Some Postural Diagrams

Yesterday I put together some preparatory diagrams for the Image Game, working through the basic 'loop' of play, in terms of the selection, synthesising, and deployment of images. This resulted in some excellent stress testing in the glog server, as well as a good deal of spirited play between the worthies. 

This is turn got me thinking about the postures of the game - the building blocks that players internalise (usually as children), and which constitute its semi-formal 'grammar'. There are basic postures and advanced postures, as detailed below. 

The most important posture is also the most fundamental and straight forward. An image makes a claim (the claim can be just about anything), and a second adversarial image attempts to deconstruct or nullify that claim. Crudely, it might match or cancel a claim, but what players really want to do if show that a claim was always actually something else, ideally its opposite. 

This sounds complicated, but it's a common critical posture in our own academic/theoretical and contemporary art cultures - it's the reason many 20th century theorists are so obsessed with the rhetorical form that asserts that something is both x and not x. It is a very powerful critical move to assert this convincingly, because it puts the reader (or your adversary, if you're a Citizen) in the position of trying to work your apparently contradictory position out from first principles, ie they must demonstrate that they are already behind you. 

A claim of this kind can (and nearly always does) have content; it is not only a formal stance or posture, and is contingent on what it actually advances - nonetheless, the postural flex or terror move of asserting that something is both x and not x cannot only be understood in terms of content. 

I am not claiming (and do not believe) that these assertions are vapid or cynical - critical writing that advances past a certain threshold of abstraction often needs to invent concepts and small, contingent language games to get at its object. I likewise do not think of the Image Game as vapid or cynical (you might have a different opinion); it is imagined as a complex cultural artefact that serves a social function, but which also gives its players (the entire population of the Citizenry) a very dangerous set of critical/discursive tools that allows them to see 'around' and 'through' the cultural claims and norms of their subject states. Contemporary art training and practice is a complicated thing, tied into various colonial and class terror systems (see, as just one example among hundreds, the recent artwashing of the atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon), but also capable of producing images and concepts of great and lasting beauty. YYMV on whether you think that 'the production of images of great and lasting beauty' is encouraged or hindered by the labyrinthine critical and discursive machinery that has come to characterise the production of sophisticated contemporary art. 

So, what you are trying to do is assert your claim convincingly, such that your adversary (and any witnesses) say something like 'yes, that's true.' And what they are trying to do is advance their own position such that they demonstrate, convincingly, that your position was in fact analogous to their position all along, and to do this in a public setting, such that everyone else knows it, and back and forth it goes.  

More diagrams!