The Beer Game: Simulation for Understanding System Dynamics in the Supply Chain

(The Beer Game's game board.)

The Beer Game is one of a number of management simulators developed at MIT's Sloan School of Management for these purposes. The game was developed by Sloan's System Dynamics Group in the early 1960s as part of Jay Forrester's research on industrial dynamics. Its has been played all over the world by thousands of people ranging from high school students to chief executive officers and government officials.

Playing the Game

The game is played on a board that portrays the production and distribution of beer (figures 1-2). Each team consists of four sectors: Retailer, Wholesaler, Distributor, and Factory (R, W, D, F) arranged in a linear distribution chain. One or two people manage each sector. Pennies stand for cases of beer. A deck of cards represents customer demand. Each simulated week, customers purchase from the retailer, who ships the beer requested out of inventory. The retailer in turn orders from the wholesaler, who ships the beer requested out of their own inventory. Likewise the wholesaler orders and receives beer from the distributor, who in turn orders and receives beer from the factory, where the beer is brewed. At each stage there are shipping delays and order processing delays. The players' objective is to minimize total team costs. Inventory holding costs are $.50/case/week. Backlog costs are $1.00/case/week, to capture both the lost revenue and the ill will a stockout causes among customers. Costs are assessed at each link of the distribution chain.

The game can be played with anywhere from four to hundreds of people. Each person is asked to bet $1, with the pot going to the team with the lowest total costs, winner take all. The game is initialized in equilibrium. Each inventory contains 12 cases and initial throughput is four cases per week. In the first few weeks of the game the players learn the mechanics of filling orders, recording inventory, etc. During this time customer demand remains constant at four cases per week, and each player is directed to order four cases, maintaining the equilibrium. Beginning with week four the players are allowed to order any quantity they wish, and are told that customer demand may vary; one of their jobs is to forecast demand. Players are told the game will run for 50 simulated weeks, but play is actually halted after 36 weeks to avoid horizon effects.

Each player has good local information but severely limited global information. Players keep records of their inventory, backlog and orders placed with their supplier each week. However, people are directed not to communicate with one another; information is passed through orders and shipments. Customer demand is not known to any of the players in advance. Only the retailers discover customer demand as the game proceeds. The others learn only what their own customer orders.

These information limitations imply that the players are unable to coordinate their decisions or jointly plan strategy, even though the objective of each team is to minimize total costs. As in many real life settings, the global optimization problem must be factored into subproblems distributed throughout the organization.

The game is deceptively simple compared to real life. All you have to do is meet customer demand and order enough from your own supplier to keep your inventory low while avoiding costly backlogs. There are no machine breakdowns or other random events, no labor problems, no capacity limits or financial constraints. Yet the results are shocking.

Read the results of the game—which are consistent across all instances of gameplay here

The Creative Sees the World as Problem

"The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious for the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in—not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation. He wants to know how to earn immortality as a result of his own unique gifts. His creative work is at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his 'private religion'—as Rank put it. Its uniqueness gives him personal immortality; it is his own 'beyond' and not that of others."

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Via

10 Useful Ideas on Systems Thinking

Some good basics from Pegasus and Richard Wilkinson

1. Everything is connected to everything else.
Real life is lived in a complex world system where all the subsystems overlap and affect each other. The common mistake is to deal with one subsystem in isolation, as if it doesn’t connect with anything else. This almost always backfires as other subsystems respond in unanticipated ways.

2. You can never do just one thing.
This follows from the preceding idea. In addition to the immediate effect of an action, there will always be other consequences of it that ripple through the system. Every action has unintended consequences.

3. Different people in the same structure will produce similar results.
Charlotte Roberts asks, “Who has the most influence on the performance of an ocean liner when it is out at sea in route to its destination?” Answer: The designer of the ship. A logical extension of this notion is: Don’t try to control the players, just change the rules. If the system tries to make choices for people, the people will try to outwit the system. It is much more effective to change the rules of the game so that it is to most people’s advantage to make choices that are good for the whole system.

4. A collection of things is a system if any one element can affect the performance of the whole.
There is no inherent end to the system. The boundaries of a system are arbitrary, defined by the observer. Systems analysis is finding connection in patterns. A threshold question in systems analysis is, “What level of the whole do you seek to know?” For example, it has been observed that business is part of a larger system constructively understood as such. For example, business decisions affect the economy, environment, community, and industry, as well as the mental health and well-being of employees and their families, and the wealth of investors.

5. From “either/or” to “both/and.”
We often err when we think in mutually exclusive opposites. We consider our next steps as being either along the path of solution x or solution y. Breakthroughs come when we consider the possibilities of blending both x and y. Considering both the whole and its parts, bridging in some lively way what appear to be opposites, forces us to consider situations from multiple perspectives.

6. There is no “away” to throw things to.
Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth, said, “When you see whole systems, you start noticing where things come from and where they go. You begin to see that there is no ‘away’ to throw things to.”

7. The easiest way out is the fastest way back in.
A common blunder is to grab for a solution prematurely without appreciating the underlying root causes driving a situation. A systems thinking sequence to reach a deeper understanding is to first consider the event, then to peel back a layer to see if it is part of an underlying pattern. In other words, has this happened before? Peel another layer by asking why this pattern is occurring. Continue asking “And, why is that?” until the root cause emerges. (This is the practice of the asking the "5 whys.")

8. Profound changes can take place in ways we cannot foretell.
A small force or event can have a disproportionate effect.

9. The map is not the territory.
Useful as they are, no model, theory, or tool can capture the full complexity of the subject it addresses. Roger Harrison writes, “I never can resist the urge to create theories and models. But, I hold all maps and theories lightly, consciously making room for mystery and for doubt” (Consultant's Journey: A Dance of Work & Spirit, Jossey-Bass, 1995).

10. An answer is a question’s way of asking a new question.
And, there are no final answers.

System Dynamics and Leverage Points

SYSTEM DYNAMICS

In the language of System Dynamics, important system variables are represented as stocks, flows, and feedback loops. Stocks are the accumulations points in a system. Simple examples of stocks are water that accumulates in a bathtub, accumulations of product inventory, or money that accumulates in a bank account. Each model structure represents logic that determines behavior, and events are snapshots of that behavior:

LEVERAGE POINTS

Leverage is found during analysis of modeling results, by exploring positive or negative behaviors, looking for sources of pressure and imbalance that cause things to change, and determining changes to structure, so that behavior is improved and bad events become less frequent. Uncovering leverage points involves understanding feedback loops that link variables, or factors, that cause behavior in other variables. Feedback loops are either self-reinforcing (good or bad) or goal-seeking (seeking equilibrium).

List of leverage points in order of effectiveness:

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (Such as transport networks, population age structures)
9. The length of delays, relative to the rate of system change
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
5. The rules of system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

via Wikipedia and Whole Earth Catalogue

We Can't Walk Straight

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Slime Moulds and Emergence

SLIME moulds have added another skill to their impressive resumé: they practise a primitive form of farming.

Slime moulds - or social amoebas, as biologists now prefer to call them - have been shown to find the shortest route through mazes and pick the most nutritious food from a buffet. These are impressive feats for an organism that lives most of its life as single cells, grazing on bacteria. When food is scarce, the amoebas clump together to migrate to better feeding grounds, and reproduce by forming a capsule full of spores.

While working with several wild strains of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, Debra Brock of Rice University in Houston, Texas, noticed that a third of the strains always packaged bacteria along with their spores in the capsule. This means they can "seed" a food crop when they colonise a new habitat. These strains - which Brock calls "farmers" - even stop feeding before all the bacteria are gone, to ensure there are some left to store as seed. In contrast, the "non-farmers" keep feeding to the bitter end, leaving no bacteria to package.

To see whether the farmers benefit from the practice, Brock and her colleagues sowed spores from farming and non-farming amoebas onto sterile Petri dishes. Sure enough, the farmers' stored crop gave them a head start, and they outgrew non-farmers. Farmers even beat non-farmers on Petri dishes inoculated with natural soil bacteria, which suggests that the bacteria they store are better food (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature09668). "It's the same as humans," says Brock. "We grow crops, but we aren't going to go out and eat the leaves that we find naturally."

With no evidence that the amoebas weed or fertilise their crop, the interaction might be better termed husbandry rather than farming, says Jacobus Boomsma at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Nevertheless, its presence in some strains and not others will let us study the evolutionary origins of the behaviour.

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The Denial of Death

The Denial of Death is a work of psychology and philosophy written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973. It was awarded the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 1974, two months after the author's death. The book builds largely on the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and one of Freud's colleagues, Otto Rank.

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since man has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, man is able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving his symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an "immortality project" (or causa sui), in which he creates or becomes part of something which he feels will last forever, man feels he has "become" heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die, compared to his physical body that will die one day. This, in turn, gives man the feeling that his life has meaning; a purpose; significance in the grand scheme of things.

From this premise, mental illness is most insightfully extrapolated as a bogging down in one's hero system(s). When someone is experiencing depression, their causa sui (or heroism project) is failing, and they are being consistently reminded of their mortality and insignificance as a result. Schizophrenia is a step further than depression in which one's causa sui is falling apart, making it impossible to engender sufficient defense mechanisms against their mortality; henceforth, the schizophrenic has to create their own reality or "world" in which they are better heroes. Becker argues that the conflict between immortality projects which contradict each other (particularly in religion) is the wellspring for the destruction and misery in our world caused by wars, bigotry, genocide, racism, nationalism, and so forth, since an immortality project which contradicts others indirectly suggests that the others are wrong.

Another theme running throughout the book is that humanity's traditional "hero-systems" i.e. religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason; science is attempting to solve the problem of man, something that Becker feels it can never do. The book states that we need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic in the grand scheme of things, i.e. immortal. Becker, however, does not provide any definitive answer, mainly because he believes that there is no perfect solution. Instead, he hopes that gradual realization of man's innate motivations, namely death, can help to bring about a better world.

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Selling online what people would never buy online

Shopping skeptics said people would never buy certain things —shoes, diamond rings, cars — online because they needed to see the products in person. They were wrong. E-commerce companies have found success in all of those fields.

But some purchases still happen mostly offline, including one of the most personal: prescription eyeglasses.

Warby Parker, a New York start-up, thinks it can persuade people to shop online for glasses, with a combination of fashion, low prices, technology and old-fashioned customer service. It seems to be working.

“We’re asking consumers to change the way they buy eyeglasses, so we want to de-risk it as much as possible,” said David Gilboa, who founded Warby Parker with three friends from business school, Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt and Jeffrey Raider.

The company designs its own glasses, which largely stick to a stylish chunky look, and generally sell them for $95, including prescription lenses made of polycarbonate plastic. By contrast, designer prescription glasses typically cost several hundred dollars. The company keeps prices low by ordering from manufacturers and selling directly to consumers, avoiding expenses like brand licensing fees and retail markups along the way. It does not offer bifocals, and it charges extra for thinner lenses for strong prescriptions...Warby Parker orders the acetate for the frames directly from a supplier in Italy and has them made in the same Chinese factories the big companies use. The lenses are inserted in New York.

The Web site uses facial recognition technology so shoppers can upload a photo of themselves and try on virtual glasses. For those who are still doubtful, the company will mail five loaner frames. All glasses are returnable, and Warby Parker rents space in a few stores in big cities where people can try on glasses before ordering online.

“It’s very much a new model,” said John Gerzema, president of Brand Asset Consulting, who studies shopping trends. Most e-commerce sites try to steer customers toward a purchase, while Warby Parker encourages people to mull it over, he said.

“You may lose a few sales, but what’s interesting is they’re betting that the margin is in the relationship long-term,” as well as in fewer dissatisfied customers and returns, Mr. Gerzema said.

Warby Parker customers enter their prescription information on the site, including the distance between their pupils, which is not usually on prescriptions but which opticians can easily measure. Some states also require customers to send the company a copy of the prescription.

The founders recently hired an eyeglass designer, but they designed the first collection, using ideas from magazines, vintage stores and their grandparents’ homes. They sell a monocle — “the perfect accessory for budding robber barons, post-colonial tyrants and super villains,” the site says — based on one owned by Mr. Hunt’s grandfather.

Other young e-commerce start-ups are taking a similar approach. Bonobos, for instance, a New York business that sells men’s pants, encourages customers to order pairs in different sizes and return those that do not fit, with free shipping both ways.

via the NY Times

Dancers Among Us

via the always lovely Swiss Miss

Against Self Tracking

Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. We have pedometers in the soles of our shoes and phones that can post our location as we move around town. We can tweet what we eat into a database and subscribe to Web services that track our finances. There are sites and programs for monitoring mood, pain, blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, cognitive alacrity, menstruation, and prayers. Even sleep—a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you're unconscious—is yielding to the skill of the widget maker. With an accelerometer and some decent algorithms, you will soon be able to record your sleep patterns with technology that costs less than $100.

We're aware of how absurd this sounds. Self-knowledge through numbers. What could that possibly mean? Of course you can learn things about yourself through numbers—weight is probably the most common personal metric—but self-knowledge has connotations that go beyond quotidian facts. "Know Thyself" was inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, held up as an ideal in Latin and Christian philosophy, and recycled by generations of advice mongers. Self-knowledge was obtained through introspection and reflection; that is, through words.

But the newest tools open possibilities for personal tracking in areas of life that had always seemed inaccessible to quantitative methods. Diarists often chronicle their moods, creating a paper trail that provides a sense of mastery over fleeting emotions. There is a problem, however, with this sort of old-fashioned journal-keeping: You record your mood only when you're in the mood to do so, which introduces a bias. If you impose a regular schedule, noting your feelings at the same time every day, you face the issue that mood varies predictably with time of day and regular cycles of activity. It might seem that we're simply incapable of reliably tracking our own subjective states, but social scientists solved this problem years ago: Just randomize the time of inquiry. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson reported early results using such methods back in 1983, launching a productive line of research in psychology. At the time, of course, this was work for professionals with programmed watches. It wasn't clear how you would direct a random inquiry to yourself.

With today's technology, such things are now trivial. There is open source software for random experience sampling. This feature is already embedded in tools like Happy Factor, a Facebook app that randomly pings you with a text message, to which you respond with a number indicating your happiness level. There are protocols for measuring mental fitness that take less than five minutes to complete and provide a baseline for experiments on your brain's agility. The Web site CureTogether lets users log an enormous range of conditions, symptoms, and feelings. Modern self-tracking systems can measure our bodies, our minds, and our movements.

But can they measure our narcissism? The question comes up often enough to require an answer. My original impulse, after I'd heard it three or four times, was to investigate it in the spirit of the self-tracking movement—that is, with a number. There is a well-validated psychological test for measuring narcissism that takes only a few minutes to fill out. I administered it to three dozen self-trackers, and the mean score was 0.38, which is within the normal range. But of course, that's not a real answer, because when people ask whether self-tracking is narcissistic, they're not wondering about clinical narcissism. They're wondering about selfishness, narrowness, a retreat from social engagement and social generosity into an egotistical world of self.

Oddly, though, self-tracking culture is not particularly individualistic. In fact, there is a strong tendency among self-trackers to share data and collaborate on new ways of using it. People monitoring their diet using Tweet What You Eat! can take advantage of crowdsourced calorie counters; people following their baby's sleep pattern with Trixie Tracker can graph it against those of other children; women watching their menstrual cycle at MyMonthlyCycles can use online tools to match their chart with others'. The most ambitious sites are aggregating personal data for patient-driven drug trials and medical research.

Self-trackers seem eager to contribute to our knowledge about human life. The world is full of potential experiments: people experiencing some change in their lives, going on or off a diet, kicking an old habit, making a vow or a promise, going on vacation, switching from incandescent to fluorescent lighting, getting into a fight. These are potential experiments, not real experiments, because typically no data is collected and no hypotheses are formed. But with the abundance of self-tracking tools now on offer, everyday changes can become the material of careful study.

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Links for "self-tracking" a.k.a. "reality mining":

• MIT Media Lab Experiment
• Article from Institute for the Future
• NYT: "The Data Driven Life"
• Tallyzoo review
• Cure Together
• Tweet What You Eat
• Trixie Tracker
• My Monthly Cycles

The main overlapping circles of things people track are: fitness, health, sleep, mood, time/productivity, energy, location, lifestyle/family, money, social media patterns, learning/cognition, and general lifelogging.

Oxytocin is the agent of ethnocentrism

Oxytocin has been described as the hormone of love. This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more.

Yes, you knew there had to be a catch. As oxytocin comes into sharper focus, its social radius of action turns out to have definite limits. The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism.

A principal author of the new take on oxytocin is Carsten K. W. De Dreu, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. Reading the growing literature on the warm and cuddly effects of oxytocin, he decided on evolutionary principles that no one who placed unbounded trust in others could survive. Thus there must be limits on oxytocin’s ability to induce trust, he assumed, and he set out to define them.

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What makes a platform brilliant?

What makes a platform brilliant? Tim O’Reilly suggests platforms have the following characteristics:

1. Platforms spread when they are ubiquitous and barriers to entry are low.
2. Communications oriented. Strong platforms establish and document the rules of communication early so that all members know how to communicate with each other.
3. Rules should create an architecture of participation. Participation is easy with simple elements.
4. Platforms establish clearly defined boundaries (an api) with clearly defined extensions layers (third-party apps).
5. Extending the platform is simple with permissionless extensibility.
6. Platforms are “open enough”
7. Simple solutions allow for incredible evolution.
8. Big point: people should be able to innovate on top of your platform without ever consulting you.
9. Successul platforms drive using data. “If Google were a restaurant, they would be photographing the plates.

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You can listen to Tim O'Rielly's full talk here.

How to design better online conversations

Bad discourse isn't a behavior problem, it's a design problem...Amazon is the granddaddy of pooled user feedback—the reviews its customers produce, individually and collectively, provide a huge competitive advantage. Get Satisfaction is designed to help people complain, yet they do it in a way so useful that businesses pay for the service. Stack Overflow helps programmers pool their knowledge; HowardForums does the same for mobile phone users, English Companion for teachers, Ravelry for knitters. So if the conversation on HowardForums is good and the conversation among commenters on CNN.com isn't, does that suggest a design principle beyond "Avoid politics"?

Yes, it does, if you recognize that a rhetorical tragedy of the commons is occurring in many forums. All the participants have an incentive to have good conversations, but each participant also has an incentive to get the most attention. This tension suggests that increases in individual anonymity or in group size also increase the likelihood that someone will start acting like a jerk. Both anonymity and scale reduce what Robert Axelrod calls "the shadow of the future"—the sense that our current actions will have consequences down the road.

That provides some options for turning the jerk dial down. One is to make identity valuable: Stack Overflow won't let new users post until they have exhibited enough other behaviors—visiting the site, responding in helpful ways to other posts—to earn the karma for full participation. Another approach is to partition public platforms, thus reducing the incentive to publicly act out. Twitter does this by segmenting its audience: I can rant all I like, but only to the users I can persuade to follow me. Yet another approach is to enlist users in defensive filtering. Amazon sometimes refuses to publish a post, but most of its policing is done by customers who flag offensive reviews and elevate those they find helpful.

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What goes into a fantastic creative brief?

The creative brief that Mick Jagger wrote to Andy Warhol is considered one of the finest creative briefs What makes it good? It is empowering and gives autonomy, it shows trust, it gives clear instructions about reproduction. Many creative briefs try and solve the problem rather than putting the problem in the hands of the designer, I guess that's why designers love this brief.

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Police Buy Ads on Facebook to Solve Murder

Is there anything Facebook can't do? Yesterday, we wrote about the Dutch woman who is trying to kick drugs by joining the site—in the hope that expanding her social circle beyond addicts will help her succeed. Now comes news that police in Britain are buying ads on Facebook asking for help in their investigation into a young woman's murder. The body of Bristol architect Joanna Yeates was discovered on Christmas Day, a week after she went missing. She had been strangled. Now, police have launched a national Facebook campaign seeking witnesses. Says detective chief inspector Phil Jones: "The majority of people these days are spending time on Facebook and other social networking sites. This has become part of everyday routine for many people. This advert allows us to point people to special features on our website with all the latest information. It allows them to contact the incident room direct online rather than calling in." The ad directs anyone with information about the case to avonandsomerset.police.uk/jo.

On Tragedy

Just as automatically as we associate comedy with laughter, we associate tragedy with death. And just as was the case with the relationship between laughter and comedy, a Renaissance tragedy-- though it will always include at least one death--is not actually about death. Or, to put it another way, it is not precisely the death(s) that makes the play tragic. A great deal of ink has been spilled by critics trying to theorize the experience of tragedy; in this introduction I will briefly summarize a few of the most influential of those theories.

I. Aristotle, The Poetics

Undoubtedly the most influential book of literary criticism ever written, Aristotle's Poetics is the first written attempt to theorize the complex experience of Greek tragedy. Using as his chief example the plays of his contemporary, Sophocles, and particularly Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Aristotle talks about the enormous suffering and violent action (both physical and mental) that take place in any tragedy and identifies the chief emotions associated with these plays as pity and fear. His main task in the Poetics, however, is to describe the structure of the tragic plot:

• the plot must include a hero(ine) who has distinguished him/herself as "great" in some significant way
• the hero commits some sort of violation, which Aristotle calls hamartia
• there is a notable reversal or plot twist as a result of that violation, which Aristotle refers to as peripeteia
• the hero suddenly recognizes his/her own responsibility for that sudden change of fortune, called anagnorosis
• the tragedy ends with a purging of the emotional catastrophe (for both the characters and the audience), often the death of the hero at his/her own hands; Aristotle calls this catharsis

II. The Experience of Tragedy

In many ways, Aristotle's description of the form of tragedy, which I have only (and purposely) briefly outlined, will be useful to us in our reading. The form alone, however, does not adequately account for the complexity of the tragic experience, it does not even tell us what kind of experience tragedy is and that's where more recent critics come in.
Tragedy has been variously described as:

a) a moral experience
The characters, and the audience, learn some sort of lesson as a result of the hero's catastrophe. This approach has real limitations, as the critic Northrop Frye points out: "The tragic catharsis passes beyond moral judgment, and while it is quite possible to construct a moral tragedy, what tragedy gains in morality it loses in cathartic power" ("The Argument of Comedy" 64). In other words, the moral tragedy is boring, predictable, and generally not the kind of play we would study in this course. To read the tragedies we will study as simple lessons in morality is to do them a great disservice.

b) a personal/psychological/emotional experience.
This is a mainly secular reading of tragedy that stresses the growing self- knowledge of the hero. Tragedy, in this instance, rehearses the limits and the hidden resources of the individual self.

c) a theological experience.
This begins to take us into some pretty interesting territory, territory about which we will get quite specific in the weeks to come. One of the critics most associated with this theory of tragedy is Northrop Frye. Frye takes Aristotle's point about enormous suffering and translates it into a chiefly Christian concept: suffering makes us noble, it grants a kind of dignity to the actions of a character who cannot control his or her own destiny but who is neither exempt from making decisions. The emphasis here, as in (b) above, is almost completely on character: the tragic hero(ine), and that character's relationship with some sort of divinity. Here is Frye on the tragic hero:

Tragic heroes are wrapped in the mystery of their communion with that 'something beyond' which we can only see through them, and which is the source of their strength and their fate alike....In all tragedies there is a sense of some far-reaching mystery of which the morally intelligible process is only a part. The hero's act has thrown a switch in a larger machine than his own life, or even his own society. ("The Mythos of Autumn")
Here he is again, describing the tragic catharsis (you might want to refer back to the brief sketch of Frye in the essay on "Comedy" to refamiliarize yourself with what I describe there as his anthropological view of literature--his discussion of "ritual" here will round out that picture a little):

Many things are involved in the tragic catharsis, but one of them is a mental or imaginative form of the sacrificial ritual out of which tragedy arose. This is the ritual of the struggle, death, and rebirth of a God-Man, which is linked to the yearly triumph of spring over winter. The tragic hero is not really killed, and the audience no longer eats his body and drinks his blood, but the corresponding thing in art still takes place. The audience enters into communion with the body of the hero, becoming thereby a single body itself. ("The Argument of Comedy" 64)
"Transcendence" is the key word in this approach to tragedy: the tragic hero(ine) is not even quite human because of his/her relationship to the divine impulse. In Frye's scheme, tragic heroes are usually seen as a type of Christ, sacrificing themselves in a transformative act that might be described as redemptive.

d) a social experience
If the emphasis in Frye's approach is on Fate, conditions otherworldly around which the hero(ine) cannot move, a description of tragedy as primarily a social experience would stress the more materialist social/political forces that impinge on the hero(ine), fate. Choice (or lack thereof), in this formulation, is not determined by God, but by oppressive social practices and beliefs (see "ideology" in the essay on "Comedy"), often in flux, that entrap the hero(ine). If you are on top of things, you will be making the connection already to discussions we have had about the comedies (particularly The Merchant of Venice), and you will not be surprised that it is this approach to tragedy that will dominate our discussions for the remainder of the term.

Each tragedy we look at will give us the opportunity to get specific about the kinds of social forces at work in determining the outcome of play. Here, I would like to talk generally about the critical impulses behind this approach.

The materialist reading of tragedy sees it as a historical process that plays a crucial role in the course of cultural change. Timothy Reiss, in his book Tragedy and Truth, points out, for instance, that in "each of its major appearances [one of the most significant of which is the Renaissance], tragedy has accompanied the rupture of a familiar order, in the which the essential relationships between physical, social, and religious life are now losing their reference to any `experience of totality'" (34). In the Renaissance, tragedy signals a break with what we might call "mythical thinking," a metaphysical system in which everything has its place. Materially, that metaphysical system might be associated with feudalism. Tragedy, then--as we'll see especially in plays like The Duchess of Malfi and Othello--represents the clash of feudalism with possessive individualism. It is the clash of a system in which everything has its divinely-ordained place with a system in which individual freedom and independence determines an individual's place in society--the concept of self-determination that we are familiar with from nothing less than "The Declaration of Independence."

So what makes it tragedy then? If Renaissance tragedy signals the establishment of a new order that is all about the freedoms of the individual why isn't it more triumphant? The answer to that lies in the realization that it is only retroactively that we are able to make sense of cultural change. Timothy Reiss says that in Western history, tragedy seems to have appeared at moments that are marked by a kind of "hole" in the passage from one dominant system of thought to another. The tragic hero(ine) falls into that hole, an absence of meaningfulness. To us, they may seem almost prophetic, ahead of their time--like the Duchess of Malfi, or Othello. They themselves, however, are unable to theorize their actions in the same way; they fall prey to the social and political forces around them that convince them that their actions or beliefs are meaningless, irrational, even dangerous.

Each character that we will identify as a tragic hero(ine) attempts to be responsible for his or her own discourse--by discourse I mean not just language, but an entire way of thinking. Othello, for instance, is an example of a character attempting to enunciate for himself his own individualism but who, in enunciating it, produces disorder in his own subjectivity: his own status as a person is unclear. He is unable to grasp any definitive articulation of his self, but he is also forced to rely on a society that casts him as "Other." Caught between the two, his response is a kind of madness. (The BBC production of Othello, which stars Anthony Hopkins as Othello and Bob Hoskins as Iago, captures this rupture in the hero's subjectivity superbly; it is one of the finest productions of any Shakespeare play you will ever see.)

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