# SIG-PF 2026-10-01 — Session Notes

Participants:
  - Spencer | UTC−05:00
  - Sachin
  - sarahg
  - DrJCS
  - Andre Comeau | UTC-5
  - Spencer Norwick | UTC-7

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## 📖 The Reading

Kenneth Burke's essay on the "four master tropes" — metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony — originally published in the *Kenyon Review*. Burke pairs each trope with a corresponding function: metaphor = perspective, metonymy = reduction, synecdoche = representation, and irony = dialectic.

## 🧭 Overview

The session (a protocol fiction study group) read and discussed Burke's four master tropes, with Spencer framing the central question of what tropes/modes of thinking "protocol fiction" might naturally lend itself to. After a shared reading period, participants shared impressions of the essay and of a prior "special session"/symposium workshop. Discussion wove together Burke's tropes with recurring group concerns: whether a protocol can have a perspective, environment-vs-agent dynamics in fiction, and world building. The group also floated plans to tackle a longer-form work next.

## 💡 Key Points & Themes

- **Spencer (framing):** Burke argues the four tropes are not just literary devices but four master ways humans think about and seek truth. Spencer connected this to a recently read David Foster Wallace essay on TV, which argued TV is uniquely suited to irony because the audience gets a "god's eye view" while characters misunderstand reality. His motivating question: what mode might *protocol fiction* naturally lend itself to?
- **Spencer (continuity from prior special session):** Recalled discussion of monsters emerging in the "space between" old/new worlds and old/new rules. He linked monsters and metaphor via *irreducibility* — a monster belongs fully to neither world, and a metaphor stops functioning if the distance between its two terms collapses entirely.
- **Sachin (metonymy vs. synecdoche):** Metonymy is reduction — creating toy models or maps of the world. Synecdoche is part-for-whole with a *mutual relationship* between part and whole. He read synecdoche as a representation "through which you can act on the world," fitting the group's conception of protocols as "engineered arguments" — taking an argument and making a version of it others can act on.
- **Sachin (environment/anti-environment):** Invoked McLuhan's environment/anti-environment idea: an environment full of protocols becomes invisible "normal reality," while an anti-environment (e.g. art, or fiction like Kafka's *The Trial*) makes those rules visible. A synecdoche could function as an anti-environment that makes the larger world more visible. Also connected the part/whole theme to Borges ("The Aleph," "The Garden of Forking Paths").
- **sarahg (perspective of a protocol):** Was struck by whether a protocol has a perspective. A protocol arguably carries its creator's perspective, but once used by non-creators it "escapes the initial control" of the originator's intent — analogous to reading fiction, where authorial intent gives way to reader interpretation. She suggested the group might frame this as anthropomorphization and expected most real cases fall somewhere between the extremes.
- **sarahg (world building):** Advocated more attention to world building, noting Western fiction tends to be character- or conflict-focused while treating world building as background. Because protocols interact heavily with the environment, she argued protocol fiction is a natural place to foreground it.
- **Environment-shaping-agent spectrum:** The group sketched a spectrum from Asimov (agents acting on the world) to authors where the environment shapes the agents — Jeff VanderMeer's *Southern Reach* trilogy and Clarke's *Piranesi* (environments that are partly, literally unknowable and that shape identity), and J.G. Ballard (per Sachin, deliberately avoided space-opera/robot tropes in favor of weird environments acting on people).
- **Andre:** Valued the special sessions' hands-on, idea-generating quality and suggested running such workshops separately to draw more people. On the writing, he highlighted "degrees of being" — a character/situation gains depth as more perspectives are layered around it — a near-mathematical way to gauge how much detail to add, and connected recurring-character accumulation of perspective to why TV and anthologies feel alive. Also noted the framing prophecy = inevitable, and irony as a simple "math" idea.
- **Spencer Norwick:** Hadn't finished the reading; his mind went first to whether a protocol should have a perspective at all — perhaps a *good* protocol is void of perspective. He noted it's hard to isolate a protocol's perspective because it "looks straight at the thing passing through" it, like water in a pipe. Tied this to the irony section: when an environment is reduced to a single agent's perspective, irony becomes nearly impossible — so attempting to flesh out a protocol's perspective would hit instructive limits of the fictional form.

## 🔀 Questions & Disagreements

- Does a protocol have (or should it have) a perspective? Views ranged: sarahg (carries creator's perspective but escapes to interpretation), Spencer Norwick (a good protocol may be void of perspective). No settled answer; Spencer acknowledged it's an open, central question.
- Since Burke frames metaphor as *perspective*, how useful is metaphor for describing something that lacks a perspective (like a protocol)? Spencer raised this as an open question, and asked whether representation/synecdoche might be more apt — and whether protocol fiction should therefore lean on synecdoche.
- Do the different tropes work better or worse for world building at the sentence/paragraph/scene level? Spencer flagged this as unresolved, granting that most works use all of them.
- Who best anchors the opposite end of the Asimov ("agent acts on world") spectrum? Candidates proposed: VanderMeer, *Piranesi*, Ballard. No single answer settled.
- No sharp disagreements; the tone was exploratory and collaborative.

## 🔗 References Mentioned

- Kenneth Burke — the four master tropes essay (*Kenyon Review*)
- David Foster Wallace — essay on television (irony and the "god's eye view")
- Marshall McLuhan — environment / anti-environment essay
- Jorge Luis Borges — "The Aleph," "The Garden of Forking Paths"
- Franz Kafka — *The Trial*
- Isaac Asimov (as the "agent acts on world" exemplar)
- Jeff VanderMeer — *Southern Reach* trilogy
- Susanna Clarke — *Piranesi*
- J.G. Ballard
- "Randy's talk" on protocols for world building (from the special session; Randy not an attendee here)
- *The Membranes* (novel Spencer praised as a possible longer-form pick)
- Concept: protocols as "engineered arguments"

## ✅ Action Items & Next Time

- The group is considering a "SIG book club" to tackle a longer-form work, possibly read async with one monthly discussion session dedicated to it.
- Sachin advocated choosing a *non-Western* sci-fi novel to counterbalance their mostly Western reading; Spencer endorsed exploring one of these novels and named *The Membranes* as a candidate he loves.
- Spencer asked members to post in the thread how open they'd be to a longer, extended piece.
- Andre suggested running hands-on workshops separately from time to time to attract more participants.
- sarahg mentioned she'll borrow material from Randy's talk for a world-building class she's teaching.

## ⭐ Memorable Quotes

- **Spencer Norwick:** "It would be difficult to isolate the perspective of a protocol because it's almost like they're looking straight at the thing that's passing through them that they're shaping, like water in a pipe."
- **sarahg:** "The author has a certain intent, but... it is entirely up to the interpretation of the reader."
- **Sachin:** "You're basically taking a particular argument and making a version of it that exists in the world that other people can act on."

*Note: sarahg's audio was cutting in and out for part of the session, so some of her contributions were fragmented in the transcript and may be incompletely captured here.*