'purchase' or perspective, from difference, on ourselves
and perhaps on those aspects of our relationships to children that we are
not permitted to see by our own culture.
It is also interesting to see the fascination with complex taxonomies. I
did a quick semiotic analysis just of the images of the 152
species/individuals; as a teacher, I'd use this instead of the traditional
example -- leaves in fall -- to discuss classification as a 'scientific'
principle, and to critique the many logicist fallacies about it that are
usually taught, such as that you can have value-free descriptive
classification, or unique classification, or that taxonomy can be useful
without including metric (degrees, fuzzy sets) dimensions, etc. etc. From
first grade right through grad school.
And the social dimension, which is really the 'killer app' in Pokemon: it
was designed to _require_ interaction and trading, first via the Gameboy
handheld game computers, and generally to promote it. This is a basic
difference from the simple 'collect' imperative; it shifts the emphasis
toward 'trade', and that of course is also why there is an economics in
Pokemon (scarcity, value orderings), but interestingly it is not the
standard economics in which the goal is maximization: the goal is total
inclusiveness, the maximum power is associated with one-of-each. Forgive me
if I see in this a very Japanese cultural value, the same one that requires
broad consultations, not leaving out any class of stakeholder in decision
making, mobilizing all segments of the corporation or community for
effective action, etc.
And how wonderful that its ethos contributed to a group of kids
reconstituting a collection for a player who'd lost his; very
communitarian, but also based in a certain logic of this kind of economy,
which is not a zero sum game. The more players the better; the trade's the
thing (not entirely of course, a matter of relative balance and degree).
Of course this is an adult analysis. It does miss the crucially important
_feelings_ that kids have for the cards, the objects, playing, the
discourse, etc. (Very good site for the study of identity process in a
community via material signifiers and discourses.) Feelings compounded from
control of scary monsters (adults? anti-adults?), from appreciation for
predictable order in a dangerous and not well understood universe, from a
knowable ladder to peer esteem ... and who knows what else (or if putting
these rationalized names to the motives matters at all).
What I'd like to know more about are the processual and temporal dimensions
of the Pokemon culture. Seems pretty clear that the objects-with-meanings
mediate the linkages of events into longer term processes, along with the
body-feeling about these objects and the enfolding activities
(heterochrony). But what are these processes? how do kids 'get into'
Pokemon over hours, days, weeks? How do Pokemon groups develop and evolve
new strategies and practices for using/playing Pokemon? over days, weeks,
months, longer?
Clearly the designers and marketers were concerned with longevity of the
culture, and already had the experience in Japan to draw on. Wanna bet that
while in both contexts there is longevity, that the practices and processes
on various scales are different? The problem in imagining just how is of
course that we can't extrapolate from our understanding of adult culture
differences to child culture differences -- as big a gap in our sociology
and ethnography as the already recognized ones about gender-culture
differences and class-culture differences.
My appreciation for heterochrony grew out of models that were themselves
dissatisfied with simplistic clocktime. (My biologist friends, the
'internalist' physicists, the complexity theorists ... anticipatory
systems, trajectory entities, finite interval operationalism, phase
information entropies ... they are all duree-style correctives to notions
of metric time that are too simple to describe process in more complex
systems ... lots of these people know Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and the
reincarnated Leibniz ... there's a link to Bergson, and duree is mentioned
a lot.) Timescales build on the infrastructure of metric time, but as a
concept they are not the same, in fact they point toward certain kinds of
temporal irreducibility (ie. of processes that can only exist over
timescales longer than some lower limit), which directly denies the basic
assumptions of metric time (that intervals on any scale are simple linear
sums of shortest instants, that the units of measure for time are
arbitrary, that the laws of nature are timescale-invariant ... this is the
Newtonian view -- not necessarily Newton's of course -- the
mechanistic-reductionistic episteme).
So I am just as interested in bodily processes, and body-feeling processes,
in the phenomenological dimensions of Pokemon social-cultural processes on
these different timescales as I am in the semiotic dimensions. In the view
of time that I have held since the 70s (I collaborated at any early stage
with Gene Gendlin, a phenomenological psychologist and sometime Heidegger
scholar), time is an aspect of process, generated by process, as the
on-goingness of interactivity. Even standard physics these days (at its
most abstruse levels) more or less agrees that time is not a priori, that
is it somehow a by-product of matter in action. There are analogues of the
principle that time is not infinitely reducible to mathematical instants,
though not yet I think a fully developed theory of the autonomy of
timescales at different orders of magnitude (this is too interwoven with
issues of the complexity of the system, and with the problem of how
instants get cumulated into intervals; fundamental physics is still dealing
mainly with systems hoped to be simple enough to avoid the issue, but no
luck so far; simplicity seems more complex every year). So one can ask
about how kids bodies, and feelings, and dispositions (habitus?) are
changing in each of the different process that are going on in Pokemon on
each distinguishable timescale (range of timescales within an order of
magnitude, or rate-scale similarly). But also how larger scale 'entities',
groups and ecologies and the mini-provinces of Pokemon cultural dialects
are developing on longer timescales.
It's so nice when the relevant semiotic objects are day-glo pink and
un-ignorable.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 11 2000 - 14:04:05 PST