an international
and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, February 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
Overcoming the Logos
– Overcoming Lego:
From Imagined Space to the Spatial Imagination of the
Bionicle World
For several generations, the
interconnecting plastic bricks called Lego represented not only an educative
means of developing imagination but also one of developing children’s capacity
of logical thinking. The first Lego catalogues from the early 1960s praise the
small bricks as “good toys.” The reason can be found in the preponderant
heading: because Lego is the “simplest thing in the world.”
“Simple” – yes, but not
for simpletons. During the 1960s and the
1970s, Lego built itself a reputation as a toy for people who aspire advanced
levels of grammar through the successful combination of abstract and concrete
ways of thinking. Lego helps you to master your creativity like a language:
being imaginative without losing sight of the most basic rules of logic, you
will manage to remain coherent even in complex situations. Playing with Lego
does perhaps not make you a poet, but enables you to master a practical as well
as a theoretical “language” with a certain degree of sophistication. The idea
must have been that, once we reduce the elements of our children’s games to the
healthy level of the “basic” (providing at the same time a maximum of
modulability), children will become imaginative without becoming insane. Their
imagination will develop “reasonably well” without losing itself in the wide
space of “play” which remains, just because in this space things are only
“imagined,” frightening because infinite.
For parents this has
been extremely convenient because here play and fun were delivered with an
incorporated self-control. This conception, unconscious as it might have been,
was strong enough to provide Lego with the status of the “educative toy” as
such. It was strong enough to inspire and lend its name to a large number of
educative programs for children, various computer softwares, as well as
training courses for business people attempting to enhance their business
performance by using this brick-game as a thinking tool.What it actually is
that makes Lego “logical,” is difficult to spell out. Secondary features might
be as important as primary ones. Though the word “Lego” has been derived from the
Danish “leg godt” (play well), its phonetic resemblance with Latin words like
“logos” or “logic” might have helped from the beginning to lend it a more
scientific air. Very early the company began to point out that in Latin “lego”
also means “I study.”
Then there are the primary features.
The basic elements (bricks) are rectangular and not round-shaped. Deciding to
reject any amorphous shapes (you will not learn “logic” through pottery), Lego
managed to force play (together with the intellectual capacity supposed to be
shaped through this play), into more rigorous, geometrical structures. The
choice of colors had a similar function. Far from refusing colors straight-out
(and thus killing imagination), Lego reduced colors to shadeless “basic” ones
that remained abstract in the sense that – apart from the green for trees –
they had no relationship with anything concrete. But most obvious became the logical rigor
within the organization of the play itself. Lego bricks stick together through
an invisible structure, they create their structure so to speak out of
themselves. This means that they provide the fragile brains of 2-14 years-olds
just enough logical support to follow the laws of reason without forcing them
into abstract, pre-existing rules.
Somewhere between the
primary and the secondary features is settled the general quality of Lego as a
“serious game.” Adults must have jealously looked at these children who possess
a toy that permits them to be serious and to have fun at the same time. Soon
businessmen began using Lego because “playing with Lego” is an “efficient,
practical and effective process that works for everyone.” 1 The
transcendental power of play, known since the ancient Greeks, is here somehow
lead ad absurdum, which might be inherent already in the original Lego-bricks
themselves. The popular-scientific outline of a business-studies program using
Lego offers summaries of the works of almost all major thinkers – from Huizinga
to Piaget – who have analyzed the exceptional status of play, and attempts to
draw links between the “lightness” of play and its “usefulness” for cognitive
development as well as social competition.
In spite of the
geometrical shape of the bricks on which you can count the dots as if you count
millimeters, Lego constructions never became “mathematical” but always
maintained the structure of an organic
whole. Technical construction toys (often coming in gray) that first
necessitate the creation of a “skeleton” that will subsequently be fleshed out,
were never as popular as Lego (Lego’s own Techno-line
remained rather marginal). Lego has never been the game of the future engineer
but rather that of the well-thinking analyst who is scientifically minded
without being dull, creative without being romantic, and who manages to apply his creativity to the everyday
world. As a kind of logically trained humanists, Lego-children were designated
to become the ideal people of the 21st century.
We understand very well
why those people born between 1965 and 1975 hated Lego. According to the German
writer Florian Illies (born in 1971), this generation, raised long after the
last waves of hippidom had curled away, vehemently rejected theoretical
buildings of any kind.2 The first thing that this generation had to
throw on the rubbish was, of course, Lego.
The alternative became Playmobil that contrasts with Lego on
several levels. Playmobil offers no spaceships, no futurism and no technology of
any kind. Instead, it specializes in traditional values like farms, Blackforest
houses, and post-offices. Contemporary brochures of Playmobil read as if they
have been written fifty years earlier. In Playmobil grocery stores we find
several kinds of sausages, cheese, “and other heartful dainties.” The
hairdresser’s salon is ideal for active role-play. Kids are supposed to create
their concrete playworld as realistically and detailed as possible. Finally,
play will turn out to be what it actually is: imitation, naturally creating
full-fledged, atmospheric, play-landscapes in which no Martians have introduced
things like “structures.”
Lego had launched its
own town systems and castles in 1981. The problem with these systems has always
been that Lego-space is anti-concrete by definition. Always changing, unfolding
itself magically, Lego-space has always been intellectual, future-oriented, and
abstractly-organic. The only things that remain stable in Lego-space are
“creativity” and some vague notion of logic. Lego made some further cramped
attempts at becoming Playmobil-like. The most decisive act took place in 1978,
when the Lego-persons learned to walk. Before that date, Lego-persons (and
there were not many of them) had two legs made of one single piece of plastic.
In 1978 the legs got separated and got joints. Space now became more concrete
because people could walk through it, which influenced, of course, the entire
way of playing with Lego. The accent was removed from the linguistic-structural
activity of creating abstract-organic spaces, and put on the
empathic-experiential way of perceiving created environments composed of
concrete objects. But the play-mobilized
Lego was no success. Playmobil itself became the game for concretely human
people who see life not as determined by ideologies but by role-play.
In the 1990’s Lego
changed again, and this time more than ever. Some of the bricks became
“intelligent,” interactive, and able to move. More and more “special parts”
were introduced, making “basic” parts almost a rarity. A large part of the
ambition to appear “logical” was abandoned and the initial idea of Lego as a
creative toy appeared as utterly weakened. Observers expected that the entire
concept of Lego as a pedagogical principle flowing out of the optimistic
humanism of preceding generations had simply ceased to make sense. The use of
Lego bricks would soon be restricted to alternative education programs and
business courses. As a popular toy Lego was bound to die out. Then something
unexpected happened: Somebody invented “virtual reality.” In the 1980 Lego
boasted to give “imagination space to soar.” Now Lego designers recognized what
Lego’s mission should really be in the contemporary world: to spatialize
imagination.
When Lego invented the
universe of the Bionicles, children began to desire Lego again. However, this
time, kids (and it was only them
because adults do not understand much of these new Lego) were not so much
fascinated by what could be identified as the traditional Lego-logic but by Lego-space.
The new Lego-line is
called “Bionicle.” Bionicles are sleek and stylized robots that developed out
of earlier Lego-robots called “Throwbots.” As real cyborgs, they live in a
typical AI universe in which the boundary between humans and machines are
fuzzed. The aesthetics as such is in no way original but developed since the
1970s especially in Japanese techno-pop culture. Originally, these strange and
threatening techno-pop cyborgs built a contrast with the simpler Disneyian
aesthetics of robots. Equipped with samurai swords and insect carapaces, they
thrived particularly well in Japanese mangas and animés like Tekkaman and Evangelion. First, these android,
biomechanical monsters had mainly negative connotations and were forced to
adopt the roles of enemies; only later could they appear also as sad and
problematic creatures.
Human bodies wrapped in
technology or exoskeletons, hybrids of skin/chrome, flesh/metal,
organic/inorganic, etc. are not new; but so far, they did not necessarily enter
the rooms of young well-educated Lego-engineers. Still, Lego decided to invest
in this kind of imaginary – though not without undertaking some changes. The
Bionicles’ existence is based on a story that takes place somewhere “in space”
far away from earth. The plot comes along as a mixture of
Polynesian mythology, African religion, Eastern philosophy and Greek
polytheism, which distances it completely from the Japanese animé world. The story itself is simple
and trivial which seems to reconfirm the Spartan aesthetic of Lego as the
“simplest thing in the world.” The spiritual mixture of exotic cultures that is
woven into the good-vs-evil-story, on the other hand, remains strangely alien
to the spirit of Lego.
In any case it is utterly opposed to the
idyllic, hedonistic world of Playmobil. Empathy and simple identification are
still forbidden. The characters being robots, their facial expressions are
metallic, and display emotions only with much difficulty. What is more
important than emotions are powers –
and these powers define the basic data of a certain spatial environment.
A large part of this new
Lego-space could be conveniently recuperated from the era of traditional Lego.
The new Lego-space still has affinities with the self-forming, organic,
abstract space of traditional Lego (as much as it is utterly opposed to the
idyllic, concrete space of Playmobil). However, through an immense coincidence,
Lego-space turned out to be highly compatible with the kind of space that
fascinates us at the age of cyberreality, that is, with the computer related
social field generally referred to as cyberspace. The Bionicle planet is almost
entirely made of water with just one island sticking out of the surface (a
situation difficult to reproduce in “real time” in the children’s room). The
god Mata Nui is supposed to have fallen from the sky landing just on the
island. Unfortunately, his ill-bred brother soon joins the island in the same
way and sends Mata Nui to an eternal sleep. But the Tohunga villagers and their
Turaga leaders are prepared to fight this bad god. They even decide to call
their island Mata Nui in honor of the sleeping god. Within this story the six basic Lego-colors
have not only been maintained, but have even been complemented with more
“elemental,” that is, “spatial” qualities. Blue is the color of the Toa of
Water, white is the color of the Toa of Ice. Brown is for the Toa of Earth, red
for the Toa of Fire, etc. The blue Toa lives in and controls water, the brown
Toa lives in and controls earth, etc. The “bad guys,” the Bohroks, as well as
other groups, are divided according to the same scheme. To each color
corresponds thus a certain spatial environment and the “power” or capacity to
control this environment. “Non-spatial” remain those phenomena that cannot be controlled,
like fate, light, darkness…This grammatically constituted spatial environment
becomes more complex at the moment more efficient methods of orientation can be
acquired by wearing certain masks. You’ll get around faster in this space with
a mask of speed, more elegantly with a mask of levitation; and you experience
the whole space in a more subtle way when you have a mask of ex-ray or of
nightvision.
The patterns of the plot
as well as the space within which the plot develops, follow the logical lines
dictated by this spatial grammar. All “metaphysical”
powers that are beyond control are clearly defined in a non-spatial way. The
bad god Makuta for example, negates even the most abstract spatial qualities
when he declares that he appears as what cannot be imagined: “You cannot destroy me, as much as you cannot destroy the
sea, the wind, the void… I am nothing.” Though the Toas hasten to explain they
have emerged from the water, Makuta insists that also they have “come out of
nothing.”
Compared to the old, organic
Lego-space, space has here become more abstract and more “logical” than ever.
But there is more to this space than simply its logic: the logic applied in
this game has itself become spatial. The Bionicle-world still appears a typical
Lego product because it provides a well-structured, abstract space of an
imagination that advances, uninspired by elements from the concrete world,
solely through the power of intellect. New, however, is that here a spatial
universe is created through a large number of abstract indications. These
indications remain dynamic at every instant because they correspond to the
rules of a game. This means that to “play” with Lego has a meaning different
from the one it had before. True, children still reconstruct objects, build new
ones and act out certain parts of a game. However, the kind of empathy or imagination required, is now much more spatial than it has been in traditional Lego. Children no longer
create abstract-organic spaces with bricks into which objects can be inserted.
On the contrary, they look at the Bionicles and are aware of their spatial
capacities. In other words, the space they produce through the game is no
longer the manifestation of a constructivist logic developed through the
combination of some pieces, but space is
contained in these Legos. In this sense, the new Lego-space looks much more
like a Greek chôra.
All this accords very
well with the fact that the Bionicle story is distributed on the internet (it
is also available on DVD). To play with these Legos is absolutely uninteresting
if one has no possibility following the cartoons that provide, so to speak, the
space for these Legos. “Play” takes place, to a large extent, on the internet:
it takes place in the corresponding Mata Nui online game as well as on the
buzzpower site on which Bionicle fans discuss potential plotlines, construction
projects, and philosophical questions related to the Bionicle civilization. The
buzzpower site gathers one of the largest brandname communities in the world. Here
again, “Lego-space” stretches over an abstract sphere and playful imagination
has to adapt to this fact.
In a way, the
Bionicle-game is a play so perfect that Huizinga could have dreamt of it. In
this world, the lightness of play is so absolute that it has become purely
spatial. While conventional Lego-bricks can be stuck together in order to form
a structure on their own, in the new Lego universe one sticks together abstract
quantities of space in order to form a virtual play-space that produces space
in the form of a spatial grammar. While in traditional Lego, space developed
organically out of a para-logical activity, and in Playmobil it developed out
of imitation, in the Bionicle-world space is “virtually” given like a grammar
that is not applied to language but to space. We no longer move around, as
humanist Lego-engineers or practically minded Playmobil players, in the wide
space of imagination, painstakingly taking care not to transcend the most basic
rules of linguistic logic. Within the new Lego-space we are freer than ever. We no longer need to
take for granted the organic structure of the mental space that develops out of
logical patterns, that is, of those patterns that are supposed to exists
“somewhere in the mind” and which make us believe that “play” is beneficial for
the development of such mental, linguistic, structures.
For these reasons,
Bionicles might count among the most postmodern machines that one can think of.
In the 1980s Donna Haraway claimed that “our best machines are made of sunshine;
they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,
electro-magnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.” 3 The best
cyborgs, she concluded, are pure “ether,” they are a “quintessence.” This is
what Bionicles actually are: basic powers that manifest themselves in space and
determine this space. More than anything else, the new Lego-space is a silent
dream-space, which develops spatial structures out of itself. For this reason it represents the ideal space
of a generation for whom “the virtual” has become a part of everyday life.
Notes
1. http://www.seriousplay.com
2. Florian Illies: Generation Golf (Berlin: Argon, 2000)
3. Donna Haraway: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s [first published in 1985] in Steven Seidman, The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory (Cambridge
University Press,1994), p. 88-89.
an international
and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, February 2005, ISSN 1552-5112