Spiraling in Time with Latour and Warcraft

Pardon my French, but this reading was like sitting through someone bitching about some totally opposite bitch. I must admit... I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and I still don’t think I really know what I got out of this after putting it down. I feel like I just rode on a roller coaster ride of conceptual affirmation and criticism... I’m such a horrible person for having a modern mind - thank goodness, there’s a little nonmodern to my thinking - oh wait, I’m such a relativist! - hold on, I think I think temporality is like this... oh my gosh, I don’t really know what the hell to think of both Latour and myself after this. 

I honestly don’t even know where to go with my response. While reading, so many things came to mind that I could relate Latour to, but I quickly realized how I was thinking was exactly what he criticizes... or at least, that’s how I feel. My difficulty with this read probably lies in my tendency to find and make relations... to view things through a mirror as (I think) Latour would scold... with what is being discussed and how it involves myself or things I understand. I want to make comparisons. I want to set up boundaries. I want to view things in a vacuum, enclosed in Boyles’ lab or as my own Hobbesian Leviathan. Is he wagging his finger at me for thinking the way I do?

Even if he is, I’ll keep on thinking this way for the purpose of this response and out of frustration. I can appreciate his suggestion to rethink the existence of modernity, but I am not convinced after one quick read-through of dense content. Perhaps after class, after the final reads that work with Latour, after more time to read this again and really sit on it... perhaps then I’ll give what he has to say some serious consideration. Until then...

I found many of the concepts discussed in We Have Never Been Modern intriguing. These include those Latour critiqued and condoned. Of most interest is “the temporal framework of the moderns” and the alternative nonmodern spiral temporality (67). According to Latour, the moderns’ sense of time is linear and continuously moves forward. It looks like this:

The Temporal Framework of Moderns: 

|-----[revolution]-----[revolution]-----[revolution]-----[present]>

Because moderns push away from the past, separating themselves from the former at turning points and revolutions of dominance, they “suffer from the illness of historicism” (69). They do not seek to replicate the past nor do they desire to relive it. They categorize and display the failed ways of old in an attempt to distinguish and divide themselves apart as present. They establish their own elements and collectives to define, compare, and contrast themselves with. Nevertheless, their sense of future is faulty. The present travels along its line securely convinced of its own perfection until it hits another revolution... then present becomes past, the future is present, and the pattern of modern time continues and none of what they determined of themselves and others really mattered.

Latour’s nonmodern, however, sees temporality not as some sort of framework, a network of detached history that supports the moderns’ conception of themselves. Rather, they view temporality and time as the result of connected elements of the past. I can’t figure out a good way to visualize this, but the nonmodern’s sense of time is a spiral that “takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions, and the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled” (75). For them, the past plays an active interconnected role in both present and future, but time is not in motion. Nonmoderns do not progress or regress; they sort through the results of conceptions of time, combing through its elements unconfined by an enclosed present they never created.

This idea of modern and nonmodern temporality had me thinking about World of Warcraft. So, the player engages with Azeroth and the Warcraft universe sort of... detached from the game’s actual narrative. Gameplay is linear, yet the game functions in an expanding spiral. The moment the player creates his/her toon, he/she is thrown into the actual beginning of the game in relation to the events leading out of Warcraft III (although, when you actually start depends on expansions, races, and classes some times) ... despite the fact that some one, or possibly that same player on a different toon, has already completed endgame material. That level-1-going-on-2-Orc-Warrior will eventually reach the level cap to defeat whatever boss awaits endgame... even though whatever it happens to be at that patch has been slain a countless number of times already. The narrative for that leveling toon develops as linearly as its increasing numerical level, but the game itself occurs spirally in order to compensate for its “real time” game play and dynamic player population. 

And while the external-to-internal playability is a temporal spiral, there is an area within the game that represents this nonmodern sense of time even better, although this relation may require actual time in-game to really grasp. So, there’s this place called the Caverns of Time where these dragon guys have collected various key events of Warcraft history... the player is able to enter portals that lead to these past events and essentially engage with the game’s history. Do not confuse this with time travel or whatever in order to alter the present. Just like Latour’s nonmodern sense of temporal connection, these preserved events represent the interconnectedness of Azeroth’s past to its present and future, how each event corresponds to the other not as some sort of revolutionary (the act of change) progression marker as the moderns view it but as a series of revolutions (the act of revolving) in the spiral of events we like to call “time.” Coincidentally, the Cavern itself is shaped like a spiral, and the player emerges inside it around its center and ventures to the surrounding portals.

The Caverns of Time sand timer... imagine the
upper/lower streams of sand converging/dispersing
at the center and each grain of sand an event.

How does all this talk of time and the temporal relate back to rhetoric? Well, I think to some degree this approaches the idea of the subject, which we have encountered heavily in our readings over the past two weeks, in a different way under different terms. Latour’s “modern” is similar to the “humanist” subject, that autonomous being that functions in Boyles’ lab of causes and effects, displacing those causes in order to preserve its effects but consequentially recreating the cause in a linear motion. His “nonmodern,” however, is an entity of its own quite unlike the “postmodern” subject who is still grappling with the cause/effect object/subject relation but is dependent on the influence of externals rather than internal determination. Latour’s “nonmodern” seeks an acknowledgement of external and internal hybridity and its proliferation that both the “humanist” and “postmodern” ignore, reject, avoid, but ultimately participate in. By trying to reduce the world, society, science, language, etc. as we know it into hierarchies and relative measurements, time into a continuously progressive line, they are in fact unknowingly reinforcing the nonmodern perspective.