What to Carry Forward
I remind myself: we are at the end of an era. The means of survival and the question of preservation come to the fore. Hardly opposed, tensions abound between them. Daily survival often depends upon the failing and changing institutions that constitute the passing era, while preserving for what comes after requires imagining and tentatively constituting new social relations to carry forward what we hope survives into the next era.
The last month has been close to the bone. As one of the many trans people quietly on the move within the United States, the question of what I carry forward with me both materially and culturally looms large. And perhaps tellingly when I get close to the bone, where do I turn? The spiritual work that animates my day to day continues, and I add to it more critical and theoretical perspectives that flourish within it. Most recently that includes Ruha Benjamin, Lauren Berlant, Augusto Boal, Hélène Cixous, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Anna Kornbluh, Fred Moten, and Aaron Trammell.
That should tell me (and you) a fair bit about where and how my garden grows.
I have been rereading Berlant's Cruel Optimism for its careful elaboration of how affect enlivens attachment to produce an atmosphere that becomes something akin to a form of shared sensation by which we navigate the world. Affect "span[s] what's internal and external to subjectivity" and "saturates the corporeal, intimate, and political performances of adjustment that make a shared atmosphere something palpable and, in its patterning, releases to view a poetics, a theory-in-practice of how a world works" (16).
As a point of emergence, it is also a point of decomposition. While a genre is an "affective contract," an agreement about the ways feeling should be reproduced, this space of affect is also where contracts and theories-in-practice break down in the face of a situation that repels it. Here, fantasy is born and broken. Here, fantasy is resuscitated and remade. It can be a place of terror and despair, but it can also be a place of tenderness and possibility.
More often than not, it is a submerged place. The attachment and atmosphere appear as a commonsensical "how things are" that we must simply adjust our feelings to. But in times like these? Well, the seams do start to show.
What does that mean when it comes to this blog and my relationship to role playing games? What does it mean for the work that I am doing with my queer little girl self?
Revisiting the Dungeons & Dragons of my childhood and reading intensely around the contemporary revivals of that style in the OSR and NSR has reacquainted me with the sense of yearning (affect and attachment) I brought to the game and helped me unearth more of the fantasies (atmosphere and symbols) that it produced and worked through. That dimension of fantasy is so vital to me, and the language of Symbolism provided me with a means to understand how the images could be so full of affect and not so full of meaning. I needed that, to be sure, an appreciation for how embodied this all was, how it was suspended around me like a web I could feel the world around me with.
Situation, attachment, affect, atmosphere, and organizing symbol or image. There, an aesthetic and critical rubric I can work with going forward that relocates the weight of my work away from the circuit of genre (e.g., fantasy adventure), archetype (e.g., cleric, rogue, fighter, wizard, brainer, gunlugger, hardholder), and character (e.g., my character). I want to find the tender places where the knots of situation, affect, and attachment are exposed in the work of adjusting to a quickly changing world and tenderly explore the otherwise ways of there coming back together, find the symbols and signs that break free into their own gravity and exert pressure on that process.
And I want to favor love, whether that be love in affect, love in attachment, love in atmosphere, or love glowing from within a newborn symbol.
The color and vivacity of the art in The Painted Wastelands, Ultraviolet Grasslands, and Mana Meltdown all sang to my queer little girl heart in that way. The texts sometimes expanded on those images and sometimes collapsed them, but in each case it was the images that hummed with symbolic force, not the modules and worlds they were meant to illustrate. As symbols, they were luminous dreams stretched over the surface of sensitive skin to shimmer in response to the wordless depths of a world alongside them.
The rules for which they were produced? No. Not that at all. I don't need that weird obsession with tallying harm into abstractions like hit points and saves getting in the way of those images. I don't want to produce work animated by gambling and economy, even (or maybe even especially) when that "keeps the fiction feral" in the Powered by the Apocalypse sense, where "feral" is code for trapped in the repetition of genre and archetype. That just isn't my kink.
Which leads me to: I need to draw a sharper distinction between (a) the way play and games relate to this recuperative, future-forward artistic work and (b) the way I engage (and have engaged) with role playing games, with a critical eye toward the conditions of their emergence and reproduction as social forms that can undermine my artistic work. Without abandoning role playing games, I want to anchor myself in a creative work outside of their milieu. As I go forward, I want to reorient my own use of role playing toward that creative work wherever I can.
And I want to take seriously that these are existential questions for me. These aren't luxury engagements with products, but the recuperation of my self and future and freedom from social forms inimical to it. Critical seriousness for the sake of love. Love for myself and others that seeks a more encompassing and opportunity-rich future for us, beginning with our imagination.
I want to believe that the individual and the gaming group, the indie creator and the bespoke games, are the central locus for this work, but there is too much romantic naivete in that way of thinking. There is nothing about the smaller scale that makes them more receptive to these existential questions. Where those things open me up to my work, wonderful, but I will be more expansive because I am more expansive.