Eric Stein / Writing

Deleuze's Physics

2025-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The mind is a delirium, because the given is delirium: it is according to the principle of difference, as difference.¹ Sensibility is the name we give to the infinitesimal spacing,² the interdependent origination,³ the intra-active agency,⁴ of the differential manifold, the minimum of distance as the possibility of sense.⁵

Sense is irreducibly differential, ineluctably hyphenated, always already sense of.⁶ Sense is the rule of pure difference, the moment of contact, double sensation, touching and being touched.⁷ Sense is primary signification, a system of differences without positive terms.⁸

The pure difference of sense is the individuation of what we can name indifference. This is one name among many: boundless,⁹ unlimited,¹⁰ in-itself,¹¹ preindividual,¹² the one,¹³ void,¹⁴ hyper-chaos.¹⁵

Individuation precedes individuals.¹⁶ It is that which has been historically given the name of becoming, which again is one name among many: motion,¹⁷ limit,¹⁸ decompression,¹⁹ dephasing,²⁰ unilateralization,²¹ event,²² auto-normalization.²³

“We must then define the given by two objective characteristics: indivisibility of an element and distribution of elements; atom and structure.”²⁴ The becoming of indifference is the birth to both atom and structure, individual and environment, particle and field, neither term of the conjunction more primordial.²⁵

The given is delirium (atom, chaos); the given becomes a system (structure, complexity).²⁶ Without structure, atom remains chaos. Without atom, structure cannot become. Neither substantialism (priority of atom) nor hylomorphism (priority of structure) can be taken as explanatory, because the given is always given according to the conjunction of these two objective characteristics, neither reducible to the other. Atom and structure are a “metastable complement.”²⁷ Individuation does not occur via the “meeting of pre-existing form and matter … but a resolution springing from a metastable system that is filled with potentials … Neither form nor matter suffices.”²⁸

Sensibility, therefore, is the effect of mediation, which presupposes “an original duality of orders of magnitude and the initial absence of interactive communication between them.”²⁹ This absence of interaction is indifference, but indifference cannot be thought of as a “stable equilibrium,” because if indifference were stable, the sensible given of our experience would never arise; rather, indifference is a “system state like that of supercooling or supersaturation,” a regime of “metastable equilibrium” that is “more than unity and more than identity.”³⁰

Indifference has no identity, but rather “possesses a transductive unity, which is to say that it can dephase itself in relation to itself; it can overflow out of itself from one part to another.”³¹ This overflowing is always a “partial and relative resolution,” the sens (direction) of sensibility, the differentiation whereby “a potential energy (the condition of a higher order of magnitude) actualizes itself, [and] a matter organizes and divides itself (the condition of a lower order of magnitude) into individuals structured into an average order of magnitude.”³²

The mind becomes human nature,³³ good sense arises from madness,³⁴ reason from unreason,³⁵ knowledge from nonknowledge³⁶—and all without cause, as sheer fact.³⁷ Hume’s “atomism” and “associationism” demand a new science, a “logic of physics or of existence,” which Deleuze begins to conceptualize in Empiricism and Subjectivity, and which he will continue to elaborate for the rest of his philosophical career.³⁸ In this early work, Deleuze’s logic of existence starts with the three principles or rules of “association”: “contiguity, resemblance, and causality.”³⁹ But as the later Deleuze will demonstrate in his work with Félix Guattari, there are many more rules than these three, “rules of ‘plan(n)ing,’ of diagramming,” the “concrete rules” of existence, “singular” and “immanent” operations, the “abstract machines” that “constitute becomings.”⁴⁰ Empiricism and Subjectivity gives us the first intimation of this radical science.

Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 90. ↩
Jan Christoph Westerhoff, “Nāgārjuna,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 8, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/nagarjuna/, and Bret W. Davis, “The Kyoto School,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 9, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/. ↩
Karen Bard, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 139. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 90. ↩
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, UK: Routledge, 2003), 7. ↩
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, 1952, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 155. ↩
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1916, trans. Wade Baskin, eds. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 120. ↩
Anaximander, in Robin Waterfield, trans., The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 14. ↩
Pythagoras, in Robin Waterfield, trans., The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 103. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 18. ↩
Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2009): 4-16, https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07_simondon1.pdf, 5. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), xix. ↩
Alain Badiou, “Infinity and Set Theory: How to Begin with the Void,” 2011, European Graduate School Video Lectures, YouTube, January 12, 2012, https://youtu.be/I1G_SI1-W-4. ↩
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2006, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2008), 64. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Anaximander, in Waterfield, trans., The First Philosophers, 14. ↩
Pythagoras, in Waterfield, trans., The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 21. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 202. ↩
Badiou, Being and Event, 56. ↩
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 66. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 7. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 7. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 7. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 10. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5, 10, 7. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. ↩
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 41. ↩
Federico Luzzi, Knowledge from Non-Knowledge: Inference, Testimony and Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 25. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 27, 67. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 100. ↩
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 70, 501, 510. ↩

Given-Thought

2025-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

If thought is always already a given-thought, we must then ask with Deleuze, “what is the given?”¹ In his preliminary analysis of subjectivity, Deleuze describes the given as a “collection” and the imagination as the direct experience of this collection.² This description ultimately leads Deleuze to his schematization of generic thought as the moment of sense, the hiatus of touch, the fleeting brush of contact with the world: purposiveness.³ Thought so conceived can only be given in the world, not posited over against the world. We find ourselves necessarily “referred to nature” and the question of the given.⁴

So, what is the given? A collection, to be sure, but Deleuze now takes up the question with greater systematicity. The given is “the totality of that which appears, being which equals appearance.”⁵ Insofar as being is its appearing, the given is “movement and change without identity or law,” an “animated succession,” a differential manifold: “everything separable is distinguishable and everything distinguishable is different.”⁶ This manifold “does not presuppose anything else and nothing else precedes it.”⁷ Empirical philosophy “must begin with this experience,” the experience of the manifold, “because it is the experience,” that which has “no need of any thing to support [its] existence.”⁸

“The mind is identical to ideas in the mind,” Deleuze reminds us, and we should recall Deleuze’s earlier argument the “place [of the mind] is not different from what takes place in it; the representation does not take place in a subject.”⁹ Experience has no support because it is pure difference: “a collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions.”¹⁰ Indeed, in experience there is no re-presentation at all, only the self-presentation of being. Being is not an ideal “substrate” that appears but is ultimately inaccessible to perception; rather, its “substance” is its appearing, which makes “every perception,” as a sense of the appearing, “a substance.”¹¹ Sense is substance, substance is sensible, and the totality of substance is sensibility as such.

We see, then, that for Deleuze, experience is always experience of.¹² This is where empiricism begins. Consequently, empiricism constitutes a dual critique, “not only the critique of a philosophy of substance but also the critique of a philosophy of nature.”¹³ Substance is appearance; nature is that which appears.¹⁴ In empiricism, Deleuze sees the collapse of the “two kinds of qualities”—primary (observer-independent properties) and secondary (observer-dependent properties)—into each other, because “perception,” now redefined as sensibility or sense-substance, “gives us no difference between two kinds of qualities.”¹⁵ Thought is always thought of the given, begins and ends with the given.

In this qualitative collapse, Deleuze sees the “negation of the principle of sufficient reason,” that “everything must have a reason, cause, or ground.”¹⁶ There is no reason for the given, only sheer fact—it cannot call upon anything other than itself.¹⁷ But if the given can only call upon itself, “what exactly is it calling upon”?¹⁸ This is the problem that Deleuze must now address. In a field of pure difference, what “consistency” is there to be found?¹⁹ In his empirical analysis of the subject, Deleuze restores the given to its proper place, antecedent to and encompassing the subject: the subject is constituted in the given.²⁰ In so doing, the possibility of a transcendental critique is annihilated, the certainty of essence destroyed: empiricism discovers the “principle of difference” to be the very principle of the given.²¹ But, if difference is the principle of the given, how can it be said that the subject is constituted by principles that “impos[e] constancy on the imagination”?²² How can the given mobilize such constancy if the given is in itself difference, flux, change? Previously, Deleuze was not concerned with the sheer fact of the principles of association: the “cause cannot be known; principles have neither cause nor an origin of their power”; “philosophy has nothing to say on what causes the principles and on the origin of their power. There, it is the place of God.”²³ Now, however, Deleuze recognizes that the principle of difference threatens to undermine his argument as a whole.²⁴ So we must ask: how can difference be its own principle?²⁵

Empiricism begins with the “distinct and independent,” with “divisibility,” with the “moment of the mind.”²⁶ This moment of the mind is the pure function of sensibility that we have taken pains to articulate in the previous two essays, the hyphen of sense-substance that is the possibility of sensibility as such. The mind’s “constant,” its only constant, is purposiveness, the vacuous diagram, the empty form, difference calling upon itself as its own base case.²⁷ The moment of sense is, for Deleuze, the “smallest idea,” the “indivisible” as infinitesimal unit of divisibility, the kernel of a recursive operation that is the very differential movement of the given.²⁸ This is in no way an idealism: the indivisible idea is the genesis of sense in pure difference—as much the “sense” of the electromagnetic field as the “sense” of the perceiving body. So, Deleuze contends, “the problem of the status of the mind is the same as the problem of space.”²⁹ Again, this is not an idealism, not some transcendental panpsychism, but rather an immanent pansensibilism. The indivisible idea is the “minimum” of thought, the “terminating idea,” the “idea-limit” beyond which “no other idea” nor “no other thing in general” exists: neither “mathematical” nor “physical” but “sensible.”³⁰ The sensible point is the indivisible unit of “real existence” and the existence that “itself belongs to the unit.”³¹ This point “has no extension, and yet it exists,” exceeding the “nonexistence” of the purely mathematical point while remaining indivisible—it is the concrete nothingness of sense, the sensibility of the given.³²

In this challenging line of reasoning, the purpose of the layering and repetition of arguments throughout Empiricism and Subjectivity comes into focus. In Chapter 4, Deleuze walks his readers through his idiosyncratic interpretation of the impulses of polytheism and theism, which are in turn exemplary instances of the general rules discussed in the previous chapters. From the correction of these impulses Deleuze derives the schema of purposiveness, the diagram of causation: polytheism operates according to the principle of “continuous existence”, theism according to that of “distinct existence”, and the dual system of these principles is what we call causation, the “belief in the distinct and continuous existence of bodies.”³³ In Chapter 5, then, in order to answer the question of how the subject is constituted in the given, Deleuze situates the dual system of causation in its proper place in the given as the very principle of difference, which is the principle of the given as such. Continuity and distinguishability are the defining “characteristics” of the given, characteristics which are now reformulated as “indivisibility” and “distribution.”³⁴ This reformulation reveals the rather stunning philosophical manoeuvre that Deleuze has performed: polytheism and theism are in fact the cultural expressions of the two fundamental characteristics of the given, which Deleuze can now plainly identify as time and space.

In a manifold of pure difference, time is “the perceptible succession of changing objects” (continuous existence) and space is the “arrangement of visible or tangible objects” (distinct existence).³⁵ Causation as the principle of difference is the schematism of continuity and distinguishability, indivisibility and distribution. It is the concrete nothingness of sense, the sensible unit, the idea-limit of the given. Space and time, in turn, are emergent structures of difference, characteristics of the given in its constitution as a differential manifold.³⁶ We discover Deleuze’s project in Empiricism and Subjectivity to be much more than a science of humanity (though it is certainly such a science); it is his first attempt at an ontology of pure difference.³⁷

Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 87. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22-23. ↩
I explicated this schematization in “Sensible Subjects,” November 23, 2025, https://steinea.ca/2025/11/23/sensible-subjects/. Infinitesimal sensibility we might also give the name hapticality, to draw from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 97-99. Hapticality is “a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you. This is modernity’s insurgent feel, its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, hand laugh” (98). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. Compare Heisenberg’s quotation of von Weizsäcker in Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, 1958 (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 2000), 23: “Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. Compare Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle,” 1929, in Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, 86-95, eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 89: “In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere: all experience forms a complex network, which cannot always be surveyed and can often be grasped only in parts. Everything is accessible to man; and man is the measure of all things”; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, UK: Routledge, 2003), 1-2: “The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to appearances, and none of them is privileged … an electric current does not have a secret reverse side … it indicates only itself and the total series … The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself all the being of the existent … the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence is an ‘appearing’ which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it. For the being of an existent is exactly what it appears … it is absolutely indicative of itself”; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960, trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013), 112: “self-presentation is a universal ontological characteristic of nature”; and Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, 2015, trans. Erik Butler (London, UK: Verso, 2016), 21: “reality has no double: everything is right there, before our eyes.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87, and Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. ↩
Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88, Deleuze’s insertion. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88, and Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. Compare Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44-45: “The matter, the continuum about which and through which signs speak, is always the same … The matter segmented in order to express something expresses other segmentations of that matter.” Eco, like the later Deleuze, works closely with Louis Hjelmslev’s glossematics, as laid out in the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 1943, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). ↩
Deleuze is profoundly Sartrean, and in so being, profoundly Husserlian. See Being and Nothingness, 7: “All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no ‘content.’ We must renounce those neutral ‘givens’ which, according to the system of reference chosen, find their place either ‘in the world’ or ‘in the psyche.’ A table is not in consciousness—not even in the capacity of a representation. A table is in space, beside the window, etc … The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection with the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world.” Sartre will start to write this “consciousness of” instead as “consciousness (of),” which we might collapse even further with a hyphen: consciousness of world is consciousness (of) world is consciousness-world (given-thought simply turned around). Contemporary analogs may be found in Riccardo Manzotti, The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (New York, NY: OR Books, 2018) and Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). The latter of these is a recent discovery, so I have yet to engage with Hutto and Myin’s arguments closely. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. A later work of Deleuze’s, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 99-100, gives us more tools for thinking of Deleuzian qualities: the “canvas” (the world) is full of “figurative and probabilistic givens” and the painter’s work with these givens is a kind of “catastrophe” that “overc[omes] the canvas”; the givens are transformed, the canvas is qualified; the painter’s marks emerge from the canvas, “irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random,” the very “traits of sensation.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88 and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 14, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/. Compare also Marc Lange, Because Without Cause: Non-Causal Explanations in Science and Mathematics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 89. Reading Deleuze with Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2006, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2008), provides us with a useful corrective. In his denial of primary and secondary qualities, Deleuze walks right up to the trap of “correlationism,” that is, “the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant … the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5). Indeed, the schema “given-thought” could very easily be taken as yet another instance of the correlationism that Meillassoux challenges. However, as I hope this and the preceding essays have demonstrated, Deleuze is working to resolve precisely the same philosophical problem as Meillassoux, to escape the trap of post-Kantian critical philosophy. Deleuze’s focus on Hume in Empiricism and Subjectivity should indicate as much. In his chapter on “Hume’s Problem,” Meillassoux writes: “So long as we believe that there must be a reason why what is, is the way it is, we will continue to fuel superstition, which is to say, the belief that there is an ineffable reason underlying all things … we must transform our perspective on unreason, stop construing it as the form of our deficient grasp of the world and turn it into the veridical content of this world as such” (82). This is the “principle of factiality,” the “absolute necessity of everything’s non-necessity” (50, 62), the “absolute” as “hyper-Chaos” (64). Deleuze’s empiricism should be understood, therefore, in Meillassoux’s terms, as a “factial” speculation (79). I leave the intricacies of an interreading of these texts to a future work. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 89. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 90. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. To pull more language from Meillassoux, the given is “what is whether we are or not.” After Finitude, 27. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 25, 77. ↩
François Laruelle, while not entirely fair to Deleuze, does excellent work moving beyond this challenge in his Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). Likewise, Quentin Meillassoux’s project in the wake of After Finitude has been much concerned with the elaboration of “supercontingency,” which we might describe with Deleuze as the “principle of difference” as absolute. See Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, ed. Anna Longo (Milan, IT: Mimesis International, 2014), and S. C. Hickman, “Quentin Meillassoux: Hyper-Chaos and the Real,” The Dark Forest, May 29, 2015, https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/quentin-meillassoux-hyper-chaos-and-the-real/. ↩
To use language perhaps more significant to contemporary readers, the question that Deleuze raises here is that of how complexity emerges from chaos. Deleuze does not appear, as of yet, to have embarked upon his study of the literature in the natural sciences that will so influence later works like A Thousand Plateaus. The following pages of Empiricism and Subjectivity are very difficult, given their strict adherence to Hume’s terms without recourse to the other theories that run through Deleuze’s later thought. Reading Deleuze at this point in history, however, there are some texts to which the motivated reader can turn for additional insight: Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 1958, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1980); Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, 1972 (Dordrecht, ND: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980); Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2006, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2008); Leonard Smith, Chaos: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007); John H. Holland, Complexity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London, UK: Verso, 2018); and Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87, 90. ↩
As I have discussed in an earlier essay, “Pure Indetermination,” March 5, 2021, https://steinea.ca/2021/03/05/pure-indetermination/, this is Alain Badiou’s logic of the determination of the void, from Ø → {Ø} → 1. ↩
Refer to my elaboration of the Pythagorean concept of the “unit-point” in “Pure Indetermination,” n.p. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 90. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 91. Again, echoes of the unit-point are strong here. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 91. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 91. Compare Carlo Rovelli, “This Granular Life,” Aeon, January 23, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-atomic-theory-the-most-important-idea-in-human-history: “And there is the simple idea of the finite divisibility of things—the granular quality of the world. It is the idea that stops the infinite between our fingers.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92. ↩
Recent debates in physics on the nature of space-time are illuminating, here. Sean Carroll, amongst others, is “quite confident that space-time is emergent. It arises fairly robustly from the mutual requirements of quantum mechanics and gravity.” See “The Unraveling of Space-Time,” Quanta Magazine, September 25, 2024, https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unraveling-of-space-time-20240925/. Similarly, the concepts of “mass” and “length” may also be emergent. See Natalie Wolchover, “At Multiverse Impasse, a New Theory of Scale,” Quanta Magazine, August 18, 2014, https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-avoid-the-multiverse-physicists-propose-a-symmetry-of-scales-20140818/. ↩
And indeed, it is Deleuze’s first attempt to break out of the correlationist circle, to think what is, whether humanity is or not. ↩

The Essence of Empiricism

2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Deleuze begins his Empiricism and Subjectivity with Hume’s proposal to create a “science of humanity,” anchored not in the abstract idea of the “mind” but rather in the concrete rules of the “affections.”¹ This science must be a moral science and a sociology before ever becoming a psychology, because the “mind” has neither the “constancy” nor the “universality” required to be the basis of a science.²

Purposiveness, sensibility, the substance of anything we might call “mind,” begins in “pure imagination and mere fancy.”³ Purposiveness is a flutter, a glance; it happens in the blink of an eye.⁴ The human being touches the world, is in touch with the world: moment of sense, brush of contact, infinitesimal grasp, and then again, and again, and again. Every moment a beginning, a repetition of sense in the sensible that is always already going on.⁵

To speak of this original touch is to speak of the human being as necessarily hyphenated, a being-with.⁶ Purposiveness is the mechanism whereby this hyphenation, sign of primordial distance and relation, is taken as a rule, the base case for a recursive operation whereby the singular case (the unrepeatable, the unique) becomes the corrective program for the repetition of appearances, becomes the very law of causation.⁷ This law is a “fiction,” but an effective one; its subjects are possessed of a practical reason, a praktognosia; they know how to make do.⁸ The science of this making do is morality and sociology, no theoretical “minds” required.

The science of humanity must, therefore, begin with a “science of the sensible,” starting in the middle with sense as the absolute hiatus, the blink of nothingness between things that is, nevertheless, the possibility of sense as such.⁹ The human being is mobilized by sense, becomes a subject by way of this manifold exteriority in its radical difference, its constant repetition. The void is a plenum, a supersaturated field of associations, of “transitions, passages, ‘tendencies,’ which circulate from one to another.”¹⁰ Caught up in this field, adrift in the flow, the human being finds itself moved by the eddies of association, and in a blink the easy passage of this movement becomes a tendency, the tendency a habit, the habit a subject.¹¹ Not mind, but affection; not unity, but partiality.

So this is where we find ourselves with Deleuze’s empirical project, and where Deleuze, in turn, takes a moment to reflect on “the essence of empiricism” that he set out to examine.¹² As Deleuze begins Chapter 5, he reminds his readers that an empirical philosophy cannot be elaborated without first addressing the “problem of subjectivity,” which is to say the rather paradoxical idea that the subject “is that which develops itself.”¹³ This has been the focus of the preceding chapters, and so too of this series of essays.

To say that the subject is that which develops itself is to say that the “content” of subjectivity (content that we described last time as a vacuous diagram, an empty form) is “mediation and transcendence,” a double movement.¹⁴ The subject is an operation, the movement of which we have spent the above paragraphs recapitulating. Essential to Deleuze’s argument is that this operation comes from outside; not by the subject but in the imagination as subject—the subject is not cause but effect.¹⁵ The double movement of subjectivation, then, is at once the “self-development” of this movement and its “becoming-other,” which can also be described as the subject’s “fundamental characteristics” of “belief” and “invention.”¹⁶

The subject believes itself to be more than a delirium of sense (dimension of determination, the extensive rule, the subject’s self-development or transcendence); the subject then invents itself as subject (dimension of correction, the corrective rule, the subject’s becoming-other or mediation).¹⁷ The subject transcends the given, then twists about and declares its subjectivity as given.¹⁸ “I affirm more than I know”; I invent, I give names to the various repetitions of appearance, I posit nature as the unity of this appearance, I develop theoretical sciences and bodies of knowledge; in sum, I go about conducting all the activities of the project of human civilization—and all of this on the basis of a fiction: the concept of cause.¹⁹ “By what right” do we depend upon such “an unknown connection” for the basis of our knowledge?²⁰ Deleuze contends that the “problem of truth” is, therefore, shown to be the “critical problem of subjectivity itself.”²¹

The mechanism of subjectivation is the mechanism whereby a being “extracts from that which affects it in general a power independent of the actual exercise … a pure function.”²² This function is the diagram of purposiveness, generic thought, vacuity that takes itself as its own law. In the schematism of belief and invention, in the “secret powers” of sense, we encounter the genesis of the rule for the “presuppos[ition] [of] abstract or distinct powers.”²³ This is a restatement of Deleuze’s discussion of polytheism and theism in the previous chapter. Here, Deleuze writes:

nothing escapes our knowledge as radically as the powers of Nature, and nothing is more futile for our understanding than the distinction between powers and their exercise. How can we assume or distinguish them? To believe is to infer one part of nature from another, which is not given. To invent is to distinguish powers and to constitute functional totalities or totalities that are not given in nature.²⁴

In the terms of the previous chapter, polytheism posits the “continuous existence” of the passions as the activity of the gods and theism posits the “distinct existence” of objects and the world as the “Unique” as such.²⁵ Together, these confusions of causality disclose the fundamental confusion of the imagination that Deleuze, in the present chapter, names a “pure function.” Polytheism, then, is the rule of belief that “infer[s] one part of nature from another,” and theism the rule of invention that “distinguish[es] powers” and “constitute[s] functional totalities”—a “dual system of extensive rules” that is indeed the “dual power of subjectivity.”²⁶

Herein lies the problem of truth. On its surface, this situation points us toward a nihilistic destruction of all sense and meaning. Knowledge is simply groundless belief and fanciful invention, a figment of the pure function of subjectivation, humanity as “the measure of all things.”²⁷ But insofar as our science of humanity always begins within a world that precedes us, a world that includes all the practices and knowledge of humanity applied and at work within it, we encounter a given that, we might say, is more than the sum of its parts, a given that is both support and field for any and all empirical study.²⁸ Permit me to quote Deleuze at length:

Undoubtedly, the subject itself is given. Undoubtedly, that which transcends the given is also given, in another way and in another sense. This subject who invents and believes is constituted inside the given in such a way that it makes the given itself a synthesis and a system. This is what we must explain. In this formulation of the problem, we discover the absolute essence of empiricism.

We could say that philosophy in general has always sought a plane of analysis in order to undertake and conduct the examination of the structures of consciousness (critique), and to justify the totality of experience. Initially, it is a difference in plan that opposes critical philosophies. We embark upon a transcendental critique when, having situated ourselves on a methodologically reduced plane that provides an essential certainty—a certainty of essence—we ask: how can there be a given, how can something be given to a subject, and how can the subject give something to itself? Here, the critical requirement is that of a constructivist logic which finds its model in mathematics.

The critique is empirical when, having situated ourselves in a purely immanent point of view, which makes possible a description whose rule is found in determinable hypotheses and whose model is found in physics, we ask: how is the subject constituted in the given? The construction of the given makes room for the constitution of the subject. The given is no longer given to a subject; rather, the subject constitutes itself in the given. Hume’s merit lies in the singling out of this empirical problem in its pure state and its separation from the transcendental and the psychological.²⁹

The mind must be referred to nature, not nature to the mind.³⁰ This is the rule of empiricism. Quoting Hume, Deleuze characterizes this rule as “blind submission,” and yet only in this blindness can we properly demonstrate our “sceptical disposition.”³¹ This is the beginning of a thought that is always “coming and going,” a thought of the “middle,” a thought that is, originally and irreducibly, a given-thought.³²

Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 21. Concrete rules is a phrase from the much later work with Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 501-514. Deleuze and Guattari’s understand of “rules” in A Thousand Plateaus is a profound extension and radicalization of Deleuze’s sense of rules in Empiricism and Subjectivity. Indeed, his general rule of subjectivation, as discussed last time in my “Sensible Subjects: Empiricism and Subjectivity, 4,” November 23, 2025, https://steinea.ca/2025/11/23/sensible-subjects/, is one among many other such “concrete rules” elaborated in that later text. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 21. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 76. ↩
For the “blink of an eye,” see my paper “The Torqued Horizon: Preliminary Notes on the Hypersurface of the Real,” Radical Resistance: Dissent and Boundary Crossing in the Humanities, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, April 6, 2019, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4603405. ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 128. ↩
Hyphenation is a critical concept for my philosophy. I originally drew this concept from Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press, 2006), and then variations of it from Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 2004), and Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). I elaborated upon the concept in depth in my Fiction in the Integrated Circuit (Master’s Thesis, Trinity Western University, 2018), https://arcabc.ca/islandora/object/twu%3A4, and subsequent writings. ↩
As discussed last time, the “concept of cause” is, according to Kant, the “crux metaphysicorum” of Hume’s philosophy. See Immanuel Kant, cited in Graciela De Pierris and Michael Friedman, “Kant and Hume on Causality,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 31, 2024, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 75, 64; for “praktognosia,” see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (London, UK: Routledge, 2014), 141; for “making do,” see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). ↩
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1968, trans. Paul Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press), 56. Deleuze continues: “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing” (57). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, x. On the void, compare Karen Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice (Ostfildem, DE: Hatje Cantz, 2012). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 25, 31. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 85. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 85. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 85. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 85. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 85. Recall also the first dimension of the general rule, establishment (50). The rule is established by “interest and utility” (49), which characterization is to indicate the partiality of the subject, its sensibility, its original inclination. ↩
This is what Sartre has described as the “useless passion” of human being in Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, UK: Routledge, 2003), 636, 587: “The fundamental value which presides over this project [of consciousness] is exactly the in-itself-for-itself; that is, the ideal of a consciousness which would be the foundation of its own being-in-itself by the pure consciousness which it would have of itself. It is this ideal which can be called God. Thus the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86. Here, I must recommend Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2006, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2008), for a thorough elaboration of this problem. ↩
Compare Federico Luzzi, Knowledge from Non-Knowledge: Inference, Testimony and Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86. We might describe this as the conservation of a metastable potential, an autopoietic system that maintains itself in order to increase the expenditure of the cosmos. See Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2009): 4-16, https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07_simondon1.pdf; Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, 1972, (Dordrecht, ND: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980); and Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86, 75, 86. ↩
See my essay “Sophistics: Protagoras and the Positivists,” July 19, 2021, https://steinea.ca/2021/07/19/sophistics/. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 37. Indeed, nature, “the object of physics, is partes extra partes” and “not a whole,” and yet “feeling reacts to wholes” that are not given in nature (35-36). I am reminded of key texts in twentieth century philosophy of science, specifically Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, 1958 (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 2000) and Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86-87. This is a crucial passage with many resonances across other texts. Firstly, on the question of critical philosophy—“how can there be a given?”—Deleuze again, in “Control and Becoming: A Conversation Between Toni Negri and Gilles Deleuze,” The Funambulist, February 22, 2011, https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-control-and-becoming-a-conversation-between-toni-negri-and-gilles-deleuze: “What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us.” And Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 204: “The problem of the world—and to begin with, the problem of one’s own body—consists in the fact that everything resides within the world.” Secondly, on the constitution of the subject, see Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London, UK: Verso, 2013), 905: “We should apply here something like a weak anthropic principle: how should the Real be structured so that it allows for the emergence of subjectivity?” Thirdly, on determinable hypotheses, see Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1935 (London, UK: Routledge, 2005). Fourthly, on philosophy: what Deleuze names philosophy is specifically Platonic idealism and its myriad afterlives. Deleuze operates instead in the tradition of Heraclitean empiricism, which I have elaborated in my “Generic Science: Heraclitus, Intelligence, and the Common,” March 28, 2021, https://steinea.ca/2021/03/28/generic-science/. I am struck how François Laruelle, in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), sets himself up as superseding Deleuze, but his whole generic project is already prefigured in Empiricism and Subjectivity. Fifthly and finally, on constructivist logic: actually looking at constructivists, from Hilbert to Badiou, might yield some interesting insights. As starting points, see Richard Zach, “Hilbert’s Program,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hilbert-program/, and Alain Badiou, Being and Event, 1988, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, UK: Continuum, 2007). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. ↩
On blindness, see my “Being Planetary,” November 17, 2017, https://steinea.ca/2017/11/17/being-planetary/. ↩
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25. ↩

Sensible Subjects

2025-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Two years on.¹ We try to begin again—perpetual beginning.²

Delirium finds its rule and the rule finds its others; rules so associated are the movement of the subject, and subjects associated in turn are the movement of culture. Culture is to effectuate this association. No rule before culture, no subject before the rule.

We study tendency and habit, the subject as effect and effecting. A science of effectivity, practical sociology of the world. All these ways of making do.³

Begin again.

In Chapter 1 of Empiricism and Subjectivity, Gilles Deleuze formulates the mind as a collection of experiences, and indeed as identical to those experiences.⁴ This collection is originally without organization, without system; only when subjected by the world does the collection become a system, the mind a subject. The subject is partial and passional, an effect of the world.

In Chapter 2, Deleuze examines the rules of this subjection. Rules are the means of the satisfaction of the passions. Passions are necessarily socially affected, insofar as subjects are always already social in their constitution. So, rules are the means of social affection, bringing about the integration of sympathies in the various institutions and enterprises of human social being.⁵ This integration is culture, the moral world, the order of ends.⁶

In Chapter 3, Deleuze describes how rules for the satisfaction of the passions come to be general rules of culture. The most successful rules reflect and extend individual passions, liberating the passions from their individual limits. Culture is a project of this expanded passion, and indeed, is the world as such into which the passions are projected and integrated with the passions of others. Thus, in culture, the mind finds constancy for its passions, made subject to the world as an intention, a purpose.⁷ The subject is always already directed or inclined, a project of the world. There are no “faculties” or “occult qualities” of consciousness to be discovered here, only the durable intentions of culture as a collective project of human practical reason.⁸

So, as we at least reach Chapter 4, “God and the World,” Deleuze tries to find an example of a schematism that “would bring together all the significations that we have successively attributed to general rules.”⁹ For Deleuze, the best such example is that of religion, though the argument that follows is typically Deleuzian in its diagonality.¹⁰

Deleuze argues that there are two types of rules—“extensive” and “corrective”—and two sources for rules—“passion” and “knowledge”—amounting to four total “kinds” of rule: extensive rules of passions, corrective rules of passions, extensive rules of knowledge, and corrective rules of knowledge.¹¹ Deleuze sees polytheistic and theistic religions as the two essential “feeling[s]” of his general category of “religion,” with polytheism extending the passions, and theism extending knowledge.¹² Importantly, in both expressions, religion “confuses the accidental with the essential.”¹³ Polytheism schematizes the “diversity” and “irreducibility” of the passions as the activity of the gods, while theism schematizes the “unity of the spectacle of nature” in perception as God’s unique effect, thereby serving as his proof.¹⁴ Each schematization is, for Deleuze, ultimately a “fiction of the imagination,” an essentialization of the source (i.e., the collection of experience) as schema (i.e., the systematization of the collection).¹⁵

While different in source, the two feelings of religion, the polytheistic and theistic, constitute for Deleuze a “dual system of extensive rules,” which are, in the framework laid out in Chapter 2, also referred to as operations of “determination” (along with operations of “establishment” and “correction”).¹⁶ We only briefly touched on this framework in the essay on this chapter, so it is worth doubling back and more clearly articulating it now, since there is some difference in argumentation between Chapters 2 and 4.¹⁷

Establishment, determination, and correction make up the “three dimensions” of a “general rule,” which Deleuze defines as a “system of directed means” for the satisfaction of passions.¹⁸ The general rule integrates individual passions in an institution, a “model of actions.”¹⁹ The sum of these institutions constitutes culture or society, which is, therefore, nothing other than a “set of conventions founded on utility.”²⁰

The dimensions of the general rule are distinct but “simultaneous” in their operation.²¹ The rule is “established by interest and utility” and is “determined by the imagination.”²² This determination is the process of subjection whereby a subject is revealed as a possible model for the unordered collection of the mind, a model that is the reflection of the passional drives in the imagination in the form of a subject that could ultimately satisfy those drives.²³

Insofar as the determination is always a determination of “possible circumstances” of realization, the third operation of the general rule is required: correction. Correction resolves the “lack of adequation between real persons and possible situations.”²⁴ As such, correction operates in the mode of belief—the extension “must itself become now a real situation,” not just a possible one, and in order for this to happen, individual passions “must become the most distant,” and integrated, social passions must become “the nearest.”²⁵ The possible situation must be believed as actually possible, and so to this end the corrective operation imbues the “general interest” with “the vividness that only particular interests can have for us naturally.”²⁶

To return to Chapter 4, Deleuze speaks of the dimensions of the general rule as discrete rules in themselves (extensive, corrective), and it is for this reason that I have used the term “operation” as a synonym for dimension in the preceding paragraphs. This ambiguity in the text makes interpretation difficult, but having now walked carefully through Deleuze’s earlier argument, it becomes more obvious how the four kinds of “rules” of religion unite the significations attributed to general rules previously. And it is here where Deleuze poses the challenge to his readers of how correction might operate in the context of religion: “as religion is corrected, what is really left of it?”²⁷ If religion is a confusion, fiction, or fancy of the imagination (accidental confused for essential), how can it hope to withstand the “total critique” of correction?²⁸

As discussed above, correction closes the gap of adequation between the real and the possible by way of belief. But if, as Deleuze initially posits, the possibility of religion is itself a confusion, that gap can never be closed. The gods disappear in “an abstraction without proportion” and the supreme effect of creation is abolished as a “fictitious usage of causality.”²⁹ By the operation of correction, religion, for Deleuze, is reduced to “pure imagination and mere fancy.”³⁰ A deflationary end, if not for the subsequent turn that Deleuze performs in a repetition of Hume.

“To believe in miracles is a false belief,” Deleuze asserts, “but it is also a true miracle.”³¹ The principles of association are revealed to be operative even in a vacuum, and it is this sheer fact, disclosed for Deleuze by his particular interpretation of religion, that renders religion “justified … in its very special situation, outside culture and outside true knowledge.”³² While the principles of association can neither “know the world as an effect of divine activity” nor “know God as the cause of the world,” the principles remain effective.³³ The principles simply are, without “cause” or “origin”—we may only speak of their genesis in the apophatic mode, of God in the negative as that which causes the principles to cohere in the first place.³⁴

Deleuze names this coherence or “original agreement” of the principles of association “purposiveness.”³⁵ The correction of religion renders this coherence in diagrammatic form, not as an object of knowledge to be “known,” but as the mode of “thought” as such.³⁶ “The idea of God, as originary agreement, is the thought of something in general”—in other words, the idea of God is the most abstract determination of the original coherence of “origin” (nature) and “qualification” (human nature).³⁷ Practical and theoretical reason are always partial, and in their operation can grasp any number of principles that “can furnish us with a coherent discourse on the origin of the world.”³⁸ But generic thought, purposiveness, precedes all such reasoning, is the basis of reasoning, is that which makes it possible for us to “transcend the other perspectives which are equally possible, and to remind us that we are always confronted with partial analogies.”³⁹ Generic thought is “indifferent,” which is to say, it does not differentiate, distinguish, or decide.⁴⁰ Generic thought purposes, is directed; it tends and tilts this way and that, a force or impulse toward the world.⁴¹ Generic thought is the possibility of habituation by the world; it is the primacy of qualification over qualities, signification over signs, individuation over individuals; it is the very movement of subjectivation.

Having used religion to draw the diagram of purposiveness, Deleuze turns to a third confusion of the principle of causality that Hume discusses in his Treatise.⁴² The first confusion, typified for Deleuze by polytheism, is that of “repetitions which do not proceed from experience” (passions essentialized as gods); the second confusion, typified for Deleuze by theism, is that of “a particular object—the world—which cannot be repeated, and which is not, properly speaking, an object” (knowledge essentialized as the unity of the world).⁴³ Citing Hume, these are considered confusions of causality because:

It is only when two species of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other; and were an effect presented, which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known species, I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause.⁴⁴

The gods extend the passions, are determined as gods; the world extends knowledge, is determined as the supreme effect of God. We have already seen how the operation of correction simultaneously deflates the determination while revealing the diagram of purposiveness. What, then, can we learn from the third confusion? The third is actually the problem proper of Hume’s thought, that of the “belief in the distinct and continuous existence of bodies” as Deleuze puts it,⁴⁵ or in Hume’s words, “the continu’d existence of objects in order to connect their past and present appearances, and give them such an union with each other, as I have found by experience to be suitable to their particular natures and circumstances.”⁴⁶

This is the “crux metaphysicorum” of Hume’s philosophy, the “concept of cause” as such.⁴⁷ And for Deleuze, it is the very connection of past and present appearances of objects, the fact of this union, that achieves the “resolution of the contradiction that would arise between the conjunction of two objects in actual experience and the appearance of one of them only in my perception.”⁴⁸ Polytheism gives us repetition, theism gives us the unrepeatable, and insofar as these two reasons, connected in the “dual system” of religion, together reveal the diagram of purposiveness at their base, Deleuze can say that this “fiction of the imagination” is the very operation whereby appearance gains its “coherence and regularity.”⁴⁹ Importantly, we must reiterate that this operation should not be understood as a faculty of the mind. The mind is first and foremost a “delirium.”⁵⁰ The mind has no system in itself; it is merely an “assemblage of things.”⁵¹ For the mind to become a subject, it must be determined, and this determination is not something done “by” the mind but rather “in” the mind.⁵² The association of ideas in the imagination, the systematization of the collection of experience, is not brought about by the subject: “[r]ather than finding its origin, association finds in the imagination its terms and its object.”⁵³ Association produces the subject; association comes from outside.

This argument forms the kernel of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism.”⁵⁴ Qualities are not possessed by the subject but are rather encountered in the world. It is this very encounter that determines the subject as a subject. This is why Deleuze describes his philosophy as an “aesthetics,” a “science of the sensible.”⁵⁵ Purposiveness, generic thought, is mind “apprehend[ing] directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible.”⁵⁶ This grasp of the sensible is fleeting, but in its repetition the grasp is extended, determined, and corrected, becoming the rule of continuity as such, so laying the template for all other general rules. We see, then, that the concept of cause is to be found, at bottom, in the repetition of the generic contact between the mind and the sensible, in the generalization of the most infinitesimal moment of sense. An “outright fiction” at the very foundation of reason, fantasy and madness as the bases of continuity and consistency.⁵⁷ Philosophy is left to decide “between the contradiction or nothingness,” as Deleuze puts it, or citing Hume, “betwixt a false reason and none at all.”⁵⁸

“Modern philosophy” offers no remedy, Deleuze argues, only “hopes” for a resolution of the contradiction, “and there lies its error.”⁵⁹ The supposed “permanent, irresistible, and universal principles” of the mind (as posited by some philosophers) cannot be separated from the “variable, fanciful, and irregular principles”; reason cannot be separated from madness.⁶⁰ Deleuze, on the other hand, does not take this as reason for despair, but rather as impetus to begin again. Indifference, fancy, madness, delirium—his philosophy starts here, because we, as purposive beings, start here. “The only resource and positivity offered to the mind is nature or practice,” the “middle and temperate region,” the domain of effectivity, of making do.⁶¹ For “good sense” to emerge from the contradiction, “the mind must be referred to nature,” is always already referred to nature, in and through the projects of “moral practice” and “understanding” whereby the subject is constituted, necessarily and originally, as a sensible subject.⁶² This sensibility is both the root of the contradiction and the means by which the contradiction “is regulated by possible corrections and resolved through practice.”⁶³ Sensibility is “life,” activity, everyday pragmatics; sensibility is “science,” the possibility of a generic thought that touches, hypothesizes, experiments, learns.⁶⁴ Sensibility is perpetual beginning which, put otherwise, is to say that sensibility is the “eternal return,” the “infinite which belongs to a single time, the eternity which belongs to an instant,” being with “no beginning or end.”⁶⁵

We find ourselves “always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo,” contradiction as “conjunction,” “and … and … and,” beginning never from a “clean slate” or “ground zero,” but from the “middle,” more and less than beginning, always “coming and going rather than starting and finishing.”⁶⁶ To cite another text, this is where we find ourselves, in finding that “something already was going on,” that “the response is already there before the call goes out,” that we are “already in something.”⁶⁷ Thus spoke Zarathustra: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.⁶⁸ Begin again, begin right here, in the thick of things, just as you always have.

Notes

The previous entry in my series on Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity is “Determined Figures: Empiricism and Subjectivity, 3,” September 16, 2023, https://steinea.ca/2023/09/16/determined-figures/. ↩
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (London, UK: Routledge, 2014), lxxviii. ↩
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 29. ↩
Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 21-23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 39-41. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 33. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 55-63. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 70, 64. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 73. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 73. For diagonality, see Alexander R. Galloway, “Graphic Formalism,” ASAP Journal, March 27, 2023, https://asapjournal.com/graphic-formalism-on-the-bias-alexander-r-galloway/. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 73. Recall that passion is identified with practical reason, “the establishment of a whole of culture and morality,” while knowledge is identified with theoretical reason, “the determination of the detail of nature, that is, of parts submitted to calculation” (64). The former “proceeds in terms of probabilities (experimental reason, understanding)” while the latter “proceeds on the basis of certainty (intuition and demonstration)” (65). While passion and knowledge, practice and theory, should be understood as distinct poles of reason, in Empiricism and Subjectivity passion and practice are always prior to knowledge and theory. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 73-74. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 73-74. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 73 ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 75. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 75, 50. ↩
Eric Stein, “A Model of Actions,” June 18, 2023, https://steinea.ca/2023/06/18/a-model-of-actions/ ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 41. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 45-46. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 46. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 50. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 49. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 48-49. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 49. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 50. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 51. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 76. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 76. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 76. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 76. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 76. ↩
Recall Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23: the principles of association, “contiguity, resemblance, and causality” are that which “organize the given [of experience] into a system, imposing constancy on the imagination.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77. Compare Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 25: “philosophy, being a human science, need not search for the cause; it should rather scrutinize effects. The cause cannot be known; principles have neither cause nor an origin of their power. What is original is their effect upon the imagination.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77. Deleuze pulls this idea from Hume: “Purpose will be thought, albeit not known, as the original agreement between the principles of human nature and nature itself. ‘There is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the association of our ideas.’ Purpose gives us therefore, in a postulate, the originary (originelle) unity of origin and qualification.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77. ↩
Many resonances here. For my own thought on the matter, see Eric Stein, “Generic Science: Heraclitus, Intelligence, and the Common,” March 28, 2021, https://steinea.ca/2021/03/28/generic-science/. In my work, I have relied heavily on Edmund Husserl’s concept of “double sensation” in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, 1952, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 155, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “naïve contact” in Phenomenology of Perception, lxx. My use of “generic thought” here deliberately invokes the “generic science” of Francois Laruelle, which is predicated on the operation of what he terms “non-thetic transcendence” (NTT) in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 202: NTT is “no longer relative to” the “World and its attributes” in “the sense at any rate of philosophical, that is, traditional (positing and posited), transcendence: it supposes the simple ‘support’ or vehicle of this given without forming again with it any philosophical decision.” Through the close reading undertaken in the present essay, it has become clear to me that Deleuze provides us with a formulation of Laruellian non-philosophy over thirty years in advance. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77. Generic thought appears here as the non-predicative thought of the phenomenological epoché or reduction in Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, 1913, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 66, which is the “operation necessary to make ‘pure’ consciousness, and subsequently the whole phenomenological region, accessible to us.” The notion of “pure consciousness” came under severe critique in Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 1967, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), and has been a subject of critique throughout much of my work. See especially my Fiction in the Integrated Circuit (Master’s thesis, Trinity Western University, 2018), https://arcabc.ca/islandora/object/twu%3A456. Deleuze’s formulation presents us with a means of recovery for the phenomenological tradition and a linkage with Laruelle’s non-philosophy, insofar as generic thought can never be returned to as some “degree zero” or “garden” state of consciousness. The coherence of generic thought is the condition of possibility for all thoughts, for all principles of reason. It is the original movement by which and through which the mind is determined, becomes a subject, is made subject to the world. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 77: “In certain respects, purposiveness is more an élan vital, and less the project or the design of an infinite intelligence.” Here, Deleuze is most certainly drawing on Bergson. See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London, UK: Macmillan Publishers, 1912). ↩
It should be emphasized that Deleuze’s use of religion is precisely that, a use, and not entirely sensitive to the real complexity and plurality of historical religions. While unpacking his argument in this chapter, I was inclined to recall several sources from my studies that complicate and/or nuance Deleuze’s simple schematism of religion. On theism see Theophile James Meek, “Monotheism and the Religion of Israel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 61, no. 1 (March 1942): 21-43; on the relationship between theoretical knowledge and Christian theology, see Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,” in Creation: The Impact of an Idea, 54-83, ed. Daniel O’Connor and Francis Oakley (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969); on the intellectual acceptability of religious belief, see Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000); and on the leap of faith, see Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 1843, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). I do not think any of these sources present an impossible challenge to nor threaten to overturn Deleuze’s argument, but Deleuze’s discussion of religion would certainly benefit from a more thorough engagement with the literature in religion and theology. I leave this footnote here as a note to self, or for another motivated reader to pursue. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩
David Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 75. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩
Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩
Immanuel Kant, cited in Graciela De Pierris and Michael Friedman, “Kant and Hume on Causality,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 31, 2024, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 24. ↩
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1968, trans. Paul Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press), 56. ↩
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56. ↩
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56-57. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 80, 83. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 83. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 83. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 83-84. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. See also Chapter 3, 32: “the only possible theory is a theory of practice: with respect to the understanding, we have the calculation of probabilities and general rules; with respect to morality and the passions, we have general rules and justice.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. ↩
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 8; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25. ↩
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25. ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 128, 134. ↩
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 7. ↩

Philosophical Close Reading

2025-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Philosophy is a syntax of the real. There are many possible syntaxes (Laruelle,¹ Hjelmslev,² Benveniste³).

There is one real. Naive contact with the real makes philosophy possible—touch, perception, thought, philosophy (Merleau-Ponty⁴, Harney and Moten⁵). Any syntax is but a mapping, or better, a feeling, a feeling out of things.

The twentieth century French philosophers and their successors are at work on a metaphysical research program (Blake⁶). As a fundamentally plural program, concerned with the multiplicity of the singular real, no one “master” holds the key. Any momentary intuition can help elucidate the whole, and can also be revised or discarded if better intuitions come along.

Close reading affords precision and depth. Summative breadth is the lure of the expert (Certeau⁷). Insofar as we are all in touch with the real, we are all “scientists” (Laruelle⁸), we are all “artists” (Ranciere⁹), we are all philosophers.

Notes

François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 1943, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). ↩
Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 1966, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). ↩
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (London, UK: Routledge, 2012). ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013). ↩
Terence Blake, “Pluralist Metaphysical Research Programmes: Feyerabend, Deleuze, Laruelle, Zizek, Serres, Stiegler, Badiou, Latour,” Agent Swarm, November 17, 2016, https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/pluralist-metaphysical-research-programmes-feyerabend-deleuze-laruelle-zizek-serres-stiegler-badiou-latour/. ↩
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). ↩
François Laruelle, Theory of Identities, 1992, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016). ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 1987, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). ↩

Theory of Priority

2025-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Premise: no one is required to do anything.

At any point we may say this is not a priority and everyone goes home.

The software shall exist in whatever state we choose to leave it, even a non-existent state.

Corollary: no software is required to exist.

Priority is chosen. As soon as priority is required, we enter the realm of policy:

The software shall exist.
The software shall be functional.
The software shall be good.

In Search of a Distant Light

2025-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “In Search of a Distant Light: Metaphysical Speculation and the Horror of Decision in Elden Ring and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.” Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference, TAG Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, and Online, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15653329.

Mirrors: ~~Academia~~, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

In Elden Ring, the Shabriri Grape¹ serves as a focal point for the metaphysical speculation that has become distinctive of the studio’s oeuvre under the tenure of game director and now company president Hidetaka Miyazaki. As the player-character blindly pulls on the threads of Queen Marika’s Golden Order, woven as they are throughout the Lands Between, they find themselves inducted into a metaphysical investigation. Elden Ring toys with questions of ontology and subjectivity that challenge the idealist branch of the Western philosophical canon, and in so doing introduces a ludic torsion that requires its players to come to terms with notions of the real and its organization that go back to the beginning of recorded critical inquiry. Elden Ring, redoubling the stylistics of its forebears, is distinctly hermetic in its narrative construction, and consequently it requires of its players a hermeneutic sensibility, a willingness to engage in the interpretation of the textual traces scattered throughout its gameworld, traces such as those which accompany the Shabriri Grape. To follow the guidance of this “yellowing, oozing eyeball,” to set off in pursuit of the “distant light” it reveals, the player-character must go to the limits of their knowledge, indeed to the very limit of knowledge as such, to the original scission or abyss from which the world of Elden Ring was born.

Keywords: Game Studies, Metaphysics, Ontology, François Laruelle, Gilbert Simondon, Presocratic Philosophy, FromSoftware, Elden Ring

The Frenzied Flame

Early in Elden Ring, in the southern region of the Lands Between, the Weeping Peninsula, the player-character meets a young woman, Irina of Castle Morne, wearing a bloodstained dress and a blindfold. She tells the player-character that she wears the blindfold because her “eyesight’s been weak since birth,” that her “good father secreted [her] out the castle” in the midst of a servants’ revolt, and that her companions were slain on the road.² Now, she finds herself helpless and alone and asks the player-character to take a letter to her father, Edgar, the commander of the castle, to beg him to come to her, to save his life and leave behind his duty and his honour. The quest ultimately ends in tragedy. Upon returning to Irina with Edgar, the player-character finds her slain. Edgar blames himself for choosing “duty over [his] daughter’s safety” and swears a vow of revenge.³ The next time he and the player-character meet he has “gone perfectly mad,” overcome with something called the “frenzied flame.” His love, his hate, his purpose—the frenzied flame “melts it all away.”⁴ Upon his death he drops his weapon, some runes, and some consumables, but most importantly, he drops a single Shabriri Grape. This woeful tale and its pustulent artifact are the first hints of a metaphysics that cannot be explained by Order.

For now, the player-character continues to follow the “guidance of grace,”⁵ which leads them eventually to Castle Stormveil and the game’s first shardbearer boss, Godrick the Grafted.⁶ Defeating Godrick will open the way to the Roundtable Hold, and within it, the great doors behind which are found the chamber of the Two Fingers. These monstrous, decaying digits serve as “envoys to the Greater Will,” communicating in a “language of light” to this god beyond the stars.⁷ Opinions about the Fingers are mixed. While many continue to serve them and the Greater Will, with the Elden Ring shattered, new gods vie for power in the realm, seeking to reshape or overthrow entirely the gilded order of the Greater Will.

After Castle Stormveil, the player-character enters Liurnia of the Lakes, wherein they come upon another young woman, suspiciously familiar to the one so recently slain. She has the same voice, the same hair, the same face; she wears the same blindfold and bloodstained dress; but this woman goes by the name Hyetta. She tells the player-character that she is “journeying in search of the distant light” and asks for any Shabriri Grapes that the player-character might have.⁸ Her “eyesight has been weak since birth,” she says, but when she eats a Shabriri Grape she can “feel a distant light in the back of [her] eyes,” a light that will lead her to her “true duty, as a Finger Maiden.”⁹ What neither she nor the player-character yet knows is that the Fingers to which she is being drawn are not the two of the Roundtable Hold.

The player-character must give her three Shabriri Grapes at three different locations throughout Liurnia. After eating the third of these, Hyetta wonders what they might be: “Delectably tender and sweet, yet searing… What sight they must behold.”¹⁰ The player-character tells her that in fact they are human eyes. Hyetta, horrified, gags at the thought, but after a moment gathers herself, and tells the player-character that she has “gleaned something very important”:

The reason why it was eyes I had to eat. The distant light is far and frail. So faint it can’t be seen by the naked eye. But with everyone’s eyes together, it appears. Finally, it all makes sense. I am certain now, I will become a finger maiden.¹¹

Only with the offering of vision can the blind woman see; only from beholding the suffering of the world can an eye begin to see beyond it. From here, Hyetta is strengthened in her purpose. Her next request is for Fingerprint Grapes, grapes “which only grow on those who’ve been clasped by the burnt Fingers.”¹² It is the vision that the Fingerprint Grape affords that leads her to her final destination.

Below Leyndell, the capital of the Lands Between, are found the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds, and further below, the Cathedral of the Forsaken, and yet further below, the Frenzied Flame Proscription. Here, the player-character is confronted with a wall of flesh marked with fire, and Hyetta, awaiting them. “I’ll be a Maiden,” she says, and “you… surely, a Lord. Go to the door ahead, divesting yourself of your possessions. It will surely open, and the Three Fingers will welcome you. May the flame of chaos find purchase within you.”¹³ Not two Fingers, but three. Entering the chamber, the player-character is confronted with a shocking revelation, so obvious in hindsight, but stunning nevertheless—the Order of the Two Fingers was never all there was, could never have been complete, severed as they were from a larger whole. The Three Fingers await, inviting the player-character into their fiery grasp, to be marked with their fingerprints as the Lord of Frenzied Flame. Hyetta asks the player-character, her new Lord, to “rest [their] hand upon [her],” to sear her flesh and melt her eyes and in so doing make her the player-character’s Maiden.¹⁴ Upon doing so, she has the following to say:

Thank... thank you... I have touched them. The words of the Three Fingers. As your maiden, allow me to divine them. “All that there is came from the One Great. Then came fractures, and births, and souls. But the Greater Will made a mistake. Torment, despair, affliction... every sin, every curse. Every one, born of the mistake. And so, what was borrowed must be returned. Melt it all away, with the yellow chaos flame. Until all is One again.” Those who gave me grapes howled without words. Saying they wished they were never born. Become their lord. Take their torment, despair. Their affliction. Every sin, every curse. And melt it all away. As the Lord of Chaos. No more fractures... no more birth...¹⁵

Unless the power of another divine being is secured, this is precisely what the player-character does. Proceeding to the end game, the new Lord of Chaos finishes the work that the shattering of the Elden Ring started, overthrowing the old Golden Order and the last vestiges of its power, and finally splitting apart the symbol of the Order, the Erdtree, from within. The whole of the Lands Between are bathed in fire, the sky made molten, and above the splintered trunk of the Erdtree hangs an enormous, seething eye, the vision of the new Lord. All will be One once again.¹⁶

While many characters encountered throughout Elden Ring are motivated by personal stories of revenge, or ambition, or love, the story of the Frenzied Flame situates these strivings against a profoundly metaphysical backdrop. Hyetta’s final monologue recontextualizes the suffering of the world as a consequence of original individuation, of the splitting from which every “one” was born.¹⁷ For the Three Fingers, no Order can hope to set things right—only a restoration of the Oneness that was fractured could do so. Individuation was a mistake, the root of affliction, and so it is individuation that must be melted away. It is a bleak vision. And yet, far from being some nihilistic storytelling trick, this vision is doing important philosophical work, work that FromSoftware has been undertaking since at least Demon’s Souls in 2009.

A Philosophical Project

In Demon’s Souls, the terms of this philosophical project are explicitly articulated in the game’s opening cutscene, laying the groundwork for the critical exploration that Elden Ring continues over a decade later:

On the first day man was granted a soul, and with it, clarity. On the second day upon Earth was planted an irrevocable poison. A soul-devouring demon.¹⁸

While the diction and accompanying imagery invoke all the usual trappings of high fantasy, these short phrases do much more, inaugurating a metaphysical framework that will provide all the games that follow with their motivating contexts. With the soul comes reason, but with reason comes the necessary possibility of its extinction. In Demon’s Souls, this extinction is made manifest in a “colorless Deep Fog” that envelops the kingdom of Boletaria, and within which lurks the “Old One”¹⁹; in Dark Souls and its sequels, it is the “dark”²⁰; in Bloodborne, it is the “frenzy” caused by “insight” into the “Eldritch Truth” of the cosmos²¹; in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice it is the “terror” of apparitions²²; and in Elden Ring, of course, it is the madness of the Frenzied Flame.²³ Whether one succumbs to such dissolution or one willingly embraces it, in each of these games the player-character is forced to reckon with the tension between the rational “power of souls” and the irrational power of “chaos,” a reckoning made manifest in the choices that each games’ narrative offers.²⁴ None of these games makes clear which choice is the good or right one, and subsequent games tend to complicate things, remixing and reorienting terms to open new territories of inquiry. But what remains consistent across all of them is a figuration of some primordial reality that has been lost, perhaps forever, or perhaps yet to be recovered. In Elden Ring, this is the “One Great” of which Hyetta speaks, and which the Shabriri Grape illumines.

In the context of Buddhist philosophy, and specifically the thought of Nāgārjuna, the “One Great” can quite easily be read as the “emptiness” of being, the fact that all beings are in themselves nothing and can only be understood as individuals through their “dependent origination.”²⁵ Indeed, Shadow of the Erdtree provides extensive materials for making such an argument. The High Priest Hat of Count Ymir is distinguished by a large hole above the forehead that “represents the Greater Will and its lightless abyss.”²⁶ Ymir’s throne conceals the ladder down to the Finger Ruins of Miyr, wherein the player-character finds the “broken and abandoned” divinity Metyr, the Mother of Fingers, who was “the first shooting star to fall upon the Lands Between,” but who now confronted is revealed to be a tragic monstrosity, a writhing agglomeration of fingers.²⁷ The player-character learns that Metyr was the first child of the Greater Will, and in turn was the “mother of all Two Fingers.”²⁸ When slain, her remembrance can be used either to claim the Staff of the Great Beyond, a twisted staff topped with the lightless abyss of the Greater Will in “microcosm,”²⁹ or the Gazing Finger, a giant club marked with a “tiny wart-like eye [that] gazes vacantly into the beyond.”³⁰ This strange, primordial deity is thus remembered by either a visible void or a sightless eye, mirrored sigils of emptiness. However, while the generative void of the One Great can certainly be positioned in a long tradition of eastern philosophy, the horror of its depiction in Elden Ring is not so easily situated. Instead, this horror is better located in the inversions of western high fantasy tropes that FromSoftware’s games perform, and which, through their philosophical investigations, enact a similar inversion in what we might refer to as the tradition of western high idealism, forcing us to reconsider the primacy of the rational subject in western philosophical thought.³¹ To follow FromSoftware in this line of reasoning, we must make visible an alternative set of thinkers that connects some of the earliest western philosophers, the Presocratics, with the most recent, the radical French philosophers of the twentieth century. From Anaximander and the Pythagoreans to Gilbert Simondon and François Laruelle, we can chart a continuity of philosophy reconceived, a tradition that upends the metaphysical idealism of Plato and his Enlightenment inheritors.

Presocratics

In Anaximander, the One Great is the “boundless.”³² The boundless is the “first principle and element of existing things”; it is not “any of the other so-called elements, but something different from them … which is the source of all the heavens and the worlds in them.”³³ All “existing things” come from the boundless, and these things “die back into” the boundless “according to necessity.”³⁴ The boundless is the “infinite source from which anything which is generated is subtracted.”³⁵ It is “taken not to have an origin, but to be the origin of everything else—to contain everything and steer everything.”³⁶

In a step beyond Anaximander, for the Pythagoreans, the One Great is “number.”³⁷ Numbers “are the elements of all things,” and in turn, “the elements of number are the even and the odd.”³⁸ The “even” is the “unlimited”—cognate of Anaximander’s boundless—and the “odd” is the “limited.”³⁹ Since one, the first number for the Pythagoreans, “is both even and odd,” this means that one is “formed from both even and odd,” and so number as such “is formed from one.”⁴⁰ Since numbers are the elements of all things, this amounts to saying that all things are made of one, made of the one. One is both the number of a single thing and the principle of singularity itself, that which separates and distinguishes the unlimited.

Simondon

If we make a leap across the millennia, we find similar arguments in the writings of some twentieth century French philosophers. Where Anaximander discusses the generation of individuals from the boundless, and the Pythagoreans discuss the enumeration of individuals from the unlimited, Gilbert Simondon argues that “individuation” is a “resolution” that “appears through the division of being into phases,” where being, Simondon’s One Great, is specifically understood as the “pre-individual,” that is, “being in which there is no phase.”⁴¹ The becoming of individuals is a “mode of resolution of an initial incompatibility that is rich in potentials.”⁴² Simondon’s analogue to the boundless or unlimited is the preindividual, conceived as a “supersaturated solution,” a condition of being in “metastable equilibrium” that is

more than unity and more than identity, capable of expressing itself as a wave or as a particle, as matter or energy, because every operation, and every relation within an operation, are an individuation that divides, or dephases, the preindividual being.⁴³

The important distinction here, especially between Anaximander and Simondon, is that wherein Anaximander things “die back into” the boundless, individuals in Simondon do not return to the preindividual. Individuation is the “only ontogenesis,” a “partial and relative resolution” of the “complete being.”⁴⁴ There is an entropic irreversibility at play in Simondon, because becoming is a “resolution of the initial tensions” in preindividual being and “a conservation of these tensions in the form of structure.”⁴⁵ An individual might have its structure destroyed, but this destruction does not return the individual to a preindividual state; rather, the individual is broken up into its individual parts, which are individual in turn. Hyetta’s words should be echoing loudly here: “fractures, and births, and souls.” The question that arises, then, is if this process of individuation was indeed a “mistake,” and if so, if that mistake can be undone? Following a Presocratic metaphysics, we might think such a return possible, the cosmos ever being born from the chaos to which it will inevitably return. But following in a more contemporary metaphysics, we might think instead that preindividual chaos is lost to us, and that to wish for such a reality is to wish not for unity but incomprehensible oblivion.

Laruelle

This is the argument that François Laruelle makes in his Philosophies of Difference, a properly metaphysical argument that presents the Frenzied Flame with a robust theoretical opposition.⁴⁶ Similarly to Simondon, Laruelle’s One Great cannot be recovered:

The One is such that it distinguishes absolutely from itself—in the form of a unilateral duality without reciprocity or reversibility—a domain of reality that we call effectivity containing all the entities.⁴⁷

Like the Pythagoreans, for Laruelle all entities, as individual, come from the One, but this process of individual distinguishment is absolute and irreversible. The terrible work of philosophy is to construct a “syntax” that mirrors the One that has been lost, recreating a preindividual “identity” that can in fact never be recovered.⁴⁸ Such “unitary” thought can never effect the return it desires, can never communicate with the beyond, resulting only in the horrific assemblages of thought that vainly attempt to capture an impossible completeness.⁴⁹

Such is the horror of “decision,” an alternative name that Laruelle gives to philosophy.⁵⁰ But if one stares into this abyss for long enough, one discovers that it is an “abyss of an absolute contingency that can never be partially filled in or closed up.”⁵¹ The irreversible dephasing of the One in individuals “may always receive multiple possible interpretations” and these “interpretations [may] supply the most diverse philosophies,” but these philosophies may never capture again the One by way of decision, because the One can never “choose itself: it is the Undecidable as immediate given,” resolved in the “diversity” or “radical that-ness” of individuated being.⁵² This is the philosophical significance of the multiplicity of Elden Ring’s endings, the multiple possibilities of its closure. To follow Laruelle, we might say:

There is no possible decision as regards this diversity; it is too indifferent to offer any reason for choosing, too absurd and contingent in its existence even to offer a reason for its existence.⁵³

Individuation, as product of the becoming of preindividual chaos, is in itself profoundly unreasonable, the fundamental condition for the “very diversity of decisions” that results in the “radical absurdity” of philosophy as a totalizing project, the radical absurdity of decision and choice as such.⁵⁴ The diversity of individuated being is in fact the very “possibilization that frees choice as possible,” the “essence of choice, of absolutely any choice possible whatsoever without any limitation.”⁵⁵

Conclusion

Herein lies the irony of the Frenzied Flame ending of Elden Ring, and the outcome of the present philosophical investigation: to choose the flame of chaos, to choose to melt it all away, is to wield the very possibility of choice to annihilate choice itself, and so to annihilate choice for any and all other choosing beings who might choose otherwise. Certainly, none of these beings chose their own existence—truly every birth, in a way, is a mistake. But the absurdity and contingency of birth is precisely that which frees birth to the possibility of all the choices that follow, a life without guarantee, to be sure, but nevertheless a life. In technical terms, Laruelle refers to this life as “extra-empirical multiplicity,” the “real content” of being in the “uni-laterality” and “irreversibility” of its “unary de-jection” from the One, the immediate and radical multiplication of the “singulare tantum,” the single-as-such, in the diversity of individuals.⁵⁶ The Frenzied Flame denies the “abyss” of this myriad of “unary multiplicities,” denies life itself, demanding one final decision that would annihilate everything.⁵⁷ But it is precisely this abyss of individuation that FromSoftware has asked us to acknowledge, to step into, and therein make a final “indifferent” choice, which is to say, an un-idealizable choice, a choice that refuses to claim any “transcendental necessity.”⁵⁸ In this gesture, FromSoftware reveals the same truth Laruelle articulates, that metaphysics “acquires its true reality from none other than this very absurdity” that it denies.⁵⁹ The Frenzied Flame is the most reactionary of responses to the absurdity of existence, a refusal of the choice for existence, which is the refusal of choice itself. While FromSoftware never explicitly says whether a given ending is good or bad, perhaps this is the point. The point is to choose, because it is the choice, in the end, that matters. The choice is all we have.

References

Bloodborne Wiki. “Frenzy.” Fextralife. https://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/Frenzy.

Dark Souls Wiki. “Story.” Wikidot. http://darksouls.wikidot.com/story.

Elden Ring Wiki. “Edgar.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Edgar.

——. “Endings.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Endings.

——. “Edgar the Revenger.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Edgar+the+Revenger.

——. “Gazing Finger.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Gazing+Finger.

——. “Great Runes.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Great+Runes.

——. “High Priest Hat.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/High+Priest+Hat.

——. “Hyetta.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Hyetta.

——. “Irina.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Irina.

——. “Remembrance of the Mother of Fingers.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Remembrance+of+the+Mother+of+Fingers.

——. “Shabriri Grape.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Shabriri+Grape.

——. “Staff of the Great Beyond.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Staff+of+the+Great+Beyond.

——. “Two Fingers.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Two+Fingers.

——. “White Mask Varre.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/White+Mask+Varre.

Laruelle, François. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy. 1986. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London, UK: Continuum, 2010.

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7 (2009), 4-16

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Wiki. “Terror.” Fextralife. https://sekiroshadowsdietwice.wiki.fextralife.com/Terror.

Souls Lore. “Demon’s Souls Plot.” Wikidot. http://soulslore.wikidot.com/des-plot.

Westerhoff, Jan Christoph. “Nāgārjuna.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 21, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nagarjuna/.

Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011.

——. Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 2. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015.

——. Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015.

The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000: 14.

Notes

Elden Ring Wiki, “Shabriri Grape,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Shabriri+Grape. “A yellowing, oozing eyeball of the infirm. The surface is shriveled, and the inside is squishy, not unlike a large, overly-ripe grape. Give to the blind maiden to guide her to the distant light.” ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Irina,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Irina. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Edgar,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Edgar. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Edgar the Revenger,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Edgar+the+Revenger. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “White Mask Varre,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/White+Mask+Varre. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Great Runes,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Great+Runes. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Two Fingers,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Two+Fingers. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Hyetta. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Endings,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Endings. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Hyetta,” Fextralife. ↩
Souls Lore, “Demon’s Souls Plot,” Wikidot, http://soulslore.wikidot.com/des-plot. ↩
Souls Lore, “Demon’s Souls Plot,” Wikidot. ↩
Dark Souls Wiki, “Story,” Wikidot. Dark Souls is somewhat of an anomaly in that the status effect that will be repurposed as “frenzy,” “terror,” and “madness” in later games is “curse” in that first game, which is thematically connected not with the dark but with crystals and sorceries. This is realigned in Dark Souls II, and then complicated in Dark Souls III. Likewise, “chaos” in Dark Souls is more akin to the “crucible” than to the “chaos” of the Frenzied Flame in Elden Ring. This shifting of terms is indicative of the ongoing evolution of FromSoftware’s metaphysical research program, but also of the maturity of this program as expressed in Elden Ring, which carefully aligns the mechanic of “madness” with the theme of “chaos” and the philosophical ramifications of the Frenzied Flame ending to the game. ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Frenzy,” Fextralife, https://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/Frenzy. ↩
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Wiki, “Terror,” Fextralife, https://sekiroshadowsdietwice.wiki.fextralife.com/Terror. ↩
Importantly, the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC deliberately recycles elements from Dark Souls and Bloodborne in the new area it introduces, the Abyssal Woods, which is also known as simply the Abyss. In Dark Souls, the Abyss is the realm of Dark, wherein lies Manus, Father of the Abyss, a primeval human who lost his humanity in a past age. In Elden Ring, the Abyss is instead a realm of Madness, wherein are found the Aging Untouchables, eery echoes of the Winter Lanterns from Bloodborne. In both games, these terrible humanoid creatures are easily recognizable by their enormous, transformed heads: in Bloodborne, a fleshy mass of eyeballs; in Elden Ring, a blazing bunch of swollen grapes. To make the connection even more explicit, before the player-character encounters an Aging Untouchable in Elden Ring, they will typically come across Winter-Lantern Flies, fiery orange insects that carry frenzied flame grapes around the Abyssal Woods. FromSoftware is not often so transparent in the thematic connections that they make between their games. ↩
Souls Lore, “Demon’s Souls Plot,” Wikidot. ↩
Jan Christoph Westerhoff, “Nāgārjuna,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 21, 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nagarjuna/. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “High Priest Hat,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/High+Priest+Hat. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Remembrance of the Mother of Fingers,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Remembrance+of+the+Mother+of+Fingers. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Remembrance of the Mother of Fingers,” Fextralife. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Staff of the Great Beyond,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Staff+of+the+Great+Beyond. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Gazing Finger,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Gazing+Finger. ↩
On the subject of horror in philosophy, see Eugene Thacker’s three part series, aptly titled Horror of Philosophy, composed of the books In the Dust of This Planet, Starry Speculative Corpse, and Tentacles Longer Than Night, published by Zero Books in 2011, 2015, and 2015 respectively. ↩
The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists. Trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000): 14. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 14. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 14. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 15. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 15. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 102, 103. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2009), 4-16: 6. ↩
Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 13. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 5, 15. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 15. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 1. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 203. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 204, 205, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 201, 200. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 207. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 208. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 211. ↩

Interactive Storytelling

2025-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Interactive Storytelling.” In An Educator’s Guide to Interactive Digital Narrative: Syllabi and Resources From Around the World, edited by Joshua A. Fisher, María Cecilia Reyes, and Jonathan Barbara, 27-33. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025. Open Access and Print-on-Demand.

Mirrors: Zotero

Abstract

The Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives (ARDIN), in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University Press, proudly presents the first edition of An Educator’s Guide to Interactive Digital Narrative: Syllabi and Resources from Around the World. This global, transdisciplinary, and continuously evolving collection is dedicated to educators, scholars, and practitioners who teach and develop Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) across diverse fields—including storytelling, game development, journalism, AR/VR/XR, digital humanities, and more.

Featuring 45 syllabi from university programs worldwide, this first edition offers a kaleidoscopic view of IDN as it solidifies into a recognized academic discipline. Each syllabus spotlights unique approaches to interactive storytelling, from foundational theories to hands-on best practices. To keep pace with the rapid innovations in industry and academia, new editions will be proposed every five years—ensuring educators always have access to the latest insights, tools, and teaching methodologies.

What You’ll Find Inside

Syllabi & Teaching Materials: From survey courses and introductory workshops to advanced graduate seminars, each syllabus shares resources, assignments, grading rubrics, and platform recommendations (Twine, Unity, Inky, Adobe XD, and more).
Theoretical Foundations & Practical Guidance: Dive into transdisciplinary approaches that blend game design, media studies, literature, and computer science for holistic IDN instruction.
Community-Driven Perspectives: Learn from instructors worldwide who contribute unique insights shaped by their local context, audience, and institutional structures.
Collaborative & Flexible Pedagogies: Get inspiration for mixing lectures, peer critiques, project-based learning, and real-world playtesting.

The Lived Politics of the Negative

2024-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric, wendi yu, Gabriel Caetano Barbosa, Vitor Mattos, and Cezar Capacle. “The Lived Politics of the Negative: Tabletop Game Designers on Punk, Practice, and Utopia.” Generation Analog, Online, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17756253.

Mirrors: KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

Contra the capture of the radical impulse by the homogenizing marketing label ‘hopepunk’, this panel conceives of punk instead as ‘the lived politics of the negative’ (Muñoz, 2013). From this position, tabletop game play and design become potent refusals of the co-opting forces of the Global North, and concrete means for imagining and indeed realizing an outside and an afterward to the present crises shaping the conditions of our planetary existence. This panel mounts a challenge to colonial capitalist hegemony through the words and practices of four tabletop game designers, blending craft, theory, and experience to articulate a pluralistic and ethical vision of a punk at home and flourishing in the ruins of this crumbling world.

Keywords: Game Studies, Game Design, Tabletop Roleplaying, Analog Games, Punk, Utopia

Introduction

Applied Hope: The Solarpunk and Utopias Jam ran from May to August of 2021 and saw an incredible outpouring of creative work from a global collective of tabletop game designers. As conceived by Jo Lindsay Walton, Applied Hope was “a jam about using games to generate hopeful stories and scenarios about the future, to enrich our collective imagination and our capacity to feel joy about the future, to come up with ideas we might otherwise never think of, and to focus on details we might otherwise miss.”¹ Riffing on themes of climate change and ecological crisis, posthumanism and post-scarcity, afrofuturism and solarpunk, this radical communal project saw many incisive contributions that not only pushed tabletop roleplaying game design into new territory, but also posed profound challenges to the hegemony of tabletop publishing in the Global North.

However, in the years since the jam concluded, several of these creators have found their works “forcibly assigned” the homogenizing label of hopepunk, a genre term coined by fantasy author Alexandra Rowland in 2017 that has been variously described as “weaponized optimism” and as the “neoliberal circumscription of the imagination.”² As one among many points of inspiration for the Applied Hope jam, “hopepunk” felt innocuous enough, but since then it has become clear that the term, whatever its origins, has been rendered yet another instrument of global colonial capitalism, a marketing term rather than a call to resistance.

Contra this capture of the radical impulse stands the work of four game designers, participants and winners of the Applied Hope jam: wendi yu, Vitor Mattos, Gabriel Henrique Caetano Barbosa, and Cezar Capacle. Conceiving of punk instead as “the lived politics of the negative,” tabletop game play and design becomes a potent refusal of the co-opting forces of the Global North, and concrete means for imagining and indeed realizing an outside and an afterward to the present crises shaping the conditions of our planetary existence.³ This panel mounts a challenge to colonial capitalist hegemony through these designers’ own words and practices—with a special focus on their games Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians!, Moon Elves, Roots & Flowers, and Scraps—blending craft, theory, and experience to articulate a pluralistic and ethical vision of a punk at home and flourishing in the ruins of this crumbling world.⁴

To begin, let us look more closely at the constitutive terms of the genre label in question: ‘hope’ and ‘punk.’ Starting with the latter term, as quoted above, this panel conceives of “punk” as the “lived politics of the negative,” a theorization that we draw from the work of José Esteban Muñoz.⁵ Muñoz theorizes a “queer punk aesthetics” that “actively attempt[s] to enact a commons that is not a pulverizing, hierarchical one bequeathed through logics and practices of exploitation.”⁶ The “something else” of this commons is animated by negativity, charged by “circuits of being-with” that course with “difference and discord,” and are “laden with potentiality.”⁷ This commons, which Muñoz identifies in the early Los Angeles or Hollywood punk scene, was “marked by surging queer and racialized singularities and energies,” and was “grounded not only in a time but also a place.”⁸ To be a punk in this scene, at this time, was to be “hailed by a mode of negation associated with the outsider’s trajectory, the space to find an otherwise elusive mode of being-with.”⁹ This mode is not a shallow nihilism, but rather a “kind of negativity that displaces simple oppositions between the positive and the negative and instead shows us something else.”¹⁰ Importantly for our discussion of the design and industry of tabletop roleplaying games, such a commons is directly opposed to the “idealist notions of collectivity that often feel utopian,” to the operation of universalization that works to convert a heterogeneous constellation of singularities into a homogeneous field of interchangeable units, a transformation that converts the irreducible into data points for market capture.¹¹ To conceive of punk in this way is to refuse, in the strongest terms, the forcible assignment of a pulverizing and exploitative genre label, and the market segments that label is intended to create.

Turning from punk to hope, Adam Greenfield’s recent book Lifehouse (with chapters excerpted at Ill Will) furnishes us with the idea of the “Long Emergency,” a “reconceptualization of the entire sequence of climate change” that can help us find the “correct scale at which we can begin practically building structures for dignified collective survival.”¹² Greenfield advocates for the “construction of ‘lifehouses,’” a “new way of viewing the spaces discarded by our decaying society, and for developing strategic forms of action for their appropriation and collective usage.”¹³ In the same way that Muñoz finds a radical potential in the specific time and place of the Los Angeles punk scene, Greenfield looks to the “local experiences, local struggles, and local values” of real communities to dictate the practices of assembly that will support “mutual care” and “collective power” in those communities.¹⁴ Faced with the “terrifying set of conditions we’ve inherited,” Greenfield argues that we ought to act “directly, immediately, locally, without waiting for the state or any other institution to undertake our defense.”¹⁵ In Greenfield’s vision, the “lifehouse” serves as a site of “fellowship and vital material support,” a refuge “provisioned against the hour of maximum need and linked with others in a loose, confederal network.”¹⁶ The lifehouse functions as a locality of pragmatic assembly where the “stewardship of collective services” takes place, where a neighbourhood “might realize a vision of social ecology,” with community members “tending to themselves and the planet by practicing and experiencing solidarity, mutual care, and self-determination.”¹⁷ Like Muñoz, Greenfield’s lifehouse does not flatten difference in pursuit of an ideal collectivity, but is instead a “heterotopia of resistance,” a negative space “organized outside, apart from, and in opposition to the main currents of a society.”¹⁸ In the “wildcat infrastructure of care” that a “meshwork of lifehouses” constitutes, Greenfield sees the potential for a “syndicate of initiative,” the members of which “act only in their own names, guided solely by their own assessment of the moment and what it requires.”¹⁹ Such a syndicate “start[s] with what is closest at hand, build[s] outward from there and link[s] [its] efforts with those of the others who have set themselves the same task.”²⁰ Such an outsider infrastructure seeks no authorization or label—indeed, it refuses such ascriptions of universality and right. The project of “sanctuary, restoration, sustenance, and solace” must be, can only be, “managed and governed” by the people by whom and for whom it is carried out.²¹ The lifehouse refuses hope as slogan, and in fact, puts hope aside, moves beyond hope, to focus on “develop[ing] [our] own capacities” for resistance and regeneration, right here and now.²²

Having quickly sketched out this theoretical foundation, it is time to turn to the work itself of the four designers with whom this panel is chiefly concerned. Each of yu, Mattos, Caetano, and Capacle’s submissions to the Applied Hope jam were recognized by the organizers and the community for their remarkable contributions to design in the tabletop roleplaying space, and for their serious, nuanced engagement with the jam’s titular theme.²³ In each of these games, whether it’s yu’s “band,” Mattos’s “cosmonauts,” Caetano’s “troubleshooters,” or Capacle’s “scrappers,” we see a kind of pragmatic collectivity, heterogenous assembly, or improvisational sociality, each game asking its players to experiment with new and radical modes of being-with. By deliberately situating the players as outsiders that must learn how to care for themselves and their communities in the aftermath of some massive catastrophe, some ultimate negation, these works deliberately take up the position of the ones already discarded, the ones already exploited, who do not seek to claw back the “world before,” but instead seek to elaborate new modes of relation in the “weird ruins” of the present.²⁴ It is this panel’s contention that, in studying such works of radical design, in engaging bodily and socially with these works through play, that we can each begin to elaborate our own “lived politics of the negative” in the neighbourhoods that we call home.

The full panel, moderated by Aaron Trammell on July 24, 2024, can be viewed on the Analog Game Studies YouTube channel.²⁵

Notes

Applied Hope: The Solarpunk and Utopias Jam. Hosted by Jo Lindsay Walton and Eric Stein. itch.io, May 31, 2021 to August 31, 2021. https://itch.io/jam/applied-hope. ↩
wendi yu, “award-winning comment,” Twitter, May 21, 2023, https://x.com/wen_di_yu/status/1660299929045147657; Aja Romano, “Hopepunk, the Latest Storytelling Trend, Is All about Weaponized Optimism,” Vox, December 27, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/12/27/18137571/what-is-hopepunk-noblebright-grimdark; and Simon McNeil, “Hopepunk: A Genealogical Sketch,” Simon McNeil, December 30, 2021, https://simonmcneil.com/2021/12/30/hopepunk-a-genealogical-sketch/. ↩
José Esteban Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons,” Social Text 31, no. 3 (2013): 95-110. ↩
wendi yu, Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians! itch.io, May 3, 2021, https://wendiy.itch.io/marvelous-mutations-merry-musicians; Vitor Mattos, Moon Elves, itch.io, July 2, 2021, https://maik-malaik.itch.io/moon-elves; Gabriel Caetano Barbosa, Roots & Flowers, itch.io, June 28, 2021, https://thegiftofgabes.itch.io/roots-and-flowers; Cezar Capacle, Scraps, itch.io, June 30, 2021, https://capacle.itch.io/scraps. ↩
Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That,’” 98. I am grateful and indebted to wendi yu for putting me onto the work of Muñoz. Indeed, wendi’s Twitter thread “i loathe the word hopepunk” was my first exposure to Muñoz’s theorization of punk and was the critical impetus for this panel. See yu, “i loathe the word hopepunk,” Twitter, May 21, 2023, https://twitter.com/wen_di_yu/status/1660290172649365506. ↩
Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That,’” 96. ↩
Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That,’” 96. ↩
Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That,’” 96, 97. ↩
Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That,’” 97. ↩
Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That,’” 97. ↩
Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That,’” 98. ↩
Editors, “Beyond Hope,” Ill Will, June 22, 2024, https://illwill.com/beyond-hope, n.p. ↩
Editors, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Adam Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. Greenfield draws the phrase “syndicate of initiative” from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1974). ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
Greenfield, “Beyond Hope,” n.p. ↩
See “Prizes!” in the community forum for Applied Hope: The Solarpunk and Utopias Jam, January 15, 2022, https://itch.io/jam/applied-hope/topic/1867893/prizes. ↩
Caetano, Roots & Flowers, 5 and yu, Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians! 4. ↩
Analog Game Studies, “Generation Analog 2024 Panel 1D: Homepunk,” YouTube, July 28, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9GKWYsfeQs. ↩

Indoor Dog, Outdoor World

2024-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

This is a magical tabletop roleplaying game for a handful of adventurers and one adventurous dog.

Version 0.1 is the ashcan edition.

This game takes Into the Odd by Chris McDowall and Lasers & Feelings by John Harper, and asks, what if we played both of these games at once?

Cover art is “White Poodle in a Punt” by George Stubbs from the National Gallery of Art.

Itch.io

Dreams of Extraction

2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Dreams of Extraction: The Techno-Ecological Imaginary of Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield.” Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference, TAG Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, and Online, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12594275.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

This paper takes up Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield (2023) as an aesthetic artefact, carefully attending to the thematics of the game’s narrative in their operation as structuring ‘thought patterns’ for the player’s experience of the game, thought patterns that give form to the ‘sensible fabric’ of the game and so constitute an imaginary or ‘distribution of the sensible’ that requires critique (Rancière, 2013). Utilizing the aesthetic and material-economic theories of Nicolas Bourriaud, Jacques Rancière, Jussi Parikka, and David Graeber, this paper examines the aesthetics of the techno-ecological imaginary that Starfield institutes, close reading the play of perspectives into which the game invites the player-character, and analysing this play in its problematic orientation to the key dramatic revelation of planetary catastrophe that occurs late in the game’s main campaign. If, as climate and games scholar Benjamin Abraham writes (2022), ‘[b]ringing the climate crisis ‘home’ to all of our lives, all of our workplaces, all of our hobbies, is the necessary first step in acting to reverse climate action,’ then illuminating and critiquing Starfield’s deployment of such a crisis will help players, scholars, and developers alike take the first step in learning to pay attention to the very ‘modes of perception’ that prevent us from effecting real change in the global technological systems that have brought us to the brink of planetary collapse.

Keywords: Game Studies, Science Fiction, Climate, Ecology, Technology

I

No game studies on a dead planet.¹ As detailed by Emil Hammar, Carolyn Jong, and Joachim Despland-Lichtert in their 2023 paper bearing that subtitle, the work of game studies, and more broadly that of the games industry, is faced with a number of “interrelated crises,” the ultimate consequence of which, if not remedied, is our cosmic home becoming a dead world.² For Hammar, Jong, and Despland-Lichtert, these crises can be grouped into four general categories—“wealth inequality,” “climate catastrophe,” “calls for war and military escalation,” and “repressive attacks on minority groups”³—and the games industry, replicating this macrocosm in microcosm, faces four similar critical challenges: its “imperialist structure”; “[w]hite supremacy, militarism, and manufactur[ed] consent”; “[f]ascism, patriarchy, and repression”; and lastly, “climate apocalypse.”⁴ To combat these forces in games, and in the world broadly, the authors advocate for an alliance between game studies academics and industry professionals, a “combination of theory and practice” that must be brought to bear in the struggle to transform the “material realities underlying [our] existence.”⁵ As academics, we cannot theorize our way out of this trouble without putting theory into practice, but likewise, as industry, we cannot practice our way out of this trouble if we do not bring theory to bear on the transformation of our practice. But how to strike the right balance? How to avoid inclining too far to one pole or the other? How to ensure theory and practice remain closely tied? Through the critique to follow, this papers attempts to provide a model for such efforts.

To narrow our focus, we will concern ourselves with just one of the above four crises, that of the climate crisis. Aiding us in our struggle, Benjamin Abraham’s Digital Games After Climate Change (2022) provides us with an invaluable practico-theoretical resource for inquiry and action, a thorough study of the games industry that not only performs the work of criticism proper to game studies, but also the empirical analysis of the material realities of the climate impact of game production and distribution, of gameplay, and of hardware manufacturing.⁶ Furthermore, Abraham concludes his book with a robust framework of necessary actions for developers, manufacturers, publishers, platform holders, and consumers to take in order to realize a “carbon neutral games industry,” which is the “moral responsibility” of all those who benefit from the industry’s cultural productions.⁷ However, while Abraham’s book is certainly essential reading for academics and industry professionals alike, for the purposes of this paper, it will also serve as a foil to help develop a more robust understanding of aesthetic critique that might better serve theorists in the development of pragmatic approaches to their concerns, and in turn help practitioners to recognize the implications of their work that might otherwise go unscrutinised if theory is set aside.

Abraham is less concerned with the content of games, and more so with “chang[ing] the world itself—the world that players inhabit; the world that ‘preforms’ their senses,” but he does remark that games can “perform ideological critique,” and that they can do so most potently through “aesthetic engagement.”⁸ As a games educator, this has been my own approach to teaching on the theme of climate and games, utilizing an upper level course in video game aesthetics to fuse the theories of Nicolas Bourriaud, Jacques Rancière, Jussi Parikka, and David Graeber, and applying these theories to the careful analysis of contemporary video games. Aesthetics is a matter of seeing and not seeing, of visioning and en-visioning, of making sensitive contact with the world of our perception. So, while we should of course ask questions about the production of artworks, as Abraham does with video games, Jacques Rancière would argue that we should not be too quick to disregard the analysis of the “sensible fabric of experience” within which that production occurs.⁹ For Rancière, aesthetics must be concerned both with “performance and exhibition spaces, forms of circulation and reproduction” and with “modes of perception and regimes of emotion, categories that identify them, thought patterns that categorize and interpret them.”¹⁰ Both “forms of circulation” and “modes of perception” make up the “fabric of experience”—or, to compare here with Abraham, who in turn draws on Max Horkheimer, we might say that forms of circulation and modes of perception together constitute the “current condition of human praxis.”¹¹ Aesthetics should not be excluded from discussions of pragmatics because aesthetics, at least in Rancière conception, is fundamentally pragmatic as a mode of study.

As Rancière notes, the draw to “demystify” works of art by exposing the “prosaic conditions of their existence,” their material conditions, is a powerful one, but this work depends upon the very “ethereal idealities of art and aesthetics” that provide the demystification with its necessary “markers” of significance.¹² It is too easy to become disenchanted with the work of criticism and aesthetics for lack of material impact, to turn our attention to “the world itself” at the expense of understanding the very means of that attention. Rancière, however, argues that “[s]ocial revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution,” that we can only transform the world of our existence when we have first transformed how we see.¹³ To change the world, we must ultimately change our material reality. But, if we fail to attend to the “idealities” that maintain the “sensible fabric” of this reality, our efforts will inevitably be captured and recuperated by the systems that we seek to disassemble.¹⁴ To say that the world itself “preforms” the senses of those who live within it is, therefore, to embark upon the work of aesthetics.

Abraham, after Horkheimer, argues: to “understand the ways that even looking and how our sense faculties are actively shaped for us we must pay attention to the whole arrangement and ‘praxis’—the practice and theory—of human life today as it presents itself.”¹⁵ This commitment leads him to focus “heavily on the production of games, the material stuff that gets made, and the economic forces involved,” and admirably so; but, as we have argued, to take this move on Abraham’s part as a cue to leave the work of aesthetic or ideological critique behind entirely would be to refuse to take up some of our most effective instruments for social transformation.¹⁶ Abraham is rightly dismissive of those critiques that centre “distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’” design (in the moralistic sense), but we should take seriously his hunch that “there might be something about the nature of interaction itself which seems to accord with ecological thinking.”¹⁷ Indeed, as Abraham continues:

If we look at the ideas and ideologies embodied in interactions within games—in other words, the nature of relationships between player and world, player and objects, player and other things as foregrounded or backgrounded by design—then we are just as much doing ecological thinking.¹⁸

When we pay attention to the “mechanical interactions [of a game] and the meanings they create, as well as the ideologies and attitudes about nature that they embody,” we are thinking ecologically, and more so, we are becoming capable of identifying those idealities in the world at large that structure and reinforce the material realities threatening our planetary existence.¹⁹ Rather than be embarrassed about the work of game studies in the face of overwhelming and interlocking planetary-scale crises, we should approach this work with both seriousness and gusto, recognizing the “ethereal idealities” of scholarly work as essential tools in the toolkit of revolution—if, of course, they are applied to such ends with militant commitment and fervent resolve.

To this end, this paper takes up Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield (2023)²⁰ as an aesthetic artefact, carefully attending to the thematics of the game’s narrative in their operation as structuring “thought patterns” for the player’s experience of the game, thought patterns that give form to the “sensible fabric” of the game and so constitute an imaginary or “distribution of the sensible” that requires critique.²¹ Utilizing the aesthetic and material-economic theories of Bourriaud, Rancière, Parikka, and Graeber, this paper examines the aesthetics of the techno-ecological imaginary that Starfield institutes, close reading the play of perspectives into which the game invites the player-character, and analysing this play in its problematic orientation to the key dramatic revelation of planetary catastrophe that occurs late in the game’s main campaign. If, as Abraham writes, “[b]ringing the climate crisis ‘home’ to all of our lives, all of our workplaces, all of our hobbies, is the necessary first step in acting to reverse climate action,” then illuminating and critiquing Starfield’s deployment of such a crisis will help players, scholars, and developers alike take the first step in learning to pay attention to the very “modes of perception” that prevent us from effecting real change in the global technological systems that have brought us to the brink of planetary collapse.²²

II

How do you make someone care about the planet?²³ While Abraham is most interested in the “very practical, concrete and achievable changes that can be made in and around games today which are guaranteed to have substantial positive impacts,” the question of how we make people care remains an important one, one that will require answering if we are to plan for a just society to come—which is to say, a just society that has found its way through the climate crisis of our present.²⁴ We have seen the limits of self-discipline,²⁵ of gamification,²⁶ of representation,²⁷ and of persuasion²⁸ as strategies for making people care about social issues through games, and as Abraham remarks, such “didactic” approaches to player motivation are ultimately stultifying.²⁹ But, rather than leave behind the effort of making people care because these approaches have proved only minimally effective at best, perhaps we need to take these failures as symptoms of a more problematic root cause: the disciplining of our vision.³⁰ We are trained to see, and to not see. In Rancière’s terms, “aisthesis” (perception) preforms the ground or territory for “mimesis” (representation).³¹ Aesthetics is the means by which, whether intentional or not, the “prose of the world” is transformed into intelligible experience.³² When this transformation results in a work of art, we encounter a “merging” of art’s “own reasons with those belonging to other spheres of experience,” the artwork coming to channel the motivations and projects and purposes from the sometimes very disparate “prosaic” regimes upon which aesthetics does its work.³³ Artworks thus become “scenes of thought” requiring analysis in order for us to understand the disciplinary function that they perform.³⁴ For this reason, critique, far from being a distraction, can in fact be emancipating, furnishing us with new paradigms of vision potentiating new means of action, means that will be necessary for us to respond to the climate crisis at the levels of scale, complexity, and haste that are required.

In The Exform (2016), Nicolas Bourriaud provides us with our first new paradigm of vision.³⁵ Bourriaud asks us to pay attention to “refuse and discharge,” to the “realm of waste,” to all that “resists assimilation” by global capital: “the banished, the unusable and the useless.”³⁶ When we pay attention to this realm of the “unproductive” and “unprofitable,” social “grey zones” start to come into view, wherein “surplus human beings”—the “undocumented” and “unemployed” and “untouchable[]”—find themselves relegated.³⁷ There is a new form to the “spectral dance” of capitalism, a “mutation” that entails new “effects … on our modes of thinking and feeling.”³⁸ Bourriaud terms this form “the real of globalism,” and importantly, because the function of this real is to render whole swathes of society, economy, and the planet itself as “zones of exclusion,” fields of indiscernibility and invisibility, we need to make use of a new “optical machinery” if we are to become effective combatants against it.³⁹ The optical machinery we require operates in a “realist” mode—not in the sense of real-ism as colloquially deployed in the video games space as a measure of verisimilitude, but rather in the sense of “lift[ing] ideological veils which apparatuses of power drape over the mechanism of expulsion and its refuse.”⁴⁰ The work of aesthetics thus becomes profoundly material. Insofar as there has been a “parallel evolution over the last two centuries” of the aesthetic and the political, Bourriaud argues, we discover that “[g]estures of expulsion and the waste it entails … constitute an authentically organic link” between these domains.⁴¹ Just as we witness an “ever-renewed separation of the significant from the insignificant in art,” so too do we witness new “ideological frontiers drawn by biopolitics … at the heart of a given society.”⁴² The aesthetic and the political are mutually determining, reciprocally reinforcing each other. To identify this reciprocal operation in action, therefore, we must maintain a realist vision; we must pay attention to the “realm of the exformal,” to those “point[s] of contact,” like “socket[s]” or “plug[s],” that mediate the “process of exclusion and inclusion” that “consigns beings and things to the world of waste and holds them there in the name of the Ideal.”⁴³ When we learn to see the exforms at work around us, we are becoming sensitive to the systems of domination that overdetermine our lives.

Jacques Rancière provides us with our second paradigm of vision in his The Politics of Aesthetics (2013).⁴⁴ Where Bourriaud talks about the “exform,” Rancière talks about the “distribution of the sensible,” which he defines in the following way:

I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This appointment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. … The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which the activity is performed.⁴⁵

Thus for Rancière, like Bourriaud, there is “an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics,” a “system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”⁴⁶ This “primary aesthetics” performs a “delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.”⁴⁷ Political transformation is, consequently, as much about aesthetic transformation as it is about the transformation of material conditions. Indeed, if we follow Rancière’s line of thinking, aesthetics is entirely concerned with material conditions, because aesthetics as a “regime” of critical thought is specifically concerned with the “forms of visibility” that give direction to our everyday actions.⁴⁸ The study of aesthetics takes up these “structure-giving forms,” and in so doing also reveals the “artistic practices” that “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility,” helping us to grasp those forms that might otherwise exceed our capacities by virtue of their scale and complexity.⁴⁹

We find our next paradigm of vision in Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (2015), in which we are invited to attend simultaneously to “scientific cultures,” “technological reality,” and “artistic perspectives.”⁵⁰ In the same way that Bourriaud and Rancière demonstrate that there is a substantial link between aesthetics and politics, Parikka emphasizes the “impossibility of detaching the political from the natural,” the irreducible mediation there between.⁵¹ The link between politics and nature is always a matter of mediation—“nature affords and bears the weight of media culture” and media culture in turn “leave[s] [its] mark, and the earth carries it forward as an archive.”⁵² Media “structure how things are in the world and how things are known in the world”; media “work on the level of circuits, hardware, and voltage differences”; and “media govern us humans on a semiotic level too.”⁵³ Where Bourriaud has us look for sockets and plugs, Parikka focuses on “levers, layers, strata, and interconnections,” the “abstract geology” that enables us to formalize, and so become capable of perceiving, the “medianatures” in which we are embedded.⁵⁴ Likewise, if Rancière’s study of aesthetics helps us see the structures of action in everyday life, Parikka’s media geology helps us to dig into the “record of actions” inscribed in the world around us, the scars of the simultaneously “epistemological” and “technological workings on/with the geophysical” that are indicative of our planetary-scale civilization.⁵⁵ So, to examine media, and to do the work of criticism on the “artistic perspectives” we find therein, we must inevitably reckon with those “forms of power that traditional humanities theory is incapable of understanding or grasping if it continues to talk about hermeneutic meanings or persists to operate with traditional sociological concepts.”⁵⁶ In media, and especially in video games, we directly encounter the world “which the engineers as much as the military intelligence and secret agencies gradually recognized before humanities did,” the “neotechnic age of electricity” that is “grounded in the wider mobilization of the materiality of the earth as part of industrialization, technology, and also media technological culture.”⁵⁷ Our criticism brings us directly into a contest with the logics of planetary capitalism, which Parikka argues is “based on logistics of energy,” a contest which, if we hope to win it, will require us to develop new “vocabularies” and use these vocabularies to tell new “stories,” stories containing not only words but “material intensities and signifying structures” as such.⁵⁸

Finally, in The Utopia of Rules (2015), David Graeber provides us with our fourth paradigm of vision, directing our attention to the social form of “bureaucracy” that “informs every aspect of our existence.”⁵⁹ Graeber charts the rise of bureaucracy through the postwar period and the establishment of the “world’s first genuinely planetary bureaucratic institutions in the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions,” noting the significant shift from British imperial colonialism to American global administration.⁶⁰ In this transformation of the international political order, we see a “gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits”—a process Graeber terms “total bureaucratization.”⁶¹ Total bureaucratization paves the way for financialization, and with financialization comes a new distribution of sensibility, a new way of looking, a new ideology of perception: “that everyone should look at the world through the eyes of an investor.”⁶² The logic of “finance-driven capitalism” becomes the logic of social organization, ultimately “engulfing any location where any number of people gather to discuss the allocation of resources of any kind at all.”⁶³ It is no wonder Bourriaud finds that the “most striking image of refuse and discharge occurs in the economic sphere: junk bonds with toxic assets.”⁶⁴ The Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, and the more recent economic crisis within the technology and video games industries, are direct consequences of global financialized capitalism.⁶⁵ As Graeber summarizes:

Increasingly, corporate profits in America are not derived from commerce or industry at all, but from finance—which means, ultimately, from other people’s debts. These debts do not happen by accident. To a large degree, they are engineered—and by precisely this kind of fusion of public and private power [that total bureaucratization makes possible]. … One result of all this debt is to render the government itself the main mechanism for the extraction of corporate profits. … And insofar as bureaucratic logic is extended to the society as a whole, all of us start playing along.⁶⁶

In an echo of Bourriaud’s “zones of exclusion,” Graeber continues to elaborate upon the bureaucratic game that has captured and restructured our planet:

‘globalization’ had almost nothing to do with the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, products, and ideas. It was really about trapping increasingly large parts of the world’s population behind highly militarized national borders within which social protections could be systematically withdrawn, creating a pool of laborers so desperate that they would be willing to work for almost nothing.⁶⁷

Against these dominating forces, Graeber’s work as an activist was very deliberately a matter of making visible that which the powers that be would rather remain out of sight:

The actions operated like a magic charm that exposed everything that was supposed to be hidden: all we had to do was show up and try to block access to the venue, and instantly we revealed the existence of a vast global bureaucracy of interlocking organizations that nobody was supposed to really think about. And of course, at the same time, we would magically whisk into existence thousands of heavily armed riot police ready to reveal just what those bureaucrats were willing to unleash against anyone—no matter how nonviolent—who tried to stand in their way.⁶⁸

In Graeber’s critical aesthetics, if we might refer to it as such, we come to see bureaucracy as “financialization, violence, technology, [and] the fusion of public and private,” all “knit together into a single, self-sustaining web.”⁶⁹ This web is pervasive, massive, and complex, a truly planetary-scale form that is impossible to grasp in its entirety, and yet plays an overwhelmingly determinative role in our day-to-day lives. The enormity of challenging such a system can be paralyzing. But perhaps we do not need to grasp such a system in its entirety in order to become sensitive to it, in order to come to care about its local effects, to understand the distribution of sensibility that it performs, the narratives that it disciplines us to internalize, the projects that it teaches us to accept as given.

This is why, before embarking on the critique of Starfield to be developed in the third and final section of this paper, we have expended all these words in a defense of the work of aesthetics. If we are to take concrete steps toward an end after climate change, we must be able to envision that end, must be able to envision an end worth wanting. Aesthetics is not a distraction; it is the impetus for the work. Learning to see always goes hand in hand with learning to act.⁷⁰

III

Existence itself is a mystery which yearns to be uncovered.⁷¹ So reads an important in-game text, “Among the Grav Jumps,” a phrase that proves to be the thematic linchpin of Starfield as a narrative artefact. These words provide an education in how Starfield wants the player to see its world, but they also indicate the broader aesthetic structure of the game as one concerned with revelations of knowledge through progressive reframings of perspective.

The first mission of the game, “One Small Step,” starts on May 7, 2330, at a mining outpost of Argos Extractors on the moon Vectera. The player-character goes through a narrative tutorial and introduction to the game, following two Argos employees as they make their way to the source of a gravitational anomaly deep in the mines. Argos has been contracted by Constellation, an “explorer’s group,” to unearth the anomaly, but has not been given any other information about what they seek.⁷² When the player-character interacts with the anomaly, an etched piece of mysterious metal, they lose consciousness and experience a cosmic vision accompanied by an orchestral swell, verging on discordance. The player-character then awakens in the outpost’s medical facilities and tries to articulate what they experienced to their colleagues.

Apparently unharmed, the player-character goes with the mining crew to meet Barrett, the representative of Constellation who hired Argos for the job. The player-character learns that Barrett has had a similar encounter with another anomalous artifact, and he invites the player-character to join Constellation. When asked what Constellation is, Barrett replies: “You ever stare up at the stars at night, wondering what’s out there? That’s us. There’s where we go.”⁷³ From their life as a “dusty,” the player-character is thrown into a new existence of mystery and exploration. As Barrett enthusiastically continues, “[w]hile everyone else is busy playing politics, we’re the ones braving the unknown. Charting the vastness of space. Without us, the galaxy’s just a big room with the lights turned out.”⁷⁴ Already, Starfield demonstrates a thematic interest in what is given attention and what is ignored, what is seen and what is unseen, what is known and what is unknown. The call to adventure and discovery is thus articulated as an aesthetic logic, a logic and attendant project of perception.

Upon arrival at the Lodge, Constellation’s headquarters, the player-character meets the other members of the group and learns more about their mission to find other artifacts like the one found on Vectera. Importantly, the player-character is told that “[n]o manufactured material in the Settled Systems” behaves like the artifacts do, with one of the members of the group, the theologian Matteo, speculating that this must mean that the artifacts were made by “an intelligence outside the Settled Systems.”⁷⁵ The player-character is then officially inducted into the group by Sarah Morgan, the Chair of Constellation, who reinforces Barrett’s earlier declarations of purpose: “We’re all here because we’re committed to exploring space. Humanity may have settled the stars, but that doesn’t mean we should stop diving into the unknown.”⁷⁶ The universe must be uncovered.

In the next main story mission, “The Old Neighborhood,” the player-character goes in search of another artifact, this time with Sarah along as their companion. This mission takes the player-character to the Nova Galactic Staryard, in orbit around the Earth’s moon, where they learn two story details that will prove to be critical later on: first, that the Staryard is where “the first interstellar ships were made,” and second, that “Earth and everything around it was abandoned a long time ago.”⁷⁷ Earth is an old, half-remembered memory at this point, closer to myth than reality for many of the denizens of the Settled Systems. Indeed, during the first mission, the mining boss remarks: “Half the crew doesn’t believe Earth exists, but it’s still there. Same with Constellation.”⁷⁸ Humanity’s original home, and the explorer’s group that has brought the player to its doorstep, are both positioned as belonging to an unknown and invisible past.

At the Lodge during the next mission, “Into the Unknown,” the player-character participates in a debate between Matteo and Noel, during which the game narrative directly frames these characters as representatives of two competing imaginaries or worldviews:

Matteo: I catch myself just staring at the Collection [of artifacts] sometimes. Wondering what it all means. Maybe that’s how our ancestors felt when they were looking up at the stars for the first time?

Noel: They didn’t just gawk at the stars, Matteo. They explored. They tested. Science brought us to space, not day-dreaming.

Matteo: I disagree. What’s the point of science, if not to enable humanity’s dreams? And where do those dreams come from?

…

Matteo: You’re with me, right? Science or dreams? Which one is the true muse of space exploration?⁷⁹

The player-character can side with Matteo or Noel, or refuse to pick a side, but the two affirmative choices are telling. If the player character chooses science, they say: “Without it, dreams aren’t possible.” If the player chooses dreams, they say: “Without them, science has no meaning.”⁸⁰ In these potential dialogic paths, the game tells a larger story about human knowing, asking the player-character to intervene and to express one or the other perspective through their decision.

A few missions later, at the end of “All That Money Can Buy,” the player-character and their companions encounter their first Starborn, piloting an alien vessel, the Helix, that has the same anomalous signature as the artifacts. The Starborn demands that the player-character hand over the artifacts, declaring that they “hold something [they] have no right to,” that the player-character is “unworthy to possess the Artifacts.”⁸⁰ Significantly, the Starborn continues: “Abandon your thirst for knowledge or drown in it … The more you understand, the more damage you will do.”⁸¹ Constellation’s quest of discovery is here reframed as a dangerous one, a dive into cosmic waters that might ultimately swallow the diver.

In the subsequent mission, “Starborn,” as the members of Constellation discuss this encounter, Walter Stroud, the “wallet” of Constellation, remarks that the experience was like being “children playing with their parent’s things.”⁸² Barrett speculates that the Starborn are the “original creators from the furthest fringes of space”; Matteo invokes “the metaphor of avenging angels coming down to keep humanity from forbidden knowledge.”⁸³ Science and dreams appear more and more as two sides of the same coin, the synthesis of which will require the player-character to become an actor in a higher-order domain of effectivity.

In “Further Into the Unknown,” Matteo and Noel once again butt heads, Starfield asking the player-character to reflect on the purpose and dangers of their quest:

Matteo: What if the Starborn are right? What if our hunt for the Artifacts is a fool’s errand? Doomed to failure and catastrophe?

Noel: You think we’re doing the wrong thing? We just want answers. Isn’t that why we all joined in the first place? The… ‘noble quest of discovery?’

…

Matteo: I just hope that this journey doesn’t turn us into something that we wouldn’t recognize from where we are now.

This construction of a debate invites the player-character’s intervention, to reckon with their choices and to ultimately press forward to what Barrett will later describe as “the dawn of a new era of humanity.”⁸⁴

The mission “High Price to Pay” sees Constellation come under attack from another Starborn, the Hunter, whose assault forces the group to go on the run, leaving many injured and, depending on your affinity with different group members, one dead.⁸⁵ During this mission, the player-character learns about something called the “Unity” from the Hunter, who enigmatically states that there is “a greater purpose to all this,” that perhaps the player-character will “glimpse the Unity yet.”⁸⁶ These words remind Matteo of the teachings of Keeper Aquilus, the founder and priest of Matteo’s religion, the Sanctum Universum. For the Sanctum, Matteo tells the player character, the “answers are out there in the stars.”⁸⁷ The player-character and Matteo embark upon the next main story mission, “Unity,” during which they go to speak with Keeper Aquilus, and begin uncovering the truth behind all of the mysteries that Constellation has encountered.

As the player-character and Matteo approach the Sanctum Universum, they hear Keeper Aquilus delivering a message to some followers:

Keeper Aquilus: God has given us the intelligence, the ingenuity to reach into the stars. To travel his path. To truly find him. But we can’t do it alone. The ONLY way is through…

Andreas: Unity.

Keeper Aquilus: Ha! Yes, Andreas! Yes. Unity.⁸⁸

When questioned about “Unity,” Keeper Aquilus says that unity is how “humanity comes together,” that it is how “we are to love each other even as our universe becomes more complex.”⁸⁹ When pressed to think if “Unity” might point to something secret, Keeper Aquilus says:

There have always been mysteries that seem to defy our understanding of the universe. Beyond rational thought. We enter life as an act of someone else’s faith in us. There’s no way of knowing who we will become, and yet the risk is made anyway. So you’ve pushed into the unknown, not knowing where it would take you. And it has brought you here.⁹⁰

Constellation’s quest of discovery is here reformulated in religious terms, or, in Matteo’s words, from the perspective of “dreams.” Discovery, exploration, and the revelation of the unknown is not merely a human project but a metaphysical one, a demand of the universe itself.

The Keeper then tells a story about a Pilgrim who found the “true meaning of Unity,” suggesting that perhaps there might be a “code” to uncover in the metaphor of the tale.⁹¹ He directs the player-character to go speak to representatives of the two other major belief systems in the universe of Starfield—the House of Enlightenment and House Va’ruun—and to ask them about Unity. In each of these conversations, the player-character hears a variation on the Pilgrim’s tale, as well as two alternative perspectives—as “beginning” and as “shadow”—on Unity.⁹² Upon recounting their words to Keeper Aquilus, he is able to decipher the code and directs the player-character to the Pilgrim’s final resting place. But before he sends the player-character off, he makes explicit the game’s narrative positioning of the player-character that until now had remained subtext: “You’ve now spoken to many different perspectives on our universe. In a way, you’ll be carrying their philosophies with you on this journey. I know you’re looking for a specific ‘Unity’ but… if you had to guess what it was? What interpretation would you give it?”⁹³ The player-character exists in the world of Starfield as a focal point of vision, whose decisions play a structure-giving, form-shaping role in the overall narrative’s potential outcomes. What the player-character chooses to say resolves the various probabilities of expression that make up the multiple different in-game worldviews, instituting a sensibility for that given playthrough that retroactively becomes the meaning of the player-character’s actions. “Unity” is in fact to be found in the player-character as universal subject.

The player-character travels to the planet revealed by Keeper Aquilus, landing at the Pilgrim’s Rest and proceeding to investigate what the Pilgrim had left behind. Across five writings, the player-character learns of the Pilgrim’s existence as a Starborn, about their many “various pasts” and “possible futures,” and their eventual relinquishment of Starborn glory and acceptance of a finite life, through which they might at last “live to enlighten the blessed universe before me.”⁹⁴ A sixth and final writing begins the next mission, “In Their Footsteps,” and points the player-character to another planet, where a puzzle provides coordinates to a point in space where the player-character comes upon the two prior Starborn that they had encountered: the Emissary (pilot of the Helix), and the Hunter.

The conversation that follows reveals the nature of the Unity as an in-game reality. Starborn were once human beings who discovered the artifacts and managed to assemble them all into something called the Armillary, an instrument that “open[s] the way to the center of [the] universe” where they encounter the “Unity,” a “doorway to an infinite number of other[]” universes.⁹⁵ Having revealed this unknown and invisible structure to the player-character, the Emissary and the Hunter present them with a new dichotomy: to control who has access to the Unity or to allow any capable of seizing the artifacts to do so. The responsibility for the distribution of power is placed in the player-character’s hands. But before they decide, the Emissary sends the player-character on one more mission, back to the moon and Earth, because there “are secrets there” that the player-character must still “discover.”⁹⁶

In “Unearthed,” the player-character lands at the Nova Galactic Research Station on Earth’s moon and begins to uncover Starfield’s final mystery. Through audio logs, the player-character learns about the first test launch of a gravitational drive equipped starship and is directed from there to the NASA Launch Tower on Earth. The tower is a great industrial structure rising out of the barren desert surface of the now uninhabitable planet, a final monument to the beginnings of humanity’s interstellar adventure. Finding a way inside and delving down and down and down, the player-character makes a parallel descent into the records of the scientists who worked there, learning about Victor Aiza’s discovery of the first artifact on Mars in the early 2100s, the secretive military-backed project that followed, and the improbable advances in the project’s research that opened the way for the first gravitational drive. In the final audio log the player-character finds, recorded September 8, 2160, Aiza makes his confession:

My name is Doctor Victor Aiza, and if you’re listening to this, then you probably already know the truth. I was young when I first headed the retrieval team of an odd gravitational anomaly on Mars, but I kept what really happened that day hidden from everyone except… one other person. Even she didn’t believe me at first, but I have no reason to lie to anyone now, so I hope you’ll accept this… confession, whoever you are. When I touched the anomaly, I experienced 12 days of lost time. I met… myself. He told me everything that has since come true. The Grav Drive equations. The tests on the Moon. Earth’s atmosphere sputtering away because of what we had done. But he also told me about a city, thriving on a planet orbiting a distant star. Human culture, art, music, lifestyles evolving and shining brightly across all of space. What price would I be willing to pay for that future? Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe Judith was right, and I’m just a coward who wants to believe his mistakes were justified. But everyone has forgotten about the real origins of the Grav Drive. This… Artifact, from Mars.⁹⁷

The Unity beckoned humanity into space through the artifacts, but, through the technology that human scientists developed to grasp the vision the Unity proffered, they tore the magnetosphere of their planet to shreds, rendering their homeworld a wasteland. The dream of the stars was realized through a profound ecological catastrophe, the uncontrollable and irrevocable destruction of the conditions of habitability on Earth. Aiza saw the promise of an interstellar culture as worth this sacrifice, and yet this final project log remains a confession, suffused with regret. “I hope you make better use of [the artifact] than I did,” he concludes.⁹⁸ Returning to the surface, this is now the choice that the Emissary and the Hunter demand the player-character make.

The Emissary sees the scouring of Earth as an irreparable harm, but the Hunter argues that it was an “easy trade, honestly. Why have one world, when you can have all of the Settled Systems?” The Emissary counters: “They didn’t get to make a choice. How many would’ve chosen Earth? What gave Victor Aiza the right to choose for them?”⁹⁹ The player-character, as they have done throughout the main story, is invited to enter the debate, to take a side or abstain, but, while this choice is framed as the critical choice of Starfield’s grand narrative, the resolution of every prior dichotomy, the materialization of the player-character’s chosen philosophy, whatever one chooses, the outcome is virtually indistinguishable. The player-character goes to the Buried Temple, collects the last of the artifacts, assembles the Armillary, and makes the final grav jump to the center of the universe. The all-important choice, while framed as a choice about the fate of Earth, is not about the Earth at all. All of the decisions made over the course of Starfield can be remade on the other side of the Unity in new game plus, but the choice that destroyed the Earth remains permanently out of reach. Earth must always be destroyed for humanity to become Starborn, for the player-character to be invested with a freedom of decision that takes them beyond the universe itself.

At the Unity, the player-character’s final conversation is with themself, or a version of themself, one who had passed through the Unity before them. This other self describes the player-character’s “final leap” with the following words:

In order to become Starborn, you must give the universe one last thing. Yourself. That intangible part of you, that ‘something’ that makes you unique amongst the infinite, will explode like a supernova. A part of you will fuse with the essence of this universe, while another part leaves it behind forever. Do you understand what I mean? This one final leap will change this universe forever, even as you leave it behind.¹⁰⁰

The aesthetic logic of Starfield has built to this precise point over its many hours of gametime. Every narrative conceit, every flourish of imagination, ultimately resolves in this elevation of the player-character to a kind of godhood, an exit from linear time into the indefinite recurrence of new game plus. But as Bourriaud reminds us, the gesture of expulsion is precisely the moment where aesthetics and politics meet, and in Starfield, the ultimate realization of such a moment is in the simultaneous expulsion of humanity’s dead homeworld into memory and the player-character’s inevitable decision to step through the Unity. The Unity is an exform, a universal socket joining together a myriad of other such universes, mediating passage for that which can be seen and that which must remain hidden. Indeed, the player-character, as the mechanism of resolution for competing imaginaries, passes through the Unity as visibility itself, a Möbius eyeball—that for whom all of Starfield was necessarily built to be seen; that which constitutes the very structure of Starfield’s visibility as such. Every prior dichotomy of the game is redistributed by the Unity, every major choice made by the player-character presented to them one last time for their judgment. The reality of the game is shown to be thoroughly mediated by the vision the Unity affords, a techno-ecological imaginary in which the planet must always be sacrificed for humanity’s transcendence, over and over and over again. This is the aesthetic logic at play in Starfield, and it is the self same logic that we must challenge in our own world, with all the seriousness and gusto that we can muster, if we are to leave this world better than we entered it for all the generations to come.

References

Abraham, Benjamin J. Digital Games After Climate Change. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Exform. 2015. Translated by Erik Butler. London, UK: Verso Books, 2016.

Cava, Kody. “Video Game Execs Are Ruining Video Games.” Jacobin, May 16, 2025. https://jacobin.com/2024/05/video-games-union-zenimax-exploitation.

Chang, Alenda Y. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Farca, Gerald. “The Emancipated Player.” Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG (2016). https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/762.

Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015.

——. “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” The Baffler, no. 24 (January 2014). https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun.

Hammar, Emil L, Carolyn Jong, and Joachim Despland-Lichtert. “Time to Stop Playing: No Game Studies on a Dead Planet.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 14, no. 1 (2023): 31-54. https://doi.org/10.7557/23.7109.

Howard, Todd. Starfield. Windows, Xbox Series X/S: Bethesda Game Studios, 2023.

Jagoda, Patrick. Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Kunzelman, Cameron and Michael Lutz. “43 – Schüll – Addiction By Design.” Game Studies Study Buddies, January 31, 2022. http://rangedtouch.com/2022/01/31/43-schull-addiction-by-design/.

Marx, Karl. “Preface (to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).” 1859. In Early Writings, 424-428. London, UK: Penguin, 1992.

McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Makes Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London, UK: Routledge, 2012.

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Raftopoulos, Marigo. “Has Gamification Failed, or Failed to Evolve? Lessons From the Frontline in Information Systems Applications.” GameFIN Conference 2020, Levi, Finland, April 1-3, 2020. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2637/paper3.pdf.

Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. 2011. Translated by Zakir Paul. London, UK: Verso, 2019.

——. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. 1987. Translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

——. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. 2000. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Schüll, Natasha Dow. Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Notes

Emil L. Hammar, Carolyn Jong, and Joachim Despland-Lichtert, “Time to Stop Playing: No Game Studies on a Dead Planet,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 14, no. 1 (2023): 31-53. https://doi.org/10.7557/23.7109. ↩
Hammar, Jong, and Despland-Lichtert, “Time to Stop Playing,” 31. ↩
Hammar, Jong, and Despland-Lichtert, “Time to Stop Playing,” 31. ↩
Hammar, Jong, and Despland-Lichtert, “Time to Stop Playing,” 33, 34, 36. ↩
Hammar, Jong, and Despland-Lichtert, “Time to Stop Playing,” 45. ↩
Benjamin J. Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 240-245, 239, 237. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 55, 48 ↩
Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, 2011, trans. Zakir Paul (London, UK: Verso, 2019), x. ↩
Rancière, Aisthesis, x. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 45. ↩
Rancière, Aisthesis, x. ↩
Rancière, Aisthesis, xvi. ↩
This is a simple repetition of the Marxist dogma of the reciprocity of base and superstructure, but one all too easily forgotten. See Karl Marx, “Preface (to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy),” 1859, in Early Writings, 424-428 (London, UK: Penguin, 1992). On the “recuperat[ion] [of] all anomalies or resistances” by capital, with special focus on games, see Patrick Jagoda, “Gamification,” in Experimental Games, 41-72 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020). ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 45. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 45. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 81, 80. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 80-81 ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 80. ↩
Todd Howard, Starfield (Windows, Xbox Series X/S: Bethesda Game Studios, 2023). ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2013, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 3. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 53. ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 57. ↩
Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Makes Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011), cited in Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 28. Abraham is critical of McGonigal’s project, which is “largely a self-disciplinary, or self-help project,” a “brain hack approach to solutions [that] is immediately inadequate when applied to anything more complex than simple chores.” ↩
Marigo Raftopoulos, “Has Gamification Failed, or Failed to Evolve? Lessons From the Frontline in Information Systems Applications,” GameFIN Conference 2020, Levi, Finland, April 1-3, 2020, https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2637/paper3.pdf, cited in Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 36. ↩
Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), cited in Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 38. ↩
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), cited in Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 43. As with McGonigal, Abraham is also critical of Bogost’s project, which “treats ideology more like an engineering problem to be overcome than something involving unpredictable and irreducible human complexity.” ↩
Abraham, Digital Games After Climate Change, 51, 53. Here Abraham cites Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 1987, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), as well as Gerald Farca’s “The Emancipated Player,” Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG (2016), https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/762, in order to make the argument that the “emancipated player” ought to focus on “something much bigger in scope than changing the world through games,” that the emancipated player ought to focus on changing “the world itself” (Abraham, 55). But the specific potency of emancipation as a concept throughout Rancière’s work is precisely that which is found in the enjoyment of art, in the “workers’ reveries” that supposedly stand in the way of “real social development” (Rancière, Aisthesis, xvi). I continue to quibble with Abraham on the matter of aesthetics because artworks, especially so conceived by the “aesthetic regime” of modernity, have the potential to “create ruptures” in the sensible fabric of everyday existence by “condensing features of regimes of perception and thought that precede them, and are formed elsewhere” (Rancière, xii). Artworks work with perception and transform it, teaching us through perception how to see in new ways. Through this experience of seeing anew, we encounter the “paradoxical link[] between the aesthetic paradigm and political community”—that the very emancipatory art that illuminates the path to social revolution simultaneously “does not allow any strategy to lay claim to it” (Rancière, xiv, xvi). Emancipatory art makes no guarantees, and this is precisely what makes it emancipatory. Emancipation is the ends of social revolution, and emancipatory rupture is the means, but this “movement” of emancipation “does not want anything” other than its own unclaimable realization (Rancière, xvi). We must continue to do criticism, to talk about works of art, to allow our vision to be transformed, while acknowledging the fact of risk and the possibility of failure, that the process of emancipation is always a wager. This is why our work requires both seriousness and gusto. ↩
“Discipline” as a concept is of course most associated with the work of Michel Foucault, but here I channel Foucault through the invaluable commentary of Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz on their podcast Game Studies Study Buddies, on which the subject of discipline and games is a frequent topic of conversation. Perhaps as a best example, see episode 43 on Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction By Design, January 31, 2022, http://rangedtouch.com/2022/01/31/43-schull-addiction-by-design/. For Schüll, see Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Schüll’s theorization of the “machine zone” is the key concept to deploy here, derived from the subconsciously coercive functions of gambling machines. ↩
Rancière, Aisthesis, xi. ↩
Rancière, Aisthesis, x. ↩
Rancière, Aisthesis, xi. ↩
Rancière, Aisthesis, xi. ↩
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, 2015, trans. Erik Butler (London, UK: Verso Books, 2016). ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, viii. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, viii. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, viii-ix. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, viii, ix, viii-ix. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, x. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, x. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, x. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, x, xi. ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 2000, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013). ↩
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 7-8. ↩
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8. ↩
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8. ↩
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 4, 8. ↩
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 9, 8. ↩
Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), viii. ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, ix. ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, viii, x. ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, 1, 2, 3. ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, 4, 5, 13. Medianatures, Parikka notes, is a “variation on Donna Haraway’s famous and influential concept of naturecultures.” ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, 22. ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, 2. ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, 3, 15. ↩
Parikka, A Geology of Media, 18, 20, 160 (footnote 57). ↩
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 5. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 13. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 17, 18. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 20. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 20, 21. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, vii. ↩
Kody Cava, “Video Game Execs Are Ruining Video Games,” Jacobin, May 16, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2024/05/video-games-union-zenimax-exploitation. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 24, 26. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 29. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 29. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 42. ↩
Throughout my writings, I have emphasized the phenomenological foundation of vision in touch, in the grasp. For the theoretical underpinnings of this argument, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (London, UK: Routledge, 2012), 7, and throughout: “The visible is what we grasp with our eyes; the sensible is what we grasp through our senses.” ↩
“Among the Grav Jumps,” in-game text, in Starfield. ↩
Heller, dialogue, in Starfield, “One Small Step.” ↩
Barrett, dialogue, in Starfield, “One Small Step.” ↩
Barrett, dialogue, in Starfield, “One Small Step.” ↩
Noel and Matteo, dialogue, in Starfield, “One Small Step.” ↩
Sarah Morgan, dialogue, in Starfield, “One Small Step.” ↩
Sarah, dialogue, in Starfield, “The Old Neighborhood.” ↩
Lin, dialogue, in Starfield, “One Small Step.” ↩
Matteo and Noel, dialogue, in Starfield, “Into the Unknown.” ↩
Helix, dialogue, in Starfield, “All That Money Can Buy.” ↩ ↩²
Helix, dialogue, in Starfield, “All That Money Can Buy.” ↩
Walter Stroud, dialogue, in Starfield, “Starborn.” ↩
Barrett and Matteo, dialogue, in Starfield, “Starborn.” ↩
Barrett, dialogue, in Starfield, “No Sudden Moves.” ↩
The four potential deaths are also the four romanceable characters: Sarah Morgan, Barrett, Sam Coe, and Andreja. ↩
The Hunter, dialogue, in Starfield, “High Price to Pay.” ↩
Matteo, dialogue, in Starfield, “High Price to Pay.” ↩
Keeper Aquilus, dialogue, in Starfield, “Unity.” ↩
Keeper Aquilus, dialogue, in Starfield, “Unity.” ↩
Keeper Aquilus, dialogue, in Starfield, “Unity.” ↩
Keeper Aquilus, dialogue, in Starfield, “Unity.” ↩
Singh and Mir’za, dialogue, in Starfield, “Unity.” ↩
Keeper Aquilus, dialogue, in Starfield, “Unity.” ↩
Pilgrim’s Writing 5 and Pilgrim’s Final Writing, in-game text, in Starfield, “Unity.” ↩
The Emissary, dialogue, in Starfield, “In Their Footsteps.” ↩
The Emissary, dialogue, in Starfield, “In Their Footsteps.” ↩
Victor Aiza, audio recording, in Starfield, “Unearthed.” ↩
Victor Aiza, audio recording, in Starfield, “Unearthed.” ↩
The Hunter and the Emissary, dialogue, in Starfield, “Unearthed.” ↩
The Unity, dialogue, in Starfield, “One Giant Leap.” ↩

The Author Is Alive and Wants to Sell You Books

2024-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

“The coming into being of the notion of the ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences”

—Michel Foucault

This is an exquisite corpse ttrpg in which you and some friends explore the career of THE AUTHOR.

Version 0.1 is the ashcan edition.

If you are a millionaire, this game costs $50.00. Otherwise, take a community copy.

Many thanks to Momatoes, Franziska Trischler, Aaron Lim, Pam Punzalan, Thomas Manuel, and Jay Dragon for the excellent conversations that inspired this work.

Cover art is “Still Life With Skull, Books, Flute And Pipe” by Harmen Steenwyck from Artvee.

Itch.io

Determined Figures

2023-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

In the previous two entries on Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953),¹ we first examined Deleuze’s argument for the externality and passivity of the mind, which is determined in its habits and tendencies by the preexisting world,² and second, his articulation of the mind in its systematization and generalization by the diagrams and models and institutions it encounters in that world.³ For Deleuze, the subject is the effect of a diversion, a bundle of passions and interests that are extended beyond the scope of the individual by way of general rules.

Now, after a few months of diversion of my own, we return to discuss chapter three of Deleuze’s book, “The Power of the Imagination in Ethics and Knowledge.” Having described the way in which the mind and its passions are given order and extended beyond itself by and into the cultural world, Deleuze proceeds to look more closely at the operation of the rules that make such a generalization possible. For a rule to be a general rule, it must both reflect and extend the passions of the individual minds it proposes to govern.⁴ “Being reflected,” Deleuze writes, “the passions are found before an enlarged reproduction of themselves, and see themselves liberated from the limits and conditions of their own actuality.”⁵ In this reflection, the passions find an instrument for greater satisfaction, the possibility of a more fulfilling end than might be achievable in isolation. Presented with the general rule, the passions see “an entire artificial domain opening up … the world of culture,” and so “project themselves in it.”⁶ The result is that the “reflected interest transcends its own partiality,” and the disordered mind becomes an ordered subject.⁷

Deleuze identifies three types of such rules, those of taste, of freedom, and of interest and duty.⁸ In each case, the mind finds itself affected, “ceases to be fancy, is fixed, and becomes human nature.”⁹ Diagrammatically, the passions “trace effectively constant and determined figures in the imagination,” maintaining the mind’s projection into the cultural world of beliefs and actions, maintaining the mind as human nature, as a subject with its projects.¹⁰ In the “univocal movement” of a passional project, ideas in the imagination “get associated in virtue of a goal, an intention, or a purpose which only the passions can confer upon human activity.”¹¹ Insofar as Deleuze has previously claimed that “the only possible theory is a theory of practice,” that the study of the human being should be concerned with the study of “instinct, habit, or nature,” we see then that practical reason, the praktognosia of the human subject, is “the establishment of a whole of culture and morality.”¹²

Theoretical reason, the reason of metaphysics and science, “is the determination of the detail of nature, that is, of parts submitted to calculation,” but reason in this sense, as we have already learned, is just one form of practice, a form that is often “practically or technically insufficient.”¹³ “Habit is the root of reason,” Deleuze argues, and indeed, we are habits, “nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’”¹⁴ Without habit, there can be no projects, no reflection and extension of the passions in the cultural world that preexists the subject. Habit “presupposes experience,” “is experience,” is what “allows the understanding to reason about experience, as it transforms belief into a possible act of the understanding.”¹⁵ The pathways and circuits between terms, established and maintained by the myriad of other subjects following their courses, should not first and foremost be analyzed by way of the “logic of mathematics,” but require instead the interpretation made possible by a “logic of physics or of existence,” the practical study of the passions in their habitual operations.¹⁶ There are no “faculties” nor “occult qualities” to unearth, no world spirit or invisible hand—such ideas themselves are but reflections and extensions of the passions of specific individuals, embedded in the specific context of their society’s means and models, and taken up by later minds for their own habitual satisfaction.¹⁷

No, what we must instead attend to is the “very unphilosophical species of probability” characteristic of human intention, the subject proceeding in its projects by way of feeling and instinct and tendency and diversion.¹⁸ In the following chapter, Deleuze will examine the ways in which the extension of passions brought about by general rules are modulated and corrected, continuing to counterpose a practical sociology to theoretical psychology. His concern, and so ours, continues to be not with the “secret meaning” of subjectivity, but with the empirical realm of effectivity.¹⁹

Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991). See my annotations at “Empiricism and Subjectivity,” March 29, 2023, https://www.steinea.ca/2023/03/29/deleuze-empiricism-and-subjectivity. ↩
Eric Stein, “We Can Always Play Backgammon,” May 26, 2023, https://www.steinea.ca/2023/05/26/we-can-always-play-backgammon. ↩
Stein, “A Model of Actions,” June 18, 2023, https://www.steinea.ca/2023/06/18/a-model-of-actions. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 55. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 56. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 56. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 56. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 57-58. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 59. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 60. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 63. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 32, 30, 64. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 64, 33. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 66, x. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 68. Emphasis added. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 67. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 70. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 72. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 70. ↩

Arcane Procedures

2023-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

I have wanted to learn how to play Magic: The Gathering for some time, but never had anyone to teach me, nor have I ever felt comfortable showing up to Friday Night Magic at a local game store on my own. In the last year or so my desire to learn has only grown as a few different people I follow have been talking more and more about the game:

Avery Alder on Twitter¹
Zullie the Witch about Elden Ring and Magic²
Jay Dragon’s “The Magpie’s Cube”³
Bruno Dias’s “Compleat History”⁴

So it was to my great delight that I finally had the chance to try it out, invited by a local friend to a draft night for the new The Lord of the Rings set.⁵ The last trading card game I actively played and collected was The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game, so this felt like a fitting entry point to the hobby.⁶ I had a great time.

I ended up drafting a primarily red/white aggro deck with some fun Rohirrim synergies.⁷ I was primarily picking cards based on vibes, and every now and again registering a given effect or ability as a good one to pull. I won my first two games (the veteran I was playing against went easy on me), and managed to pull off some combos powered by Théoden, King of Rohan and Bill the Pony.⁸ My next two games were against a primarily blue deck, and I had a more challenging time, winning the first by a very slim margin and drawing the second. My final two games were against my friend, and he steamrolled me with a green trample deck.⁹ I paid too much money for the Elven Council Commander deck before I left, but I had no regrets as I sleeved up the cards at home and turned over the possibilities of each in my mind.¹⁰

Since then, I have been quite obsessed, reading as much as I can, watching videos, analyzing mana curves, the works.¹¹ Scryfall and Moxfield have become my best friends.¹² I also played a bit of Arena to get some more familiarity with the rules—and oh, are there rules, rules upon rules upon rules.¹³ One particular family of rules that caught my attention was that of white typal/token generation,¹⁴ and the lifegain synergies of many angel cards that plug into the token generator to create some powerful feedback loops.¹⁵

This brings us to the subtitle of this essay, “Elspeth’s Choir.”¹⁶ This is the name I have given to my first crafted modern deck, a mono white angel-centric deck with token generation and lifegain at its core.¹⁷ I have not had the opportunity to test it against other players’ decks, but I have been pleased with its performance in goldfishing and have been trying out various changes to see what will prove to be the most effective, and the most fun.¹⁸

The generator that powers the whole thing is made up of five specific cards: Impassioned Orator, Anointed Procession, Divine Visitation, Archangel of Thune, and Increasing Devotion.¹⁹ Played in this order, in ideal circumstances, the following machine comes together:

Whenever another creature enters the battlefield under your control, you gain 1 life.
If an effect would create one or more tokens under your control, it creates twice that many of those tokens instead.
If one or more creature tokens would be created under your control, that many 4/4 white Angel creature tokens with flying and vigilance are created instead.
Whenever you gain life, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.
Create five 1/1 white Human creature tokens.

With that fifth step, the board explodes: I create five 1/1 tokens; these are doubled under the effect of Anointed Procession, so now I have ten tokens on the board; these are then transformed into ten 4/4 tokens by Divine Visitation; as each enters the battlefield, I gain one life thanks to Impassioned Orator, and for each life gained, Archangel of Thune adds a +1/+1 counter to each creature I control; the end-state is a chorus of ten 14/14 angels, in addition to whatever else I have on the board. With just one more Impassioned Orator (not too difficult with a mana-value of two), the counters on the above double: ten angels, twenty life gained, twenty +1/+1 counters per angel—a terrifying, radiant legion.

The deck includes some more powerful legendary angels—including the titular planeswalker Archangel Elspeth²⁰—there to help out in the instance of a more resilient opponent, as well as several low mana-value but highly synergistic cards: Bishop of Wings, Inspiring Overseer, and Voice of the Blessed.²¹ If all goes to plan, these additional cards remain supplemental, primarily there for flavour and reinforcement, but with the potential for big payoffs (especially if Giada, Font of Hope gets on the board in the right sequence,²¹ or if Akroma, Angel of Wrath gets on the board before the token generator triggers²²).

The complexity of Magic: The Gathering presents its players with a field of what feels like endless possibilities and combinations. What if I included more sorceries and instants, or what if I focused on artifacts and other passive effects? What if I emphasized command and rule enforcement rather than aggro and tokens? What if I had to manage an opponent with burn, or bounce, or board wipes?²³ What if I tried to rebuild this deck in the Commander format? What if… ?

Magic: The Gathering constitutes a manifold of diagrams for play, a model of actions, a repertoire of arcane procedures.²⁴ There is a specialized praktognosia or practical knowledge at work here, of which we can indeed say, with Deleuze, that “the only possible theory is a theory of practice.”²⁵

Notes

Avery Alder, @lackingceremony, Twitter. ↩
Zullie the Witch, “In an interview,” Twitter, May 4, 2022, https://twitter.com/ZullieTheWitch/status/1521838805308915712 and “Compare Nykthos,” Twitter, July 18, 2022, https://twitter.com/ZullieTheWitch/status/1548991938581434368. ↩
Jay Dragon, “The Magpie’s Cube,” Medium, June 15, 2022, https://possumcreek.medium.com/the-magpies-cube-54eac20f36fd. ↩
Bruno Dias, “A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame,” Cohost, parts 1-20, October 8, 2022 / January 17, 2023, Cohost. ↩
Scryfall, “The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR),” Scryfall, https://scryfall.com/sets/ltr. ↩
Wikipedia, “The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_Trading_Card_Game. ↩
MTG Wiki, “Aggro deck,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Aggro_deck. ↩
Scryfall, “Théoden, King of Rohan,” Scryfall, https://scryfall.com/card/ltr/233/th%C3%A9oden-king-of-rohan and “Bill the Pony,” Scryfall, https://scryfall.com/card/ltr/3/bill-the-pony. ↩
MTG Wiki, “Trample,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Trample. ↩
Moxfield, “Elven Council,” Moxfield, https://www.moxfield.com/decks/4aKNkLrXmU-zsytziZ6JnQ. ↩
MTG Wiki, “Mana curve,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Mana_curve. ↩
Scryfall, https://scryfall.com/; Moxfield, https://www.moxfield.com/. ↩
In fact, there are so many rules and combinations thereof that Magic is Turing complete. See Churchill, Biderman, and Herrick, “Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete,” arXiv, March 24, 2019, https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828. I was directed to this paper by a video from Because Science, “I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering,” YouTube, October 31, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA. It seems there is something of a conceptual synergy between my newfound hobby and my reading of Deleuze—we can always play Magic, after all—and my high level interest in combinatorial logic. See “Combinatorics,” April 26, 2021, https://www.steinea.ca/2023/05/26/we-can-always-play-backgammon, “Recombinatorics,” June 9, 2021, https://www.steinea.ca/2021/06/09/recombinatorics, and “Numbers and Games,” September 9, 2022, https://www.steinea.ca/2022/09/09/numbers-and-games. ↩
Chase Carter, “Magic: The Gathering creators ditch ‘tribal’ at urging of cultural consultants,” Dicebreaker, June 26, 2023, https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/magic-the-gathering-game/news/magic-the-gathering-drops-tribal-cultural-consultants; MTG Wiki, “Token,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Token. ↩
MTG Wiki, “Life,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Life. ↩
Eric Stein, “Elspeth’s Choir,” Moxfield, https://www.moxfield.com/decks/U25VZf_U4UiSDCPBu9pAsw. ↩
MTG Wiki, “Monocolored,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Monocolored. ↩
MTG Wiki, “Goldfishing,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Goldfishing. ↩
Scryfall, “Impassioned Orator,” https://scryfall.com/card/m20/306/impassioned-orator; “Anointed Procession,” https://scryfall.com/card/akh/2/anointed-procession; “Divine Visitation,” https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/8/divine-visitation; “Archangel of Thune,” https://scryfall.com/card/2xm/5/archangel-of-thune; and “Increasing Devotion,” https://scryfall.com/card/c20/91/increasing-devotion. ↩
Scryfall, “Archangel Elspeth,” https://scryfall.com/card/mom/6/archangel-elspeth. ↩
Scryfall, “Giada, Font of Hope,” https://scryfall.com/card/snc/14/giada-font-of-hope. ↩ ↩²
Scryfall, “Akroma, Angel of Wrath,” https://scryfall.com/card/c20/73/akroma-angel-of-wrath. ↩
MTG Wiki, “Direct damage,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Direct_damage; “Bounce,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Bounce; and “Board wipe,” Fandom, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Board_wipe. ↩
See my “A Model of Actions: Empiricism and Subjectivity, 2,” June 18, 2023, https://www.steinea.ca/2023/06/18/a-model-of-actions. ↩
See my “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics,” May 28, 2021, https://zenodo.org/record/4824078 and Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991) 32. ↩

A Model of Actions

2023-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

The institution, unlike the law, is not a limitation but rather a model of actions, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect means. This understanding of the institution effectively reverses the problem: outside of the social there lies the negative, the lack, or the need.¹

Last time, we examined Deleuze’s empirical logic of the subject as presented in chapter one of his study of David Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953).² Because of his philosophical commitment that “nothing is ever transcendental,” Deleuze must locate the subject and its movements in the realm of the practical and the habitual, contrary to the idealist tradition of epistemology and metaphysics that we can trace as far back as Plato.³ The subject in Deleuze’s conception is not first and foremost an agent or actor, but something acted upon, something determined, which is to say, something subjected. This is the Humean innovation, Deleuze contends, that the essence of the subject, the essence of human nature, comes from without. Subjectivity is not cause but effect; the mind is diverted by a tendency, invested with an affection, and so made into a subject.

The example employed in the last essay was that of the game of backgammon. Such forms of practice reveal domains beyond skeptical reason, trans-forming the subject through the assumption of rules that always already precede them. Backgammon is a uniquely suitable exemplar for its ancientness, a ludic multiplicity of local traditions and variations communicated from practitioner to practitioner over centuries, but all games, not only ancient ones, can be said to operate in this way.⁴ A game is an abstract machine⁵ specially suited for the creation of a particular game player, a particular gamer.⁶

It is this process that concerns Deleuze in chapter two of Empiricism and Subjectivity, “Cultural Worlds and General Rules.” If subjectivity is primarily formed from without, rather than expressing itself from within, then the immediate context of this formation must be scrutinized if we are to understand this process better, in all of its situated variations. As noted last time, the human being is first and foremost a passional and social being, or more precisely, a being of socially affected passions. To be human is less to be “egoistic” than to be “partial”—partial to a system of mores with particular ends that satisfy individual passions.⁷ Moral conscience, from Deleuze’s empirical perspective, is “to approve and disapprove … to praise or blame,” and importantly, to orient one’s individual “pain and pleasure … with reference to character in general.”⁸ This is the sociality of feeling.

For Deleuze, this sociality does not arise from each individuals’ recollection of transcendental notions of the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ and the ‘beautiful,’ which is to say, from each individuals’ participation in the universal. Rather, sociality (or “sympathy”) is the “positive totality” that integrates the “plurality of partialities” characteristic of communities of passional beings.⁹ Partiality is an “inequality of affection,” an asymmetry of interest, that, when not integrated into some “positive moral world” tends to results in “contradiction and violence.”¹⁰ Deleuze’s innovation on social contract theory, then, as drawn from Hume, is that the contract is not an agreement of “limitation” but possibility.¹¹ In society, individual, partial passion finds a broader horizon. The promise of society is the integration of sympathies and consequent satisfaction of passions to a greater degree than would be possible otherwise.

In this view, there is not some ideal “justice” that presides over a society, but rather a number of rules that dictate the various modes of its operation.¹² These rules, rather than being understood as some ideal Law, are rather to be understood as “means.”¹³ The problem of society, the “moral problem,” is thus a “problem of schematism,” the “act by means of which we refer the natural interests to the political category of the whole,” the “moral world … wherein particular ends are integrated and added to one another.”¹⁴ The rules of this moral world constitute “a system of directed means,” a “model of actions.”¹⁵

Here, Deleuze uses Hume’s example of property to explicate the “form and content” of the general rule, the topological significance of the extension of sympathies through the mediation of institutions.¹⁶ For our purposes, it is the broader question of motivation beyond the singular motive of property that is of concern.¹⁷ Society presents itself as the positive terminus for human motivation, and so the morality of any specific human passion is determined by its integrability to a given society. “Society is a set of conventions founded on utility,” Deleuze argues, “not a set of obligations founded on a contract.”¹⁸ To be moral is to find one’s satisfaction in the ends afforded by society; to be sociable is to sustain the institutions that satisfy one’s passions.

The “institution” is a machine, a “designed system of possible satisfaction.”¹⁹ To adhere to the rules of the institution is to become an operator of the machine, a player of the game, with the intent of receiving the pleasures it promises. It need not be “this system” or “this form”—there are a “thousand others, which we find in other times and places.”²⁰ The nature of the institution, of any institution, is simply that of the “figures traced by the drives according to the circumstances.”²¹ The institution is a diagram of passions. Because it is better (i.e., more pleasurable) to have one’s passions “extended through artifice” than to be “destroyed through contradiction,” the imagination, through the three principles of association discussed last time, produces possible models of integration that might allow both itself and others to join their sympathies in a “real situation.”²² Through “belief” in this possible world so modeled, society is discovered; and indeed, the newly formed subject finds society to have always already been there, because there is no subject without society. The human being is always already determined by an “antecedent ethics and an order of ends”—to be human is to be in society.²³ There is no state of nature for human beings other than social nature.

Deleuze concludes the chapter with an analysis of the “three dimensions” of the “general rule” of property: “its establishment, its determination, and its correction.”²⁴ This analytic model could be extended to any such rule or institution, or to a collection of these that constitutes a given moral world. We will leave the discussion here, with the possibility of such analysis left open for the future. Next time, we will turn to chapter three of Empiricism and Subjectivity with a closer look at how the rules or models discussed here are possible at all.

Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 45-46. See my annotations at “Empiricism and Subjectivity,” March 29, 2023, https://www.steinea.ca/2023/03/29/deleuze-empiricism-and-subjectivity. ↩
Eric Stein, “We Can Always Play Backgammon,” May 26, 2023, https://www.steinea.ca/2023/05/26/we-can-always-play-backgammon. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 24. ↩
We use backgammon because that is Deleuze’s example, though at least one Wikipedia editor remarks that the “popular belief” that backgammon is the “oldest board game in the world” is false, and is rather a later addition (c. 1635) to the family of “tables games”—which do in fact reach back in history to the Jiroft culture of 5,000 years ago. See “Backgammon,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backgammon. However, to speak of “tables games” is to employ perhaps an even better metaphor, a uniquely antimetaphysical one: there is no ideal table, only a myriad of tables (both the support and the game played upon that support) and their practical, historical inheritances. ↩
The abstract machine is a key concept in Deleuze’s work, particularly in his collaboration with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). ↩
For an extended discussion of the “gamer,” see my review series of Amanda Phillips Gamer Trouble (2020), starting with “The Idea of the Gamer,” May 25, 2021, https://www.steinea.ca/2021/03/25/idea-of-gamer. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 38. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 37. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 39, 38. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 38, 40. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 39. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 40. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 40. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 40-41. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 41, 45. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 43: “the significance of justice is exclusively topological.” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 45: “Hume adds many other motives to interest … prodigality, ignorance, heredity, custom, habit, or ‘spirit of greed and endeavor, of luxury and abundance.’” ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 46. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 47. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 47. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 48-49. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 43, 50. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 33. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 50. ↩

Beasts and Sovereigns

2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Beasts and Sovereigns: The Zoopolitical Imagination of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring.” Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference, Online, 2023. https://zenodo.org/record/8051188.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

Game development studio FromSoftware’s work over the last thirteen years has been much concerned with kingship and rule—what it means to be a lord, and what happens to the land when lordship fails. Demon’s Souls (2009), the Dark Souls trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), Bloodborne (2015), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), and now, Elden Ring (2022), each ask these questions in their own way, and each provide distinctly varied answers. But across all of these games—and especially across the ‘un-trilogy’ of Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring—the question of the sovereign is always tied to the question of the beast: that which rules over society and that which cannot live within it. This paper uses the discourse of the political animal inaugurated by Aristotle, and taken up by subsequent philosophers Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Derrida, to illuminate the work of deconstruction that FromSoftware’s games perform. Through the constant shifting between the figures of the beast and the sovereign, and the torsion and ultimate destruction of this dialectical opposition, FromSoftware seeks to inaugurate a new ethico-political regime, one wherein the cyclical, consumptive violence of power is set aside in favour of a multiplicity of lines of flight beyond.

Keywords: Game Studies, Animal Studies, Sovereignty, Political Philosophy, FromSoftware, Elden Ring

Beasts and Sovereigns

Since my graduate studies, I have been much interested in the figure of the beast, and the “couple, coupling, [and] copula” it forms with the figure of the sovereign.¹ I have also devoted thousands upon thousands of words over this same period to the deconstructive work performed by FromSoftware’s Souls games, games which, I have argued, deliberately invoke the tropes and trappings of western fantasy—inspired by the likes of Sorcery!, Rune Quest, Dragon Pass, and of course, Dungeons and Dragons²—while introducing a torsion or tremor to the implicit metaphysics of the genre, which is also to say, to the implicit metaphysics of the west proper.³ On the surface, and most plainly in the three Dark Souls games—Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), and Dark Souls III (2016)⁴—FromSoftware deploys the rhetoric of western sovereignty in the figures of the fire and the sun, only to subvert these figures through an injection of difference—the dark—and later through a proliferation of multiplicities.⁵ FromSoftware stages a resurgence of the philosophical cave (the kiln, the deep, the night, the womb), the groundless ground, the void, the boundless, the supersaturated nothing, deliberately choosing for this primordial reality to be something hidden, something forgotten, that only through play is disclosed.⁶ This is a total work,⁷ not only carried out in the narratives and metaphysics of FromSoftware’s games, but in their mechanics⁸ and ecology⁹—and, as I will argue in this paper, through a specific set of characters and their stories, those titular beasts and sovereigns.

Two recent studies helpfully situate us with respect to the question of the beast in video games: Tom Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity (2022) and Jaroslav Švelch’s Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity (2023).¹⁰ In the former, Tyler locates the origin of the problematic deployment of animals in games in the etymological fusion that is the word game. From Old English, “gamen or gomen was a broad term used to indicate amusement, merriment, joy, and the like, as well as jests and jokes.”¹¹ In the late Middle Ages, the word “came to be associated with that particular kind of entertainment that involved chasing, catching, and killing animals, which is to say hunting, and was used to refer specifically to those wild beasts who were the hunter’s quarry.”¹² ‘Game’ developed a double meaning, both act and object of the hunt. In modern video games, animals have, in turn, been reduced to generic objects of player action, perhaps most directly in Nintendo’s Duck Hunt (1984).¹³ This gamic construction of the animal replicates a metaphysical divide between human and beast that goes back as far as recorded history, a divide that Tyler argues is fundamentally violent and consumptive in nature.

Likewise, Švelch locates the monster in a similar position, citing Tunnels & Trolls (1975) in the first line of his introduction: “A dungeon without monsters would be dull stuff.”¹⁴ Like animals, monsters in games help to “keep up the flow of gameplay by offering adequate doses of challenge,” functioning as “targets of player action—dynamic obstacles that can be surmounted by perseverance, wits, or hand-eye coordination.”¹⁵ A monster is both “an attraction, showcasing the artistry of the creators and the graphical possibilities of the machine” and an object “appear[ing] in order to kill [the player]—or to be killed—and then disappear again, [as] flickers of automated agency in a rudimentary game world.”¹⁶ Symbolically, monsters are multivalent, used in one moment for oppression, in another for indictment, and in yet others for estrangement or transgression.¹⁷ In all such uses, just like Tyler’s animals, monsters are positioned in a “simplistic and anthropocentric” way as “expendable and calculable enemies,” yet more violence and consumption directed against metaphysical others.¹⁸

Both Tyler and Švelch advocate for a change to this state of affairs, a change that we might generally describe as a decentering of the human subject, the playing subject, the consuming subject. This is precisely what I contend to be the total work of FromSoftware’s games, the delocation of the sovereign subject (of sovereignty, of subjectivity), Étienne Balibar’s “citizen-subject,” that “internal center of thought whose structure is that of a sovereign decision.”¹⁹ To talk about beasts in games we must also talk about sovereigns, about the “unheimlich, uncanny reciprocal haunting” between.²⁰

Let us return to the primal scene of this haunting. In his Politics, Aristotle famously asserts that “man is by nature a political animal,” the zoon politikon.²¹ Human beings have a “social instinct,” Aristotle claims, and consequently, to be apolitical is to go against human nature—“he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is self-sufficient, must be either a beast or a god.”²² Here is the original scission between human and beast, human and sovereign. In society humans find their end, their telos—“man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.”²³ The poles of human politics are the beast-without-law and the sovereign-above-law—humanity finds itself in the middle.

Eighteen-hundred or so years later, Niccolò Machiavelli takes up this scene, but introduces to it a stich, a twist, a crossing-over.²⁴ In The Prince (1532), Machiavelli writes that “there are two ways of fighting—one by the law, the other by force.”²⁵ While the “first method is appropriate for men, [and] the second for beasts,” the law is “frequently not sufficient, [and so] it is often necessary [for a prince] to have recourse to the second.”²⁶ A prince that is not only good but capable must “understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.”²⁷ The prince, centaur-like, must “make use of both natures,” becoming more than animal and more than human, which is to say, becoming sovereign.²⁸

A little over one hundred years later, Thomas Hobbes takes this peculiar couple, the beast and the sovereign, and fuses the two back together—but now with a new arrangement. In his On the Citizen (1642), Hobbes repeats and extends a proverb of Plautus: “Man is a God to man, and Man is a wolf to Man. The former is true of the relations of citizens with each other, the latter of relations between commonwealths.”²⁹ Under the law, benevolence; outside the law, predation. Following this logic, Hobbes goes on to write in Leviathan (1660) that law is not a natural end for humankind, because true human nature is the war “of every man against every man.”³⁰ Humanity’s wolfish hunger must be circumscribed and curtailed by the artifice of the state—by Leviathan, beast and sovereign in one, a new, “artificial man.”³¹

Reading this philosophical tradition in his lecture series The Beast and the Sovereign (2009), from which this essay takes its name, Jacques Derrida draws our attention to the “lines of force” that continue to mobilize this pairing after more than two millennia, this pairing first split, then twisted, and then joined once more.³² There is a constant shifting between beast and sovereign, sovereign and human, human and beast—a constant shifting of the border between, the metaphysical demarcation that determines which beings belong in which categories, which beings belong period.

The wolf is a mask—in French, loup, a black velvet mask worn by women at masked balls—that allows the one who wears it “to see sovereignly without being seen”; simultaneously, “the face of the beast” can be seen “under the features of the sovereign.”³³ In this duplicity, it is “as though, through the maw of the untameable beast, a figure of the sovereign were to appear.”³⁴ This is the “fantastic, phantasmic, insistent, recurrent altercation between man and wolf, between the two of them, the wolf for man, man for the wolf, man as wolf for man”—homo homini lupus.³⁵ Such is “the story of politics, the story of the origin of society, the story of the social contract.”³⁶ And in this story, as Derrida shows, “stealthy as a wolf” (à pas de loup), that “there is no wolf,” “the wolf is not here,” “there is no such thing as the wolf”—humanity is predator and prey, its very own ghost, the cause of its own haunting (or hunting).³⁷ Sovereignty is devouring, Derrida argues; “its force, its power, its greatest force, its absolute potency,” is a “power of devourment (mouth, teeth, tongue, violent rush to bite, engulf, swallow the other, to take the other into oneself too, to kill it or mourn it).”³⁸ The human is the beast; the human is the sovereign.

This is where we once again take up the analysis of FromSoftware’s games, looking this time to two of their games of which I have written little, and one new, of which I am now only writing for the first time: that is, Demon’s Souls (2009), Bloodborne (2015), and Elden Ring (2022).³⁹ Where the Dark Souls trilogy makes thematic the question of the sovereign, this alternate un-trilogy makes thematic the question of the beast, taking up the other side of the suture, as it were, the “onto-zoo-anthropo-theologico-political copulation” wherein the “beast becomes the sovereign who becomes the beast.”⁴⁰

First, in Demon’s Souls, we enter the realm of Boletaria, a kingdom that has been engulfed by a colorless fog and plagued by demons that steal the souls of humanity—that is, steal humanity’s reason, a triple signifier for Derrida: raison (rationality), avoir raison (right), and avoir raison de (overcoming).⁴¹ The player is told that Old King Allant is to blame, having awakened the Old One, a “great beast,” and so bringing about the demon plague. After defeating the Old King, the penultimate boss of the game, the player learns that Allant had not merely awakened the great beast but had made a pact with it, becoming a demon, a beast, himself. Below the Nexus, the hub of the gameworld, the player finds the true Allant, laying within the eldritch innards of the Old One itself, now reduced to a monstrous and feeble vision of his former sovereign glory. A pitiful, horrific mass, barely able to wield the once fabled sword now fused to one of its limbs, the true king is revealed to be nothing but a failing organ of the beast. The final boss of the game, King Allant barely makes for a fight at all, a sovereign defanged.

Allant and the Old One are not the only vehicles for this narrative. If players take the time to talk to non-player characters (NPCs) in the Nexus, complete an optional quest, and read the item description for the reward received for doing so, they will learn that the God of this world, supposed divine guarantor of both souls and sovereigns, is nought but the great beast itself: “the symbol of God was nothing more than the image of the Old One.”⁴² Intelligence and magic, personified by an NPC, Sage Freke, and associated with demons and the Old One, and faith and miracles, personified by another NPC, Saint Urbain, and associated with God, are demonstrated to be one and the same: the beast and the sovereign; the beast is the sovereign.

Next, in Bloodborne, we find ourselves in the city of Yharnam on the eve of the Hunt. Regular folk lock themselves in their homes and burn incense to ward off beasts, while hunters prowl the streets in search of prey. The first enemy the player encounters is a monstrous werewolf, which will typically savage all but the most dextrous of players. Shortly after, in Central Yharnam, the player will encounter a mob of hunters gathered around a crucified and burning beast. Alternately engaging in combat with monstrous creatures and murderous huntsmen, the opening hours of Bloodborne are a blood-soaked, harrowing nightmare.

But in a subsequent area, an NPC, Retired Hunter Djura, calls out to the player, warning them not to trespass in a place “burned and abandoned by men.” Old Yharnam, he says, “is now home only to beasts,” and they “are of no harm to those above. Turn back.”⁴³ If the player ignores his words and proceeds, he will open fire with his gatling gun, making for a tense descent through the buildings, dodging beasts within and bullets without. If the player makes it through this area, however, and leaves Djura alone, they will be able to return to him after progressing the story and make peace by choosing to “spare the beasts of Old Yharnam.”⁴⁴ He responds regretfully: “There’s nothing more horrific than a hunt. In case you’ve failed to realize… The things you hunt, they’re not beasts. They’re people.”⁴⁵ Following this conversation, if the player chooses to betray the retired hunter and kill him anyway, he indicts you with his dying breath: “It’s you… You’re the beast. Just think about what you’re doing. It’s utter madness…”⁴⁶ Another character, the Afflicted Beggar, says something similar after transforming into an Abhorrent Beast: “You hunters have got more blood on your hands … Hunters are killers, nothing less! You call me a beast? A beast? What would you know? I didn’t ask for this.”⁴⁷ In Bloodborne, then, we witness the collapse of the human-beast dichotomy, an implosion of the dialectic. Echoing Derrida: there is no wolf, the wolf is not here, there is no such thing as the wolf, homo homini lupus.

Just like Demon’s Souls, as the plot progresses, and so long as the player pays careful attention to item descriptions and environmental details, undertakes optional quests, and exhausts the dialogue of NPCs, a broader cosmological—and indeed, archaeological—context emerges. Yharnam was built on top of Old Yharnam, which was in turn built on top of the ancient civilization of Pthumeria, and it on top of a labyrinth yet older. There in the depths the Pthumerians communed with the Great Ones, celestial, eldritch beings akin to the great beast from Demon’s Souls. Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen, the final boss of Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons, the sovereign of that buried kingdom, made a “blood contract” with the Old Ones, and so bore for them a child.⁴⁸ Such contracts and research into the mingling of the blood of humans and Great Ones carried on with the school of Byrgenwerth, the school of Mensis, the Choir, and the Healing Church—all of which leads to the scourge of the beast that turns the people of Yharnam into monsters: the beast and the sovereign; the beast is the sovereign; sovereign and beast are man.

Finally, in FromSoftware’s latest, Elden Ring, we see again the question of the beast made thematic. In the Lands Between, the shattering of the Elden Ring at some time past has left the realm in disarray. Queen Marika the Eternal is vanished, and only her children remain, decimating the land with their ambition. As the player progresses through the game, they meet a four-armed princess, the empyrean Ranni, and her faithful wolf-man companion Blaidd. As an empyrean, Ranni is one possible successor of Marika’s eternal Golden Order, and all such successors, the player learns, are given a “shadowbound beast” like Blaidd to aid them in their trials, but also to ensure the potential sovereign’s allegiance to the Greater Will, outer god of the Order. In progressing Ranni’s questline, the player learns that she is set on a course against the Greater Will, a “dark path” to “betray everything, and rid the world of what came before,” which is to say, to rid it of its subjugation to an uncaring, otherworldy being.⁴⁹ Blaidd remains loyal—“I’m part of her being. Her very shadow,” he says—until almost the end when he is at last overcome by the Greater Will and forced to fulfil his purpose.⁵⁰ The beast must control his sovereign, and the player in turn must put the beast down to protect her.

Regardless of whether or not the player chooses to follow Ranni’s quest, they will eventually be forced to battle with Gurranq, the Beast Clergyman. A terrifying cleric and sworn opponent of death, Gurranq, for much of the game, is a merchant who will teach the player Bestial Incantations, feral expressions of faith in the Golden Order. During the late-game battle with him, the player discovers that Gurranq is none other than Maliketh, the Black Blade, shadowbound beast of Marika herself, and protector of the Rune of Death. Reading item descriptions connected to Maliketh reveals that Marika used him as “a vessel to lock away Destined Death,” giving she and her demigod children immortality, and the Golden Order its strength.⁵¹ But as these texts also reveal, Marika betrayed Maliketh, allowing a piece of the Rune of Death to be taken by Ranni and used by her to slay Godwyn the Golden (Marika’s son) in his soul, and she her own flesh, freeing her to carry out her designs against the Greater Will.⁵² In these two sovereigns’ stories, beasts are deployed as both lines of force and lines of flight—means of reinscribing the power of the sovereign, and means of shattering it.

The last detail of Elden Ring that firmly situates it in the un-trilogy with Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne is the nature of the Greater Will itself. The Greater Will is an Outer God, the preeminent god of the Lands Between, but just one of many such celestial beings at large in the cosmos of the game. Various NPCs and demigod bosses that the player meets are dedicated to these eldritch beings, and the player can even become a servant of some of these themselves, unlocking alternative endings to the game. Like Demon’s Souls, like Bloodborne, the “double and contradictory figuration of political man” discloses the reality of the “state as animality, or even bestiality … either a normal bestiality or a monstrous bestiality itself mythological or fabulous.”⁵³ An eldritch, uncanny being or beings—the Old One, the Great Ones, the Outer Gods—serves as the monstrous ground of human sovereignty, while in turn potentiating the becoming-beast of its sovereign subjects. The state exists in a constant state of war against its own subjects, and indeed, in a constant state of war against the artifice of its own institution.⁵⁴ The beast gives the sovereign its power, while haunting that power, threatening its authority, in every instance of its use.

If the Dark Souls trilogy is a critique of the metaphysics of sovereignty, the sequence of Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring makes for its voracious, beastly shadow. These gamic fables position beasts at their centers, displacing subjects and sovereigns alike in order to make explicit the conditions of human “politicity” as such, the “being-political of the living being called man.”⁵⁵ Wherein our real lives there is no wolf, only other humans, FromSoftware mobilizes actual beasts to help reveal the complex structures of sovereignty that philosophers have been analyzing and attempting to understand—to varying degrees of success—for over two thousand years. In so doing, FromSoftware uses their games to enter into political discourse through a side door, making the ethical claim that, contra La Fontaine, the reason of the strongest is not always best. Like the pensée of Pascal upon which Derrida meditates, when the sovereign is not “able to make what is just, strong,” the sovereign makes “what is strong, just.”⁵⁶ Such is the beast in the sovereign.

Since Dark Souls II, FromSoftware has sought to present another path altogether, a path beyond power and violence, a path “beyond the scope of light, beyond the reach of dark.”⁵⁷ The “grand betrayal” of the nihilistic dualisms between beasts and sovereigns, sovereigns and humans, humans and beasts—the torsion and ultimate destruction of such dialectical oppositions—is the subtle metaphysical ploy these games unfold.⁵⁸ In Elden Ring, after all these years, after all these hours played, FromSoftware once again retraces this thematic, reduplicating these narrative structures to the very limits of intelligibility so as to elaborate a manifold of political possibilities for worlds to come. Perhaps, then, we, like Ranni, must pursue a line of flight⁵⁹—a path beyond “certainties,” a path of “impossibilities,” yes, but a path free from the scorching light of the sun, a path that takes us on a “thousand year voyage under the wisdom of the Moon.”⁶⁰ What could possibly await us?⁶¹

References

Aristotle. Politics. In The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Volume One: From Plato to Nietzsche. Edited by Andrew Bailey, et al. 177-242. Toronto, ON: Broadview Press, 2008.

Balibar, Étienne. “Citizen Subject.” e-flux 77 (2016): 1-11.

Bloodborne Wiki. “Retired Hunter Djura.” Bloodborne Wiki. https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/03/old-hunter-gyula.html.

——. “Afflicted Hunter.” Bloodborne Wiki. https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/03/blind-man.html.

——. “Ring of Betrothal.” Bloodborne Wiki. https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/04/ring-of-betrothal.html.

Dark Souls II Wiki. “Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin.” Wikidot. http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/bosses:aldia-scholar-of-the-first-sin.

Dark Souls III Wiki. “Fire Keeper.” Wikidot. http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:fire-keeper.

Davis, Bret W. “The Kyoto School.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. April 9, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Demon’s Souls Wiki. “Talisman of Beasts.” Wikidot. http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/talisman-of-beasts.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 1. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Elden Ring Wiki. “Ranni the Witch.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Ranni+the+Witch.

——. “Blaidd.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Blaidd.

——. “Remembrance of Maliketh the Black Blade.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Remembrance+of+the+Black+Blade.

——. “Cursemark of Death.” Fextralife. https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Cursemark+of+Death.

Galloway, Alexander. “On the Bias.” ASAP Journal. March 27, 2023. https://asapjournal.com/graphic-formalism-on-the-bias-alexander-r-galloway/.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. In The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Volume One: From Plato to Nietzsche. Edited by Andrew Bailey, et al. 413-490. Toronto, ON: Broadview Press, 2008.

——. On the Citizen. Translated by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. In The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Volume One: From Plato to Nietzsche. Edited by Andrew Bailey, et al. 346-375. Toronto, ON: Broadview Press, 2008.

Menuez, Paolo Xavier Machado. “The Downward Spiral: Postmodern Consciousness as Buddhist Metaphysics in the Dark Souls Video Game Series.” Master’s Thesis, Portland State University, 2017. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4161/.

Mielke, James. “‘Dark Souls’ Creator Miyazaki on ‘Zelda,’ Sequels and Starting Out.” Rolling Stone. October 5, 2016. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/dark-souls-creator-miyazaki-on-zelda-sequels-w443435.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka. Bloodborne. PS4: FromSoftware, 2015.

——. Dark Souls. PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011.

——. Demon’s Souls. PS3: FromSoftware, 2009.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka and Yui Tanimura. Elden Ring. PlayStation; Xbox; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2022.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura. Dark Souls III. PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016.

Reuben, Nic. “Sekiro, Samsara and From Software’s cycles of death.” Eurogamer. April 3, 2019. https://www.eurogamer.net/sekiro-samsara-and-from-softwares-cycles-of-death.

Shibuyo, Tomohiro and Yui Tanimura. Dark Souls II. PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014.

Sliva, Marty. “Inside the Mind of Bloodborne and Dark Souls’ Creator.” IGN. February 5, 2015. https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/02/05/inside-the-mind-of-bloodborne-and-dark-souls-creator-ign-first.

Stein, Eric. “Praise the Sun: The Metaphysics of Dark Souls from the First Flame to the End of Fire.” Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, Western University, London, ON, June 3, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603500.

——. “Pure Vessels: The Insect and the Other in Dark Souls and Hollow Knight.” Insect Entanglements, Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol, Online, June 19, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603508.

——. “Tactile Thematics: From Power to Skill in FromSoftware’s Souls Games.” Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference, Albuequerque, NM, February 19, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603488.

——. “The Dark Sigil Will Guide Thee: The Hollowing Mechanic in FromSoftware’s Souls Games.” Northeast Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Online, October 23, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603519.

——. “The Fire Fades: Navigating the End of the World in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls.” International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 19, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603492.

——. “The Zoopolitical Imagination: Animality, Sovereignty, and the Subject.” April 12, 2017. https://www.steinea.ca/2017/04/12/the-zoopolitical-imagination.

Švelch, Jaroslav. Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.

Tyler, Tom. Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

VaatiVidya. “Demon’s Souls Story: The Defilement of God.” YouTube. May 26, 2021. https://youtu.be/Jvl2rzo1fN0.

Wagner, Richard. Opera and Drama. 1851. Translated by William Ashton Ellis. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Notes

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 30. For my original research on the “zoopolitical imagination,” see my paper “The Zoopolitical Imagination: Animality, Sovereignty, and the Subject,” April 12, 2017, https://www.steinea.ca/2017/04/12/the-zoopolitical-imagination. ↩
See Marty Sliva, “Inside the Mind of Bloodborne and Dark Souls’ Creator,” IGN, February 5, 2015, https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/02/05/inside-the-mind-of-bloodborne-and-dark-souls-creator-ign-first, and James Mielke, “‘Dark Souls’ Creator Miyazaki on ‘Zelda,’ Sequels and Starting Out,” Rolling Stone, October 5, 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/dark-souls-creator-miyazaki-on-zelda-sequels-w443435. ↩
Compare Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), which I have counted as mechanically in a continuity with the broader ‘Soulsborne’ sequence, but which operates in a distinct metaphysical or cosmological realm—an explicitly Buddhist one. See Nic Reuben, “Sekiro, Samsara and From Software’s cycles of death,” Eurogamer, April 3, 2019, https://www.eurogamer.net/sekiro-samsara-and-from-softwares-cycles-of-death, for a direct reading of Sekiro along these lines, and Paolo Xavier Machado Menuez, “The Downward Spiral: Postmodern Consciousness as Buddhist Metaphysics in the Dark Souls Video Game Series,” (master’s thesis, Portland State University, 2017), https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4161/, for an application of a Buddhist metaphysical framework to FromSoftware’s oeuvre as a whole. ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011), Tomohiro Shibuyo and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls II (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014), and Hidetaka Miyazaki, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls III (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016). ↩
The rhetoric of the sun yokes together the terms visibility, knowledge, reason, truth, power, presence, being, and reality—that Platonic table of values. See my “Praise the Sun: The Metaphysics of Dark Souls from the First Flame to the End of Fire,” Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, Western University, London, ON, June 3, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603500. ↩
This primordial reality is cyclicity (saṃsāra) and dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). The linear, luminous power of Gwyn’s sunlight spears splits the grey stasis of the everlasting dragons, only to reveal the dark as backdrop of the new scene, the unground of disparity that terrifies Gwyn, and so must be controlled, ringed about with a sign, and eventually (or perhaps originally) with a city, to ward off the passing of the ages and the weakening of power by very disparity that which made it so. See here also the meontology of the Kyoto School that begins with nothing where western ontology begins with something: Bret W. Davis, “The Kyoto School,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, April 9, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/. ↩
A Gesamtkunstwerk, as in Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, 1851, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). ↩
Eric Stein, “Tactile Thematics: From Power to Skill in FromSoftware’s Souls Games,” Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference, Albuequerque, NM, February 19, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603488, and “The Dark Sigil Will Guide Thee: The Hollowing Mechanic in FromSoftware’s Souls Games,” Northeast Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Online, October 23, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603519. ↩
Eric Stein, “The Fire Fades: Navigating the End of the World in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls,” International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 19, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603492, and “Pure Vessels: The Insect and the Other in Dark Souls and Hollow Knight,” Insect Entanglements, Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol, Online, June 19, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603508. ↩
Tom Tyler, Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and Jaroslav Švelch, Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023). ↩
Tyler, Game, 2. ↩
Tyler, Game, 2. ↩
Tyler, Game, 2. “Duck Hunt, then, is a game about game.” ↩
Švelch, Player vs. Monster, 1. ↩
Švelch, Player vs. Monster, 2, 4. ↩
Švelch, Player vs. Monster, 2-3. ↩
Švelch, Player vs. Monster, 3. ↩
Švelch, Player vs. Monster, 7. ↩
Étienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” e-flux 77 (2016): 1-11; 1. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 17. ↩
Aristotle, Politics, in The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Volume One: From Plato to Nietzsche, eds. Andrew Bailey, et al., 177-242 (Toronto, ON: Broadview Press, 2008), 1253a1. ↩
Aristotle, Politics, 1253a30, 1253a27. ↩
Aristotle, Politics, 1253a31. ↩
For a structural and critical reading of such crossings, see Alexander Galloway, “On the Bias,” ASAP Journal, March 27, 2023, https://asapjournal.com/graphic-formalism-on-the-bias-alexander-r-galloway/. ↩
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Volume One: From Plato to Nietzsche, eds. Andrew Bailey, et al., 346-375 (Toronto, ON: Broadview Press, 2008), 364. ↩
Machiavelli, The Prince, 364. ↩
Machiavelli, The Prince, 364. The prince’s true virtue is not to be virtuous (i.e., moral, just), but to act with virtù, that is, virtuosity in response to opportunity. ↩
Machiavelli, The Prince, 364. Machiavelli remarks that this lesson “has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse. The centaur brought them up in his discipline; just as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures/” ↩
Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. ↩
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: Volume One: From Plato to Nietzsche, eds. Andrew Bailey, et al., 413-490 (Toronto, ON: Broadview Press, 2008), 424. ↩
Hobbes, Leviathan, 413. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 2. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 6, 18. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 18. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 9. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 9. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 5. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 23. ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Demon’s Souls (PS3: FromSoftware, 2009), Hidetaka Miyazaki, Bloodborne (PS4: FromSoftware, 2015), and Hidetaka Miyazaki and Yui Tanimura, Elden Ring (PlayStation; Xbox; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2022). ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 18. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 7. ↩
Demon’s Souls Wiki, “Talisman of Beasts,” Wikidot, http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/talisman-of-beasts. Popular lore theorist VaatiVidya neatly weaves together the threads of this twist in his video “Demon’s Souls Story: The Defilement of God,” YouTube, May 26, 2021, https://youtu.be/Jvl2rzo1fN0. ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Retired Hunter Djura,” Bloodborne Wiki, https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/03/old-hunter-gyula.html. ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Retired Hunter Djura.” ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Retired Hunter Djura.” ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Retired Hunter Djura.” ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Afflicted Hunter,” Bloodborne Wiki, https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/03/blind-man.html. ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Ring of Betrothal,” Bloodborne Wiki, https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/04/ring-of-betrothal.html ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Ranni the Witch,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Ranni+the+Witch. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Blaidd,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Blaidd. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Remembrance of Maliketh the Black Blade,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Remembrance+of+the+Black+Blade. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Cursemark of Death,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Cursemark+of+Death. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 26. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 27. ↩
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 25. ↩
Pascal, cited in Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 8. ↩
Dark Souls II Wiki, “Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin,” Wikidot, http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/bosses:aldia-scholar-of-the-first-sin. ↩
Dark Souls III Wiki, “Fire Keeper,” Wikidot, http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:fire-keeper. ↩
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). We cite Deleuze and Guattari here, at the end, as we escape the earth for the stars—to loose them from the gravity of power and so loose fate. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Ranni the Witch.” ↩
Dark Souls II Wiki, “Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin.” ↩

We Can Always Play Backgammon

2023-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature (1953) is a remarkable book.¹ Slim but dense, it is full of the usual Deleuzian diagonalities² and foldings, a striking precursor to his later, more-often-read books. Empiricism and Subjectivity is Deleuze’s first book, based on the graduate thesis that he wrote under the supervision of Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem, and as a first book it is more grounded than the ones that would follow, and indeed, functions for them as a sort of ground, or perhaps better, as a field of potentialities.

Deleuze states his research program succinctly: to survey the history of “new concepts created by a great philosopher”—in this case, David Hume.³ Primarily a close reading of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), with reference to other major works like An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Deleuze identifies Hume’s key contributions to philosophy as twofold: the “concept of belief” and the “real meaning” of the “association of ideas.”⁴ Contrary to idealist or rationalist theories of mind that locate knowledge and ideas in the subject’s interiority, Hume’s theory of mind—or properly, his theory of human nature—locates knowledge and ideas outside of the subject, and in fact, as prior to the subject.⁵ Through belief in this outside, the human being is “subjected”—made into a subject, made subject to the world.⁶

For Deleuze, to conduct a “science of humanity” one must begin as a “moralist and a sociologist, before being a psychologist.”⁷ Before one can posit the figure, one must first apprehend the background; before one can posit the individual, one must first apprehend the environment; before one can posit the subject, one must first apprehend society. This is not to erase the discrete human being, but rather to properly situate the human being as a “passional” entity always already embedded in a “social” context.⁸ One cannot conceive of the individual subject as the degree zero of society, the origin point, the locus of pure agency that determines the world around it. The individual human being is, rather, determined, or in Deleuzo-Humean terminology, “affected.”⁹ Through a naive belief in the world, the subject is formed, transformed, nature becoming mind becoming nature.¹⁰

How does the mind become human nature?¹¹ Deleuze formalizes this process as he reads it in Hume, formulates the logic behind the subject’s operation. For our purposes here, it is useful to sketch out the steps in his argument:

Mind “is not nature.”
Mind is “identical with the ideas in the mind.”
“Ideas are given, as given; they are experience.”
Therefore, mind is experience.¹²

This argument is followed by a dependent one:

Mind is a “collection,” not a “system.”
A collection “is not a faculty” but an “assemblage of things.”
An assemblage is “not different” from what is assembled.
Therefore, mind is not by nature a subject (that is, a system).¹³

The mind and its ideas—the “imagination”—must, as a consequence, be “something determinable” if the mind is ever to become human nature, if the human is ever to become a subject.¹⁴ As Deleuze contends: “Nothing is done by the imagination; everything is done in the imagination.”¹⁵ Before its determination, the mind is “delirium,” “change,” “indifference” (i.e., without differentiation).¹⁶ There is no system, only collection, insofar as experience in the immediacy of its givenness is without determinate order. And yet, there is a logic that intervenes in the mind, structuring forces that traverse it, subjecting the imagination.

The three principles of association—“contiguity, resemblance, and causality”—are the basic functions that “organize the given into a system, imposing constancy on the imagination,” and that “fix and naturalize the mind.”¹⁷ This organization should not be talked about in terms of causes, only “effects.”¹⁸ One cannot presuppose an agency behind their functioning—“nothing is ever transcendental”—but only “scrutinize” their outcomes, analyze and describe them.¹⁹ The relations instituted by the principles of association are, importantly, “external to their terms,” without necessity.²⁰ It is the very lightness of this exteriority that gives these relations a kind of substance, by virtue of repeated “easy transition” between terms.²¹ In following these pathways, the mind comes to acquire a “tendency,” a “disposition[],” a habit—subjectivity itself is seen to be “an effect.”²² Belief, then, is the subject’s fidelity to the effect of its own formation.

“I affirm more than I know,” the subject says; “I speak in general terms and I have beliefs.”²³ The subject constantly invokes the moment of its foundation, referring others to the “idea[s] [it] claim[s] to have” but can never actually show.²⁴ The subject feels the system of its formation, but can only insist upon this system’s reality, in the mode of a constant proof.²⁵ There is no self-evident representation, no correspondence—only feeling, the “affection of the mind” by forces that exceed it.²⁶ Reason is not primarily agential or active; reason is “instinct, habit, or nature.”²⁷

For Deleuze, then, “the only possible theory is a theory of practice.”²⁸ Reason is but one mode of practice, and a “practically or technically insufficient one” at that—it “does not apply to all there is.”²⁹ Reason seeks differences, distinctions, decisions, but this “skepticism,” this desire for scission, “has its origin and its motive on the outside, in the indifference of practice.”³⁰ The world is always there, outside the mind; indeed, the world is the mind, insofar as the world constitutes the totality of experience. It is in the moment of the mind being put into practice, the moment of the mind becoming-subject, that we discover this “preexisting world” of which the mind is but a part, a narrow field of view.³¹

In the world of practice, skepticism is defanged, because “practice itself is indifferent to skepticism: we can always play backgammon.”³² For five-thousand years we have played backgammon, across a myriad of local and historical variations, and of this practice the skeptic must remain silent, because the game can always be played. The backgammon board set before it, the mind discovers that the game already has rules, and through their assumption becomes a subject, made partial to a particular mode of practice. Which game, which games—whether backgammon, or soccer, or Halo, or any other game—is without guarantee, a chance operation, a fateful encounter—but the subject is determined, regardless.

So it is in the moment that we discover the world we also discover that this world “presupposes an antecedent ethics and an order of ends.”³³ The subject is an effect, a tendency, a habit, or put yet another way, a “partiality.”³⁴ Everywhere there are traces of the efforts, the effects, of other partialities, their “diverting and slanting” of the whole.³⁵ The mind is always already crisscrossed by these lines of force, prior to the moment of its subjection. Perturbations in the field of experience effectuated by the movements of these lines radiate outward, intersecting with other such perturbations, a complex manifold of passions in the midst of which the mind finds itself, and says of itself, for the first time, “I…”³⁶

We begin with the world and discover the subject, just as the subject begins with the world and discovers itself. This is Deleuze’s empiricism, the practical slant of his philosophy that short circuits idealist theories of the subject. The subject transcends the mind by way of belief, but it is in no way transcendental. The subject is a habituation or tendency of the given, a partiality of experience, an instinct or feeling born of a systematization of sensation. Having arrived at this point, following Deleuze in establishing the subject as an affection, next time we will turn our attention to the various rules of this affection and the cultural world that institutes them.

Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991). See my annotations at “Empiricism and Subjectivity,” March 29, 2023, https://steinea.xyz/gilles-deleuze-empiricism-and-subjectivity/. ↩
Alexander R. Galloway, “Graphic Formalism,” ASAP Journal, March 27, 2023, https://asapjournal.com/graphic-formalism-on-the-bias-alexander-r-galloway/ ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, ix. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, ix. ↩
In Deleuze’s reading, Hume is an externalist. See, for instance, Riccardo Manzotti, The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (New York, NY: OR Books, 2017). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 31. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 21. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 21. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 21. ↩
“What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us.” See Gilles Deleuze and Toni Negri, “Control and Becoming,” The Funambulist, February 22, 2011, https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-control-and-becoming-a-conversation-between-toni-negri-and-gilles-deleuze. Compare “naive contact” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (London, EN: Routledge, 2012). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 25. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23, 24. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, x. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 24. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 25, 27, 26. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 28. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 28. ↩
On insistence, compare Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” 1957, in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006). On proof, compare Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 30. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 30. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 32. A praktognosia. See my “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics,” Bio and Psyche: Reading the Symptomatic Body, May 28, 2021, https://zenodo.org/record/4824078. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 33. For decision, compare François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 33. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 33. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 34. Emphasis added. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 33. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 35. ↩
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 35. ↩
“We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’” See Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, x. ↩

Imagined Agency

2023-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Imagined Agency: Review of Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone’s Fictional Games.” Ancillary Review of Books, May 26, 2023. https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2023/05/26/imagined-agency-review-of-stefano-gualeni-and-riccardo-fassones-fictional-games/.

Mirrors: Zotero

Review

Throughout the media we enjoy, from novels to films to video games, we encounter games that exist as “part[s] of fictional worlds,” games that “cannot actually be—or at least were not originally meant to be—played.” Games like Suzerainty from Disco Elysium, Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes, and (originally) Pai Sho from Avatar: The Last Airbender are just a few of many such examples of fictional games from popular culture. For philosopher game-designers Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone, it is precisely this unplayability that makes games like these worthy of further study–a task they undertake in their new book from Bloomsbury Academic, Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play (2023).

While the question of agency in games is a common one in games studies, explored at length in recent books like C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency As Art (2020), the question of agency in fictional games, in games that cannot actually be played, leads down less well-trodden pathways. Representations of fictional games are less interested in how these games work as complete, balanced systems, and more in what they do in the fictional worlds of which they are a part. For Gualeni and Fassone, what is required in cases such as these is an “aesthetics of imagined agency,” an inquiry into the new modes of action and possibility revealed by those games that can only exist within works of fiction.

Gualeni and Fassone structure their book around discussions of four specific functions or uses of fictional games. Fictional games can serve as proxies for the dominant ideologies of their fictional worlds, as catalysts for subverting these dominant ideologies, as incantations for deceiving and overpowering the inhabitants of fictional worlds, or as transformative tools for existential transcendence. The authors emphasize that these functions are not the only functions possible for fictional games, and this openness to conversation, along with the substantial compendium of fictional games included as an appendix to the book, makes Fictional Games an invaluable tool for ongoing research.

Chapter 1, “On Fictional Games,” presents numerous scholarly interlocutors (ranging from foundational work by Bernard Suits to cutting-edge research by Aaron Trammel), as well as practical examples of fictional games to help situate readers in the discussion. Gualeni and Fassone make careful distinctions between the various types of games that appear in fictional works, separating nested games and minigames from the fictional games that interest them. Properly fictional games are characterized, above all, by their “unplayability,” insofar as they are either fictionally incomplete (like Calvinball), currently impossible (like lightcycle racing in Tron), humanly inaccessible (like David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ), or ethically impermissible (like the many iterations of Rollerball across fiction and film, or the version of children’s games in Squid Game). The unplayability of fictional games marks them as instruments of speculation, and I could not help but draw comparisons between this line of inquiry and that of Cameron Kunzelman in The World Is Born from Zero (2022), also reviewed for ARB. Like Kunzelman, Gualeni and Fassone seek to understand how games shape subjectivity, how games and ideology interact, and the possibilities for transformation that games afford.

In Chapter 2, “Fictional Games and Ideology,” Gualeni and Fassone look at fictional games as “proxies” or “playable moral allegories” for dominant or hegemonic ideologies. Such games operate within their fictional worlds as “ideological state apparatuses” in the Althusserian-Marxist framework, working to “reproduce” ideology by “representing it” and by “ensuring its continuation.” In the final case study of the chapter, a reading of Robert Altman’s film Quintet (1979), readers encounter a fictional game—the titular Quintet, an assassination game played on a board mirroring the layout of the city—that is so ideologically powerful and pervasive that it remains the only trace of a society otherwise lost to an ice age, a simulation without origin. Fictional games that reproduce ideology stifle creativity and possibility, and often violently. Quoting from the film, the authors remark: “all things of value feed the game.”

The subsequent chapter, “Fictional Games as Utopian Devices,” considers fictional games that engage with the dominant ideology, but rather than seeking to reproduce it, resist and subvert it, catalyzing new possibilities. Gualeni and Fassone conduct an extended analysis of the game Azad from Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games (1988). In Azad, players are “not simply taking part in a ludic activity defined by aspects of randomness and strategic thinking,” but rather “are proposing competing political claims that are implied in their in-game interactions.” For the authors, the political possibilities afforded by such games are akin to art practices like Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism, which “embraced chance and interactivity in artistic production as expressive ways to oppose instrumental rationality.” Even in dystopian settings, fictional games can present characters with “moment[s] of truth” to which the only possible response is the “satisfaction of a utopian impulse,” the refusal of the current order and the embrace of something altogether new.

Chapter 4, “Fictional Games as Deceptions and Hallucinations,” draws on the work of phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer to theorize how fictional games can lure, enchant, and master their players. Much in the same way that fictional games as ideological proxies can ultimately come to replace the society they once represented, fictional games as deceptions or hallucinations are often used in stories “in which the characters’ sanity or sense of themselves is at risk,” causing them to doubt their reality. Games like the one at the centre of David Fincher’s The Game (1997) make thematic the shifting of roles, the embrace of risk, and the negotiation of the boundary between what is and is not the game.

The final chapter of case studies, “Fictional Games and Transcendence,” examines fictional games that function as transformative tools for the fictional subjects with whom they interact. Through readings of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943) and Alastair Reynolds’ Diamond Dogs (2003), Gualeni and Fassone examine the themes of “human transcendence, post-biological evolution and the future of play” that are explored by the fictional games around which these narratives revolve. Both Hesse’s titular Glass Bead Game and the Blood Spire challenge in Diamond Dogs teach their players new ways of thinking and being in the world, but do not do so by merely causing their players to imagine such cognitive or bodily transcendences. Rather, they “effectively prompt and/or allow players to overcome their physical, perceptual and/or cognitive limitations.” Writing specifically of the Blood Spire, the authors observe that to take on the challenge of such games “means being confronted with radical questions concerning one’s sense of identity, the continuity of one’s selfhood and how meaning can be attributed to one’s existence.” In such cases, play becomes a passage to realms of radical alterity.

However, despite the frequently radical nature of the games discussed throughout their study, Gualeni and Fassone decline to make any strong claims about games, preferring instead to remain primarily within the realm of description. Their conclusion is short and mostly summative in purpose, presenting some paths for future inquiry. They remind readers that Fictional Games is “an initial exploration of what is, to [their] knowledge, a previously uncharted scholarly theme.” To this end, their book is a resounding success, full of careful analyses and robust theorization. But in this conclusion, I miss the directness of a critique that might go beyond description, or a program for design that might mobilize the transformative elements of some of the games that they discuss. For those looking for further reading in this vein, I would recommend following up Fictional Games with two other books: the previously mentioned book by Cameron Kunzelman, The World is Born From Zero, and Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games (2020), reviewed for ARB here. Kunzelman’s “direct intervention” and Jagoda’s “art-science” present two possible routes forward. Perhaps with such tools we might be able to build on Gualeni and Fassone and endeavour to “stimulate and structure forms of transcendence that concern the playing individual” ourselves. Such is the territory of critique and design, a territory with much that remains for us to explore.

Tactile Thematics, 2

2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Tactile Thematics, 2: Passages of Plurality in FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.” Presented at the International Conference on Games and Narrative, The Games Institute, University of Waterloo, May 16, 2023. https://zenodo.org/record/7948775.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

Since Demon’s Souls (2009), game development studio FromSoftware has demonstrated a concern with subjectivity—a concern that is expressed materially through their mechanical interrogation of the ludic subjectivity that emerges in video game narratives. From game to game, FromSoftware has steadily dismantled the essential or metaphysical subject of play, substituting it with an ever more complex and entangled subject that finds itself embroiled in and compromised by the myths and plots that drive each game’s overarching story. By nesting moment-to-moment gameplay loops within the broader narrative metastructures of these games, chaining these loops together into thematic systems, FromSoftware has worked to challenge conventions of roleplaying game protagonaity, supporting their narrative aims at the tactile level of interaction. Building on prior empirical research focused on Demon’s Souls (2009), Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016), and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), this paper brings FromSoftware’s latest title, Elden Ring (2022), into the discussion, undertaking a close reading of the mechanics and items that make this new game distinctive, and which continue the design trajectory of the preceding titles, a trajectory that now spans nearly a decade and a half of game development.

Keywords: Game Studies, Game Design, FromSoftware, Elden Ring, Narrative, Pluralism.

Introduction

In late 2019, I began work on an empirical study of game development studio FromSoftware’s last decade of games, hypothesizing on the basis of my results a mechanical trajectory away from the transcendental subject and toward the tactile subject.¹ Working through Demon’s Souls (2009), Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016), and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), I conducted a frame-by-frame analysis of every weapon moveset across these six games—for a total of 580 weapon analyses—comparing the number of distinct animations (or moves) per controller input in order to calculate a relative complexity value per weapon and an average complexity value per game.² To summarize these findings: in Demon’s Souls I found an average complexity of 1.21 (average of 15.72 inputs across 64 weapons); in Dark Souls, an average complexity of 1.14 (average of 16.78 inputs across 108 weapons); in Dark Souls II, an average complexity of 1.30 (average of 26 inputs across 204 weapons); in Bloodborne, an average complexity of 1.29 (25.96 inputs across 26 weapons); in Dark Souls III, an average complexity of 1.27 (average of 29.65 inputs across 177 weapons); and in Sekiro, an average complexity of 43.80 (5 inputs across 1 weapon, 40 prosthetic tools, and 17 combat arts). I also compared these moveset complexity values against the player-character attributes in each game, noting a shift away from abstract and transcendental ‘power’ in Demon’s Souls, signified by soul level, to concrete and tactile ‘skill’ in Sekiro, which does away with character stats almost all together.

More than simply game mechanics, however, it was and remains my contention that FromSoftware uses their mechanics in thematic ways, reinforcing the overarching narratives of their games at the level of moment-to-moment interaction. In my original study of these “tactile thematics,” I remarked that I did not have the time “to interrogate this thematic at the symbolic or narrative levels,” but that the data was “at least indicative of the actuality of this thematic at a mechanical level.”³ Since then, I have undertaken such a symbolic and narrative exploration, considering FromSoftware’s thematic interests in the realms of the ecological,⁴ the metaphysical,⁵ the entomological,⁶ the anthropological,⁷ and shortly forthcoming at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference, the zoological.⁸ Through years of play and study, FromSoftware’s anti-transcendental convictions have made themselves patently clear. Their games are not only entertainment objects but rhetorical devices that involve their players in ruptures of in-game worldviews, using their mechanics to at first subtly, and then overtly, refigure what it means to be a subject as the player-character passes from one order or rule to the next.

With the release of FromSoftware’s Elden Ring (2022) I found myself once again considering the unique tactility of the studio’s game design work, and the sheer proliferation of interactional possibilities this new game affords.⁹ Elden Ring features 308 weapons (far exceeding their previous high point of 204 in Dark Souls II), approximately 100 different weapon arts that can be swapped between weapons (applied through ashes of war), the return of power stancing from Dark Souls II, the return of jumping and stealth mechanics from Sekiro, the introduction of guard countering when blocking attacks, and perhaps the most profound addition, mounted combat. While Elden Ring may not reach the level of focused complexity that Sekiro does (which borrows much from the world of character action games while remaining fundamentally, in my view, a Souls game), it exceeds Sekiro by a wide margin in its expansive complexity, its wide-open approach to combat encounters and world design.

While a continuation of my original empirical project in precisely the same mode would certainly be of value, I want to narrow my focus in this paper to look at what I am terming passages of plurality in Elden Ring’s design.¹⁰ Since my master’s thesis, and throughout my writing on FromSoftware’s games, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s question who comes after the subject? has been a persistent point of concern.¹¹ I have argued that this “is the question that Dark Souls has you play, over and over again,” that FromSoftware’s oeuvre makes for “a folding, twisting interrogation that buckles under the burden of its own eternal repetition,” an interrogation in which both “the subject and its other are dead, burnt to ash, faded into darkness, and yet [in which] we ask, in the midst of this, our ongoing crisis, who comes?”¹² In the dialectical annihilation of the player-subject across the Dark Souls trilogy, FromSoftware supplants the transcendental and universal with a “multiplicity of actually existing subjectivities irreducible to a singular image of thought or mode of being.”¹³ In Dark Souls III, FromSoftware only gestures at such a pluralist world to come; in Elden Ring, this world is realized.¹⁴ For the remainder of this paper, I would like to examine some of the mechanics of this realization, and reflect on the narrative work that these mechanics perform.

Passages of Plurality

Perhaps the most striking feature of Elden Ring’s narrative, in comparison with its predecessors, is the fact that its Golden Order, the current rule of the gameworld, is confronted not with a dialectical opposite but with a plurality of alternatives. Elden Ring is not a story of disparity—of “heat and cold, life and death, … light and dark”¹⁵—but multiplicity. Where FromSoftware’s prior works—and especially the Dark Souls trilogy—are narratively and ontologically structured around a cycle of overcoming (or sublation), Elden Ring is structured by a field of anarchic abundance.¹⁶ Where Gwyn’s rule of fire is the rule, which can be supplanted by Kaathe’s rule of dark, Marika’s Golden Order is merely a rule, which happens to be the dominant one—a dominance secured through sovereign power rather than any intrinsic juridico-metaphysical right.¹⁷ Where in previous games, the player-character can choose to prop up the old, failing order, or replace it with a new one—a simple binary¹⁸—in Elden Ring, the player-character must choose between a manifold of options, none of which presents itself as an unquestionable good. In the Dark Souls trilogy, fire gives way to dark which gives way to fire, and so on; in Elden Ring, gold gives way to fracture, dusk, order, despair, frenzied flame, or stars. In some of these endings, gold persists, but transformed (fracture and order); in others, gold is tossed utterly aside (dusk, despair, and frenzied flame); and in yet others, the world itself is left behind (stars). From Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls III, the player-character must attain the power to solidify the old order or institute a new one; in Sekiro, and now in Elden Ring, the player-character must develop the skill required to negotiate and traverse a complex field of intersecting and conflicting rules.¹⁹ “There is no path,”²⁰ no guarantee, but this openness of outcome in Elden Ring is also the very possibility of possibility as such, the shattering of metaphysical syntax by the contingency of the real.²¹

So, to return from such ponderous philosophical discourse to the realm of the empirical, I would like to briefly highlight four elements of Elden Ring’s design, and discuss how these elements construct alternative passages of subjectivity for the player-character, and how these elements traverse and overdetermine the player-character, animating and organizing them from without.²² These four elements are as follows: memory stones,²³ talismans,²⁴ items,²⁵ and spells.²⁶ While a superficial reading of this list would recognize only a standard list of roleplaying game (RPG) elements, my interest is in FromSoftware’s deliberate and particular use of these elements to materialize narrative and thematic elements of the game, and through their use integrate these narrative and thematic elements into the playing subject.

Memory Stones

In Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls trilogy, spells require slots to equip.²⁷ In Demon’s Souls, the number of slots the player-character has available to them is determined by their Intelligence attribute (for sorceries) and Faith attribute (for miracles), and can be increased through the use of the Ring of Magical Nature and the Ring of Devout Prayer, respectively.²⁸ The number of casts per spell slot is also determined by Intelligence, which determines the player-character’s Mana Points (MP), and which can be increased through the use of the Silver Coronet and Silver Catalyst (though catalysts can only be used to cast sorceries and not miracles).²⁹ Faith also determines the power of miracles that the player-character casts, while an additional attribute, Magic, determines the power of cast sorceries.

The Dark Souls games introduce a new attribute, Attunement, that becomes the sole determinant of magic slots, with Intelligence now determinant of sorcery aptitude and power, and Faith of miracle aptitude and power. Like Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls games have items that can increase attunement slots: the White and Darkmoon Seance Rings in Dark Souls;³⁰ the Southern Ritual Band and Black Witch Hat, which increase slots, and the Northern Ritual Band, Hexer’s Hood, and Saint’s Hood, which increase casts, in Dark Souls II;³¹ and the Deep Ring, Saint’s Ring, and Darkmoon Ring, which increase slots, and the Dusk Crown Ring which reduces the cost of casts in Dark Souls III.³²

Sekiro does not have an equivalent to magic, so we will not discuss it here, but in Bloodborne we find a prototype for how spells will work in Elden Ring. In Bloodborne, the Arcane attribute determines the power of attacks with arcane weapons and items. Importantly, there are no spells known intrinsically by the player-character. Rather, spells in Bloodborne are cast through the use of arcane artifacts known as Hunter’s Tools.³³ There are no spell slots, no spell memory—only material things that hunters must learn how to wield. In Elden Ring, then, we see one development along these lines that replaces attribute-determined spell slots in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls I, II, and III, with memory stones.³⁴ Every player-character starts the game with two spell slots, and can only increase this number by finding memory stones around the gameworld, of which there are eight. Rectangular, “black, lightly beguiling stone[s]” inset in a tarnished gold charm and attached to a similarly tarnished gold cord, these memory stones take the playing subject outside of themselves, situating their magical potential in the world at large, rather than in their interiority. Like prior games, there is also a distinct item that can increase slots, the Moon of Nokstella talisman, an artifact that brings us to next design element in question here.

Talismans

As has already been noted above, in Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls trilogy, rings are used to modify player-character attributes, and enact other effects, that allow the player to customize their gameplay experience. In Bloodborne, in the place of rings are Caryll Runes, which are discovered in the world and etched into the player-character’s memory.³⁵ As with magic, Sekiro has no equivalent to rings. In Elden Ring, rings are replaced with talismans. Unlike a ring which, as per bodily experience, is worn on a finger and becomes a part of the wearer’s phenomenological background, talismans in Elden Ring are carried in talisman pouches. Like memory stones, talisman pouches determine how many talismans can be carried. All player-characters start the game with one pouch, and can find three more as they adventure through the world.³⁶

Some talismans look like pendants or charms, as one might expect from the name, but as the game progresses, the talismans that the player-character discovers become more and more strange and unsettling, uncanny fragments of the failing world (very much in line with the arcane tools of Bloodborne). The horn charms are the “budding horn[s]” of a “long-lived beast,”³⁷ the scarseal and soreseal charms are eyes engraved with runes and wrapped with fine tendrils,³⁸ the Prince of Death’s Cyst is a literal cyst taken from the face of the Prince of Death himself,³⁹ the Shard of Alexander is a slimy, flesh-covered shard of the player-character’s adventuring companion Iron Fist Alexander,⁴⁰ and Millicent’s Prosthesis is the actual prosthetic hand of another adventuring companion, Millicent, that can be taken from her in an act of betrayal.⁴¹ This is just a small selection of the eighty or so talismans that can be found throughout Elden Ring, each of which serves to mechanically involve the player-character in some element of the plot, entangling them with this or that character, this or that faction, this or that order. Rings in prior FromSoftware games are also certainly used for storytelling, but Elden Ring’s talismans do a remarkable job situating the player-character in context, serving as physicalized reminders of trials they have undergone, enemies they have faced, and friends they have lost (or turned against).

Items

Every FromSoftware game since Demon’s Souls has had consumable and reusable items, but one of the largest developments Elden Ring introduces to the formula is crafting. Weaving together several threads of design from previous games, Elden Ring’s crafting system is surprisingly robust—so much so that one critic, Spencer of Video Game Choo Choo, was able to complete a “chemist run” of Elden Ring in which he used no weapons or spells, only quick item and pouch slot items.⁴² While similar challenges have been undertaken by challenge run streamers in the past (like LobosJr’s consumables only all bosses run of Dark Souls⁴³), Elden Ring suggests such a possibility to those not typically interested in challenge runs of already challenging video games, inviting its players into alternative modes of engagement entirely outside of the modes offered by previous games.⁴⁴ What is more, beyond mechanics, these modes invite player-characters into various in-game communities and their practices, the situated knowledges of the different groups populating the land.⁴⁵

Dark Souls III introduced spell books, which could be found throughout the gameworld and given to sorcery and miracle teachers to unlock new spells for purchase. These return in Elden Ring, and in greater number (for reasons to be discussed below), but to their count are added a plethora of cookbooks for crafting, which can be found or purchased as the player-character’s adventure progresses. These “record[s] of crafting techniques” induct the player-character into the skillful traditions of the Nomadic Warriors and Radahn’s Armorers, the Glintstone Craftsmen and Golden Order Missionaries, the Ancient Dragon Apostles and the Perfurmers, the devotees of St. Trina and the ones afflicted by the Frenzied Flame.⁴⁶ The design of these books reflect their origin, from weather-worn and blood-stained to crisp and delicate, and again serve to materialize the skill of the player-character. Knowledge in Elden Ring is not acquired through transcendental bestowal, but through dusty and crumbling tomes, through communal learnings passed down from survivor to survivor, craftsperson to craftsperson, scholar to scholar.

Furthermore, some of the essential items used in crafting—Cracked Pots, Ritual Pots, and Perfume Bottles—tie the player-character even more closely to their communities of use.⁴⁷ Cracked Pots and Ritual Pots are small, magical jars used for crafting a wide number of throwable items that do various types of damage and other effects to enemies, and which mend themselves when broken, returning to the player-character’s inventory to be refilled. Like memory stones and talisman pouches, there is a limited number of cracked and ritual pots that can be found throughout the world, and as with memory stones and talisman pouches, these items effectively externalize a capacity that the player-character can build over the course of the game. In fact, the player-character can follow a line of flight and become-jar, embracing the possibilities indicated by Iron Fist Alexander and his nephew Jar Bairn, donning the Jar helmet given by Alexander (“a uniquely jarlike gesture of friendship”),⁴⁸ choosing to carry the Shard of Alexander after his death, the Companion Jar talisman after returning his innards to Jar Bairn,⁴⁹ the Great-Jar’s Arsenal talisman after completing the Great-Jar’s challenge,⁵⁰ summoning the Soldjars of Fortune in battle,⁵¹ and even to take up the Jar Cannon that uses explosives to launch greatbolts at foes.⁵² This material terrain suggests a whole realm of possibilities for play, and even the possibility of life after all this conflict in the idyllic village of Jarburg in the role of Potentate.

If becoming-jar is not to the player-character’s fancy, they could instead choose to align with the “depraved perfumers” and “jar poachers,” learning the ways of those aromatic physicians. From the Perfume Bottle items—which are also limited in number and function like cracked and ritual pots—the player character can learn of the “art of perfuming,” which was “jealously guarded in the capital” prior to the Shattering before becoming “widely practiced throughout the Lands Between.”⁵³ The various aromatics that can be crafted with perfume bottles have distinct effects from pots, allowing the user to scatter sparks in an area-of-effect,⁵⁴ to spit poison or acid,⁵⁵ to buff self and allies,⁵⁶ and even to turn their body to steel.⁵⁷ To fully embrace the technique of the perfumers, the player-character can don their garb and take up their armaments,⁵⁸ and carry the Perfumer’s Talisman to increase the potency of their aromatics.⁵⁹ Against the jars, the perfumers present another way of being in Elden Ring’s world, and another mode of interaction for the player-character that goes beyond those available in prior games.

Spells

The final element requiring our consideration are spells themselves.⁶⁰ I have already touched on magic above with the discussion of memory slots, but with spells the passages of plurality that concern us here fully unify the levels of the mechanical and the thematic, the interactional and the narrative, the tactile and the metaphysical. Early on, players noticed that different types of spells had different magical sigils that would appear when cast. Long time lore hunters like Zullie the Witch and Quelaag set to work examining and organizing them, noticing the deliberate relationships and continuities in their design.⁶¹ Meanwhile, Redditors collected in game images and then exported high-resolution graphics of them for the community to get a better look,⁶² and Tumblr users turned to colour theory to scrutinize the meanings behind them.⁶³ What all of these player-researchers were discovering was the essential plurality of Elden Ring’s metaphysics, the anarchic openness of its ontological foundations.

As categorized on the Elden Ring wiki, there are thirteen kinds of sorceries in the game and twelve kinds of incantations (known in former games as miracles). Where in the Souls games, all sorceries flowed from intelligence and the soul, and all miracles from faith and the divine,⁶⁴ in Elden Ring intelligence and faith are merely conduits for the influence of outer powers. As critic Renata Price remarks in an episode of Waypoint Radio, this state of affairs makes it possible for the player-character to undergo a transformation of belief by way of their very encounter with alternative powers.⁶⁵ While in Dark Souls the player-character might abandon faith and reject Gwyn’s age of fire (and so too be mechanically punished for investing in the attribute), in Elden Ring faith can actually, materially find a new terminus. One player-character might embrace Dragon Communion,⁶⁶ and receive dragon eyes in return; another might turn to the ways of the fire monks and the flame of the Fell God;⁶⁷ and yet another might learn the strength of beasts, wielding claws and stones with ferocious fervour.⁶⁸ Likewise, wielders of sorceries start with simple Glintstone sorceries,⁶⁹ but through their travels can learn of forbidden and otherwise unheard of powers—sorceries of gravity and the full moon,⁷⁰ of night and of snow,⁷¹ and even of the Primeval Current itself.⁷² As with the other elements of design examined in this paper, these are not trivial reskins for added flavour, but mechanically rich and interactively divergent paths for the player to take, affording not only different angles of engagement in moment-to-moment play, but different contexts for roleplaying that allow the player-character to situate themselves against the backdrop of the world and the overarching narrative in markedly distinct ways.

Conclusion

Elden Ring wants its players to commit, and then to challenge its players with alternative commitments, competing worldviews, and indeed, contradictory and competing realities. The world of Elden Ring is a world of events without guarantees, demanding a skillful fidelity of the player-characters who navigate it.⁷³ It is difficult to play Elden Ring without being transformed; the plurality of endings of the game require it, one way or another.

By way of conclusion, I would like to cite from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, a pluralistic coda for this reading of Elden Ring:

Individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesies, tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather, of bundles of lines, for each kind is multiple. We may be more interested in a certain line than in the others, and perhaps there is indeed one that is, not determining, but of greater importance . . . if it is there. For some of these lines are imposed on us from outside, at least in part. Others sprout up somewhat by chance, from a trifle, why we will never know. Others can be invented, drawn, without a model and without chance: we must invent our lines of flight, if we are able, and the only way we can invent them is by effectively drawing them, in our lives.⁷⁴

Such possibility, bewitching and fearful,⁷⁵ a mystery always already unfolding⁷⁶—so it is to “challenge[] the swirling constellations” of the Lands Between, to touch their light and be touched by them in turn.⁷⁷ This double sensation,⁷⁸ this intimate, metamorphic contact,⁷⁹ is the basis of Elden Ring’s tactile thematics, the opening of a plurality of passages to worlds and ways of being yet to come.

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Notes

Eric Stein, “Tactile Thematics: From Power to Skill in FromSoftware’s Souls Games,” Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference, Albuequerque, NM, February 19, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603488. ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Demon’s Souls (PS3: FromSoftware, 2009); Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011); Tomohiro Shibuyo and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls II (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014); Hidetaka Miyazaki, Bloodborne (PS4: FromSoftware, 2015); Hidetaka Miyazaki, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls III (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016); and Hidetaka Miyazaki and Kazuhiro Hamatani, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PS4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2019). ↩
Stein, “Tactile Thematics,” 7. ↩
Eric Stein, “The Fire Fades: Navigating the End of the World in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls,” International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 19, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603492. ↩
Eric Stein, “Praise the Sun: The Metaphysics of Dark Souls from the First Flame to the End of Fire,” Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, Western University, London, ON, June 3, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603500. ↩
Eric Stein, “Pure Vessels: The Insect and the Other in Dark Souls and Hollow Knight,” Insect Entanglements, Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol, Online, June 19, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603508. ↩
Eric Stein, “The Dark Sigil Will Guide Thee: The Hollowing Mechanic in FromSoftware’s Souls Games,” Northeast Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Online, October 23, 2020, https://zenodo.org/record/4603519. ↩
Eric Stein, “Beasts and Sovereigns: The Zoopolitical Imagination of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring,” Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, Online, June 6, 2023, forthcoming. ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki and Yui Tanimura, Elden Ring (PlayStation; Xbox; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2022). ↩
If conference attendees or later readers of this work are interested in continuing that empirical project, please reach out and I can share a copy of my original data. Also, to this end, YouTuber Zombie Headz continues to do the lord’s work, recording in wonderfully consistent detail many of the weapon movesets in Elden Ring, as he did for Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls III (an effort that was instrumental in the completion of my original study). As of this writing, his Elden Ring Weapon Movesets playlist includes 105 different moveset videos, a significant corpus to begin with for further study. See Zombie Headz, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFei6EEuJdKc1Mwh7YNme7kuseYQJplcH. ↩
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Introduction,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 1–8. ↩
Stein, “The Dark Sigil Will Guide Thee,” 2. ↩
Stein, “The Dark Sigil Will Guide Thee,” 2. ↩
On plurality and multiplicity, see Stein, “Praise the Sun.” ↩
Dark Souls Wiki, “Story,” Wikidot, http://darksouls.wikidot.com/story. ↩
As always, I am indebted to Terence Blake’s ongoing research program in philosophical pluralism. See, for instance, Blake, “Ontological and Epistemological Anarchism,” Agent Swarm, March 24, 2018, https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/ontological-and-epistemological-anarchism-zizek-and-feyerabend/. ↩
For more on this, see my forthcoming “Beasts and Sovereigns.” ↩
Again, see my “Praise the Sun” for how Dark Souls III begins to open this binary. ↩
This passage, and the attendant work of intimacy, negotation, and touch, is the focus of my master’s thesis, “Fiction in the Integrated Circuit,” Trinity Western University, 2018, https://arcabc.ca/islandora/object/twu%3A456. I continued this line of inquiry in shorter form in my tabletop RPG supplement, Affinity: A DREAM Plugin, DREAMJAM, itch.io, August 3, 2019, https://vagrantludology.itch.io/affinity-dream. ↩
Dark Souls II Wiki, “Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin,” Wikidot, http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/bosses:aldia-scholar-of-the-first-sin. ↩
Of anarchy, Tom Nomad writes: “anarchy is only the beginning, it is only generating the possibility of possibility, the possibility of existence, the possibility of life with no guarantees and so, full of potential.” From Toward an Army of Ghosts: Immanence, Conflict, and Crisis (Berkeley, CA: Repartee, 2017), 96. For philosophical syntax, see François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). For more on life without guarantee, see my “No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart,” GENeration Analog: The Tabletop Games and Education Virtual Conference, Online, August 5, 2021, https://zenodo.org/record/5156494. ↩
We might say that Elden Ring’s psychology is externalist. Works that have been influential in shaping my own externalist perspective on psychology include: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (London, EN: Routledge, 2012); Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux 36 (July 2012); Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015); and Riccardo Manzotti, The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (New York, NY: OR Books, 2017). ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Memory Stone,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Memory+Stone. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Talismans,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Talismans. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Items,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Items. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Magic Spells,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Magic+Spells. ↩
A system with its roots in “Vancian magic,” derived from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth novels (1950-84), and common in roleplaying games since Dungeons & Dragons (1974). ↩
Demon’s Souls Wiki, “Spells - Magic and Miracles,” Wikidot, http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/spells. ↩
Demon’s Souls Wiki, “Silver Coronet,” Wikidot, http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/silver-coronet and “Silver Catalyst,” Wikidot, http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/silver-catalyst. Important to the plot of the game, the Talisman of Beasts can cast both sorceries and miracles. For more on this, see my “Beasts and Sovereigns,” forthcoming. ↩
Dark Souls Wiki, “Attunement,” Wikidot, http://darksouls.wikidot.com/attunement. ↩
Dark Souls II Wiki, “Attunement,” Wikidot, http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/attunement. ↩
Dark Souls III Wiki, “Attunement,” Wikidot, https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Attunement. ↩
Bloodborne Wiki, “Arcane Items,” Bloodborne Wiki, https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/03/arcane-items.html. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Memory Stone.” ↩
Caryll Runes overlap with Covenant mechanics from the Souls games, and also point forward to Great Runes in Elden Ring. There is much in Bloodborne that warrants further study. For now, see Bloodborne Wiki, “Carryl Runes,” Bloodborne Wiki, https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/p/caryll-runes.html and “Covenants,” Bloodborne Wiki, https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/p/covenants.html. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Talisman Pouch,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Talisman+Pouch. An editor on the wiki notes that this usage is likely a variations on Shinto and Buddhist omamori, amulets consisting of small items inside brocade bags. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Immunizing Horn Charm,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Immunizing+Horn+Charm. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Marika’s Soreseal,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Marika's+Soreseal. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Prince of Death’s Cyst,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Prince+of+Death's+Cyst. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Shard of Alexander,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Shard+of+Alexander. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Millicent’s Prosthesis,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Millicent's+Prosthesis. ↩
Spencer, “I Completed Elden Ring Using Only Items,” Video Game Choo Choo, July 6, 2022, https://videogamechoochoo.com/i-completed-elden-ring-using-only-items/. ↩
LobosJr, “Dark Souls Consumables Only All Bosses Challenge,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4u6G4YFiH1g8cbVXqc_342wbWsIXBjZh. ↩
Though, LobosJr has also undertaken such a run of Elden Ring. See “Elden Ring Consumables Only,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVDIXUXJIIvGfJzUYZzVvn2PfiIMqTe4f. ↩
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575-599. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Cookbooks,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Cookbooks. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Cracked Pot,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Cracked+Pot; “Ritual Pot,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Ritual+Pot; and “Perfume Bottle,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Perfume+Bottle. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Jar,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Jar. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Companion Jar,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Companion+Jar. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Great-Jar’s Arsenal,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Great-Jar's+Arsenal. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Soldjars of Fortune Ashes,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Soldjars+of+Fortune+Ashes. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Jar Cannon,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Jar+Cannon. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Perfume Bottle.” ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Spark Aromatic,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Spark+Aromatic. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Poison Spraymist,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Poison+Spraymist and “Acid Spraymist,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Acid+Spraymist. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Uplifting Aromatic,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Uplifting+Aromatic and “Bloodboil Aromatic,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Bloodboil+Aromatic. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Ironjar Aromatic,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Ironjar+Aromatic. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Depraved Perfumer,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Depraved+Perfumer. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Perfumer’s Talisman,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Perfumer's+Talisman. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Magic Spells.” ↩
Quelaag, “Sigil Art Design and Evolution,” Twitter, April 20, 2022, https://twitter.com/xIngenue/status/1516937911911944192. ↩
u/trolledwolf, “As some people were asking for them,” Reddit, April 3, 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/tvmrx2/as_some_people_were_asking_for_them_heres_all_the/ and u/One-Eyed-Dragon, “Collection of Spell Sigils or Glyphs,” Reddit, November 18, 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/yyljm8/collection_of_spell_sigils_or_glyphs_fixed_version/. ↩
yournextflame, “Elden Ring Sigils and Color Theory,” Tumblr, August 2, 2022, https://www.tumblr.com/yournextflame/691494799908405248/elden-ring-sigils-and-color-theory. ↩
Again, I want to emphasize two significant caveats: firstly, in Demon’s Souls, we learn that sorceries and miracles share a source (see my “Beasts and Sovereigns” for more on this), and secondly, in Dark Souls III, we encounter the beginnings of plurality through the divergences between Divine, Londor, and Deep spell books (see my “Praise the Sun” for more on this). ↩
I believe this was during the Elden Ring Spoilercast, Waypoint, December 23, 2022, https://play.acast.com/s/vicegamingsnewpodcast/elden-ring-spoilercast, but I am also certain that Price has made this argument on several occasions. I will miss the critical treasure that Waypoint has been for all these years. Essential reading, essential listening. Be good and be good at it—FCGH. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Dragon Communion Incantations,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Dragon+Communion+Incantations. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Fire Monk Incantations,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Fire+Monk+Incantations. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Bestial Incantations,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Bestial+Incantations. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Glinstone Sorceries,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Glintstone+Sorceries. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Gravity Sorceries,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Gravity+Sorceries and “Full Moon Sorceries,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Full+Moon+Sorceries. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Night Sorceries,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Night+Sorceries and “Snow Witch Sorceries,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Snow+Witch+Sorceries. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Primeval Sorceries,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Primeval+Sorceries. ↩
Here I invoke Alain Badiou’s terminology from his Being and Event, 1988, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, EN: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). ↩
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 202. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Comet Azur,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Comet+Azur. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Ranni’s Dark Moon,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Ranni's+Dark+Moon. ↩
Elden Ring Wiki, “Sorceress Sellen,” Fextralife, https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Sorceress+Sellen. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 95. ↩
Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 4ff. ↩

AFK

2023-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

This zine refuses naive understandings of play as intrinsically liberatory or radical.

As work beyond law, beyond control, beyond empire, non-play is a destituent labour, effort by way of the direct mobilization of the rule.

Inspired by Hugh Farrell’s essay for Ill Will, “The Strategy of Composition,” and the land defenders of whom he writes, this zine channels the “possibility of revolutionary organization” that we see erupting in the midst of such contested spaces as Standing Rock, Lützerath, and the Atlanta Forest.

Written for the Radical Futures jam.

All images are from CrimethInc, “The Defense of Lützerath.”

Itch.io

Reality and Determination

2023-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

For the last several years, through these field notes and my other writings, I have been pursuing a specific form of thought, a diagram of the real. This diagram is a twin, a dual, of being and becoming, void and individuation, reality and determination—neither more originary, neither reducible to the other.

In the final book of the reading club that put this thought into motion, Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy, we saw one of the eminent representatives of modern physics, the father of quantum mechanics, retrace this diagram that structures the philosophies of Anaximander and Heraclitus, Sartre and Simondon, Badiou and Laruelle—different philosophies to be sure, and sometimes even set in opposition to one another, but nevertheless each concerned with the originary dual, viewing its structure from a variety of perspectives. By way of scientific instruments and insights, Heisenberg in turn presents another angle on this diagram of the real, another frame or resolution.

A quotation from Heisenberg’s colleague von Weizsäcker is the first sketch presented in his collected lecture series that hints at the common form being uncovered: nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science. There is an order of precedence here, what Laruelle would term a “unilateral determination.” In Heisenberg’s words, the significance of this phrase appears common sense: of course that is the case! But that common—or generic—sense belies a profound ontological fact. The real is ancestral to us; it precedes us; and as much as our instruments help us to discern the features and functions of the real, we in turn precede them. Tools feed back into their users, changing how they perceive the world, and so too do these perceptions actively transform the world of which they are originally an impression. But something always escapes. Beyond the horizon there is the region, that which cannot be circumscribed by human knowing. Something always threaten to torque and shatter the syntax of our understanding, something that is, nevertheless, the very support for this syntax.

We determine, but we are determined. We decide, but we are decided. We know, but we are known. This is the cryptic or mystic quality of the real, the saturated field of our being. We are immersed in the common, held in dialogue in the common, entangled with other ones in the common. We are the common—it is all of us, the entirety of us, and still always more than us. It is the universe, the black, the deep. It is the there is and the there will be.

Heisenberg talks about the steady expansion of the frame of modern physics, the emergence of more complex systems from less—from mechanics, to thermodynamics, to electrodynamics, and finally, in his day, to quantum mechanics. He talks about predicted elements of these systems, not yet known for a fact at the time of his lectures, but the veracity of which we can attest to today. He describes in quite practical terms the forcing of the situation of natural science that overturns old paradigms while demonstrating, through that very overturning, that the new paradigm has been here all along. In all of this, he is careful to maintain a distinction between the real and what we know of the real, refusing a dogmatic realism that must reify all statements of knowledge. For Heisenberg, and for the other thinkers in the tradition charted above, there is room for the uncanny in science, for a thought not at home, a thought that enters us but is not us, a thought that is not ours, a thought that could be without us entirely. The concomitant truth of the common is that our natality and mortality are simply events, processes, of the common, and not finally determinative of it. We end, and that which is continues to be.

There is a weight to this thought of thought-without-thought, a weight Heisenberg materially locates in the atomic bomb. Thought made planetary discloses the possibility of a total annihilation of thought, of a scouring of the ground of thought itself. To be determined by the real is to live with the possibility that our determination might end, that our ongoing individuation is necessarily finite and profoundly contingent. This is a sobering reality to embrace, but also one invested with opportunity. The occasion of total annihilation reveals the possibility for any occasion whatsoever, for swerve and action, for impulse and reaction. The involution of the planetary system of control and its apocalyptic puncture by the bomb make way for a new operational modality of tactility and geometry, combination and kinetics. The originary dual is not a speculative model but a generative machine. The bomb, while total, is but one potentiality.

This is the diagram I have been after, a diagram in the end that I can only represent in partialities—a metaphysical elephant, as it were. And yet this effort, to be partial in this way, is precisely the means needed to operate and be operated by the machine of being. Partes extra partes, parts beside parts, each one a line of flight painting a trail of stars across the universe.

Spring Cleaning

2023-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

So much work over the dark months on this website, such a proliferation of words and pages—possibly too much, or at least too much for me to manage simultaneously. I’m going to wind down updating this journal and focus my efforts elsewhere. I’ve been pondering a replacement using ActivityPub, which would also replace my current Twitter and Mastodon accounts. But we will see.

I’ve written previously about the Artemis program, and I was quite excited to see the Artemis II crew announced. One of the four astronauts on this mission to the moon is Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian, who will become the first ever from my country to do so. Neat.

In other space news, the Hubble Space Telescope detected a remarkable anomaly that has been identified as a possible black hole, ejected from its galaxy and pulling a trail of stars along with it. The press release reads:

There’s an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long “contrail” of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It’s likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

As astronauts prepare to leave our atmosphere, this invisible monster has me thinking once again about the “potent nothing” of space, the infinite void that constitutes the background of our understanding, that supersaturated abyss of signification. Some light material to get me through spring cleaning.

Radical Futures

2023-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m hosting the #radicalfuturesjam in collaboration with SPRAG: The Society for the Promotion of Radical Analog Games. It runs until the end of April, and welcomes all who dream of transforming our social systems and networks of relation for the better.

https://itch.io/jam/radical-futures

We are looking for tabletop games that challenge existing hierarchies, power relations, and inequalities, that reinvent social institutions, and that transform people and communities so we can live in peace, abundance, and with ecological care.

The jam is open to all tabletop formats, and takes an expansive approach to the definition of games. For prompts, suggestions, and further guidelines, click through to the jam page linked above.

Eagle

2023-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

One of the best parts of living in Sechelt is the bird population. Watching groups of red-breasted mergansers diving for fish while I’m out on my walks is a delight. But most spectacular is the bald eagle that has taken up a perch in the gnarled tree that stands about fifty metres from my window, where it can survey the shallows of the inlet at a perfect angle. What a splendid distraction throughout my work day.

Ring Fit

2023-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In 2015, I had a catastrophic ankle injury that left me walking on crutches for months. The tendons and ligaments that I damaged never fully recovered, and I have since reinjured the same ankle multiple times—most recently while hiking during the summer of 2022. In 2016, I started graduate school, and though I would not change my decision to pursue graduate studies, nor would I alter the professional path my studies set me upon, the negative side effects to my health as a consequence of this journey have not been insignificant. Though highly active throughout my youth and early twenties, these two personal factors have been the most substantial contributors to the decline in my general wellbeing over the last decade.

But personal factors are never exclusively to blame, and the last few years have made this fact especially clear. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified the precarious social and economic conditions that have defined my adult life, driving me to change industries between bouts of unemployment. Such contingent circumstances have directly impacted my physical and mental health for the worse. Furthermore, groceries have never been more expensive, making healthy choices extremely burdensome. The powers that be seem to think an engineered recession is the solution for our inflationary woes, while acknowledging that such a choice will directly harm regular people. The personal factors noted above have certainly been the most immediate contributors to my diminishing quality of life, but the effects have been noticeably magnified since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

As I write this—New Years Eve 2022—I am reminded of the line from Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and specifically the adaptation of it by Peter Sloterdijk, who takes the line for the title of his book: “You must change your life.” To pull from Wikipedia, Sloterdijk proposes an “anthropotechnics,” a set of “techniques of individual and collective self-transformation,” the use of which might aid in our negotiation of the “the networks of discipline through which we live our lives and construct our world.” While this page is specifically concerned with an effort of individual self-transformation, I want to emphasize that the personal and collective must always go hand in hand. To this end, I am inspired by Inhabit’s publication, Inhabit.Body, a “strength and conditioning guide for insurgents,” a manual “aimed at constructing a base of physical power” in order to fashion our bodies into “more capable weapons on the road to becoming ungovernable.” When I first read Inhabit.Body in 2020, I was inspired to think of the health of my body not as a commodity in the circuits of capital, but as an instrument for collective action.

This brings us to the title of this post: Ring Fit. I picked up Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure for the Switch on Boxing Day this year, and it is my intention to see just how far this game can get me in 2023 on the road to regaining some of my physical power. Update: I originally planned to maintain a log of my exercises, but the practice wore on me, and ended up a deterrent to me being active. So, after spring cleaning, this post is all that remains.

Star Citizen

2022-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

A friend convinced me to give Star Citizen a try during the November 2022 free-fly event. The game is horribly buggy and absurd in its ambition. I am not confident that it will ever have a full launch. And yet, there is something captivating about it, the scope of what they have already created awe-inspiring. Climbing into your ship, taking off from the hanger, flying up, and up, and up out of the atmosphere and into the vast expanse of space, and then engaging your quantum drive and crossing the solar system to reach some isolated outpost adrift in a nebula on the brink of nothingness, is quite unlike anything I have experienced in gaming before. The UI is awful, quests are broken, and frustrating, accidental deaths are much too frequent, but the experience of piloting a spaceship in this game nevertheless tickles my brain in just the right kind of way. I have found myself watching YouTube guides, and reading up on starcitizen.tools, and comparing statistics with erkul.games on my lunch hours, experimenting with upgrades to the ships that I have added to my hangar. I have become quite taken with the Drake Interplanetary line of vessels, and greatly enjoy how crafty they are to fly.

Weather Balloons

2022-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

I learned about weather balloons from Mark Rober’s latest YouTube video, “Egg Drop From Space,” and I had no idea the planetary-scale human coordination that goes into tracking the weather. It’s obvious, after the fact, but I still find it remarkable. As per Wikipedia:

Weather balloons are launched around the world for observations used to diagnose current conditions as well as by human forecasters and computer models for weather forecasting. Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily, usually at 0000 UTC and 1200 UTC.

Thousands of people, multiple times a day, in synchrony, measuring the weather, with balloons. Benjamin Bratton writes about “planetary-scale computation,” and this is one of the most practical instances of the theory I’ve encountered.

Liftoff

2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

Artemis I has finally launched, and it was a sight to behold. “We rise together,” the commentator said, and watching with all these other people around the world, seeing the overwhelming enthusiasm, joy, and fellowship in the chat, I felt that to be true. I remember the space shuttles from my younger years, but I don’t have any memories of watching a launch as it happened. And there hasn’t been a crewed moon landing in my lifetime, so knowing that this is the first mission in preparation for that to happen once again is thrilling. I watched the full broadcast on NASA’s YouTube channel, but there is also a video of the launch only that can be seen at NASA’s Twitter.

The Hollow Crown

2022-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

I watched The Hollow Crown telefilms of Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2 tonight. Jeremy Irons and Tom Hiddleston are quite remarkable. The history plays were never taught in school, and I’ve not had the chance to read them. But I can feel the English major fire being stoked in me by these adaptations, and my fingers itch to order more books for the shelf.

The Peripheral

2022-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Peripheral is cool. Four episodes in as of today. I read quite a bit of William Gibson’s work as a teenager, my dad’s old mass market paperbacks, but haven’t read any of his recent books. So far, the show is promising, and I hope it’s doing the source material justice.

Games In Action

2022-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

A really excellent looking conference is happening this weekend at The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on the UBC campus: Games In Action: Interactivity / Activation \ Activism. Very sad I can’t attend. Lots of interesting panels and demos, and a pop-up arcade put on by Heart Projector and the UBC Emerging Media Lab.

Monstress and Saga

2022-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Was off the coast for the day today, and popped into Chapters for a quick browse. To my delight, in the graphic novels section, there were copies of Monstress Vol. 7 and Saga Vol. 10 (the latter of which is the first volume released in the series in four years).

Morrowind

2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

On a whim, I got The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind up and running on my PC and spent the last few days playing through the opening zone of the game, Seyda Neen. The last time I played Morrowind was shortly before The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out, which was 2006. It’s been a while. I own the game of the year addition through GOG, and most of the effort was put into getting it to display correctly on my 1440p monitor. Aurelie’s Wrye Mash Guide was extremely helpful. To summarize the process, you just need three pieces of software: the Wrye Mash Polemos Fork, MLOX, and tes3cmd. Following the guide, I was able to easily install a few mods: the Morrowind Code Patch, Morrowind Graphics Extender XE, Morrowind Enhanced Textures, UI Expansion, and Better Dialogue Font. Some of them install directly, and some through the Wrye Mash interface. Nothing too complicated. I didn’t want to change the game dramatically, but rather just make it playable at higher resolution. So far, so good. I’m having a great time.

Mechanics of Speculation

2022-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Mechanics of Speculation: Review of Cameron Kunzelman’s The World Is Born From Zero.” Ancillary Review of Books, September 9, 2022. https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2022/09/21/mechanics-of-speculation-review-of-cameron-kunzelmans-the-world-is-born-from-zero/.

Mirrors: Zotero

Review

The eighth volume in De Gruyter’s Video Games and the Humanities series, Cameron Kunzelman’s The World Is Born From Zero is a fascinating look at the intersection of games and science fiction, presenting a novel argument for what constitutes this intersection at the “formal and (often) microscopic level”—namely, Kunzelman’s concept of “mechanics of speculation”. After surveying the terrain in his introduction, Kunzelman elaborates this concept across four substantial chapters. He situates his argument against the backdrops of game studies, science fiction studies, and the tradition of speculative philosophy in chapter one, then proceeds to apply his argument to questions of labour and subjectivity in chapter two, anti-Blackness and visuality in chapter three, and climate and politics in chapter four. A two-page conclusion ends the book with a light touch, inviting engagement with and extension of the preceding inquiry.

Kunzelman’s primary interlocutors, the three French philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Quentin Meillassoux, make for lofty intellectual scaffolding. However, the care and sensitivity with which Kunzelman situates himself while attending to the “allied ways of addressing the world” that aid him in his study—most importantly, the vital work in Black studies without which his own thought would not be possible—is admirable. Furthermore, while he recognizes the academic context of his book, Kunzelman also acknowledges that many different audiences may find something of interest in it, and so takes pains to “give the reader all the tools they might need to see what [he] sees” in his chosen materials. Chief among these tools is the concept of mechanics of speculation that is central to the book.

Kunzelman argues that mechanics of speculation in video games are seen in “moments of slight interaction,” often “so routine as to be invisible,” and yet “have robust effects on how our subjectivities form, how we interface with racial logics, and how we frame potential futures for humanity and the planet we share.” Video games do things, and some of their most potent actions can be discerned at the “formal” and “microscopic” level of moment-to-moment mechanics, while nevertheless having societal, and sometimes even planetary effects. For Kunzelman, the uniquely science-fictional of these mechanics are the ones that “activate[] speculation within a player,” allowing a player to “swerve and transform their expectations,” exploring “something more than the material conditions of our world.” What makes Kunzelman’s argument compelling, however, is not that his mechanics of speculation flee this world in some escapist fantasy, but rather find their motivation in the “contingency” of the world, a contingency that makes possible “radically other worlds or potentials for our own world,” glimmers of which we might first discover at the “micro-level of interaction” while playing a video game.

Importantly, nothing about such mechanics is guaranteed to be liberatory. Indeed, much of Kunzelman’s analysis is concerned with the failures of speculative interaction and its capture by capitalism, racism, and ecologically destructive global interests. But in the same way, mechanics of speculation can never be entirely foreclosed, creating space for action wherever player and game meet. Every time a player is prompted for input, video games “create a condition within which something unexpected could happen,” an input-output structure that Kunzelman considers to be fundamental to games. This argument could be read fruitfully against Ian Bogost’s early game studies works, Unit Operations (2006) and Persuasive Games (2007), wherein the concept of the “unit operation,” a “discrete, compressed element[] of fungible meaning” takes a similarly fundamental position. Where I have been critical of Bogost’s “purposes of persuasion” in the past—that is, “assessment”, “deliberation”, and “conversations”—which are made possible in games by the unit operations he theorizes, Kunzelman’s mechanics of speculation improve on Bogost’s rhetorical operations by introducing the possibility of “direct intervention” to the situation. Bogost’s deployment of another French philosopher, Alain Badiou (who happens to be Quentin Meillassoux’s teacher), never attains the militancy that is core to Badiou’s project, and though I would not consider Kunzelman’s book an activist text, it is refreshingly frank about the oppositional and contested reality of political life.

In his conclusion, Kunzelman makes no claim to solutions, and only gestures toward the “hope” of “speculations that free rather than imprison.” And yet, insofar as Kunzelman is primarily concerned with action, with the interactive subtleties of ideology in play, with the subject-forming potentiality of games before and beyond any rhetorical moves a game makes, his book presents scholars, designers, and players of games with a radical instrument for speculating about and working toward “radical possible outcomes” for the world in which we live, outcomes that “give[] us something beyond ourselves” and take us past the “very edges of what we can conceive as possible arrangements of the world.” Mechanics of speculation are not mysteries but tools, or more bluntly, bricks, as Brian Massumi writes of concepts in the translator’s foreword to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980): “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” A concept is not something to merely converse about; a concept “is an act.” It is in this conceptual mode that Kunzelman leaves his readers, beckoning us to delight in the “speculative breakage” that happens “in the day-to-day experience of games,” to throw bricks through the firmament in order to catch a glimpse of the world to come.

Train Burglaries

2022-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

A break from physics and philosophy: how about some good ol’ heists? Specifically, train heists? Back in January, CBSLA reported the story “Union Pacific: Train Robberies Up 356%,” and the images and videos are quite spectacular. Thousands of packages burgled from slow moving trains around Union Station, leaving the surrounding area positively smothered with cardboard detritus. Photojournalist John Schreiber has an excellent thread to accompany the article. To make matters worse, a train subsequently derailed in that very area, with footage and photos shared by photographer Mike Ade Ojo in another thread.

Scale Relativity

2022-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Last year, Terence Blake tweeted about Mark Wilson and the concept of “scale relativity,” and I have had the related clippings sitting in my notes since then, unsure of how to proceed—mostly because the work exceeds me, as with much of my research and reading of late. So perhaps a summary will suffice for now.

Laurent Nottale defines the theory of scale relativity in his paper “Scale-Relativity and Quantization of the Universe. I. Theoretical Framework” (1996) as “extend[ing] Einstein’s principle of relativity to scale transformations of resolutions,” and writes that the theory is “based on the giving up of the axiom of differentiability of the space-time continuum.” He goes on to argue that, as a consequence of giving up this axiom, the “geometry of space-time must be fractal, i.e., explicitly resolution-dependent.” This fractal structure allows for the breaking of “time reversibility” at the “infinitesimal level,” and so for the transformation of “classical mechanics into a generalized, quantum-like mechanics.”

In his “Scale Relativity, Fractal Space-Time, and Morphogenesis of Structures” (2000), Nottale continues his argument, writing that solving the resultant “generalized Schrödinger equation … provides us with a theory of morphogenesis and self-organization,” because solving this equation “yield[s] probability densities, which are interpreted as a tendency for the system to make structures.”

In “On Optimism and Opportunism in Applied Mathematics: Mark Wilson Meets John Von Neumann on Mathematical Ontology” (2004), Michael Stöltzner writes about the relationship between mathematics and physics in Mark Wilson’s work. I also saved Valia Allori’s article “Primitive Ontology in a Nutshell” (2015) here, but the link with Wilson and scale relativity is unclear after all these months. Perhaps a related paper on ResearchGate where I found Nottale’s papers?

The works of Wilson’s that are of primary interest to Blake are his Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour (2006) and Physics Avoidance: Essays in Conceptual Strategy (2017). Blake links Thomas Ryckman’s review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews in which Wilson is characterized as “the moral compass of analytic philosophy,” as well as a video discussion of scale relativity in Mark Wilson’s work from the Subset of Theoretical Practice (their previous video is on Laurent Nottale). It looks like Wilson has a new book out this year, Imitation of Rigor: An Alternative History of Analytic Philosophy (2022), which “attempts to reconnect analytic philosophy with the evolving practicalities within science from which many of its grander concerns originally sprang.” Fascinating stuff.

Zettelkasten

2022-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Back in June, over on the assemblag.es Mastodon instance, CJ Eller and I had a productive exchange about modes of knowledge organization (see CJ’s “Garbage Heap,” my “Compost Epistemology,” CJ’s “Communities of Compost,” and our short discussion). Subsequently, in reading about Zettelkasten (slip box systems), I was linked to Niklas Luhmann’s “Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account” (1981), in which he writes:

It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion. Somehow we must mark differences, and capture distinctions which are either implicitly or explicitly contained in concepts. Only if we have secured in this way the constancy of the schema that produces information, can the consistency of the subsequent processes of processing information be guaranteed.

I do not use a Zettelkasten, but this website, the notes and this journal (and its repository), do a similar work of marking differences and capturing distinctions, of securing the constancy of schemas and producing information. The difference is that this website uses a simpler organizational method than Luhmann’s register: it is organized in time. I try to capture what I am thinking about and working on as I go, so that when it becomes necessary to make some official statement, I can trace back a line of inquiry through various series of writings, pinning specific conceptualizations to various periods of my life by way of a simple date tag. There is nothing novel here, no special method, but for now, this is how I think with writing.

Awareness Contexts

2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In Gary Alan Fine’s Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (1983), Fine cites the earlier work by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, “Awareness Contexts and Social Interaction” (1964), drawing on the four awareness contexts they propose—open, closed, suspicion, and pretense—to articulate his own theory of frames and games.

Coming back across Fine’s work recently reminded me of Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit series School of Stealth, and particularly the third part of this series, “How do Stealth Games Deal with Detection?” It struck me that Glaser and Strauss’s awareness contexts map quite neatly to detection states in video games: closed is hidden, suspicion is looking, and open is found. However, the pretense context is something of an outlier. At first, I thought pretense might map to a disguised state, like we see in the Hitman games (2016, 2018, 2022). But on the contrary, in Glaser and Strauss’s framework, disguised would actually also be a closed context. Pretense emphasizes that awareness contexts are not so much about stealth, but rather about sociality. As Fine writes, a “pretense awareness context applies when both parties are aware [of each other’s identities] but pretend that they are not.” Awareness contexts are not about hiding in shadows, but about hiding in groups, about the strategic concealment and disclosure of identity.

So, then, what kind of social stealth games might we make, where pretense is the preeminent mode? Perhaps we can find examples in detective games like Her Story (2015), Return of the Obra Dinn (2016), and Paradise Killer (2020), but what other types of games might there be for us to find, or to make?

Bridge Laws

2022-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Terence Blake’s work has been quite influential for me over the years—specifically, his conception of the “incommensurable.” This line of thought can be traced back to his paper “Image is the Measure: Notes on Incommensurability and the Dream,” which in turn emerges out of the tradition of French continental philosophy. Blake considers his work a “metaphysical research program” in the mode of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, and I have taken this heuristic to be characteristic of my own method as well.

In a recent blog post, Blake writes about “bridge laws” and “catgory-crossings” (as opposed to “category-mistakes”), those procedures whereby thought can “bridge the gap of incommensurability between a general theory and the various observational auxiliary theories needed to specify its empirical consequences and to make it testable.” For Blake, bridge laws are not only to be found in the sciences, but should be deployed between philosophy and the “various practices and procedures that instantiate and inspire its concepts.”

I watched this video from Quanta Magazine the other day on the Langlands program, which emerged in the late 1960s from the construction of bridge laws between number theory and geometry. I think of this quotation from Deleuze: “I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician…. Bergson says that modern science hasn’t found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.” So I wonder, what might be the bridge law between the Langlands program and metaphysics? Or to cross in the other direction, what might be the bridge law between the Langlands program and physics? This latter crossing is already being explored.

Materials for further reading can be found, as per usual, in the Codeberg repository for this journal.

Art and Space

2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

In 1979, Jean-Pierre Luminet published his paper “Image of a Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk” in Astronomy and Astrophysics in which he presented the world’s first simulated photograph of a black hole and its accretion disk. In 2019, the first real image of a black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and published in the paper “Focus on the First Event Horizon Telescope Results” in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Luminet remarked on the striking continuity between the two images (and other early computer simulations that followed), art prefiguring radio imagery by way of mathematics.

In 1953, Jackson Pollock painted The Deep, which hangs in the Centre Pompidou today. In 2007, Olivier Michelon wrote of the painting: “The work resembles a cloud of brushed and poured milky paint, a cream mass in the center of which a slit discovers a matte black background accented with red. By approaching the atmospheric sensations of contemporary color-field painting, Jackson Pollock delivers with The Deep a vision that has remained singular in his career. Dug in the center of a torn nebula, this abyssal space still resonates, indicating an unexplored direction.”

In 2022, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory released a MeerKAT radio telescope image of the galactic centre. What Michelon could not have known is that Pollock’s torn nebula somehow presaged this image—not simply a nebula but the heart of the galaxy itself, radio bubbles bursting from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. A saturated abyss, an overflowing void. We can echo Hans-Georg Gadamer and say: the mode of being of nature is “pure self-presentation.”

Destroy This Computer

2022-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

I believe I was first put on to this quotation by something on Alexander Galloway’s blog, perhaps in relation to his Uncomputable (2021). Regardless, this part of an interview with Milan Kundera for the Paris Review has stuck with me:

I always think of a Czech composer I have passionately admired since childhood: Leoš Janácek. He is one of the greatest masters of modern music. His determination to strip music to its essentials was revolutionary. Of course, every musical composition involves a great deal of technique: exposition of the themes, their development, variations, polyphonic work (often very automatic), filling in the orchestration, the transitions, et cetera. Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always existed in composers’ heads—if they had to, composers could write sonatas without a single original idea, just by “cybernetically” expanding on the rules of composition. Janácek’s purpose was to destroy this computer! Brutal juxtaposition instead of transitions; repetition instead of variation—and always straight to the heart of things: only the note with something essential to say is entitled to exist. It is nearly the same with the novel; it too is encumbered by “technique,” by rules that do the author’s work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into its historical setting, fill up the lifetime of the characters with useless episodes. Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations. My purpose is like Janácek’s: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic word-spinning.

These computers are diagrams (of composition, of technique). Not all diagrams ought to be destroyed, only those that have lapsed into a dogmatic automatism.

Become Mud

2022-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

With Russia in apparent retreat from Ukraine, I was reminded of this Twitter thread by @leothotsky69420 from back in March: “become mud.” Responding to a thread on truck maintenance practices and mud season in Ukraine, they write: “become mud. mud is alive. mud says no to war and yes to new life, mud is earthseed.” They continue, citing @yung_lacanian: “The point of walking without rhythm is asignification, total synthesis with the milieu. Becoming Sand.” They also cite the dialogue between Zhuangzi and Huizi: “It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful.” Another tweet: “mud is counterlogistics and lying flat. mud is antiwork and pets the fish.” Pointing to David Graeber and David Wengrow: “were our ancestors’ minds trained by mud? are we more mud than we already know? mud as teacher, mud as family. mud as life, mud as death.” Mud is a form of destituent power: “make the distinctions muddy,” “make the ground soggy,” “turn lakes and parking lots into wetlands and estuaries, to spread complexity and biodiversity, to make our daily lives dependent on such a myriad of different relations and worlds and practices that our lives could never again be separated from their specific forms.” Finally, a transverse invocation of scripture: “the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them.”

Kolyuchin Island

2022-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

No theory, math, or games today. Instead, here are some polar bears. In September 2021, photographer Dmitry Kokh shot these incredible photos of a group of polar bears who took over an abandoned Soviet polar weather station on Kolyuchin Island, in the far northeastern Chukotka Autonomous Okrug of Russia.

Numbers and Games

2022-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

The fact that the description of games in combinatorial game theory uses the notation { L | R }, a deliberate application of Dedekind’s cut by which he constructed the set of the real numbers, strikes me as quite remarkable.

A game is defined as the “list of possible ‘moves’ that two players, called left and right, can make. The game position resulting from any move can be considered to be another game. This idea of viewing games in terms of their possible moves to other games leads to a recursive mathematical definition of games that is standard in combinatorial game theory.” { L | R } is the notation used to write the definition of a given game. L or left indicates “the set of game positions that the left player can move to” and R or right “the set of game positions that the right player can move to.” Of course, this definition of a game precludes those other games that are not played out through a series of moves between positions (a closure of understanding that I find problematic. See my A Game, Perhaps). Nevertheless, the parallel between sets of numbers and sets of games fascinates me.

The wiki article for the Dedekind cut does not use { L | R } for its notation, but rather { A | B }. It’s John Conway who makes the connection explicit in chapter zero of On Numbers and Games (1976):

Dedekind (and before him the author—thought to be Eudoxus—of the fifth book of Euclid) constructed the real numbers from the rationals. His method was to divide the rationals into two sets L and R in such a way that no number of L was greater than any number of R, and use this “section” to define a new number (L | R) in the case that neither L nor R had an extremal point.

Conway’s book quickly exceeds my abilities, but I’ll be chewing on this connection for some time. I have already written about the combinatorial quality of games (see my notes “Combinatorics” and “Recombinatorics”), so this presents a new region of study for me to explore over the coming years.

Jupiter

2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

The “Manifesto for the Committee to Abolish Outer Space” is a text that deeply frustrates me and yet one that I think about often. It is a foreclosure of political possibility akin to anarcho-primitivism that refuses to think with those modes of radical thought that have found inspiration in space for mobilization here on earth. Outer space precedes us; it is ancestral, as Meillassoux would term it in his After Finitude (2008). As such, outer space presents an absolute pivot for thought upon which both radical and reactionary projects can turn (for instance, consider the difference between Russian Cosmism and Italian Futurism, respectively). Outer space is the great neutral (which does not mean it is without features or traits; I am here thinking with Deleuze, Logic of Sensation (1981) and Barthes, The Neutral (2002)).

Coming across Björn Jónsson’s processing work on the JunoCam’s raw images of Jupiter, however, inevitably returned the Manifesto to my mind. Jonsson’s images come in true colour and enhanced palettes, and though both are beautiful, the enhanced images are undeniably arresting. And yet, as the Manifesto reads: “They told us that outer space is beautiful. They showed us nebulae, big pink and blue clouds draped in braids of purple stars … [But] the colors are lies, the nebulae are lies. These images are collated and pigmented by computers; they’re not a scene you could ever see out the porthole of your spaceship. Space isn’t even ugly; it isn’t anything.” There is a project at work here in these images, a visionary project and a project of vision. Outer space is ancestral, but these images are decidedly human products.

I mentioned back in July that I was reading Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (1958), and have since finished it. One thread that runs throughout the book comes from a Weizsäcker quotation in chapter three: “Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science” (23). In a very Heideggerian way, Heisenberg argues that “what we perceive is already perceived as something” (45), but rather than use this claim to argue for the ontological distinction of human perception, he instead uses it to deprioritize the human, arguing for the ineluctable determination of thought by the real (compare my note “Generic Science: Heraclitus, Intelligence, and the Common”). François Laruelle has described a similar cascade of orders in his essay “On the Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color,” found in Dark Nights of the Universe (2013). His terms are the “Earth, the World, [and] the Universe” (1). For Laruelle, “Man works the Earth, lives in the World, thinks according to the Universe,” or put otherwise, the “Earth is man’s ground, the World his neighbor, the Universe his secret” (1). In Weizsäcker and Heisenberg’s terms, the universe is nature, the world is man, and the earth is natural science. The early Heidegger mistakenly makes the world into the universe, but later he rediscovers the “night” that precedes the world and makes its light possible (see my note, “Chasm, 2: The Element”). This night is Laruelle’s “opacity of the real,” the “without-Ground which fixes light in the remote,” the very “Radical of color” (3-4). The universe requires a different vision. Outer space might not be anything, but it is a potent nothing.

Years ago, when I was employed as a barista, I typically worked the 5am to 10am shift before catching the bus to school. Leaving the house in the dark, I would be greeted as I stepped out onto the front porch by the bright spot of Jupiter in the night sky. This became a tradition for me, an intimate moment shared with this celestial body nearly 600 million kilometers away. So far, yet so near, Jupiter became almost interior to myself in this quiet ritual, this silent moment saturated with the universe. C.A.O.S. wants “to create a future,” to “return the cosmos to its proper domain.” But these are not far away things; what outer space, the black universe, teaches us, what the light of Jupiter taught me all those years ago, is that the future and the cosmos are already here, a secret that we must only learn how to see.

Being Meat

2022-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Being Meat: Review of Tom Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity.” Ancillary Review of Books, August 29, 2022. https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2022/08/29/being-meat-review-of-tom-tylers-game-animals-video-games-and-humanity/.

Mirrors: Zotero

Review

To talk about Tom Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity, we need to talk about meat. Indeed, if Tyler’s final chapter is to be taken at its word, meat is the point of the whole book—or rather, the point is to persuade readers to give up their taste for meat. Ranging in topic from classics to apologetics to nutrition, this chapter does not so much present an argument to tie together the disparate essays comprising the book, but rather, in an all-too-clever twist, characterizes the whole collection as a “Trojan Horse” for a “vegan sensibility.” This move does a disservice to Tyler’s project, undercutting what I found to be a brisk, insightful, and accessible study of the myriad relationships between animals and games.

Tyler is a lecturer in digital culture at the University of Leeds, with research focused on cultural studies, animal studies, and game studies. Game collects a number of previously published essays (including the final essay, “Trojan Horses”), as well as a few new ones ranging across these interests. It is an eclectic sampling, which Tyler himself notes in the first chapter of the book:

The incitements to think differently about animals and video games arrive, in these essays, from many, varied sources: from children’s TV shows and Old English etymologies, to be sure, but also from encyclopedias, classical mythology and medieval fables, literary fiction and film, regional newspapers, memoirs, poetry, Edwardian comedy and Shakespearean tragedy, contemporary art, musical nomenclature, theological tracts, ethology, entomology, ichthyology, primatology, ecological and environmental studies, hunting and fishing manuals, sitcoms and the works of philosophy, and, in one instance, the collected letters of the 4th Earl of Chesterfield.

It is this variety of references that makes Game a valuable contribution to the field of game studies, and though I quibble with Tyler’s argumentative framing in his conclusion, I nevertheless find myself enticed and enlightened by what he has to say.

In Chapter One, Tyler locates his interest in games by way of etymology, tracing the history of three distinct senses of the word: game as amusement, game as hunted animals, and game as attitude. In Chapters Two and Four, Tyler articulates a theory of existence that challenges the logic that reduces the “concrete individual” to a “mere instance of the type,” to a shadow of the Platonic idea. His is an enumerative method whereby one “attempt[s] to isolate and differentiate one individual after another… from a series of their kind.” It is this method that allows him, in Chapters Six, Eight, and Nine, to elaborate an ethical position that we might describe as being meat. Drawing on philosopher Val Plumwood’s “prey perspective,” Tyler proceeds to challenge the use of animals as “ciphers” or “absent referents” to absolve human beings of their predacious desires, instead contending for the “unique existence and experiences” that all meat-being entails. Drawing on philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his analysis of the paintings of Francis Bacon, Tyler argues that, in the “vitality” that meat signifies in both games and life—sustenance, restorative, enhancement, and resource—there is at once a “deep identity” or “zone of indiscernibility” that is revealed. There is a common “indistinction” between consuming and consumed bodies, both of which are shown to be “profoundly vulnerable” and not so easily held separate from each other.

Chapters Three, Five, and Seven play with animal sensation, diminutive terms for animals, and fishing, respectively, and Chapter Ten is a loosely-related essay on consumption and the meaning of bullshit. Chapter Eleven considers questions of misanthropy and pathology, priming readers for an extended discussion of normality in Chapter Twelve, “Difficulties.” Though I find much in the preceding chapters to be of value, this chapter is perhaps the best single essay in the book, one that intersects with quite a lot of other contemporary work in game studies, and which would be a useful excerpt to read for students and designers of games alike. Tyler’s “Difficulties” can be read productively alongside Chapter Five, “Difficulty,” of Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games (2020, reviewed for ARB here), the entirety of Amanda Phillips’ Gamer Trouble (2020, reviewed for the No Escape book club in five parts, starting here), and Meghna Jayanth’s “White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design” (2021). Tyler’s addition to this ongoing analysis and critique of the “normate” player allows us to welcome the “other-than-human” to the table, further expanding “the modes and means of play” available to us. Here, Tyler once again returns to the singular and concrete, arguing that “we must move in our thinking from a hollow Everyplayer to the particular gamers, in all their varied specificity, who willfully subject themselves to the difficulties of playing a game.” Particular, specific, willful—this is the meaty subjectivity we can take from Tyler’s study.

It is for this reason that I find myself frustrated with Tyler’s treatment of his own book as a “Trojan Horse,” a mere apologetic. This is not to say that the “vegan sensibility” for which Tyler advocates is wrong. As the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health reported in 2019, a global transition to diets that are healthy for individuals, communities, and the world will require “significant dietary shifts” toward those “rich in plant-based foods and with fewer animal source foods,” and specifically a reduction “by more than 50%” of “foods such as red meat and sugar.” The Commission argues that a “radical transformation of the global food system is urgently needed,” regardless of one’s position on the ethics of meat-eating in and of itself. In a time of climate collapse, our relationships with animals are not subsidiary to the problem but central to it, and should be seen as a necessary inclusion in all conversations about planetary survival and restoration. Perhaps it is just a difference in style, but for my part, I wish that Tyler had come out and made such an argument plainly, rather than reduce the range of compelling ideas and positions in his book to a homogeneous oneness.

Indeed, though uneven, the ambulatory and ruminative quality of Game is, in the end, its strength. Game is a procedural exploration of what it means to be a body, what it means to be meat, in all the willful singularity that such a being necessitates. Much more than an apologetic for veganism (though it certainly might be convincing to this end for some), Tyler’s Game is a thoughtful reflection on what it means to be human in a hypermediated world on the verge of breakdown, with an eye toward a more ethical multispecies future to come.

Production and Pedagogy

2022-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Production and Pedagogy: Teaching Game Development in the University Classroom.” Presented at the TWU CREATE Conference, August 26, 2022. https://zenodo.org/record/7036777.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

What might university instructors learn of pedagogy when their work is approached from the perspective of production? More specifically, how might the university classroom be transformed when instructors actively shift their focus as educators away from pedagogy and toward production? Drawing on two academic years of hands on video game production work with students in their second, third, and fourth years at Trinity Western University, and informed by Jacques Rancière’s critical project first articulated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), and more recently elaborated upon in the The Emancipated Spectator (2008), this paper argues that an educational paradigm of ‘production,’ counterposed to an educational paradigm that we can loosely and imprecisely describe as traditional ‘pedagogy,’ makes possible a transformation of the university classroom from a domain of stultifying explication into a domain of emancipatory exploration. With further theoretical support from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommmons (2013), this paper proposes tactics whereby teachers might short circuit the professionalization of academic instruction and the commodification and alienation of its students, so fostering emancipatory and egalitarian learning environments that encourage students to take hold of the means of production themselves.

Keywords: Game Development, Game Production, Pedagogy, Jacques Rancière, Michel de Certeau, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten

Production and Pedagogy

For several years now I have been interested in, and indeed troubled by, the power dynamics of the pedagogical relationship. Something about teaching as a profession, as the execution of a certain authority, feels like a betrayal of the very impetus of teaching itself, a betrayal of the dynamics of the classroom, of study, those same dynamics that swept me along into graduate studies and then into a teaching role, and that keep me coming back, semester after semester, year after year.¹ I have stayed with this trouble, interrogating it periodically, but always find myself unable to resolve these feelings—apart from whatever statements of refusal I can muster.² But as time wears on, it becomes ever more pressing that I arrive at such an elusive resolution, especially if I am to continue gleaning my food from the university’s halls. It is appropriate, then, with this ceaseless forward progress of the clock, that it is with time that I will begin.

To talk about pedagogy, we need to talk about its past, its present, and its future. I am not a historian, so I will leave the chronological consideration of these temporal factors to such an individual, and instead focus on time as a complete structure—an existential structure, we might say—a structure that we can understand as being formally constitutive of human beings in the given context of the educational institution.³ To be as clear as possible, the basic claim with which we begin is that we human beings exist in time, cannot escape from time, and so our projects (such as education) are necessarily temporal in their make-up.

Let us discuss the temporality of pedagogy. Firstly, the past of pedagogy is a past characterized by ignorance. As Jacques Rancière writes in The Emancipated Spectator, “the very logic of the pedagogical relationship … is to abolish the distance between [the teacher’s] knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus.”⁴ The student wallows in their ignorance, oblivious to their state, but the teacher has left his own ignorance behind, left it in the past. In this framework, to become a teacher is to gain the “knowledge of ignorance,” to be able to say to a student, you know nothing, and I will teach you what you do not know.⁵ There is a “distance separating knowledge from ignorance,” a distance that the teacher leverages in order to show the student how their ignorance is the very “opposite of knowledge,” a distance that functions by way of the “interminable practice of the ‘step ahead’” that separates the teacher “from the one whom he is supposed to train to join him,” that separates the teacher from his own ignorant past.⁶ This temporal move permits the teacher to distinguish “two intelligences: one that knows what ignorance consists in and one that does not.”⁷ The pedagogical relationship depends upon the institution of this “radical difference” between ignorant past and knowledgeable present.

Secondly, then, the present of pedagogy is concerned with the establishment of a position from which the authority of the teacher’s voice can emanate. As Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life, to be a teacher is to convert one’s “competence into authority,” to “exchange” it and take on the title of “Expert.”⁸ As the newly minted expert consolidates his position, “he abandons the competence he possesses as his authority is extended further and further, drawn out of its orbit by social demands and/or political responsibilities.”⁹ The expert learns that his role as a teacher was never actually about teaching, but rather only about power, about institutional priorities and economic processes. If this stark revelation concerns the expert, he can speak of the solemn responsibility to train the leaders of the next generation, eliding the “abuse of knowledge” that created the “basis of the place” upon which he “pronounces” on this and other very important subjects.¹⁰ In constructing the radical difference between his own ignorant past and his present expertise, the expert “submit[s] himself to [an] initiatory practice,” a practice that provides him entry to a new “socioeconomic order.”¹¹ The expert, with his knowledge of ignorance in hand, may speak “as an ordinary man, who can receive authority in exchange for knowledge, just as one receives a paycheck in exchange for work.”¹² As ordinary as this exchange may seem, it is only the expert who is permitted to participate in this game of “economic powers and symbolic authorities,” because he has been initiated, and he is in on the secret—his present position depends on it.¹³

Thirdly and finally, the future of pedagogy is the absolute radicalization of the distance between ignorant student and knowledgeable professional. Pedagogy must always create distance from its past, must always be a step ahead, and so the position of the teacher, of the expert, cannot be allowed to remain, to dwell. To make another existential claim, this means that the future is the “primary meaning” of pedagogy.¹⁴ As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write in The Undercommons, the “university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it.”¹⁵ Pedagogy must fly toward the future to prevent being erased by its past. Because of the temporal constitution of the expert’s position, its concretion in the disavowal of the very past that authorizes the expert’s speech, teachers are forced to get “beyond” teaching if they hope to become experts, to become professionals.¹⁶ “If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university,” a pathology that threatens the powers and authorities of the institution, the powers and authorities that allow the university to continue initiating new professionals, always a step ahead with yet one more beyond for these professionals to reach.¹⁷ The pathology of teaching is a threat because it reveals that the past of pedagogy is always right there, the radical difference between knowledge and ignorance not so large as the institution requires. Before professionalism, before expertise, “there is the experience of being taught and of teaching”—indeed, it is “teaching that brings us in.”¹⁸ Power cannot abide such close contact with its subjects, because contact threatens erasure, the collapse of the symbolic order into tautology. The university needs teaching labour, is self-identical with this labour, but maintains its power in the annihilation of that which authorizes it, the teaching that must only be a phase.

Past, present, future—the temporality of pedagogy here presented figures as a seemingly inescapable horizon. But, as an unprofessional teacher, tasked with the formation of new game development professionals, I find myself in a strange and tenuous position. Our game production courses—beginning with a single semester in GAME 110 and GAME 290, and continuing into the upper level two semester courses GAME 390 and GAME 490—unite students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and ask them to make a game. Programmers and artists, designers and musicians, these students bring what knowledge they have to the studio, and the instructor is merely there to facilitate the process. Certainly, I can instruct students in the use of tools with which I have familiarity, or impart my opinions about what makes good game design and what does not, but in the last instance, I cannot hope to be an expert in all of the areas of specialty required by the project. I frequently find myself without answers, unable to provide solutions, required to collaborate with my students to achieve our goals. I am constantly caught up against my own limitations, and yet the outcomes of the course do not go unrealized. We make a game; my students graduate as professionals; the knowledge required to do so was there all along.

I do not believe that there is something metaphysically distinct that separates the game development classroom from any other classroom in the university. Rather, it is in game production that I discovered a point of inversion for my own pedagogical practice, a point of inversion for the entire existential structure of pedagogy here elaborated. Harney and Moten write of the “tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond,” the “self-incurred minority” that chooses not to overcome the supposed “pathology” of teaching, the “impractical,” the “naive,” and the “unprofessional.”¹⁹ The future these moles choose is about “not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood.”²⁰ This is a profound upending of the futurity of pedagogy, because it refuses the “individualisation of research” in a prophetic “disclosure of the commons.”²¹ The past is here—that is how “prophetic organization” has always worked, that which “predicts its own organization,” that which was here the whole time.²²

Where the expert exchanges their competence for authority, the game production classroom is marked by its “operations.”²³ De Certeau writes about how authority always speaks from a position, from a “proper place,” but in the “ways of operating” of game development, we see that knowledge in action is organized “relative to situations,” never as an absolute locus of power.²⁴ These operations take the form of “tricks”—try these key strokes, use this shortcut, download that application—the skillful means whereby one takes advantage of the “opportunities afforded by a particular occasion.”²⁵ An operational trick is precisely not an ordered form of knowledge that can be imparted from expert to student; tricks are scrounged, gathered, and collected, constituting a “repertory with which users carry out operations of their own.”²⁶ The “facts” of operation are in no way universal, but rather form a “lexicon of users’ practices.”²⁷ Through operational tricks, students in the game development classroom “make do with what they have,” and in so doing learn things I could not have taught them.²⁸ Like workers on the factory floor, students take what they find and make something of their own, “divert[ing] time” from the university into “products whose sole purpose is to signify [their] own capabilities through [their] work.”²⁹ The game production classroom is entirely disinterested in the pedagogical gap between knowledge and ignorance. Production begins with a simple enunciation: here are the tools, here are the machines: now make something.

And so we return to the past of pedagogy, the past of ignorance, a past that now shows itself for the false construction that it is. As Rancière writes, “there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors.”³⁰ Pedagogy would declare that “such knowledge is merely an ignoramus’s knowledge,” but this is precisely how knowledge works in the actuality of its operations.³¹ A student in the production studio “advances by comparing what she discovers with what she already knows,” is “concerned solely with knowing more, with knowing what she did not yet know.”³² The only distance here “is not the gulf between her ignorance and the schoolmaster’s knowledge,” but rather the distance of the “path” from here to there. In game production we learn that “[e]verywhere there are starting points, intersections and junctions that enable us to learn something new.”³³ A narrative designer learns scripting; an artist learns project management; a programmer learns level design; at every point, in every moment, there are students learning, exploring, and making do.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière puts forward the remarkable claim that “all intelligence is equal.”³⁴ Drawing on the “intellectual adventure” of a peculiar French lecturer, Joseph Jacotot, who taught French to a group of Flemish speaking students without “explanation” or “explication,” indeed without any traditional “teaching” whatsoever, Rancière sets about overturning the “enforced stultification” that he considers to be the basic principle of education in this pedagogical mode.³⁵ Rancière relays how Jacotot, in his experiment with non-teaching, had the revelation that it is the explicator “who constitutes the incapable as such,” and that the “pedagogical myth” of the existence of “an inferior intelligence and a superior one” was precisely that, a myth.³⁶ When “two individuals … in the first moments of life” can be seen to have “absolutely the same intelligence,” doing “exactly the same things, with the same goal, with the same intention,” there is no such difference, no gap.³⁷ For Rancière, “these two humans have equal intelligence.”³⁸ So why is it that later, when these two individuals are observed again, they “are no longer doing the same things, are not obtaining the same results”?³⁹ Rancière argues that it is a matter of attention—for the two individuals in question, as they grow, their “[c]ircumstances become diverse, and [they] develop[] [their] intellectual capacities as those circumstances demand.”⁴⁰ The human being is “a will served by an intelligence,” and it is this will that determines a student’s success in a given subject.⁴¹ When education begins with the knowledge of ignorance, the first lesson that is taught is how to say “I can’t.”⁴² But if the “virtue of our intelligence is less in knowing than in doing,” less in explication than in exploration, if the focus of our educational practice shifts from pedagogy to production, the first lesson is altogether different.⁴³

Rancière recounts another of Jacotot’s lessons, this time in drawing and painting, a lesson that I have found profoundly useful in my own instruction.

We begin by asking the student to talk about what he is going to represent—let’s say a drawing to copy. It would be dangerous to give the child explanations of the measures he must take before beginning his work. We know the reason for this: the risk that the child will sense in this, his inability. We will thus trust in the child’s will to imitate. But we are going to verify that will. A few days before putting a pencil in his hand, we will give him the drawing to look at, and we will ask him to talk about it. Perhaps he will only say a few things at first—for example, ‘The head is pretty.’ But we will repeat the exercise; we will show him the same head and ask him to look again and speak again, at the risk of repeating what he already said. Thus he will become more attentive, more aware of his ability and capable of imitating. We know the reason for this effect, something completely different from visual memorization and manual training. What the child has verified by this exercise is that painting is a language, that the drawing he has been asked to imitate speaks to him.⁴⁴

This is the first lesson, and in it we “verify that all wanting to do is a wanting to say and that this wanting to say is addressed to any reasonable being.”⁴⁵ Such instruction, such cultivation, is “not a matter of making great painters; it’s a matter of making the emancipated.”⁴⁶ The knowledge of ignorance requires that the teacher say to the student, you know nothing, and I will teach you what you do not know; but in working for the intellectual emancipation of our students, we make “people capable of saying, ‘me too, I’m a painter,’ a statement that contains nothing in the way of pride, only the reasonable feeling of power that belongs to any reasonable being.”⁴⁷ And here, we can substitute the terms for whatever discipline it is we are responsible for teaching. For myself, it is my singular goal that my students be able to leave my classroom at the end of the semester and say, me too, I’m a game developer, that they be able to look at the tools and machines before them and say, I can.

References

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London, UK: Verso, 2021.

——. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Stein, Eric. “Teaching for Food,” April 20, 2018. https://steinea.work/2018/04/20/teaching-for-food.

——. “Teaching for Food, 2: Not to Be Called Rabbi,” May 29, 2020. https://steinea.work/2020/05/29/teaching-for-food-2.

Notes

Eric Stein, “Teaching for Food,” April 20, 2018, https://steinea.work/2018/04/20/teaching-for-food. ↩
Eric Stein, “Teaching for Food, 2: Not to Be Called Rabbi,” May 29, 2020, https://steinea.work/2020/05/29/teaching-for-food-2. ↩
There are significant problems with Heidegger that I have discussed elsewhere, but when we start talking about time, it’s hard not to reach for him. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 364: “the being of this being [Dasein, which at this moment is the human being] is constituted by historicity.” Thinking of time structurally is also something unavoidably Heideggerian. Contrary to “vulgar” temporality, the “pure succession of nows,” existential temporality consists in its “ecstasies,” “the phenomena of future, having-been, and present” held together “in their equiprimordiality” as the structure that is the “‘outside of itself’ in and for itself.” See Being and Time, 314. ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, UK: Verso, 2021), 8. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 7. ↩
De Certeau, 7. ↩
De Certeau, 8. ↩
De Certeau, 8. ↩
De Certeau, 8. ↩
De Certeau, 8. ↩
Heidegger, Being and Time, 313. “The ‘before’ and the ‘ahead of’ indicate the future that first makes possible in general the fact that Dasein can be in such a way that it is concerned about its potentiality-of-being. The self-project grounded in the ‘for the sake of itself’ in the future is an essential quality of existentiality. Its primary meaning is the future.” ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 27. ↩
Harney and Moten, 28. ↩
Harney and Moten, 27. ↩
Harney and Moten, 27. ↩
Harney and Moten, 28. ↩
Harney and Moten, 28. ↩
Harney and Moten, 28. ↩
Harney and Moten, 28. ↩
De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 21. ↩
De Certeau, 30, 38, 21. ↩
De Certeau, 26, 37. ↩
De Certeau, 31. ↩
De Certeau, 31. ↩
De Certeau, 18. ↩
De Certeau, 25. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 8-9. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 46. ↩
Rancière, 3. ↩
Rancière, 7. ↩
Rancière, 50. ↩
Rancière, 50. ↩
Rancière, 50. ↩
Rancière, 51. ↩
Rancière, 52. ↩
Rancière, 52. ↩
Rancière, 65. ↩
Rancière, 66. ↩
Rancière, 66. ↩
Rancière, 66-67. ↩
Rancière, 67. ↩

Universal Design

2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

I have been thinking about useability a lot of late, especially with respect to how people interface with abstract forms like knowledge or code, and the ways in which abstraction mediates use. Today in my ongoing study I learned about universal design, which got me thinking about design for games and the web beyond aspirations of useability. Universal design is a vision of useability or accessibility not as a reaction to a hostile environment, but as a foundational principle for any given environment we might create.

What initially pointed me in the direction of universal design was a link to a forthcoming book by Jennifer L. Pusateri, Transform Your Teaching with Universal Design for Learning. Whether or not this will be merely another pedagogical technology recuperated by institutional education is to be seen, but the underlying framework of universal design will likely remain of interest. To this end, I have converted the source document from NCSU that is linked above to markdown, and saved it to my /journal repository at Codeberg for permanent reference.

Artemis

2022-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been reading more about NASA’s Artemis program, and specifically taking a look at the Artemis Accords of 2020, a “shared vision for principles, grounded in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, to create a safe and transparent environment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy.”

In comparing these documents, I find the emphasis in the Artemis Accords on information transparency and the sharing of scientific data, and the addition of a mandate for “interoperable and common exploration infrastructure and standards,” to be interesting, positive byproducts of the techno-global era in which we live. However, while the focus in the Outer Space Treaty is on state responsibility and liability, the Artemis Accords emphasize “commercial activities” in the introduction, and later plainly acknowledge the “extraction and utilization of space resources.” Another byproduct of the present era, but a more concerning one.

I got set up on Codeberg today, and will be slowly migrating my repositories over there from GitHub. The first, though, is a new /journal repository, which I will be using as a source for materials referenced in journal entries here, including the two treaty documents discussed today.

Generation Analog

2022-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been extremely busy, but I was really happy to have had the chance to present at Generation Analog again this year. I was on the Participation and Pedagogy panel, and the whole thing (as well as all of the other panels) are now available on the Analog Game Studies YouTube channel. The paper, which I mentioned below, is also available to read at Zenodo, in full and for free.

Play to Lose

2022-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Play to Lose: Animation, Failure, and the Milieu in Trophy Dark.” Presented at the GENeration Analog: The Tabletop Games and Education Virtual Conference, July 28, 2022. https://zenodo.org/record/6932651.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

In her essay “Reclaiming Animism” (2012), Isabelle Stengers writes that reclaiming “means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as ‘not ours’ but rather as ‘animating’ us, making us witness to what is not us.” It is this notion of animation that mobilizes this paper on Jesse Ross’s tabletop roleplaying game Trophy Dark (2021), and which informed my own experience as simultaneous game facilitator and game design instructor for a class of fifteen undergraduate students. With a group split roughly in half between students with varying levels of experience with Dungeons & Dragons (and solely Dungeons & Dragons) and students with no tabletop roleplaying experience whatsoever, Trophy Dark, and specifically Ross’s incursion “Witchwood,” made for a group exercise in this animative witness to the “not ours” and “not us” of which Stengers writes. Rather than adopting a rationalist, critical separation from the play experience, or a romantic, reflective immersion in the play experience, this particular group of students discovered in Trophy Dark a vehicle for the “active,” “transformative,” and indeed “metamorphic” experience that Stengers describes, using the chosen incursion as an instrument for the shared dramatic failure that is “playing to lose,” as advocated in Trophy Dark’s player’s guide. Stengers awakens her readers to a “rhizomatic” materialism, or a materialism of the “milieu,” and together in the Witchwood we encountered the same. This paper charts the contours of our adventure.

Keywords: Game Studies, Game Design, Tabletop Roleplaying, Analog Games, Story Games, Storytelling, Trophy Dark, Jesse Ross, Isabelle Stengers, Pedagogy

Play to Lose

In this paper, I want to take a different approach than I do usually—that is, to overtheorize, to become lost in the thicket of critique—and instead focus on practice. All too frequently in my work, I find myself following bypath after bypath, turned about amidst the woods and ruins, never to make it to the destination I set out to reach.¹ There is certainly a place for theory, and much of my research efforts last year were concentrated on theorizing tabletop roleplaying games (specifically, lyric games and Belonging Outside Belonging games).² But here, I want to dwell on practice, be animated by practice, spending these pages to discuss a semester of play in the university classroom, and in particular, a three-part play session of the “Witchwood” incursion for Jesse Ross’s Trophy Dark (2021).³

Published by Jason Cordova of The Gauntlet, Trophy Dark is a fantasy horror tabletop roleplaying game adapted from Cthulhu Dark (2017) and Blades in the Dark (2017), with a table experience that owes much to the tradition of story games.⁴ Trophy Dark sets the expectation for narrative collaboration and improvisation early on—players are recognized as “co-storyellers,” with the power to “introduce story elements that no one—not even the GM—was expecting.”⁵ Every incursion (an adventure module in the Trophy Dark format) is structured around a theme, and as the game master’s principles emphasize, the most “rewarding session is one that brings the theme to life.”⁶ The best incursions have a way of luring players into the story, just as their characters are lured deeper and deeper into the dark forest. My students’ eyes shone with dread delight as we moved from ring to ring of the incursion, concentric scenarios driving us closer and closer to our doom.

The “Witchwood” incursion,⁷ written by Ross, plays with images, characters, and plots from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Our group of player-characters set off in search of “Dora,” following a crumbling brick road that lead to a rumoured “green fortress.” Along the way, they came upon a pair of magical slippers that drove their wearer to ruin, and found themselves stalked by a monstrous lion that struck cowardice in the hearts of those who witnessed it. I chose the incursion specifically for this layering of literary elements, and my students were thrilled when they recognized the source, and terrified to see what twisted turn the story would take next.

This play experience was the final play experience of the course, an introduction to game design that I teach using tabletop roleplaying games. I had fifteen undergraduate students under my care (twelve of whom participated in all three Trophy Dark sessions), split roughly in half between students with varying levels of experience with Dungeons & Dragons (and solely Dungeons & Dragons) and students with no tabletop roleplaying experience whatsoever. Students came from a variety of majors, including a few from our game development program, as well as from media and communication, English literature, creative writing, and business administration. The class was conducted online via Zoom, with students spread between several countries. We began the semester by playing Ben Robbins’ Kingdom (2021), then proceeded through The Quiet Year by Avery Alder (2013), The Skeletons by Jason Morningstar (2015), and Dialect by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu (2017).⁸ Class time we spent focused on play, and then after each play experience, students would use concepts from the course textbook, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp’s Games, Design and Play (2016), to complete exercises reflecting on the games played during class.⁹ Upon completion of our Trophy Dark incursion, having built up a significant frame of reference for tabletop roleplaying and a critical vocabulary to go with it, we pivoted to a multi-week design intensive wherein students wrote and workshopped their own tabletop roleplaying games.

Throughout the semester, I was incredibly impressed with my students’ openness to play and improvisation, and their willingness to be vulnerable and kind with each other at the virtual table. For my part as both facilitator and instructor, it is important to emphasize that this does not happen by accident, and actively cultivating a safe play culture is vital to successful and healthy play experiences,¹⁰ especially when such experiences are taking place in a classroom between peers who did not necessarily choose to be there with each other member of the class, and when the games being played, like Trophy Dark, have the potential to delve into disturbing territory (see the content warnings at the beginning of “Witchwood”: body horror, graphic violence, manipulation).¹¹ As the facilitator, I made sure to set the tone before every session, laying out ground rules for interpersonal interaction during play, as well as lines and veils for the content that would be permitted at the table.¹² We adhered to a fairly strict PG-13 content rating for all of our games, including Trophy Dark, which, rather than limiting the students, presented them with a safely bounded field for expressing their creativity on all manner of subjects—conflict and violence, to be sure, but also such fraught domains as community building, familial relationships, and personal identity. I owe so much credit to my students for being willing to play, to take risks, to share space with one another, and to be generous with each other as co-storytellers all semester long.

In the case of our Trophy Dark incursion, I specifically want to focus in on the concept of failure, which Trophy Dark enshrines in its three player principles: embrace tragedy, don’t hold back, and play to lose. By this point in the semester, my students were already well-versed in putting story first, and had become quite adept at playing off of each other’s characters to produce drama. So, when I read these principles from the game book, and proceeded to tell my students that their characters should be desperate, complicated, and morally compromised, and that most of them were certainly going to die, the excitement was palpable. Especially in a university course, where “failure” and “losing” typically have such severe connotations, and even material penalties, the prospect of embracing failure, of participating with the intent of losing, had a radical effect.

Trophy Dark is elegant and precise in the ways it supports drama. My students were surprised and pleased by the playful ambiguity of the random tables for occupations, backgrounds, drives, and rituals.¹³ Some picked from the lists, and some rolled for random results. Unprompted, students compared character sheets and started weaving bonds, intuiting relationships based on social position and aligning (or opposing) goals based on motivations. In response to the question “what does this mean?” regarding various table entries, I would always respond, you tell me, and the glee in my students’ faces at this answer was wonderful to see.¹⁴

The gameplay mechanics of Trophy Dark do an excellent job pushing players toward tragedy and failure. The balance of risk and ruin is a powerful instrument for drama, presenting frequent opportunities for things to go wrong and disaster to befall the player-characters. Using ruin in the place of hit points is a brilliant bit of design, providing the facilitator with numerous handles for storytelling. For instance, at the end of our first session (character creation and ring one), one player, who had managed to reach five ruin (of six maximum) through a rather chaotic series of events, casually picked up the “pair of iridescent shoes” dropped by the witch the party had encountered and decided to put them on. Not realizing that they were already at five ruin, I told the player to automatically mark one ruin, as dictated by the rules. There was a shocked pause, the player staring at me, mouth agape, and then—“I’m already at five… what happens now?” Rather than have them keel over and die on the spot, I was able to reply: “you lose yourself to the wilds that have been growing inside you. You choose whether you become a monster in service to the forces of nature (and the whims of the GM), or whether you simply die.”¹⁵ There was another pause as they typed a private message to me in Zoom chat: “can I come back? I have some ideas!” Their character would reappear throughout the remainder of the incursion, becoming a key figure in the plot in a way none of us could have foreseen.

Another mechanic that became the instrument of much drama was the devil’s bargain.¹⁶ Every time a risk roll occurs, the facilitator and other players at the table can offer bargains to the one rolling in exchange for an additional die. My students quickly realized that devil’s bargains provided an additional means for shaping the trajectory of the story, outside of direct, in-character action. The bargains offered ranged from silly to sombre, and frequently involved elaborate ploys, devastating betrayals, and tragic losses. Through one devil’s bargain, one player-character ended up with a sentient tree growing inside of them, which eventually sprouted as a second, bark-covered head with the chosen name Brock. At first a means of comedic relief, by the end of the game Brock had become a character in his own right, and served as a fulcrum for a touching moment between two of my students’ characters.

In a group so large, conflict between characters is bound to occur, and occur it did. Unlike previous times that I have run Trophy Dark, this group made regular use of the contest roll, in all manner of contexts. Sometimes player-characters disagreed about a course of action, and a contest roll would help determine which way the rest of the party swayed. Other times, player-characters drives would directly conflict, and a contest roll allowed for tense resolutions of strife and interpersonal violence. Rituals were frequently deployed in creative ways, and always to unpredictable ends, and more than once were the tables turned on an over-confident player-character who thought they could get their way. As the facilitator, one of the best features of the contest roll is the way in which it levels the playing field between players. As mentioned above, about half of my students had experience playing Dungeons & Dragons, and the other half had no experience at all with tabletop roleplaying games. As might be expected, the players with D&D experience tended to be more dominant in their play, centring their characters and making it difficult for quieter players and those with less tabletop experience to participate. In one such situation, early in our second session, one player-character, a disgraced town-guard with a military background, tried to bully another player-character, a mourning widow with some witchcraft up her sleeve, into following his directions. The disgraced guard thought that he had gotten his way, but clearly the widow was not onboard, so I paused the action and invoked the contest roll.

First, we agreed what was at stake: recognition as leader of the group. Then, we gathered dice. Each wanted to win the contest, so each took a few extra dark dice, risking more potential ruin from the roll. And then, we rolled, looking for sixes. The guard looked at his roll in disbelief; the widow had more sixes. And to the guard, with a face of stone, the widow said a single word: doom. And she slapped him. The player pointed to the ritual on their character sheet, “Doom,” and said that since they had rolled extra dark dice, it made sense in the story that the widow had used her ritual to exert her will against the guard, focusing her magic into the open-handed blow. One of the dark dice that guard had rolled showed a one, so he marked one point of ruin, as per the rules. For the rest of the game, players would joke about the “slap of doom” that changed the course of events, a simple mechanical intervention that transformed the order of things.

It is with this sense of transformation that I want to conclude this paper, drawing on the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers’s theory of animation—just a moment of theory, I promise—to form an understanding of what happens in the practice of playing tabletop roleplaying games, what happened in my class’s collective practice of the rules and mechanics of Trophy Dark.

In her essay “Reclaiming Animism” (2012), Isabelle Stengers writes that reclaiming “means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as ‘not ours’ but rather as ‘animating’ us, making us witness to what is not us.”¹⁷ To be animated by an experience is to be “lured into feeling,” to be “compromised by magic,” to encounter and be transformed by the “not ours” and “not us.”¹⁸ Trophy Dark expertly forces its players into such compromised and metamorphic encounters, short circuiting player agency in order to teach players a different kind of desire, a different kind of play.¹⁹ The incursion is an instrument for this teaching, an “assemblage” or “milieu” that beckons players into a new feel, the feel of failure, of tragedy, of disaster, the feel of drama, and of love.²⁰ Rather than progress through skill trees, characters in Trophy Dark connect and contest with each other in rhizomatic networks of touch, subterranean systems that cannot be pinned down with “criteria,” only navigated by “craft.”²¹ Through our adventure in the Witchwood, we found ourselves caught up in the “flux of participation,” in the work of “realization,” that labour whereby the real is not disclosed, as some philosophers might phrase it, but made.²²

“Reclaiming means recovering what we have been separated from,” writes Stengers, and “regenerating what this separation has poisoned.”²³ The tabletop roleplaying hobby, indeed the tabletop roleplaying industry, is in many respects a “poisoned milieu,” overdetermined by relations of bigotry and extraction that go back to fantasy gaming’s roots.²⁴ Beyond tabletop games, the students that signed on to Zoom to join my class in January of this year expressed a deep alienation and despair, a feeling that I too share, grappling with an “absent future” realized by violent state apparatuses and predacious corporations.²⁵ But as Stengers argues, the “need to struggle and the need to heal” are “irreducibly allied” if we are to “avoid resembling those we have to struggle against,” if our “poisoned milieu” is to be “reclaimed.”²⁶ Through our time with Trophy Dark, we caught a glimpse of what such reclaiming work might look like in the tabletop roleplaying game community—nothing guaranteed or complete, always an “imperfect realization”—how one might, in a decisive moment, stare power in the face and pronounce doom upon it, become like the Furies, taking back the future from those tyrants who believed it theirs.²⁷

To bring theory back to practice, I will close with a final anecdote. After our story ended, while debriefing as a class, one student, who had participated less than some of the others, remarked how they never knew what to do, because any time they wanted to act, their actions would put their character in danger. They said: it’s like, to do something, to accomplish anything, you have to accept that you might fail, that you might lose. And perhaps it is trite to say, but that is precisely the point.

References

Alder, Avery. The Quiet Year. Buried Without Ceremony, 2013.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Harper, John. Blades in the Dark. Silver Spring, MD: Evil Hat Productions, 2017.

Hymes, Kathryn, and Hakan Seyalioglu. Dialect. Thorny Games, 2017.

Jayanth, Meghna. “White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design.” Medium, November 30, 2021. https://medium.com/@betterthemask/whiteprotagonism-and-imperial-pleasures-in-game-design-digra21-a4bdb3f5583c.

Macklin, Colleen, and John Sharp. Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2016.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (an Inside Narrative). Edited by Michael J. Everton. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2016.

Morningstar, Jason. The Skeletons. Bully Pulpit Games, 2015.

Movement, California Student Occupation. “Communiqué from an Absent Future.” We Want Everything, September 24, 2009. https://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/.

Robbins, Ben. Kingdom. Second Edition. Lame Mage Productions, 2021.

Ross, Jesse. Trophy Dark. Hedgemaze Press; The Gauntlet Gaming Community, 2021.

Shaw, Kienna, and Lauren Bryant-Monk. “TTRPG Safety Toolkit V2.5,” 2021. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/114jRmhzBpdqkAlhmveis0nmW73qkAZCj.

Stein, Eric. “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics,” May 28, 2021. https://zenodo.org/record/4824078.

———. “No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart,” August 5, 2021. https://zenodo.org/record/5156494.

Stengers, Isabelle. “Reclaiming Animism.” E-Flux, no. 36 (July 2012): 1–10. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/.

Vossen, Emma. “There and Back Again: Tolkien, Gamers, and the Remediation of Exclusion Through Fantasy Media.” Feminist Media Histories 6, no. 1 (January 2020): 37–65. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.37.

Walmsley, Graham, Kathryn Jenkins, and Helen Gould. Cthulhu Dark. Thieves of Time, 2017.

White, William J. Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001-2012: Designs and Discussions. Palgrave Games in Context. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Notes

After all this time, Melville is still my teacher: “In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some bypaths have an enticement not readily to be withstood.” Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (an Inside Narrative), ed. Michael J. Everton (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2016), 66. ↩
See Eric Stein, “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics” (May 28, 2021), https://zenodo.org/record/4824078 and Eric Stein, “No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart” (August 5, 2021), https://zenodo.org/record/5156494. ↩
Jesse Ross, Trophy Dark (Hedgemaze Press; The Gauntlet Gaming Community, 2021). ↩
Graham Walmsley, Kathryn Jenkins, and Helen Gould, Cthulhu Dark (Thieves of Time, 2017); John Harper, Blades in the Dark (Silver Spring, MD: Evil Hat Productions, 2017). On story games, see William J. White, Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001-2012: Designs and Discussions, Palgrave Games in Context (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 69-71, and throughout. ↩
Ross, Trophy Dark, 22, 24. ↩
Ross, 24. ↩
Ross, 120-125. ↩
Ben Robbins, Kingdom, Second Edition (Lame Mage Productions, 2021); Avery Alder, The Quiet Year (Buried Without Ceremony, 2013); Jason Morningstar, The Skeletons (Bully Pulpit Games, 2015); and Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu, Dialect (Thorny Games, 2017). ↩
Colleen Macklin and John Sharp, Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2016). ↩
An excellent resource to this end is Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk, “TTRPG Safety Toolkit V2.5,” 2021, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/114jRmhzBpdqkAlhmveis0nmW73qkAZCj. ↩
Ross, Trophy Dark, 120. ↩
See “Lines and Veils,” in Shaw and Bryant-Monk, “TTRPG Safety Toolkit V2.5.” ↩
“Player’s Guide,” in Ross, Trophy Dark, 5-20. ↩
This approach is encouraged by the rules text. See Ross, 9. ↩
Ross, 19. ↩
Ross, 17. ↩
Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux, no. 36 (July 2012): 1–10, https://www.eflux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/, 7. ↩
Stengers, 7, 8. ↩
On agency and desire in games, see Meghna Jayanth, “White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design,” Medium, November 30, 2021, https://medium.com/@betterthemask/white-protagonism-and-imperial-pleasures-in-game-design-digra21-a4bdb3f5583c. ↩
Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 7, 3. On love and feel, see “Fantasy in the Hold,” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 87-99. ↩
Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 7, 8. ↩
Stengers, 8, 9. ↩
Stengers, 4-6. ↩
See, for instance, Emma Vossen, “There and Back Again: Tolkien, Gamers, and the Remediation of Exclusion Through Fantasy Media,” Feminist Media Histories 6, no. 1 (January 2020): 37–65, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.37. ↩
California Student Occupation Movement, “Communiqué from an Absent Future,” We Want Everything, September 24, 2009, https://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/. ↩
Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 6. ↩
Stengers, 7. See Stein, “No Dice, No Masters” for my detailed analysis of games and emancipatory possibility. To summarize: what makes a game emancipatory cannot itself guarantee emancipation. ↩

Numeration

2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Over the weekend, I was contacted by a cousin from a long lost branch of the family, which had severed ties back in the sixties. She and her father had started doing research into their family tree, since most of the information that they had was lost when her grandfather died. She stumbled across a partial family tree that I had uploaded to Ancestry back in 2013, and realized that our great grandmothers were sisters. I mentioned her to my grandmother, and she was full of stories of her childhood with the cousins of that generation prior to the schism; my cousin in turn had some stories featuring my great aunt and my great grandmother from before when my grandmother was born.

I’ve been experimenting with Mermaid.js for a visual representation of the genealogical history that my grandmother started in the seventies, and which she digitized in the early 2000s. I’d ultimately like to convert all of it to a more durable plaintext format, since the files are currently in .doc format. My latest efforts, though, have been learning about genealogical numbering systems in order to develop a consistent, well structured index for the data that I’m inputting to the Mermaid flowchart. My grandmother’s records all use the Henry System, a descending system that works quite well for capturing the full scope of a family with a shared common ancestor. But to build a family tree in the other direction, and so to bring together four different family trees for each of my four grandparents, simply using the Henry numbers as indices doesn’t work, since the same person can show up in multiple trees with a different identifier in each (for instance, I am 1114321, 11362621, and 1634321 across three of the trees in which my name appears). My Mermaid tree is using an Ahnentafel (ancestor table) instead, which is an ascending method that makes for a much cleaner markdown source file. Indeed, though I’m using the table to produce a tree, the data structure is meaningful in itself, whether or not it is diagrammed, and ideal for plaintext. As Wikipedia puts it: “an ahnentafel is a method for storing a binary tree in an array by listing the nodes (individuals) in level-order (in generation order).” As a “functional theory of numeration,” it’s a fascinating artifact, and a surpisingly useful tool in this digital age.

The principles of the Ahnentafel method were first published in 1590 by Michaël Eytzinger, and thinking about this duration, and the duration between myself and some of my oldest recorded ancestors, brings the seventh generation principle to mind, requiring that I consider just how radical the principle is. My ancestors of the seventh generation were born around 1800, and could not have conceived of the life that their seventh great grandson lives. Seven generations from now will take us to the 2200s, and I, similarly, cannot conceive of the lives any potential seventh great grandchildren of mine might live. Catastrophic climate change by 2030, global food system collapse by 2050—these dates simultaneously remain at a distance and yet present an unavoidable, inevitable horizon, a horizon that is less a firm boundary and more a temporal oil spill leaking into the present. The year 2200 feels inconceivable. And yet, it is precisely the work of imagining an earth without us that is necessary for us to properly orient ourselves toward the emergency at hand, and so make possible a conception of an earth with us for those yet to come, seven generations from now.

Journal, Now, Play to Lose

2022-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

I’m quite pleased to have gotten this HTML Journal up and running, and enjoying the more relaxed format to what I usually write. Checking in at The Neon Kiosk once a day is a pleasant little routine.

I need to get around to writing up a Now page, and then I’m going to try and get Webmentions working and use them for my longer Notes. Maybe I’ll move to m15o’s HTML Blog format too, though it will take a bit of fussing the way the posts are currently setup with Jekyll/Liquid. I’ll likely make this a part of a larger project to migrate the site off GitHub.

Finished my conference presentation for Generation Analog today: “Play to Lose: Animation, Failure, and the Milieu in Trophy Dark.” In it, I discuss my experience facilitating tabletop roleplaying games, and specifically Jesse Ross’s Trophy Dark, for an undergraduate introduction to game design course at the university where I teach. Conference is online, and tickets are free, if an analog game studies conference sounds interesting to you.

Rain

2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rain today, and some wind. First I’ve seen the inlet disturbed. The water has been so still and smooth since we got here. It was humid last night, in advance of the weather coming in, and today I’ve felt the moisture in my left knee and ankle, reminders of injuries that refuse to entirely heal.

The ankle has been years, but the knee is fresh. I bouldered a lot before the pandemic, but that stopped when quarantine came, that and physical activity in general. Unemployment and then work from home does that to you. When numbers finally declined in the region and restrictions on gyms lifted, I decided I’d try something I’d always been interested in, and signed up for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at the Gracie Barra in town. Good covid safety policies and a positive gym culture made for a pleasant experience. It was a lot of fun, with a lot of good, kind people. When I received my third stripe I jumped right into GB2, and promptly got dropped on my knee, hard. Loss of mobility, major swelling, and a nasty purple bruise that leaked out from under my knee cap. I rested it, tried to rehab it as best I could, but then a few weeks later I did the same again. It’s aching a lot today.

There’s no Gracie Barra on the Sunshine Coast, though there are some other gyms not far from here. I’m nervous about the culture at a new gym, and I’m nervous about my knee, but I do miss it, the mechanics of rolling, the way your body learns to inhabit form. There’s a bouldering gym very close by, so maybe it’s time to grab my shoes and chalk bag once again. There’s a formalistic quality that bouldering and jiu jitsu share, something that both my brain and my body appreciate.

Corridors and More

2022-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

On corridor thinking from yesterday, Donna Haraway provides a short bibliography for further reading:

Mary Ellen Hannibal, The Spine of the Continent: The Most Ambitious Wildlife Conservation Project Ever Undertaken (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2012).
Michael E. Soulé and John Terborgh, Continental Conservation: Scientific Foundations Of Regional Reserve Networks (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999).
Jodi A. Hilty, Annika T. H. Keeley, William Z. Lidicker Jr., and Adina M. Merenlender, Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity and Climate Adaptation (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2019).
Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2005).
Alexandra Koelle, Rights of Way: Race, Place, and Nation in the Northern Rockies, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2010.

On production, and my day job. From Latin, produco. A few senses:

I lead or bring forth, forward or out.
I conduct to; bring before, present.
I draw or stretch out, lengthen, extend.
I bring to light, disclose, expose.

In game production, there is some nobility claimed by virtue of both position and etymology: production as bringing forth, as bringing to light, as conducting and extending what is (and I am inclined to say that there is something to these definitions). The producer orchestrates, conductor of a symphony. But, in reality, production is more often than not closer to a fifth sense of the word:

I place one thing before another.

In this sense, production is a matter of counting, of sequencing, a combinatorial effort. To produce a game is primarily to enumerate and arrange. Less glamorous than bringing forth, to be sure. But also, more practical and material. There is no magic here, and that’s good, because magic is shit process. All focus needs to be on the work, on the actual effort expended by actual people. That is the function of production.

Progress on the interactive storytelling syllabus continues. My game list, broken up into the three categories mentioned yesterday (chatty is now dialogic, much more scholarly…), is as follows:

Wordless Stories

Thatgamecompany, Journey (2012)
Ustwo Studios, Monument Valley (2014)
Playdead, Inside (2016)
Buried Signal, Gorogoa (2017)
Nomada Studio, Gris (2018)
Mountains, Florence (2018)
Witch Beam, Unpacking (2021)

Dialogic Stories

The Fullbright Company, Gone Home (2013)
Campo Santo, Firewatch (2016)
Night School Studio, Oxenfree (2016)
Geography of Robots, Norco (2022)

Environmental Stories

Mobius Digital, Outer Wilds (2020)
Shedworks, Sable (2021)

Constituting the analytic portion of the course, students will conduct a solo analysis of one of the wordless stories, a partner analysis of one of the dialogic stories, and a group analysis of one of the environmental stories. Thinking about drama as both individual writer-designers and together as a writers room.

Hello, World!

2022-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

We have made the move from the hustle and bustle of the Fraser Valley to the quiet and calm of Sechelt, on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. We love it here. We are on the inlet side of town, and this has me thinking about corridors, those geographic passageways that Donna Haraway writes about in Staying With the Trouble (2016) as “essential to [the] being” of symbiont life. “The restoration and care of corridors, of connection, is a central task” for the communities that inhabit and travel them. Corridors are “practical and material, as well as fabulous and enspirited.” I want to cultivate “corridor thinking.”

I have been reading Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (1958) as part of my ongoing book club with my brother. It’s good, so far, accessible for a non-physicist. Puts to rest a lot of misreadings of quantum mechanics as irreparably subjectivist or correlationist. He carefully lays out the order of nature > humanity > science, emphasizing the unilaterality of this order (compare my book club entry on Heraclitus, “Generic Science: Heraclitus, Intelligence, and the Common”). He also takes pains to dismiss shallow interpretations of quantum mechanics as anti-realist, considering it instead an updated theory of the real against a dogmatic or reductive realism. We’ll see where the book goes as Heisenberg tries to generalize to the level of human experience.

For pleasure, I’ve been reading Robert Jordan’s The Shadow Rising (1992), book four of The Wheel of Time. I started the series last summer, and read the first three books relatively quickly. This one is a monster, and has been slower going. But, after a couple hundred pages of prologue, the plot finally got moving and reading has been brisker. I’ve been using Bookwyrm by @tripofmice to track my fun reading, and though I’m not very active there, I enjoy my time on the site. As per usual, I’m @steinea.

I just finished reading and reviewing Tom Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity (2022) for the Ancillary Review of Books. That should be up soon. Next for ARB is Cameron Kunzelman’s The World Is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games (2022). I’ll likely start reading that once I’m done with Heisenberg.

I started playing Sable (2021) from Shedworks and Raw Fury last night. Though buggy, the art, animation, and music are gorgeous, and I’m already quite enticed by the story the game is weaving. The Perpetual calls…

What else, what else… I watched season one and two of For All Mankind recently, and have been watching season three as it airs. The show rekindled a love for space that has been somewhat dormant throughout the pandemic, and led me to stumble across NASA’s Artemis program, which somehow I hadn’t heard about. Lunar settlement, Mars exploration, fiction and dreams finding purchase in reality. I recall the “slow cancellation of the future” and David Graeber’s brilliant analysis of this state of affairs in The Utopia of Rules (2015). Amidst fires and floods and plagues and wars, it has been so hard to dream, to imagine a future at all.

I work on EA’s FIFA, and was struck today, as I frequently am, by the interconnectedness of things, and the precarity of the global stack. A data center in Dublin experienced some hardware failure that sent over five hundred VMs offline, one of which we needed for a FIFA deploy. Everyone was in a panic, and everything was out of our control.

In my other life, I teach game design and production, and I am very excited to be teaching interactive storytelling in the fall once again. I started work on my syllabus yesterday, thinking about the games we’ll play and discuss as a class. I’ve arrived at three loose groupings: Wordless Stories, Chatty Stories, and Environmental Stories. I’ll be using Alexander Swords’ Forest Paths Method for Narrative Design (2020) as a textbook, as I have in previous iterations of the course. I think it does an excellent job of teaching the mechanics of drama in the interactive space, providing writers of all backgrounds with simple, extensible tools for applying their craft to writing for games.

I’ve written this according to m15o’s spec for HTML Journals, and hope to get it up on The Neon Kiosk soon. I’ll continue to use Atom for longer notes, but I’m looking forward to experimenting with this looser, shorter format (well, shorter for future entries, hopefully…).

Compost Epistemology

2022-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

This was a child born for sympoiesis—for becoming-with and making-with a motley clutch of earth others. —Donna J. Haraway

Bakhtin

“However monological the utterance may be (for example, a scientific or philosophical treatise), however much it may concentrate on its own object, it cannot but be, in some measure, a response to what has already been said about the given topic, on the given issue, even though this responsiveness may not have assumed a clear-cut external expression. It will be manifested in the overtones of the style, in the finest nuances of the composition. The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones, and they must be taken into account in order to understand fully the style of the utterance. After all, our thought itself—philosophical, scientific, and artistic—is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well.”¹

“Dialogic boundaries intersect the entire field of living human thought … dialogic relations are always present, even among profoundly monologic speech works.”²

“The exact sciences constitute a monologic form of knowledge: the intellect contemplates a thing and expounds upon it. There is only one subject here—cognizing (contemplating) and speaking (expounding). In opposition to the subject there is only a voiceless thing. Any object of knowledge (including man) can be perceived and cognized as a thing. But a subject as such cannot be perceived and studied as a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject, become voiceless, and, consequently, cognition of it can only be dialogic.”³

“The problem of the boundaries between text and context. Each word (each sign) of the text exceeds its boundaries. Any understanding is a correlation of a given text with other texts. Commentary. The dialogic nature of this correlation … Understanding as correlation with other texts and reinterpretation, in a new context (in my own context, in a contemporary context, and in a future one). The anticipated context of the future: a sense that I am taking a new step (have progressed). Stages in the dialogic movement of understanding: the point of departure, the given text; movement backward, past contexts; movement forward, anticipation (and the beginning) of a future context.”⁴

“If we transform dialogue into one continuous text, that is, erase the divisions between voices (changes of speaking subjects), which is possible at the extreme (Hegel’s monological dialectic), then the deep-seated (infinite) contextual meaning disappears (we hit the bottom, reach a standstill). Complete maximum reification would inevitably lead to the disappearance of the infinitude and bottomlessness of meaning (any meaning). A thought that, like a fish in an aquarium, knocks against the bottom and the sides and cannot swim farther or deeper. Dogmatic thoughts.”⁵

“Thought knows only conditional points; thought erodes all previously established points. The elucidation of a text not by means of other texts (contexts) but with extratextual thinglike (reified) reality. This usually takes place in biographical, vulgar sociological and causal explanations (in the spirit of the natural sciences) and also in depersonalized historicity (‘a history without names’).”⁶

“The process of gradual obliteration of authors as bearers of others’ words. Others’ words become anonymous and are assimilated (in reworked form, of course); consciousness is monologized. Primary dialogic relations to others’ words are also obliterated—they are, as it were, taken in, absorbed into assimilated others’ words (passing through the stage of ‘one’s own/others’ words’). Creative consciousness, when monologized, is supplemented by anonymous authors.”⁷

“Monologized creative consciousness frequently joins and personifies others’ words, others’ voices that have become anonymous, in special symbols: ‘the voice of life itself,’ ‘the voice of nature,’ ‘the voice of the people,’ ‘the voice of God,’ and so forth. The role of the authoritative word in this process, which usually does not lose its bearer, does not become anonymous.”⁸

Benjamin

“A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour—and that day is Judgment Day.”⁹

“His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”¹⁰

“The ragpicker is the most provocative figure of human misery. ‘Ragtag’ <Lumpenproletarier> in a double sense: clothed in rags and occupied with rags. ‘Here we have a man whose job it is to pick up the day’s rubbish in the capital. He collects and catalogues everything that the great city has cast off, everything it has lost and discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery, and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he collects the garbage that will become objects of utility or pleasure when refurbished by industrial magic’ … As may be gathered from this prose description of 1851, Baudelaire recognizes himself in the figure of the ragman. The poem presents a further affinity with the poet, immediately noted as such: ‘a ragpicker stumbles past, wagging his head / and bumping into walls with a poet’s grace, / pouring out his heartfelt schemes to one / and all, including spies of the police.’”¹¹

“Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.”¹²

“A model of Fourierist psychology in Toussenel’s chapter on the wild boar. ‘Now, surrounding the dwellings of humanity are great quantities of broken glass bottles, rusty nails, and candle ends, which would be completely lost to society if some careful and intelligent hand did not charge itself with the collection of all these valueless relics, to reconstruct out of them a mass susceptible of being reworked and made fit for consumption again. This important task evidently belongs among the attributes of the miser…. Here the character and mission of the miser perceptibly rise: the pinch-penny becomes a ragpicker, a salvage operator…. The hog is the great salvager of nature; he fattens at nobody’s expense.’”¹³

“Student and hunter. The text is a forest in which the reader is hunter. Rustling in the underbrush—the idea, skittish prey, the citation—another piece ‘in the bag’ (Not every reader encounters the idea.)”¹⁴

de Certeau

“It is true that the Expert is growing more common in this society, to the point of becoming its generalized figure, distended between the exigency of a growing specialization and that of a communication that has become all the more necessary. He blots out (and in a certain way replaces) the Philosopher, formerly the specialist of the universal. But his success is not so terribly spectacular. In him, the productivist law that requires a specific assignment (the condition of efficiency) and the social law that requires circulation (the form of exchange) enter into contradiction. To be sure, a specialist is more and more often driven to also be an Expert, that is, an interpreter and translator of his competence for other fields. That is obvious even within the laboratories themselves: as soon as decisions regarding objectives, promotions, or financing are to be made, the Experts intervene ‘in the name of’—but outside of—their particular experience. How do they succeed in moving from their technique—a language they have mastered and which regulates their discourse—to the more common language of another situation? They do it through a curious operation which ‘converts’ competence into authority.”¹⁵

“Authority is indissociable from an ‘abuse of knowledge’—and in this fact we ought perhaps to recognize the effect of the social law that divests the individual of his competence in order to establish (or re-establish) the capital of a collective competence, that is, of a common verisimilitude.”¹⁶

“Since he cannot limit himself to talking about what he knows, the Expert pronounces on the basis of the place that his specialty has won for him. In that way he inscribes himself and is inscribed in a common order where specialization, as the rule and hierarchically ordering practice of the productivist economy, has the value of initiation. Because he has successfully submitted himself to this initiatory practice, he can, on questions foreign to his technical competence but not to the power he has acquired through it, pronounce with authority a discourse which is no longer a function of knowledge, but rather a function of the socioeconomic order.”¹⁷

“The resurgence of ‘popular’ practices within industrial and scientific modernity indicates the paths that might be taken by a transformation of the object of our study and the place from which we study it.”¹⁸

“Take, for example, what in France is called la perruque, ‘the wig.’ La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room. Under different names in different countries this phenomenon is becoming more and more general, even if managers penalize it or ‘turn a blind eye’ on it in order not to know about it. Accused of stealing or turning material to his own ends and using the machines for his own profit, the worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit. In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family through spending his time in this way.”¹⁹

“Far from being a regression toward a mode of production organized around artisans or individuals, la perruque reintroduces ‘popular’ techniques of other times and other places into the industrial space (that is, into the Present order).”²⁰

“The actual order of things is precisely what ‘popular’ tactics turn to their own ends, without any illusion that it will change any time soon. Though elsewhere it is exploited by a dominant power or simply denied by an ideological discourse, here order is tricked by an art. Into the institution to be served are thus insinuated styles of social exchange, technical invention, and moral resistance, that is, an economy of the ‘gift’ (generosities for which one expects a return), an esthetics of ‘tricks’ (artists’ operations) and an ethics of tenacity (countless ways of refusing to accord the established order the status of a law, a meaning, or a fatality). ‘Popular’ culture is precisely that; it is not a corpus considered as foreign, fragmented in order to be displayed, studied and ‘quoted’ by a system which does to objects what it does to living beings.”²¹

“In scholarly writing, it is nothing other than the return of the voices through which the social body ‘speaks’ in quotations, sentence fragments, the tonalities of ‘words,’ the sounds things make … Through the legends and phantoms whose audible citations continue to haunt everyday life, one can maintain a tradition of the body, which is heard but not seen. These are the reminiscences of bodies lodged in ordinary language and marking its path, like white pebbles dropped through the forest of signs. An amorous experience, ultimately. Incised into the prose of the passage from day to day, without any possible commentary or translation, the poetic sounds of quoted fragments remain.”²²

“These quotations of voices mark themselves on an everyday prose that can only produce some of their effects—in the form of statements and practices.”²³

“Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write … Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise.”²⁴

“We should try to rediscover the movements of this reading within the body itself, which seems to stay docile and silent but mines the reading in its own way: from the nooks of all sorts of ‘reading rooms’ (including lavatories) emerge subconscious gestures, grumblings, tics, stretchings, rustlings, unexpected noises, in short a wild orchestration of the body.”²⁵

Rancière

“For, in truth, there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors.”²⁶

“The human animal learns everything in the same way as it initially learnt its mother tongue, as it learnt to venture into the forest of things and signs surrounding it, so as to take its place among human beings: by observing and comparing one thing with another, a sign with a fact, a sign with another sign.”²⁷

“From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work—an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it.”²⁸

“The distance the ignoramus has to cover is not the gulf between her ignorance and the schoolmaster’s knowledge. It is simply the path from what she already knows to what she does not yet know, but which she can learn just as she has learnt the rest; which she can learn not in order to occupy the position of the scholar, but so as better to practise the art of translating, of putting her experience into words and her words to the test; of translating her intellectual adventures for others and counter-translating the translations of their own adventures which they present to her.”²⁹

“She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her. She participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way.”³⁰

“There is no more a privileged form than there is a privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points, intersections and junctions that enable us to learn something new if we refuse, firstly, radical distance, secondly the distribution of roles, and thirdly the boundaries between territories.”³¹

Harney and Moten

“Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened.”³²

“The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage ‘self-incurred minority.’ He tries to contrast it with having the ‘determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.’ ‘Have the courage to use your own intelligence.’ But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call ‘the beyond of teaching’ is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond ‘the beyond of teaching’), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste.”³³

“The waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase—unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back.”³⁴

“What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards.”³⁵

“They study in the university and the university forces them under, relegates them to the state of those without interests, without credit, without debt that bears interest, that earns credits. They never graduate. They just ain’t ready.”³⁶

“Here they meet those others who dwell in a different compulsion, in the same debt, a distance, forgetting, remembered again but only after. These other ones carry bags of newspaper clippings, or sit at the end of the bar, or stand at the stove cooking, or sit on a box at the newsstand, or speak through bars, or speak in tongues. These other ones have a passion to tell you what they have found, and they are surprised you want to listen, even though they’ve been expecting you. Sometimes the story is not clear, or it starts in a whisper. It goes around again but listen, it is funny again, every time. This knowledge has been degraded, and the research rejected. They can’t get access to books, and no one will publish them. Policy has concluded they are conspiratorial, heretical, criminal, amateur. Policy says they can’t handle debt and will never get credit. But if you listen to them they will tell you: we will not handle credit, and we cannot handle debt, debt flows through us, and there’s no time to tell you everything, so much bad debt, so much to forget and remember again.”³⁷

Bourriaud

“Things and phenomena used to surround us. Today it seems they threaten us in ghostly form, as unruly scraps that refuse to go away or persist even after vanishing into the air.”³⁸

“We have witnessed the realm of waste assume vast dimensions. Now it encompasses whatever resists assimilation—the banished, the unusable and the useless … Waste, according to the dictionary, refers to what is cast off when something is made.”³⁹

“Social energy produces waste; it generates zones of exclusion where the proletariat, popular culture, the squalid and the immoral pile up in a jumble—the devalued ensemble of what one cannot bear to see.”⁴⁰

“As the negation of experience—that is, of what has been acquired, and therefore bare of all waste—the lottery of our times excludes unprofitable accumulation a priori. A universe from which all waste has been definitively evacuated, relegated to an obscure underground, and made forever invisible and subsidiarized (filialisé): this is the repression underlying the phantasmagoria of the age. On the one hand, it amounts to a world without remainder—arranged as a factory for living, incessantly ‘cleaned’ by design. On the other, it is riddled with emissions, favelas and suburbs; obsessively, it pushes the nomadic, the migrant, the filthy and the obsolete outside the city gates.”⁴¹

Haraway

“And then Camille came into our lives, rendering present the cross-stitched generations of the not-yet-born and not-yet-hatched of vulnerable, coevolving species … Gestated in SF writing practices, Camille is a keeper of memories in the flesh of worlds that may become habitable again. Camille is one of the children of compost who ripen in the earth to say no to the posthuman of every time.”⁴²

“We were asked to fabulate a baby, and somehow to bring the infant through five human generations. In our times of surplus death of both individuals and of kinds, a mere five human generations can seem impossibly long to imagine flourishing with and for a renewed multispecies world. Over the week, the groups wrote many kinds of possible futures in a rambunctious play of literary forms. Versions abounded … The version I tell here is itself a speculative gesture, both a memory and a lure for a ‘we’ that came into being by fabulating a story together one summer in Normandy. I cannot tell exactly the same story that my cowriters would propose or remember. My story here is an ongoing speculative fabulation, not a conference report for the archives … All the versions are necessary to Camille.”⁴³

“The Children of Compost insist that we need to write stories and live lives for flourishing and for abundance, especially in the teeth of rampaging destruction and impoverization. Anna Tsing urges us to cobble together the ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’; and among those arts are cultivating the capacity to reimagine wealth, learn practical healing rather than wholeness, and stitch together improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds.”⁴⁴

“Readers of science fiction are accustomed to the lively and irreverent arts of fan fiction. Story arcs and worlds are fodder for mutant transformations or for loving but perverse extensions.”⁴⁵

“The Communities of Compost worked and played hard to understand how to inherit the layers upon layers of living and dying that infuse every place and every corridor. Unlike inhabitants in many other utopian movements, stories, or literatures in the history of the earth, the Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they could start from scratch. Precisely the opposite insight moved them; they asked and responded to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with ghosts and with the living too.”⁴⁶

“All new human members of the group who are born in the context of community decision making come into being as symbionts with critters of actively threatened species, and therefore with the whole patterned fabric of living and dying of those particular beings and all their associates, for whom the possibility of a future is very fragile.”⁴⁷

“The animal symbionts are generally members of migratory species, which critically shapes the lines of visiting, working, and playing for all the partners of the symbiosis. The members of the symbioses of the Children of Compost, human and nonhuman, travel or depend on associates that travel; corridors are essential to their being. The restoration and care of corridors, of connection, is a central task of the communities; it is how they imagine and practice repair of ruined lands and waters and their critters, human and not.”⁴⁸

“The Children of Compost came to see their shared kind as humus, rather than as human or nonhuman … The human and animal symbionts keep the relays of mortal life going, both inheriting and inventing practices of recuperation, survival, and flourishing.”⁴⁸

“Because the animal partners in the symbiosis are migratory, each human child learns and lives in nodes and pathways, with other people and their symbionts, in the alliances and collaborations needed to make ongoingness possible. Literally and figurally, training the mind to go visiting is a lifelong pedagogical practice in these communities.”⁴⁹

“For the child’s symbionts, Camille 1’s birthing parent chose monarch butterflies of North America … That meant that Camille of the first generation, and further Camilles for four more human generations at least, would grow in knowledge and know-how committed to the ongoingness of these gorgeous and threatened insects and their human and nonhuman communities all along the pathways and nodes of their migrations and residencies in these places and corridors, not all the time everywhere.”⁵⁰

“The child-bearing parent who chose the monarch butterfly as Camille’s symbiont was a single person with the response-ability to exercise potent, noninnocent, generative freedom that was pregnant with consequences for ramifying worlds across five generations. That irreducible singularity, that particular exercise of reproductive choice, set in train a several-hundred-year effort, involving many actors, to keep alive practices of migration across and along continents for all the migrations’ critters.”⁵¹

“The Children of Compost would not cease the layered, curious practice of becoming-with others for a habitable, flourishing world.”⁵²

† I was moved to collect this bundle of clippings by CJ Eller’s “Garbage Heap,” May 3, 2022, https://blog.cjeller.site/garbage-heap, in a vagrant attempt to embrace the “heap,” to think-by-compost and so elaborate an epistemological model born of and for the earth.

Notes

Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92. ↩
Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 120, 125. ↩
Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 161. ↩
Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 161-162. ↩
Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 162. ↩
Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 163. ↩
Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 163. ↩
Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 163. ↩
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940, in Illuminations, 253-264, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 254. ↩
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257-258. ↩
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1982, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 349-350, J68,4. ↩
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460, N1a,8. ↩
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 632-633, W7a,4. ↩
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 802, m2a,1. ↩
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 7. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 8. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 8. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 25. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 25. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 26. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 26. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 163. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 164. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 174. ↩
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 175. ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2008, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, UK: Verso, 2009), 8-9. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10-11. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 13. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 17. ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), 27. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 27. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 27. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 28. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 67. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 68. ↩
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, 2015, trans. Erik Butler (London, UK: Verso, 2016), vii. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, viii. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, ix. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, 95 ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 134. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 134-136. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 136. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 136. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 138. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 139-140. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 140. ↩ ↩²
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 140. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 142-143. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 143. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 168. ↩

Dying Well, 2

2022-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Our movement lies in nature; we are its death. —Thomas Nail

Death is a reality. We begin again with Plato, but take issue with his subsequent premises.¹ Death can be other than the separation of the soul from the body (as Simmias argues); it is possible that life may not come to be from death (as Cebes fears).² If death is a reality, but the second and fifth premises of Socrates’s argument are shown to be false, the dialogue’s line of reasoning collapses. And as identified in the previous essay in this series, this is in fact the case, because Plato does not have the historical benefit of the developments in the field of thermodynamics that saw the discovery of entropy (i.e., the second law of thermodynamics) in the 1800s.³

As a reminder, Plato has Socrates state: “if, instead, coming-to-be were a linear process from one thing into its opposite only, without any bending back in the other direction or reversal, do you realize that all things would ultimately have the same form: the same fate would overtake them, and they would cease from coming to be?”⁴ Socrates positions this counterargument as that which, if it were true, would defeat his own, but the consequence of which, that “everything would ultimately be dead,” is for him obviously too absurd to accept.⁵ There is no room for the justified doubts of Simmias and Cebes, and in order to silence them, Socrates concludes with an appeal to authority, to a shared cultural belief, rather than allowing for the persistence of open but necessarily uncertain inquiry.

But what if we do begin again, holding open the question of death, of what it means to die well, of what it means to do philosophy under the paradigm of entropy? Perhaps we might avoid the logic of scission that Plato instantiates on the basis of his incorrect understanding of death. If we take death as real, as a phenomenon or process of the real, and not as a flight from the real, how then is our thought transformed? Thomas Nail’s philosophy of motion, his kinetics, presents us with one possible pathway forward.

Recently excerpted by Ill Will for their series Worlds Apart,⁶ Thomas Nail’s “Kinocene Ethics,” the final chapter of his Theory of the Earth (2021),⁷ is, as the editors describe it, a “reciprocal transformation of philosophy and cosmology” whereby “philosophy appears at once as a material and cosmic activity” and the cosmos “becomes, in a deeper sense, philosophical—that is, ‘capable of philosophy.’”⁸ At the heart of this transformation is Nail’s idea of “kinetic expenditure,” the set of “many profligate techniques” whereby the cosmos develops and exhausts itself.⁹ Where the Platonic paradigm requires the eternal recuperation of energy, Nail’s entropic paradigm acknowledges the actual use of energy, that the amount of energy available for “conversion into work” is steadily decreasing.¹⁰

I have struggled with how to present Nail’s thought, other than simply saying, please read it yourself. As such, rather than take a position here as master or academician, I step into the entropic fold, condensing my citations into fifteen theses for a “kinetic pluralism,” a manifesto for “metabolic communism.”¹¹

Nail writes:

Humans are the cosmos continued by other experimental means to increase the expenditure of the planet and the cosmos, but not alone.
Kinetic expenditure is the tendency of matter in motion to spread out from higher concentrations to lower ones.
The material meaning of life is to help improve the expenditure of the universe.
The tendency of life is thus to die well together with others.
Death is not an unfortunate part of life; instead, life is a part of death that reproduces itself—not in order to live but in order to die and help others die.
If we want to live and persist on the earth as one of its animals, then we have to give our lives generously back to the earth and help it hasten its dissipation.
The key is to increase the rates and patterns of kinetic expenditure in such a way that the patterns sustain themselves, so that they can keep on experimenting and expending.
Matter always flows asymmetrically, entropically, and in metastable patterns of increasing disequilibrium.
The ideas of equivalence, equilibrium, reversibility, and scarcity are false—meaning they have not been physically found in nature so far.
The more ways of living there are, the more ways there are to consume and expend different energy sources.
No single organism can use all energy sources, so nature requires an army of specialized levels, relations, and singular techniques.
The more kinds of people and technologies there are, living in the more diverse ways, the more thoroughly we will be able to degrade and expend planetary energy.
In nature there is only the tendency to allow increasing experiments in motion and expenditure that do not undermine further experiments toward increasing expenditure.
If we want to survive, we need a materialist commons, where we treat each main pattern of the earth’s motion as a commons for the others.
The metabolic commons is also a cosmic commons in which the sun, solar system, and broader universe participate directly in self-degradation.

Unlike Socrates’s stultifying arguments, these words of Nail’s presents us with a program for action. “Life,” Nail writes, “is a gift given to the organism to intensify the expenditure of the cosmos and itself.” By living and dying well, we participate in the expenditure of the cosmos as “commons for itself,” existing “in order to unravel itself.” Through our societies and technologies, our “[a]rt, culture, and sexuality,” all of our myriad techniques of “thinking, doing, and being,” we are nature, the cosmos, the real as it “continually struggles to become other than it is,” all so that it might “expend itself faster.” Contrary to the undeath of Socratic ideality, Nail’s metabolic communism provides us with an ethic of generous dissipation, accepting death so that more life might come from it. If we follow Nail’s argumentation, if we accept his claims, we find ourselves upon a new “hypothetical ethical ground,” a new description or “metaethics” of the very basis of ethical action itself—our planetary survival. Nail admits of no universals here, no ghastly idealism, but only the particularities of life on this delicate, wondrous planet. And so we repeat Nail’s maxims with which he concludes his text: Increase planetary expenditure! Compost everything! Increase diversity! This is the kinetic program, the means by which we might come to understand how to die well, in whatever corner of earth we call home.¹²

Notes

Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2009), 64c. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 86c-d, 88a. ↩
Gordon W. F. Drake, “entropy,” Britannica, n.d., https://www.britannica.com/science/entropy-physics. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 72b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 72c-d. ↩
Ill Will, Worlds Apart, https://illwill.com/series/worlds-apart: “Worlds Apart is a new series exploring cosmology, ecology, science fiction, and the ends of capitalist society. What lies at the root of the West’s war of annihilation upon the Earth, our only home? How must the revolutionary imagination respond to the destruction and construction of livable worlds? How are communities inventing, defending, and inhabiting sites of collective life against industrial expansion and ecological devastation, and what limits do they encounter along the way?” ↩
Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). ↩
Ill Will, Introduction to Thomas Nail, “Kinocene Ethics,” Ill Will, April 21, 2021, https://illwill.com/kinocene-ethics. ↩
Ill Will, Introduction, n.p. ↩
Drake, “entropy,” n.p. ↩
Nail, “Kinocene Ethics,” n.p. ↩
All citations Nail, “Kinocene Ethics,” n.p. ↩

Dying Well

2022-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

In Plato’s Phaedo, we find Socrates awaiting his execution, explaining to his followers why he does not fear his impending death. All that follows in the dialogue is an effort to prove that “a man who has truly spent his life in philosophy feels confident when about to die, and is hopeful that, when he has died, he will win very great benefits in the other world.”¹ It is Socrates’s assertion that “all who actually engage in philosophy aright are practicing nothing other than dying and being dead.”²

In the previous entry here, I critiqued the Platonic metaphysics that drives the argument of the Phaedo, the institution of the divided line that inverts the structure of the real, establishing the knower as primary to the known, a blatant reversal of the Presocratic recognition that the knower is unilaterally and irreversibly determined by the known, a position most clearly articulated by Heraclitus. Here, I shift my focus to critique the Platonic physics that undergirds his metaphysics, and which, if scrutinized, causes the entire edifice of Plato’s argument to collapse. If we take the Socrates of the Phaedo at his word, checking his statements of fact for ourselves, we discover the support upon which he relies to be a simple falsehood with no basis in the real.

The argument is as follows:

Death is a reality.³
Death can only be the separation of the soul from the body.⁴
Souls continue to exist in Hades after the death of the body.⁵
Souls are born again from Hades into new bodies.⁶
This is possible because all things come to be from their opposites.⁷
If death comes to be from life, life can only come to be from death.⁸
Living things and living people are born.⁹
Souls must survive the death of the body, continuing to exist in Hades, so that birth can occur.¹⁰

On its face, this is a difficult line of reasoning for modern readers to accept. But it is Socrates himself who provides us with the counterargument that is his undoing. He supposes that if “there were not perpetual reciprocity in coming to be, between one set of things and another, revolving in a circle, as it were,” then there would be no guarantee that the soul would not ultimately perish.¹¹

Socrates says it plainly, and those familiar with the second law of thermodynamics will find the articulation of his counterpoint quite striking: “if, instead, coming-to-be were a linear process from one thing into its opposite only, without any bending back in the other direction or reversal, do you realize that all things would ultimately have the same form: the same fate would overtake them, and they would cease from coming to be?”¹² Even more emphatically, “if all things that partake in life were to die, but when they’d died, the dead remained in that form, and didn’t come back to life, wouldn’t it be quite inevitable that everything would ultimately be dead, and nothing would live?”¹³

Put otherwise, if the second law of thermodynamics, the concept of entropy, is true, if coming-to-be is indeed bound in a linear direction by the arrow of time, as determined by the second law, then everything will in fact die, and even the divine soul will be found to be without ultimate power over death, and indeed be subject, in the last instance, to death.

Considering such a position to be obviously false, Socrates moves on, point proven. He proceeds to make two complementary arguments for the persistence of the soul, the argument from recollection and the argument from affinity, which we will not analyze in detail here. But, continuing from these two arguments, Simmias and Cebes, Socrates’s interlocutors, have a chance to pose their objections. Simmias proposes his theory of attunement, arguing that death comes to the body when its natural tension, which he calls “soul,” is loosed, so rendering the soul the “first thing to perish in what is called death.”¹⁴ Simmias goes right to the base of Socrates’s reasoning, striking at the second of his premises, that death can only be the separation of the soul from the body. If death can be defined differently, then the rest of Socrates’s argument does not follow.

Cebes is shaken by Simmias’s theory of the soul, but cannot accept that “soul isn’t stronger and longer-lived than body.”¹⁵ However, even if the soul is stronger than the body, and might die and be reborn multiple times, this does not guarantee that soul “does not suffer in its many births, and does not end by perishing completely in one of its deaths.”¹⁶ Cebes struggles with the fifth of Socrates’s premises, uncertain that the reciprocity of coming-to-be is in fact perpetual.

After these two objections, Plato has the dialogue briefly pause, shifting the frame back to Phaedo, who has been relaying the conversation with Socrates to Echecrates, a Pythagorean philosopher who had not been able to be with Socrates prior to his death. Echecrates remarks, “What argument shall we ever trust now? How thoroughly convincing was the argument that Socrates gave, yet now it’s fallen into discredit.”¹⁷ This is the flaw of magisterial philosophy, of the logic of scission, which necessitates the institution of schools for the induction of students into mysteries, rather than simply directing students to look for themselves, say what they have seen, and verify with others what they have said. Simmias and Cebes rightly consider the physics Socrates presents, recognizing how the evidence before them contradicts the premises that Socrates uses to support his metaphysical claims.

To be clear, none of this ought to be taken as disproving the existence of the soul. Such an accomplishment is an impossibility. Socrates’s doctrine of the soul as “divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, unvarying, and constant” is unfalsifiable because the soul is also defined as “invisible,” entirely removed from empirical ways of knowing.¹⁸ Socrates’s doctrine of the soul is precisely that: a doctrine, not a fact. This is what makes many of the Presocratics, on the other hand, so marvellous to read. No matter the radicalism of their assertions, they remain consistently realist in their claims. In my series on “generic science,” even a thinker so apparently anti-realist as Parmenides nevertheless makes falsifiable claims about what the real actually is and how it is structured, claims that have fascinating analogues that are still debated in contemporary cosmology. Socrates, on the contrary, is no realist.

To Simmias’s objection, Socrates shows that Simmias’s assent to the theory of recollection (itself an unfalsifiable theory) undermines his own theory of attunement.¹⁹ To Cebes’s objection, Socrates first recounts his dalliances with “natural science,” which ultimately led him to a teleological theory of the real as governed by the forms.²⁰ Because the forms determine the real, the soul must exist and be completely imperishable, because the only way the soul can know the forms, and so make knowledge possible, is by existing together with the forms for all eternity. So, the only refutation for Cebes’s objection is the same unfalsifiable theory that Socrates uses to discredit Simmias’s objection. Truth, for Socrates, cannot properly be known, only taught.

To conclude the dialogue, Plato has Socrates recount the myth of the afterlife to explain why souls exist in the cycle of death and rebirth, and how practicing philosophy aright helps one to die well, attaining to an afterlife spent in a “pure dwelling” above the earth, like the gods.²¹ Here, Socrates fully resorts to religious and mythological language, pure doctrine, directing his followers to recall their shared cultural beliefs, taking comfort in Socrates’s instruction in how best to navigate the afterlife. And yet, if we are to believe Socrates that to “practice philosophy” is to “cultivate dying,” there is a peculiar fear of and aversion to death that motivates the dialogue as a whole.²² In the imperishability and immutability of the forms, and of the soul, their instrument, the Platonic doctrine shows itself not to be an exercise in dying well, but the very repudiation of death, losing its life in the very effort of trying not to die.

Socrates is not wrong that if we are to practice philosophy we must cultivate dying. He is wrong in that his philosophy does not in fact cultivate death but propagates undeath.²³ If we are to do philosophy today, we must strike at the very premises that Simmias and Cebes challenge, the premises that address the very physics of death as a phenomenon of the real. And as noted above, it is Socrates who points the way: it is to the question of entropy that we now must turn.

Notes

Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2009), 63e-64a. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 64a. Implied, but not stated here, soul is therefore the principle of life, that which makes a body a living body. This reasoning follows on Presocratic association of soul with intelligence, and intelligence with air, and so with breath. See my series of essays beginning with “Being and Motion” for a tracing of the lineage from motion to soul. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 64c. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 64c. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 70c. This and the next premise are according to “an ancient doctrine.” ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 70c. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 71a. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 71c. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 71d. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 71e. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 72b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 72b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 72c-d. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 86c-d. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 87a. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 88a. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 88d. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 80b, 79b. For falsifiability, see Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1935, trans. Karl Popper, Julius Freed, and Lan Freed (London, UK: Routledge, 2002). ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 92b-c. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 96a. Specifically, from 97c-99c, Socrates uses Anaxagoras as a support to argue that “intelligence should be the reason for everything,” and that if intelligence is the reason for everything, then one can determine how “each thing comes to be or perishes or exists” by asking “how is it best for that thing to exist, or to act or be acted upon in any way?” By framing scientific inquiry in this way, Socrates is able to argue that things are the way they are because it is “best for them to be just the way they are,” and it is the “good or binding” that “genuinely does bind and hold things together” in that way. This is a remarkably twisted reading of Anaxagoras, whose “intelligence” or “mind” is rigorously Eleatic in its constitution, and Milesian in its origin. The universe, for Anaxagoras, is one, and mind is the principle of its becoming, the principle of becoming as such. Becoming is not being, but it is always of being. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 114c. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 67e. ↩
Plato’s Academy is the first vampire castle. See Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” The Northstar, November 22, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20131129003704/https://thenorthstar.info/?p=11299. Fisher writes: “The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.” ↩

Logic of Scission

2022-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

In Plato’s Phaedo, Simmias has the right of it:

I think, Socrates, as perhaps you do too, that in these matters certain knowledge is either impossible or very hard to come by in this life; but that even so, not to test what is said about them in every possible way, without leaving off till one has examined them exhaustively from every aspect, shows a very feeble spirit; on these questions one must achieve one of two things: either learn or find out how things are; or, if that’s impossible, then adopt the best and least refutable of human doctrines, embarking on it as a kind of raft, and risking the dangers of the voyage through life, unless one could travel more safely and with less risk, on a securer conveyance afforded by some divine doctrine.¹

Knowledge not as a matter of certainty, but as an achievement,² an adventure,³ a wager.⁴ But Plato never gives Simmias room. His challenges to Socrates’s arguments cannot be answered, only confounded, twisted. If not, the bar of metaphysics, that terrible wound in the real, might start to heal—and then what would be the use of a philosopher and his academy?

Laruelle

Plato’s divided line, the bar of occidental metaphysics, operates through scission, a machine for cutting, a knife for dividing. Through the logic of this scission, a “syntax” is elaborated, a “matrix” that grids the real.⁵ This is “philosophical decision,” the operation of “analysis,” the move whereby the real is thoroughly loosened, decomposed into constituents and reordered according to the will of the philosopher.⁶ What is needed instead is “vision,” a “scientific thinking of the One [that] excludes its dismemberment into a syntactical side and a real side.”⁷ There is only the real, the One, “a real singulare tantum [single as such, single only],” and it is because the real is the singular as such that science is possible, that nonphilosophical vision can become the beginning of our inquiry: look and see, there is the “individual implying the immediately absolute,” there, and there, and there.⁸

The effect of the One, the “real content” of this effect, is its “unilaterality” and “irreversibility,” the “de-jection” or “de-position of Being by the One” that presents to our vision the “extra-empirical multiplicity” of what is, the “non-positional” and “non-objectivizable diversity” of the real.⁹ This real cannot be “determined in an ontological mode,” is “in no way decidable, not even partially,” and indeed, has “no need of any criterion of choice nor of any critique.”¹⁰ Critique—krī́nō, to separate, divide, distinguish, decide—must always “justify or legitimate itself,” but for scientific vision “there is nothing to choose, no multiplicity of significations or interpretations of the One, no ontological or rational foundation that would be more powerful than” the real itself, the real given to our senses.¹¹ Science is always already with what it studies. Our vision is presented with a myriad of indices to study and discuss, to see, and touch, and taste.

In science we discover the bar, the divided line, the syntax of the real, to be grounded in an “abyss” of “radical absurdity.”¹² Our vision, our generic science, begins from this premise of absurdity, embracing “this diversity, radical that-ness or in itself … a diversity that is absolutely indifferent, [which] grounds … an absolute or indifferent choice.”¹³ There is nothing to choose, no need to choose, we are already with what we would choose, and this is the very “essence of choice, of absolutely any choice whatsoever without any limitation.”¹⁴ Our vision, our generic science, is, therefore, the practice of a “transcendental possibilization that frees choice as possible.”¹⁵

Plato would foreclose this choice, would deny the real, in favour of his decision—a “strategy,” a “logic,” and an “economy” performed and instituted with a single cut.¹⁶

Plato

Socrates asks, “do sight and hearing afford mankind any truth, or aren’t even the poets always harping on such themes, telling us that we neither hear nor see anything accurately?”¹⁷ Certainly, he continues, whenever the soul “sets about examining anything in company with the body, it is completely taken in by it.”¹⁸ To be a true philosopher, one must “undertake the hunt for each reality alone by itself and unsullied”—each reality, which is to say, each constituent of Plato’s syntax, each form, each decision.¹⁹ The true philosopher must be “separated as far as possible from his eyes and ears, and virtually from his whole body, on the ground that it confuses the soul, and doesn’t allow it to gain truth and wisdom when in partnership with it.”²⁰ To know in this way is to be “pure,” to be separated “from the body’s folly,” and so to attain “through our own selves [to] all that is unsullied.”²¹ To know in this way is to decide against the real, to deny the absurdity of any such decision.

The cut in the real that Plato introduces is between “two kinds of beings, the one kind seen, the other invisible,” the seen “never constant” and the invisible “always constant,” the seen known by the senses, the invisible by the intellect.²² Syntax and soul are elevated above the real, attributed all of the terms that once belonged to the Eleatic One: “divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, unvarying, and constant in relation to itself.”²³ Plato inverts the unilateral, irreversible determination of cognition by the real, instituting a hallucinatory logic that makes it impossible for his students to do as Simmias advocates, to test, to learn, to find out how things are, trapping them in doubt and indebting them to the economy of his academy. A grand deception: to call freedom a “prison,” to call knowledge “ignorance.”²⁴

Heraclitus

Plato repudiates doxa, opinion, but in Heraclitus we see that doxa is the means whereby we might negotiate the uncertainty of all knowing. For Heraclitus, to “speak with intelligence [one] must stand firm by that which is common to all.”²⁵ Unlike Plato, this “common,” that which is present to intelligence, to every intelligence, is not the invisible syntax of the real, the forms, but that which is “accessible to sight, hearing, apprehension.”²⁶ We need not go to the master to have him explain the mysteries of the real, because the real is here before our eyes, and our opinions of the real may be checked against those of every other who looks and sees and forms opinions of their own. Indeed, for Heraclitus, all people have “the potential for self-knowledge and sound thinking.”²⁷ The true intellectual danger is for one to “live as though they had private understanding,” to do as Socrates urges: the soul “to trust none other but itself.”²⁸

Only through study and discussion can we come to know what “always was and is and shall be.”²⁹ Not to “withdraw,” but to be with.³⁰

Rancière

Freedom as imprisonment; knowledge as ignorance. This is the logic Plato would have us accept, the cut of his metaphysical pedagogy.

In pedagogical logic, the ignoramus is not simply one who does not as yet know what the schoolmaster knows. She is the one who does not know what she does not know or how to know it. For his part, the schoolmaster is not only the one who possesses the knowledge unknown by the ignoramus. He is also the one who knows how to make it an object of knowledge, at what point and in accordance with what protocol. For, in truth, there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors. But for the schoolmaster such knowledge is merely an ignoramus’s knowledge, knowledge that cannot be ordered in accordance with the ascent from the simplest to the most complex. The ignoramus advances by comparing what she discovers with what she already knows, in line with random encounters but also according to the arithmetical rule, the democratic rule, that makes ignorance a lesser form of knowledge. She is concerned solely with knowing more, with knowing what she did not yet know. What she lacks, what the pupil will always lack, unless she becomes a schoolmistress herself, is knowledge of ignorance—knowledge of the exact distance separating knowledge from ignorance.

This measurement precisely eludes the arithmetic of ignoramuses. What the schoolmaster knows, what the protocol of knowledge transmission teaches the pupil in the first instance, is that ignorance is not a lesser form of knowledge, but the opposite of knowledge; that knowledge is not a collection of fragments of knowledge, but a position. The exact distance is the distance that no yardstick measures, the distance that is demonstrated solely by the interplay of positions occupied, which is enforced by the interminable practice of the ‘step ahead’ separating the schoolmaster from the one whom he is supposed to train to join him. It is the metaphor of the radical gulf separating the schoolmaster’s manner from the ignoramus’s, because it separates two intelligences: one that knows what ignorance consists in and one that does not. It is, in the first instance, the radical difference that ordered, progressive teaching teaches the pupil. The first thing it teaches her is her own inability.³¹

This is the stultifying move of pedagogy, of philosophy, of the academy. The gulf, the split, the cut made between knowledge and ignorance, is the very scission that divides the real from itself and sets a logic over it to rule it, a logic into which students might be inducted, so long as they gain the favour of the master—and of course, so long as they pay the fee. What cannot be said, what must not be said, is that a student need only “observe[] what is before her, say[] what she has seen, and verif[y] what she has said,” and she will know what she did not know previously.³² As Simmias argues, find out, learn, test—that is all that one must do to know the real, that, and simply that.

The distance the ignoramus has to cover is not the gulf between her ignorance and the schoolmaster’s knowledge. It is simply the path from what she already knows to what she does not yet know, but which she can learn just as she has learnt the rest; which she can learn not in order to occupy the position of the scholar, but so as better to practise the art of translating, of putting her experience into words and her words to the test; of translating her intellectual adventures for others and counter-translating the translations of their own adventures which they present to her.³³

Plato’s logic of scission is an “embodied allegor[y] of inequality,” a “distribution of the sensible, an a priori distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities attached to these positions.”³⁴ If we are to think, to set out on the adventure of thought, we must repudiate Plato’s decision, must unlearn the “inequality of intelligence,” must embrace the contingency of study, this emancipatory work whereby we might indeed be able to “change something of the world we live in.”³⁵ There are no forms; in fact, there “is no more a privileged form than there is a privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points, intersections and junctions that enable us to learn something new.”³⁶ Let us look and see together.

Notes

Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2009), 85c-d. ↩
Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux 36 (July 2012), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/. Stengers writes: “In experimental sciences, such achievements are the very condition of what is then, after they have been verified, celebrated as an objective definition. An experimental achievement may be characterized as the creation of a situation enabling what the scientists question to put their questions at risk, to make the difference between relevant questions and unilaterally imposed ones.” And before science, achievement characterizes sense perception itself. Alva Noë writes: “Seeing is an achievement, our achievement, the achievement of making contact with what there is. We can fail to see.” All sense experiences are achievements: “We make them. We don’t just have them. We manage them. If you think of living as a stream of doing, and undergoing, then the achievement of meaning and integration that is characteristic of our actual lived experiences is a thing of value.” See Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015), xi, 204. The achievement that is experience is not limited to scientific inquiry. It is generic, a generic science. ↩
Stengers also characterizes the achievement of knowledge as an adventure, but here we can turn to Giorgio Agamben, The Adventure, 2015, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). The achievement of knowledge is an adventure of discovery, both the knight’s quest and the troubadour’s song, not passive but a matter of making, of poetry. Such adventure is always a “chance,” always “risky,” a “providential event” in which the “knight [has] an encounter with both the world and himself.” An adventure must be seized, and in so doing, it becomes more than “what happened,” but “also its narration.” An adventure must be seized and then recounted. See The Adventure, 21, 22, 24, 26. ↩
I cannot find a specific reference but I believe this term comes to me from Richard Kearney. He always spoke of the wager of faith, of belief. More tangibly, and to bring these notes back around to the matter of science, Michael Polanyi considers all scientific inquiry, and indeed, “all novel thought” as necessitating an “existential commitment.” Indeed, for Polanyi, science is simply “a variant of sensory perception.” See The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), xix, xvii. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 6, 11. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 196, ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 196, 6. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 200. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 201, 202. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 204. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 205. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 65b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 65b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 66a. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 66a. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 67b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 79a-b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 80b. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 82d-e. ↩
Heraclitus, F12, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 39. ↩
Heraclitus, F28, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 41. ↩
Heraclitus, F31, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 41. ↩
Heraclitus, F6, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 38, and Plato, Phaedo, 83a-b. ↩
Heraclitus, F36, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 42. ↩
Plato, Phaedo, 83a. ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2008, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, UK: Verso, 2009), 8-9. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10-11. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 12. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 11, 23. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 17. ↩

A Wonderfully Inconsistent Being

2022-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “A Wonderfully Inconsistent Being: A Review of Timothy Morton’s Spacecraft.” Ancillary Review of Books, January 19, 2022. https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2022/01/19/a-wonderfully-inconsistent-being-a-review-of-timothy-mortons-spacecraft/.

Mirrors: Zotero

Review

Published as part of the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury, philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton’s Spacecraft (2021) is a slim, lively study of the fantastic vessels of science fiction, and in particular those of the Star Wars universe, with the Millennium Falcon serving as the crux of the book. This craft signals “the irreducible uniqueness of how things are,” an idea that is central to Morton’s thought. Drawing on the resources of the school of object-oriented ontology, Morton unfolds their argument across an introduction and four compact chapters—“Garbage,” “Winnings,” “Hyperspace,” and “Anyone”—working to demonstrate the “radically democratic” nature of spacecraft, and indeed of Star Wars as a franchise—a much needed intervention given the recent and ongoing toxic episodes in the fandom. Morton’s language is sharp, their ideas persuasive, informed by years of work on such projects as Hyperobjects (2013), Dark Ecology (2016), and Humankind (2017). But Spacecraft requires no familiarity with Morton’s bibliography, nor with object-oriented ontology, and this is by design. Fatigued with the cynical and paranoid reason endemic to theory, Morton takes a different approach, a “deliberately naïve” one, recognizing that their purpose in writing this book is not to show that they “must be very intelligent,” but rather for “both of us,” reader and writer, to try “to change the world for the better.” This is the ultimate goal of Spacecraft, and indeed, it is the essential function of the book’s primary object, the Millennium Falcon.

I refer to the Millennium Falcon above as a “craft,” rather than a “ship,” following Morton in their distinction between these two generic sets of vessels. A craft is a “multiple entity” that does not have “an inside distinct from an outside”; a ship, on the other hand, implies “a kind of holism where the whole swallows all the parts.” The Millennium Falcon is a craft; a Star Destroyer is a ship. Where ships are used for blockades and bombardment, conquest and control, craft are for charting lines of flight, for escape and evasion, smuggling and stunting—indeed, as Morton writes, the Millennium Falcon seems “to open up the space for things to happen.”

Craft are never docked; always parked. Indeed, craft are often parked and forgotten, or even lost, making it possible for them to be found just when they are needed. For Morton, the “found-ness” of the Millennium Falcon signifies the “found-ness of all objects whatsoever, the fact that they resist total appropriation”. To follow this thought further, not only can a craft like the Millennium Falcon be found, but a craft can be won. The Falcon has no master, just people who fly it. The relationship is fundamentally different between the pilot and passengers on the Falcon and the crew of a Star Destroyer. Star Destroyers are hierarchical and authoritative; the Falcon is ecological and contingent.

For Morton, craft are a means for us to enter into a reality free from the dominating tractor beams of power. This reality is not a different reality from our own, because reality has “no ‘other’ side”—rather, it is the beach beneath the street, what has always been there, only paved over. This reality Morton refers to as hyperspace, “hyper no longer in the sense of beyond, but in the sense of concentrated or condensed,” spacetime as a feel, “space-feel,” not an empty, orderly Cartesian grid, but saturated and thick, or in Morton’s words, “creamy,” “damp,” “luminous,” and “glistening.” Hyperspace does not take us outside of space, outside of reality, but rather is the experience of space as envelopment, of time as temporality, of reality as “the very possibility of moving at all, anywhere.” Hyperspace is not some “sublime infinity” but a “gigantically beautiful entity” (a hyperobject) with which we enter into relation by way of spacecraft, a “middle” that can be accessed “from anywhere in the story.”

The possibility that anywhere, anyone can enter hyperspace is the radical political potential of spacecraft, a potential that Morton finds especially potent in the Star Wars iteration of faster-than-light travel. You do not need a crew of military personnel or special powers to enter hyperspace: you “just need to know how to flip some controls.” There are no guarantees that it will work—spacecraft are fundamentally contingent entities—but the possibility is always open and available to anyone who reaches for the instrument panel. The Millennium Falcon is a “wonderfully inconsistent being,” a “rickety but comfy freighter,” a vessel you can “tinker with” or “craft.” The pilots of the Falcon are crafty “artisans,” playing it like an instrument, like a game, and insofar as passengers of the Falcon “can hop on and off” at will, we the “audience-chorus” are invited to tinker, to craft, to play, becoming collaborators or conspirators with those who were already there and those who are yet to come, learning that the Falcon is not only a means for getting from one planet to another, but a means for “improvising a revolution.”

“The Falcon,” Morton writes, “really is a millennium falcon, a nonhuman being that announces the possibility of a new age.” This is the possibility that Morton first felt as a child, imagining spacecraft and playing with models. It is the possibility I first felt building LEGO Star Wars sets and poring over the Star Wars Incredible Cross-Sections books, reading every Star Wars: X-Wing book I could get my hands on and playing any video game available in which I could pilot a vessel from the Star Wars universe. It is the possibility I felt when Rey was still just Rey, and a young stable boy used the Force to pull a broom to his hand: the possibility that the Force is for anyone. As Morton astutely shows, hyperspace reveals that it is “a truly classless galaxy at its core, despite how people have messed it up,” that the Force is a continuum, a habitat, that one need only find a hyperdrive in a junkyard to make a break for the stars. This is the promise that spacecraft hold.

Concrete Rules

2021-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

“There are rules, rules of ‘plan(n)ing,’ of diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere…”

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

This was going to be an rpg, but the game never arrived, only this set of terms, this collection of rules. They are concrete rules because they are real, but their reality makes them no less abstract in their possibility. Deleuze and Guattari sought a metaphysics for the mechanosphere, the cosmicization of beings and concepts. These are the rules they provide.

Itch.io

No Dice, No Masters

2021-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart.” Presented at the GENeration Analog: The Tabletop Games and Education Virtual Conference, August 5, 2021. https://zenodo.org/record/5156494.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

This study of Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Belonging Outside Belonging system for tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) follows in Jacques Rancière’s project of ignorance, as set out in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) and as continued in The Emancipated Spectator (2008). With Rancière’s politics as a framework, this study works backward from Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games (2007) to his Unit Operations (2006), and then to Alain Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), in order to recover the radical politics undergirding Bogost’s distinct method of game criticism. Badiou’s Manifesto, going beyond Bogost’s primary philosophical source, Badiou’s Being and Event (1988), clarifies the political stakes of Badiou’s ontology, allowing us to return to the present with a more robust politics of procedurality motivating our critical work. From here, Alder and Rosenbaum’s Dream Askew / Dream Apart (2018) furnishes us with a provocative model of emancipatory procedurality suited not only for radical play but radical design, challenging the limits of Bogost’s “persuasion” as an activist paradigm.

Keywords: Game Studies, Tabletop Roleplaying, Belonging Outside Belonging, Avery Alder, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Ian Bogost, Emancipation, Procedures

Introduction

This study of Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Belonging Outside Belonging system for tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) follows in Jacques Rancière’s project of ignorance, as set out in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)¹ and as continued in The Emancipated Spectator (2008).² With Rancière’s politics as a framework, this study works backward from Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games (2007)³ to his Unit Operations (2006),⁴ and then to Alain Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy (1989),⁵ in order to recover the radical politics undergirding Bogost’s distinct method of game criticism. Badiou’s Manifesto, going beyond Bogost’s primary philosophical source, Badiou’s Being and Event (1988),⁶ clarifies the political stakes of Badiou’s ontology, allowing us to return to the present with a more robust politics of procedurality motivating our critical work. From here, Alder and Rosenbaum’s Dream Askew / Dream Apart (2018)⁷ furnishes us with a provocative model of emancipatory procedurality suited not only for radical play but radical design, challenging the limits of Bogost’s “persuasion” as an activist paradigm.

To begin, let us situate ourselves in Rancière’s project of ignorance. Summarizing this project in The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière locates the impetus for it in “the eccentric theory and singular fate of Joseph Jacotot, who created a scandal in the early nineteenth century by claiming that one ignoramus could teach another what he himself did not know, asserting the equality of intelligence and opposing intellectual emancipation to popular instruction.”⁸ Contrary to the “self-vanishing mediation” of the “pedagogical relationship,” contrary to the subsumption of knowledge to the “position” of the knower, Jacotot’s proposition of equality refuses this elevated position, arguing that knowledge is, quite simply, a “collection of fragments.”⁹ To unify and purify this heterogeneous collection, while teaching the pupil that, in their ununified, unpurified state, they are without knowledge (that is, without the cohesion of the collection that would constitute the ‘true’ position of knowledge), is the work of “stultification,” the institution of the gap of “inequality” into the procedure of learning that obfuscates the operational logic of this procedure that is actually the case.¹⁰ What is the case, Rancière argues, is that “there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors.”¹¹ The schoolmaster denies that this procedure is in fact constitutive of knowledge, designating “such knowledge [as] merely an ignoramus’s knowledge, knowledge that cannot be ordered in accordance with the ascent from the simplest to the most complex,” or, we might say, from appearances to ideal truth.¹² The schoolmaster introduces a bar into actuality, a split or scission that is the primary formal structure to which emancipation is opposed.

Intellectual emancipation, on the other hand, is predicated on the “verification of the equality of intelligence.”¹³ Knowledge does not require the purity of a position artificially separated from the procedure of its conception; knowledge simply requires an intelligence to “venture into the forest of things and signs surrounding it,” to “observ[e] and compar[e] one thing with another, a sign with a fact, a sign with another sign.”¹⁴ Learning is not possible due to the transcendental illumination of the sun of truth, as mediated by the schoolmaster who vanishes into its searing light. Learning is possible because a learner “observes what is before her, says what she has seen, and verifies what she has said.”¹⁵ The bar does not exist by nature; it is a construction. “From the ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist constructing hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work,” argues Rancière, because there is no bar to separate these intelligences from each other, no “radical gulf that can only be ‘bridged’ by an expert.”¹⁶ Intelligence is always and already “translation,” proceeding by “comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it.”¹⁷ The distance between two intelligences is never a gulf between knowledge and not-knowledge (i.e., ignorance), but between knowledges; it is the “path,” for the learner, “from what she already knows to what she does not yet know, but which she can learn just as she learnt the rest.”¹⁸

Rancière’s project of ignorance can be named as such precisely because it remains in the space of ignorance, never learning the “inequality of intelligence” because such inequality, once more to emphasize, is not a fact to be learned but to be constructed.¹⁹ For a learner to situate herself in this project of ignorance is for her to “learn not in order to occupy the position of the scholar, but so as better to practise the art of translating, of putting her experience into words and her words to the test; of translating her intellectual adventures for others and counter-translating the translations of their own adventures which they present to her.”²⁰ This is a radically egalitarian project, one in which mastery is “uncoupled” from knowledge, in which we “venture,” together, “into the forest of things and signs, to say what [we] have seen and what [we] think of what [we] have seen, to verify it and have it verified.”²¹ The transcendental distance between ignorance and knowledge is abolished; we are all ignoramuses who know innumerable things and who continue to learn ever more. The only distance that remains is “factual distance,” the distance of a path from the known to the not-yet-known, a “path that constantly abolishes any fixity and hierarchy of positions with their boundaries.”²² To situate ourselves in this project is to make ourselves ready for the work of emancipation. And by situating ourselves in this project, we make ourselves ready for the work of the present study.

Procedurality

Having situated ourselves in Rancière’s project, we can now proceed to address the key technical terminology of this study. In his Persuasive Games, Bogost defines procedurality as a “way of creating, explaining, or understanding processes.”²³ Processes, in turn, are the “way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems.”²⁴ We can condense these definitions by saying that procedurality is a way in which we “structure behaviour.”²⁵ To use the above discussion of Rancière as an example, procedurality helps us understand knowledge not as a position but a procedure. Knowledge is a procedure of observing, saying, and verifying, the results of which are communicated by translating, comparing, and illustrating; future results are anticipated on the basis of past results, and we structure our behaviour in particular ways in order to act toward desired ends in accordance with anticipated results. No position makes knowledge what it is; it is the open set of these processes, the quality of procedurality, that describes knowledge in its actuality.

Reading a rule book and gaining a knowledge of the rules makes the procedurality of knowledge even more explicit. One does not merely understand a rule book; to understand a rule book, one must know how to put it into practice. I can read Alder’s Dream Askew, tell my friends about it and how I think we should try to play it, and then we get together, we talk about how to play, and we play it. Afterward, we keep talking about our experience, comparing our thoughts and feelings—was it good, was it bad, what new modes of thought did it teach? We share stories, we laugh, we recollect. And then we go about our lives, all these fragments going with us. And perhaps we play again, tell other friends about the game, play with a different group. Or perhaps we never play again, but always remember that experience, who we were with, how it worked, what we did. Perhaps even we do none of this, reading the text only and allowing our imaginations to be directed by the rules, envisioning interactions, scenarios, worlds, a silent play for one. In these various experiences, we see that understanding is so much more than understanding the text, understanding the rules; understanding is about being carried along by the various processes dictated by the procedure that is the game. To understand a rule is not merely to understand the content of the words, but to be transformed by it.²⁶

Importantly, procedures are not “fixed” or “unquestionable” entities.²⁷ Procedures, as we have seen in these examples, often consist of “intersecting,” “interleaved,” and/or “nesting” processes, and users of procedures frequently “muster[ ] new processes” and “seamlessly blend[ ] them with the procedure” to achieve different results.²⁸ In the case of tabletop gaming, “rule zero” enshrines this procedural arbitrariness: if a rule doesn’t work, “alter” or “discard” it.²⁹ Procedures are assumed and enacted by “actors,” which means that procedures can also be set aside by those actors.³⁰ Understanding the rules means knowing how to put them into practice, but it also means knowing when a set of rules isn’t for us, when to close one rule book and open another.

This is the first emancipatory kernel that we encounter at the formal level of games, the emancipatory kernel of procedurality as such. If knowledge is a position, then knowledge becomes something to be explained; the rules need a master to ensure their transmission. But if knowledge is a procedure, an open set of processes, then no master is required. There is no need for a master to induct us into the hidden mysteries because we can all look for ourselves; we do not need to seek to make our rules disappear in the mediation of the master’s rulings; we simply adopt the rules as a procedure and begin to play. It is the relation between procedures and their adoption that we must now unpack.

Unit Operations

“Intellectual emancipation,” writes Rancière, “is the verification of the equality of intelligence.”³¹ But the equality of intelligence “does not signal the equal value of all manifestations of intelligence,” only the “self-equity of intelligence in all its manifestations.”³² If the emancipatory kernel of procedurality can be located in the arbitrariness of procedures, this also means that emancipation is not guaranteed. We can adopt a rule set unwittingly—through ideology, through cultural influence, through the recommendation of a friend. Or we can have a rule set forced upon us—by a police officer, a boss, a game master. Procedurality does not guarantee emancipation. As Rancière writes, all we can affirm is that we “have seen certain facts. We believe that this could be the reason for it. We (and you may do the same) will perform some other experiments to verify the solidity of the opinion.”³³ But that is all. To assert an “identity of cause and effect,” an identity of fact and reason, is simply to “sum[ ] up the ideas that tell the story of the fact” with a name, forgetting that the “name of a fact is not its cause, only at best, its metaphor.”³⁴ Such summing up requires one to take a position external to the procedure of knowledge, to take up a position of authority whereby one can “therefore-ize” about the facts.³⁵ The desire to guarantee the facts enacts a closure of their emancipatory possibility. If we do this, we mistake “our opinions for the truth”—that is, we become transfixed by the guarantee of truth when opinions, as opinions, are most important.³⁶ To undertake a procedural critique that retains the possibility of emancipation, then, we must remain with the facts, remain internal to the procedure of knowledge, thinking that “our opinions are opinions and nothing more,” that our “words,” indeed, “are merely words.”³⁷ Rancière writes:

One mustn’t see in this an obstacle to communication. Only the lazy are afraid of the idea of arbitrariness and see in it reason’s tomb. On the contrary. It is because there is no code given by divinity, no language of languages, that human intelligence employs all its art to making itself understood and to understanding what the neighboring intelligence is signifying. Thought is not told in truth; it is expressed in veracity. It is divided, it is told, it is translated for someone else, who will make of it another tale, another translation, on one condition: the will to communicate, the will to figure out what the other is thinking, and this under no guarantee beyond his narration, no universal dictionary to dictate what must be understood.³⁸

“What is essential,” then, “is to avoid lying, not to say that we have seen something when we’ve kept our eyes closed, not to believe that something has been explained to us when it has only been named.”³⁹ It is the “explicators” with their “truth” that we must actually fear, those who interrupt the procedure of knowledge with the “form of stultification.”⁴⁰ These masters cannot teach knowledge, only “inability.”⁴¹ In telling their subjects what they do not know, they obscure the fact that the “virtue of our intelligence is less in knowing than in doing”—the first lesson the master teaches is always how to say the words “I can’t.”⁴² There is no knowledge here, only “self-forgetfulness,” a denial of the “privileged relation of each person to the truth.”⁴³ A “society of the emancipated,” on the other hand, would admit of no such mastery, only a myriad of voices saying I can.⁴⁴ The society of the emancipated “would only know minds in action: people who do, who speak about what they are doing, and who thus transform all their works into ways of demonstrating the humanity that is in them as in everyone.”⁴⁵ We must identify those procedures that do not clamp down on the arbitrariness of procedurality, that do not stultify the emancipatory energy of a situation. And to do so, we must familiarize ourselves with Bogost’s concept of the “unit operation.”

Introduced in Unit Operations, the unit operation is a “discrete,” “disconnected,” “meaning-making” entity.⁴⁶ More concretely, a unit operation, defined according to its constituent terms, is “a material element, a thing,” and “a basic process that takes one or more inputs and performs a transformation on it.”⁴⁷ Compared with systems, which are “characteristically protracted, dependent, sequential, and static,” unit operations are “characteristically succinct, discrete, referential, and dynamic.”⁴⁸ However, systems and unit operations are not opposed. Rather, contemporary systems can be described as “fluctuating assemblages of unit-operational components rather than overarching regulators.”⁴⁹ “Unit operations articulate connections between nodes in networks,” writes Bogost, and so thinking in terms of unit operations allows us to think systems from the bottom up, beginning with the open logic of procedurality instead of the closed logic of systematicity.⁵⁰ Units operations “build relations,” doing so “according to a broad range of diverse logics.”⁵¹ As such, thinking in terms of unit operations prevents us from falling into totalizing or universalizing interpretive modes. Indeed, unit operations “privilege function over context, instances over longevity.”⁵² Bogost is not arguing against contextual and historical critique, but rather arguing for an understanding of contextual and historical structures as emergent from the “material and conceptual logic” of unit operations.⁵³

Bogost avoids the reification of units as substantial entities through the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Unit operations are first and foremost relational because a “unit is never actually unitary; it is always a multiplicity.”⁵⁴ Bogost deploys Badiou’s concepts of the “situation” and the “count as one” to get to this point.⁵⁵ Being as such is a “multiplicity of multiplicities,” the “set” of which Badiou names the “situation.”⁵⁶ A situation is always a “structured presentation” of these multiplicities, a “configuration.”⁵⁷ This “structuring process” and its result is the “state” of a given situation, that which renders a situation this situation.⁵⁸ The structuring of a situation is a work of articulation and instantiation, a “process or a frame” for rendering multiplicity “a multiplicity.”⁵⁹ This is the “count as one,” the action that “produces a particular set,” that “takes a multiplicity and treats it as a completed whole.”⁶⁰ A unit operation, then, can be understood in the sense of the count as one: “an understanding, largely arbitrary, certainly contingent, of a particular situation, compacted and taken as a whole.”⁶¹ The unit is a multiplicity made unitary through a name.

As Rancière tells us, a name is not a reason. Bogost supports this point: “the count as one tells us scarcely little about the way that the configured elements of a set function: what they do, and how they do it.”⁶² Consequently, unit analysis or procedural critique is necessary if we are not to mistake metaphors for causes, if we are to engage in critical description and not authoritarian prescription—which is precisely the danger of critique, to become intoxicated with naming, to enter into the college of explicators through a side door so as not to be seen by the demos of which we purport to be members. Insofar as procedurality, for Badiou, is explicitly political, working back to Badiou from Bogost’s application of his ideas will provide us with the necessary radical motivation to avoid a recuperation of critique by power. Indeed, where Bogost comes to emphasize persuasion, Badiou is always interested in revolution, in emancipation. It is Badiou to whom we now turn.

Truth Procedures

Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy opens with the problem of possibility, which he frames as the possibility of the intervention of the “unthinkable into thought.”⁶³ Looking at the history of the twentieth century, Badiou names “Hitler and his henchman” as the most horrific of instances of such an intervention.⁶⁴ Contrary to the philosophers who, after Nazism, considered philosophy to be impossible, who considered Nazism itself an impossible “object for philosophy,” Badiou sees the unthinkable possibility of Nazism as indicative of the nature of possibility as such and of the work of philosophy yet to be done.⁶⁵ The “crux of the matter,” writes Badiou, “is to know what the following means: taking one more step.”⁶⁶ How is a “single step” to be taken within a given situation; how is the “moving-itself of thought within the articulated element of its conditions” possible?⁶⁷

This possibility Badiou frames as the possibility of “discontinuity in time and space.”⁶⁸ Between “Greek city-states, classical Western absolute monarchies and bourgeois parliamentary societies,” there is a remarkable discontinuity of “social formations,” and yet philosophy persists between them, understood by each subsequent formation as continuous with itself in the previous formation.⁶⁹ The “conditions of philosophy are transversal,” Badiou contends, cutting across history, across ideology, by way of a “relation to thought [that] is relatively invariant.”⁷⁰ Badiou names this invariance “truth,” and the conditions of philosophy, as a result, “truth procedures.”⁷¹ Badiou restricts the number of these procedures to four, but myself and others expand this set to include other “generic procedures” that can also be characterized by the truth procedure Badiou elaborates.⁷² What is essential, no matter the number of such procedures, is that they “stand out from the cumulation of fields of knowledge by their eventful origin.”⁷³

In a given “state of things,” in a “situation,” there can be “cognition, correct statements, accumulated knowledge.”⁷⁴ All the processes of the knowledge procedure that we described above are real and efficacious. But if there is not an event to “supplement” this situation, “there is no truth.”⁷⁵ Truth requires an event that “can neither be named nor represented by referring to the resources of the situation,” an event that is “inscribed by a singular naming, the bringing into play of an additional signifier.”⁷⁶ This additional signifier is the unthinkable, that which could not have been named before its irruption. Philosophy is, therefore, that which “gather[s] together all the additional names,” that which “configurates the generic procedures, through a welcoming, a sheltering, built up with reference to their disparate simultaneity.”⁷⁷

At a first glance, Badiou’s conception of philosophy seems to directly contradict Rancière’s project of ignorance upon which we have heavily relied here. Indeed, without truth, Badiou contends that there is only “veridicality,” while Rancière denies that thought can be “told in truth,” but only in “veracity.”⁷⁸ It would seem that these two thinkers are opposed. Not so. Though Badiou relies heavily on the language of truth, his conception of truth makes an authoritarian mastery of it impossible. Philosophy “does not establish any truth,” but rather “sets a locus of truths.”⁷⁹ The welcoming and sheltering that philosophy performs is not the unifying and purifying of knowledge that Rancière rebukes. Instead, the “common place” of philosophy is a “conceptual site in which the generic procedures are thought as compossible.”⁸⁰ The place or site of thought is a unity only insofar as it is the “unity of a moment of truths,” a moment the “aim” of which is to “think ‘together’” the discontinuity or disparity of its terms.⁸¹ “Philosophy does not pronounce truth,” argues Badiou, “but its conjuncture, that is, the thinkable conjunction of truths.”⁸² In this way, Badiou’s philosophy, like Rancière’s learning, is also a work of observing, saying, and verifying, with Badiou more interested in this work at and subsequent to the moment when a term is introduced to the situation for which no one yet has a name.

Badiou goes on to seal this complementarity that we have identified between his truth and Rancière’s ignorance: the “philosophical operators must not be understood as summations, totalizations,” because their “eventful and heterogeneous nature … excludes their encyclopedic alignment.”⁸³ The conditions of philosophy are not conditions of mastery but “precarious, nascent conditions,” the operational logic of which are characterized by “crises, paradoxes, and breakthroughs,” by “quaking” and “wavering,” by “revolutions and provocations.”⁸⁴ Truth is not a position, but a “hole in knowledge”; as such, truth is profoundly “fragile.”⁸⁵

If we look to other writings of Rancière’s, we see a further complementarity with Badiou in his conception of the “distribution of the sensible.”⁸⁶ Rancière defines the distribution of the sensible as the “dominant system of self-evident facts of sense perception.”⁸⁷ We learn by observing, saying, and verifying, by comparing what we see and what we think about what we see with others, but these processes are always overdetermined by the “structure of domination and subjection.”⁸⁸ Intellectual emancipation is predicated on the proposition of the equality of intelligence, but it begins when we intervene in the “system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”⁸⁹ This intervention in a system of forms is a process or operation that Rancière and Badiou share, a process vital for the work of emancipation.

So, then, how does Badiou’s truth procedure actually work? We can describe the truth procedure as consisting of four processes, each of which are defined in Being and Event: nomination, intervention, fidelity, and forcing. Nomination is the process that “constitutes” the event “as susceptible to a decision concerning its belonging to the situation.”⁹⁰ Intervention is the process of “unfolding the consequences of this nomination in the space of the situation to which it belongs.”⁹¹ Fidelity is the process that “separates out, within the set of presented multiples, those which depend upon an event.”⁹² And forcing is the process whereby a term is “positively investigated with respect to its connection to the name of the event.”⁹³ Put more simply, nomination is the naming of the event, intervention is the elaboration of the terms of the event, fidelity is the gathering of the terms of the event, and forcing is the verification of the terms of the event as belonging to the situation they extend. The result of this overall procedure is the “generat[ion]” of “veridical statements that were previously undecidable” according to the terms of the situation prior to the event.⁹⁴ In this way, an event can be considered true because the truth procedure demonstrates that the terms of the event are “the truth of the situation, and not the absolute commencement of another.”⁹⁵ After the event has occurred and its investigation by the truth procedure been completed, “no information can be extracted” from the event “which was not already present in … the fundamental situation” because the truth has effected a “generic extension” of that situation.⁹⁶ By the process of forcing, the final step of the truth procedure, the truth itself is shown to be veridical in the situation in which it originally appeared like a hole, revealing that the forest of things and signs extends farther than previously thought.

Truth functions neither as master nor guarantor. Truth is that which emancipates the situation, freeing it from the paralysis of the state. The possibility of truth is the possibility of rupture, the possibility of change that always troubles the borders of the situation. Truth “is by itself void,” it “operates but presents nothing,” it “refer[s] to nothing in presentation,” only to the possibility of the new.⁹⁷ Neither master nor guarantor, truth forms no allegiance with the good. The possibility of truth is the possibility of any truth whatsoever, including the most undesirable of such. Consequently, human subjects are invested with a profound responsibility—not as pious adherents to transcendental forms, but as “militant[s]” of truths investigating their consequences here and now.⁹⁸ Explication is replaced with “active fidelity”; the rule of master over subjects is replaced by the “zeal of citizen-militants” side-by-side in the streets.⁹⁹

If we are to deploy Bogost’s method to the ends of an emancipatory critique, we must retain Badiou’s militancy. Indeed, it is precisely the “feverish exploration” of militant fidelity that Badiou sees as vital to overcoming the “almost global paralysis of a political thinking of emancipation.”¹⁰⁰ What is more, for Badiou there can be no subject other than the subject that is “a local configuration of the procedure.”¹⁰¹ The subject is always “internal to the situation,” and insofar as truth arrives in the situation from the outside, we cannot say that the subject “knows the truth, or that it is adjusted to the truth.”¹⁰² The subject is the “local moment of the truth,” but it is neither “consciousness nor unconsciousness of the true,” because it has no being apart from the truth of which it is a moment.¹⁰³ Given that procedural criticism is performed by a subject, procedural criticism relies, at a fundamental level, on the emancipatory activity of the truth procedure by which the subject is itself instantiated. The subject cannot remain aloof from this procedure because it is a consequence of the procedure.

The militancy of Badiou’s philosophical project is easily overlooked in the struggle to comprehend its terms. But a system without “strife” or “combat” has not been successfully realized in the mode Badiou proposes.¹⁰⁴ Badiou’s Manifesto clarifies his polemical objectives. The “polemos” that Badiou seeks to preserve is that of a war against “dogmatic terror,” against “tyrannies,” against such disasters of the “State” as Nazism.¹⁰⁵ “Philosophy is possible,” asserts Badiou, and not only possible, but “necessary,” a “new responsibility” for thought that is both “duty” and “desire.”¹⁰⁶ It is with such duty and desire that we at last proceed to the work of critique itself.

Emancipation

Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Dream Askew and Dream Apart are dreams of emancipation. Made possible by the equality of intelligence, these games make this equality a theme. Each game focuses on a “marginalized group of people living together in precarious community.”¹⁰⁷ Emancipation from the powers that be is not a guarantee for these groups, but the fragile possibility of such is generative of the stories that will carry players forward. Player-characters will “work together, fall in love, fight, hurt one another, heal together, enact ill-advised plans, and all the rest.”¹⁰⁸ Emancipation does not preclude strife. But it is the play itself, as an exercise in emancipatory procedurality, in the adoption of procedures without guarantee, in the assumption of the possibility of the new and the otherwise, that constitutes an emancipatory space. Not every manifestation of the procedure will be equal, but the self-equity of those enacting the procedure is born forth in every one of its manifestations.

Alder and Rosenbaum’s dreams are predicated on equality, but they begin with a statement: “no dice, no masters.”¹⁰⁹ In the “referential universe” of tabletop roleplaying games, this statement signals the “occurrence of that indiscernible of the situation,” which is a mode of play with neither dice rolls nor game masters.¹¹⁰ As the statement of a subject, no dice, no masters is “bound to the future anterior of the existence of an indiscernible”—it is a “hypothetical signification.”¹¹¹ It is a signification to be explored, to be investigated, to be tested, and eventually, to be verified (or not). No dice, no masters, signifies a possibility that may or may not be shown to be true by “the retroaction of the existence … of an indiscernible part of the situation.”¹¹² The situation dictates that we must play with dice and we must play with masters, but in the verification of this statement we discover that we could play without dice and without masters all along. We play the game and so discover its terms to be veridical, extending the situation of play itself.

The subject who pronounces the statement no dice, no masters, the subject who plays such a game, is constituted as the finite moment of this possible truth. This subject’s play is “a matter of confidence, or of knowing belief,” which carries the subject from the indiscernible of the truth to its verification in the situation.¹¹³ This confidence is realized in the process of forcing, the subject’s “fundamental law.”¹¹⁴ Forcing verifies if a statement is veridical for the “universe of sense,” the universe that is “suspended” from the infinite void of possibility.¹¹⁵ There are three possible outcomes for this process of enquiry: the “statement cannot be forced,” the “statement can be universally forced,” or the “statement can be forced by certain terms.”¹¹⁶ The event of the truth does not guarantee any outcome; it is a shock triggering action. If the statement cannot be forced, then our language for the articulation of the event needs to be revised; but if the statement can be forced in part or in full, then the terms of the situation can be extended accordingly.

Alder and Rosenbaum acknowledge that many of their readers “will have a long history of roleplaying games,” and that “some instincts developed in other games may lead [them] astray here.”¹¹⁷ “Play is driven by the choices that players make,” rather than by the chance of dice rolls.¹¹⁸ This play is “not strictly competitive or cooperative,” but rather is interested in “exploring the drama that wells up between the main characters and all around them.”¹¹⁹ Rather than having the action directed by a game master, players “are encouraged to make authentic, interesting choices with a spirit of curiosity.”¹²⁰ The “situation-to-come” that is indicated by the statement no dice, no masters presents a radical reconfiguration of the situation of play, one where “conversation,” “exploration,” and “experiment” are not peripheral, as to the violent and extractive action of tables past, but central to the experience.¹²¹ It is possible to configure a space of action otherwise, to overflow the rigid channels of traditional agency.

The elaboration of a truth procedure can require a “break with historicism,” a “desire … against history.”¹²² The emancipatory statement, no dice, no masters, appears as a “bright opening of eternity, without God or soul,” appearing from the “very fact that its effort,” the effort of play, “put[s] us in agreement” with the possibility of the truths it pronounces.¹²³ To modulate and transform Badiou’s concept of philosophy, we can say of tabletop roleplaying that its history is “the history of its ethics,” of its failures and its successes, of the “succession of violent gestures through which [it] is withdrawn from its disastrous redoubling.”¹²⁴ Such a history is a history of the “a desubstancialization of Truth” and the “self-liberation of its act,”¹²⁵ a history wherein play is emancipated from its rulers, its procedures self-liberated from their guarantors. To declare no dice, no masters, is to force the terms of this new situation; to approach this declaration as a critic is to recognize it as the thematic of a new procedural genre.

The first operation of play in Dream Askew / Dream Apart is to “establish[] a food plan.”¹²⁶ Alder and Rosenbaum encourage “[e]ating together,” preparing food from “on-theme recipe suggestions” if the such an opportunity is afforded by the play space.¹²⁷ The food plan is one process in a set that we can name the comfort procedure, a set of rules considering nutrition, bathroom, and accessibility needs.¹²⁸ This procedure is not separate from play, but integral to it. Likewise, the safety procedure that follows on the subsequent page is also integral to play, consisting of one simple process: “pause.”¹²⁹ This process is “an agreement” that allows players “to take risks and play seriously,” to diligently enquire into the conditions of the situation no dice, no masters describes.¹³⁰ Alder and Rosenbaum continue to elaborate procedures for asking, correcting, and teaching, continuing to extend the space of play with new terms, dislocating these responsibilities from the traditional site of the game master and redistributing them equally between the members of the table.¹³¹ From here, procedures for character creation and world creation are established, but there is no distinction between these procedures and the preceding. The multiple of these terms constitutes the game, and fidelity to this multiple, the gathering together of these terms, is a necessary step in the procedure of the game as a whole.

To act in play, players utilize the “move” procedure.¹³² The process driving this procedure takes a “prompt” for an input and produces narrative action as an output, operating any time a player-character wants to “take action.”¹³³ The outline of this operation is striking in its distinction from the operation of a dice roll in traditional roleplaying games. With the dice roll, a player-character is confronted with a challenge to be met with a certain power—be it intelligence, strength, charisma, or otherwise.¹³⁴ The dice roll musters the terms of the state to exercise the player-character’s situational authority, their position in the state. Power is leavened with chance, but the mechanical trajectory of such games is the ultimate suppression of chance through the operational logic of the level up. As the numbers go up, the possibility of a negative outcome goes down. The move, on the other hand, uses a token-exchange operation and does away with chance entirely. Negative outcomes are no longer to be feared because any time a player-character makes a “weak move” and shows their “character’s vulernability, folly, or even just plain rotten luck … they also earn a token.”¹³⁵ In the future, a player-character can spend tokens they have gained to make a “strong move,” where they show how their “character’s skill, power, astute planning, or good luck come to bear and transform a situation.”¹³⁶ The overdetermination of the dice roll by a character’s state paralyzes the threat of possibility; the move, on the other hand, mobilizes this threat in its very structure, welcoming it as necessary to the possibility of emancipation.

Bogost proposes three “purposes of persuasion” that games can realize as instruments of “procedural rhetoric.”¹³⁷ The first, “assessment,” is aligned with power, and “always requires an appeal to an existing domain.”¹³⁸ Assessment measures the results of a procedure against the terms of the situation as it exists now. The second, “deliberation,” “sit[s] ambiguously between the support and ouster of an existing logic.”¹³⁹ Deliberation is the “motivated recognition of the situation’s structure,” which may lead to the reinforcement or challenging of that structure.¹⁴⁰ The third, “conversations,” is the way in which “communities use discourse to establish and refine their beliefs.”¹⁴¹ Conversation “creates and prolongs” the process of deliberation, a sort of generalized critique.¹⁴² It is conversation that Bogost ultimately considers to be the process whereby we can “recognize the persuasive and expressive power of procedurality,” seeing how procedures “seed changes in our attitudes, which in turn, and over time, change our culture.”¹⁴³ Conversation is a means for us to be “conscious of the procedural claims we make, why we make them, and what kind of social fabric we hope to cultivate through the processes we unleash on the world.”¹⁴⁴ But if we do not understand Bogost’s conversation in the militant register that we encounter in Badiou, such procedural efforts will ultimately be in vain, yet more disruptions to be recuperated by the state.

It is one thing to comment on the effects of a dice-and-level system in tabletop roleplaying games; it is another to design a procedure that shatters that system from within, dismantling its logic and replacing it with something new. Alder and Rosenbaum take the terms of “player” and “character” and “action” and reconfigure their relationships to each other, supplementing them with additional terms like “comfort” and “safety,” extending the situation of play to include ends that would have been impossible in the prior state. Dream Askew and Dream Apart do not seek to persuade people of their truths, but to militantly elaborate them through play. Emancipatory thought is not a thought of relative positions but of absolute rupture. Truth is an absolute imposition that demands passion, fervour, and commitment from its subjects. To inaugurate a truth procedure is not to persuade another of the reasonablness of one’s own position, but to undertake a criminal enterprise. Truth does not belong to the situation, it comes from outside, it is deemed “illegal” by the state.¹⁴⁵ The nomination of the event of a truth is an “illegal representative” that goes unrecognized by the state.¹⁴⁶ It cannot be recuperated by the state because it demands the emancipation of its subjects, those revealed by the truth procedure to have belonged to it all along, to have belonged outside the belonging the state decrees. This is not simply a matter of persuasion, but of revolution, the demonstration of the insufficiency of the state through the retroaction of one’s very existence.

When Alder and Rosenbaum pronounce no dice, no masters, they begin the elaboration of a truth procedure that they nominate as “Belonging Outside Belonging.”¹⁴⁷ They provide guidelines for their readers to write their own Belonging Outside Belonging games, to effect the procedure in their own localities, to carry it forward in a mode of ongoing intervention, fidelity, and forcing. Belonging Outside Belonging proposes the existence of “marginalized group[s] who’ve gathered together to build community,” groups that “stand[] in sharp relief to a larger, looming dominant culture.”¹⁴⁸ These groups do not belong to the state, but to the indiscernible of the future situation. And yet, these groups are already here, as the process of forcing reveals, and Alder and Rosenbaum encourage designers to lean in to this, “to start from a place of lived experience and personal affinity.”¹⁴⁹ There is no bar between lived experience and experience at the table, no hierarchy of realities. A given belonging outside belonging is not a situation alternative to the situation, but an otherwise of the situation, an “outsiderness” that is “muddy and complicated” insofar as it is “outside the larger culture in one sense, but in other senses … entangled with, dispersed throughout, and uneasily pushed up against it.”¹⁵⁰ Play is not a frivolous activity, but a deadly serious enaction of a procedure that cuts across all artificial divisions of the situation and revolts against those who would maintain them.

The event of truth does not entail the end of strife, but often instead its magnification. Alder and Rosenbaum do not shy away from such conflict. Rather, in their fidelity to the truth of the situation, in their militant investigation of the statement no dice, no masters, they recognize conflict as being a sign of emancipation to come. The procedures they outline, the two games, Dream Askew and Dream Apart, consist of sets of processes that invite players into the work of emancipation, to become subjects of the truth of a particular belonging. In turn, Alder and Rosenbaum invite these subjects to write their own belongings, to give names to other truths, to invite other players to continue the work of emancipation. No one of these games, no variant of play, is final, because truths always transcend their finite moments. But truths are also always here—to be explored, experimented with, improvised upon, creating ever new subjects through their play. This is the radical fact of the event that Alder and Rosenbaum verify in their design, a fact that they invite others to verify in turn. To describe Dream Askew / Dream Apart as a work of procedural rhetoric, as Bogost might, would be too weak. Dream Askew / Dream Apart is a handbook for a militant praxis of emancipation.

Conclusion

In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière uses his project of ignorance to open a discussion of the “paradox of the spectator”: the spectator is not necessary for theatrical performance but “there is no theatre without the spectator.”¹⁵¹ A performance can indeed take place without an audience. Spectation does not contribute to the performance; it is passivity, the “opposite” both of “knowing” and “acting.”¹⁵² Indeed, Rancière notes that throughout the history of the theatre, spectation is considered a “bad thing,” a poorer or lesser thing, than the peformance of what is spectated.¹⁵³ And yet, without the spectator, there is no theatre. Such is the paradox to be overcome.

A “true community” of the theatre would “not tolerate theatrical mediation,” its “measure” instead “directly incorporated into the living attitude of its members.”¹⁵⁴ To arrive at such a community, a “different theatre” is required, “a theatre without spectators: not a theatre played out in front of empty seats, but a theatre where the passive optical relationship implied by the very term is subjected to a different relationship,” which Rancière names “drama.”¹⁵⁵ Drama, as opposed to theatre, would pull the spectator “into the magical circle of theatrical action.”¹⁵⁶ Rancière identifies two exemplary dramatic projects working toward this end: Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theatre” and Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty.”¹⁵⁷ Brechtian drama is “an assembly in which ordinary people become aware of their situation and discuss their interests”; Artaudian drama is a “purifying ritual in which a community is put in possession of its own energies.”¹⁵⁸ Each dramatic project relies on “the Romantic vision of truth as non-separation” and seeks to “restor[e] to spectators ownership of their consciousness and their activity.”¹⁵⁹ Drama accomplishes the work of a “self-vanishing mediation,” drawing the spectator from the “evil of spectacle” to the “virtue of true theatre.”¹⁶⁰ But, as we have already seen above, such self-vanishing mediation is not ultimately emancipatory but stultifying. This mediation is “the very logic of the pedagogical relationship,” positioning the spectator as the “ignoramus” to be educated.¹⁶¹

I have argued elsewhere that tabletop roleplaying games, especially the sub-genre of lyric games (a set in which many Belonging Outside Belonging can be included), operate in the same tradition as Brechtian theatre and other active arts that rose to prominence in the twentieth century.¹⁶² I would still maintain that there is something structurally radical to such games, something that responds directly to the concerns Brecht and Artaud sought to address. But if we position tabletop roleplaying games, lyric games, Belonging Outside Belonging games, as some mystery into which players must be inducted, if we treat players of mainstream games like Dungeons & Dragons as passive ignoramuses requiring education, we unwittingly negate the emancipatory energy that our games hold, stultifying our players before they have a chance to see for themselves, to say what they have seen and what they think about what they have seen, and to have their experience verified by others in the community of play. In short, if we take such a position we become the pedagogues, the dogmatists, the fascists, the tyrants, policing the intelligences of others and instituting, over and over again, the bar between ignorance and knowledge.

Dream Askew / Dream Apart does no such thing, and so if we are to remain committed to the truth of the event it names, elaborating its terms with the fervour of a militant fidelity, investigating and working to verify the statement no dice, no masters, we cannot be so presumptuous as to take up the position of masters ourselves. It is “not a matter of making great” players; “it’s a matter of making the emancipated: people capable of saying, ‘me too,’” I play too.¹⁶³ There is no pride in this simple statement, “only the reasonable feeling of power that belongs to any reasonable being.”¹⁶⁴ As Rancière powerfully argues, pride “consists in saying softly to others: You neither,” you do not play, not correctly, not in truth.¹⁶⁵ This is in no way to vindicate the maintenance of power by power, not to prop up the positions of tyrannical game masters. We verify the equality of intelligence but not the equality of its manifestations. But it is to say that one who does not play indie tabletop games, who has never heard of Belonging Outside Belonging, still “acts,” still “observes, selects, compares, interprets,” still “links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen” at other tables, “in other kinds of place.”¹⁶⁶ To assert otherwise is not to do the work of emancipation, but to maintain yet another “embodied allegor[y] of inequality.”¹⁶⁷

Our procedures make no guarantees, even the most radical of procedures, as I have argued of Belonging Outside Belonging. We cannot “presuppose an identity between cause and effect,” because the play itself is “an autonomous thing,” the “third thing” between the one who knows and the one who does not-yet-know.¹⁶⁸ Play is “alien to both,” the elaboration of an event “to which they can refer to verify in common” what the one who does not-yet-know “has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks of it.”¹⁶⁹ Play is “owned by no one,” its “meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.”¹⁷⁰ Certainly, I believe that games in the Belonging Outside Belonging genre, and lyric games in general, have “produced many enrichments” of tabletop roleplaying, just as Brecht and Artaud did for theatre.¹⁷¹ But these enrichments do not guarantee a particular reception, only the extension of a situation that each subject must observe, say, and verify for themselves. Rancière makes the point most compellingly:

This shared power of the equality of intelligence links individuals, makes them exchange their intellectual adventures, in so far as it keeps them separate from one another, equally capable of using the power everyone has to plot her own path. What our performances—be they teaching or playing, speaking, writing, making art or looking at it—verify is not our participation in a power embodied in the community. It is the capacity of anonymous people, the capacity that makes everyone equal to everyone else. This capacity is exercised through irreducible distances; it is exercised by an unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations.¹⁷²

When it comes to tabletop roleplaying games, a particular procedural form may be more or less illustrative or inspiring, more or less provocative to this or that player. But there is “no more a privileged form than there is a privileged starting point.”¹⁷³ Rancière maintains that “[e]verywhere there are starting points, intersections and junctions that enable us to learn something new.”¹⁷⁴ Rancière hopes to “restore” the “theatrical stage” to an “equal footing with the telling of a story, the reading of a book, or the gaze focused on an image.”¹⁷⁵ We might add, play at the table to this list. His vision is for a “new scene of equality where heterogeneous performances are translated into one another,” where experience becomes a game becomes a story becomes a theatrical performance becomes an experience for another, and another, another… Everywhere there are starting points, everywhere there are things to learn, to say, narrate, to translate. To work in this new scene of equality is to work with a “better understanding of how words and images, stories and performances, can change something of the world we live in.”¹⁷⁶ And indeed, to play a Belonging Outside Belonging game in this mode is to militantly work toward such emancipatory change, one table at a time.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Alder, Avery, and Benjamin Rosenbaum. Dream Askew / Dream Apart. Buried Without Ceremony, 2018.

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

———. Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated by Norman Madarasz. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. Montréal, QC: CTheory Books, 2001.

Blake, Terence. “Generic Ontology Vs Specific Biography: Badiou as Symptom and Cure.” Agent Swarm, February 5, 2017. https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/generic-ontology-vs-specific-biography-badiou-as-symptom-and-cure/.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

———. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Galloway, Alexander. “Superpositions.” Culture and Communication, October 11, 2014. http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/superpositions.

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Peterson, Jon. “The Origins of Rule Zero.” Playing at the World, January 16, 2021. https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-origins-of-rulezero.html.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London, UK: Verso, 2021.

———. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Stein, Eric. “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics,” May 28, 2021. https://zenodo.org/record/4824078.

———. Lost Scriptures. Zine Quest 2: itch.io, 2020. https://steinea.itch.io/lost-scriptures.

Notes

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, UK: Verso, 2021). ↩
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). ↩
Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). ↩
Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999). ↩
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). ↩
Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum, Dream Askew / Dream Apart (Buried Without Ceremony, 2018). ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 1. ↩
Rancière, 8-9. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Rancière, 8-9. ↩
Rancière, 9. ↩
Rancière, 10. ↩
Rancière, 10. ↩
Rancière, 10. ↩
Rancière, 10. ↩
Rancière, 10. ↩
Rancière, 10. ↩
Rancière, 11. ↩
Rancière, 11. ↩
Rancière, 11. ↩
Rancière, 11. ↩
Bogost, Persuasive Games, 2-3. ↩
Bogost, 3. ↩
Bogost, 3. ↩
Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 4. In the rule “a transformation is carried out. This transformation … implies a radical reformulation of the very conceptuality that up until that moment articulated the relationship between human action and norm, ‘life’ and ‘rule,’ and without which the political and ethical-juridical rationality of modernity would be unthinkable.” ↩
Bogost, Persuasive Games, 3. As Jean Baudrillard writes, rules are “conventional and arbitrary, and ha[ve] no hidden truth”; as such, “only their observance matters, and the resulting giddiness”; likewise, if one no longer finds passion in the rules, “one simply leaves the game.” See Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montréal, QC: CTheory Books, 2001), 132. ↩
Bogost, Persuasive Games, 6-8. ↩
Jon Peterson, “The Origins of Rule Zero,” Playing at the World, January 16, 2021, https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-origins-of-rule-zero.html. ↩
Bogost, Persuasive Games, 10. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10. ↩
Rancière, 10. ↩
Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 45. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 14, and Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 49. ↩
Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 49. ↩
Rancière, 45. ↩
Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 45, and Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 23. ↩
Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 62. ↩
Rancière, 59. ↩
Rancière, 59. ↩
Rancière, 65. ↩
Rancière, 65, 57. ↩
Rancière, 57. Alexander Galloway, citing François Laruelle, characterizes this privileged relation as “direct or radical,” the work of which is the work of “generic science. See Alexander Galloway, “Superpositions,” Culture and Communication, October 11, 2014, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/superpositions. ↩
Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 67. Rancière uses the example of painting, citing Jacotot: “There is no pride in saying out loud: Me too, I’m a painter! Pride consists in saying softly to others: You neither, you aren’t a painter.” ↩
Rancière, 71. ↩
Bogost, Unit Operations, 3. ↩
Bogost, 7. ↩
Bogost, 4. ↩
Bogost, 4. ↩
Bogost, 8. ↩
Bogost, 8. ↩
Bogost, 4. ↩
Bogost, 8. ↩
Bogost, 12. ↩
Bogost, 11. ↩
Bogost, 12. ↩
Bogost, 12. ↩
Bogost, 12. ↩
Bogost, 11. ↩
Bogost, 11. ↩
Bogost, 13. ↩
Bogost, 14. ↩
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 31. ↩
Badiou, 31. ↩
Badiou, 30. ↩
Badiou, 32. ↩
Badiou, 32, 38. ↩
Badiou, 33. ↩
Badiou, 33. ↩
Badiou, 33. ↩
Badiou, 33. ↩
See Eric Stein, Lost Scriptures (Zine Quest 2: itch.io, 2020), https://vagrantludology.itch.io/lost-scriptures; Terence Blake, “Generic Ontology Vs Specific Biography: Badiou as Symptom and Cure,” Agent Swarm, February 5, 2017, https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/generic-ontology-vs-specific-biography-badiou-as-symptom-and-cure/; and Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). ↩
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 36. ↩
Badiou, 36. ↩
Badiou, 37. ↩
Badiou, 36. ↩
Badiou, 37. ↩
Badiou, 37, and Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 62. ↩
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 37. ↩
Badiou, 37. ↩
Badiou, 37. ↩
Badiou, 38. ↩
Badiou, 37. ↩
Badiou, 37. ↩
Badiou, 37, 38. ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 7. ↩
Rancière, 7. ↩
Rancière, 13. ↩
Rancière, 8. ↩
Badiou, Being and Event, 203. ↩
Badiou, 203. ↩
Badiou, 232. ↩
Badiou, 417. ↩
Badiou, 417. ↩
Badiou, 417. ↩
Badiou, 416-417. ↩
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 124, 127. ↩
Badiou, Being and Event, xiii. ↩
Badiou, xiii, 353. ↩
Badiou, 329, xi. ↩
Badiou, 396. ↩
Badiou, 396. ↩
Badiou, 396-397. ↩
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 134, 135. ↩
Badiou, 134-135. ↩
Badiou, 136, 137. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, Dream Askew / Dream Apart, 4. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 6. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 8. ↩
Badiou, Being and Event, 405. ↩
Badiou, 400. ↩
Badiou, 400. ↩
Badiou, 400. ↩
Badiou, 403. ↩
Badiou, 403. ↩
Badiou, 403-404. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, Dream Askew / Dream Apart, 8. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 8. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 8. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 8. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 8. ↩
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 137. ↩
Badiou, 137. ↩
Badiou, 144. ↩
Badiou, 144. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, Dream Askew / Dream Apart, 10. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 10. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 10. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 11. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 11. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 13-15. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 31. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 31. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 31. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 31. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 31. ↩
Bogost, Persuasive Games, 317, ix. ↩
Bogost, 322. ↩
Bogost, 333. ↩
Bogost, 332. ↩
Bogost, 335. ↩
Bogost, 333. ↩
Bogost, 340. ↩
Bogost, 340. ↩
Badiou, Being and Event, 206. ↩
Badiou, 208. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, Dream Askew / Dream Apart, 162. At the time of writing, their are 98 items with the Belonging Outside Belonging tag on itch.io. This is an excellent place to begin exploring: https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-belonging-outside-belonging. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 162. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 162. ↩
Alder and Rosenbaum, 162. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2. ↩
Rancière, 2. ↩
Rancière, 2. ↩
Rancière, 3. ↩
Rancière, 3. ↩
Rancière, 4. ↩
Rancière, 4. ↩
Rancière, 6. ↩
Rancière, 7. ↩
Rancière, 7. ↩
Rancière, 7. ↩
Eric Stein, “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics” (May 28, 2021), https://zenodo.org/record/4824078. ↩
Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 66-67. ↩
Rancière, 67. ↩
Rancière, 67. ↩
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 13. ↩
Rancière, 12. ↩
Rancière, 14. ↩
Rancière, 15. ↩
Rancière, 15. ↩
Rancière, 15. ↩
Rancière, 17. ↩
Rancière, 17. ↩
Rancière, 17. ↩
Rancière, 22. ↩
Rancière, 23. ↩

The Idea of the Gamer, 5

2021-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

After several months of reading and analysis, we can at last bring this series on Amanda Phillips’ Gamer Trouble to a close.¹ In this essay, I would like to draw together Phillips’ final chapter with the conclusion to the book, linking Phillips’ understanding of “identity” with their understanding of “agonism” to highlight the “differential form” of selfhood that is particularly evident in “twenty-first century movements under capitalist production.”² To be clear, Phillips does not treat of this form as unique to the twenty-first century, but rather demonstrates how this form is both thematized and troubled in contemporary videogames. It is this trouble which is of interest to us here.

Working off Kara Keeling’s conceptualization of “I = Another” and Audre Lorde’s “house of difference,” Phillips conducts a reading of FemShep in the Mass Effect trilogy, beginning with the “provocation” that FemShep “doesn’t actually exist.”³ Having not played a Mass Effect game in over eight years, Phillips’ reading dazzled me, identifying the trouble of FemShep’s presentation across the franchise in ways I had never before recognized. With great care and precision, Phillips highlights FemShep’s problematic positioning as secondary to the “index” of “white masculinity” that is BroShep, a positioning that is fundamentally effected at “the level of technology.”⁴ Phillips’ full discussion is well worth reading, but to summarize, they contend that it is the “investment in the white masculine body as digital Adam” that leads to the myriad troubles with “digital Eve,” troubles which become particularly salient in the case of FemShep.⁵ FemShep does not exist because her position in the game is that of “a ‘figurative man’ in the shape of a woman.”⁶

Always sensitive and nuanced in their writing, Phillips is quick to head off the “transphobic undertones of this critique,” noting that to “call someone ‘really’ a man or ‘really’ a woman in this context is to reflect on the ways that certain bodies are boxed into menu choices in the system and how such boxes influence the ways designers think about these individuals.”⁷ Systemically, structurally, Mass Effect is a series that produces a binaristic framing of character identities despite attempting to present a more “diverse range” of identities and orientations at the level of narrative—a failure that Phillips masterfully articulates before satirizing it with a delightful bit of pseudocode.⁸

It is in this failure, however, that Phillips discerns the possibility of “new forms of politics.”⁹ Rather than a politics based in identity and autonomy, the politics Phillips seeks begins where identity “fails to cohere,” in the “gaps and holes that structure [FemShep’s] existence as a customizable character,” in the very “fissures into which gamers suture their own investments and begin to ‘identify with’ the character.”¹⁰ Rather than look to the white male “center of subjectivity” for political force, Phillips looks to the “flexible points of customization that allow different versions of that character to exist,” versions that cannot ultimately be reconciled with each other.¹¹ FemShep does not have an “essence,” has no “sameness across platforms.”¹² Instead, FemShep resembles something closer to Lorde’s “house of difference,” functioning as a “place where communities can converge around their distance from hegemonic forms of power in order to collectively support one another.”¹³

In videogames, the fact that “I = Another” foregrounds the fact that identity is always “inflected” by difference, and is consequently characterized by “vulnerability and instability.”¹⁴ Justice begins, therefore, not with the “assimilation” of identities to power “in spite of difference,” but with the sheltering and “coalition” of identities that operates “through and with difference.”¹⁵ This is the politics that emerges in the community around FemShep, a politics that Phillips seeks to mobilize.

FemShep does not exist, is not “a character in her own right,” and yet, through her “inconsistencies … fans have achieved solidarity—not, crucially, by ascending to the status of the hero themselves but by inhabiting her contradictions, learning from them, and leveraging them to speak back to policies demonstrating that she (and they) are less than in gamer culture.”¹⁶ FemShep’s vulnerable and instable character “offers imperfect possibilities for a range of differences, a makeshift shelter for the marginalized” that is not the end but rather the starting point for a radical politics.¹⁷

In the conclusion to Gamer Trouble, Phillips gives this politics a name: agonism. Reclaiming Roger Caillois’ understanding of “agon” (the equal contest or combat) from its white supremacist, antagonistic deployment, Phillips sees in agonism the “disagreement” that is “crucial for pluralistic societies to function.”¹⁸ Where diversity is ultimately homogenizing as a political principle, agonism “is honest about the incommensurable differences between various factions and identities that nevertheless recognize the value in multiple perspectives.”¹⁹ Agonism acknowledges that “competition rarely happens on equal terms,” and so it is “invigorated not by decisive victory but by struggle in the context of a fair distribution of power.”²⁰ Agonism honours the ties between adversaries in a shared space, while antagonism has only enemies that wish to destroy each other.²¹ In the face of the real antagonisms that plague our world today, Phillips contends that we must go beyond diversity politics to a radical agonistic politics that brings difference to the fore.

An agonistic politics is “able to face hard truths and hard problems without the expectation that they will be amicably resolved, to legitimate nonpeaceful resolutions to old and deep problems, and to differentiate between conflict and violence, contest and conquest.”²² Where diversity effaces difference, and antagonism annihilates it, agonism operates through the “frank and honest assessment of power differentials and places the burden on those with more power and privilege to level the playing field in whatever ways possible, including by making themselves uncomfortable, uneasy, and open to making mistakes.”²³ Phillips remarks that this “is where many quests for justice end,” but the radicality of agonistic politics welcomes the vulnerability and instability of identities, seeking to negotiate imbalances and build coalitions of resistance.²⁴ While “our inner heroes abhor weakness and disadvantage and are loathe to take risks that leave us exposed to ridicule or social penalties,” an agonistic politics “embraces constraint, failure, and fair(er) contest,” that which terrifies the solid and powerful self but delights the “inner gamer.”²⁵

“Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble”—this is the challenge of an agonistic politics, a radical politics in pursuit of justice.²⁶ And if we, like Phillips, “stay with the trouble,” there may yet be reason to be “hopeful” and “optimistic” about the possibility in gaming of justice to come.²⁷

Notes

Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020). ↩
Kara Keeling, cited in Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 137. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 137. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 147, 143. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 152. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 153. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 153. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 152-153. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 141. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 141, 139. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 147, 154. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 155. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 161. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 169, 161. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 161-162. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 169. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 169. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 174. Phillips is quite close to Rancière on this point. See, for instance, Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 175. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 176, 178. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 176. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 178. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 178. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 178. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 178. ↩
John Lewis, cited in Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 171. ↩
Donna Haraway and John Lewis, cited in Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 183, 171. ↩

Sophistics

2021-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

During my training in theory and criticism, I remember being exposed to the bogeyman of the Vienna Circle. However, when I read a short piece by Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath in a later course on the philosophy of technology, “The Scientific Conception of the World” (1929), a pamphlet published to “give a survey of the area of problems in which those who belong to, or are near to, the Vienna Circle are working,” what I encountered was not some cabal to be feared and despised but a cohort of allies.¹ Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath’s presentation of their “scientific world-conception” was all together different from what I expected.² They envisioned a “scientifically oriented people’s education,” and various members of the school were involved in the institution of a “society for popular education” that offered “popular university courses” and a “people’s college.”³ On the basis of their scientific world-conception, members of the Vienna Circle worked “toward a new organization of economic and social relations, toward the unification of mankind, [and] toward a reform of school and education.”⁴ It was the Vienna Circle’s intent to “fashion intellectual tools for everyday life, for the daily life of the scholar but also for the daily life of all those who in some way join in working at the conscious reshaping of life.”⁵ What is more, the “anti-metaphysical factual research” of the Vienna Circle challenged aristocratic and authoritarian modes of thought, making it a threat to the rising fascist powers in Europe. Carnap, a socialist and pacifist, would flee for the United States just six years after the publication of this text.

Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath hold in high regard the “struggle against the metaphysics of the thing-in-itself and of the concept of substance.”⁶ They are critical of armchair philosophy, insofar as no member of the Vienna Circle was “a so-called ‘pure’ philosopher,” each of them having “done work in a special field of science.”⁷ Their “empiricist and positivist” program is an exercise in the “construction of scientific concepts from ultimate elements, namely sense data,” always “trying to make contact with the living movements of the present.”⁸ In so doing, they take “a position not only free from metaphysics, but opposed to metaphysics,” maintaining the assumption that “there is knowledge only from experience, which rests on what is immediately given” to perception.⁹ By adopting this position, the Vienna Circle is able to posit “only empirical statements about things of all kinds” and “analytic statements of logic and mathematics.”¹⁰ Far from reductive scientism, the program here described admits of both phenomenological complexity and logical rigour, supported by and directed back into a robust ethics.

In my pursuit of a program of “generic science” throughout the series of essays with that title (and the related pieces in the broader series on the Presocratics), Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath’s essay has been ever present in my mind. And concluding our reading of the Presocratics with Protagoras, the “direct” and “radical” possibilities of sophistics as an alternative to aristocratic, institutional, ideal philosophy seems fitting.

At the end of their pamphlet, Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath make their “stand on the ground of simple human experience”—the common, xunōi, as we first encountered it in Heraclitus—“returning, after a metaphysical interlude, to a unified picture of this world which had, in a sense, been at the basis of magical beliefs, free from theology, in the earliest times.”¹¹ From the perspective of our generic program, what becomes clear is that the Vienna Circle is not in fact without a metaphysics—theirs is a superphysical metaphysics of “logic and mathematics”—and is properly concerned with an overcoming of the bar of philosophical decision instituted by Plato, and repeated throughout the history of western philosophy from Plato onward. The continuum, the adjacency, of physics and metaphysics, which existed prior to Plato’s intervention, is restored. We see as much in the likes of Gilbert Simondon and Alain Badiou, metaphysicians par excellence who break with the history of philosophy to take their elementary data from the sciences and mathematics. Indeed, it is for this reason that Gilles Deleuze can describe himself as a “pure metaphysician,” following Bergson in the elaboration of a metaphysics for “modern science,” the “metaphysics it needs.”¹² There are far more points of affinity, far more sites of allegiance, between the analytic and continental schools than are commonly believed. And now, all of the tools and resources of these disparate schools are made available to a twenty-first century sophistics, an anti-metaphysical metaphysics, that begins with the simple dictum: see for yourself.¹³ Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath write:

In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere: all experience forms a complex network, which cannot always be surveyed and can often be grasped only in parts. Everything is accessible to man; and man is the measure of all things. Here is an affinity with the Sophists, not with the Platonists; with the Epicureans, not with the Pythagoreans; with all those who stand for earthly being and the here and now.¹⁴

A direct and radical sophistics posits the unilateral determination of cognition by the real, the simple fact that one can look and see, that everywhere there are surfaces to be explored.¹⁵ This does not mean that one can always understand what one sees immediately, or that new instruments will not disclose realities that baffle our received intuitions. But as the authors continue, this is a simple consequence of acknowledging the priority of the real over cognition, the fact that cognition is a subset or species of the real. “That knowledge of the world is possible rests not on human reason impressing its form on the material,” they write, “but on the material being ordered in a certain way.”¹⁶ Through inquiry, we might discover that the world is “ordered much more strictly” than we thought, or that it might “be ordered much less,” but in either case we make our discovery “without jeopardising the possibility of knowledge,” because knowledge and cognition can only be of the real, and nothing other than the real.¹⁷ Sophistics is an exercise in the refutation of the Platonic scission, an egalitarian welcoming of the common into the domain of philosophy.

We see as much in Protagoras, who Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath cite without naming. Derided for his position that “Man is the measure of all things,” a comprehensive reading of the testimonials to Protagoras’s works reveals a nuanced and ethical thinker, not the straw man he was made out to be by Plato and his other critics.¹⁸ Protagoras is not a mere relativist, but a complex thinker working from a distinct and testable set of premises. “Man is the measure of all things,” for Protagoras, because the “mind [is] nothing but the senses.”¹⁹ Consequently, the mind can only have knowledge of “the things that are” and not “of the things that are not.”²⁰ As measure, a human subject can say of the things that are, “they are,” and of the things that are not, “they are not,” because such statements are predicated on the basic possibility of perception: see for yourself. Thus, when Diogenes Laertius reports that Protagoras asserts that “everything is true,” he misunderstands what this truth is. Socrates, speaking in Plato’s Theaetetus, gives voice to Protagoras’s position, saying: “Perception, then, is always of something that is, and it is infallible, which suggests that it is knowledge.”²¹ The infallibility of this operation, taken in broader context, is not of the known, but of the knowing. Plato is searching through the vehicle of Socrates for certainty, and Diogenes scoffs at the possibility of everything being true, but Protagoras, like the Vienna Circle that follows him millenia later, is not concerned with certain truth, but with the simple continuity of thought with the real. Every statement of what one perceives is true if one truly states what one has seen—if one does not truly state what one has seen, this does not jeopardise the possibility of knowledge; rather, one is merely mistaken, deceived, or lying.²² For fear of error and interference, the pursuit of certain truth covers over the actual operations that make knowledge possible at all.

In the Cratylus, Socrates challenges Hermogenes on his Protagorean position, asking how an existent might have “stable being” in itself if its being is in its appearing and its being perceived.²³ Such a problem is only a problem insofar as the knower is privileged over the known, cognition over the real. It is a non-issue for Protagoras, because all knowledge comes from perception of something that is. One might perceive something from a peculiar angle, or only in part, or one might have their perception manipulated by another, or one might lie about what one perceives, but because perception is always unilaterally determined by the real, the real continues on in its existence, oblivious to the struggles of the humans seeking to know it. As such, when we read in the testimonial of Didymus the Blind that “the being of things that are consists in their being perceived,” we would do better to interpret this statement along Sartrean, rather than Berkeleyian lines.²⁴ This interpretation of Protagoras is further confirmed by the statements his character makes in Plato’s Protagoras and Theaetetus. The type of knowledge Protagoras seeks is a praktognosia, a practical knowledge, concerned with material conditions of existence.²⁵ He says:

What I teach is the art of making good decisions, both in one’s domestic affairs, so that one can manage his estate and household in the best possible way, and in the affairs of the community, so that he can maximize his potential to conduct political business and address political issues.²⁶

This should not be understood as instruction in cold economization or ruthless politicizing. Rather, Protagoras’s practice is contingent upon what he has learned about the real, and the logic he has elaborated on the basis of that learning:

I know of plenty of things which are harmful to people (they may be foods or drinks or drugs, or whatever), and others which are beneficial; and I know of things which are neither harmful nor beneficial to people, but which are to horses—or are only to cattle, or only to dogs. And then there are things which are neither harmful nor beneficial for any of these creatures, but are for trees; and things which are good for the roots of trees, but bad for their shoots, such as manure, which is good for all plants when it is applied to their roots, but deadly if put on their shoots and young branches. Or then there’s olive oil, which is completely pernicious for all plants and ruins the hair of all non-human creatures, but is good for human hair and for the rest of their body too. Goodness is so diverse and varied that even in our case one and the same thing may be good for the outside of a human body, but awful for the inside.²⁷

Protagoras is not interested in discovering the “stable being” of things, but in “a change from one state to the other,” and specifically in a change to a “better” state.²⁸ And this is only possible if one attends to the facts of “what one is experiencing.”²⁹ Protagoras’s philosophy is pragmatic in the same sense that the empiricism and positivism described by Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath is pragmatic—their logical investigations are predicated on an ontology of surfaces and materials. Protagoras states what he has seen, making his understanding available for consideration and verification by others. As Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath write, a “scientific description can contain only the structure (form of order) of objects, not their ‘essence.’”³⁰ A scientist can only describe what they have seen, and ask others to check their work. So, then, it is on such a pragmatic basis that Protagoras, in the Theaetetus, says the following:

I claim that each sphere of operations has its wise practitioners: there are doctors for bodies, farmers for plants … and I claim that politicians who are wise and good at their job substitute sound for unsound ethical notions in their communities. It is true that whatever seems ethically fine to each community also is ethical for it, for as long as that rule is in force, but a wise person changes each unsound notion they have, and makes sound notions be and appear for them. By the same token, a Sophist, since he is capable of guiding his pupils in the same way, is wise and deserves to be paid a lot by his pupils.³¹

Protagoras is not advocating for an opportunistic relativism, but is in fact articulating how human knowledge communities have functioned throughout history—which is to say, through intersecting and overlapping spheres of operations with specific rules of practice, which are communicated from practitioner to practitioner, to be tested, applied, adjusted, and replaced as each practitioner and each community of practice sees fit. This state of affairs does not jeopardise the possibility of knowledge; rather, it defines knowledge, articulating a framework for generic knowledge procedures that, in the words of Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “serve[] life” and the everyday people who live it.³² This is the sophistry we posit against the dominion of the philosophers, the thought of the common that, like the old mole, burrows under the foundation of the ivory tower to bring it to the ground.

Notes

Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle,” 1929, in Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 86-95. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 88. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 87. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 88. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 88. The authors remark that the likes of Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, and Max Adler, working in Vienna at the time, “cultivated and extended” Marx’s work, a reshaping of life in the domain of political economy. Marx’s famous assertion, that the “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” is particularly resonant with the social aims of the Vienna Circle. For Marx, see “Concerning Feuerbach,” 1845, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1992), 423. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 87. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 88. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 87, 89. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 88, 91. Insofar as this “given” is based on Brentano’s intentionality, Derrida’s critique of Husserlian phenomenology in Voice and Phenomenon provides a fruitful point of conjuncture. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 90. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 95. ↩
Gilles Deleuze, “Responses to a Series of Questions,” Collapse 3 (2007): 39-43. ↩
I have explored this dictum at length, as presented by Jacques Rancière, in my paper “No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart,” to be presented at the GENeration Analog Virtual Conference, August 4, 2021. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 89. I would quibble with the alignment of the Sophists against the Pythagoreans, but this is understandable on the authors part, given my own rather idiosyncratic reading of the Pythagoreans, which I have still to fully explore. ↩
I am reminded of Hayden White’s description of Foucault’s writings: “no center,” “all surface,” and “willfully superficial.” He goes on to argue that “this is consistent with the larger purpose of a thinker who wishes to dissolve the distinction between surfaces and depths, to show that wherever this distinction arises it is evidence of the play of organized power and that this distinction is itself the most effective weapon power possesses for hiding its operations.” See The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 105. I am also reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of “exteriority” in such texts as their “Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 351-423. Our arch-analytics find themselves in good company. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 92-93. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 93. ↩
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 211. ↩
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 211. ↩
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 211. ↩
Plato, Theaetetus, 151e8-152c6, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 214. ↩
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 1987, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 59: “What is essential is to avoid lying, not to say that we have seen something when we’ve kept our eyes closed, not to believe that something has been explained to us when it has only been named.” ↩
Plato, Cratylus, 385e4-386a4, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 215. ↩
Didymus the Blind, Commentary on the Psalms, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 214. For Sartre, see Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, UK: Routledge, 2003), 1-2: “The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to appearances, and none of them is privileged”; being has no “secret reverse side”; the “appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself all the being of the existent.” ↩
See my “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics,” Bio and Psyche: Reading the Symptomatic Body, May 28, 2021, https://zenodo.org/record/4824078, in which I discuss this practical knowledge at length. ↩
Plato, Protagoras, 316b8-319a7, 212. ↩
Plato, Protagoras, 334a3-c2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 215-216. Badiou has written that philosophy “does not establish any truth but it sets a locus of truths,” contending that truth in the singular is an emptiness, and that philosophy “goes astray when it proposes the ecstasy of a place of Truth.” However, Badiou ultimately aligns himself with Plato against the sophists, though he sees them as worthy adversaries, claiming that philosophy “is a construction of thinking wherein the fact that there are truths is proclaimed against sophistry.” I would argue that Badiou is much closer to the sophists than he might admit. See Manifesto for Philosophy, 1989, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 37, 133, 123. ↩
Plato, Theaetetus, 166c9-167d2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 216. ↩
Plato, Theaetetus, 166c9-167d2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 216. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 91. ↩
Plato, Theaetetus, 166c9-167d2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 216-217. ↩
Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” 95. ↩

Pure Indetermination, 2

2021-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

“Every relation or possession is situated within the non-possessable which envelops or contains without being able to be contained or enveloped. We shall call it the elemental.”¹

“It unfolds in its own dimension: depth, which is inconvertible into the breadth and length in which the side of the element extends. To be sure, a thing likewise presents itself by but one unique side; but we can circle round it, and the reverse is equivalent to the obverse; all the points of view are equivalent. The depth of the element prolongs it till it is lost in the earth and in the heavens. ‘Nothing ends, nothing begins.’ To tell the truth the element has no side at all. One does not approach it. The relation adequate to its essence discovers it precisely as a medium: one is steeped in it; I am always within the element.”²

“The element presents us as it were the reverse of reality, without origin in a being, although presenting itself in familiarity—of enjoyment—as though we were in the bowels of being. Hence we can say that the element comes to us from nowhere; the side it presents to us does not determine an object, remains entirely anonymous. It is wind, earth, sea, sky, air. Indetermination here is not equivalent to the infinite surpassing limits; it precedes the distinction between the finite and the infinite.”³

“The element I inhabit is at the frontier of a night. What the side of the element that is turned toward me conceals is not a ‘something’ susceptible of being revealed, but an ever-new depth of absence, an existence without existent, the impersonal par excellence … We have described this nocturnal dimension of the future under the title there is. The element extends into the there is.”⁴

“there is this void itself. It does not exist by virtue of a play on words. The negation of every qualifiable thing allows the impersonal there is to arise again, returning intact behind every negation, whatever be the degree of negation.”⁵

“In driving out darkness the light does not arrest the incessant play of the there is. The void the light produces remains an indeterminate density which has no meaning of itself prior to discourse, and does not yet triumph over the return of mythical gods. But vision in the light is precisely the possibility of forgetting the horror of this interminable return, this aperion, maintaining oneself before this semblance of nothingness which is the void, and approaching objects as though at their origin, out of nothingness. This deliverance from the horror of the there is is evinced in the contentment of enjoyment … Vision is a forgetting of the there is because of the essential satisfaction, the agreeableness [agrément] of sensibility, enjoyment, contentment with the finite without concern for the infinite.”⁶

“The absolute indetermination of the there is, an existing without existants, is an incessant negation, to an infinite degree, consequently an infinite limitation. Against the anarchy of the there is the existent is produced, a subject of what can happen, an origin and commencement, a power.”⁷

Notes

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 1961, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 131. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 131. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 132. We must emphasize the “as it were,” here. The element is not the reverse side of being, because being has no reverse side. But, insofar as the indetermination of the element “precedes the distinction between the finite and the infinite,” the not that the element expresses appears as it were to be not of being. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 142. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 190. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 190-191. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 281. ↩

The Idea of the Gamer, 4

2021-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Foucault

The pictorial image, the photographic image, the cinematic image, the interactive image. In each, play as the entanglement of spectator and spectated, the drama that is the coming to presentation of being.¹ All images are known through interaction, a fact predating history. We see as much in the cave paintings of Lascaux, which solicit a particular mode of interaction to this day: use this light, in this way, to produce this effect of vision. One does not simply observe this prehistoric artwork; rather, we might say, one must enter into observation with it, enter into the play of images. At Lascaux, we find the pictorial and cinematic folded into each other, presenting a primordial situation for the play of spectator and spectated.²

In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault shows us when the image first becomes thematic, when “representation undertakes to represent itself.”³ Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) is the very representation of “Classical representation” and the “definition of the space” that Classical representation “opens up to us.”⁴ This painting is “representation in its pure form,” representation that foregrounds the “essential void” of its “foundation”: the subject-spectator.⁵ The image as image is made thematic—the painting is made to be presented while also being about its presentation. But in this representation, the image subsumes interaction, reproducing it in a subsidiary mode: the gaze. Interaction as such remains implicit, unthematic.

In Las Meninas, the gesture remains frozen, the “skilled hand” of the painter “suspended in mid-air, arrested in rapt attention on the painter’s gaze.”⁶ The gaze, to be sure, “waits upon the arrested gesture,” but it is the gaze and not the skilled hand that will ultimately find its representation in Velázquez’s work.⁷ The gesture remains subject to the subject-spectator. This is not an attempt on my part to reinstitute the painter as master, but rather to indicate the abstract mechanism of the gestural, that which allows for the holographic upspringing of the volume of representation. Drama requires staging. But to get to the point indicated, we need to follow Foucault in his analysis.

The painter gazes at us from the painting, at the invisible point that we are: “our bodies, our faces, our eyes.”⁸ His gaze draws a “dotted line” that “reaches out to us ineluctably, and links us to the representation of the picture.”⁹ The spectator is included before the fact in that which they spectate, discovering their own gaze to have been anticipated, expected, invited. There is a “pure reciprocity” here: “we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us.”¹⁰ This is the thematization of the image.

But there is not only this reciprocity of the gaze that gives form to the picture. The painter stands to the side of his “great canvas,” its back turned to us, “stubbornly invisible,” preventing “the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established.”¹¹ The point that we are “never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity.”¹² Our attention is drawn to the canvas so that we might discern an answer to the question: “Seen or seeing?”¹³ But an answer yet alludes us.

The painter works on his painting by the “flood of light” emanating from a window to his left that “bathes at the same time, and with equal generosity, two neighbouring spaces, overlapping but irreducible”: the volume of the studio (the scene of the painting represented to us) and the volume of what we might refer to as the stage (the scene of the drama of the representation as such, of our spectation of the painting before us).¹⁴ The light from the window “serves as the common locus of the representation,” the “pure aperture” that “balances” the “Image par excellence,” the pure image, the work of the painter always withheld from us on his “invisible canvas.”¹⁵ Between these poles, pure aperture and pure image, “there streams in … the pure volume of a light that renders all representation visible.”¹⁶ We discover the image as such in diagram, the structure from which any and all images spring: aperture, surface, volume. An aperture that makes visible; a surface made visible that captures visibility; a volume that encompasses both making and capture, both the maker and the one who witnesses the making and what is made.

Foucault proceeds to draw our attention to the numerous pictures depicted on the walls of the studio, their representations “buried in a darkness without depth.”¹⁷ Only one stands out, visible through “a light that belongs only to itself,” a light that, upon further consideration, reveals that this representation is not a picture but a mirror.¹⁸ This represented representation “is the only one visible” in the scene, “nothing other than visibility” itself, “yet without any gaze able to grasp it.”¹⁹ It is not for anyone in the scene, but for us. Indeed, this mirror does not reflect anything in the scene, but rather two figures, represented nowhere else for our spectation. This mirror “cuts straight through the whole field of the representation, ignoring all it might apprehend within that field, and restores visibility to that which resides outside all view”: the place of the subject-spectator.²⁰ The mirror, as a representation only for us, “is addressing itself to what is invisible both because of the picture’s structure and because of its existence as painting.”²¹ The diagram of the image is not only to be discovered within the painting; it is made explicit, thematic. The mirror displays “what is exterior to the picture, in so far as it is a picture,” offering a “metathesis of visibility,” a transposition that “allows us to see, in the centre of the canvas, what in the painting is of necessity doubly invisible.”²²

In the mirror we see two figures: Philip IV and Mariana, sovereigns of Spain. The “compelling tracer line” of their gazes, “joining the reflection to that which it is reflecting, cuts perpendicularly through the lateral flood of light.”²³ That is to say, the line of the subject-spectator’s gaze links up with itself, is continuous with itself, through the middle of the aperture-surface-volume diagram. By this line, we discover other forms superimposed on the first diagram of the image, other forms that contribute to its thematization. From painter, to mirror, to an open doorway in the back of a room, to the window, there is a “spiral shell that presents us with the entire cycle of representation.”²⁴ The figures that form the frieze in the fore and middle ground of the painting have a double structure: a cross with its centre on the eyes of King Philip’s daughter, the Infanta Margarita, and a curve with the Infanta at its centre that “at once contains and sets off the position of the mirror,” creating a loop between foreground and background.²⁵ The spiral that is the cycle of representation; the cross that is the represented; the curve that encompasses them both. By the gaze of the sovereigns, occupying the space of subject-spectator that we ourselves occupy, we discover a second diagram, a reduplication of the first, an externalization potentiated by the fact of the painting as painting.

What “creates this spectacle-as-observation,” Foucault argues, “is the two sovereigns.”²⁶ Without their gaze, the second diagram is not made explicit, the thematization of the image not made complete. But with their gaze, captured for us by the mirror, made continuous with itself by way of this representation, the “entire picture” is revealed to be “looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene.”²⁷ This is what Foucault means by the effort of representation to represent itself. In this picture, there is an “exact superimposition” of the “model’s gaze as it is being painted, of the spectator’s as he contemplates the painting, and of the painter’s as he is composing his picture,” which “three ‘observing’ functions come together in a point exterior to the picture” revealed by the structure of the picture itself.²⁸ This point is “an ideal point in relation to what is represented, but a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point that makes the representation possible.”²⁹ It is this point, with its constantly changing content, that is the subject of Velázquez’s representation—“representation in its pure form.”³⁰

So we see that the pictorial or representational image has been thematized, and that the play of representation is here quite clearly on display. However, interaction as such, the play of coming to presentation as such, remains unthematized. In the thematization of the image, it is the representational image, deriving its structure from the gaze, that is represented. Though interaction is necessary for the construction of such a representation, interaction is not its subject. We must pursue the construction itself, the instrument of which is not the gaze but the gesture, and the expression of which is not the painting but the diagram. Foucault has already shown us one such diagram, but we must leave the domain of Classical representation if we are to ascertain the diagram as such. In so doing, we will be able to make the connection, across history, between the pictorial image and the interactive image, taking hold of the play that is common to them both.

Deleuze

It is Gilles Deleuze’s study of painting, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), that provides us with a path forward.³¹ In Las Meninas, we witness the gesture arrested by the gaze. In the paintings of Francis Bacon, on the other hand, we see how the gesture prefigures the figurations of the gaze, the figurations of the domain of representation. There is a “preparatory work that belongs to painting fully,” writes Deleuze, that is distinct from painting insofar as it “precedes the act” that in its completion will include it.³² This work is the work of the diagram: “invisible,” “silent,” and “extremely intense.”³³ In the diagram, the painter approaches the canvas prior to representation as a field of “figurative and probabilistic givens” out of which a pictorial representation may yet be constructed, but need not be.³⁴ The diagram of the image that Foucault shows us in Las Meninas is a diagram, just one possible response to the givens of the canvas. Velázquez’s use of this diagram—aperture, surface, volume—and his thematization of it through a second diagram—the spiral, the cross, the curve—spring up from his gestural “battle” with the canvas that goes unrepresented in the painting itself.³⁵

The diagram, as Bacon defines it, cannot be characterized by the clean visibility of representation. Rather, in a diagram, one must “make random marks (lines-traits); scrub, sweep, or wipe the canvas in order to clear out locales or zones (color-patches); throw the paint, from various angles and at various speeds.”³⁶ In the diagram, there is a “catastrophe” that appears “in the midst of the figurative and probabilistic givens” of the canvas and the painter’s mind, a catastrophe that surpasses them both.³⁷ The diagram is the “emergence of another world” within the world of these givens, an emergence that indicates the possibility of holograms altogether other from those of representation: “irrational,” “involuntary,” “accidental,” “free,” “random,” “nonrepresentative,” “nonillustrative,” “nonnarrative.”³⁸ Where the lines and forms of classical representation are “significant,” acting as “signifiers,” the “traits” of the diagram are entirely “asignifying,” “traits of sensation” rather than representation.³⁹ Certain traits can indeed be used for representation—pure aperture, pure image, pure volume—but they only signify in a configuration like the one Foucault describes, and the traits themselves operate in a domain other than the visible: the domain of the “manual.”⁴⁰

In Las Meninas, the painter is “caught in a moment of stillness” because he “could not at the same time be seen on the picture where he is represented and also see that upon which he is representing something.”⁴¹ He must halt his work for representation to take form; the gaze must overcome the gesture. But with Bacon’s diagrams, the painter “works with a rag, stick, brush, or sponge; it is here that he throws the paint with his hands.”⁴² Prior to visibility, prior to representation, the hand can be characterized by “an independence,” is “guided by other forces, making marks that no longer depend on either will or sight.”⁴³ The diagram signals the intrusion of the outside:

These almost blind manual marks attest to the intrusion of another world into the visual world of figuration. To a certain extent, they remove the painting from the optical organization that was already reigning over it and rendering it figurative in advance. The painter’s hand intervenes in order to shake its own dependence and break up the sovereign optical organization: one can no longer see anything, as if in a catastrophe, a chaos.⁴⁴

The diagram is a “turning point” for painting, the “chaos-germ” that “ends the preparatory work and begins the act of painting” as such.⁴⁵ There are many paths that can be followed from this point, as many paths as there are possible diagrams. But the diagram, as a concept, is the “operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches,” that must be “utilized” in the coming to presentation of the artwork.⁴⁶ The diagram is not significant; it is “suggestive”; it presents “possibilities of fact” that “do not yet constitute a fact (the pictorial fact).”⁴⁷ For traits to “evolve into a Figure, they must be reinjected into the visual whole”; but in Bacon’s painting, “it is precisely through the action of these marks that the visual whole will cease to be an optical organization; it will give the eye another power, as well as an object that will no longer be figurative.”⁴⁸ For Bacon, it is not the image that is made thematic, but the particularity of use that produces it.

Bacon’s path is the path of “analogy,” a predecessor to which Deleuze identifies in Cézanne.⁴⁹ Other paths include the path of abstraction “that reduces the abyss or chaos (as well as the manual) to a minimum,” and the path of abstract expressionism in which “the abyss or chaos is deployed to the maximum.”⁵⁰ In abstraction, artists “replaced the diagram with a code”; in abstract expressionism, “the diagram merges with the totality of the painting,” the work becoming “exclusively manual.”⁵¹ It is for this reason that Deleuze considers Bacon’s path a “kind of middle way.”⁵² In Bacon, the diagram “remain[s] operative and controlled,” a “possibility of fact” that does not “submerge the whole,” allowing us to “emerge from the catastrophe” with both the “precision of the sensation” and the “clarity of the Figure” that is altogether new.⁵³ It is the “rigor of the contour” that Bacon conserves, the thought of the “outline” that renders this third path the path of analogy.⁵⁴

Analogy uses the diagram as a “motif,” the “intertwining” of a “sensation” and a “frame.”⁵⁵ Analogy is “modular” rather than “integral”—it “establish[es] an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements,” it “introduc[es] a literally unlimited possibility of connections between these elements, on a field of presence or finite plane whose moments are all actual or sensible.”⁵⁶ The digital, on the other hand, is an operation of “codification,” “homogenization,” and “binarization” that integrates its elements “on a seperate plane, infinite in principle,” the moments of which are only available by “conversion-translation.”⁵⁷ Cézanne’s motifs are works of analogue “modulation”, utilizing “planes” rather than “perspective,” “color” rather than “chiaroscuro,” and “body” rather than the “form-background relationship.”⁵⁸ In Bacon’s assumption of this diagram, there is a “liberation” of painting from the representational regime, a liberation that “occur[s] only by passing through the catastrophe” of the diagram to produce a “more profound resemblance” than representation, the realization of sensation.⁵⁹ The diagram is a “modulator,” an abstract machine.⁶⁰ And it is with this machine that we can at last address interaction directly.

Phillips

The diagrammatic gesture postdates the representational gaze in the pictorial arts, just as the interactive image postdates the pictorial image in the arts at large. And yet, it is the paradox indicated from the beginning of this essay that the diagrammatic and interactive subtend the representational and pictorial. In chapter three of Amanda Phillips’ Gamer Trouble (2020), all these lines of force converge.⁶¹ The present essay, continuing the series “The Idea of the Gamer,” takes us to the site of the turn in video games, to the diagram that operates as the modulator between the preparatory work and the work of gameplay. Just as there are multiple possible paths from this point in painting, so too are there multiple possible paths in gaming. Phillips identifies three such paths, made concrete by three figures: Chell from Portal, Bayonetta from Bayonetta, and Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider reboot. Each of these figures is distinguished by a particular interactive diagram that Phillips meticulously analyzes. As Deleuze writes, we can both “differentiate” and “date” diagrams, allowing us to identify the “moment” when a painter, or in the present case, a game studio or franchise, “confronts” the diagram of their work “most directly.”⁶² As Phillips shows, in each of these three diagrams, the confrontation is primarily a confrontation with the “figurative and probabilistic givens” of race and gender from which each gameworld springs. These figures realize gamic sensation in distinct ways, and it is my purpose in this final section to unpack Phillips’ presentation of each.

In the previous entry in this series, I mentioned how Phillips moved from the “hidden surface problem” in 3D graphics to a reading of the “face” in video games. I also remarked that an inclusion of Deleuze and Guattari’s examination of faciality in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) would have been beneficial, but was too much to include given the limited scope of these pieces.⁶³ Insofar as Deleuze and Guattari define “faciality (visagéité)” as an abstract machine, I am pleased to have returned to this point by way of another route, providing something of an armature for the previous discussion. Now, however, it will be worth broaching the hidden surface problem not as matter of the face but of interaction, using the same article cited by Amanda Phillips, Jacob Gaboury’s “Hidden Surface Problems” (2015), to do so.⁶⁴

In his article, Gaboury works toward a “theory of the digital image that is not visible in the rendered output of the screen, but which nonetheless structures and limits our engagement with computational technology.”⁶⁵ In other words, he is working toward a diagram of the digital image, or what he also names the “screen image.”⁶⁶ The screen image is a “material object in its own right,” and so we can say with Deleuze that the screen image, like painting, is to be “made the object of practical studies.”⁶⁷ The screen image is not a “mere interface for deeper material processes,” but a complex material process in its own right.⁶⁸

The inaugural question of the field of computer graphics, the question that gives rise to the diagram of the screen image, is threefold: “How is an object constructed, what is it made of, how does it interact with the world around it?”⁶⁹ The problem that arises from this triple question is the problem of the “hidden surface.”⁷⁰ Gaboury is careful to establish that this problem should not be seen as a problem of “perspective,” but of “simulation.”⁷¹ While computer graphics have succeeded photography and film as the dominant mode of the image today, the problems of this mode do not stand in simple continuity with the problems of modes past. The simulation of perspective as a “structuring system whereby space is mapped and displayed in relation to a viewing subject,” the system Foucault describes in his analysis of Las Meninas, posed little difficulty in the early days of computer graphics.⁷² Perspective did not need to be reinvented for the computer. Rather, the primary difficulty for early computer graphics was the simulation of objects.⁷³ For instance, the first “perspective-construction algorithm,” produced by Lawrence Roberts in 1963, did not construct a “virtual object,” such as the cube primitive with which game designers and developers would be familiar in game engines like Unity; rather, it produced a “three-dimensional representation,” the “simulation of a largely mathematical technique”—“Renaissance perspective”—“for constructing vision.”⁷⁴

What would prevent this algorithm, and others being developed at the same time, from being deployed at scale or in real time, was the problem of “account[ing] for what parts of the object should be visible to a viewer, and which should be hidden.”⁷⁵ Researchers were not interested with “reproduc[ing] a particular way of seeing,” because this had already been solved by perspective, by representation; instead, they were interested “in the structure of objects themselves.”⁷⁶ The field of the screen image presents different givens than that of the pictorial image. Consequently, the “technical challenges” of computer graphics “have no basis in earlier visual media forms,” which requires that we not “presume a genealogy of the visible,” not presuppose the diagram of aperture-surface-volume.⁷⁷ Citing Friedrich Kittler, Gaboury maintains Kittler’s point that computers “are born dimensionless and imageless.”⁷⁸ As such, “graphics must not only calculate that which is to be seen, but also anticipate and hide that which is known but should not be seen, that which must be made hidden and invisible.”⁷⁹ The pure volume of representational space is easy; the simulation of opaque objects is the challenge.⁸⁰

The diagram that came closest to solving the problem of the opaque, the hidden, the invisible, was the “list-priority” algorithm, the variations of which were “designed for high quality interactive simulation.”⁸¹ List-priority algorithms determined whether an aspect of a “scene” should be “calculated using static image-space algorithms” or dynamic “object-space” algorithms, solving the hidden surface problem through the “proper categorization of a given scene.”⁸² This solution, the closest to the modern solution, was found not by conceiving of the computer screen as a surface like a painting, photo, or film, but as a scene for interaction. The problem was not the representational drama, but the staging of the drama. In 1978, Edwin Catmull developed the Z-Buffering method, the modern solution, which “utilizes a custom physical memory storage—known as a ‘buffer’—to store depth information for the purpose of hidden surface removal.”⁸³ Insofar as scene prioritization presented the path forward for computer graphics, “hardware solutions” arose in turn as means to better “accelerate, decode, connect, and transform graphical data in a given system”—exemplified by developments in graphics card technology today, developments that are primarily driven by the gaming sector.⁸⁴

The screen image, therefore, is not a matter of “capturing the world through the indexical trace of light on a surface,” but rather of “constructing objects for visual interaction.”⁸⁵ The “figurative and probabilistic givens” of the interactive scene are the “graphical objects” potentiated by a given game engine, which is itself the game designer’s palette and brush.⁸⁶ The basic diagram of the digital image, the screen image, the interactive image, is that of scene-object-interactor, a diagram for doing rather than seeing, of the gesture rather than the gaze, making explicit the manual quality of the diagram as such. It is through this diagram that the modulation of catastrophe into figure, field into game, is performed.

For Phillips, then, it is vital to understand this history if we are to correctly interpret their presentation of the “gamic gaze.” If we revert to the diagram of representation, interaction will be subjected to the image and gesture subjected to the gaze. But in the three instances of the gamic gaze Phillips analyses, the operative diagram is not that of aperture-surface-volume but scene-object-interactor. Insofar as the history of the screen image is a history driven by the demands of interaction, Phillips analyses help us chart the long course of the manual arts through the regime of the optical and back to their conditions of existence.

Phillips argues “for an understanding of the gamic gaze that attends to more than what is looked at and who is looking, but to the procedural, historical, corporeal, and cultural contexts in which the looking is done.”⁸⁷ In other words, Phillips positions the gamic gaze as subject to the scene, the stage, the space of interaction rather than the space of representation. Video games certainly have a distinct “power of visuality,” but “computation and play help sculpt how we look at the screen—as well as how it looks back at us.”⁸⁸ This sculpting, this manual art, is the diagram to be considered.

The modulating action of this diagram can be seen in the operation of the “machine-eye view.”⁸⁹ This is a view “from the perspective of the rendering engine responsible for tracking and drawing the portions of gamespace visible to the gamer in real time.”⁹⁰ In other words, this is the basic construction of a scene for interaction, the making visible of a stage for an interactor and objects.⁹¹ This scene and the gaze surveying it are “more than a visual field,” more than a volume of representation.⁹² Phillips contends that the visual field is, “rather, a matrix of recursive vectors of desire among the elements of a gamic system: human, hardware, software, rules, narrative, and representation.”⁹³ The gamic gaze is subject to the “gamic system that kinesthetically entangles the body of the gamer via technological peripherals and the demands of play.”⁹⁴ Thus, in the same way that the spectator is included before the fact in Las Meninas, the gamer is included before the fact in the game, discovering their action to have been anticipated, expected, invited.

Following Deleuze, we recognize that the diagram of interaction is deployed in a variety of different ways, producing modulations that lead players down very different paths. First, if we consider Chell in Portal, the machine-eye view is from a first person perspective, the visual field constituted much like that of the subject-spectator of representation. However, unlike the representational subject-spectator, the player as Chell takes on the role of subject-actor. The “game camera functions as the player character’s eyes from a position that sutures gamer to character through the gaze.”⁹⁵ But the game is not for the gaze; the game is for the gestures of interaction. The “tangled gazes” of Chell and GLaDOS’s cameras constitute a visual field criss-crossed by competing lines of action, and the Portal Gun that occupies much of the player and Chell’s visual field is a means of traversing this visual field, a means of action.⁹⁶ The visibility it makes possible is a visibility that restructures the scene, that connects points in space not previously so distributed. The final confrontation with GLaDOS sees the deployment of this active visibility to dismember and desubjectify her. The representational volume collapses, the “gamer’s hostile gaze” not a pure reciprocity but the mobilization of the scene itself for violence.⁹⁷ Phillips rightly critiques the narrative around Portal as a story of female empowerment, seeing in Portal the use of a voiceless feminine body (Chell) and a bodiless feminine voice (GLaDOS), modulated by the first-person shooter diagram, to antifeminist ends. Furthermore, Chell’s depiction as not only a feminine body but a “brown feminine body” reproduces the “histories of women of color … who have been forced into scientific experimentation in the name of the greater good.”⁹⁸ Rather than structure the action of the game around an assault on “the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal structures that put them there in the first place,” both Chell and GLaDOS “continuously hold each other in check with their gazes,” with the former ultimately killing the latter by way of the player’s actions.⁹⁹

There is, however, a quiet short circuiting of this matrix of violence that Chell effects. At the beginning of the game, the gamer is provided with a “wide angle of the avatar’s body” through a portal specifically “set up in such a way … [to] help the gamer orient themselves in the twisted spatial perspectives of the game, making these mirrors … integral to connecting with the avatar.”¹⁰⁰ Chell is “literally objectified” by the “portal gaze,” made into the “avatar-thing with which the gamer must identify.”¹⁰¹ But, insofar as the suture of the first-person perspective is modulated by the institution of this loop between avatar-thing and player-subject, the possibility of the suture coming undone presents itself. Beyond that introductory scene, the gamer can only see Chell’s body “through the lens of carefully arranged portals.”¹⁰² But it is this “particular restriction of vision” that has the “curious effect” of splitting the suture of gamer and character: for Chell to look back at the camera “requires the avatar to break the physics of the game.”¹⁰³ Chell glances at herself, looks away from the “line of sight” of the “gamer’s camera,” dissolving the “suggestion that the camera is coterminous with her eyes.”¹⁰⁴ The pilot becomes a passenger for just a moment, with just a glance, troubling the scene of interaction with a question of unreconciled agency. This glance is not ultimately a liberatory one, insofar as the gendered and racial violence of the game as a whole overcodes such minor actions. But the very possibility of such minor actions as programmed, the fact of the manual labour required to produce such a disruptive look, indicates the distinction of the screen image and the interactive scene from the pictorial and representational.

In Bayonetta, then, Phillips identifies a disruptive modulation of the diagram of interaction that is not relegated to a glance but characterizes the game as a whole. Interpreted according to a representational paradigm, the character of Bayonetta “is the ideal candidate for thinking about the objectification of women in video games.”¹⁰⁵ But, insofar as a video game is not primarily a representational space, but an interactive one, Bayonetta’s presentation has the effect of “femme disturbance,” which “disrupts simplistic notions of agency and resistance to open the way for recognizing how systems might be assailed from within.”¹⁰⁶ Phillips does not shy away from the “difficult context” of Bayonetta’s production as a character, the fact of the “visual enticement of misogynist consumers” and creators alike.¹⁰⁷ As a game, however, the interaction that Bayonetta requires “enlists the gamer in a project that deprivileges and ridicules phallic scopophilia, dismembers the structures of religio-corporate masculinity, literally and figuratively castrates its central figures, and channels masturbatory pleasure at the game’s climaxes into a clitoral form.”¹⁰⁸ Bayonetta’s “hypervisible” body is not simply about being visible, as it would be as a pure representation, but rather is about “imagining new ways to confront oppressive regimes.”¹⁰⁹ In a refusal of representation, Bayonetta denies the gamer “control” of its “scopic regime,” refusing to privilege the spectator-subject’s view.¹¹⁰ Furthermore, the game uses its interactive space to “create moments” that Phillips describes as “sexual analogues in which controller functions mimic sexual activity” with a distinctly “clitoral” structure.¹¹¹ That is to say, the game modulates player action, is a modulator of interaction, introducing a catastrophe to the givens of masculine gamespace. Bayonetta goes beyond masculine “voyeurism” to enact “a masculine identification with a feminine character,” what Phillips calls a “transgender gamer identification[]” that rejects the “foundational mytholog[y]” of the “target demographic” of “straight white adolescent boys,” using its interactive possibilities to “explore the queer and transgender fantasies that attend feminine avatars in games that court masculine audiences.”¹¹² Phillips concludes that “Bayonetta’s aggressively feminine, queer sexuality reaches beyond the screen to implicate the gamer in its own pleasures, disturbing the narratives we tell about what it means to be a gamer, or a woman, or a slut, or a hero in contemporary times.”¹¹³ Bayonetta is the realization of a truly radical sensation.

To round out the chapter, Phillips turns to Lara Croft, the “First Lady of gaming,” and the 2013 reboot of her character and the franchise in particular.¹¹⁴ Lara’s “ascension to the role of hero” in this game and its sequels is coupled with a “physical vulnerability … more common in survival horror games,” drawing Tomb Raider into the territory of the “body genre,” as theorized by Carol Clover and Linda Williams.¹¹⁵ The machine-eye and visual field of Tomb Raider “take[] on the physiological aspects of the first-person camera,” which “amplifies the gamer’s connection to Lara, despite the placement of the camera at a distance from her body.”¹¹⁶ In one particular instance of in-game trauma, “[c]olor drains from the screen and the image distorts with the pain of the impact, the controller pulsing and Lara whimpering with every step as the gamer guides her limping body around.”¹¹⁷ Phillips sees this particular sequence as “exemplary of the gamic gaze” because the visual field is “complicated by a recursive set of multisensory input and output that serves to invoke a sense of copresence (and commiseration) with the avatar.”¹¹⁸ The screen image is not a representation to be spectated, but an interactive scene that directly involves the player’s body in its action. The diagram is manual, physiological, a “forward-looking, anticipatory loop that engages digital and physical bodies.”¹¹⁹ Lara “exist[s] as more than an object separate unto herself”; she, like Bayonetta, “reaches back through the gamer’s gaze upon her and imposes [her] own demands on their behavior.”¹²⁰ Lara’s body is a locus for the modulation of the player that results in the production of the figure of gameplay, a total scene and a plurality of scenes that are, indeed, more profound resemblances than mere representation.

Phillips notes Lara’s role in the narrative as a “kick-ass avenger and brutal colonizer” like Indiana Jones, but reserves a more in depth discussion of the politics of such gameplay for the following chapter.¹²¹ It will be that discussion we consider in the next entry for this series.

Notes

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960, trans. revis. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 106ff. ↩
I first learned about the remarkable construction of these images from Sean Zabashi, Twitter, June 12, 2021, https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1403914695128457219. In 1960, Sigfreid Giedion proposed the essential role of firelight in the interaction with cave paintings, and in 1993 Edward Wachtel theorized how the superposition of paintings and etchings, when viewed by firelight, could produce a sort of animation or proto-movie. See Giedion, “Space Conception in Prehistoric Art,” in Explorations in Communication, eds. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), 71-89, and Wachtel, “The First Picture Show: Cinematic Aspects of Cave Art,” Leonardo 26, no. 2 (April 1993): 135-140. For contemporary reporting, see Zach Zorich, “Early Humans Made Animated Art,” Nautilus, March 27, 2014, https://nautil.us/issue/11/light/early-humans-made-animated-art, and Jennifer Ouellette, “Archaeologists recreated three common kinds of Paleolithic cave lighting,” Ars Technica, June 19, 2021, https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/archaeologists-recreated-three-common-kinds-of-paleolithic-cave-lighting/. ↩
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1966, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), 16. ↩
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/las-meninas/9fdc7800-9ade-48b0-ab8b-edee94ea877f, and Foucault, The Order of Things, 16. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 16. This is the subject of the painting and the aesthetic subject who is a spectator of the painting. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 3. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 3. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 4. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 4. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 4. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 5. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 5. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 5. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 5. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 6. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 6. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 6. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 6. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 7. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 8. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 8. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 8. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 10. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 11. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 13. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 14. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 14. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 14-15. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 15. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 16. ↩
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London, UK: Continuum, 2003). ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 99. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 99. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 99. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 99. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 99-100. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 100. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 100. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 100. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 100. ↩
Foucault, The Order of Things, 4. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 100. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 100-101. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 101. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 101, 102. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 101. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 101. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 101-102. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 111. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 103, 104. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 104. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 111. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 110. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 110, and fn. 18, 186. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 112. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 116. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 116. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 118. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 119. ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 120. For “abstract machine” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 510: “There is no abstract machine, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate within concrete assemblages: They are defined by the fourth aspect of assemblages, in other words, the cutting edges of decoding and deterritorialization. They draw these cutting edges. Therefore they make the territorial assemblage open onto something else, assemblages of another type, the molecular, the cosmic; they constitute becomings. Thus they are always singular and immanent.” ↩
Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020). ↩
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 102. ↩
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 167-191. ↩
Jacob Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object,” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (2015): 40-60. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 42. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 41. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 41, and Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 114. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 41. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 43-44. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 45. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 46. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 46. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 47. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 47-49. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 50. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 50. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 51. ↩
Friedrich Kittler, cited in Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 50. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 51. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 52. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 54. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 55. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 56. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 57. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 57. ↩
Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems,” 57. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 105. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 105. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 126. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 126. ↩
Pippin Barr has produced a set of presentations of the basic “scenes” of twenty different game engines, The Nothings Suite, April 21, 2021, https://pippinbarr.github.io/the-nothings-suite/, a project remarkable for its simplicity. In each, the scene as a space for interaction is made explicit, one of the three constituent elements of the diagram of the interactive image. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 132. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 132. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 132. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 107. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 108. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 113. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 117-118. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 119. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 116. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 116. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 114, and Figure 3.6, 115. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 115. Fans have commented on this peculiarity online. For instance, see Reddit user drachenhunter, “Just started playing portal,” June 28, 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r/Portal/comments/29db2a/. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 115. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 120. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 121. Phillips receives the concept of “femme disturbance” from micha cárdenas. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 122. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 129. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 121. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 126. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 128-129. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 131. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 132. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 133. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 133, 134, 127. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 135. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 135. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 135. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 135. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 135. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 135. ↩

Generic Science, 4

2021-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

As in the previous entry on generic science, this fourth and final piece in the series will engage with a set of post-Parmenidean thinkers in a direct and radical way, taking its que from the generic program articulated by Heraclitus. This essay will consider Leucippus of Abdera, Democritus of Abdera, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Gorgias of Leontini.

Before doing so, a brief aside. I have been influenced, for some time, by Terence Blake’s use of the “metaphysical research programme” (drawing from Karl Popper) as an organizing framework for addressing the work of different philosophers. Furthermore, I have been influenced by Blake’s interest in pluralist metaphysical research programs, which we can “describe, analyse, and evaluate” according to a “loose partially overlapping set of criteria” (drawing from Paul Feyerabend): openness, pluralism, testability, realism, diachronicity, apophaticism, and democracy.¹ This is a potent generic set of criteria for philosophical research and development, which helps us to adopt the standpoint Alexander Galloway describes (drawing from François Laruelle). Galloway writes:

For Laruelle, philosophy means roughly “the thing that is transcendental vis-à-vis the real.” Taken in this sense philosophy is always representational, reflective, or mediated. Philosophy reveals the conditions of possibility of things (but not those things themselves). By contrast, generic science means roughly “the thing that is immanent vis-à- vis the real.” Science is always direct or radical, not reflective or mediated. Science reveals things immediately, unilaterally, and unconditionally. Thus when Laruelle refers to non-philosophy as a science of philosophy he means simply that it focuses on philosophy’s radical or irreflective immanence, not its penchant for the transcendental.²

If we imbricate Galloway’s conception of a “generic science” with Blake’s set of criteria for the analysis of metaphysical research programs, it becomes clear how we can continue to persist in direct and radical analysis without falling into the naivety of some supposed common sense.³ Open and democratic, pluralist and realist, diachronic and apophatic, and above all, testable—this is the sort of framework for science that I have been probing throughout this series.

This framework is what allows us to read Parmenides’s poem as making statements about the real, which consequently allows us to test the veracity of his claims, to evaluate the metaphysical research program that is his fortress of being, and to weigh it against other such programs, encountering fruitful conjunctions and disjunctions of thought therein. As such, we can do away with the mystical masters handing down knowledge from on high, and instead step into the mud together with our teachers. It is for this reason that Heraclitus directs his followers to “listen” to the principle of being, to the logos, themselves, and not to listen only to him.⁴ Likewise, Empedocles, though self-styled as a mystical figure, nevertheless directs his followers to “use whatever it takes to make things clear to the mind.”⁵ In this way, we can even genericize Laruelle’s generic program, and treat of him in open and democratic dialogue with his predecessors, his peers, and his successors. It is precisely this sort of work that we have been doing with respect to Parmenides, and to which we now return.

Leucippus and Democritus

If we recall, the eighth fragment of Parmenides provides us with the key terms for his research program: being is unborn, imperishable, entire, alone of its kind, unshaken, complete, all together, single, continuous, indivisible, homogeneous, coherent, changeless, and equal to itself.⁶ It is this description of being that I have named the “Parmenidean fortress of being,” and it is this description to which most of the thinkers who followed Parmenides respond in their own descriptions of being.

This is indeed the case with the Atomists, Leucippus of Abdera and Democritus of Abdera. Aristotle writes of Leucippus:

Some of the thinkers of old had decided that what-is is single and unmoving, on the grounds that void is non-existent, and that there could be no movement without a separately existing void, nor even a plurality of things without the existence of something to keep them apart … Leucippus, however, thought that he had come up with explanations which conformed with the evidence of the senses in that they would not do away with generation or destruction or movement, or with the plurality of existing things.⁷

Parmenides is precisely the “thinker of old” to whom Aristotle is referring in this testimonial, and what we see here is Leucippus taking the direct and radical stance of a generic science toward Parmenides’s program. Unlike Zeno who, as we have seen previously, accepted the terms of Parmenides’s framework without question, entered into its depths, and then set about trying to prove the framework to be true with his paradoxes, Leucippus takes this framework on its surface and sets about testing it, with both intellection and observation. Aristotle continues:

[Leucippus] agreed with the monists that there could be no movement without void, that the void is non-existent, and that nothing about what-is can not be. For what really and truly is, he said, is a plenum. Nevertheless, he said, this is not single, but there are numerically infinite existents which are imperceptible because of their minute size. These things are in motion in the void (for the void exists), and their coming together constitutes generation, while their dissolution constitutes destruction.⁸

With Leucippus, Parmenides’s intellectual belief that being is single and continuous is nuanced by the application of observational data. Parmenides’s being is certainly a plenum—entire, complete, all together, continuous, indivisible, homogeneous: in sum, a fullness—but it takes on the speculative appearance of a marble, hard and smooth, unchangeable and impermeable. Leucippus, on the other hand, presents a very different image of being—not a marble, but a “spherical body [that] billows out like a membrane and encloses within itself all kinds of atoms.”⁹ To choose another real-world object for a contrasting term, where Parmenides’s being is a marble, Leucippus’s is something closer to a water balloon.

Where Leucippus’s philosophical program becomes even more remarkable, however, is in his ascription of reality to the void. The passage from Aristotle is somewhat confusing on this point: the void is “non-existent,” and “nothing about what-is can not be,” but the void “exists.”¹⁰ How is this possible? Thankfully, Aristotle clarifies elsewhere, writing of Leucippus and Democritus that their “elements are the full and the void, by which they mean what-is and what-is-not.”¹¹ Their “first principle” is, significantly, dual.¹² For the Atomists, “what is full and solid” is what-is, and “what is void and rarefied” is what-is-not.¹³ So, “they say that what-is has no more existence than what-is-not, because void exists just as much as solidity.”¹⁴ Void is not simply the absence of the full; it is another principle. What-is and what-is-not are equiprimordial “material causes” irreducible to each other.¹⁵ This is why “nothing about what-is can not be”—the full cannot be destroyed, made void, only separated. Likewise, the void is “non-existent” because it does not exist in the manner of what-is, cannot be made to be—and yet, it nevertheless exists, in a manner of its own.¹⁶

If we take a generic stance with respect to Leucippus and Democritus in turn, we can bring to bear the efforts of modern physics to help us understand how the non-existent might be said to exist. Looking into space, we see celestial bodies scattered in the void, accretions of matter and energy adrift in the black. The vacuum of space is the great, material nothingness of the modern era. And yet, this nothing is not mere absence. This nothing is expanding. We can observe celestial bodies receding from us, but it would be incorrect to imagine this movement as that of an arrow loosed from a bow, flying from point a to point b. It is the to itself that is expanding, an expansion of distance as such, which results in pushing points a and b further apart, causing the appearance of the recession of point b from point a. The void is not an absence; it is an “element,” a “material cause,” a “first principle.”¹⁷

Another example, to solidify our understanding. The void of space appears to be utterly empty, a vacuum, and yet the vacuum is. Karen Barad has discusses this fact in their What is the Measure of Nothingness?:

From the point of view of classical physics, the vacuum has no matter and no energy. But the quantum principle of ontological indeterminacy calls the existence of such a zero-energy, zero-matter state into question, or rather, makes it into a question with no decidable answer. Not a settled matter, or rather, no matter. And if the energy of the vacuum is not determinately zero, it isn’t determinately empty. In fact, this indeterminacy is responsible not only for the void not being nothing (while not being something), but it may in fact be the source of all that is, a womb that births existence … According to QFT, the vacuum can’t be determinately nothing because the indeterminacy principle allows for fluctuations of the quantum vacuum.¹⁸

The vacuum is not an absence but a “field,” emphasizes Barad, “something that has a physical quantity associated with every point in spacetime.”¹⁹ Because of the indeterminacy principle, this field is never totally inert or empty, but rather hovers around its zero point, “virtual particles” flitting in and out of existence.²⁰ Barad continues:

Virtual particles are not in the void but of the void. They are on the razor edge of non/being. The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The vacuum is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what could be … Nothingness is not absence, but the infinite plentitude of openness.²¹

Such is how Democritus can call the void by the names of “no-thing” and “infinite” at the same time.²² “There is no more reason for thing to exist than for no-thing to exist,” writes Democritus, no reason to affirm the full and deny the void.²³ Indeed, these are equally necessary principles, a fact the Atomists discover through their direct and radical inquiry.

Diogenes

Theophrastus writes of Diogenes of Apollonia that he “was more or less the last of those who made a study of natural science.”²⁴ Primarily influenced by Anaxagoras (a Parmenidean) and Leucippus (an Atomist), Diogenes also reaches back to Anaximenes (a Milesian) to state “that air is that from which everything else comes into existence.”²⁵ Theophrastus describes Diogenes’s book as “cobbled together,” and yet, if we situate Diogenes in our paradigm of generic science, or apply the Blake/Feyerabend criteria to his research program, this cobbling together presents itself in a different light: pluralist, realist, democratic.²⁶ Furthermore, in his own words, Diogenes maintains that “at the start of any book a writer ought to make his starting-point indisputable, and his methodology straightforward and authoritative.”²⁷ This is not a mystical project, but a project to be tested. If his starting point or methodology can be disputed, then they should be disputed. This is the challenge Diogenes poses, and the engagement that he invites.

Diogenes’s ontology permits only of qualitative difference and diversity: “all existent things are modifications of the same thing and are the same thing … they become differently qualified at different times and return back to the same thing”—that thing being air.²⁸ Like Anaximenes, Diogenes’s thought is poorer for its loss of the Milesian dual, being and motion, but writing as he is at a later date, he ends up being more interesting for his epistemology. Because air for Diogenes is also “soul and intelligence,” he is led to reproduce Heraclitus’s materialist theory of cognition, a grounding of air, as it were. Heraclitus links intelligence and the common—being, the logos—with a pun: “with intelligence” is xun noōi and the common is xunōi.²⁹ The “mind-in-us” exists in a state of “natural union with what surrounds us” because it is what surrounds us: it is a “fraction of what surrounds us” that is “in exile in our bodies.”³⁰ Diogenes, then, is very much espousing a Heraclitean point of view when he writes: “it is by means of the same one thing that all living creatures live and see and hear, and the rest of their intelligence too stems from the same one thing”—again, that thing being air.³¹ By taking this position, Diogenes present his research program as open and testable, allowing us to plainly see the various strands of thought running through it, and to describe, analyse, and evaluate the arguments he makes on that basis. Though his ontology is, as a whole, less interesting than other Presocratic philosophers, Diogenes is, nevertheless, worth reading to witness a generic research program at work.

Gorgias

With Gorgias of Leontini, we at last cross over from the Presocratics to the Sophists. One of the elder Sophists—like Protagoras, an early adopter of the 100 mina fee³²—Gorgias has an entire Platonic dialogue dedicated to the criticism of his ideas. However, if we situate Gorgias in our paradigm of generic science like we did with Diogenes, we are able to detach Gorgias’s arguments from the Platonic paradigm, and so treat of him as a philosopher legitimately attempting to address the Parmenidean fortress of being as a testable hypothesis.

The testimonial of Sextus Empiricus to Gorgias’s work On What Is Not or On Nature (echoing Parmenides’s poem) does an excellent job presenting the logical core of Gorgias’s argument. Like Melissus, Gorgias recognizes that Parmenides’s ascription of the properties unborn and imperishable to being entails that being is “infinite.”³³ Just as we do today when considering the physical universe to be infinite, Gorgias follows the logic of the statement: “since it is infinite, it is nowhere, because if it is somewhere, then that in which it is is different from it, and so something with being will no longer be infinite, given that it is contained within something.”³⁴ Thus, two of Parmenides’s terms—unborn and imperishable—entails a third—infinite—and for these three terms to hold, so too must the terms entire, alone, and complete. Gorgias continues to follow the logic:

For the container is greater than the contained, but there is nothing greater than what is infinite, which means that something infinite cannot be anywhere. But neither is it contained within itself. For if this is so, the container and the contained will be identical, and the thing with being will become two, both place and body (the container being place and the contained being body). But this is absurd, and therefore something with being is not within itself either.³⁵

If being is unborn, imperishable, and infinite, it must necessarily be entire, alone, and complete. If it is entire, alone, and complete, it must also necessarily be all together, single, continuous, indivisible, homogeneous, and coherent. By exploring the implications of being as infinite, Gorgias is able, therefore, to simultaneously demonstrate the necessity of the majority of Parmenides’s terms, while also revealing the paradox of the place of the universe: the universe is the sum of all possible places, spacetime itself, but where is the universe? Far from what we might describe with the pejorative use of “sophistic,” this question that Gorgias raises is a legitimate one.

Above, we noted that the universe is expanding. But this raises the question, what is the universe expanding into? Much like Archytas of Tarentum who asked of Parmenides’s fortress, what is beyond the edge?, our everyday, observational understanding of space leads us to ask similar questions. And because we are limited in what we can directly observe in the universe, we must use our intellection to consider a variety of models for that which lies beyond observation, and then test our models with whatever means are at hand. This is the basic work of science, with potential answers that are mind-bending and exhilarating, and which raise more questions the further we try to go.³⁶

Given the conclusion that being is nowhere, Gorgias argues that the “outcome of all this is that if something with being is eternal, it is infinite, and if it is infinite, it is nowhere, and if its nowhere, it has no being. And so, if something with being is eternal, it has no being at all.”³⁷ From here, Gorgias goes on to conclude that that which has no being cannot be known, and even if it could be known that knowledge could not be communicated. It is here that some of the rhetorical trickery for which Gorgias is known appears to comes into play. If, however, we approach Gorgias’s arguments in the generic mode, these arguments should not be dismissed as examples of mere rhetoric, but taken on as actual attempts at philosophical research and development. Specifically, the logical slide from nowhere to non-being is worth interrogating, precisely because it reveals a flaw in Gorgias’s speculative model of the real, a flaw that can be remedied precisely through the work of generic analysis that we have been pursuing across the four entries in this series, and the broader series on the first philosophers in general. So, to begin to read Gorgias in the generic mode, in a direct and radical way, we must ask: how can being be nowhere and yet have being? We take questions of philosophy as questions to be answered, not because we fear the unknown, but because this is precisely the posture that the unknown solicits—as Barad writes, it is the “jubilation of emptiness.”³⁸

And it is with the jubilation of emptiness, with more questions for which we do not have the answers, that we conclude our series on generic science, which I hope has proved a fruitful cobbling together of thoughts on ancient philosophy. Next time, the conclusion to this series on the first philosophers as a whole with an essay on Protagoras and the prospects of sophistry today.

Notes

Terence Blake, “Pluralist Metaphysical Research Programmes: Feyerabend, Deleuze, Laruelle, Zizek, Serres, Stiegler, Badiou, Latour,” Agent Swarm, November 17, 2016, https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/pluralist-metaphysical-research-programmes-feyerabend-deleuze-laruelle-zizek-serres-stiegler-badiou-latour/. ↩
Alexander Galloway, “Superpositions,” Culture and Communication, October 11, 2014, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/superpositions. ↩
Indeed, there is an interesting project to be pursued in the analysis of the mediation within scientific revealing that allows science to reveal what is “immediately, unilaterally, and unconditionally.” For instance, we might use Don Ihde’s inquiry into the history and phenomenology of optical instruments in Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1990), but adopt a Laruellian non-standard approach to this inquiry, rather than a poststructural or differential approach—which would result, I believe, in an altogether different set of conclusions… ↩
Heraclitus, F10, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 39. ↩
Empedocles, F7, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 143. ↩
Parmenides, F8, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 59-60. ↩
Aristotle, On Generation and Destruction, 324b35-325b5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 171. ↩
Aristotle, On Generation and Destruction, 324b35-325b5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 171-172. ↩
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 183. ↩
Aristotle, On Generation and Destruction, 324b35-325b5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 172. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b4-20, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 172. ↩
Aristotle, On Generation and Destruction, 324b35-325b5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 171. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b4-20, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 173. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b4-20, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 173. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b4-20, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 173. ↩
Insists? Consists? ↩
For an accessible overview, see Corey S. Powell, “Fate of the Universe,” Aeon, January 7, 2020, https://aeon.co/essays/how-they-pinned-a-single-momentous-number-on-the-universe. ↩
Karen Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice (Ostfildem, DE: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 8-9. ↩
Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness?, 10. ↩
Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness?, 11. ↩
Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness?, 13, 16. ↩
Aristotle in Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 173. ↩
Democritus, F1, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 174. ↩
Theophrastus in Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 196. ↩
Theophrastus in Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 196. ↩
Theophrastus in Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 196. ↩
Diogenes, F1, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 196. ↩
Diogenes, F2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 196. ↩
Heraclitus, F12, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 39. ↩
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 44-45. ↩
Diogenes, F5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 198. ↩
Diodorus of Sicily, Universal History, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 225. ↩
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 233. ↩
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 233. ↩
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 233. ↩
Two accessible examples: Jesse Emspak, “Does the Universe Have an Edge?,” Live Science, April 2, 2016, https://www.livescience.com/33646-universe-edge.html, and Stephanie Pappas, “What happened before the Big Bang?,” Live Science, April 17, 2019, https://www.livescience.com/65254-what-happened-before-big-big.html. As the above article from Powell demonstrates, such questions have driven much research in modern physics, and continue to pose challenges to scientists today. ↩
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 233. ↩
Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness?, 13. ↩

Utopics

2021-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

“To live utopia means constructing the representation which will speak its impossibility and simultaneously indicate it as that which it excludes. It is the empty space bordering and framing representation. This is the space of blessedness in representation, the permanent instant of happiness, all in one moment loss, limit and the neutral.” —Marin, Utopics, xxvi

This zine is inspired by my engagement with Louis Marin’s book Utopics: Spatial Play (1984), which is in turn a reading of Thomas More’s book Utopia (1516).

Over 20 pages, I draw on five presocratic philosophers (Anaximander, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and Leucippus and Democritus), five twentieth century philosophers (Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari, Laruelle, and Badiou), and then weave the threads of their thought together with Marin’s thought of utopia. The outcome is less tapestry, and more patchwork. Marin is a challenging read, and I found this short zine to be exceptionally challenging to write.

There is no game in this zine. These pages are the opening of a factory, a welcoming of other readers to join me in the assembly of machines for thought with which me might begin to play, and play anew.

If philosophy is your style, I have written at much greater length and with much more precision and clarity on most of the thinkers to whom I here refer. The particular intensity of thought that I am following throughout the zine begins with my essay “Being and Motion.”

As per usual, this zine is in A5 format, and should be easily printable if you select “booklet” in the print dialog on your computer. The cover image is a diagram from Marin’s Utopics. The background image is from More’s Utopia, which is in the public domain at Wikimedia Commons.

Itch.io

Recombinatorics

2021-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Changing the Game

“We’ve seen that a game can change. We’ve seen that the very game we’re playing can become something we never intended it to be. We made the change. It changed because of the way we were playing it … As long as we make sure that it is the right time and that everyone understands and agrees to the rules, we can do anything we want to and still be playing well. OK, we might not be playing the game. But there is no ‘the game’ for a play community. Any game whatever, as long as we are playing it well, is the game … There’s a tendency, as we begin to make things official, to think that only one particular form of a game is the real game. The fact is, any game we’re playing is a real game. That’s the fact. After all, the only thing that makes a game real is that there are people playing it.”¹

The Passion for Rules

“The game’s sole principle, though it is never posed as universal, is that by choosing the rule one is delivered from the law. Without a psychological or metaphysical foundation, the rule has no grounding in belief. One neither believes nor disbelieves a rule—one observes it. The diffuse sphere of belief, the need for credibility that encompasses the real, is dissolved in the game. Hence their immorality: to proceed without believing in it, to sanction a direct fascination with conventional signs and groundless rules … The Law describes a potentially universal system of meaning and value. It aims at objective recognition. On the basis of its underlying transcendence, the Law constitutes itself into an instance for the totalization of the real, with all the revolutions and transgressions clearing the way to the law’s universalization. By contrast, the Rule is immanent to a limited and restricted system, which it describes without transcending, and within which it is immutable. The rule does not aspire to universality and, strictly speaking, it lacks all exteriority since it does not institute an internal scission. It is the Law’s transcendence that establishes the irreversibility of meaning and value. And it is the rule’s immanence, its arbitrary, circumscriptive character, that leads, in its own sphere, to the reversibility of meaning and the reversion of the Law … The rule has no need of a formal structure or superstructure—whether moral or psychological—to function. Precisely because rules are arbitrary and ungrounded, because they have no referents, they do not require a consensus, nor any collective will or truth. They exist, that’s all. And they exist only when shared.”²

Playtime in Utopia

“Let us return to this game, and instead of considering it as a systemic strategy totalizing all possibilities, uno inuitu mentis, think of it as a game that is played in this space. Each ‘turn’ of the game whose rules describe the system allows the conflict between the players to be reinvented and superior to it. With every turn, or throw, the whole system is brought into being; each turn nonetheless surpasses the system and its strategies … Each throw is situated between the structural balance of the positions and the unbalancing effect of the throw itself, of the event or act whereby a double strategy is contained and invented, despite the fact that a diagram of possible choices eliminating the force of contradiction of the rational struggle of contradictory elements cannot be sketched out. This throw or move opens up the whole field of possibilities, but the field itself cannot be controlled because it is nothing but indetermination.”³

The Abyss of Philosophical Decision

“From this we gather the paradoxical ‘logic’ of immediate or non-thetic (of) itself decision. It is clear that this diversity, radical that-ness or in itself of NTT, a diversity that is absolutely indifferent, grounds, unlike the One, an absolute or indifferent choice and thus an absolute limitation of philosophical choice or a positive annulment of philosophical decision. There is no possible decision as regards this diversity; it is too indifferent to offer any reason for choosing, too absurd and contingent in its existence even to offer a reason for its existence. But also too positively stripped of reason not to liberate decision and to ground choice in its radical absurdity: it is the very diversity of decisions. NTT is even an absolute principle of choice, the principle of choice … It is the essence of choice, of absolutely any choice possible whatsoever without any limitation. It is a matter of neither a strategy, nor a logic, nor an economy of choice, but of a transcendental possibilization that frees choice as possible.”⁴

The Birth of the Rule

“The fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era witnessed the birth of a peculiar literature that, at least at first glance, does not seem to have had precedents in the classical world: monastic rules … The present study intends to show how, in these texts that are at once dissimilar and monotonous, the reading of which seems so difficult to the modern reader, a transformation is carried out. This transformation—to an extent probably more decisive than in the juridical, ethical, ecclesiastical, or historical texts of the same era—collides with law as much as with ethics and politics. It also implies a radical reformulation of the very conceptuality that up until that moment articulated the relationship between human action and norm, ‘life’ and ‘rule,’ … the rule enters in this way into a zone of undecidability with respect to life. A norm that does not refer to single acts and events, but to the entire existence of an individual, to his forma vivendi, is no longer easily recognizable as a law, just as a life that is founded in its totality in the form of a rule is no longer truly life … Just as precepts that are no longer separable from the monk’s life cease to be ‘legal,’ so the monks themselves are no longer ‘regular,’ but ‘vital.’”⁵

Notes

Bernie DeKoven, The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy, 1978 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 39, 45, 57. ↩
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 1979, trans. Brian Singer (Montréal, QC: CTheory Books, 2001), 133, 134, 136. ↩
Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (New York, NY: Humanity Books, 1984), xxii, xxv. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (1986), trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 206. ↩
Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, 2011, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 3, 4, 26. ↩

The Idea of the Gamer, 3

2021-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter two of Amanda Phillips’ Gamer Trouble¹ begins with an epigraph from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Making Face, Making Soul (1990):

Between the masks we’ve internalized, one on top of the other, are our interfaces. The masks are already steeped with self-hatred and other internalized oppressions. However, it is the place—the interface—between the masks that provides the space from which we can thrust out and crack the masks.²

Phillips uses “haciendo caras,” or “making faces,” in combination with the “computational materiality” originally signalled by the “hidden surface problem” in 3D graphics to develop a remarkable reading of the “face” in video games, and specifically the production of the face through “essentialist ideas of identity.”³

For my part, I want to draw Phillips’ work into conversation with two key thinkers in twentieth century continental philosophy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. This is not an exercise in presenting authorities on the matter, but rather an exercise in self-organization, a bringing into conversation of the particular citations animating my thought. I had originally intended to include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s examination of faciality in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) in this converstation as well, but in returning to that text I realized that I could not fit all that would need to be said with respect to it in an essay of (at least somewhat) reasonable length. So for now, I will concentrate on the two phenomenologists and attempt to tie their ideas together with Anzaldúa and Phillips, and reserve a reading of Deleuze and Guattari for a separate set of essays at a later date.

Merleau-Ponty

In the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty wrestles with the problem of the face—and generally, the other—against the backdrop of Edmund Husserl’s “reduction.”⁴ Let us follow Merleau-Ponty closely for a few pages.

Phenomenology is “descriptive psychology,” the directive to go “to the things themselves.”⁵ Merleau-Ponty describes this as the “disavowal of science,” because the “I” is no longer “the result or the intertwining of multiple causalities that determine my body or my ‘psyche,’” no longer a “a part of the world, like the simple object of biology, psychology, and sociology.”⁶ Rather, all “that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own … The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world.”⁷ This is not the same as the “idealist return to consciousness,” in which the philosopher works backward from the “unity of the object” to reconstitute the “synthetic activity of the subject”; rather, phenomenology “remains within [the object] and makes its primordial unity explicit.”⁸

This is certainly an improvement, the basic acknowledgment that the “world is there prior to every analysis that I could give of it.”⁹ In idealist reflection, the philosopher believes that they “move[] in the reverse direction along the path of a previous constitution and meets up with—in the ‘inner man,’ as Saint Augustine says—a constituting power that it itself has always been,” an “invulnerable subjectivity.”¹⁰ But this is a false belief, a “naïveté, or, if one prefers, an incomplete reflection that loses an awareness of its own beginning.”¹¹ We can say so, with Merleau-Ponty, because of the simple fact that “I began to reflect, my reflection is a reflection upon an unreflected; it cannot be unaware of itself as an event.”¹² The upsurge of reflection is a “change in the structure of consciousness” that “involves recognizing, prior to its own operations, the world that is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself.”¹³ The phenomenological innovation is that the “real is to be described,” not “constructed” or “constituted.”¹⁴ Merleau-Ponty continues:

The real is a tightly woven fabric; it does not wait for our judgments in order to incorporate the most surprising of phenomena, nor to reject the most convincing of our imaginings. Perception is not a science of the world, nor even an act or a deliberate taking of a stand; it is the background against which all acts stand out and is thus presupposed by them. The world is not an object whose law of constitution I have in my possession; it is the natural milieu and the field of all my thoughts and of all my explicit perceptions¹⁵

For this reason, truth “does not merely ‘dwell’ in the ‘inner man’; or rather, there is no ‘inner man,’ man is in and toward the world, and it is in the world that he knows himself.”¹⁶ This is the primary gesture of phenomenology. “When I return to myself from the dogmatism of common sense or of science,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “I do not find a source of intrinsic truth, but rather a subject destined to the world.”¹⁷

In this Merleau-Ponty discerns the “true sense” of Husserl’s “reduction”—“idealist,” but in a different mode from the “idealist reflection” critiqued above.¹⁸ The idealism of the reduction “treats the world as a unity of value that is not divided between, say, Paul and Pierre; that is, a unity in which their perspectives intersect and that causes ‘Pierre’s consciousness’ and ‘Paul’s consciousness’ to communicate.”¹⁹ Subjective consciousnesses do not float through the world like invulnerable bubbles or transparent eyeballs. The “perception of the world ‘by Pierre’ is not Pierre’s doing, nor is the perception ‘by Paul’ Paul’s doing; rather, in both cases it is the doing or the work of pre-personal consciousnesses whose communication raises no problems, since this very communication is in fact required by the definition of consciousness, sense, and truth.”²⁰ Consciousness is, by definition, perception of “this world” as “the system of truths.”²¹ But this conclusion produces some unfortunate consequences:

A consistent transcendental idealism strips the world of its opacity and its transcendence. The world is precisely the one that we represent to ourselves, not insofar as we are men or empirical subjects, but insofar as we are all one single light and insofar as we all participate in the One without dividing it. Reflective analysis is unaware of the problem of others [autrui], just as it is unaware of the problem of the world, because from the first flicker of consciousness it grants me the power to go toward a truth that is universal by right, and since the other is himself without haecceity [thisness], without place, and without a body, the Alter and the Ego are one and the same in the true world, which is the unifier of minds.²²

The “lived world” is accepted as an unproblematic given, and others are reduced to the sameness of that universal light that has “a value rather than an existence.”²³ There is nothing “hidden behind these faces or these gestures, and there are no landscapes that remain inaccessible to me; there is but a touch of shadow that owes its existence to the light.”²⁴ In overcoming the incomplete reflection of an earlier idealism, Husserlian description produces another incomplete reflection.

Husserl is aware, however, of the “problem of others,” and Merleau-Ponty, drawing on Husserl’s then unpublished later writings, takes hold of this problem to get beyond the incompleteness of Husserl’s earlier work.²⁵ The fact that others see me and I see others is a fact precisely because the experience of otherness is not a value but an existence. “I must be my exterior, and the other’s body must be the other person himself” because “the Ego and the Alter Ego are defined by their situation and are not set free from all inherence.”²⁶ Consciousness does not float through the world, untethered; it is always in, toward, and destined to the world. Through the reduction, then, “I do not discover merely my presence to myself, but also the possibility of an ‘outside spectator.’”²⁷ Consciousness is affected by an “inner weakness that prevents me from being absolutely individual and that exposes me to the gazes of others … as one consciousness among consciousnesses.”²⁸ Consciousness is more than itself, defined by its “embodiment in a nature” and its “historical situation” with others.²⁹ Thus, for the later Husserl, “transcendental subjectivity” will “be an intersubjectivity.”³⁰ Merleau-Ponty explains:

I rediscover the world—which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations—‘in myself’ as the permanent horizon of all of my cogitationes [thoughts] and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself. The true Cogito does not define the existence of the subject through the thought that the subject has of existing, does not convert the certainty of the world into a certainty of the thought about the world, and finally, does not replace the world itself with the signification “world.” Rather, it recognizes my thought as an inalienable fact and it eliminates all forms of idealism by revealing me as “being in the world.”³¹

In this way, Merleau-Ponty is able to dispense with “Husserl’s entire misunderstanding with his interpreters, with the existential ‘dissidents,’ and ultimately with himself,” by demonstrating the proper function and actual functioning of the reduction—not as withdrawal, but as “wonder” (a term Merleau-Ponty gets from Husserl’s assistant, Eugen Fink), a rupture that does not place the subject outside the world but rather “conceiv[es] [of] the subject as a transcendence toward the world,” which conception “teach[es] us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world.”³² Radical doubt and absolute certainty are both dissolved in the instant of our “standing in wonder before the world.”³³ As such, through the problem of others, through the problem of the face, phenomenology ceases to be an “idealist philosophy” and becomes an “existential philosophy.”³⁴

Levinas

Wherein Merleau-Ponty the alter ego presents a problem that ultimately discloses the ambiguity of our existence, for Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity (1961), the face to face is something altogether more, an “irreducible relation.”³⁵ The “notion of the face,” for Levinas, “brings us to a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung [meaning-giving or sense-giving] and thus independent of my initiative and my power.”³⁶ The face “signifies the philosophical priority of the existent over Being” and “makes possible the description of the notion of the immediate” in the “face to face.”³⁷ The “immediate” here proposed is not that of “transcendence,” found in “moments of liturgical, mystical elevation,” nor that of “immanence,” in which “every ‘other’ … would vanish at the end of history.”³⁸ It is the “idea of infinity.”³⁹ The infinite immediacy of the face to face is nontotalizable. To integrate the “particularism of points of view” in an “impersonal spirit” is “cruelty and injustice,” and also quite simply false.⁴⁰ The face of the other does not only disclose our being in the world, but also a “point that is absolute with regard to history—not by amalgamating with the Other, but in speaking with him.”⁴¹

The idea of infinity is not “produced as only echoing the transcendence of Infinity, for then the separation would be maintained within a correlation that would restore totality and render transcendence illusory.”⁴² The idea of infinity “is transcendence itself”—unabsorbable and incomprehensible, the “final secret of being.”⁴³ The face to face “is not a modification of the ‘along side of. . . .’”⁴⁴ It is not the totalizing thought: we in the world together. It is the “ultimate situation” that “involves a calling into question of oneself, a critical attitude which is itself produced in the face of the other.”⁴⁵

The face to face, though “given to vision,” is “a relationship different from that which characterizes all our sensible experience.”⁴⁶ Vision “opens nothing that, beyond the same, would be absolutely other, that is, in itself,” because to see is “always to see on the horizon.”⁴⁷ Insofar as light “conditions the relations between data,” light might be thought as “a being out of what is beyond all being,” the “origin of itself … as fire and sun”—those eminent philosophical metaphors—which has served as “the figure of every relation with the absolute.”⁴⁸ But Levinas is adamant: this figure “is only a figure. The light as sun is an object.”⁴⁹ Consequently, light remains “relative to an elemental and obscure ground,” and cannot make possible “the consciousness of radical exteriority” that we experience in the face to face.⁵⁰ Levinas finds a more suitable metaphor in the façade:

By the façade the thing which keeps its secret is exposed enclosed in its monumental essence and in its myth, in which it gleams like a splendor but does not deliver itself. It captivates by its grace as by magic, but does not reveal itself. If the transcendent cuts across sensibility, if it is openness preeminently, if its vision is the vision of the very openness of being, it cuts across the vision of forms and can be stated neither in terms of contemplation nor in terms of practice.

This is the face, the transcendent not as mystical oneness but as an experience of the profoundly other. “The face is present in its refusal to be contained,” writes Levinas, denying the power of vision and the authority of the sun.⁵¹ “It is neither seen nor touched,” cannot be made a “content” of consciousness.⁵² The face of the other is “infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign”:

The alterity of the Other does not depend on any quality that would distinguish him from me, for a distinction of this nature would precisely imply between us that community of genus which already nullifies alterity.⁵³

The difference encountered in the face to face is an “absolute difference,” which cannot be “produced in a process of specification descending from genus to species.”⁵⁴ In the face to face, the “terms, the interlocutors, absolve themselves from the relation, or remain absolute within relationship.”⁵⁵ Vision cannot fix the other in their place, nor does the vision of the other fix me in mine. The face is not a matter of sight or light, but speech—it is that which “solicits the Other,” that which “announces the ethical inviolability of the Other,” that which operates in the “facing position” as a “moral summons.”⁵⁶

How can this be so? Levinas makes a dazzling traversal of the various “notion[s] of infinity” in Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, but the infinity of the “other absolutely other” is not found therein—the infinite for Levinas “does not limit the freedom of the same; calling it to responsibility, it founds it and justifies it. The relation with the other as face heals allergy.”⁵⁷ Of the four names mentioned, this is most distinctly not the infinity of Hegel, in which the “positivity of infinity” excludes “all multiplicity from it”—Levinas’s infinite, on the other hand, is supremely pluralist, non-allergic: “radical alterity” is not something I “conceive by relation to myself, but confront out of my egoism. The alterity of the Other is in him and is not relative to me; it reveals itself.”⁵⁸ In this revelation, this “epiphany,” my experience is not first of violent “resistance,” of allergic reaction, but of “welcome,” of “peace”—the experience of the face “has a positive structure,” and this structure is “ethical.”⁵⁹

If the face in Merleau-Ponty is partially responsible for disclosing our being in the world, the face in Levinas discloses the absolute contingency of this being and the ethics disclosed by it. Famously, Levinas asserts that ethics “precedes ontology,” but in his conclusions he does proceed to make a concrete ontological claim: being is exteriority.⁶⁰ He elaborates:

Being is exteriority: the very exercise of its being consists in exteriority, and no thought could better obey being than by allowing itself to be dominated by this exteriority. Exteriority is true not in a lateral view apperceiving it in its opposition to interiority; it is true in a face to face that is no longer entirely vision, but goes further than vision … Exteriority, taken as the essence of being, signifies the resistance of the social multiplicity to the logic that totalizes the multiple. For this logic, multiplicity is a fall of the One or the Infinite, a diminution in being which each of the multiple beings would have to surmount so as to return from the multiple to the One, from the finite to the Infinite. Metaphysics, the relation with exteriority, that is, with superiority, indicates, on the contrary, that the relation between the finite and the infinite does not consist in the finite being absorbed in what faces him, but in remaining in his own being, maintaining himself there, acting here below … In understanding being as exteriority, in breaking with the panoramic existing of being and the totality in which it is produced, we can understand the meaning of the finite without its limitation, occurring within the infinite, requiring an incomprehensible fall of the infinite, without finitude consisting in a nostalgia for infinity, a longing for return.⁶¹

This is truly a pluralism, a thought of the pure multiple that does not make of the finite a poor reflection of some greater reality, but rather sees in the absolute difference of true and actual finitude the opening of an infinite relation that both necessitates and is the basis for ethics as such. The face does not only express our being in the world; it expresses an obligation.

Phillips

If we continue on this ethical trajectory, however, we discover that the obligation of the face is punctured by questions of politics.⁶² Merleau-Ponty presents us with a compelling argument for the ambiguity of bodily existence, an argument that denies the possibility of a self-contained subject. Levinas goes well beyond Merleau-Ponty, taking the openness of the subject to the other as the basis for his pluralistic metaphysics of exteriority. But, making statements as to what being is does not necessarily entail action in accordance with those statements. Regardless of how readers fall on the is-ought problem (is it or is it not possible to say how things ought to be on how the basis of how things are?), in this particular case, the ought entailed by Levinas’s is is not in fact the case.⁶³ Even if Levinas’s ontology is correct, many people so defined do not appear to live in accordance with their ontological constitution, honouring the “ethical inviolability” of the other. Though Levinas’s ethics is metaphysics, it remains an ethical program and not a description of an actual state of affairs.⁶⁴ To put the point bluntly: not all people get to have a face. According to Levinas, the face ought to be a given, but politically, it is not.

I am not well read enough in Levinas’s thought, or in the scholars of his work, to comment further on his response to this problem, to say whether or not he addressed the gap between program and reality. However, Totality and Infinity remains a profoundly animating work for me, and even more so in returning to it with Phillips’ Gamer Trouble in mind.

Phillips looks at the face in motion-capture animation, physiognomy, and avatar creation, deploying Anzaldúa’s theorization of masks and interfaces to problematize the essentializing forces at play in each. The “logic of realism” performed by the “quantization” of the human face “insulate[s] digital techniques from political accountability,” propagating racism and sexism at the machine level.⁶⁵ As in the case of physiognomy, quantization in contemporary digital imaging technologies lends “an air of truth to these prejudices: if it can be measured consistently, it must be real.”⁶⁶ Well before the advent of these technologies, physiognomy and phrenology had already “concretized the face as a weapon of oppression within the developing logic of modernity.”⁶⁷ Darwin “criticized the unscientific nature of physiognomy,” but his own work on facial expressions was ultimately appropriated by the “ruling elite to classify and separate human beings based on physical characteristics.”⁶⁸ This same work by Darwin is discussed in Frederic Parke’s animation textbooks, the computer graphics researcher who “created both the first computerized facial model and the first computer-animated face at the University of Utah in the early 1970s.”⁶⁹ A history shows itself. Phillips summarizes:

The sciences of faces and facial expressions, with all of their problematic assumptions about human nature and the historical baggage of racism and sexism that comes along with them, underwrite much of the training and development of computer facial animation techniques.⁷⁰

The “use of these data is irresistible,” as evidenced by the many works on the matter, but the use of these data also contributes to the maintenance of racist and sexist image logics, which we see at work in video games to this day.⁷¹ Interfaces like that of the FaceGen interface in Fallout 3 mask the “internal processes” that are in turn built on these racist and sexist logics.⁷² Those who do not fit the default—the “white man,” as FaceGen makes painfully clear—are forced to wear “masks as social performances … constraining faces into recognizable labels.”⁷³ But, as Phillips contends, drawing on Anzaldúa, “there is power not simply in casting off these masks but in negotiating the space between a face and its masks,” the “interface” now as “the layer of cloth used in sewing to reinforce stitching and the structure of garments.”⁷⁴ She continues:

As the very sites of contact between enforced identity and the self, interfaces are painful and restrictive, the sources of oppression and regulation of bodies. However, the scars created at the interface also provide structure and strength for the face to break free of its masks, to honor the truths the masks create and the lies that they conceal, to negotiate complicated layers of identity forged in the friction between self and oppression. She calls haciendo una cara a “metaphor for constructing one’s identity,” but it is also about the necessity of continuing to move through the world in the face of oppression, to bear and work the masks from within and not lose sight of one’s own identity, to embrace the inter/face and expose it to the inter/faces of others.⁷⁵

In the “inter/face,” we encounter a forceful political expansion for Levinas’s ethical program, one that is not only cognizant of the face to face as an embodied experience, but in the complexity and multiplicity of its digital expressions. Insofar as the face is not only an experience but a technology, an instrument of “facemaking,”⁷⁶ we go beyond ethics to politics, to the possibilities of direct action whereby we might intervene in the racist and sexist processes at work in our video game consoles and our computers and our world and set about disabling and dismantling them. This is the path back to something like a Levinasian ethics for the digital age.

We discover the world together with our others; we discover irreducible multiplicity in their faces; but in neither of these do we discover a politics. This chapter of Gamer Trouble is an excellent contribution to that end.

Notes

Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020). ↩
Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1990). ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 68, 97. ↩
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012). ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxi-lxxii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxii-lxxiii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxiv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxv. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvi-lxvii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvii ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxvii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxviii. ↩
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 79. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 51. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 51-52. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 52. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 52. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 52. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 52. Every time I read Levinas, I feel as though I have never read Levinas. Indeed, it is though I am here, now, speaking with him, tied to him in this irreducible bond, “uprooted from history”—his, mine, ours—in this profound particularity. This feeling is also the feeling of recognition, of seeing that which before I had not seen, which is also the recognition of being wrong. I do not know if I have ever read Levinas correctly—but perhaps this is the beginning of me trying to do so. In this beginning, I cannot ignore the history of my collision with Laruelle, whose understanding of non-thetic transcendence, the “radical that-ness” of existents, has substantially transformed my thinking. See François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (1986), trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 206. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 79-80. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 80. Levinas maintains that it is “Religion” that is the “ultimate structure” because in religion “relationship subsists between the same and the other despite the impossibility of the Whole.” I invoke the tie above, and here it feels appropriate to cite Jean Baudrillard, from whom I receive the term. He writes: “The Law establishes equality as a principle: in principle everyone is equal before the Law. By contrast, there is no equality before the rule; for the latter has no jurisdiction over principles. Moreover, in order for everyone to be equal they must be separated. The players, however, are not separate or individualized: they are instituted in a dual and agonistic relation. They are not even solidary—solidarity supposing a formal conception of the social, the moral ideal of a group in competition. The players are tied to each other; their parity entails an obligation that does not require solidarity, at least not as something that needs to be conceptualized or interiorized.” See Seduction, 1979, trans. Brian Singer (Montréal, QC: CTheory Books, 2001), 136. The players are not individualized by the Whole, not organized by the Whole, not equalized by the Whole—the players are instituted in relation, a parity without solidarity. Baudrillard calls this the “rule”; Levinas calls it “religion.” However, the tenor of this relation is quite different between the two, and further work needs to be done to synthesize Baudrillard’s “seduction” and Levinas’s “love.” ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 80. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 81. This sentence continues: “and under his authority.” I have previously criticized Levinas’s understanding of authority in my “Teaching for Food, 2,” May 29, 2020, https://steinea.github.io/notes/2020/05/29/teaching-for-food-2, but with Laruelle and Baudrillard this authority does not present itself to me in the same light. The argument around Levinas in that essay is consistent with what I still believe, but I was unfair to Levinas himself. I did not realize how little of Levinas I grasped, how much more I have to learn from him—not as a transcendental authority, but as partner in the tie of study. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 187. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 191. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 191. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 191-192. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 192. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. This again sounds remarkably like Baudrillard, in which the players are not “separate or individualized” because this would require a Law to equalize the separate and individual as such. Separation, individuation, simply is—contingent and absurd—and the recognition of this by another is the irreducibility of the “dual and agonistic relation” of the tie. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195-196. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 196. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 196, 121. Levinas’s thoughts on pluralism solidify him, in my mind, as a thinker after the philosophies of difference, with whom he is lumped by Laruelle. Levinas writes that the ontological difference between Being and beings “should have served as a foundation for a pluralist philosophy in which the plurality of being would not disappear into the unity of number nor be integrated into a totality.” (80) And later, preceding the words cited in the body of this essay: “Pluralism is not a numerical multiplicity. In order that a pluralism in itself (which cannot be reflected in formal logic) be realized there must be produced in depth the movement from me to the other, an attitude of an I with regard to the Other (an attitude already specified as love or hatred, obedience or command, learning or teaching, etc. . . . ), that would not be a species of relationship in general; this means that the movement from me to the other could not present itself as a theme to an objective gaze freed from this confrontation with the other, to a reflection.” See Totality and Infinity, 80, 121. Similarly, Laruelle writes: “The One casts, outside of the mastery proper to Difference, and without positing it, a diversity which is the residue of the unary destruction of Difference and which is neither ontic nor ontological. It is no longer a matter of an idealized diversity in general, but a diversity of the contingency that refuses itself absolutely to any idealization whatsoever, that is rather the presupposition of every idealization by philosophy in general and by Difference in particular. Diversity ‘in itself’ and non-thetic (of) itself more profound than the ‘Thing in itself’ and testifying to an absolute contingency of Difference, even ‘finite’ Difference.” See Philosophies of Difference, 200-201. The fact that the “attitude of an I with regard to the Other” is specified but not a species signifies this absolute contingency of Difference. A phrase I have often cited from Alexander Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xii-xiii, captures this point quite succinctly: “The one is never the Whole or the All, but rather merely a finite and generic one: this one; this one here; this one here in person.” Galloway has also described the nonthematic, nonobjective “movement from me to the other” as a “direct or radical” relation. See “Superpositions,” Culture and Communication, October 11, 2014, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/superpositions. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43, 290. To be fair, the entirety of Levinas’s work is ontological, but it is the ethical experience of the face as exteriority that in fact indicates the primordial structure of being as exteriority. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 290, 292. ↩
Simone de Beauvoir critiques an earlier work of Levinas’s on this point in the introduction to The Second Sex, 1949, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2011), 6, footnote 3. Likewise, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari further disassemble the face in “Year Zero: Faciality,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167-191. ↩
For an overview, with excerpts from original sources, see “Is-ought problem,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 42. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 74. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 75. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 75. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 76. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 78-79. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 79. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 80. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 85. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 94, 85. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 85. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 85. ↩
Perhaps the abstract machine of faciality, as Deleuze and Guattari name it. ↩

Method

2021-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Here is the purity of means.

This zine was written today for the “The Body in Poetry” workshop facilitated by Katie Condon as part of the Bio and Psyche symposium, organized by Els Woudstra and Brooke Clarke at Rice University. Travis Lau’s lecture that preceded the workshop, “On the Pain of Poetry,” played an instrumental role in its production.

This creative project follows on the completion of my research project, “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics.” The paper is open source, available to read now at Zenodo via the link. In it, I stitch together a phenomenological approach to the body with modernist lyric poetry, and modernist lyric poetry with lyric games in the tabletop roleplaying scene.

Pieces 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7 were written in response to prompts given to us in the workshop. Pieces 3 and 5 are excerpted from Mallarmé and Plato, respectively. I have only lightly edited the workshop pieces, tying up some trailing lines for coherence. Otherwise, they remain as they were when I wrote them. I thought this was important—to, in Travis’s words, open the “collective of care and thinking” in which these pieces were written to each of you.

The description for this project, which is a recurring motif in the zine, is adapted from Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s essay, “The Anarchy of Beginnings.” The cover image is clipped from Albrecht Dürer, Jesus Among the Doctors.

CW: piece #6 mentions blood and bodily harm.

Itch.io

Bodies in Form, 2

2021-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Bodies in Form, 2: Tabletop Roleplaying as Cosmic Poetics.” Presented at the Bio and Psyche: Reading the Symptomatic Body, May 28, 2021. https://zenodo.org/record/4824078.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “motricity” and Alva Noë’s concept of “organization,” this paper offers a phenomenological and enactive approach to tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) as a form of poiesis, making—both auto-poetic, as defined by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and sym-poietic, as defined by Donna Haraway. This self-making and making-with is not understood in the sense of either self-possession or self-realization, but as a mode of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call “fugitive planning,” a planning with the potential for direct action at the cosmic scale. This cosmic poetics is a poetics that rejects “the assignation of traits,” as Legacy Russell beckons us to do, delighting in the glitched becomings of “generic difference.” Bringing this theoretical constellation to ground, this paper examines select examples from the recent boom in independent “lyric” games, situating them in their experimental aesthetic context in order to derive a praxis for the elaboration of the poetics here described.

Keywords: Motricity, Organization, Autopoiesis, Sympoiesis, Planning, Poetics, Cosmic, Tabletop Roleplaying, TTRPG, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alva Noë, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Donna Haraway, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Legacy Russell

Introduction

This paper continues in a line of inquiry that I first embarked upon in my paper “Bodies in Form: Motricity Across Mediums in The Last of Us and The Last of Us: American Dreams,” which I presented at the University of Florida Graduate Comics Organization Conference in 2019.¹ However, unlike that paper, which was concerned with a video game and a comic book, the present paper is concerned with tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) and poetry. I intend to demonstrate the theoretical applicability of the embodied, phenomenological method of my 2019 paper across ludic domains, but also to ally ttrpgs with poetry in the writing of the body. In this way, play and poiesis become complementary terms, a coupling hopefully productive of what Isabelle Stengers terms a “metamorphic transformation” of both parties in the relation.²

To do so, I will use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “motricity”³ and Alva Noë’s concept of “organization”⁴ to provide the framework for a phenomenological and enactive approach to ttrpgs as a form of poiesis, making—both auto-poetic, as defined by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela,⁵ and sym-poietic, as defined by Donna Haraway.⁶ This self-making and making-with is not understood in the sense of either self-possession or self-realization, but as a mode of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call “fugitive planning,”⁷ a planning with the potential for direct action at the cosmic scale. This cosmic poetics is a poetics that rejects “the assignation of traits,” as Legacy Russell beckons us to do, delighting in the glitched becomings of “generic difference.”⁸ Bringing this theoretical constellation to ground, I will examine select examples from the recent boom in independent “lyric” games, situating them in their experimental aesthetic context in order to derive a praxis for the elaboration of the poetics here described.

Motricity

Merleau-Ponty elaborates the concept of “motricity” in part one, section III of his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity.”⁹ His phenomenology of the body begins from the fact that “I hold my body as an indivisible possession and I know the position of each of my limbs through a body schema that envelops them all.”¹⁰ The schema, though “indivisible,” is not a purity or a totality, but rather a “plan” in which the discrete parts of the body are “implicated,” an altogether different kind of wholity that Merleau-Ponty also names as “posture.”¹¹ With “posture,” Merleau-Ponty gets beyond Gestalt “form,” reaching for a “dynamic” sense of the body that is always already “toward a certain task, actual or possible,” a “situational spatiality.”¹² In this situational spatiality, the word “here” as such “designates the installation of the first coordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, and the situation of the body confronted with its tasks.”¹³ The body does not careen about an empty field like a billiard ball, but rather shifts and slides through a thick mesh of contexts that it “is in and toward.”¹⁴

It is the in-ness and toward-ness of the body that affords what Merleau-Ponty terms “concrete movement.”¹⁵ Concrete movement and grasping movement are basic functions of the situated body. The grasp is “magically complete; it only gets under way by anticipating its goal.”¹⁶ This anticipation is neither a “positional consciousness” nor a “representation” because it does not require any such determinate thought for its performance.¹⁷ If I direct you to touch your nose, you do not first need to envision where your nose is to then be able to touch it; you simply touch it. Thus, Merleau-Ponty writes, “bodily space” can afford “a grasping intention without being given to an epistemic one.”¹⁸ Bodily space is first an “envelope” of “habitual action” before it is an “objective milieu,” and furthermore, the body can be a “means of insertion” into “familiar surroundings” without reference to any “objective milieu” whatsoever.¹⁹ In the completeness of concrete movement, there is a “lived relation” that is “given in the natural system of one’s own body.”²⁰ Such an “operation takes place wholly within the order of the phenomenal” and has no need to “pass through the objective world.”²¹ Thus, for the craftsperson, workbench, tools, and materials are “presented to the subject as poles of action; they define, through their combined value, a particular situation that remains open, that calls for a certain mode of resolution, a certain labor.”²² And in this space, the body responds to the task with the “necessary movements,” the “motor reactions,” required of it, all “without any calculation” because my body is my “power for a certain world.”²³

This power is “motricity,” the body’s basic “motor project” or “motor intentionality.”²⁴ Motricity is the work that bodies do: “marking out borders and directions in the given world,” “establishing lines of force,” “arranging perspectives,” “organizing the given world according to the projects of the moment,” and “constructing upon the geographical surroundings a milieu of behavior and a system of significations.”²⁵ Motricity “polarize[s] the world, causing a thousand signs to appear there, as if by magic, that guide action.”²⁶ This structuring work Merleau-Ponty also names the “unity of behavior,” but again this “unity” is not to be understood as a purity or a totality.²⁷ Rather, this unity challenges that of the “Kantian subject,” which “posits a world” over against the purity of its subjectivity, presenting the “actual subject” in its stead who “must first have a world or be in the world,” the subject who “must hold a system of significations around himself whose correspondences, relations, and participations do not need to be made explicit in order to be utilized.”²⁸ The unity of the actual subject is a “primordial,” worldly unity, a “fundamental function,” an “intentional arc,” that “projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation,” that “ensures that we are situated within all of these relationships.”²⁹ Motricity, the unity of behavior, is thus “original intentionality,” consciousness before the “I think that,” consciousness first as an “I can.”³⁰ “The motor experience of our body is not a particular case of knowledge,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “rather, it offers us a manner of reaching the world and the object, a ‘praktognosia,’ that must be recognized as original, and perhaps as originary.”³¹

This praktognosia, practical knowledge, is the “elementary power of sense-giving” that undergirds all understanding.³² “To understand is to experience”—in the French, éprouver, test—“the accord between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the realization.”³³ This test of understanding should not be understood as a matching of terms in a table of correspondences—rather, the body “is our general means of having a world” because it is the very proof of existence that allows for the subsequent projection of “a cultural world around itself.”³⁴ The body “has its world,” has a “hold” on the world, and through this “naïve contact” projects or enacts worlds—ideological, moral, or otherwise.³⁵

Organization

Alva Noë begins his Strange Tools (2015) with an anecdote about vision.³⁶ In conversation with an artist, two competing questions emerge. Vision scientists typically ask: “How do we see so much on the basis of so little?” The particular artist in this anecdote asks, on the other hand: “Why are we so blind, why do we see so little, when there is so much around us to see?”³⁷ The first question is premised on the belief that “seeing happens in the brain”; the second, however, is premised on the belief that “seeing isn’t something that happens automatically, or for free; we are too liable not to see even what is there.”³⁸

To draw together Noë with our discussion of Merleau-Ponty, in the case of the vision scientists, the brain and the objective milieu are opposed, set in positional relation, their respective contents tabulated and matched. Examination of the optical apparatus on this basis therefore naturally leads to the question, how do we see so much?, given the paucity of data in that half of the relation. As Noë writes, seeing, in this view, relies on “tiny distorted upside-down images in the eyes,” and the brain somehow takes these images and produces the vibrancy and fullness of what is seen.³⁹ However, as Merleau-Ponty contends, this interpretation of vision requires perception to be a “determination of the objective world,” and “such a representation either is or is not.”⁴⁰ Representation “delivers to us its object without any ambiguity and as an identifiable term throughout all of its appearances,” but this is quite frankly not the case, as Merleau-Ponty shows throughout Phenomonology of Perception in his treatment of optical illusions and distortions, neuro-atypicality, and perceptual hiccups and glitches.⁴¹ The body is indeed the proof of the world that is, but the hold that it maintains is a “darkness,” like the “foundation of sleep,” or a “vague reserve of power,” or a “zone of non-being in front of which precise beings, figures, and points can appear.”⁴² Merleau-Ponty maintains, therefore, that we must “reject as abstract any analysis of bodily space,” or here, any analysis of vision, “that considers only figures and points, since figures and points can neither be conceived nor exist at all without horizons.”⁴³ The body as background and horizon, as proving power, is always “implied” and ambiguous, and never guaranteed.⁴⁴

For Noë, then, in the case of the artist, vision is not a matter of positional tabulation, but of insertion, of the around-ness of familiar surroundings. Consequently, seeing is “an achievement, our achievement, the achievement of making contact with what there is.”⁴⁵ Seeing is not primarily epistemic, but rather a grasp, a taking hold of the real. And insofar as the grasp of vision is something to be done, we can indeed “fail to see.”⁴⁶

This puts us in a rather paradoxical situation but, I would contend, a situation rich with potential. Between Merleau-Ponty and Noë, we see that the naïve hold of the body on the world is a proof that short circuits the doubt induced by the notion of the positional cogito—or, we might say, short circuits Cartesian doubt—restoring to us a belonging with being that is the elementary basis for our understanding. On the other hand, this basis is dark, ambiguous, vague, a hold that is sure, yet impossible to fix in place, impossible to guarantee or ground in an epistemic way. Certainty (I know that) is replaced with invitation (I could try to), what Stengers describes as the animating power of the “lure”—knowledge not as a set of identifiable terms, but as processes of “[a]lluring, suggesting, … inducing, capturing, mesmerizing.”⁴⁷ These kinds of knowledge processes are often labelled as “specious,” but as Noë writes, these knowledge processes present in situ the “enactive” or “actionist” approach to human experience (or more generally, animate experience), recognizing that our experience, our knowledge, “is not something that happens in our brains, or anywhere else, for that matter; it is something we do or make, or achieve.”⁴⁸ In Stengers’ terms, experience is a “craft,” an “art of immanent attention.”⁴⁹ And for Noë, the craft of experience is precisely that which is potentiated by the ambiguity of existence as “active animals or people.”⁵⁰

Noë writes that “art provides us an opportunity to catch ourselves in the act of achieving our conscious lives, of bringing the world into focus for perceptual (and other forms of) consciousness.”⁵¹ To provide us with a framework for understanding this achievement, Noë presents us with his concept of organization.

Motricity is original intentionality, the basic directedness of active animals, that by which an actual subject “hold[s] a system of significations around himself.”⁵² At their most basic, these significations are made up of the “affordances” of everyday life, the basic motor projects signified by the handle on a coffee cup or the keys of a keyboard.⁵³ But, as Merleau-Ponty is also sure to note, these motor projects as poles of action—presented by the workbench, for instance—provide the foundation for more complex ideological and moral projects, which is to say, of cultural projects in general. This is in no way to say that cultural projects can be reduced to motor projects, but rather that cultural projects rely on this polarization of the world, which occurs through the dynamic interplay of motor subject and situation.

With organization, then, Noë helps us think through situation—what I described above as a thick mesh of contexts—getting beyond the simple tools of the phenomenologists (e.g., Heidegger’s hammer) to the “strange tools” of art, and the complex cultural projects or “organized activities” into which such strange tools invite us.⁵⁴

The task solicited by an organized activity is not something that can be located in the brain, but rather “itself shapes, enables, and constrains us.”⁵⁵ With the task, “we find ourselves put together and made up in the setting of the activity,” in the situation.⁵⁶ We might say that the chef is made up in the setting of the kitchen, the hockey player in the setting of the rink, the soldier in the setting of war. The chef, the hockey player, the soldier are not essentially so, but only so insofar as they are organized in that way, insofar as their motor intentionality is entrained by their situation for the performance of a given task or tasks.

This situational quality of the task is what makes it an “organized activity,” which can be defined by six key features: it is “primitive and ‘natural’” (inasmuch as complex, organized behaviour depends upon the entraining of specific reflexes—cutting vegetables, shooting a puck, aiming a rifle); it presents an “arena[] for the exercise of attention, looking, listening, doing, undergoing”; it “exhibit[s] structure in time”; it is “emergent” and is “not governed by the deliberate control of any individual”; it has a “function, whether social or biological or personal”; and it has the potential to be “pleasurable.”⁵⁷

What is important to recognize here is that, although an organized activity “downward entrain[s]” the “behavior of the individuals caught up in it,” the activity is not itself an ideal form, existing outside, in some transcendental realm.⁵⁸ Organization is “a biological concept,” and as such must be understood on the basis of the immanent contact between the body and the world.⁵⁹ “Living beings,” writes Noë, “are organisms—organized wholes—and the central conceptual puzzle life throws up for science is that of understanding how mere matter, and the order characteristic of physics, gets taken up, integrated, and organ-ized in the self-making, world-creating manner of life.”⁶⁰

The proof of motricity leads us to the conjuration of projection—éprouver leads to évocation.⁶¹ The magic of situation is the way it animates motor beings, the way it organizes the intentional arc for the performance of complex tasks. “To be alive is to be organized,” asserts Noë, and “insofar as we are not only organisms but are also persons, we find ourselves organized, or integrated, in a still larger range of ways that tie us to the environment, each other, and our social worlds.”⁶² To be alive, then, is also to be alive to difference, to the diverse possibilities of organized life. Though Merleau-Ponty is emphatic on the essential point of motricity, motricity entails that there are “several ways for the body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.”⁶³ The unity of behavior is not, to repeat, a unity in the sense of a purity or a totality, but rather the unity of an open situation. Indeed, in holding motricity or behaviour to be basic, Merleau-Ponty argues that, “if a single function is expressed throughout all of these experiences,” it is not the purifying nihility of the cogito, but the “movement of existence” itself, “which does not supress the radical diversity of contents, for it does not unite them by placing them all under the dominion of an ‘I think.’”⁶⁴ This is why the praktognosia of the motor body is to be interpreted as not only “original,” but “perhaps as originary,” as cited above, because the movement of existence is, by definition, praxical.⁶⁵ When what is speaks, it says, I do.

As Noë elaborates, the existentiality of action presents us with a profoundly saturated domain of research. There is “no tension between the natural and the learned when it comes to the ways we find ourselves embedded in patterns of organization,” because it is “our nature to acquire second natures.”⁶⁶ It is little wonder, then, that habit has been such a recurring theme throughout the history of philosophy.⁶⁷ Habit is simply, commonly biological—but what the biology of habit teaches us is that we cannot understand “organized activities … by considering these phenomena only in relation to what is happening in the nervous system of the participants,” nor can organized activities be understood at “the level of conscious, deliberate action.”⁶⁸ Organization occurs at an “intermediate level,” the “embodiment level.”⁶⁹ Embodiment is “a temporally extended, dynamic exchange with the world around us, one that is guided by principles of timing, thoughtfulness, movement, spontaneity, function, and pleasure,” but also by “all manner of learned understandings and expectations and engagements with this or that task.”⁷⁰ To be a body is to be organized, but to be organized is to acknowledge that our bodies are always already compromised, porous, open. Noë writes:

We are organized. We get organized. We are organisms! Our lives are structured by organized activities, in the large, in the small. Our lives are one big complex nesting of organized activities at different levels and scales. Talking, walking, eating, perceiving, driving. We are always captured by structures of organization. This is our natural, indeed our biological, condition. It is the basic fact about us. And crucially, these structures of organization are not of our own making.⁷¹

There is certainly a terror in this alien agency that traverses our bodies, but this is also what makes our situations rich with potential. The structures of organization in which we are embedded are typically not of our own making, but art is what we make “out of organized activities.”⁷² Art is the staging of organization; it is about the “display” of what is staged, “about the showing” itself.⁷³ Framed another way, Noë describes art as a “practice for investigating our absorption” in organized activities.⁷⁴ For instance, Noë writes, if dance is a mode of being organized, choreography is the investigation of this mode.⁷⁵ If life “is organized toward its own self-maintenance and self-production in the face of the physical processes that enfold and threaten to dissolve it,” then art “seek[s] to bring out and exhibit, to disclose and to illuminate, aspects of the way we find ourselves organized.”⁷⁶ The arts are thus “reorganizational practices,” the praktognosic means whereby we come to understand “the ways we find ourselves organized and so, also, the ways we might reorganize ourselves.”⁷⁷ Motricity leads to projection, organization leads to reorganization, and praxis, therefore, leads to poiesis.

Poetics

Noë derives his understanding of life and organization from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), and it will serve us well to turn to this work here. Maturana and Varela’s purpose in their study of autopoiesis—the self-making of living organization—is “to understand the organization of living systems in relation to their unitary character.”⁷⁸ Autonomy, as the defining characteristic of a living organism, is a consequence of unity, but this unity is always contextual: a “universe comes into being when a space is severed in two.”⁷⁹ Autonomy—the unity of behavior as we have termed it above—is basic, determinative of the individual organism as individual. But the individuation, the severing, is what is properly primordial. The individual organism is indeed autonomous, but as Gilbert Simondon remarks, the individual, as a consequence of the individuation, is a “relative reality.”⁸⁰ The real is praktognosic, as we asserted above. And for Maturana and Varela, the praktognosic movement of individuation is what produces the autonomous organism as something concerned, in its very constitution, with the “maintenance of identity.”⁸¹

Maturana and Varela take a “mechanistic” approach to living identity in order to bracket out non-physical “forces or principles” in their analysis.⁸² But their mechanism is not interested in “properties or components, but in processes and relations between processes realized through components.”⁸³ This approach supports Merleau-Ponty’s observation, cited above, that there are “several ways for the body to be a body.”⁸⁴ In Maturana and Varela’s words: “It is our assumption that there is an organization that is common to all living systems, whichever the nature of their components.”⁸⁵ Maturana and Varela are not interested in “classes or types of living systems,” but rather in the “phenomenology” of these self-making machines, in the praktognosic self-assertion of the living: I do.⁸⁶

To get a hold of what, particularly, constitutes a self-making machine, Maturana and Varela are careful to define the broader domain of machines, often naïvely conceived as “concrete hardware systems,” before proceeding to carve out the space that can be uniquely defined as “living.”⁸⁷ Machines are “unities,” significant “in terms of relations,” constituting “network[s] of interactions and transformations.”⁸⁸ The organization of the machine is what defines the machine as a particular type of machine, but this organization can be realized by any given structure, which Maturana and Varela define as the “actual relations which hold among the components” of the organization.⁸⁹ In this way, to use Noë’s example of dance for a high-level illustration, dance is clearly an organization insofar as it constitutes a particular network of interactions and transformations independent of its components, the individual dancers.

To proceed to consider living machines, autopoietic machines—for instance, the dancers organized by a dance—we see that there is a particular grouping of machines that “maintain constant, or within a limited range of values, some of their variables.”⁹⁰ This is a process that occurs “completely within the boundaries of the machine which the very same organization specifies.”⁹¹ These machines are “homeostatic machines,” and all autopoietic machines are homeostatic machines, but not all homeostatic machines are autopoietic.⁹² Autopoietic machines are defined by the “fundamental variable which they maintain constant.”⁹³ Maturana and Varela write:

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.⁹⁴

The “fundamental variable” that an autopoietic machine maintains is “its own organization.”⁹⁵ For “a machine to be autopoietic, its defining relations of production must be continuously regenerated by the components which they produce.”⁹⁶ As such, autopoietic machines are “autonomous,” have “individuality,” are “unities,” and “do not have inputs and outputs.”⁹⁷

That “living systems” are “physical autopoietic machines” is, for Maturana and Varela, “trivially obvious,” but what is more radical is their assertion of the converse: that “a physical system, if autopoietic, is living.”⁹⁸ Maturana and Varela assert that “autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to characterize the organization of living systems,” and it will take them the remainder of the work to demonstrate that “all the phenomenology of living systems, including reproduction and evolution, indeed requires and depends on autopoiesis.”⁹⁹ Though their analysis is remarkable and worth reading in full, what concerns us at present is the relation between an autopoietic machine and its environment, the larger system or systems in which living organisms find themselves embedded. Though Maturana and Varela are careful to focus on “the autonomous nature of living unities” in order to define life as such, this does not mean that “evolutionary thought,” or we might say, contextual thought, is unimportant, nor would Maturana and Varela say so.¹⁰⁰ Autopoietic machines always exist within an environment, and as we have seen with Noë, that which is organized is always susceptible to reorganization.

The autopoietic machine itself does not have inputs and outputs in its organization. The structure of an autopoietic machine has inputs and outputs (e.g., nutrients incorporated into cells) but the organization can only be “perturbated by independent events and undergo internal structural changes which compensate these perturbations.”¹⁰¹ Maturana and Varela continue:

If the perturbations are repeated, the machine may undergo repeated series of internal changes which may or may not be identical. Whichever series of internal changes takes place, however, they are always subordinated to the maintenance of the machine organization, [the] condition which is definitory of the autopoietic machines. Thus any relation between these changes and the course of perturbations to which we may point to, pertains to the domain in which the machine is observed, but not to its organization.¹⁰²

So, then, a self-maintaining machine can be changed in its structure while maintaining its organization, rendering inquiry into the domain of the machine worthwhile for understanding the existence of the autonomous entity as a nevertheless relative reality.

All autopoietic machines are “organized in such a manner that any physical interference with their operation outside their domain of compensations will result in their disintegration: that is, in the loss of autopoiesis.”¹⁰³ Consequently, the “actual way in which the autopoietic organization is realized in one of these machines (its structure) determines the particular perturbations it can suffer without disintegration, and hence, the domain of interactions in which it can be observed.”¹⁰⁴ Maturana and Varela expand on this point:

We can describe physical autopoietic machines, and also manipulate them, as parts of a larger system that defines the independent events which perturb them. Thus, as noted above, we can view these perturbing independent events as inputs, and the changes of the machine that compensate these perturbations as outputs. To do this, however, amounts to treating an autopoietic machine as an allopoietic [other-making] one, and to recognize that if the independent perturbing events are regular in their nature and occurrence, an autopoietic machine can in fact, be integrated into a larger system as a component allopoietic machine, without any alteration in its autopoietic organization.¹⁰⁵

The projection of a motor subject into a cultural project, the reorganization of an organism, the allopoietic integration of an autopoietic machine into a larger system—this is the mode of poiesis with which we are presently concerned. To be sure, this mode remains poietic, remains a making. In her Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway names this mode sympoiesis, no longer self-making but making-with.¹⁰⁶ If autopoiesis describes the self-perpetuating operation of a living organism, sympoiesis describes the operations into which such organisms enter that take those organisms beyond themselves.

Autopoiesis is what defines the organization of living systems. Maturana and Varela’s emphasis on the autonomy of the unity of the organism is vital for preserving what François Laruelle terms the “principle of real choice” or “of choice as such.”¹⁰⁷ There is an “absolute contingency” to this autonomy, and a “diversity that is absolutely indifferent” therein, what Laruelle describes as the “radical that-ness” of existents.¹⁰⁸ The autonomy of autopoietic machines must be retained if we are to have any sense of the individual as real. But this autonomy is also always relative, a unity severed from a surrounding space. The unity is not itself primordial, but profoundly contingent, grounded in a “radical absurdity.”¹⁰⁹ As Maturana and Varela emphasize, living machines in themselves are “purposeless systems,” because purpose always “reflect[s] our considering the machine or system in some encompasssing context.”¹¹⁰ As Haraway contends, “nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing,” because autopoiesis always takes place in a domain and is as such “complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, [and] historical.”¹¹¹

The severing, the individuation, the determination itself of the unity, is primordial. To cite Simondon once again, we can say that the individual is “a certain phase of being that supposes a preindividual reality, and that, even after individuation, does not exist on its own, because individuation does not exhaust with one stroke the potentials of preindividual reality.”¹¹² The individual appears by way of the unilateral determination of the individuation, and can as such be understood as a real individual, but must also be understood more broadly in the “pair individual-environment.”¹¹³ Autopoietic machines always dwell in sympoietic contexts.

There is something of sympoiesis even within autopoietic machines. As Maturana and Varela comment, we “can analyze a physical autopoietic machine in its physical parts, and treat all its partial homeostatic and regulatory mechanisms as allopoietic machines,” which need not in themselves be autopoietic.¹¹⁴ Haraway writes that the “irresistible attraction toward enfolding each other is the vital motor of living and dying on earth.”¹¹⁵ She continues:

Critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each another, get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate one another, and thereby establish sympoietic arrangements that are otherwise known as cells, organisms, and ecological assemblages.¹¹⁶

The possibility of a sympoietic understanding of life is not precluded by Maturana and Varela, but is rather opened by them. As Haraway reminds us, archaea and bacteria eventually fused in an allopoietic feedback system to become the autopoietic machine we know as the “modern complex cell.”¹¹⁷ Refusing a “mystical or transcendental sense” to autopoiesis, as Maturana and Varela say we must, allows us to be clear-eyed in our examination of the machines before us, the machines we are.¹¹⁸ Autopoietic machines are always already “holobionts,” “entire-beings,” their structure constituted in “polytemporal, polyspatial knottings,” “hold[ing] together contingently and dynamically,” involved with “other holobionts in complex patternings.”¹¹⁹ “Critters do not precede their relatings,” writes Haraway, but we might make the point more general by stating, once again, that the movement of existence is, by definition, praxical, organizational, relational.¹²⁰ The real itself is poietic. To be autonomous, a unity, an individual, is never to stand on one’s own. We are always already caught up in the praktognosia of what is. We must unlearn our isolated understanding of individuality if we are to understand the fact that we are always already “ones and manys.”¹²¹

To think through such existence, Haraway makes a call for “art science worldings” that help us come to know, in a praktognosic way, the doings of sympoietic life. The fourth worlding that Haraway presents draws on the cosmological performance of the Navajo idea of “hózhó” in the weaver’s work in an attempt to decolonize the terms “art” and “science” themselves.¹²² To follow Haraway in this work, I acknowledge, as Stengers does, that such “bridge-making is a situated practice,” that “I am situated,” and so “as a generative constraint I must accept to not feel free to speak and speculate in a way that would situate others.”¹²³ So, I listen:

Hózhó is a central concept in Navajo cosmology and daily practice. Usual translations into English are “beauty,” “harmony,” and “order”; but I think a better translation would emphasize right relations of the world, including human and nonhuman beings, who are of the world as its storied and dynamic substance, not in the world as a container … Weaving is a useful practice, to be sure, and an economic one; but, fundamentally, weaving is also cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric … Weavings are individual; they are made by a particular woman and embody her style and sensibility, recognizable by knowledgeable members of the community. Names of weavers and weavers’ lineages matter, but weavings are not made to be possessed as property … Weaving is neither secular nor religious; it is sensible. It performs and manifests the meaningful lived connections for sustaining kinship, behavior, relational action—for hózhó.¹²⁴

The “art of weaving and care of Churro sheep” at the heart of this cosmological practice was directly targeted by the U.S. War Department in the 1860s, with the “[k]illing of Navajo animals … a central act of the removal” of the Navajo people from the land.¹²⁵ A second targeted killing of Churro sheep in the 1930s under the direction of New Deal authorities was carried out in an appalling “act of scientific colonial arrogance and culpable ignorance,” from which Navajo pastoralism has not recovered.¹²⁶ But in 1977, with the founding of the Navajo Sheep Project and the subsequent activist support of Churro care and weaving in several Navajo communities, the restoration of hózhó, of sympoietic relations, began to take place.¹²⁷

Today, the Black Mesa Water Collective continues in this restorative work, continues to plan, continues to “practice for building on the strengths of local people, culture, and land, in alliance with many partners, to make resurgence on Black Mesa and beyond a reality.”¹²⁸ We too must plan for “learning again, or for the first time, how to become less deadly, more response-able, more attuned, more capable of surprise, more able to practice the arts of living and dying well.”¹²⁹ We must plan because the poetry of our being-together is “without guarantees,” always threatened by that larger system of colonist, capitalist violence that cannot bear the “mathematical vitality” of those ones that are less and more than one.¹³⁰ We must plan, because to do so is to step into the possibility of organization at the cosmic scale.

Planning

The body plans, is planned by and with other bodies, projects itself and is projected into others’ plans. We say: let’s plan. Planning is an art science, but it is also much more than that, as the organizing concept of hózhó in Navajo culture teaches us. Planning, in this mode, is cosmic direct action, the body cosmic at work.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten begin chapter five of The Undercommons (2013), “Planning and Policy,”¹³¹ with an epigraph from James Brown’s “Funky President”:

Let’s get together, get some land
Raise our food, like the man
Save our money like the mob
Put up the factory on the job.¹³²

This call to planning is a direct challenge to the kinds of policies that saw the decimation of Churro sheep in the name of “carrying capacity”—an ecological concept to be sure, but one enforced with technocratic and patriarchal disregard for Navajo practices of care.¹³³ For Harney and Moten, planning “sees through the evidence of mass incapacity, cutting the despair it breeds.”¹³⁴ This cut, this severing, is not the metaphysical cut of philosophy¹³⁵ but the sympoietic cut by which a “universe comes into being.”¹³⁶ This cut is the cut of a “metacritical hope” that “has always exceeded every immediate circumstance in its incalculably varied everyday enactments of the fugitive art of social life.”¹³⁷ This fugitive art “is practiced on and over the edge of politics, beneath its ground, in animative and improvisatory decomposition of its inert body.”¹³⁸ Unlike policy, planning “emerges as an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of positions, but also takes the form of embodied notation, study, score.”¹³⁹

Planning is the “informal” mechanism of the “social reproductive realm,” but planning also acknowledges the essential informality of this realm. So this is the plan:

to invent the means in a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night. This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing or dancing or teaching or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.¹⁴⁰

Planning is the reorganization of the living that refuses to be organized as one and only one. Planning is an investigation into our essential sympoietic organization, into the modes of making-with that shape everyday life. Planning is “self-sufficiency at the social level, and it reproduces in its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in difference, in the play of the general antagonism.”¹⁴¹ Planning directs autopoiesis into allopoiesis, projects the motor subject into social subjectivity, reorganizes the organized being into new choreographies of being-with, into a new, expansive self-producing, self-maintaining body. We see, then, that autopoiesis—life producing itself—finds in planning the “militant preservation” necessary for its ongoingness in a hostile world, expanding the “domain of compensations” that an individual organism can sustain.¹⁴²

The care of Churro sheep is one such expansion. Indeed, as Harney and Moten argue, policy always seeks to “break up these means as a way of controlling them.”¹⁴³ Risk—here, exceeding the “carrying capacity” of the land—is externalized, converted into “an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be harvested without end.”¹⁴⁴ This externalization of care is a “demonstration designed to separate you from others.”¹⁴⁵ It denies the fact that care is a cosmic performance, that we are already in it, that the informality of hózhó is precisely the point. The “multitude is already productive for itself”—it does not need to be managed, because the multide “uses every quiet moment, every sundown, every moment of militant preservation, to plan together, to launch, to compose (in) its surreal time.”¹⁴⁶

Policy demands that “those who stay in motion need to stop and get a vision,” asserting that one must see and know before one can hold.¹⁴⁷ There is something wrong about those who plan, those “ones who do not know to seek their own correction.”¹⁴⁸ “They are out of joint,” write Harney and Moten, “they seek solidity in a mobile place from which to plan, some hold in which to imagine, some love on which to count.”¹⁴⁹ Those who plan say I do, “signalling the problematic essentialism of those who think and act like they are something in particular,” maintaining their “choreographic fixity and repose, this security and base and bass-lined curve.”¹⁵⁰ Policy wants to give planners “vision,” because the space of planning is “too dark.”¹⁵¹ “You can hear something, can feel something present at its own making,” can feel the doing of the general antagonism, the social poiesis that is always already going on.¹⁵² Vision begins with a hold, in the hold, but what policy offers is “baseless vision, woven into settler’s fabric.”¹⁵³

Planning is a matter of “means without ends,” of pure means, as Rodrigo Karmy Bolton writes, a destituent revolt with the power to “delegitimize a determinate regime” by revealing the “thoroughly ‘anarchist’ structure” of power, the fact that existence not only is, but does, praktognosic from every angle and in every direction.¹⁵⁴ It is for this reason that Legacy Russell describes the body as cosmic in her Glitch Feminism (2020).¹⁵⁵ In the praktognosia of bodies we express the praktognosia of what is, becoming “inconceivably vast” in our doing.¹⁵⁶ The body’s projection into organization and reorganization, into planning and sociality, makes of the word body a “world-building word”—the poetics of being a body, the poetics of being a body with others, is thus a cosmopoiesis.¹⁵⁷ To be cosmic, to do cosmopoiesis, is to “make[] room for realizing other realities,” to “explore [one’s] range.”¹⁵⁸ Cosmopoietic bodies “have no single destination but rather take on a distributed nature, fluidly occupying many beings, many places, all at once.”¹⁵⁹ This is a sympoietic passage “from unity to multplicity” wherein the body “consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time.”¹⁶⁰ Cosmopoiesis is a “personal and collective dispersion toward vastness.”¹⁶¹

The involutional impulse of the living to “consume and be consumed” becomes a “radical act of self-discovery,” a reorganizational investigation into how “a body can simultaneously, mutually, consensually” enfold and unfold new worlds in sympoietic play with other bodies.¹⁶² This play “requires us to remain in perpetual motion,” to “refuse definition,” to “become impossible” so that we “cannot be named,” because when “we name bodies in an effort to make them useful, we end worlds.”¹⁶³ The autopoietic organization is purposeless, can only be defined as purposeful in allopoietic relations, in the larger systems and contexts in which it finds itself. To short circuit the purposing of the body as directed toward a determinate ends, to remain in the informal sociality of pure means, to choose survival, to continue to plan and play, we must “affirm and celebrate the infinite failure of arrival at any place,” finding “ourselves in outer space, exploring the breadth of cosmic corporeality,” becoming, as Frédéric Neyrat writes, “cosmic maroons” and “solar communists” and “cosmological wanderers”—those members, each, who “give rise, out of place, to the outernationale of planetary subjects.”¹⁶⁴

To be a subject in this way is to “embody error by finding new ways to self-define,” to adopt the sympoietic cut as the possibility of what micha cárdenas calls the “stitch,” the “operation that involves using one entity to connect two formerly separate entities,” to “join, in the service of healing and creation, rather than in the service of destruction.”¹⁶⁵ In the stitch, we reject the “assignation of traits,” the defining of bodies by their components, choosing, as Alexander Galloway writes, to “abstain from the bagging and tagging of bodies.”¹⁶⁶ Russell continues to cite Galloway:

This does not mean that all bodies are now blank. Quite the opposite. All bodies are full. But their fullness is a generic fullness, a fullness of whatsoever they are. Likewise, it does not mean that difference has “gone away.” The opposite is the case, as difference may now finally come into its own as generic difference.¹⁶⁷

Galloway is building on Laruelle here, on the radical that-ness of existents. For Russell, then, following in the virality of this idea, generic difference “keeps all doors open, all boxes—ticked, unticked, and those yet to be imagined beyond our wildest dreams of revolution—a possibility.”¹⁶⁸ Generic difference affords the mobilization of direct action at the cosmic scale, a “fugitive” and “catastrophic” praktognosia, a “gorgeous, slippery, keyed up” doing, a means of cosmic praxis “modeled on no model” because the cosmos itself is already on the move, already moving through it.¹⁶⁹ Cosmopoiesis is the making of “anarchitecture,” the building of “ecstatic and catastrophic” machines, machines that we are and were and will be, “beatific” and “leaky” and “limitless.”¹⁷⁰ There is just one invitation that remains—one invitation, but one that is generic and full: do you want to play? Together, we speak with the cosmos: I do.

Play

This paper began with a promise to apply an embodied, phenomenological method to the study of tabletop roleplaying games, and in so doing, to ally ttrpgs with poetry in the writing of the body. Having thoroughly prepared the ground for this work, we now must begin to do precisely that.

Motricity, the grasping, situated orientation of the body in space, is original intentionality. Motricity describes the thick contextual mesh that bodies inhabit, surrounding space polarized by a myriad of motor projects. Insofar as intentionality is projection, motricity naturally leads to the projection of bodies into projects irreducible to motor projects, projects we might describe as ideological, moral, or cultural. In this projection, we see how the organization of the body is open to reorganization, how the autopoietic self-making of living machines is a unity that nevertheless cannot be separated from its environment, and so always finds itself involved in allopoietic relations that produce ends other than the self-making of the machine. Furthermore, allopoiesis is a general term, capturing the cultural, political, and ecological sympoiesis of our being and making-with each other, and also the cosmopoiesis of bodies in the vastness of the outernationale of anarchic subjects.

In all of this, projection is a given, a naïve consequence of the primordial cut by which the universes of bodies are instituted. But this given is not determinative. The only determination is the unilateral determination of the individuation, the irrevocable, utterly contingent production of individuals. In this contingency of projection, individual bodies, living machines, are therefore open to reorganization and planning, to new choreographies, new worldings, that direct them into new poietic possibilities. Herein lies the possibility of ttrpgs.

In his treatment of concrete movement, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates the way in which the motricity of the body allows for the “insertion” of that body into “familiar surroundings.”¹⁷¹ But it is also possible for the body to perform abstract movement, to be inserted into unfamiliar surroundings, on the basis of this motor core. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of a subject being directed to perform a salute, a minimal gesture:

He role-plays with his own body, he amuses himself by playing the soldier, he “irrealizes” himself in the role of the soldier just as the actor slides his real body into the “great phantom” of the character to be performed. The normal subject and the actor do not take the imaginary situations as real, but inversely they each detach their real body from its living situation in order to make it breathe, speak, and, if need be, cry in the imaginary.¹⁷²

This minimal gesture is one possible minimal form of play, or perhaps the minimal possibility of play as such—to perform, to act, to play a role that is understood epistemically as unreal, but to nevertheless do as bodies do, breathing, speaking, crying, saluting. The normativity and reality here invoked are not taken by Merleau-Ponty to in fact be so. These terms signify that our definitions of the “normal” and the “real” are always the product of the “spectator,” the one “who lends to the subject of movements his own objective representation of the living body.”¹⁷³ What is basic to the living machines that are bodies is the “power” to “settle into my surroundings as an ensemble of manipulanda without intending my body or my surroundings as objects in the Kantian sense, that is, as systems of qualities linked by some intelligible law, as entities that are transparent, free of all local or temporal adherence, and ready to be named or at least available for a gesture of designation.”¹⁷⁴ For the soldier in the army and the body playing at saluting, the motor experience is the same: there is “my arm as the support of these familiar acts, my body as the power of determinate action whose field and scope I know in advance, and my surroundings as the collection of possible points for this power to be applied.”¹⁷⁵ In the Kantian sense, the spectatorial, normative, ‘realistic’ sense, in this motor experience there is “my arm as a machine of muscles and bone, as a flexing and extending apparatus, as an articulated object, and the world as a pure spectacle with which I do not merge but that I contemplate and that I point to.”¹⁷⁶ This second sense is quite simply incorrect, reductively objective and so possessed of only superficial explanatory power.

I have described this experience of a gesture as minimal because certainly there is more at play here than the motor project of the gesture alone. The total experiences of the soldier and of the one who roleplays are quite different. The soldier is interpellated by ideological and political projects that solicit the response of a salute, while the role player, the actor, the cadet irrealize themselves to do so—each to a greater or lesser degree. And yet, the salute also organizes the body, downward entraining it, teaching those who play what it feels like to be called out by authority and respond correctly. Though the soldier and the roleplayer inhabit different contexts, the gesture is an organizing project with a distinct context of its own. This is especially clear in the case of cadets, whose play at being in the military is indeed the training and entraining of young bodies for military service. What is more, this training ties into even broader cultural projects that include sometimes heated negotiations of nationhood.¹⁷⁷

If a salute can call up so much while being in itself so little, what then of the more elaborate choreographic projects that invite us to detach ourselves more completely from our living situations? What of those projects that seek to short circuit the militaristic and propagandistic entraining of bodily subjects, the moral and ideological training that demands all bodies be one and only one—those projects that seek instead the ecstatic and catastrophic trajectories of bodies that never arrive, but are always on the way? This is where, I argue, we meet the genre of the lyric game in contemporary tabletop roleplaying.

Though the popularity of ttrpgs generally can be attributed to the success of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons (1974), which was itself derived from the fantasy supplement to Gygax and Jeff Perren’s tabletop wargame Chainmail (1971), what are today described as lyric games belong in their design—their organization—to a very different tradition.¹⁷⁸ Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World (2012) has already done the work of presenting the history of mainstream “fantastic adventures” at the table.¹⁷⁹ But for us, there is another history that is now to be considered.

My research into lyric games, and specifically my research into the conjuncture of ttrpgs and poetry, began with my encounter with CAConrad’s (Soma)tics or (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, the first set of which, numbers 1-6, were published in Fence magazine in 2007.¹⁸⁰ CAConrad has written 123 numbered (soma)tics, between 2007 and 2017, as well as two collections of (soma)tics, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (2012) and Ecodeviance (2014)—which is only a selection of their extensive bibliography.¹⁸¹ For CAConrad, poetry and ritual are “ancient technologies,” and their (soma)tic poetic practice explicitly invokes the “magic” of poetry that directs bodies to move, to make, and to do. Consider, for instance, (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual #1:

Wash a penny, rinse it, slip it under your tongue and walk out the door. Copper is the metal of Aphrodite, never ever forget this, never, don’t forget it, ever. Drink a little orange juice outside and let some of the juice rest in your mouth with the penny. Oranges are the fruit of Aphrodite, and she is the goddess of Love, but not fidelity. Go somewhere outside, go, get going with your penny and juice. Where do you want to sit? Find it, and sit there. What is the best Love you’ve ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you’re busy, you’re a poet with a penny in your mouth, idle chit chat is not your friend. Be quiet so quiet, let the very sounds of that Love be heard in your bones. After a little while take the penny out of your mouth and place it on the top of your head. Balance it there and sit still a little while, for you are now moving your own forces quietly about in your stillness. Now get your pen and paper and write about POVERTY, write line after line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world.

Poem, ritual, lyric game—this was my first encounter with the form, my first intimation that poems could be games and games could be poems, that the lyric, as old as Sappho and Pindar, was indeed a cosmic poetics, the play of the body in the movement of existence, the short circuiting projection of the body into absurd and contingent becomings. This was my introduction. CAConrad, however, was neither the first nor the last to write such things. There is a remarkable experimental context in which CAConrad is operating, and which allows us to get a first grasp on the alternative tradition of lyric games. In treating of the following experiments, it is not my intent to identify each individual with each other, to say that they are each expressing the same mystical or transcendental truth, but rather to identify the praktognosic impulses in each that loop around, cut across, and often collide with each other.

Experiments

Perhaps the earliest experiment that we can make of use is Wagner’s Opera and Drama (1851), which, as Jacques Rancière remarks, is concerned with “the passage from a language of imagination to one of sensible reality.”¹⁸² For Wagner, “it is not enough for the new drama to signify a reality and describe an action. It is action that directly presents this reality to the senses in the language of the senses.”¹⁸³ It is this idea that would be instrumental in Adolphe Appia’s manifesto for mise en scène—staging or scenography—Staging Wagnerian Drama (1895), in which the “theatre must no longer narrate actions, but directly express the potential of life,” a life that “affirms its potential in the energy of bodies,” in the intensity of “pure movement.”¹⁸⁴

Another early experiment is that of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument” (1895), in which the poet asserts that “all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book,” not to be shelved away in a dusty library, but as “a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion”—in short, a literary organization of the sensible, a textual mobilization of the living.¹⁸⁵ Mallarmé would continue, in his enigmatic A Roll of the Dice (1897), to make an organizing gesture, the dice throw, the subject of poetic and typographic experimentation, a gesture that would go on to inspire Gilles Deleuze’s own treatment of the “ideal game” in The Logic of Sense (1969), once again stitching together poetry and play.¹⁸⁶

A more concrete experiment is Bertolt Brecht’s Manual of Piety (1927), a collection of poetry “intended for the readers’ use” that includes such “lessons” as “Supplications” and “Spiritual Exercises”—this is poetry that does something to the reader, that invites the reader to a doing, using the framework of “piety” as a means for devoting readers to action.¹⁸⁷ Brecht directs his readers to use the various lessons included therein to complement specific occasions, but regardless of occasion he advises readers to conclude “every reading” from the Manual with the final chapter, a single poem, “Do Not Let Them Fool You!”¹⁸⁸ The third stanza reads:

Don’t let them get your hopes up!
Today is all there is.
Let pious people suffer!
Life’s all earth has to offer.
There’s no life after this.¹⁸⁹

His Manual of Piety directs readers to attend to life, to this life, to the material conditions of our organization, to the utter occasionality of all things.¹⁹⁰

William Carlos Williams takes an experimental approach to poetry as formal action, an approach he critically articulates in “The Poem as a Field of Action” (1948), but first demonstrates in Spring and All (1923).¹⁹¹ In the former, Williams writes that we need “a new measure or a new way of measuring that will be commensurate with the social, economic world in which we are living,” that in doing so we will be “making the mass in which some other later Eliot will dig,” that we must have “the pride, the humility and the thrill in the making” and “the clarity of knowing what we are doing—what we may do: Make anew—a reexamination of the means.”¹⁹² Such poetic action is not “putting the rose, the single rose, in the little glass vase in the window,” but rather “digging a hole for the tree—and as we dig have disappeared in it”—not an epistemic poetry but a grasping, praktognosic poetry.¹⁹³

The means of which Williams writes is the structure of poetry, but in the “reexamination” of this means that he solicits, poetry itself is clarified as means, as a task, as a project—a means of making, by definition, but a making of and for the social world, the economic world, the concrete world—the world in which holes are dug. Williams make the same point in Spring and All, as follows:

So then—Nothing is put down in the present book—except through weakness of the imagination—which is not intended as of a piece with the «nature» which Shakespeare mentions and which Hartley speaks of so completely in his «Adventures»: it is the common tiling which is annonymously about us.

Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligeable to the point of insignificance. Whatever «life» the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind; Scheherazade, who lived under threat—Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are as actual, as sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot.

What I put down of value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from «reality»—such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.

But this smacks too much of the nature of—This is all negative and appears to be boastful. It is not intended to be so. Rather the opposite

The work will be in the realm of the imagination as plain as the sky is to a fisherman—A very clouded sentence. The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognisant of the whole—aware—civilized.¹⁹⁴

Williams’s poetry is “of a piece” with the anonymous common, and “composition” is not, consequently, an “escape” from this silent mass. Such poetry does not express the particular “life” of the artist, but derives its “vitality” from its actuality, from the fact that words are real—they do something in the world, they do something to the reader, they do something to the one who writes them: the word put down for itself, a part of nature, of the world, of the cosmos.

Charles Olson takes up Williams’s call for an active and actual poetics through his own experimental form, “projective verse.”¹⁹⁵ Projective verse is for Olson to be understood in three senses: as “projectile,” as “percussive,” and as “prospective.”¹⁹⁶ This poetics “involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem itself”—the poem as being of “essential use”—“There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE”—use in projection, percussion, prospection, that in which the “PLAY of a mind” is shown, not the mind as “egotistical Sublime” but as simple experience, “naïve contact” we might say, projects and projection, organization and reorganization.¹⁹⁷

The editors of the collection explicitly state that Olson’s theory of projected verse is phenomenological, citing the poet John Clarke’s notes from a 1964 lecture of Olson’s that names “The Phenomenology of Perception of the 20th c.” as heralding the return “of the possibility of a paratactic poetics”—a poetics of placing side by side—which poetics was later developed by Olson as an extension of his projective poetics.¹⁹⁸ The projective “does” something, Olson writes, it does something “both to the poet and to his reader,” and this something is precisely the “kinetics of the thing”—poetry is “energy transferred from where the poet got it … by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.”¹⁹⁹ This is a praxical theory, a praktognosic poetics. The editors include an excerpt from Olson’s later essay, “The Projective, in Poetry and in Thought; and the Paratactic” (1965), to illustrate the point:

my interest, in adding the paratactic to any previous though [sic] on the projective (prospective prescriptive eternal) is to assume, by experience, that the poetry and the thought called purposive behavior “practice” requires some different mode of action—activity literally, living around the clock, eating even, making love differently finding yourself engaged in an impossible war with the realistic, and with realistic people—

… my … point would be … that syntax … or the order of all movement … has a name for itself parataxis²⁰⁰

The projectile, percussive, and prospective here becomes the prospective, prescriptive, and eternal, that which Olson “assume[s], by experience,” to be the basis for poetry and practice, “activity literally,” the “order of all movement” as “parataxis,” or to reinvoke the terminology of above, the praktognosic movement of existence.²⁰¹ Strangely, Olson describes this experience as “an impossible war with the realistic,” but we can perhaps oppose this to the “reality” of his earlier essay: so, “realistic” as epistemic representation of reality, versus “reality” as that of which all is part, the radical that-ness of things.²⁰²

Thus, we can properly understand what Olson means when he writes that projective verse is a “composition by field” wherein the poet “puts himself in the open,” into the “large area of the whole poem.”²⁰³ Quoting Robert Creeley, Olson declares: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” which is to say that form and content are both of the same reality, working upon the same reality, toward the same reality, and that for this reason “every element in an open poem … must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality,” and “just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world.”²⁰⁴ The whole poem, the entire poem, is a part of phenomenological, praxical experience, is constructed in and through phenomenological, praxical experience—it is, we might say, a holopoem, poetry for holobionts. In turn, the whole poem is not an egoistic representation or reflection of the real, but a paratactic addition to it, a true doing.²⁰⁵ This paratactic doing is already present in “Projective Verse”:

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!²⁰⁶

There is much of CAConrad’s (soma)tic style in these lines, in their directed and directorial quality—projective, prescriptive, prospective. These are directions to be done. What is more, Olson names this doing “eternal,” much in the way that Merleau-Ponty names praktognosia as “originary.”²⁰⁷ In the later essay, he writes:

Aristotle called it the way beads are strung on a string one bead and thread after another And there is that sense that it is one foot after the previous foot that nothing doesn’t happen expect [sic] as succession, and with that order of succession in time… known only if you do yourself place one next thing after one you have definitely expressed the placing of, like your foot the step before—etc the succession in time being solely the experience in terms of a different & known & palpable order—physical, literally, & temporal…²⁰⁸

A poetics of the “different & known & palpable,” of the “physical, literally,” but also of the “temporal”—Olson invites us to act, to get organized, to go “down through the workings of [our] own throat[s] to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama, has to come from, where, the coincidence is, all acts spring.”²⁰⁹ This is the springing up of the original (motricity) and the originary (the movement of existence), that poiesis of what is in which the I do finds its voice.

After Williams and Olson, we can consider Yoko Ono’s experiments with “instruction” in Grapefruit (1964) and Acorn (2013), which read like minimalist (soma)tics.²¹⁰ Consider “Walking Piece” from Grapefruit:

Walk in the footsteps of the person in front.
    1. on ground
    2. on mud
    3. in snow
    4. on ice
    5. in water
Try not to make sounds.²¹¹

Or consider “Stone Piece,” also from Grapefruit:

Find a stone that is your size or weight.
Crack it until it becomes fine powder.
Dispose of it in the river. (a)
Send small amounts to your friends. (b)
Do not tell anybody what you did.
Do not explain about the powder to the
friends to whom you send.

Wendell Berry experiments with the praxical in his poetry, too, especially in a collection like Farming: A Hand Book (1970).²¹² In the “Farmer Among the Tombs,” his ecological and poetic sensibilities converge in a direction to act, a poem that feels as though, to be properly understood, it must be actualized, put into practice:

I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,
their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,
the bones imprisoned under them.
Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!
Pry open the vaults and the coffins
so the dead may nourish their graves
and go free, their acres traversed all summer
by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.²¹³

Plow, haul, pry—this is a grasping poetry, a poetry of the hand and the earth. Where Brecht is a fatalist, calling readers to act now because now is all we have, Berry’s handbook invites a different piety, a piety of life as born upon the soil, profoundly sincere, full of sorrow and hope.

If we look beyond poetry, we see this active, praxical impulse in other disciplines throughout the twentieth century. In music, John Cage’s experiments, Fluxus, and Danger Music see myriad disparate investigations into organization and instruction. For example, George Maciunus writes in the Fluxus Manifesto (1963): “PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be ~~fully~~ grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes, and professionals.”²¹⁴ Takehisa Kosugi’s Music for a Revolution (1964) is stark and brutal, just a single sentence: “Scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later.”²¹⁵

In the same period, we can consider Guy Debord and the Situationist International’s politically oriented “situations” and Allan Kaprow’s “happenings.”²¹⁶ For Debord, the mobilizing energy of the situation is that “the world must be changed”—we must do something, we must act, we must make something new.²¹⁷ Debord writes: “Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the discovery of new ones, means which are more easily recognizable in the domain of culture and customs, but which must be applied in interrelation with all revolutionary changes.”²¹⁸ The construction of a “situation” is thus “the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality”—organization and reorganization of the living, the projection of motor bodies into revolutionary cultural activities.²¹⁹ Kaprow’s happenings, unlike Debord’s situations, “appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular literary point”—they are “open-ended and fluid” events in which “nothing obvious is sought and therefore nothing is won.”²²⁰ This is an art practice disinterested in praxis of the political kind, and yet Kaprow also writes that the possibility of such work is the “certainty of a number of occurrences to which we are more than normally attentive.”²²¹ Though lacking political consciousness, happenings nevertheless depend on the essential organization of bodies and the possibility of their reorganization.

Kaprow describes happenings as “essentially theater pieces,” and if we turn once more to theatre, it is worth considering the rise of that experiment with the mode of dramatic presentation as such that we find in improvisation. Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for Theater (1963) is perhaps the ur-work in the field, and Keith Johnstone’s Impro (1981) is an essential addition.²²² Improv has been identified as a valuable discipline for those in the ttrpg scene, too, as evidenced by the publications of Martin Ralya’s Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters (2014) and Karen Twelves’s Improv for Gamers (2018).

Improvisation as a technique of organization is not restricted to theatre, however. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten frequently invoke the potential of improvisation in the context of jazz as an instrument of planning, and thus a powerful means of sociality.²²³ In their recent work, they connect the practice of improvisation with Walter Rodney’s “groundings” and the “rasanblaj” taught by Gina Athena Ulysse and M. Jacqui Alexander—means that challenge the racist meritocracies of western capitalist societies by getting “displaced into this (dis)position” that is both the comportment (disposition) of the body as organized and organizing grasp and the refusal of positional consciousness ((dis)position) that requires the subject to be one and only one, to be one whose “position is scaffolded with ideas of development, improvement, merit”—the position that, in my own position, I have been entrained for my entire life.²²⁴

Rodney writes that “the black intellectual, the black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the black masses.”²²⁵ He teaches that grounding is a practice, a praktognosia, and I listen:

I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting-down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say. We have to ‘ground together’ … I would speak wherever there was a possibility of our getting together. It might be in a sports club, it might be in a schoolroom, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully. (Those of you who come from Jamaica know those gully corners.) They are dark, dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them. I have spoken in what people call ‘dungle’, rubbish dumps, for that is where people live in Jamaica … I have sat on a little oil drum, rusty and in the midst of garbage, and some black brothers and I have grounded together.²²⁶

Grounding with those labelled as “criminals and hooligans,” Rodney’s practice is a practice of fugitive planning, of social poetics, of collective reorganization.²²⁷ Rasanblaj is similarly praktognosic, similarly a matter of sociality. For Ulysse and Alexander, you cannot have “rasanblaj (as a organizing principle, of sorts) without even attempting to do a rasanblé (gather as people), especially knowing the nuances and multi-layered significations in this term.”²²⁸ Rasanblaj begins at the syllable (Olson would be delighted):

Resist the impulse to translate, pronounce it first. Think consciously of the sound. Let the arch of the r roll over the ah that automatically depresses the tongue; allow the hiss in the s that will culminate at the front of the teeth to entice the jaw to drop for the an sound while un-smacking the lips will propel the bl surrounding the depressed ah again ending with j. Play with its contours. Know what this word feels like in your mouth. In Haitian Kreyòl. 3 syllables. Ra-San-Blaj.²²⁹

This syllabic beginning projects us into a physiological, phenomenological, enactive politics, a play of the body, a sympoietic experiment. This (dis)position is “defined as assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping (of ideas, things, people, spirits. For example, fè yon rasanblaj, do a gathering, a ceremony, a protest).”²³⁰ It is ordering and reordering, gathering and regathering, a politics and a sociality that derives its vitality from that originary movement, a politics and a sociality that is that very movement.

We could cite a number of games, chart a path through kriegsspiele and the old school scene, brush shoulders with the grognards—but to think by this milieu would only be to reproduce its particular organization. I want to be reordered, disordered—I want to delight in the energy of bodies, dance in this glittering occasion, dig a hole for a tree, be transformed by a superior passional quality. I want to ground together. To experiment with lyric games, this is the tradition with which we need to experiment and plan.

Games

There is a world being made, indeed, a myriad of worlds. This is a range that I want to explore, a range in which we might personally, collectively, disperse toward vastness. The cosmopoietic energy of these games is anarchitectural, ecstatic, catastrophic. We move, we dig, we project, we use, we ground, we assemble.

In the way that CAConrad’s (soma)tics first showed me what poetry could do, how poetry could organize both writer and reader, Anna Anthropy’s Game Poems (2018) were the first to frame this mode of poetic action explicitly as games. Consider “Game: Manifesto”:

Come up with a “must” sentence.
“We must make weird art.” Find
ten ways to rewrite the sentence
so that the meaning stays the same.²³¹

Jay Dragon’s zines in the Games For The Missing & The Found series (2019-2020) have been widely influential for those interested in lyric games. The short piece, “were queer & in a field,” is a strong early example:

Before play begins, stand on the ground and listen to the weather. Feel the grass press against your bare feet. Breathe.²³²

Riverhouse Games publishes ritualistic games that are grounded in and attentive to the experiences of everyday life. In The Yielded Peace of Little Ground (2019), we are given a ritual for planting seeds:

Magical Principle #1: Magic is natural. Plant your seeds and cast a spell. As you plant your seeds, hold a desire in your heart. Put your desire into the soil where it will feed your plant. You may add more to this ritual if you wish but you don’t need to. Write down your desire here:

Go to the next page when your seeds have sprouted.²³³

And in Six Spells To Help With Your Curse (2019), a collection of self-care exercises, we are given a ritual for doing laundry, a potent reorganization of this otherwise mundane task:

Components: Laundry that has been worn, Laundry detergent, A washing machine, A dryer or laundry rack.

Somata: Gather the laundry together in a basket and think about the times that you donned each outfit. Recall the dust that each cloth has picked up throughout the day. Imagine that all of the effort you spent is contained in each mote of dust. The clothes are full of sweat and spent energy. Place them into the washing machine one by one, giving each of them a look over. Add the laundry soap. Start the load and as the machine fills with water, imagine the soap is a salve that dissolves the sweat and effort stored in each fiber. Once the cycle is completed, remove your now clean clothing and dry each piece, either all together in a dryer, or hung up on your rack. As the water evaporates, each piece of clothing is made anew. Smell the dry clothes in a deep breath. One by one, fold them.

Your folds store energy for when you need it. You are imbuing each article of clothing with power that you will use later.²³⁴

Jared Sinclair brings together drama, poetry, and play in Ophelia, A Role-Playing Game (2019), a one page, meditative solo game:

Character Creation. You are Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, widow of King Hamlet, now married to Claudius. This is true: you are Gertrude, whether your friends and family know it or not.

You are also you, whoever you were before you started playing this game. Nonetheless, you are Gertrude. You should remain Gertrude for as long as you can remember that you are her.

How to Play. You are you, and should go about your life as you would normally. The fact that you are also Gertrude has very little practical effect on your life. In truth, you may sometimes forget that you are Gertrude, as if she is sleeping inside of you. This is fine; perhaps you’ll remember again one day.

Whenever another person near you says the word “drowned,” Gertrude awakens and responds by saying, “Drowned, drowned.” For this moment, you are no longer you, but fully and only Gertrude, and you are unspeakably sad.

After Gertrude responds this way, she recedes into you, as before. You are still Gertrude, but she is gone. She will not respond again to “drowned” or any other word until the sun has set and risen. You are, of course, still you.²³⁵

Adam Dixon’s Long Games for Two Players (2019) is a collection of four game poems meant to be played across great spatial and temporal distances, tangling with intimate relationships through poetic action. In “Now Then,” Dixon writes:

Play with a friend that you used to know better.
Whenever you bump into them, greet them by saying,
“Now then!”

You may never talk to them for longer than five
minutes. Talk about anything other than how you really
feel.²³⁶

In Sing It Again (2019), Riley Rethal uses the mechanics of Powered by the Apocalypse games to adapt Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown into a single-player poem. Sing It Again begins:

when you meet a boy who makes you
feel alive in a way you’ve never felt
before, take a +1 forward to resisting
the temptation to leave.

when you meet a girl who makes you
want to sing a song so beautiful it
might fix the world, roll. on a 10+, hold
three. on a 7-9, hold one. spend hold
to make promises you can’t keep.²³⁷

Abe Mendes’s Moon Game (2019) is presented as a collectible trading card game wherein the “cards”—the moons—to be traded are produced through the repetition of the central ritual Mendes describes, a poetic subversion of a highly consumer-driven genre:

How to play:

Look up (at night).
For best results, also go outside.

Collect a moon.
Capture the image of the moon in a photograph, a drawing, a poem, or a song.

Reflect.
Observe your moon for a moment. Take one deep breath. Then set it aside and carry on with your night.

Repeat.
If you ever look up at a moon and recall this game, add that moon to your collection.

Trade moons.
Should you encounter another who has collected at least one moon, exchange one of yours with one of theirs. Describe the night your moon was collected, as best as you can remember, and listen closely as they do the same. When you part ways, watch over their moon as you would your own.²³⁸

Small Gods Press has published a number of poetic and ritualistic games, but their Ludicrous Compendium takes the poetic impulse literally, using haiku to do something more evocative with the format of the monster statblock:

Ophsiminos
All-seeing thoughtless spirit
Suffocating all revealing
Trapped frustrated desperate seeking²³⁹

Maria Mison and Jay Dragon collaborated to make 101 Games for Survival (2020), released in response to the “terrible time[s]” of COVID-19. #47 in the collection is particularly startling and beautiful:

Make a little effigy of yourself. Draw a self portrait, or give a spoon some arms and legs, or forge a homunculus. Whenever you get mad at yourself and want yourself to die, look at the effigy. Does it deserve to die also? Would you condemn such a fragile thing to be destroyed, for no reason other than its own existence and its glorious life?

If your answer is yes, rip it to pieces and create anew. Keep rebuilding yourself until you fall in love.²⁴⁰

Using one of the most venerable forms in English literature, Chris Bissette’s Sonnet (2020) implements poetry in the construction of a compact, elegiac resolution mechanic:

You have been born to wield the voice of fate,
Its song writ large across your tattooed skin.
And fate calls down numbers from one to eight,
Cries out to you, “cast the bones to begin!”
On lowest throw silence, you speak no more,
Oh highest throw sing your view of heaven.
Your dreams are red violence on two through four,
Caked in dust of age if five through seven.
Eight times the cry comes down with tumbling die,
Eight people met, eight judged through your dark lens.
Stain your page with truth; never falsify.
To wield fate is to scour and burn and cleanse.
You were born to watch the havoc of time;
Keep your journal in answer for your crime.²⁴¹

Returning to Hamlet—and “playable in response” to Jared Sinclair’s Ophelia above—Mousewife Games’s Ophelia is a business card roleplaying game that addresses the question of living in an exchange between two players. The first half of this exchange reads:

O! To feel what you feel!
To play, pass this card face down to someone else.
Draw attention to a tragedy no one is noticing,
in a way no one will understand.
Leave them, bewildered.

O! To feel what you feel!
To play, redeliver this card to the person who gave it.
Tell them how long you’ve been holding it,
how much it needs to go back to them.
Give them a sad smile, and your attention.
Listening may do no good, but could it do any harm?²⁴²

This is in no way meant to be an exhaustive list. The “lyric-game” tag on itch.io has, at the time of writing, 188 entries, which does not include lyric games lacking the tag, or games published elsewhere.²⁴³ As such, this has been only a selection of those games with which I have previously entered into sympoietic loopings and crossings, games that have helped me in my own cosmopoietic practice.

There is no mystical, transcendental truth that unifies these works. There is, however, a consistent praktognosia in each, an intimate contact with the movement of existence that is irreducible to some purity of intent—original intentionality, our hold upon the world, the projects of our collective making and remaking, are always already compromised and contingent, embodied and absurd, organized and open to reorganization.

As the publication dates of each of the games above indicate, the emergence of lyric games has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and as such we have only seen the beginnings of a profusion of critical philosophies and creative visions for these means akin to the profusion of praktognosic experiments in theatre, poetry, music, and politics that we also examined here. It my hope that in placing lyric games in conversation with those experiments that poets and game designers and critics and creatives will discover new and generative spaces for planning and collaboration, organization and resistance, drawing on the radical lineage of lyric games to bring about vast and impossible transformations in the tabletop roleplaying scene, and to use tabletop roleplaying games to bring about even more vast and more impossible transformations in culture at large.

There is no conclusion—only making and more making, a poetics of the and. So for now, let’s play. And together, we speak: I do.

References

Alexander, M. Jacqui. “Groundings on Rasanblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander.” Emisférica 12, no. 1 (2015). https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1-essays/e-121-essay-alexander-interview-with-gina.html.

Anthropy, Anna. Game Poems, 2018. https://w.itch.io/game-poems.

Bernacer, Javier, and Jose Ignacio Murillo. “The Aristotelian Conception of Habit and Its Contribution to Human Neuroscience.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, no. 883 (November 3, 2014): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00883.

Berry, Wendell. Farming: A Hand Book. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1970.

Bissette, Chris. Sonnet, 2020. https://loottheroom.itch.io/sonnet.

Bolton, Rodrigo Karmy. “The Anarchy of Beginnings: Notes on the Rhythmicity of Revolt.” Ill Will, May 8, 2020. https://illwill.com/the-anarchy-of-beginnings-notes-on-the-rhythmicity-of-revolt.

Brecht, Bertolt. Manual of Piety. Translated by Eric Bentley. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1966.

CAConrad. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2012.

———. Ecodeviance: (Somat)tics for the Future Wilderness. Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2014.

———. “(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals.” Fence 10, no. 1 (2007): 55–59. https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/62350/.

———. “(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals. (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals.” Blogspot, n.d. https://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/.

Debord, Guy. “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action.” Translated by Ken Knabb. Situationist International Online, June 1957. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London, UK: The Athlone Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Dixon, Adam. Long Games for Two Players, 2019. https://adtidi.itch.io/long-games-for-two-players.

Dragon, Jay. Games for Lost People, 2019. https://possumcreekgames.itch.io/games-for-lost-people.

Eco, Umberto. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Foundation, Poetry. “An Introduction to the Black Mountain Poets.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed May 22, 2021. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/151709/an-introduction-to-the-black-mountain-school.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Games, Mousewife. Ophelia, 2021. https://mousewifegames.itch.io/ophelia.

Games, Riverhouse. Six Spells to Help with Your Curse, 2019. https://riverhousegames.itch.io/six-spells-to-help-you-with-your-curse.

———. The Yielded Peace of Little Ground, 2019. https://riverhousegames.itch.io/the-yielded-peace-of-little-ground.

Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. London, UK: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966.

Gygax, Gary, and Dave Arneson. Dungeons & Dragons. Lake Geneva, WI: TSR, Inc., 1974. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/28306/.

Gygax, Gary, and Jeff Perren. Chainmail. Lake Geneva, WI: TSR, Inc., 1971. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17010/.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Itch.io. “Top Physical Games Tagged Lyric-Game.” Accessed May 24, 2021. https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-lyric-game.

Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Kaprow, Allan. “Happenings in the New York Scene.” In Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley, 15–26. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961.

Kosugi, Takehisa. Music for a Revolution. 1964. https://id3419.securedata.net/artnotart/fluxus/tkosugi-musicforarev.html.

Laruelle, François. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London, UK: Continuum, 2010.

Maciunus, George. Fluxus Manifesto. 1963. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/127947.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. A Roll of the Dice. Translated by Jeff Clark and Robert Bononno. Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2015.

———. “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument.” In Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters, translated by Bradford Cook. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956.

Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980.

Mendes, Abe. Moon Game, 2019. https://abemendes.itch.io/moongame.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014.

Mison, Maria, and Jay Dragon. 101 Games for Survival, 2020. https://mariabumby.itch.io/101gamesforsurvival.

Moran, Dermot. “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 53–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2011.11006731.

Moten, Fred, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis. “Refusing Completion: A Conversation.” e-flux, no. 116 (March 2021): 1–14.

News, Postmedia. “Veteran Calls Out Canadian War Museum for Using Wrong ‘American-Style’ Salute on Promotional Poster.” National Post, January 24, 2016. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/veteran-calls-out-canadian-war-museum-for-using-wrong-american-style-salute-on-promotional-poster.

Neyrat, Frédéric. “Undercomets: On the Structure of Antagonism and the Cosmo-Geological Field.” Ill Will, April 8, 2021. https://illwill.com/undercomets.

Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York, NY: Hill; Wang, 2015.

Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” Poetry Foundation, 1950. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse.

Ono, Yoko. Acorn. New York, NY: OR Books, 2013.

———. Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1965.

Peterson, Jon. Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games. San Diego, CA: Unreason Press, 2012.

Press, Small Gods. The Ludicrous Compendium Volume I, 2020. https://smallgodspress.itch.io/ludicrous-compendium-1.

Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. London, UK: Verso, 2019.

Rethal, Riley. Sing It Again, 2019. https://metagame.itch.io/sing-it-again.

Rodney, Walter. The Groundings with My Brothers. London, UK: Verso, 2019.

Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London, UK: Verso, 2020.

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia, no. 7 (2009): 4–16. http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07.pdf.

Sinclair, Jared. Ophelia, a Role-Playing Game, 2019. https://s-jared.itch.io/op helia-a-role-playing-game.

Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. Third Edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

Stein, Eric. “Bodies in Form: Motricity Across Mediums in the Last of Us and the Last of Us: American Dreams.” ImageText in Motion: Animation; Comics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, April 13, 2019. https://zenodo.org/record/4603470.

Stengers, Isabelle. “Reclaiming Animism.” e-flux, no. 36 (July 2012): 1–10. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/.

Ulysse, Gina Athena. Emisférica 12, no. 1 (2015). https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj.html.

Williams, William Carlos. Spring and All. Paris, FR: Contact Publishing, 1923. https://archive.org/details/spring_and_all/page/n5/mode/2up.

———. “The Poem as a Field of Action.” Poetry Foundation, 1948. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69393/the-poem-as-a-field-of-action.

Notes

Eric Stein, “Bodies in Form: Motricity Across Mediums in the Last of Us and the Last of Us: American Dreams” (April 13, 2019), https://zenodo.org/record/4603470. ↩
Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux, no. 36 (July 2012): 1–10, https://www.eflux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/, 9. ↩
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014). ↩
Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York, NY: Hill; Wang, 2015). ↩
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980). ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013). ↩
Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London, UK: Verso, 2020). ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 100-148. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 100-101. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 101-102. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 102. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 102-103. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 103. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 108. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 108. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 109. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 109. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 113. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 115. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 115. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 121. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 131. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 131, 137. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 139. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 141. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 143. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 146. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 147-148. This proof also has analogs in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s understanding of the “subject matter” and Umberto Eco’s understanding of the “continuum.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 187, and Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 45. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 141, lxx. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, xi. ↩
Noë, xi. ↩
Noë, xi. ↩
Noë, xi. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 103. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 103. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 103. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, xi. ↩
Noë, xi. ↩
Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 8. ↩
Stengers, 8, and Noë, Strange Tools, xi-xii. ↩
Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 8. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, xii. ↩
Noë, xii. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 131. ↩
The term “affordance” originates in James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (London, UK: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966), 285. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, xii, 5. For an excellent discussion of simple tools and the development of phenomenological thought with respect to them, see chapter two of Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), “Lifeworld: Praxis and Perception,” 31-38. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, 5. ↩
Noë, 5. ↩
Noë, 6. ↩
Noë, 5. ↩
Noë, 6. ↩
Noë, 6. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 115. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, 6. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 125. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 139. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 141. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, 7. ↩
For the philosophical history of the concept, see Dermot Moran, “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 53–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2011.11006731. For an intersecting history of the concept in neuroscience, see Javier Bernacer and Jose Ignacio Murillo, “The Aristotelian Conception of Habit and Its Contribution to Human Neuroscience,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, no. 883 (November 3, 2014): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00883. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, 8. ↩
Noë, 8. ↩
Noë, 9. ↩
Noë, 10. ↩
Noë, 10. ↩
Noë, 13. On this point, Noë reproduces Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic phenomenology, as laid out in Truth and Method (1960), though Gadamer is not cited. Chapter 2 of Truth and Method, “The Ontology of the Work of Art and its Hermeneutic Significance”—and specifically Gadamer’s remarks on play, occasionality, the ceremonial, and decoration therein—prefigures Noë’s biological approach in a remarkable way. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 106-178. ↩
Noë, Strange Tools, 15. ↩
Noë, 15. ↩
Noë, 15-16. ↩
Noë, 16-17. ↩
Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 75. ↩
Maturana and Varela, 73. ↩
Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia, no. 7 (2009): 4–16, http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07.pdf, 5. ↩
Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 73. ↩
Maturana and Varela, 75. ↩
Maturana and Varela, 75. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 125. ↩
Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 76. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 76. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 77. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 77. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 77. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 77. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 78. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 78. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 78. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 78-79. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 79. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 79. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 80-81. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 82. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 82. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 75. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 81. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 81. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 81. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 81. ↩
Maturana and Varela,, 82. ↩
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 204. ↩
Laruelle, 203, 206. ↩
Laruelle, 206. ↩
Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 85-86. ↩
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58. ↩
Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Simondon, 5. ↩
Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 82. ↩
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58. ↩
Haraway, 58. ↩
Haraway, 61. ↩
Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 80. ↩
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 60. ↩
Haraway, 60. ↩
Haraway, 60. ↩
Haraway, 89. ↩
Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 1. ↩
Haraway, 90-91. ↩
Haraway, 91-92. ↩
Haraway, 93. ↩
Haraway, 95. ↩
Haraway, 97. ↩
Haraway, 98. ↩
Haraway, 98, 89. ↩
Harney and Moten, THe Undercommons, 73-82. ↩
Harney and Moten, 73. ↩
James Brown, cited in [@haraway_staying_2016], 94. ↩
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 73. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, xx. ↩
Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 73. ↩
Harney and Moten, THe Undercommons, 73. ↩
Harney and Moten, 73. ↩
Harney and Moten, 73-74. ↩
Harney and Moten, 74. ↩
Harney and Moten, 76. ↩
Harney and Moten, 76, and Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 81. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 76. ↩
Harney and Moten, 77. ↩
Harney and Moten, 77. ↩
Harney and Moten, 77. ↩
Harney and Moten, 77. ↩
Harney and Moten, 78. ↩
Harney and Moten, 78. ↩
Harney and Moten, 79. ↩
Harney and Moten, 79. ↩
Harney and Moten, 79. ↩
Harney and Moten, 84, 81. ↩
Harney and Moten, 82, and Rodrigo Karmy Bolton, “The Anarchy of Beginnings: Notes on the Rhythmicity of Revolt,” Ill Will, May 8, 2020, https://illwill.com/the-anarchy-ofbeginnings-notes-on-the-rhythmicity-of-revolt. ↩
Russell, Glitch Feminism, 41. ↩
Russell, 41. ↩
Russell, 41 ↩
Russell, 43. ↩
Russell, 46. ↩
Édouard Glissant, cited in Russell, 46. ↩
Russell, 46. ↩
Russell, 103. ↩
Russell, 74-76. ↩
Russell, 88, and Frédéric Neyrat, “Undercomets: On the Structure of Antagonism and the Cosmo-Geological Field,” Ill Will, April 8, 2021, https://illwill.com/undercomets. ↩
Russell, Glitch Feminism, 77, and micha cárdenas, cited in Russell, 78. ↩
Alexander Galloway, cited in Russell, 122. ↩
Alexander Galloway, cited in Russell, 122. ↩
Russell, 123. ↩
Russell, 129, 150. ↩
Russell, 152-153. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 106. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 107. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 108. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 107-108. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 108. ↩
Merleau-Ponty, 108. ↩
For instance, see Postmedia News, “Veteran Calls Out Canadian War Museum for Using Wrong ‘American-Style’ Salute on Promotional Poster,” National Post, January 24, 2016, https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/veteran-calls-out-canadian-war-museum-for-usingwrong-american-style-salute-on-promotional-poster. I recall having my form corrected as a child by an older relative, and being told “that’s not how Canadians salute”—even though there are no soldiers in my family. ↩
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, Dungeons & Dragons (Lake Geneva, WI: TSR, Inc., 1974), https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/28306/, and Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, Chainmail (Lake Geneva, WI: TSR, Inc., 1971), https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17010/. ↩
Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games (San Diego, CA: Unreason Press, 2012). ↩
CAConrad, “(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals,” Fence 10, no. 1 (2007): 55–59, https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/62350/. ↩
CAConrad, “(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals. (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals,” Blogspot, n.d., https://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/, CAConrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2012), and CAConrad, Ecodeviance: (Somat)tics for the Future Wilderness (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2014). ↩
Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London, UK: Verso, 2019), 122. ↩
Rancière, 122. ↩
Rancière, 120, 130-131. ↩
Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956). ↩
Stéphane Mallarmé, A Roll of the Dice, trans. Jeff Clark and Robert Bononno (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2015), and Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London, UK: The Athlone Press, 1990), 58-65. ↩
Bertolt Brecht, Manual of Piety, trans. Eric Bentley (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1966), 9. ↩
Brecht, 11, 233. ↩
Brecht, 233. ↩
For occasionality, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 144-159. Occasionality is a characteristic of those works of art that concretely present the occasion of their “coming-to-presentation,” which is both the structure of the work of art and the structure of being itself. ↩
William Carlos Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action,” Poetry Foundation, 1948, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69393/the-poem-as-a-field-of-action, and William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (Paris, FR: Contact Publishing, 1923), https://archive.org/details/spring_and_all/page/n5/mode/2up. ↩
Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action.” ↩
Williams. ↩
Williams, Spring and All, 21-22. ↩
Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” Poetry Foundation, 1950, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse. See also Poetry Foundation, “An Introduction to the Black Mountain Poets,” Poetry Foundation, accessed May 22, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/151709/an-introduction-to-the-black-mountain-school. ↩
Olson, “Projective Verse.” ↩
Olson. ↩
Olson. For Clarke, see footnote 4. ↩
Olson. ↩
“The Projective, in Poetry and in Thought; and the Paratactic” (1965), in Olson. ↩
“The Paratactic,” in Olson. ↩
“The Paratactic,” in Olson. ↩
Olson. ↩
Olson. As cited above, Umberto Eco maintains that the “matter, the continuum about which and through which signs speak, is always the same.” He continues: “In order to express them, one must choose formalized or formalizable portions of the continuum, which are the same as what is talked about, that is, the same continuum segmented by the content … The matter segmented in order to express something expresses other segmentations of that matter.” See Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 44-45. ↩
Hans-Georg Gadamer would say that the poem is an “increase of being.” See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 154ff. ↩
Olson, “Projective Verse.” ↩
Olson, and Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 141. ↩
“The Paratactic” (1965), in Olson. Readers might hear a resonance with Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and… and…’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’ … American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed.” See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25. Olson, likewise, shakes and uproots the verb to be: “‘Is’ comes from the Aryan root, as, to breathe. The English ‘not’ equals the Sanscrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish. ‘Be’ is from bhu, to grow.” ↩
Olson, “Projective Verse.” ↩
Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1965), and Yoko Ono, Acorn (New York, NY: OR Books, 2013). ↩
Ono, Grapefruit. ↩
Wendell Berry, Farming: A Hand Book (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1970). ↩
Berry, 20. ↩
George Maciunus, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/1279, 47. ↩
Takehisa Kosugi, Music for a Revolution, 1964, https://id3419.securedata.net/artnotart/fluxus/tkosugi-musicforarev.html. ↩
Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action,” trans. Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, June 1957, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html, and Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961), 15–26. ↩
Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action.” ↩
Debord. ↩
Debord. ↩
Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene.” ↩
Kaprow. ↩
Viola Spolin, Improvisation for Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, Third Edition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), and Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons. ↩
Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion: A Conversation,” e-flux, no. 116 (March 2021): 1–14, 13. ↩
Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (London, UK: Verso, 2019), 67. ↩
Rodney, 67-68. ↩
Rodney, 68. ↩
M. Jacqui Alexander, “Groundings on Rasanblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander,” Emisférica 12, no. 1 (2015), https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1-essays/e-121-essay-alexander-interview-with-gina.html. ↩
Gina Athena Ulysse, Emisférica 12, no. 1 (2015), https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj.html. ↩
Alexander, “Groundings on Rasanblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander.” ↩
Anna Anthropy, Game Poems, 2018, https://w.itch.io/game-poems, 11. ↩
Jay Dragon, Games for Lost People, 2019, https://possumcreekgames.itch.io/games-forlost-people, 4. ↩
Riverhouse Games, The Yielded Peace of Little Ground, 2019, https://riverhousegames.itch.io/the-yielded-peace-of-little-ground, 4. ↩
Riverhouse Games, Six Spells to Help with Your Curse, 2019, https://riverhousegames.itch.io/six-spells-to-help-you-with-your-curse, 6. ↩
Jared Sinclair, Ophelia, a Role-Playing Game, 2019, https://s-jared.itch.io/ophelia-a-roleplaying-game. ↩
Adam Dixon, Long Games for Two Players, 2019, https://adtidi.itch.io/long-games-fortwo-players, 4. ↩
Riley Rethal, Sing It Again, 2019, https://metagame.itch.io/sing-it-again, 2. ↩
Abe Mendes, Moon Game, 2019, https://abemendes.itch.io/moongame, 2. ↩
Small Gods Press, The Ludicrous Compendium Volume I, 2020, https://smallgodspress.itch.io/ludicrous-compendium-1, 8. ↩
Maria Mison and Jay Dragon, 101 Games for Survival, 2020, https://mariabumby.itch.io/101gamesforsurvival. ↩
Chris Bissette, Sonnet, 2020, https://loottheroom.itch.io/sonnet. ↩
Mousewife Games, Ophelia, 2021, https://mousewifegames.itch.io/ophelia. ↩
For reference, see itch.io, “Top Physical Games Tagged Lyric-Game,” accessed May 24, 2021, https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-lyric-game. ↩

The Idea of the Gamer, 2

2021-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

At last continuing with Amanda Phillips’ Gamer Trouble¹ for the No Escape book club,² it is time we look at chapter one of Phillips’ book, “Of Dickwolves and Killjoys.”

In this chapter, Phillips does an excellent job dissecting the mentality of #GamerGate and identifying its historical precedents. Through analyses of the Penny Arcade “Dickwolves” incident and the affective rage of the Shakesville community in response to gamer “tough babies,” Phillips is able to mount a compelling argument for the ordinariness of such gamer trouble—that the essential and constant anxiety of the gamer’s position produces the toxic and trolling behaviour that has come to characterize much of the popular gaming community.

I do not wish to rehearse this behaviour here, especially because Phillips has already done the work to which I would be adding little, if anything. Gamer Trouble is well worth the read for this historical contextualization of #GamerGate alone. What I am more interested in pursuing is an understanding of the interface envelope, discussed last time, as the material basis of gamer anxiety, and following this understanding through to its more fundamental implications.

Phillips presents the “interface envelope,” theorized by James Ash, as an alternative to the paradigms of flow and immersion that have dominated in game studies for some time. The interface envelope describes the “circuits of power” (both literal and ideological) that “continuously adjust[] and fold[]” themselves around the gamer, so “creat[ing] shifting, extended modes of engagement.”³ The interface envelope is “responsive,” “flexible,” and “temporary,” and as such cannot be universalized across all gamers.⁴ This understanding of interfaciality allows for more precise descriptions of the varied experiences of gamers, and as Phillips notes, is also more conducive to a “feminist analysis of gaming.”⁵ In chapter one, though Phillips does not explicitly invoke the interface envelope, it is this material phenomenon that makes the position of the gamer a tenuous one, and consequently an anxious one.

Between 1976 and 2005, Phillips identifies a series of challenges to the gamer’s position that were mobilized by the structural ambiguity of games, the fact that games seem never only to be for games’ sake. In 1976 and 1983, respectively, objectionable content in Death Race and Custer’s Revenge led to moral panic over the effects of video games; in 1993, the Video Games Rating Act and the Entertainment Software Ratings Board were established to regulate content in video games; in 1999, the Columbine shooting identified video games as a prime influence on the perpetrators; and in 2005, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sparked outrage over a sex minigame that had not been entirely removed from the shipped product, leading to the “video game censorship saga of 2005.”⁶ As Phillips is quick to point out, such panics did not end there. Indeed, Donald Trump attempted to scapegoat violent video games after the Parkland, El Paso, and Dayton shootings in 2018 and 2019 in order to distract from gun control legislation and preserve the interests of his electoral base.⁷

But if we engage with the anxiety that games produce on the grounds of such debates, we will quickly discover our critical possibilities to be limited. Trumpish scapegoating of games leads to a false dichotomy—to oppose Trump, to champion gun control instead, led some to the outright denial that games could play such a role, even though we are rightly concerned about the power of games in other contexts. For instance, Xbox controllers have been used to improve the performance of operators in various military applications for over a decade,⁸ video games like America’s Army have been used as recruiting tools for the US Armed Forces for almost two decades,⁹ and most recently, the US Army found itself embroiled in controversy over its manipulative recruiting tactics, frequently targeted at children, on Twitch.¹⁰ In each case, the reason for concern is that video games entrain or engender specific mentalities, modulating the gamer at even the most basic level of motor skills to be more susceptible to certain perspectives and behaviours.¹¹ The question, then, is not simply one of content, but rather one of form—or, to frame this in a more active way, a question of function. In other words, to address the anxiety that games produce we need to ask the question, what is it that games do?

What is a gamer doing when they drive a car into stick figures on a screen, or commit atrocities against people rendered in pixels, or use a controller to have sex with an in-game girlfriend? This is no longer a question about the representation of such acts, about objectionable content that one could just as likely encounter in literature or film. Rather, the unique concern that video games provoke is about form and about function. These are not mere acts being witnessed but rather interactions being performed. The gamer is put into play through the interface; the gamer is infected with what plays out on the screen; the gamer is mutated from being a distinct entity into a hyphenated player-character. Inasmuch as the concept of the interface envelope indicates that the experience of playing games does not entail an absolute immediacy, a perfect and total immersion, neither does the experience of playing games entail perfect and total separation, the absolute distance to which we might pretend in the interpretation of challenging or problematic works of literature or film. Games, quite distinctly, do something, and they do something to those who play them.

Indeed, games mobilize the very “clue” that serves Hans-Georg Gadamer in his “ontological explanation” of the work of art: the clue of play.¹² No art, Gadamer maintains, be it literature, film, or video games, is “an object that stands over against a subject for itself”—all art involves interaction and application.¹³ In short, all art involves play. And this fact is anxiety inducing, because “all playing is a being-played. The attraction of a game, the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters the players.”¹⁴ The fact that art, in its structure as play, “takes place ‘in between’” negates the possibility of an aesthetic consciousness standing over against an artwork, negates the possibility of a closed subject who is master of their own actions and experiences.¹⁵ On the contrary, “play draws [the player] into its dominion and fills [the player] with its spirit.”¹⁶ This, Gadamer argues, is the ontological structure of the work of art, and this is also the answer to the question what is it that games do? Games involve us; games compromise us.

Thus, to address the basic function of games, and so be able to mount an informed and cogent challenge to fearmongering, bad faith arguments about their dangers, we must acknowledge that, in fact, games are never only for games’ sake, that even the most neutral and ambivalent of games still does something, and that games are only ever fully realized when enacted.¹⁷ We cannot separate play from being-played.

If we follow this line of reasoning with Gadamer, projecting games back onto the real, we recognize that games—and play more generally—constitute an ontological structure that I might hazard to describe as the ontological structure of what is as such.¹⁸ This structure is one we can name in the most general way as original contingency—a notion that I draw from Jean-Paul Sartre,¹⁹ François Laruelle,²⁰ and Quentin Meillassoux.²¹ Games disclose the fundamental contingency of the real, and so are locally productive of that vertigo or angst characteristic of existentialism. The interface envelope, then, is simultaneously the performance of a role that shelters the gamer from the contingency of existence, but also the opening of an experiment with and upon the material of existence itself.

Phillips’ argues that “the problems facing gamers are not abstractions” but “real and immediate,” warranting our attention and concern.²² What should now be clear is that the real and immediate anxiety that games induce is not limited to games but rather is indicative of a more basic ontological problem.

In his Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre maintains that the “for-itself” exists as a “flight toward” an “impossible future … where the for-itself would be an in-itself-for-itself—i.e., an in-itself which would be to itself its own foundation.”²³ In other words, to simplify Sartre’s technical terminology, the human being is always searching to become its own ground and guarantee—what Sartre also calls the “in-itself-as-self-cause.”²⁴ This search is a search for the most fundamental of values, which Sartre describes as follows:

The fundamental value which presides over this project is exactly the in-itself-for-itself; that is, the ideal of a consciousness which would be the foundation of its own being-in-itself by the pure consciousness which it would have of itself. It is this ideal which can be called God. Thus the best way to conceive of the fundamental human project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God.²⁵

It is this project that Sartre calls a “useless passion” and a “perpetual failure.”²⁶ But, as I have written elsewhere, “it is precisely this passion that Sartre recognizes as requiring an ethics.”²⁷ It is impossible for me to become the “foundation of [my] own being” or the foundation “of the in-itselfs which form the world”—what remains is “to decide the meaning of being,” and this is indeed both our ethical “anguish” and our “responsibility.”²⁸ We “can not possibly derive imperatives from ontology’s indicatives,” but we can engage in “moral description,” in the analysis of the “ethical meaning of various human projects.”²⁹ This means that we can indeed mount a critique of a game perpetuating colonial fantasies, of a game that entices players with the prospect of committing consequence-free war crimes, or of an entire marketing apparatus designed to lure impressionable young people into the fold of an imperial war machine. We can and should critique such projects.

This also means, however, that we cannot attempt to simplify the work of critique through the deployment of universals. We must attend to the particular. So, years of scholarly studies have shown that video games do not produce aggression in gamers,³⁰ but the US Army still boasts of its use of video games for the development of combat skills and tactical thinking,³¹ and the Israeli Defense Force has talked openly about the transferability of video game expertise in its younger soldiers to the operation of command and control technologies.³² Video games may not directly produce aggressive behaviour or violent acts, but it would seem that certain games are at least conducive to militaristic ways of thinking, and so participate in reinforcing a more general ideological organization of gender, race, class, and national identity that, when taken as a whole, is a strong predictor of a given individual’s perspectives and behaviours.

What is required of our “moral description” is, therefore, a “tangible” ethics as recently described by ziq, which works “on a case-by-case basis” and is “tied to real cause and effect outcomes.”³³ To avoid a regress, Sartre helps us understand how this does in fact get beyond fruitless moralism. Sartre writes that such a work necessitates “abandoning the psychology of interest along with any utilitarian interpretation of human conduct,” necessitates getting beyond both “egoism and altruism,” and “beyond also any behavior which is called distinterested.”³⁴ Any such universalizable ethics operates on the “moral plane” and so “concurrently on that of bad faith.”³⁵ A tangible, particularized ethics on the other hand, what Sartre calls moral description, attempts, as freedom, “to take itself for a value as the source of all value,” not as self-cause (and so in bad faith), but that which, in its flight, generates values, and so is both profoundly contingent and profoundly responsible for that which it brings into being.³⁶

We ask with Sartre: “can one live this new aspect of being?”³⁷ Can one live in the play of contingency? Sartre presents us with three options in response: escape situation, remain situated, or become “more precisely” and “more individually” situated.³⁸ The third option is implied to be the option Sartre favours, and it is also the option that studies like Phillips’ help us move toward.

If the human being exists in a state of flight away from its own freedom, its own contingency, and toward the in-itself-as-self-cause that it would make of itself, and the project of this flight is that whereby values come to be injected into a groundless existence, providing authorization of and meaning to that project, a particularized ethics is that which neither denies its situation, its limitations, nor resignedly accepts its situation, but seeks to carefully describe the project of its situation and the particularities of its flight.

In making the connection between ordinary gamer anxiety and the constitutive anxiety of academic game studies—the narratology vs. ludology debate—Phillips undertakes precisely this descriptive work. If “growing up gamer means anxiously reestablishing one’s credentials in the adult world,” then the “anxieties” of game studies “about being taken seriously” as a discipline cannot be treated as fundamentally different in kind.³⁹ Indeed, both popular gaming communities and academic game studies deploy “kinds of border policing” that “share common origins,” “strategies,” and “outcomes”—an ideological organization that, when taken as a whole, is a strong predictor of a given individual’s perspectives and behaviours. To be direct on this point, Phillips identifies this ideological organization as the misogyny, homophobia, and racism endemic to both popular gaming and the academic study of games.⁴⁰

We “cannot write about it,” we cannot write about these structural violences, “without positioning ourselves within it,” writes Phillips.⁴¹ But to position ourselves in this way, to take responsibility for our actions and for our spheres of influence, is to do the particularizing work required of good faith moral description—or we might say plainly, the work of good faith critique. Such work does not provide alibis for abusers, but it also does not allow us to position ourselves on a moral high ground. We are already in it, in the middle of things.

As Jean Baudrillard writes, in the contingency of our situation, we find ourselves inextricably “tied to each other.”⁴² This is “an obligation that does not require solidarity” precisely because the rule of the tie is “arbitrary and ungrounded”—factical, the phenomenologists might say—and so does “not require a consensus, nor any collective will or truth.”⁴³ Ties “exist, that’s all.”⁴⁴ Such existence provides no guarantee, no authorization, but it demands responsibility, a demand that entails an “absolute reciprocity” whether we like it or not.⁴⁵

Such ties are the forms, the functions, the structures of our varied situations, and these cannot be denied. As Baudrillard writes elsewhere, we must “observe,” “accept,” “assume” (in the sense of taking on), and “analyze” that which is before and around us if we are ever to rise to the “imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight.”⁴⁶ And indeed, as Phillips writes, sometimes checking the system requires “anger and ire.”⁴⁷ The work of critique is necessarily a passionate one because “all human existence is a passion.”⁴⁸ Which passion, which life, which game remains for us to choose.⁴⁹

Notes

Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020). ↩
Kaile Hultner, “The Return of the No Escape Book Club,” No Escape, February 24, 2021, https://noescapevg.com/the-return-of-the-no-escape-book-club/. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 14. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 14. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 14. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 33. ↩
Daniel Arkin, “Here’s what we know about the links between video games and violence,” NBC News, March 2, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/here-s-what-we-know-about-links-between-video-games-n852776, and Jane C. Timm, “Fact check: Trump suggests video games to blame for mass shootings,” NBC News, August 5, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-trump-suggests-video-games-blame-mass-shootings-n1039411. ↩
David Hambling, “Game Controllers Driving Drones, Nukes,” Wired, July 19, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/07/wargames/; Colin Schultz, “A Military Contractor Just Went Ahead And Used an Xbox Controller For Their New Giant Laser Cannon,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 9, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/military-contractor-just-went-ahead-and-used-xbox-controller-their-new-giant-laser-cannon-180952647/; Shannon Liao, “US Navy submarines are getting Xbox 360 controllers to control their periscopes,” The Verge, September 19, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military-xbox-360-controller; and Noah Smith and Leore Dyan, “A new Israeli tank features Xbox controllers, AI honed by ‘StarCraft II’ and ‘Doom’,” The Washington Post, July 28, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/07/28/new-israeli-tank-features-xbox-controllers-ai-honed-by-starcraft-ii-doom/. ↩
Mike Thompson, “Killing in the name of: The US Army and video games,” Ars Technica, January 1, 2019, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/army-video-games/. ↩
James Vincent, “Twitch tells US Army to stop sharing fake prize giveaways that sent users to recruitment page,” The Verge, July 17, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/17/21328130/us-army-twitch-esports-gaming-recruitment-fake-prize-giveaway. ↩
See Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), for an excellent, in-depth analysis of this modulatory quality of video games. ↩
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960, trans. revis. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013). ↩
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 107. ↩
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 111. ↩
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 113. ↩
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 113. ↩
This final point is one that Alexander Galloway makes in his Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and which more recently Patrick Jagoda has used to great effect in Experimental Games. ↩
See my “From Governance to Planning,” April 10, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4685024; Fear of Play, Tech Jam, itch.io, April 22, 2021, https://vagrantludology.itch.io/fear-of-play; and “Combinatorics,” April 26, 2021, https://steinea.github.io/notes/2021/04/26/combinatorics. ↩
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003). ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2009). ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 63. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 384. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 640. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 587. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 615 and 640. ↩
Eric Stein, Useless Passions, Philosophy Game Jam #3, itch.io, October 16, 2020, https://vagrantludology.itch.io/useless-passions, 7. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 577. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 645. ↩
Timm, “Fact check,” n.p. ↩
Scott Kuhn, “Soldiers maintain readiness playing video games,” The United States Army, April 29, 2020, https://www.army.mil/article/235085/. ↩
Smith and Dyan, “A new Israeli tank,” n.p. ↩
ziq, “Morality vs. Ethics,” April 27, 2021, https://raddle.me/wiki/morality_vs_ethics. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 646. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 646. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 647. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 647. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 647. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 35 and 50. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 63 and 38. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 63. ↩
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 1979, trans. Brian Singer (Montréal, QC: CTheory Books, 2001), 136. ↩
Baudrillard, Seduction, 136. ↩
Baudrillard, Seduction, 136. ↩
Baudrillard, Seduction, 136. ↩
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 160 and 163. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 64. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 646. ↩
I will leave it to a footnote, but I am here deliberately invoking Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, even if what follows has become so common as to have become cliché: “You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world. The Catholics will reply, ‘Oh, but they are!’ Very well; still, it is I myself, in every case, who have to interpret the signs.” See Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946, trans. Philip Mairet, marxists.org. ↩

Combinatorics

2021-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

In my paper “From Governance to Planning,”¹ I draw on Jean Baudrillard’s description of hyperreality as “produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” in order to attempt an articulation of a post-representational real, the real without double.² This articulation leads to a model of “combinatorial planetarity” that is, in Baudrillard’s words, “programmatic, metastable, [and] perfectly descriptive.”³ There is no longer a need for a syntax of the real, a philosophical representation of what is, but only for a “science of appearances,” an “intimate combinatorics” that performs the “labour of analyzing, designing, enumerating, graphing, grouping, and ordering” without reference to an outside.⁴

This “intimate combinatorial science” I also present as a “ludology.”⁵ I take up this ludological science of the real once again in my Fear of Play,⁶ in which I invoke Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction⁷—specifically the chapter “The Passion for Rules”—wherein he presents the following dichotomy:

The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while the Law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs. The one concerns cycles, the recurrence of conventional procedures, while the other is an instance based in an irreversible continuity. The one involves obligations, the other constraints and prohibitions. Because the Law establishes a line, it can and must be transgressed. By contrast, it makes no sense to “transgress” a game’s rules; within a cycle’s recurrence, there is no line one can jump (instead, one simply leaves the game). Because the Law—whether that of the signifier, castration, or a social interdiction—claims to be the discursive sign of a legal instance and hidden truth, it results in repression and prohibitions, and thus the division into a manifest and a latent discourse. Given that the rule is conventional and arbitrary, and has no hidden truth, it knows neither repression nor the distinction between the manifest and the latent. It does not carry any meaning, it does not lead anywhere; by contrast, the Law has a determinate finality. The endless, reversible cycle of the Rule is opposed to the linear, finalized progression of the Law.⁸

It is the seduction of rules that Baudrillard proposes at the end of his Simulacra and Simulation as the next step beyond the nihilistic acceptance and analysis of our hyperreal existence. And it is the seduction of rules that drives me to continue in my imbrication of philosophy and play—not as the elaboration of a new syntax on the basis of yet another transcendental signifier (capital p Play), but as the performance of the “purest of pure expressions,” the expression of the “nothingness of original contingency.”⁹ Play is a combinatorics of nothingness.¹⁰

In tabletop roleplaying, this expression of nothingness is known as “Rule Zero,” the “idea that a gamemaster has the discretion to alter or discard published rules.”¹¹ Jon Peterson traces this rule back at least as far as the free kriegsspiel wargames used by the Prussian military to train their officers in the 1800s, and cites its explicit codification as the “Gamer’s First Law” in the tabletop rpg scene by Ed Simbalist in 1978.¹² Peterson attributes the rise of Rule Zero as the term of choice (over the Gamer’s First Law) to discussion around Carl Henderson’s SPYCHASER: Fantasy in 1994.¹³ But, regardless of origin, Rule Zero is simply the localized expression of the ontological contingency that the rule signifies.

When representation collapses, so too does the Law. All that remains is the operational immanence of the rule, the combinatorics of play.¹⁴

Notes

Eric Stein, “From Governance to Planning,” April 10, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4685024. ↩
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. ↩
Stein, “From Governance to Planning,” 7, and Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. ↩
Stein, “From Governance to Planning,” 9. ↩
Stein, “From Governance to Planning,” 9. ↩
Eric Stein, Fear of Play, Tech Jam, itch.io, April 22, 2021, https://vagrantludology.itch.io/fear-of-play. ↩
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 1979, trans. Brian Singer (Montréal, QC: CTheory Books, 2001). ↩
Baudrillard, Seduction, 131-132. ↩
Stein, Fear of Play, 6 and 5. ↩
Indeed, play, we might say, is the passage from Ø, the name of pure indetermination, to {Ø}, the small one. This is the mediation that produces something out of nothing, a process with neither ground nor guarantee. ↩
Jon Peterson, “The Origins of Rule Zero,” Playing at the World, January 16, 2021, https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-origins-of-rule-zero.html. ↩
Peterson, “The Origins of Rule Zero,” n.p. ↩
Peterson, “The Origins of Rule Zero,” n.p. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 34. Baudrillard specifically writes of the controlling response to the collapse of the regime of representation: “Programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment—nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm—the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law.” And yet, the operational immanence of the society of control is only the game of sovereignty as it is now played, and not the final possibility of our post-representational hyperreality. This closure is what I work to get around in both “From Governance to Planning” and Fear of Play. ↩

Generic Science, 3

2021-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

To this point, our discussion of a generic science, itself a continuation of our discussion of the Milesian intuition of an originary dual, has been mostly concerned with the sketching of a diagram, the drawing of a line of continuity, between Anaximander’s distinctly Milesian abstraction and Heraclitus’s apparent mandate of an empirical methodology. This sketchwork has allowed for a rereading of Parmenides, and his inheritor Anaxagoras, outside of, and properly prior to, the opposition of Parmenides and Heraclitus in the Platonic duel.

Having spent a significant amount of time on this outline, I would now like to apply it to three distinct thinkers: Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos, and Empedocles of Acragas. To avoid making our model into a monolith, I will not attempt to expand our continuity, but rather will treat of each of these thinkers in a direct and radical way, each responding to the Parmenidean fortress of being in a distinct fashion.

In this context, Zeno is the easiest to deal with. Zeno’s philosophy is, quite simply, a failure with respect to the generic program elaborated by Heraclitus.¹ Having contended previously that Parmenides shares in Heraclitus’s generic program, maintaining that the “point from which [he] start[s] is common,” Zeno’s doubling down on the speculative aspect of Parmenides thought is misguided.² Zeno’s paradoxes “respond[] to those who argue in favour of a plurality, paying them back what is due to them and then more besides,” unlike Anaxagoras who, through reason and observation, mounts a direct and radical response to Parmenides, supporting some of his conclusions while either nuancing or refuting others.³ Anaxagoras treats Parmenides’s philosophy as statements about what is common that can be verified or falsified; Zeno treats Parmenides’s philosophy as a revelation to be defended at all costs.

Melissus, on the other hand, continues in the generic mode that we saw put into practice by Anaxagoras. In the previous essay, we cited the eighth fragment of Parmenides at length, in order to capture each of his statements made with respect to what is. Melissus, reflecting upon these statements, is not led to defend their truth, but is rather led to refute and replace one of them. If what is is one, and it “always was and always will be”—in Parmenides’s terms, “unborn and imperishable”—then what is can certainly not be held within “the bonds of a limit which restrains it all about,” but rather must be “without limits.”⁴ Parmenides’s perfect sphere, complete and therefore finite—of which Archytas of Tarentum rightly quipped, “If I were to reach the edge … could I stretch my hand or my stick outside or not?”—is an empirically testable, rationally considerable statement.⁵ Indeed, it is a statement with which physicists are still concerned today: whether the universe does in fact have an edge, and if it does, how that edge works. On Melissus’s part, the edge, given Parmenides’s other premises, must be denied.

Parmenides asserts that for what is, the common, to be one, it must, by definition, be “alone of its kind.”⁶ For Melissus, the fact that what is has neither beginning nor end entails its unlimitedness, which in turn entails its aloneness: “for if there were two things, they could not be unlimited, but would have limits in relation to each other.”⁷ The question of the edge always remains a real question. So, looking at being, reflecting on being, Melissus comes to the same conclusion of oneness as his predecessors, but this conclusion allows him to identify a flaw in Parmenides’s framework and provide a correction to it without discounting the subtlety or rigour of Parmenides’s thought in general.

Melissus’s revision of Parmenides’s also leads to the fascinating conclusion that if being “exists, its must be one; and being one it must be incorporeal,” because if it had “solidity, it would have parts, and then it would no longer be one.”⁸ This is in no way frivolous speculation, but a legitimate conclusion based on a critically considered set of principles. Having already exerted much effort examining the real abstraction at work in Anaximander and Pythagoras, Melissus’s incorporeal real is not a problematic mystification, but a useful means for approaching a singular universe in a non-subtantialist way. Thus, in the same way that Anaxagoras is able to open Eleatic being to the possibilities of Milesian becoming, we might say by way of parallel that Melissus opens Eleatic being to the possibilities of a kind of Pythagorean abstraction. In both cases, these possibilities are possibilities afforded by Parmenides’s philosophy. Though he asserts the closure of being, his philosophical method and the conclusions it produces remain open to extension and critique.

Turning now to Empedocles, we see that although he is known for his system of the four classical elements, he is not detached from his intellectual milieu. Empedocles asserts that “there is no way for what-is-not to be born, and for what-is to perish is impossible and inconceivable.”⁹ He also asserts: “Nor in the totality is there anything empty or overfull.”¹⁰ In these two fragments, we see a distinctly Parmenidean framework undergirding Empedocles’s philosophy. Being remains, for Empedocles, unborn and imperishable, complete and all together. But unlike Parmenides, who argues that what is “stays in the same state and in the same place” and is “everywhere of equal intensity,” Empedocles allows for “a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed.”¹¹ Parmenides cannot account for structure, but we have already seen how Anaxagoras introduces structure through dispersion. Empedocles’s earth, water, aither, and fire obey most of the Parmenidean rules, but are subject to organization by the “two initiatory forces, love and strife.”¹² Like Anaxagoras, he allows for structure without denying the oneness of being.

Empedocles goes on to argue that “[n]othing comes into existence or ceases to exist; there is only them … they are just themselves, and by running through one another they become now this and now that, and remain for ever the same.”¹³ In the age of love, everything comes together in a “rounded sphere,” “equal to itself from every direction, and entirely boundless … delighting in its encircling solitude.”¹⁴ This sphere Empedocles also names “mind,” “sacred and inexpressibly vast.”¹⁵ So, like Anaximander, wherein there is a sort of phase transition whereby by the opposites are separated out from the boundless, like Pythagoras, wherein the unlimited is determined by limit, and like Anaxagoras, wherein small, compact, and indeterminate being undergoes dispersion, Empedocles presents another argument for the mechanism whereby being becomes that does not deny the oneness of being, the fact that everything is.

Indeed, just like the Milesians, Empedocles positions a sort of dual at the origin of things—the “principles” that are the four elements and the “forces” that “set [them] in motion.”¹⁶ Love and strife, as the coupled, tensional forces of becoming, are not subsidiary to being, but equiprimordial with it. Coming after Parmenides, we also see Empedocles responding to the powerful challenge that Parmenides mounts, using both reason and the senses to affirm some of Parmenides’s conclusions and deny others.

We conclude with Empedocles because of a rather startling testimonial that comes late in the collection. Theophrastus reports that Empedocles assumes “that thinking is either identical to or very similar to sense-perception.”¹⁷ As we have seen in the Pythagorean unit-point and the Heraclitean intelligence-common, Empedocles operates in the same Presocratic tradition wherein thought is unilaterally determined by the real because thought is real.¹⁸ This is a remarkable externalist psychology that we lose with the scission of the real and its syntax by Plato’s bar, a psychology that this series on generic science has hoped to recover. It is this identification of thought with its object that, in part, makes possible the direct and radical approach to (meta)physics that we have been pursuing here.

In taking this approach, we can assess the thought of the likes of Zeno, Melissus, and Empedocles by identifying their claims with respect to the real, empirically assessing their veracity (is this statement in fact correct?), and rationally assessing their consistency (is this abstraction in fact coherent?). By refusing an ontological divide between the empirical and rational standpoints, we also open ourselves to pragmatic rereadings of these Presocratic thinkers. Where an intuition might have led to an ultimately false set of empirical conclusions, it may yet prove instructive as an abstraction. Such abstractions can be useful for us today insofar as they furnish us with problems to pursue in our own experimental and theoretical pursuits—many of which, indeed, bring us to the cutting edge of research in the natural sciences.

Notes

Heraclitus “rate[s] highly … those which are accessible to sight, hearing, apprehension,” and directs his listeners to listen not to him “but to the principle,” the common logos. See Heraclitus, F28 and F12, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 41 and 39. ↩
Parmenides, F2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 57. ↩
Zeno in Plato, Parmenides, 127d6-128d6, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 75. ↩
Melissus, F2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 84, and Parmenides, F8, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 59 and 60. ↩
Archytas, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 54, footnote 9. ↩
Parmenides, F8, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 59. ↩
Melissus, F5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 84. ↩
Melissus, F7, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 85. ↩
Empedocles, F11, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 145. ↩
Empedocles, F12, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 145. ↩
Parmenides, F8, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 60, and Empedocles, F13, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 145. ↩
Empedocles, F10, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 144. ↩
Empedocles, F20, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 148. ↩
Empedocles, F25, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 151. ↩
Empedocles, F26, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 151. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 147. ↩
Theophrastus, On the Senses, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 157. ↩
To signify this determination, we should perhaps flip “unit-point” and “intelligence-common” to “point-unit” and “common-intelligence”—the real determines thought. ↩

Fear of Play

2021-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Fear of Play is an essay on nonsovereignty and games, presented here in a zine format. It was written for Adam Vass and Will Jobst’s Tech Jam as a sort of cognitive plugin, in the spirit of my first ever game project, Affinity.

Using the work of David Graeber, Jean Baudrillard, Patrick Jagoda, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney, Fear of Play tries to get around the issue of sovereignty and the violence it entails, both in the sphere of tabletop gaming and in the political sphere.

Fear of Play flows from my proposition of a gmless free kriegsspiel play style in my Zine Quest 3 project Glitchspiel and from my study of nuclearity, ludology, and anarchy in “From Governance to Planning.”

Itch.io

Generic Science, 2

2021-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

Why begin with void? After drawing our continuity between the abstract ontologies of Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus, we can now return to Alain Badiou and his peculiar beginning, using it as a staging area for engaging with Parmenides of Elea and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. This progression of essays has allowed us to separate the traditional pair of Heraclitus and Parmenides, so keeping us at a distance from Plato’s treatment of the two thinkers and allowing their philosophies to stand on their own. This should, in turn, put us on a better footing for returning to Badiou as promised and engaging with the motive for his philosophical project.

In Badiou’s lecture, “How to Begin with the Void,” he does not dive into building his ontology out of sets of nothing right away.¹ Rather, Badiou spends a significant amount of time setting up his ontology in its historical situation, specifically with respect to the “concept of the infinite.”²

For Badiou, the philosophical moment in which we find ourselves is that of an “irrational struggle” between a “reactive classicism” and a “reactive romanticism.”³ The “rational struggle” between science and religion at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century has given way to a new “dominant contradiction,” a contradiction that, in this mode of reaction, strikes backward at the fusion of the One and the Infinite that can be understood as the abstract foundation of the West.⁴

In an earlier lecture in the series, “A History of Finitude and Infinity: Romanticism and Modernity,” Badiou locates the genesis of Western modernity in the Judaeo-Christian supersession of the finite Greek One by the infinite One—the “new God.”⁵ Infinite possibility becomes thinkable, and significantly, it becomes thinkable as transcendent. The mediation between finite existence and infinite Being is thus a kind of miracle, a miracle which is figured in the person of Jesus Christ, the first dialectical mediation, and thus fusion, of the One and the Infinite.⁶

Classicism, the thought of classical antiquity, maintains the One as finite, and perfection as the realization of the finite possibilities of the One. Romanticism, on the other hand, maintains the One as infinite and transcendent, and perfection as the creation of radically new possibilities by way of an eruption of infinite possibility in the finite.⁷

We find ourselves today at the far end of this subsequence, in the “third sequence,” the dialectic of the classical and the romantic nearing its terminus.⁸ Two thousand years of mixture have brought us here—but for what? Badiou’s presentation of “reactive classicism” and “reactive romanticism” is difficult and vague, providing us with little help in answering this question. What Badiou makes clear, however, is that both positions are characterized by the proposition of the “impossibility of a new access to the infinite.”⁹ Reactive classicism seeks to make a world with the “finite possibilities” available to it while reactive romanticism seeks dissipation in and of the world—for both, the world is “something like a terrible necessity,” that which is utterly, finally closed.¹⁰

It is challenging to pin down which thinkers or schools of thought Badiou has in mind when he describes these two modes of reaction, but what is more important is understanding Badiou’s chief concern in framing this struggle: his concern over the possibility of a future, over the possibility of something new emerging in the world. If the infinite is, truly, foreclosed, then “there is no mediation between concrete life and something like an opening to the infinite,” and “if there is no mediation, in some sense there is no future, no real future.”¹¹ Badiou continues:

There is a small future inside the present, something like the movement of the present, but this movement is not exactly the representation of the future, but the present itself. Every day the world changes, but this change is the change of the same, it is a change inside the same, because our world is a world that’s law is to change. It is a law: that we must change. If change is the law of the situation, it is not a true change, but a continuation. A true change would be much more to stop all that, and not to continue. But it is not possible to stop, because the law of the world is to continue absolutely, to continue to produce, to continue in different modes of capitalism, to continue the banks, and so on. To continue is the law of the world as it is … When there is no mediation between our world, finite existence, and something infinite, what exists is by necessity always the same thing, because there is no mediation for something really different.¹²

Though I find Badiou’s utilization of “reactive classicism” and “reactive romanticism” ultimately unproductive, it does serve to bring us to the point of asking the vital question of the possibility of newness, a question which, for our purposes here, also brings us face to face with Parmenides and his profoundly singular vision. In constructing this new dialectic, we can short circuit the dialectic of classicism and romanticism that has culminated in reaction and exhaustion, and so attempt to begin again.

Wherein the prior thinkers we have been considering have all included change by some mechanism or other in their ontologies (soul, motion, god, limit, or the logos itself), Parmenides concludes that change is impossible, and thus unreal. The Parmenidean paradigm is distinguished by this denial, a denial to which we have already seen Badiou, at a distance, respond.

We are told that Parmenides “would not agree with anything unless it seemed necessary,”¹³ and Parmenides himself writes that it is “well-rounded truth,” and not the “beliefs of mortals,” that he seeks.¹⁴ Like Heraclitus, Parmenides asserts that the “point from which I start is common; for there shall I return again.”¹⁵ We have already cast this philosophical posture as that of a Laruellian “generic science,” which stands in a “direct or radical” relation to the real.¹⁶ Indeed, like Laruelle, Parmenides begins his inquiry before the “paths of night and day,” his vision described by Waterfield as “transcend[ing] the polarity of light and dark.”¹⁷ In other words, Parmenides begins in Laruelle’s “black universe”—that which is always already before the scission of philosophical syntax, and always already after, “opaque and solitary,” “deaf and blind,” unreflected, groundless, and “entirely interior to itself.”¹⁸ This is the “hyperspace” in which Parmenides’s education by the goddess occurs.¹⁹

Parmenides is known for his “two ways”—the way “that it is and it cannot not be” and the way “that it is not and that it must not be.”²⁰ The first is the “path of Trust,” the second “an altogether misguided route.”²¹ These gnomic statements can be somewhat difficult to parse, but what we see in each is a proposition about a state of affairs linked with a modal assertion. That it is is necessary; that it is not is impossible.

As in Heraclitus, what is, for Parmenides, is “what can be spoken and thought,” because what can be spoken and thought “is there for being.”²² Waterfield is careful to note that by this “Parmenides cannot mean, literally, that thinking and being are identical, but that they are co-extensive: thinking is thinking of a thing as it is.”²³ We can nuance this position, however, and say that thinking and being are not co-extensive in Parmenides, like two distinct planes superimposed, but rather are parts of the same continuum—as in Heraclitus, thought stands firm by being. As we have remarked previously, this direct and radical relation of thought to the real echoes the phenomenological dictum that “[a]ll consciousness is consciousness of something” or the externalist dictum that consciousness is identical with its contents and not a theatre of representations.²⁴ To this citational play we might add the semiotic dictum, that the “matter segmented in order to express something expresses other segmentations of that matter.”²⁵ Parmenides later confirms this reading, contending that the “same thing both can be thought and is that which enables thinking. For you will not find thinking apart from what-is, on which it depends for its expression.”²⁶ Thought is secondary, unilaterally determined by being.

It is this unilateral determination that leads Parmenides to the necessity of his conclusions. Allow me to quote at length:

what-is is unborn and imperishable, entire, alone of its kind, unshaken and complete. It was not once nor will it be, since it is now, all together, single, and continuous. For what birth could you seek for it? How and from what did it grow? Neither will I allow you to say or to think that it grew from what-is-not, for that it is not cannot be spoken or thought. Also, what need could have impelled it to arise later or sooner, if it sprang from an origin in nothing? And so it should either entirely be, or not be at all. Nor ever will the power of trust allow that from what-is it becomes something other than itself …

Thus birth has been extinguished and perishing made inconceivable. Nor can it be divided, since all alike it is. Nor is there more of it here and an inferior amount of it elsewhere, which would restrain it from cohering, but it is all full of what-is. And so it is all coherent, for what-is is in contact with what-is. Now, changeless within the limits of great bonds, it is without beginning and without end, since birth and perishing have been driven far off, and true trust has cast them away. It stays in the same state and in the same place, lying by itself, and so it stays firmly as it is, for mighty Necessity holds it in the bonds of a limit which restrains it all about, because it is not lawful for what-is to be incomplete. For there is no lack in it; if there were, it would lack everything …

Now, since there is a last limit, what-is is complete, from every side like the body of a well-rounded sphere, everywhere of equal intensity from the centre. For it must not be somewhat greater in one part and somewhat smaller in another. For, first, there is no such thing as what-is-not, to stop what-is from joining up with itself; and, second, it is impossible for what-is to be more here and less there than what-is, since it all inviolably is. For from every direction it is equal to itself, and meets with limits.²⁷

Just like in Heraclitus, being is our teacher, “single” and “continuous.”²⁸ And indeed, Parmenides’s argumentation here reads much like a development of Heraclitus’s common logos. For what is to truly be single, it must be alone, complete, together, alike, full, coherent, and inviolable. And if what is meets these criteria, it also necessarily entails the fact that what is not cannot be because what is would as such have to have a beginning and an end, and what need could impel something to arise from nothing? This is Parmenides’s answer by way of an absolute affirmation to the arche-philosophical question: why are there beings at all instead of nothing?²⁹

What I find most striking about this long passage, however, are the generic, scientific questions that animate it, questions that animate cosmological research to this day. If we read Parmenides through Laruelle, his inquiry quite clearly becomes a matter of direct, radical relation to the universe. Where earth is the old autochthony of human being, and world is the horizon of human possibility, universe is the “how” and “according to” of thought, the abstract substance of the real.³⁰ Such a mode of thought is what Quentin Meillassoux means when he invites us “to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not.”³¹ Waterfield finds Parmenides’s attention to physical questions “remarkable,” given that his “chief intention was utterly to repudiate the world of the senses.”³² This seems a poor reading. Rather, Parmenides wants to get out of himself, not to repudiate sense data but to repudiate mortal belief. As we have tried to demonstrate in the thought of Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus, and now in Parmenides, reason is real, and human reason, when correct, is unilaterally determined by this reason that is common.

If so viewed, the questions to which Parmenides is responding are questions to which we can attempt to propose actual answers. For instance, the cosmological principle dictates that everywhere the universe is equal in intensity in the sense that it is homogeneous and isotropic at a large scale. However, this principle requires us to nuance our understandings of Parmenidean togetherness and fullness in order to properly understand the homogeneous but structured distribution of matter throughout the universe and the more abstract vacuum energy of the universe, which is signified by the cosmological constant. The universe remains single, but what this singleness looks like is transformed. We could pursue similar lines of inquiry in order to respond to the questions of aloneness, completeness, alikeness, coherence, and inviolability in Parmenides, and even to the question of the beginning and end of the universe—the possibility of which Parmenides denies due to lack of sufficient reason.³³ Our generic and radical scientific posture does not, as such, deny philosophical questions, but rather restores philosophy to its proper footing. To do philosophy is to attempt to say what is.

If we continue in this mode to Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, we see that Eleatic thought is not some mystical school requiring dogmatic adherence but a posture inviting inquiry, challenge, and innovation. As with Heraclitus, “one ought to follow what is common” and not the word of the master handed down from his “private universe.”

Anaxagoras, unlike Parmenides, proposes a beginning, at which point “[a]ll things were together, with no limits set on either number or smallness; for there were in fact no limits set on smallness. And while everything was together the smallness of things meant that nothing was distinct.”³⁴ He continues:

separation would have taken place not only here with us, but also elsewhere. Before there was separation, while all things were together, not even any colour was distinct, because the mixture of all things made that impossible—the mixture of the moist and the dry, the warm and the cold, the bright and the dark, with a great deal of earth among them, and an infinite number of seeds quite dissimilar to one another.³⁵

Importantly, Anaxagoras’s beginning is separation, a “dispersal,” and not “creation.”³⁶ Thus, in a Milesian move, Anaxagoras introduces phase or becoming into the singularity of being, a nuance of the Parmenidean singularity that does not violate the criteria defining that singularity. What is remains inviolable—separation does not come from outside, but is intrinsic to what is. Just as we might say of phase changes in water that it does not at any point pass into nothingness, but only through different structures or forms of organization, so too does being, in Anaxagoras, never depart from itself—simply, “everything grew as it was dispersed.”³⁷

The separation, for Anaxagoras, is “prevailed over” by air and aither (that is, fire), and these are “separated off from the vault of the surrounding matter, which is limitless.”³⁸ What we see here in this first phase of being is an infinite density, from which first air (a Milesian principle of change) and aither (fire, the Heraclitean concretion of the change intrinsic to the logos) are separated out, and from which in turn are separated all the other seeds or “homoeomeries.”³⁹ Growth happens not out of nothingness, so preserving the Eleatic denial of what is not, but “as a result of things that already exist.”⁴⁰ Thus, we see a kind of fusion of Anaximander and Parmenides in Anaxagoras wherein the boundless containing opposites separated off by motion is preserved as the singularity of infinite density containing all things.

To tie all of this together, Aëtius remarks that, for Anaxagoras, the “effective cause” of the separation is “mind,” thus preserving another term from the Milesian framework.⁴¹ Indeed, for Anaxagoras, mind is “independent,” “on its own and by itself.”⁴² Mind is “responsible for initiating the rotation,” and as Aristotle writes, the rotational separation of the homoeomeries is a “unique event,” the “source” or “single principle” of the phase transition.⁴³ Certain statements on Anaxagoras’s part can lead to a spiritualization of this principle, but if we retain a rigorous generic and scientific posture toward him, as he does toward Parmenides, Anaxagoras’s mind presents itself as a fairly obvious continuation of the Presocratic realism with respect to reason that we have been tracing. Dualism itself is avoided by Anaxagoras’s rigorous Eleaticism—while “mind” is independent, the universe is “one,” and mind cannot, therefore, be transcendent. Though Anaxagoras’s mind is not as elegant as motion in Anaximander or limit in Pythagoras, it is at worst a repetition of Thales’s soul, and we have already seen how the Milesian positing of a dual at the origin of individuated being is in fact one of the most useful Presocratic intuitions available to us today.

What is more, this posture helps us refigure Anaxagoras’s homoeomeries from the macroscopic scale of “flesh, bone, and so on,” to a much more fundamental scale.⁴⁴ If we do so, we find a remarkable counterpoint to the four classical elements of Empedocles (which Aristotle also notices), with Anaxagoras’s mixture providing us with a logical template for a universe that is single but full of structure. We cannot claim that Anaxagoras somehow intuited the standard model of particle physics, but if we were to try and explain the standard model to Anaxagoras and Empedocles, it seems likely that Anaxagoras would be the first to assent to the proposition.

But what of the void? Why begin with Badiou? This dialectic has been necessary for us to understand the stakes of the Judaeo-Christian supersession of the finite Greek One, but also to short circuit the reaction and exhaustion of the classicism-romanticism dialectic.

Badiou contends that our philosophical moment is one of reaction because the new is foreclosed. The Judaeo-Christian transcendence of finitude encounters the death of god and is caught fast. Either one accepts finitude, or one delays and dissipates it through the “imaginary and tragic infinite of translation.”⁴⁵ Both paths are ultimately a “nihilism.”⁴⁶ And yet, the death of god cannot be denied because the god of philosophy is no true god, only some “ultimate being.”⁴⁷ The fusion that Badiou locates in the historical figure of Jesus itself appears foreclosed.

What, then, is to be done? Is there a possibility of a new access to the infinite? Badiou would argue that there is, and this argument finds its basis in modern mathematics. To get there, we must examine the four possible orientations to the infinite that Badiou identifies.

The first hypothesis is that the One is Infinite and Transcendent. This is the hypothesis of the New God, and so an anatheism, god after the death of god, a “creation,” a “new vision.”⁴⁸ The second hypothesis is that the One is Infinite and Immanent, which Badiou identifies as the “modern vitalism, a new philosophy of life.” The third hypothesis is that the One is Finite but is yet “something divine,” a “Weak God” or a “modern paganism.” However, for Badiou, this perspective also ultimately is a “dispersive law,” effecting a “dissemination” of the One by the dissemination of the divine. The powerful intuition of the universe as single is lost. The fourth hypothesis, then, is that the One is Finite and Neutral—it is “indifferent”; it “does not work for our satisfaction.” The “clarification” of this final hypothesis is what leads Badiou to the void.⁴⁹

To begin a philosophical inquiry, we begin in nothing, like Descartes, like Socrates. The alternative is to begin by the infinite, but this Badiou rightly identifies as the “religious way,” the way of revelation, which saps philosophical questions of their force because these questions find themselves already preempted by an answer. To do philosophy we begin in nothing, but to begin in nothing “we must affirm that nothingness exists.”⁵⁰ This is the Badiousian bootstrap, his subtle shift from “knowledge” to “use.”⁵¹ We affirm the “existence of the fact that it can be said that I know nothing,” like Socrates and Descartes, and we affirm the existence of “nothing as an experience,” like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre.⁵² These are the two modes of the “subjective possibility” of nothingness, but for Badiou, this possibility is predicated on a further possibility, the “possibility of a trace, of a pure ascription of nothingness,” a “pure beginning, a name for nothing, the smallest thing possible,” and “it will be for us the beginning.” This is how we begin with void, but also this is why we begin with void, the modern mathematical basis for the reinstantiation of the infinite.⁵³

Without rehearsing Badiou’s argument already covered in “Pure Indetermination,” let us try to be precise here, following through on our dialectic. In Parmenides, being is, alone, complete, and inviolable. But his denial of the possibility of birth or perishing denies the existence of the real structures that tell a different story, indeed, which necessitate a different story. Anaxagoras sees this difficulty, and with resources drawn from Anaximander inverts Parmenides, allowing for what is to remain alone, complete, and inviolable, but now also as without limit. Anaxagoras thus opens Eleatic thought to the Milesian intuition that allows not only for being but the becoming of being, the equiprimordial dual which we interpreted with help from Gilbert Simondon and his theory of the preindividual (being) and its individuation or dephasing (becoming). Finally, Badiou’s positing of the “trace” of nothingness is the very framing that allows us to look back on the individuation, as individuals, and understand its basis in an inaccessible, unrecoverable prior phase, the pure indetermination and infinite density or saturation of preindividual being. Short circuiting classical and romantic thought in this way, we (re)discover a properly generic and radical scientific thought that stands in direct and groundless relation to the real. The framing, the trace, the individuation—a sort of cosmic microwave background for our philosophy—remains neutral, unjustifiable and unreasonable, but in this factiality of what is,⁵⁴ we also recover the Parmenidean assertion that it is and it cannot not be in its truest sense as the pure affirmation of that which does not require and is utterly indifferent to the affirmation of its existence.

Notes

Alain Badiou, “Infinity and Set Theory: How to Begin with the Void,” European Graduate School Video Lectures, YouTube, January 12, 2012 [2011], https://youtu.be/I1G_SI1-W-4. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “A History of Finitude and Infinity: Romanticism and Modernity,” European Graduate School Video Lectures, December 17, 2011, https://youtu.be/DyZmXPLeT2Q. ↩
Badiou, “A History of Finitude and Infinity: Romanticism and Modernity,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “A History of Finitude and Infinity: Romanticism and Modernity,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “A History of Finitude and Infinity: Romanticism and Modernity,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Eudemus in Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 56. ↩
Parmenides, F1, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 57. ↩
Parmenides, F2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 57. ↩
Alexander Galloway, “Superpositions,” Culture and Communication, October 11, 2014, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/superpositions. ↩
Parmenides, F1, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 57, and Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 55. In his “On the Black Universe,” François Laruelle writes: “Black is anterior to the absence of light, whether this absence be the shadows that extinguish it, whether it be it nothingness or its positive opposite. The black universe is not a negative light.” See Laruelle, “On the Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color” (1988), http://www.recessart.org/wp-content/uploads/Laruelle-Black-Universe1.pdf, 4. ↩
Laruelle, “On the Black Universe,” 2, 3, 4. ↩
Laruelle, “On the Black Universe,” 6. ↩
Parmenides, F3, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 58. ↩
Parmenides, F3, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 58. ↩
Parmenides, F5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 58. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 51. ↩
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, UK: Routledge, 2003) and Riccardo Manzotti, The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (New York, NY: OR Books, 2018). ↩
Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 45. ↩
Parmenides, F8, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 60. ↩
Parmenides, F8, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 59-60. Syntax adjusted for readability. ↩
Parmenides, F8, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 59. ↩
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), 1. ↩
Laruelle, “On the Black Universe,” 2. ↩
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006), trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 27. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 55. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 53, note 7. ↩
Anaxagoras, F1, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 122. ↩
Anaxagoras, F5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 122-123. ↩
Elias of Crete, Commentary on the Speeches of Gregory of Nazianzus, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 123. ↩
Elias of Crete, Commentary on the Speeches of Gregory of Nazianzus, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 123. ↩
Anaxagoras, F1 and F2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 122. ↩
Aëtius, Opinions, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 123, and Aristotle, On the Heavens, 302a28-b4, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 124. ↩
Aëtius, Opinions, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 123. ↩
Aëtius, Opinions, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 124. ↩
Anaxagoras, F10, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 125. ↩
Anaxagoras, F10, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 125; Aristotle, Physics, 187a23-b7, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 125; and Aristotle, Physics, 203a16-33, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 127. ↩
Aristotle, On the Heavens, 302a28-b4, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 124. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
I will not delve into theology here, but there has been much recent writing re-litigating this conception of god. See Yujin Nagasawa, Maximal God: A New Defense of Perfect Being Theism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Jeff Speaks, The Greatest Possible Being (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018). Jonathan Kvanvig has reviewed both for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. See Kvanvig, NDPR, May 1, 2018, https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/maximal-god-a-new-defense-of-perfect-being-theism/, and Kvanvig, NDPR, January 4, 2019, https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-greatest-possible-being/. ↩
Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), and Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Badiou, “How to Begin with the Void,” n.p. ↩
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 79. Factiality is Meillassoux’s term for the “principle of unreason,” the principle that precedes or is beneath the principle of sufficient reason (which Parmenides invokes), which dictates that there is “no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is.” See After Finitude, 60. ↩

From Governance to Planning

2021-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “From Governance to Planning: Nuclearity, Ludology, Anarchy.” Response to New World Order: For Planetary Governance, April 10, 2021. https://zenodo.org/record/4685025.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

This paper responds to the call “For Planetary Governance” written by Benjamin Bratton and issued by The Terraforming and Strelka Mag. Through a hermeneutics of the nuclear facilitated by Martin Heidegger, Jean Baudrillard, and Patrick Jagoda, it examines the atomic bomb as the final symbol of a nationalist, metaphysical age of spirit, and the initial structure of a postnational, antimetaphysical age of control. Progressing from Baudrillard’s nihilism through Jagoda’s ludology, this paper then deploys David Graeber’s critique of bureaucracy to interpret the generalization of control in the intermediate international age, a generalization that prevents passage to the ethical planetary governance Bratton solicits. Finally, Jagoda’s theory of experimental games is placed into conversation with Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s critique of governance in an attempt articulate a combinatorial science of play and planning suited to a properly antimetaphysical and ethical planetarity.

Keywords: Governance, Planning, Nuclearity, Ludology, Anarchy, Jean Baudrillard, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, Patrick Jagoda, David Graeber, Benjamin Bratton, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Legacy Russell

I

We are called to address “the question of governance,” a governance, writes Benjamin Bratton, that might be suitable for the construction of an “alternative planetarity.” But, insofar as this call requires of us a new way of thinking, it is necessary that we first address thinking as it is, in this moment.¹

In his “Memorial Address” (1955), Martin Heidegger argues that thought is like a “field,” a “ground for growth.”² Such thought is “meditative,” rather than “calculative,” and it is this cognitive mode that Heidegger considers to be characteristic of the human being, a mode that is imperilled by modernity: “man today is in flight from thinking.”³ The calculative, the computational, “never stops, never collects itself,” closer to an “expressway” in its structure than a “field.”⁴

There is an allure to Heidegger’s reasoning. Highway driving and the infinite scroll can both induce kinetosis, motion sickness. As a remedy for this nausea, Heidegger prescribes a return to our “home ground,” declaring that the “flourishing of any genuine work depend[s] upon its roots in a native soil,” that indeed for any “human work to flourish, man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether,” into the “open realm of the spirit.”⁵ If the end of the human being is thought, the “life-giving homeland” is the beginning, root and ground, the self-soil of cognition.⁶ Modernity, for Heidegger, threatens to wash this “farmstead” away in its torrent.⁷

And yet, in Heidegger’s invocation of “spirit,” that which actually subtends his address is revealed. Jacques Derrida, in his Of Spirit (1987), remarks of an earlier address by Heidegger, the “Rectorship Address” (1933), that spirit, Geist, is neither “pneuma nor spiritus,” but the “flame” that can “be said, and thus thought, only in German,” the “self-affirmation” that is, and can only be, the self-affirmation of the German “order.”⁸ This order is the “value of command, of leading, duction or conduction, the Führung, and the value of mission: sending, an order given.”⁹ It is this “mission” that sends the “Führer, the guide,” Heidegger as rector in this case, and it is the Führer who in turn sends all others.¹⁰ Heidegger positions himself as the one “to guide this high school spiritually,” and that those who follow this spiritual mission, “masters and pupils, owe their existence and their strength only to a true common rootedness.”¹¹ As Derrida notes, this “onto-typological motif” of the Führer as spiritual guide thus necessarily yokes spirit with “force,” Prägekraft, shaping or formative power, that by which the mission of spirit is made a command and by which those who hear the command are made into ones to be commanded.¹²

This command involves four key directives: “questioning,” “world,” “earth-and-blood,” and “resolution.”¹³ The force of Heidegger’s spirit is to command the “will to know”¹⁴ or the “will to essence,” whereby the “true spiritual world” can be brought about with a “a resolution which accords with the tone of the origin,” that which is “the deepest power of conservation of its forces of earth and blood,” essence mounting from its depth up into its proper “grandeur.”¹⁵ In case this “spiritual world” does not yet appear familiar, Derrida says plainly that Heidegger is “spiritualizing nazism.”¹⁶ Heidegger’s geistige Kraft or “spiritual force” is the force of National Socialism.¹⁷

But what of governance? Derrida provides the commentary that gives motive both to his study and to this excursus with which we have begun here. To found a discourse in spirit, even one that “state[s] [its] opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism,” is to found a discourse in an “oppositional determination” predicated at minimum on a “voluntarist form” of the subject, which nevertheless resolves at maximum to a “metaphysics of subjectivity.”¹⁸ Even the most noble of “axiomatic[s],” democracy and human rights, insofar as the freedom they promise is a “formal liberty” rooted in “abstract universality,”¹⁹ are predicated on such a spiritual discourse, and as such find themselves “haunted” by the “most fatal figure of this revenance”—Nazi geistige Kraft.²⁰

Thus, if we return to consider our present way of knowing, the calculative or computational mode, and the nausea this mode induces, we no longer find recourse to an alternative—or rather, our search for an “alternative planetarity” is spurred on by that which was always already alternative, that which is in flight from the ground, and indeed, is severed from any originary ground. If meditative thought, which Heidegger champions as the remedy for the nausea of modernity, is nothing but honey to make the pill of Nazism go down easier, how then are we to think? Do we allow ourselves to “fall into the clutches of planning and calculation, of organization and automation?”²¹ Such would imply the call for planetary governance that instigated this essay, that which takes its cue from “[a]rtificiality, astronomy, and automation”—i.e., non-soil, non-earth, non-spirit—and which takes for its question not the question of the meaning of being but the question of the “knowing, modeling, mobilization, regulation, [and] distribution”²² of that being in which, we might say with Jean-Paul Sartre, “appearance becomes full positivity,” not as “opposed to being” but the “measure of it.”²³

Heidegger’s Geist “confers the most reassuring and elevated spiritual legitimacy on everything in which, and on all before whom, he commits himself, on everything he thus sanctions and consecrates at such a height.”²⁴ But this background text demands a “world-picture (Weltbild)” and a “map of the world (Weltcarte)” that necessarily entail a geopolitics that is none other than a Weltpolitik, that imperialism under which the planetary is subsumed to the nation.²⁵ If instead we open the question of governance by way of a science of appearances, we refuse the mantel of spiritual legitimacy entirely, refuse the link to any authorizing ground, refuse the “being-behind-the-appearance” the mission and conduction of which would guarantee the position of the master.²⁶ Such a science of appearances recognizes that existence is “absolutely indicative of itself,” without reference to any universal.²⁷

We must be careful, however, not to assume that such a science necessarily furnishes us with a politics nor, for that matter, with any functional system of governance. To “fall” into that which Heidegger positions as opposite to “meditative” thought is indeed to fall into that “oppositional determination” that, however minimal, eventually arrives back at a metaphysics of spirit. If we are to avoid the kerygma of yet another Weltgeist, so reifying the present world order as it is, it is necessary that we explore that which provides the conditions, in Heidegger’s reading, for its emergence: the nuclear bomb.²⁸

II

“The age that is now beginning has been called of late the atomic age,” writes Heidegger, the “most conspicuous symbol” of which “is the atom bomb.”²⁹ Nuclear physics is for Heidegger the apotheosis of calculative thought, the ultimate means for human beings to “set free new energies in nature.”³⁰ Calculative thought converts nature into a “gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry,” which extractive mode is most perfectly realized in nuclear fission, the splitting of atomic nuclei to release “gigantic” quantities of energy for human use—often to catastrophic ends.³¹ The nuclear as such fully realizes the possibility of a technology that could “break out somewhere” and “destroy everything,” an absolute possibility akin to Heidegger’s being-toward-death, but at a planetary scale.³²

In his “Man and Machine” (1934), the Russian existentialist Nicolas Berdyaev argues that the “planetary feeling of the earth” comes about through the “actualism and titanism of technique,” a feeling that becomes “especially apparent in the field of military technique.”³³ Prior to World War I, the “destructive power of the weapons of old was very limited and localized; with cannon, muskets, and sabers neither great human masses nor large towns could be destroyed nor could the very existence of civilization be threatened.”³⁴ In the aftermath of the First World War, however, we see that “[a]ll this is now feasible,” and Berdyaev speculates on the possibility of future cataclysms not only on a “historical but on a cosmic scale.”³⁵ Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be bombed just eleven years later.

“When man is given power whereby he may rule the world and wipe out a considerable part of its inhabits and their culture,” writes Berdyaev, “then everything depends upon man’s spiritual and moral standards, on the question: In whose name will he use this power—of what spirit is he?”³⁶ But, as we have seen, to ask this question of spirit is always to enter into an oppositional determination, to presuppose a being-behind-the-appearance that might authorize our decisions. Berdyaev can only take us so far.

It is Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) who provides us with a model of calculative thought native to the atomic age that does not smuggle with it a guarantor or guide, those servitors of spirit.³⁷ To cite Sartre once again, both to repudiate Heidegger and to draw forward a continuity, in Baudrillard the “appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privileged”—none has “a secret reverse side,” nor are any referred to some “hidden reality.”³⁸

For Baudrillard, the “sovereign difference” between “maps” and “territories,” between appearance and being, has “disappeared”—the “imaginary of representation” is lost and with it too “all of metaphysics.”³⁹ No longer can an “imaginary coextensivity” of the “real and its concept” be proposed as a ground for cognition, the field from which we might mount up to spirit.⁴⁰ Rather, we discover that the real itself is “produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control,” an “operational” real, the “hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.”⁴¹

Certainly, Berdyaev proposes something similar, the passage from “organism” to “organization,” from “growth” to “construction,” and as a consequence the advent of new “organized bodies” that have no homeland to which they might return.⁴² And indeed, Berdyaev presents us with a precursor to Baudrillard’s hyperreal, what he terms “superphysical reality,” actual and titanic and irrevocably sundered from spirit.⁴³ But Berdyaev does not help us through this sundering, nor have we somehow moved beyond Baudrillard’s critique. We go about politicking and playing at governance, each of us sheltering our idiosyncratic metaphysics so that we do not have to accept our nihilistic “fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us.”⁴⁴ We encounter a profound “melancholia,” the “inherent quality … of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems,” and yet we defer and deter our melancholy through therapy, the “generalized process of indifferentiation” whereby we put off acknowledging that there “is no more stage,” that only the “desert grows” in its place, the “monstrous finality” that awaits us.⁴⁵

To be a nihilist, however, to “observe,” “accept,” “assume” (that is, take on), and “analyze,” is to organize for the “imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight.”⁴⁶ Nihilism is a terrorism against the “hegemony” of the system, a hegemony that is itself the “other nihilism,” the “other terrorism,” the otherness of which is merely a ploy, the system in its deployment of nihilistic “indifference” and terroristic “neutralization” which was always already first to do so.⁴⁷ Without nihilism, any revolutionary or ultra-radical actions—the “ruses of desire,” the “revolutionary micrology of the quotidian,” the possibilities of “molecular drift”—will only ever be deterred and neutralized.⁴⁸

We need this nihilistic orientation to superphysical nuclearity, to the hyperreality disclosed by the planetary, which is to say, we need a new collective “anticipatory resolution” that is only properly “authentic” in its abandonment of individual “facticity” in favour of collective “factiality”—the fact, as Quentin Meillassoux argues, that “only the contingency of what is, is not itself contingent … that contingency alone is necessary.”⁴⁹ The existential question—why are there beings at all instead of nothing?⁵⁰—is replaced with a historical question: why do there continue to be beings instead of nothing? And it is this question that, in its implication of the absolute possibility of nothingness, simultaneously reveals the possibility that there could be something else.

The nuclear signifies the absolute “irreference” of what is, that there is no ground, a signification that is, therefore, the “liquidation of all referentials” in an “operation of deterring” the “real process” of extinction.⁵¹ It becomes clear that the “atomic age,” the dominion of calculation, is not “thoughtlessness,” but the technical concretion of the impossibility of a ground for thought. Spiritual, metaphysical thought tried to deny this impossibility with obscene violence, but its defeat was already sealed, a closure made only more final by the obscenity of the bomb. In the wake of World War II, these two obscenities are conjoined in the thought of nuclear holocaust, another onto-typological yoking, but this time of Heidegger’s two regimes of cognition—that which is now past with the interminably deterred present. Futurity is foreclosed, replaced with progress, and history in turn is rendered static by the “museum.”⁵² The nuclear reveals the possibility of an otherwise the realization of which is denied by the planetary system of the nuclear’s deployment. It is little wonder that today we find ourselves paralyzed before the climate emergency, which has largely replaced prior generations’ concerns over nuclear holocaust. We never learned to think through the “hyperreal event[]” of the nuclear, an event we now find “indefinitely refracted” in other scenes of total annihilation—to name only the climactic: global heating, rising seas, ocean acidification, sea ice melting, water pollution, drought and scarcity of water, soil erosion, air pollution, insect die-off, and nature loss⁵³—somehow always imminent yet always deferred.⁵⁴

We cannot move on yet. We need Baudrillard’s clear-eyed nihilism, what we might describe as his “passionate, anxious freedom toward death, which is free of the illusions of the they”—here, the “they” being that common sense now realized in the total, orbital logic of deterrence.⁵⁵ We must press on in our articulation of the structure of the nuclear, orienting ourselves in the torrent of the “programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine” of hyperreal, combinatorial planetarity, if we are to reclaim that something else which the absolute irreference of the bomb implies.⁵⁶

III

The nuclear bomb is the “symbol” of the age of calculation, Heidegger claims, but insofar as this age brings with it a new epistemology, we find that the symbol as such is fundamentally transformed, reconfigured as structure, less sign and more system, a symbol with neither centre nor referent. The only real, “nondeterrent” use of the bomb, that horrific double punctuation enacted by the United States, signalled the end of the representational regime in which the bomb could have operated as a symbol, the passage from the symbolic to the “system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life.”⁵⁷ The saturation that is distinctive of the symbol is replaced with the “zero-sum signs” of the system—“neutralized, indifferent, equivalent.”⁵⁸ Even the old conflicts are deterred, the “archaic violence” of war, competition between subjects or spirits, replaced with “a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes.”⁵⁹ There is no more “allegiance,” only “complicity.”⁶⁰

Nuclear holocaust becomes a “pretext” that “interrupts, neutralizes, freezes … any revolt, any story [from being] deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation.”⁶¹ “Damocles’ nuclear sword” is therefore what makes possible a “universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect,” paradoxically, “is not at all aimed at an atomic clash,” because the threat of the clash alone is what freezes all other narratives—it is the hyperreal event par excellence.⁶²

“Deterrence is not a strategy,” writes Baudrillard, “it circulates and is exchanged.”⁶³ Through this circulation, the “progressive satellization of the whole planet” is effected, the instantiation of the orbital “hypermodel of security.”⁶⁴ Consequently, “the Law no longer exists,” replaced with a “[p]rogrammed microcosm” into which both real and concept are folded, “the total universe of the norm” in which the only law is “the operational immanence of every detail”—“[t]rajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment.”⁶⁵ The nuclear and the orbital control system are the “vectors” whereby the real is made satellary, free-floating, the ungrounding of cognition, the equalization of form and content, the neutralization of the distinction therebetween. As Baudrillard writes, “the terrestrial principle of reality”—Heidegger’s “field,” “farmstead,” “native soil,” “homeland”—“becomes eccentric, hyperreal, and insignificant … all the terrestrial microsystems are satellized and lose their autonomy.”⁶⁶

This “gigantic involution” is a kind of existential “blackmail.”⁶⁷ As “liberating potentialities” increase, so too do control systems—the real must always be deferred, because if the real ever arrives, it will annihilate itself, annihilate us.⁶⁸ Emancipatory energies “freeze in their own fire, they deter themselves,” the system experiencing a “vast saturation … by its own forces, now neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive.”⁶⁹ If we are truly to attempt to think a new governance for a new planetarity we must reckon with this state of affairs.

Baudrillard asks: “what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could exist behind this enclosure”?⁷⁰ This is a rhetorical question, on his part. The only possibility he foresees is that of an “explosion toward the center … an implosion where all these energies would be abolished in a catastrophic process … a reversion of the whole cycle toward a minimal point.”⁷¹ Nothing exists beyond the nuclear because the nuclear is that which reveals the groundlessness of the real while simultaneously threatening its annihilation. It is the unsurpassable, the “culminating point of available energy,” which is to say, of the real as standing-reserve, signifying, by its indefinite refraction, a succession of events “without logic,” or rather, with the only logic: that any event might be the end; that there will be a final generation.⁷²

To be clear, this is not an empty thought experiment. To say there will be a final generation is indeed to recognize the very factiality of existence, the fact “that contingency alone is necessary.”⁷³ Life, cognition, the universe—none of this is necessary. The historical question of being—why do there continue to be beings instead of nothing?—can thus be rephrased pragmatically: how do we go on? The absolute possibility of the bomb causes the philosophical program that sought to elaborate a syntax of the real to dissolve.⁷⁴ There is no outside; the real has no double. We once again encounter the need for a science of appearances, but now this science presents itself as an ethical demand for an intimate combinatorics—the labour of analyzing, designing, enumerating, graphing, grouping, and ordering, all from the inside. Our new science does not operate in some “alternative realit[y],” as Patrick Jagoda contends in Experimental Games (2020), but is rather “of the world and in it,” refusing metaphysical duplicity while playing with modes of “action, interaction, enactment, expression, participation, and interpellation.”⁷⁵

Baudrillard states that “[n]o strategy is possible any longer,” while also remarking that nuclear deterrence is governed by none other than the “strategy of games.”⁷⁶ And indeed, in the place of philosophy, what we have been invoking here with our intimate combinatorial science can also be understood as a ludology. As Jagoda carefully demonstrates, games are, indeed, the model of governance that emerges at the planetary scale after World War II, the model of the nuclear that comes to be the model for everything else. As such, it is to games that we now must turn.

IV

Let us chart a brief conceptual history of what we might understand as ludological governance. First, Baudrillard’s abovementioned theorization of law as replaced with “the operational immanence of every detail”—“[t]rajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment”—indicates the actually existing governance characteristic of control systems.⁷⁷ Second, in her Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Donna Haraway elaborates a cyborg epistemology that does not think “in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, [and] costs of lowering constraints.”⁷⁸ Third, Eric Zimmerman, in his “Manifesto for a Ludic Century” (2013), identifies a departure from “linear media,” especially notable in the twenty-first century, toward “game-like experiences,” rendering media and culture “increasingly systemic, modular, customizable, and participatory.”⁷⁹ Fourth, in response to the absolute possibility of nuclear annihilation, we encounter the ethical demand of a combinatorial science that emerges as the only possible strategy under the actual and titanic regime of deterrence, deploying such tactics as analyzing, designing, enumerating, graphing, grouping, and ordering. Fifth and finally, Jagoda argues that gamification indicates a “notable movement” in “social, political, and economic life” away from “appearing,” in the mid-twentieth century “society of the spectacle” (as theorized by Guy Debord), to “acting,” which can be characterized by the “paramount operations” noted above: “action, interaction, enactment, expression, participation, and interpellation”—which is to say, by ludological operations.⁸⁰ This brief history, itself a combinatorial game of citation, helps orient us toward Bratton’s assertion that the question of planetary governance is a question of “knowing, modeling, mobilization, regulation, [and] distribution,” allowing us to draw the obvious parallels between these sets of operations and so make the claim that what Bratton is in fact soliciting is a ludological approach to planetary governance.

It has been necessary to chart this path, beginning with Heideggerian spiritualism and passing through Baudrillardian nihilism, for two main reasons. First, Baudrillard’s nihilism helps us to avoid a transcendentalization of games or play that would position either concept as ground, a new farmstead from which a new spirit might mount up and take its authoritative place on the world stage. If, as Derrida writes, we effect a “Destruktion” of philosophy—of the imaginary of representation—but do so “still in the name of spirit,” we risk perpetuating Heidegger’s “diabolical” program, allowing metaphysics to return and so opening the door, once again, to the figures of racism, totalitarianism, nazism, and fascism that we were so desperately attempting to forestall.⁸¹

Second, Baudrillard’s nihilism helps us to avoid positioning games or gamification, as the solution to either his question—what project, power, strategy, or subject is native to the system of control?—or to Bratton’s question of planetary governance. What the nuclear paradigm discloses is the absolute irreference of the real, that the real has neither reverse side nor double—a fact that, we have already noted, precedes the technological concretion of the nuclear. As Sartre writes, “[b]eing is, without reason, without cause, and without necessity; the very definition of being reveals to us its original contingency.”⁸² Games and gamification cannot be treated as keys for unlocking the hidden reality behind the real, the being-behind-the-appearances—rather, games and gamification are modes of acting in, interacting with, enacting, expressing, participating with, and interpellating the real, any of which may be more or less effective, more or less emancipatory, more or less responsive to any experimental criteria we may choose. This is why our combinatorial science, and any ludological governance that may be derived from it, is always already a matter of ethics, of an intimate politics. Gilles Deleuze, in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990), writes that there “is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”⁸³ For us, these “weapons,” what games might afford, are the tactics and operations required for the performance of an ethical ludological governance.

The planetary order “produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks”⁸⁴ is the society of control, which we have explored in detail through Baudrillard’s theory, and which Deleuze positions in relation to the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.⁸⁵ The society of control described by both Baudrillard and Deleuze is also what is commonly known as neoliberalism, a term Jagoda usefully describes as a “heuristic,” traceable by “varied genealogies” back to Hayekian theory in the late 1940s, the economic experiments of the 1970s, and the Reaganite and Thatcherite politics of the 1980s, all while functioning as a point in a broader historical constellation including “Taylorism, post-Fordism, postindustrialism, and advanced capitalism.”⁸⁶ Given the scope of what we are dealing with here, and the fact that our object has undergone a significant transformation “since its inception,”⁸⁷ Baudrillard’s condensation of this constellation into the hyperreal event of nuclearity needs to be updated. This “geopolitical architecture,” as Bratton terms it in The Stack (2015),⁸⁸ clearly anticipates its own alternatives—“modulation[s]” foreclosing actual individuations⁸⁹. The call for a new world order, for a passage from the “few strong columns” of post-war internationalism to a “dynamic mix of materials and structures” at some anticipated planetary, post-national stage,⁹⁰ entails only transformation without actual change, failing to escape the “coils of the serpent.”⁹¹ So, when Jagoda contends that “games are the material and metaphorical means by which that paradigm,” neoliberalism, “establishes and perpetuates itself,” we must take him seriously.⁹² We need to move forward with care, with neither fear nor hope, and continue, with Baudrillard, to observe, accept, assume, and analyze these weapons that we encounter. Games are tools, and indeed, games can be weapons. But they are not intrinsically emancipatory. Games do things. They are the model of action in the control society, but they provide us with neither ethics nor politics—that is up to us.

The proliferation of games as the primary “armature[] and diagram[] of global power”⁹³ occurred in a feedback loop with the proliferation of the social, economic, and political theories, and the more general historical conditions, noted above. Specifically, since the publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1944), games have operated as a formal and cognitive apparatus for the globalization of the human species, providing the “groundwork for creating a scientific language for understanding the entire social world.”⁹⁴ Games facilitated the shift from an understanding of the human as spirit or subject to actor or agent, an understanding that was adopted and extended by neoliberal programs in an effort to not only “describe and model” the behaviours of actors, as Von Neumann and Morgenstern did, but to “prescribe” desirable behaviours.⁹⁵ Biopolitics, governmentality, soft power—these modes of governance are deployed on top of the logic of games, “set[s] of regulated activities” or “set[s] of rules,” a new “pedagogy” for actors in control societies.⁹⁶ And this same logic is the logic that subtends, and was in fact pioneered by, the orbital system of nuclear deterrence.

If we maintain this focus on game theory, we begin to see how Baudrillard’s theorization of the hegemony of deterrence can be updated. Game theory, taken to its “logical extreme,” was partially responsible for the “historical US policy transition from MAD to NUTS (nuclear utilization targeting selection)” in the 1970s.⁹⁷ The nuclear system of “zero-sum signs” that Baudrillard describes as “neutralized, indifferent, equivalent” is, specifically, the paradigm of mutual assured destruction wherein the “two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity”⁹⁸—a system of “bilateral deterrence.”⁹⁹ With the institution of NUTS in 1980 and then the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, the system became one of “asymmetric deterrence, escalation dominance, coercive bargaining, and [American] hegemony.”¹⁰⁰ In a way, NUTS assured the formal end of the Soviet Union before its actual end eleven years later. With NUTS, the neutral system of existential blackmail perpetuated by the nuclear was tilted. The absolute possibility of nuclear annihilation became not only a “pretext” for a “universal security system,” but a pretext for the American administration of that system, and thus the assurance of American interests at the planetary scale.¹⁰¹

What is more, NUTS became viable as a nuclear strategy for the United States because of progress in the development of integrated circuit technologies, which saw huge advances in their design through applications in precision first-strike technologies like the B-70 Valkyrie nuclear bomber and the Minutemen nuclear missile program, both in 1958.¹⁰² These advances led to the production of the first “monolithic integrated circuit” in 1959, which is the fundamental technology of modern computation and the means by which the society of control insinuated itself into the lives of everyday people the world over.¹⁰³ The feedback loop closes; the coils of the serpent tighten. It is not a surprise that “GAFA”—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—is the first of the “multipolar hemispherical stacks” to have risen to ascendance.¹⁰⁴ The power of these corporations is derived, technologically, from American nuclear hegemony.

Bratton’s theory of “The Stack” is highly effective in the charting of paths forward through the control society, but if GAFA is positioned as simply equivalent to BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent), we neglect the uniquely American formation of this post-national technological system. To make this claim is not to assert that BAT, or any other stack, might not diverge from the American model, or that the American model is somehow ontologically necessary, but rather that the model ought not be ignored, just as we ought not ignore the Westphalian template of the nation even when nations the world over bear little resemblance to the European nations of the seventeenth century. If we remain ignorant of the American overdetermination of the society of control, the fact that the control society described by the likes of Baudrillard and Deleuze is American in its inception, our search for new weapons, new tools, new tactics and operations, will only lead us to become blind soldiers of yet another army, one with interests far more insidious than those of sovereign states in the Westphalian mould.

The society of control is historically notable in that it replaces the “distinct castings” of disciplinary enclosures with the “self-deforming cast” of the one actual and titanic enclosure “that will continuously change from one moment to the other.”¹⁰⁵ Wherein disciplinary societies subjects “never cease[] passing from one closed environment to another”—family, school, barracks, factory, hospital, prison, nation—the society of control provides actors with no exit whatsoever.¹⁰⁶ If the “User layer” of The Stack is the layer where the “effects” of each of the other layers “are coherently personified,” what must be understood about the control society is the planetary universalization of the actor- or agent-model of the human which consequently subjectivates the human as a user of a platform, all of which operate at the machine-level according to an American computational architecture.¹⁰⁷ The platform in question, GAFA or BAT or otherwise, matters little—what matters is that the human becomes a subject of a platform, because the platform as such ensures the ongoing dominance of the American model of control. Bratton says as much: The Stack “is not THE Stack, as in one final enclosure, but the Stack, as a generic frame that proliferates and multiples [sic] of itself as the stacks we have and the stacks to come.”¹⁰⁸ This “generic frame” is precisely the American modelization of the real, itself predicated on the contingency of the real, which we have been emphasizing here.

Overdetermined in this way, any radical possibility that we might imagine for games finds itself neutralized by “limitless postponements,”¹⁰⁹ by proliferations of the generic frame. As subjects of control, every aspect of our lives becomes gamified, and all of us are transformed into gamers, subservient users of the planetary machine. For we platform subjects, the thought of emancipation is substituted with “points, badges, leaderboards, [and] personalized content.”¹¹⁰ Governance is already ludological, not because games are inherently good for people, but because games are uniquely successful in the “condition[ing] [of] players to be more familiar with and interested in digital and networked media, requiring them to analyze information, multitask across crowded hypermediated interfaces, develop hand-eye coordination, discover operational efficiencies, and submit to management techniques organized around digital rewards and punishments”—which is to say, games are uniquely successful in training humans to be ever more “valuable” sources of “human capital” in the society of control.¹¹¹ Our intimate and combinatorial program was anticipated long before we conceived of it, every ethical and political project replaced with the imperative for each “person to enhance his or her own value”—in short, ludological governance, as it already exists, means that “everything becomes economized.”¹¹²

Before we can move forward, we must reckon with the planetary generalization of this uniquely American model of control. The only weapons in sight are the ones being used against us. The “Pandora’s box” of potentiality that Jagoda points toward at the end of his discussion of neoliberalism and control systems is not yet attainable. Before we can access any such potentiality, we must take a detour through the history of American planetary administration—the history of bureaucracy.

V

To this point, we have positioned our argument at the hinge between two paradigms of thought: the meditative and the calculative. Heidegger associates “spirit” with the meditative and “planning” with the calculative, contending that planning or calculation is necessarily less than spirit and meditation. However, as Derrida makes painfully clear, Heidegger’s repeat invocation of “spirit” as a conceptual category is nothing but a superficial justification for his Nazi politics, and should as such be handled cautiously. To propose a new “spirit” of the new regime of calculation would be to fall back into Heidegger’s fascist logic, merely elaborating the same structure with different terms.

So, we turned to the calculative, to the nuclear paradigm, to see what might be gleaned from this rootless, groundless mode of thought. With Baudrillard, we saw the nuclear bomb as the simultaneous abolition of the age of spirit and the institution of the age of control. International, oppositional conflict, most catastrophically realized in World War II, was replaced with the planetary order of nuclear blackmail. The fire of Geist was superseded by the cold of deterrence.

Finally, with Jagoda, we saw how the developing logic of games, game theory proper, assured the ascension of American planetary hegemony, a hegemony officially instituted by the policy transition from MAD to NUTS. The nuclear blackmail of the Cold War, the world held hostage by the Big Two, gave way to American administration.

But to talk about this administration, to talk about the “columns” of our contemporary world order, the order we are called to reform or replace, is also to talk about the planetary export of American bureaucracy. As David Graeber makes amply clear in The Utopia of Rules (2015), we cannot interpret the world as it is today without understanding the peculiarities of this historical form.¹¹³

Bureaucracy emerged in post-monarchical societies in order to regulate markets. Historically, markets have always been regulated by governments, and indeed, created by governments.¹¹⁴ The free market is an illusion—any such “freedom” has always been guaranteed by state power. However, with the revolutionary transitions across Europe from “absolutist monarchy” to democratic governance, it “turned out that maintaining a free market economy required a thousand times more paperwork” than the fiat power of the king—which is to say, it required the expansion of bureaucracy.¹¹⁵ Democratic nations operate through a distribution of authority, and bureaucracy is the apparatus or armature of this distribution. However, in the European model, bureaucracy was typically understood as something separate from the operation of the markets and social exchange generally, which it existed to regulate. Graeber cites Max Weber, who wrote that the “idea that the bureau activities of the state are intrinsically different in character from the management of private economic offices is a continental European notion and, by way of contrast, is totally foreign to the American way.”¹¹⁶ This is to say that “Americans simply assumed that governments and business—or big business, at any rate—were run the same way.”¹¹⁷

We see, then, in the wake of World War II, that the “very first thing the United States did, on officially taking over the reins from Great Britain,” was to “set up the world’s first genuinely planetary bureaucratic institutions in the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and GATT, later to become the WTO.”¹¹⁸ The significance of this move cannot be understated. The institution of the great post-war “columns” was a uniquely American “attempt[] to administer everything and everyone,” a move that was not only uniquely American but historically unique, insofar as the prior great powers sought only to conquer or trade with other nations.¹¹⁹

To be clear, bureaucracy itself is not unique to the United States. It was the United Sates and Germany who were the “pioneers” of the “new, private bureaucracies,” wherein “bureaucratic techniques” were applied to the “private sector,” so producing the “modern corporation” at the end of the 1800s.¹²⁰ Indeed, it is the awful irony that the sort of calculative, strategic thought Heidegger decried is what facilitated the atrocities of the regime he justified in the name of spirit. But, with German defeat in World War II and the advent of the planetary regime of nuclear deterrence, it is the American model of bureaucracy that came to hold sway.

What makes this model so insidious is the passage from “molds” to “modulation” that it effects.¹²¹ The catastrophic clashes between enclosures are replaced with deformations and transmutations of the planetary system, global experiments with social, political, and economic organization. The transition from MAD to NUTS was one such transmutation; the “strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy” in the 1970s is another.¹²² We already noted the “economic experiments” of this period with reference to neoliberalism and game theory above, but Graeber helps us understand the essential link between these experiments and their earlier forms. The 1970s saw a move away from “corporatism” to financialization.¹²³ Financialization marked a shift “away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually towards the financial structure as a whole.”¹²⁴ The political regimes of Reagan and Thatcher through the 1980s assured the transition to this new world of “mergers and acquisitions, corporate raiding, junk bonds, and asset stripping,” with the eventual result that the “investor class and the executive class become almost indistinguishable.”¹²⁵ In turn, the only thing that truly trickled down was the “credo” that “everyone should look at the world through the eyes of an investor.”¹²⁶ Insofar as this transformation of the corporation was a transformation of the American corporation, and this “model” of the American corporation was the model for the planetary columns of American administration, we see as a result a “cultural transformation” at the planetary scale, a transformation whereby financialized bureaucracy “came to invade the rest of society” and then “almost every aspect of everyday life,” so “engulfing any location where any number of people gather to discuss the allocation of resources of any kind at all.”¹²⁷ As a result of this American model, governance is reduced to the “main mechanism for the extraction of corporate profits.”¹²⁸ It is for this reason that Noam Chomsky writes that the truth of our new world order is that “the rich men of the rich societies are to rule the world competing among themselves for a greater share of wealth and power and mercilessly supressing those who stand in their way, assisted by the rich men of the hungry nations who do their bidding.”¹²⁹

Thus, if we respond to the call for planetary governance and the solicitation of an alternative planetarity with new bureaucratic formulations, new modes of administration, without addressing the hegemony of the American model, we will be oblivious to the ways in which we are contributing to a further modulation of the system already anticipated by it. The new world order post-World War II “had almost nothing to do with the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, products, and ideas,” writes Graeber, and everything to do with “trapping increasingly large parts of the world’s population behind highly militarized national borders within which social protections could be systematically withdrawn, creating a pool of laborers so desperate that they would be willing to work for almost nothing”—the instantiation of a generic planetary frame of precarity.¹³⁰ Substituting the “few strong columns” of early neoliberalism for the “dynamic mix of materials and structures” of late neoliberalism accomplishes nothing but a more subtle, intricate, and ubiquitous system for the control of labour.¹³¹ American nuclear hegemony paved the way for the hegemony of GAFA, the model of our post-national future, a future with no futurity, only progress—progress in the instruments of control. The operational immanence of every detail, the cyborg epistemology of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints, the systemic, modular, customizable, and participatory culture potentiated by computation, the gamified world of action, interaction, enactment, expression, participation, and interpellation, the governance of knowing, modeling, mobilization, regulation, distribution—none of these promise deliverance. And indeed, what becomes clear in challenging the system is that we have already lost the game. We were enlisted, trained, and then shipped out for combat, but no one ever gave us our weapons—indeed, there is no need for us to have weapons because victory is already assured. The only time weapons are produced is when this state of affairs is challenged and violence is brought to bear on the dissenters.

As Graeber powerfully asserts, “the self-conscious completion of the world’s first effective planetary-scale administrative bureaucratic system” with the “waning of the Cold War” was not about “free trade” or the “free market” but rather about “ensuring the extraction of profits for investors,” which was in turn ensured by violence.¹³² Planetary bureaucracy only works if it is “backed up by the threat of force.”¹³³ Total bureaucratization sees the proliferation of “security cameras, police scooters, issuers of temporary ID cards, and men and women in a variety of uniforms acting in either public or private capacities, trained in tactics of menacing, intimidating, and ultimately deploying physical violence … even in places such as playgrounds, primary schools, college campuses, hospitals, libraries, parks, or beach resorts.”¹³⁴ The system instituted by the nuclear bomb culminates in a new symbol, a new structure: the bank, the “perfect point of conjuncture between guns and information.”¹³⁵ Through the capacity of technologies originally developed to afford the United States with first-strike capability, the bank now lives in our pockets, on our smartphones, the ever present mode of deterrence reminding us that we must play the game even though we have already lost. Biometric security, credit score updates by push notification, PDF bank statements, SMS overdraft alerts, stock tracking apps, personal investment clients—all of this exists to remind us that we must play and that if we do not, we will be annihilated, which is to say, ejected from the bottom of society into the nuclear desert of the real.

The new weapons of the society of control do not belong to us—they live in our pockets and are used against us every day. This is the generalized holocaust the nuclear bomb foretold, the “restaging of extermination” through “a medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence,” “more systematic … than the camps themselves.”¹³⁶ Now “‘everyone knows,’ everybody has trembled and bawled in the face of extermination—a sure sign that ‘that’ will never again occur,” but this is so because “it has always been in the midst of currently reproducing itself.”¹³⁷ Fatal revenance, played out in the media, in culture, in governance, far beyond the television where Baudrillard locates it, the unexorcisable, the same “process of forgetting, of liquidation, of extermination, same annihilation of memories and of history, same inverse, implosive radiation, same absorption with out an echo, same black hole as Auschwitz.”¹³⁸ The “mirror of being and appearances” was annihilated by the bomb, but in its infolding of the real and its concept, the final horrific convulsion of spirit became the first “major event of cold systems, of cooling systems, of systems of deterrence and extermination that will then be deployed in other forms.”¹³⁹ The mass itself becomes “cold,” sapped of its decisive action, disarmed—there is only the opportunity for a “tactile thrill and a posthumous emotion,” a “spill into forgetting with a kind of good aesthetic conscience of the catastrophe.”¹⁴⁰

We are made “harmless” because there is no longer the possibility of an exit, of an outside from which a true attack might be mounted—“YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word”—such is the “about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself” because all of this “is immediately located in your head”—the frame is inside us.¹⁴¹ The control society, the planetary administration, “transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape”—there are only “samples, data, markets,” and of course, the arche-model, “banks.”¹⁴² And through everything, “surfing” is all that we can do to navigate these freezing waters, this cold system, riding the currents produced by this generalized serpent of extermination.

Nihilism has brought us to a point of what Fred Moten calls “self-consumptive anger,” this anger in the face of a total administration that cares nothing about us, this “anger of the poor in spirit,” this “anger of a common love.”¹⁴³ Reduced to dividuality, to modulations of the system, we cannot become complicit, “scurr[ying] about trying to curry favor by pretending [we] actually believe” what power declares “to be true,” what power desperately does not want us to “really think about.”¹⁴⁴ When the self is transmuted into an investment bank, into standing reserve, into a nuclear bomb, we must say with Amiri Baraka: “Find the self, then kill it.”¹⁴⁵ In response to this world order, the only weapon we can claim is “self-obliteration”—“not suicide” but “a common social refusal of self-possession.”¹⁴⁶

It is only at this point, in this space of a common self-destruction, “adrift in this common wind,” that we can truly take up the call for a planetary governance, the intimate politics of a planetary belonging that does not simply reduplicate the system we already have. Indeed, to this point I have excluded a term from Bratton’s question of “knowing, modeling, mobilization, regulation, [and] distribution,” a term that the repeat insertion of the [and] has served to hide: “enforcement.” A simple word, a banal word, especially in the context of the words preceding it, and yet, as we have seen, this question of the planetary—from the question of spirit to the question of bureaucracy—is subtended by enforcement, by the threat of violence. This has been why we have belaboured the nuclear structure as the structure of the control society, from early internationalism to late postnationalism. Whether column or stack, these forms of planetarity are set up and protected by men with guns, by fingers on switches, by the powerful who see all of us as reserves awaiting extraction, as vessels for the exchange of capital. This is the planetarity that we must disassemble. This is the system for which an alternative must be built. This is where our combinatorial science must be brought into play.

VI

In the conclusion to Being and Nothingness, Sartre contends that ontological contingency leads us to the point of ethical considerations, but not to an ethics itself: “we can not possibly derive imperatives from ontology’s indicatives.”¹⁴⁷ However, the factiality of our existence does “allow us to catch a glimpse of what sort of ethics will assume its responsibilities when confronted with a human reality in situation.”¹⁴⁸ The contingency of planetary being does not necessitate planetary belonging, but it does “reveal[] to us, in fact, the origin and the nature of value; we have seen that value is the lack in relation to which the for-itself determines its being as a lack.”¹⁴⁹ The self is insufficient, and so all of our “various human projects” become subject to “moral description,” to the assessment of this or that “passion” that can only ever be “freely chosen [from] among others.”¹⁵⁰

As such, we reencounter Berdyaev’s question—In whose name will he use this power—of what spirit is he?—but now must answer without alibi, without ulterior justification. Insofar as an ethics is a passion freely chosen, the one who chooses is, finally, the one responsible. To pretend otherwise, to hide behind a universal, is to act in “bad faith,” to adhere to an “ethics which is ashamed of itself.”¹⁵¹ Sartre famously declares that “it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations,” but this is not the emptiness of nihilistic fascination but the analysis made possible by a nihilism accepted and assumed, an analysis of the lack of ground that ethics find in being.¹⁵² Sartre writes, therefore, that “these questions … can find their reply only on the ethical plane”—this is the “future work” that we now take up.¹⁵³ How ought we respond to this human reality in situation that we have been analyzing here?

In The Stack, Bratton presents his “design brief for the User layer,” which is worth quoting at length:

In the image of planetary-scale information infrastructure, comprising trillions of addressable haecceities, the resolved scale of the platform need not be for one User at a time, drifting into and out of narcissistic virtual reality, but for pluralities of partial users, quasi-users, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, intermingling in intersubjective alliances, sharing perceptions, memory, algorithms and techniques, visualization rhetorics situated among the semantic graphs of aggregate User experiences predicated not just on autobiographical interoperability, but on direct physical and cognitive promiscuity.¹⁵⁴

This is an inspiring vision, in many ways, a vision that does not think in terms of “essential properties,” and so a vision in line with the general trajectory of my own work over the last several years.¹⁵⁵ However, while thinking in this way is beneficial—more explanatory, more nuanced, more true to the real-without-double of which we are a part—we cannot forget the politics that inheres in this, or any, geopolitical vision. The present essay has been an attempt at such a reminder. If we take up Bratton’s design brief but naively assume that the “intermingling” of “pluralities of partial users, quasi-users, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic,” is itself the work of justice, our “alliances” will amount to nothing but dividual complicity, yet further modulations of the system of control which has always already anticipated and accounted for our decisions because it primed us to make them.

What is to be done? The arche-political question returns, but now, faced with the infinite recombinations of the arche-totality, the modelized real, the contingent series of appearances, even this question finds that it has already been anticipated, already been accounted for. This is the danger of a politics that looks “more like a technology” and a technology that looks “more like an economics.”¹⁵⁶ Everything becomes economized. The political is neutralized. The radical possibility of the “universal User” finds itself always already preempted, utterly neutralized, indifferent, and equivalent because it is always already defined in relation to the system of planetary administration that operates according to the American model of control.¹⁵⁷

Bratton is not unaware of this difficulty: “this agnostic flatness of the User subject does little by itself to adjudicate what the ‘best’ ‘sovereign’ position for any of these Users might be.”¹⁵⁸ But it is here where a divergence presents itself. To talk of sovereignty is to talk of force, or more specifically, enforcement, as Bratton himself does in his call for planetary governance. Force is what we have also talked about here as Prägekraft, shaping or formative power, which we have seen in Heidegger’s geistige Kraft, the spiritual force of a nation, and the Kraft of the nuclear, the operational force of an inter- and subsequently post-national planet. Though formally distinct, we saw these two powers yoked in the figure of nuclear holocaust, an onto-typological motif inaugurated by the Holocaust and sealed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This motif constitutes the generalized serpent of extermination that we described above—the logic of total bureaucratization, the ultimate cold system, the freezing torrent of modernity. It is against this serpent that we must wield our new weapons, but insofar as this serpent is itself the real, we find ourselves capable only of surfing along its coils, never afforded with a vantage from which we might mount an attack. Force is the sovereign and thus exclusive right of this actual and titanic leviathan.

What, then, if we do not speak of sovereignty? What if we deny the sovereignty of the self, and more, we find the self and kill it, welcoming a “self-consumptive anger” and common “self-destruction” that the serpent can neither abide nor prevent, because it cannot incorporate and deter such a “no-thing” into itself, because this no-thing is the nihilistic acceptance and terrible passion of excessive, irreducible, unaccountable insufficiency?¹⁵⁹ Against the arche-totality, the only weapon is the an-archic—“desertlike,” “aleatory,” and newly “indifferent,” all that which brings about the dispossession, dissolution, and destruction of the first principle as such.¹⁶⁰ This is the true constitution of the “ethical plane” that Sartre signals, a barren plane populated only by absolute particularities and generic differences—unexchangeable, irreversible, irreducible. And on such a plane, new games, new tactics and operations, are, indeed, possible.

Though Jagoda does “explore many instances in which video games participate in and feed the neoliberal program, [his] argument is not that the form is categorically complicit with this way of thinking.”¹⁶¹ The experimental quality of games that Jagoda identifies is in fact a consequence of the “emergent contingency” of the real that we “can never fully control.”¹⁶² The absolute irreference of the real, the fact that the real has no double, yet indicates the possibility of something else, the possibility that the “control system” cannot “recuperate all anomalies or resistances.”¹⁶³ These “anomalies” and “resistances,” these insurgent modes of play, are not in themselves guaranteed to be emancipatory—thus the metaphor of “Pandora’s box”—but they do provide us with evidence for what it is that escapes the serpent’s coils, evidence that indeed the desert still grows.¹⁶⁴

First, nonsovereignty. Nonsovereign play is about frustration, about denying the “privilege of self-possession,” about not going with the flow, about not surfing.¹⁶⁵ Nonsovereign resistance does not seek to learn how to “move into space and time,” but instead recognizes that “it creates space and time,” that to be is to be “ontogenetic,” not “ontological.”¹⁶⁶ “Rather than encouraging speed and efficiency,” nonsovereign play “invites” us to “remain in the process and state of incompleteness for an extended period,” nourishing an “appreciation of uncontrolled middles” and “uncontrolled transformation.”¹⁶⁷ In this way, we see how nonsovereign play does in fact draw from the potency of nuclear irreference, but rather than deterrence it wields an “anti-metaphysical anger that operates, finally, so piercingly through its object that it moves in the absence of that object and of the subject.”¹⁶⁸ Deterrence requires sovereign expression, requires every user to speak their mind, to make themselves legible, to be a subject—the serpent devours such sovereign expression precisely because it is legitimate, just another modulation, just another mode in which things can be. Nonsovereign anger refuses this legitimacy, refuses to be a modulation: “Am I angry? No, I’m not.”¹⁶⁹ Nonsovereignty is about the nonrecuperable frustration that frustrates every attempt at recuperation.

Second, nonrepresentation. The refusal of recuperation is about the refusal of representation. Nuclearity annihilates the imaginary of representation while conserving it through involution, preserved as legibility. Nonrepresentational play, however, “insists on the specificity of bodies,” the impossibility of referring such specificity back to a sovereign representation, to universal legibility.¹⁷⁰ Am I a body? No, I’m not. The nonrepresentative body refuses to be made into yet another user. In this way, nonrepresentational play is anti-body, in the sense Legacy Russell employs the term, which is not a denial of the flesh but a “strategy of nonperformance” that “gives[s] form to something that has no form, that is abstract, cosmic.”¹⁷¹ Nonrepresentational play is thus the “absence of self-ownership,” the “consent to not be a single being, an embrace of a cosmic corporeality.”¹⁷² This new flesh is “unreadable” and “inaccessible” to the system of control—its sinks, it embraces “slowness in ways that are unpredictable to the user: endless buffering, crashing, damaging, deleting, reformatting.”¹⁷³ It represents no-thing. Universal legibility is short-circuited. Nonrepresentational play recognizes that “the care-full reading of others is an exercise of trust, intimacy, belonging, homecoming.”¹⁷⁴ No universal legibility—only specificities teaching each other how to read each other.

Third, nonrecuperation. Nonrecuperative play is about failure, about the failures that cannot be “converted into success.”¹⁷⁵ In the control society, failure is “a quality that can be managed and optimized.”¹⁷⁶ Failure is to be administered and governed. But what we have seen here is that such administration is always in service of the extraction of profit. So, how can we strike at this motive? We obliterate the banks, not with guns or explosives, but with the concentrated nuclearity of common self-destruction—what is also known as debt.¹⁷⁷ Nonrecuperable debt is debt that refuses conversion into credit—the always “unpayable,” the “very principle of sociality,” “all those things we owe to each other.”¹⁷⁸ As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write in The Undercommons (2013), debt is the “criminality that brings the law online,” the “runaway anarchic ground,” the ground that “runs in every direction, scatters, escapes, seeks refuge.”¹⁷⁹ The nonrecuperable is the “debt at a distance, the debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt. Excessive debt, incalculable debt, debt for no reason, debt broken from credit, debt as its own principle.”¹⁸⁰ And this is a debt we do “not intend to pay.”¹⁸¹

There is no governance here, only planning, and the nonsovereign, nonrepresentational, nonrecuperable game of planning we also call study. Governance seeks for the student to “graduate,” to “be interested,” to “join the global conversation,” to “invite others to identify their interests,” to get “credit.”¹⁸² But nonsovereign, nonrepresentational, nonrecuperable study, the study that plans, “black study,” is “study without an end, plan without a pause, rebel without a policy, conserve without a patrimony.”¹⁸³ We study and plan but we “never graduate,” we “just ain’t ready,” we are “building something in there, something down there,” this “[m]utual debt, debt unpayable, debt unbounded, debt unconsolidated, debt to each other in a study group, to others in a nurses’ room, to others in a barber shop, to others in a squat, a dump, a woods, a bed, an embrace.”¹⁸⁴ These are the sites where planning is elaborated, infrastructre becoming “anarchitecture,” the only place where we can meet with “those others who dwell in a different compulsion,” with “other ones [who] carry bags of newspaper clippings, or sit at the end of the bar, or stand at the stove cooking, or sit on a box at the newsstand, or speak through bars, or speak in tongues,” these ones who will never govern, will never be permitted to govern, and yet, these ones who “have a passion to tell you what they have found, and they are surprised you want to listen, even though they’ve been expecting you.”¹⁸⁵ Planning refuses governance. Indeed, planning is the ungovernable. Harney and Moten write:

Sometimes the story is not clear, or it starts in a whisper. It goes around again but listen, it is funny again, every time. This knowledge has been degraded, and the research rejected. They can’t get access to books, and no one will publish them. Policy has concluded they are conspiratorial, heretical, criminal, amateur. Policy says they can’t handle debt and will never get credit. But if you listen to them they will tell you: we will not handle credit, and we cannot handle debt, debt flows through us, and there’s no time to tell you everything, so much bad debt, so much to forget and remember again.¹⁸⁶

So we say, all together: “come let’s plan something together.” Really, “that’s what we’re going to do. We’re telling all of you but we’re not telling anyone else.”¹⁸⁷ Come play this game with us, come plan and study. This is the new “call,” the new game, neither that of spirit or the bomb but of the “call and response,” and our “response is already there before the call goes out.”¹⁸⁸ We are already in something. How do we go on? We already are.

References

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Berdyaev, Nicholas. “Man and Machine.” In Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, edited by Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, 203–13. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1972.

Bratton, Benjamin. “ ‘New World Order’: For Planetary Governance.” Strelka Mag, March 2021. https://strelkamag.com/en/article/new-world-order-forplanetary-governance.

Bratton, Benjamin H. “Further Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene.” Architectural Design 257 (February 2019): 14–21.

———. “On Hemispherical Stacks: Notes on Multipolar Geopolitics and Planetary-Scale Computation.” 6th Guangzhou Triennial, 2018. https://www.scribd.com/document/427991851/Bratton-Benjamin-2018-Hemispherical-Stacks-Notes-on-Multipolar-Geopolitics-and-Planetary-Scale-Computation.

———. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.

Chomsky, Noam. World Orders, Old and New. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

France-Presse, Agence. “Morales Claims US Orchestrated ‘Coup’ to Tap Bolivia’s Lithium.” Al Jazeera, December 2019. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/25/morales-claims-us-orchestrated-coup-to-tap-bolivias-lithium.

Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015.

Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Haraway, 3–90. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.

———. Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit. Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1966.

———. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000.

Hultner, Kaile. “A Requiem for the Final Generation.” No Escape, May 2020. https://noescapevg.com/a-requiem-for-the-final-generation/.

IAM. “The Everything Manifesto: A Thought Experiment for the Next Billion Seconds.” IAM Journal, November 2019. https://medium.com/iam-journal/the-everything-manifesto-a-thought-experiment-for-the-next-billionseconds-bcd9b9c938dc.

Jagoda, Patrick. Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Jones, R. V. The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945. New York, NY: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1978.

Laruelle, François. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London, UK: Continuum, 2010.

Mackenzie, Donald. Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London, UK: Continuum, 2009.

Moore, Gordon E., and Robert N. Noyce. Method for fabricating transistors. US Patent 3,108,359, issued October 1963.

Moten, Fred, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis. “Refusing Completion: A Conversation.” e-flux, no. 116 (March 2021): 1–14.

Noyce, Robert N. Semiconductor device-and-lead structure. US Patent 2,981,877, issued April 1961.

Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson. Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London, UK: Verso, 2020.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003.

Stein, Eric. “Fiction in the Integrated Circuit.” Master’s thesis, Trinity Western University, 2018. https://arcabc.ca/islandora/object/twu%3A456.

Sweeney, Steve. “After Bolivia, Elon Musk Says Capitalists Can Overthrow Any Government They Want.” People’s World, July 2020. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/after-bolivia-elon-musk-says-capitalists-can-overthrowany-government-they-want/.

Veselekov. Umurangi Generation. Microsoft Windows: Origame Digital, 2020.

Zimmerman, Eric. “Manifesto for a Ludic Century.” Kotaku, September 2013. https://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204.

Notes

Benjamin Bratton, “‘New World Order’: For Planetary Governance,” Strelka Mag, March 2021, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/new-world-order-for-planetary-governance, n.p. ↩
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 45. ↩
Heidegger, 46, 45. ↩
Heidegger, 46, 45. ↩
Heidegger, 47-48. ↩
Heidegger, 48. ↩
Heidegger, 48. ↩
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 32. ↩
Derrida, 32. ↩
Derrida, 32. ↩
Heidegger, cited in Derrida, 34. ↩
Derrida, 34. ↩
Derrida, 35. ↩
Derrida, 35. ↩
Heidegger, cited in Derrida, 36. ↩
Derrida, 39. ↩
Derrida, 39. ↩
Derrida, 39-40. ↩
Derrida, 119. ↩
Derrida, 40. ↩
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 49. ↩
Bratton, “‘New World Order,’” n.p. ↩
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003), 2. ↩
Derrida, Of Spirit, 39. ↩
Derrida, 42, 46. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 2. ↩
Sartre, 2. ↩
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 49. ↩
Heidegger, 49. ↩
Heidegger, 50. ↩
Heidegger, 50. Readers familiar with Heidegger’s oft remarked upon “The Question Concerning Technology” (1955) should recognize his signature concept of enframing (Gestell) whereby the real is converted into standing-reserve (Bestand), which is the destining (Geschick) of being in technical modernity. ↩
Heidegger, 51. ↩
Nicholas Berdyaev, “Man and Machine,” in Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1972), 203–13, 208, 210. ↩
Berdyaev, 210. ↩
Berdyaev, 210. ↩
Berdyaev, 210. ↩
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. ↩
Baudrillard, 2. ↩
Baudrillard, 2. ↩
Berdyaev, “Man and Machine,” 205. ↩
Berdyaev, 207. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 160. ↩
Baudrillard, 161. ↩
Baudrillard, 163. ↩
Baudrillard, 163-164. ↩
Baudrillard, 163. ↩
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 364, and Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 80. ↩
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), 1. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. ↩
Baudrillard, 8. ↩
IAM, “The Everything Manifesto: A Thought Experiment for the Next Billion Seconds,” IAM Journal, November 2019, https://medium.com/iam-journal/the-everything-manifesto-athought-experiment-for-the-next-billion-seconds-bcd9b9c938dc. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 21. ↩
Heidegger, Being and Time, 255. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. ↩
Baudrillard, 39, 32. ↩
Baudrillard, 32. ↩
Baudrillard, 32-33. ↩
Baudrillard, 37. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, 35. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, 40. ↩
Baudrillard, 40. ↩
Baudrillard, 40. ↩
See Veselekov, Umurangi Generation (Microsoft Windows: Origame Digital, 2020), and Kaile Hultner, “A Requiem for the Final Generation,” No Escape, May 2020, https://noescapevg.com/a-requiem-for-the-final-generation/. ↩
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 80. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 2. ↩
Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 8, 15. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 33, 32. ↩
Baudrillard, 33. ↩
Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 3–90, 30. ↩
Eric Zimmerman, “Manifesto for a Ludic Century,” Kotaku, September 2013, https://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204, n.p. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 15. ↩
Derrida, Of Spirit, 40-41. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 639. ↩
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828, 4. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. ↩
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 9, 12. ↩
Jagoda, 9. ↩
Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 3. ↩
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. ↩
Hillary Clinton, cited in Bratton, The Stack, 3. ↩
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 45. ↩
Bratton, The Stack, 3. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 46. ↩
Jagoda, 53. ↩
Foucault, cited in Jagoda, 54. ↩
Jagoda, 55. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 32, 37, emphasis added. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 55. ↩
S. M. Amadae, cited in Jagoda, 55. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 33. ↩
Gordon E. Moore and Robert N. Noyce, Method for fabricating transistors, US Patent 3,108,359, issued October 1963. ↩
Robert N. Noyce, Semiconductor device-and-lead structure, US Patent 2,981,877, issued April 1961. I trace this history in Eric Stein, “Fiction in the Integrated Circuit” (Master’s thesis, Trinity Western University, 2018), https://www.academia.edu/40272048/. See also R. V. Jones, The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945 (New York, NY: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1978), Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), and Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). ↩
Benjamin H. Bratton, “Further Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene,” Architectural Design 257 (February 2019): 14–21, 17. ↩
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. ↩
Deleuze, 3. ↩
Bratton, The Stack, 252. ↩
Benjamin H. Bratton, “On Hemispherical Stacks: Notes on Multipolar Geopolitics and Planetary-Scale Computation,” 6th Guangzhou Triennial, 2018, https://www.scribd.com/document/427991851/Bratton-Benjamin-2018-Hemispherical-Stacks-Notes-on-Multipolar-Geopolitics-and-Planetary-Scale-Computation, 3-4. ↩
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 5. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 44. ↩
Jagoda, 21, 53. ↩
Jagoda, 64. ↩
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015). ↩
Graeber, 8. ↩
Graeber, 9. ↩
Weber, cited in Graeber, 12. ↩
Graeber, 12. ↩
Graeber, 13. ↩
Graeber, 13. ↩
Graeber, 11. ↩
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 19. ↩
Graeber, 19. ↩
Graeber, 19. ↩
Graeber, 19-20. ↩
Graeber, 20. ↩
Graeber, 21. ↩
Graeber, 24. ↩
Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5. Is this not the case with the Organization of American States, which affords the ongoing interference of the United States in the affairs of Latin America? While the contestation of lithium in Bolivia leading to the coup of the Morales government is still debated, the fact that American corporate actors like Elon Musk saw the U.S. backed ouster as a vindication of the interests of the American capitalist class on the world stage is telling. See Steve Sweeney, “After Bolivia, Elon Musk Says Capitalists Can Overthrow Any Government They Want,” People’s World, July 2020, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/after-bolivia-elon-musksays-capitalists-can-overthrow-any-government-they-want/, and Agence France-Presse, “Morales Claims US Orchestrated ‘Coup’ to Tap Bolivia’s Lithium,” Al Jazeera, December 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/25/morales-claims-us-orchestrated-coup-totap-bolivias-lithium. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 29. ↩
Hillary Clinton, cited in Bratton, The Stack, 3. ↩
Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 30-31. ↩
Graeber, 32. ↩
Graeber, 32-33. ↩
Graeber, 33. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 49. ↩
Baudrillard, 49. ↩
Baudrillard, 49. ↩
Baudrillard, 2, 50. ↩
Baudrillard, 50. ↩
Baudrillard, 20, 29, 51. ↩
Baudrillard, 51, and Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 5. ↩
Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion: A Conversation,” e-flux, no. 116 (March 2021): 1–14. ↩
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 5, and Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 28-29. ↩
Baraka, cited in Moten, Harney, and Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion,” 12. ↩
Moten, Harney, and Shukaitis, 13. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 645. ↩
Sartre, 645. ↩
Sartre, 645. ↩
Sartre, 645-646. ↩
Sartre, 646. ↩
Sartre, 646. ↩
Sartre, 646. ↩
Bratton, The Stack, 264. ↩
Stein, “Fiction in the Integrated Circuit.” ↩
Bratton, “On Hemispherical Stacks,” 1. ↩
Bratton, The Stack, 274. ↩
Bratton, 285. ↩
Moten, Harney, and Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion,” 13, 12. ↩
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 162. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 25. ↩
Jagoda, 31. ↩
Jagoda, 71. ↩
Jagoda, “Control,” Experimental Games, 153-190, and “Failure,” Experimental Games, 221-250. ↩
Jagoda, 171, 184. ↩
Erin Manning, cited in Jagoda, 186. ↩
Jagoda, 186, 190. ↩
Moten, Harney, and Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion,” 12. ↩
Moten, Harney, and Shukaitis, 12. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 173. ↩
Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London, UK: Verso, 2020), 8, 91. ↩
Russell, 69. ↩
Russell, 84, 111. ↩
Russell, 147. ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 223. ↩
Jagoda, 223. ↩
Moten, Harney, and Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion,” 9. ↩
Moten, Harney, and Shukaitis, 9. ↩
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 47, 61. ↩
Harney and Moten, 61. ↩
Harney and Moten, 62. ↩
Harney and Moten, 67. ↩
Harney and Moten, 67. ↩
Harney and Moten, 67-68. ↩
Russell, Glitch Feminism, 152, and Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 68. ↩
Harney and Moten, 68. ↩
Harney and Moten, 68. ↩
Harney and Moten, 134. ↩

Generic Science

2021-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Having used Badiou to think through the Pythagoreans, I wanted to return to the beginning of his lecture and try to deal with the question of why we would want to begin with void at all.¹ Certainly, it is conceivable in the abstract, but why ought we do so? I intended to use Heraclitus and Parmenides to this end, but when I returned to Heraclitus, not just to invoke him as a premonition of the likes of Derrida and Deleuze, but really to make a return, to suspend my preconceptions of his philosophy and begin again,² it became clear to me that the Badiousian connection would have to wait.

I have always been cautious of setting up Heraclitus and Parmenides as opposites to each other, as Plato did, taking my cue from Peter Adamson that they are more alike than not.³ However, even in treating Heraclitus’s philosophy as a palintropic monism, I nevertheless positioned him, like Plato, as the prophet of flux, but felt absolved of this gesture insofar as it allowed me to find an ancient ground for my efforts to position difference, rather than identity, at the origin of being.

However, in the interim, my research took me through the work of François Laruelle, whose Philosophies of Difference thoroughly dismantled my philosophical project, preempting my arguments long before I made them, and indeed, before I had even been born.⁴ Inverted Platonism⁵ remains yoked to Platonism, and as such, is nothing but a “syntax,” a philosophical decision that splits philosophy from the real, organizing this “duel” in a matrix of correlations.⁶ To position difference as origin rather than identity makes the work of philosophy an “interminable effort,” denouncing the violence of the “scission” originally effected by philosophy while perpetuating it with finer and finer cuts.⁷

So, reading Heraclitus again, approaching the fragments as a beginner, I find my old interpretations profoundly unseated, my attention drawn to arguments over which previously I had glossed, captured as I was by his “back-turning harmony.”⁸ Now, this palintropos finds its proper footing, a footing which I hope to demonstrate with a fuller reading of Heraclitus that I intend to situate in the continuum from Anaximander to Pythagoras that I identified previously.

Heraclitus’s philosophy is determined by the logos which, in the Presocratic mode, functions as his “principle” of being.⁹ Heraclitus contends that “everything happens in accordance with this principle,” and yet, because human judgment can be incorrect, it is possible for judgment not to accord with the logos.¹⁰ This possibility of a failure in judgment is not a problem for Heraclitus, except when people begin to “live as though they had private understanding,” reversing the determining relationship between the logos and human judgment.¹¹ As Pseudo-Plutarch reports, “Heraclitus says that the universe for those who are awake is single and common, while in sleep each person turns aside into a private universe.”¹² It is for this reason that “one ought to follow what is common.”¹³ In these first fragments and testimonials, we see quite clearly that, for Heraclitus, philosophy, or human judgment more generally, is ineluctably determined by the logos, and that the universe, insofar as it is “single and common,” is our teacher.

Though Heraclitus can come across as a sage or oracle by virtue of the fragmentary transmission of his ideas, Heraclitus himself challenges this position, arguing that it is not he but the logos that teaches: “It is wise for those who listen not to me but to the principle to agree in principle that everything is one.”¹⁴ This is not a mystical unity handed down from the “private universe” of the enlightened teacher, but the fact of the unary singularity that is self-evident in being, which is to say, its mere being—single to be sure, but singularly generic, without reference to a universal singularity, and therefore truly to be termed the unary multiple.¹⁵

Certainly, one might challenge this argument as just another distortion of Heraclitus, Laruellian rather than Derridean or Deleuzian, but I think the text furnishes this reading with ample support. An endnote from Waterfield helps us on the way. Heraclitus writes: “Those who speak with intelligence must stand firm by that which is common to all.”¹⁶ Waterfield remarks that “with intelligence” and “common” are in fact deployed here as “an untranslatable pun.”¹⁷ In Heraclitus’s Greek, “with intelligence” is xun noōi and “common” is xunōi. This homophony is deliberate: “similarity of sound” in Heraclitus always “implie[s] similarity of meaning.”¹⁸ Waterfield overstates the point, however, arguing that this means that “what is common or universal is what can be apprehended with intelligence,” but what the words themselves go on to say is that “all human laws are in the keeping of the one divine law; for the one divine law has as much power as it wishes.”¹⁹ Heraclitus does not say that “what is common or universal is what can be apprehended with intelligence”; instead, what is “common or universal” is fundamentally determinative of intelligence.²⁰ This is why intelligence “must stand firm” by the common, and not the other way around—it is an irreversible relation.

Heraclitus’s emphasis on waking and sleeping and his privileging of sense perception as a means for understanding the logos help us avoid converting the “common” into a transcendental “universal” as Waterfield does. Heraclitus “rate[s] highly … those which are accessible to sight, hearing, apprehension,”²¹ because these are accessible to all in wakefulness, verifiable by anyone, for “[e]veryone has the potential for self-knowledge and sound thinking.”²² One need not be inducted to a mystical school of knowledge to recognize that “[o]rder was not made by god or man. It always was and is and shall be”²³—one need only open one’s eyes.

Now, indeed, anyone with their eyes open should immediately object, does not this position serve to validate the present (i.e., human) order of things? And they would be correct. Heraclitus himself did so. Though he refuses philosophical or pedagogical privilege, his philosophy allows him to reify his social and political privilege as a necessary consequence of the order of the logos. Waterfield notes that Heraclitus had a “reputation in antiquity … as a haughty aristocrat,” and in the fragments on politics, Heraclitus is indeed an unabashed traditionalist.²⁴ He praises the one “outstanding” man, rails against the radical egalitarianism of the Ephesians, and calls for the “quench[ing]” of “insolence.”²⁵ Heraclitus the obscure, Heraclitus the oracle of change, is, in the end, no revolutionary. And yet his philosophical commitment to the common provides us with a potential path out of the correlationist domain of ontopolitics, restoring the possibility of saying what is without referring that statement back to a human universal.

To say what is should not be treated as a trivial work. We would not want to carelessly fall into another mode of traditionalism whereby politics might be denied while at the same time carried out under the guise of common sense.²⁶ To say what is without referring back to a human universal is “to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not.”²⁷ Such work does not deny the epistemological fact that science is construction²⁸ and achievement.²⁹ It is possible to say what is but this saying is always secondary to that of which it is said. What is more, though the saying is always secondary, it is not in any way guaranteed or justified by that of which it is said, and so stands utterly without alibi.³⁰ To keep our eyes open, to say what is, is to refuse at every point that which is believed to be “established” and to deny the authorization of our understanding on the basis of any such establishment.³¹

We see, then, that when Heraclitus says that the “true nature of a thing tends to hide itself,”³² that “non-apparent” harmony is “better than apparent,”³³ that he is not denying the primacy of sense perception as a means for understanding the logos. Heraclitus does not contradict himself when he says that the road is the same road regardless of the direction one travels along it, but the river into which one steps is never the same river.³⁴ Heraclitus is simply indicating that a road is an inert pathway and direction a qualitative experience of the one walking upon it, while a river consists of both water and banks, the former of which is always running while the latter provides its shape. Heraclitus is not hinting at some mystical unity here. Such would be a Platonic misreading. On the contrary, the real is “single and common” because it is “right there, before our eyes.”³⁵ Some regions of the real are simply more complex, requiring more careful scrutiny or more nuanced consideration.

If we continue in this reading of Heraclitus, we recognize that intelligence “stand[s] firm” by the common because intelligence is common, which is to say, real. Intelligence does not exist somewhere out there; it, too, is right here. Heraclitus makes the point as follows, reported by Sextus Empiricus:

Just as cinders which are brought close to a fire undergo an alteration and start to glow, but are extinguished when they are separated, so the fraction of what surrounds us which is in exile in our bodies becomes more or less irrational in a state of separation, but in a state of union, which is achieved through the numerous sensory channels, it is restored to a condition of similarity to the whole.³⁶

The “state of union” between intelligence and the common is not a mystical unity. It is a union effected by the “numerous sensory channels” that makes communication possible between “what surrounds us” and the “fraction” of this surround that is “in our bodies.”³⁷ In modern terminology, we can say quite plainly: neurology is real, the apparatus of sensation is real, the body is real, the experiencing person is real. More philosophically, we might say that depth is folded into surface and being into appearance. Regardless of phrasing, what Heraclitus affords us is a (non)philosophical position that is “direct or radical, not reflective or mediated,” a “generic science” that persistently demands to know the answer to the question “x is what.”³⁸ There is no ideal form of the “road” or the “river” because the real is “without doubling, existing in itself only,” “simple, particular, unique.”³⁹

What remains, then, is to extend the continuity previously established between Anaximander and Pythagoras to Heraclitus. I argued that with the Pythagoreans’ use of “unlimited” and “limit,” we witness the abstraction of Anaximander’s terms “boundless” and “motion,” an abstraction that makes possible “substantive difference,” as opposed to the “qualitative difference” of Thales and Anaximenes.⁴⁰ Using Badiou to help make sense of this peculiarly substantial abstraction, I argued that limit functions as {Ø}, a closure of Ø, the void, the indeterminate, the boundless. This closure is not yet a being, but is rather a set, a determination, an individuation, whereby the 1 proper might be counted (because {Ø} has a value of 1). So we see that in the Pythagorean school the Milesian intuition that there is a dual at the origin of being—being and motion—is preserved while being reformulated in a way that protects the “abstraction of pure indetermination” against the cosmological distortions that followed, such as Anaximenes’ speculations that ultimately lead to the conflation of being and motion.

The additional claim that I made with respect to the Pythagoreans was that, in their understanding of the “unit-point,” the belief that geometric points are numeric units, we see how they understand that “cognition is the real itself.” In the terminology employed above: “intelligence is common.” Aristotle struggled with the idea that “the elements of numbers are the elements of all things,”⁴¹ but as I argued, this struggle arose from his inability to conceive of abstraction itself as real. Badiou, however, demonstrates how something might come from nothing, how the abstract can in fact be real, and if we retroject this understanding to antiquity, Anaximander’s signature abstraction, the boundless, and the general abstractness of the Pythagorean system, are made plain. Heraclitus is no different. Heraclitus begins with an abstract principle, the logos, toward which he adopts the theoretical posture characteristic of a generic science, standing in direct, radical relation to this principle, which is itself the real.⁴² We can say of the logos, then, that it is. The logos is not the double of the real; it is the real, and as such, it merely is. Thus, contrary to my own earlier readings of Heraclitus that prioritized the deconstructive flux of his aphorisms, this new reading finds Heraclitus participating in the “abstraction of the natural and naturalization of the abstract” that I previously highlighted in Anaximander and Pythagoras. Our continuity expands to three.

Notes

Alain Badiou, “Infinity and Set Theory: How to Begin with the Void,” European Graduate School Video Lectures, YouTube, January 12, 2012 [2011], https://youtu.be/I1G_SI1-W-4. ↩
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. Donald A. Landes (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), lxxviii: “If we were absolute spirit, the reduction would not be problematic. But since, on the contrary, we are in and toward the world, and since even our reflections take place in the temporal flow that they are attempting to capture (since they sich einströmen [flow along therein], as Husserl says), there is no thought that encompasses all of our thought. Or again, as the unpublished materials say, the philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts nothing as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also means that philosophy itself must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter, that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning, that it consists entirely in describing this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation.” ↩
Peter Adamson, “Old Man River: Heraclitus,” History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, December 28, 2010, https://historyofphilosophy.net/heraclitus. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy (1986), trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
A phrase Martin Heidegger pulls from Nietzsche. See Nietzsche, vols. I and II (1961), trans. David Farrell Krell (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1991), 154. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 16. I use the word “correlation” to point toward Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006), trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), but also to harken back to Jean Paul-Sartre, who is consistently critical of philosophies that rely on a “table of correlations” for a standard of judgment. Subjective and objective cannot be correlated because the split itself is unreal. “Subject” and “object” are mere names. The real “is everywhere,” but understood as “being,” the real is “transphenomenal,” i.e., not accessible to consciousness as a unity, but only in the multiple being of concrete appearance (which Laruelle might describe as the “non-thetic transcendence” of each real). See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (Abindon, UK: Routledge, 2003), 246, 18. For non-thetic transcendence, see François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 202. Gilbert Simondon is also helpful in understanding the order of precedence between “being” and “beings” in Sartre, insofar as preindividual being can be understood as transphenomenal, the in-itself properly, and as such inaccessible to phenomenal individuated beings, in which the preindividual is yet conserved, but to which prior phase state they cannot be reversed. See Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2009), 4-16. To again draw Laruelle into the fold, this irreversibility of individual to preindividual being is the “unilaterality” of the “individual implying the immediately absolute,” the “singular that is no longer or not yet a singularity,” the “diversity of the contingency that refuses itself absolutely to any idealization whatsoever.” See Philosophies of Difference, 200-201. Finally, then, in this citation of “contingency,” we can return to Meillassoux and his critique of correlationism and properly grasp the fact that “the realist meaning of the ancestral statement” (i.e., “Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans”) “is its ultimate meaning—that there is no other regime of meaning capable of deepening our understanding of it, and that consequently the philosopher’s codicil [to the ancestral statement]” (i.e., “—for humans”) “is irrelevant when it comes to analysing when it comes to analysing the signification of the statement.” This is the titular “necessity of contingency” that organizes Meillassoux’s book. See Meillassoux, After Finitude, 13-14. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 19, 6. ↩
Heraclitus, F21, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 40. ↩
Heraclitus, F1, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 37. ↩
Heraclitus, F1 and F2, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 37, 38. ↩
Heraclitus, F6, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 38. ↩
Pseudo-Plutarch, On Superstition, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 38. ↩
Heraclitus, F6, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 38. ↩
Heraclitus, F10, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 39. ↩
Thomas Sutherland makes this point nicely in his essay “Authoritarian and Minoritarian Thought. François Laruelle, A Biography of Ordinary Man,” Parrhesia 32 (2020), 253-262. “Western philosophy” is the “‘unitary’ paradigm of thought” while what Laruelle proposes is “a concept of unary multiplicities, to which he grants the name minorities, that have been ‘forgotten’ by philosophical discourse, and which can be thought prior to and independent of any and all universals, and thus in their very essence,” i.e., as non-thetic singularities or “unreflective” individuals (Sutherland, 256). ↩
Heraclitus, F12, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 39. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 317. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 317. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 317, and Heraclitus, F12, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 39. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 39. ↩
Heraclitus, F28, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 41. ↩
Heraclitus, F31, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 41. ↩
Heraclitus, F36, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 41-42. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 36. ↩
Heraclitus, F55, F56, and F58, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 45-46. These are quite clearly “authoritarian” rather than “minoritarian” statements. ↩
As Jacques Rancière powerfully argues, politics is about the “distribution of the sensible,” the determination of what is visible and thus intelligible to the system, and what is not. ‘Common sense’ politics is, in fact, not politics at all but policing, while proper (capital P) Politics is an “intervention” in the police order. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (2000), trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7, xiv. ↩
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27. ↩
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 [1979]). ↩
Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux 36 (July 2012), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/. ↩
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 62: “As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation.” See also Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform (2015), trans. Erik Butler (London, UK: Verso, 2016), 19: “Telling oneself tales means maintaining an illusion, or a bundle of illusions, that only serve to legitimate or explain our actions … these ‘stories’ amount to a posteriori justifications; that is, they cannot constitute an ‘origin’ in which a people or an individual might find support.” ↩
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxviii. ↩
Heraclitus, F25, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 40. ↩
Heraclitus, F24, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 40. ↩
Heraclitus, F14 and F34, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 39, 41. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, 21. ↩
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 45. ↩
Merleau-Ponty terms this communication “naïve contact.” See Phenomenology of Perception, lxx. ↩
Alexander Galloway, “Superpositions,” Culture and Communication, October 11, 2014, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/superpositions. ↩
Bourriaud, The Exform, 21. ↩
Eric Stein, “Pure Indetermination,” March 5, 2021, https://steinea.ca/2021/03/05/pure-indetermination. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b23-986a26, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 102. ↩
Of Laruelle, Galloway writes: “what Laruelle calls generic science also comes under another name, I think. No longer philosophy, but ‘theory.’ Philosophy is always inflationary and maximalist. Even the most hard-nosed skeptics are philosophical because they remain sufficient unto themselves—this is skepticism as an “adequate” response to the problems of thinking. By contrast, theory creates a minimalism in thought. Theory is a rigorous science of the inadequacy of material life.” See Superpositions, 2014. ↩

Earth Without Us

2021-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Earth Without Us is a 12-page zine based on Lukáš Likavčan’s Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Strelka Press, 2019). It takes his concluding five instructions for an “infrastructural geopolitics of climate emergency” and converts them into a “geoludics,” a simple worldbuilding exercise with the goal of generating a real planetary praxis.

All quotations are from Likavčan’s work, without which this zine could not have been made. If you find this interesting, get a copy of his book here.

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The Idea of the Gamer

2021-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Over at No Escape,¹ Kaile Hultner proposed the idea of a reading group that would asynchronously work its way through Amanda Phillips’ Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (2020).² With the semester nearing its end, this seemed to me like an excellent opportunity to engage with some contemporary work in game studies, and to do so in conversation with others. A month or so later, the book having finally reached me, it is time to begin.

In their first post looking at the introduction to the book, Hultner describes Phillips’ writing as “polemical,” “spicy.”³ Phillips’ writing is indeed “spicy” in the best of ways, embracing the heat of contested topics in game studies and gaming broadly. As Hultner points out, Phillips takes the primal scene of the narratology versus ludology debate in game studies to task, rightfully critiquing the “gendered timbre of the argument” that so often excludes feminist and other marginalized perspectives as “sloppy” or “emotional.”⁴ For Phillips, “an unrepentant queer feminist scholar pursuing racial justice,” such language is quite blatantly not actually concerned with “rational, precise” scholarship, as it claims, but with the erection and maintenance of “the ‘academic walls’ structuring our disciplines” (a phrase they borrow from Sara Ahmed).⁵ The work to be undertaken, then, is the work of trouble (much like Ahmed’s “complaint”⁶), which Phillips connects with John Lewis’s “good trouble,”⁷ Judith Butler’s “gender trouble,”⁸ and Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble,”⁹ so diagramming an intersectional vector space oriented toward justice.

To carry out this work of critical justice, Phillips must reckon with ‘bad’ trouble, the titular “gamer trouble,” which is to say, not only that which troubles gamers, but also the trouble gamers cause. As far back as 1450 (the Oxford English Dictionary attests) gamers were bad news.¹⁰ As Hultner notes, “we all inevitably gravitate back” to the “black hole” of #GamerGate and the “violent and continual cycle of tension, harassment and gatekeeping” out of which it sprung and which it continues to produce.¹¹ For Phillips, #GamerGate simply made visible to the general, non-gamer public those forces that already defined much of gamer culture and the “idea of the gamer” as such.¹² Indeed, this “idea of the gamer” has been an essential “marketing fiction” in the industry for decades,¹³ a fiction that Graeme Kirkpatrick has traced as far back as the early 1980s.¹⁴ The troubling work of critique is necessarily entangled with the trouble of institutionalized toxicity in gaming. Try as we might, this trouble cannot be ignored. It is for this reason that Phillips is “interested … in meeting gamer trouble on the battlefield of big-budget mainstream games.”¹⁵ It is here that the gamer ideology must be challenged.

Justice-oriented gamers might be inclined to treat this confrontation like a “boss battle,” but as Phillips makes clear, this confrontation is less a boss battle and more an “endless grind.”¹⁶ Social justice is “a process without end”; “one can never arrive” at utopia, because—to be just one of many who has made the same point—utopia is quite literally no place.¹⁷ Our work, then, the work of trouble, is to “excavat[e] the technological and ludic processes that underwrite, reinforce, and contradict what’s happening outside of the game console,”¹⁸ and to engage with the “mess of stories, rules, machines, conflicts, desires, affordances, constraints, and politics with which we continually struggle to actualize ourselves.”¹⁹ This is hard work. It can be tedious work. But it is most certainly vital work.

Phillips locates the impetus for the work of trouble in “the central turbulence that animates gaming and gamer culture: playing a video game.”²⁰ Both gamer trouble and the troubling of the gamer are predicated on this turbulence. In just a few pages, Phillips deftly constructs a model of this turbulence, simultaneously resisting the move to privilege “human subjectivity—that fetishized essence of gameplay that gamers and critics alike call ‘agency’ or ‘interactivity,’” while also avoiding the various straw men that distract from what actually happens in the act of playing a video game.²¹ Citing three key terms from the history of game studies—the magic circle, flow, and immersion—Phillips deploys James Ash’s The Interface Envelope (2015)²² to resituate these terms and check their unbridled influence without doing away with their use for understanding the real “sense of separation” that occurs during gameplay.²³ Ash’s “interface envelope” was a new concept for me, but I found it immediately compelling. Phillips describes it as follows:

The interface envelope captures the tendency of an interface to shepherd a user’s attention and entangle them within its own circuits of power, continuously adjusting and folding itself around them to create shifting, extended modes of engagement. For Ash, envelope power results when a developer successfully enfolds players within their systems, but its responsive and temporary nature means that the envelope is not always achieved nor does it always look the same from player to player. Because of its ability to imagine envelopment in terms of flexible power exchanges between gamer, game, and technology, I find this formulation particularly useful for a feminist analysis of gaming.²⁴

Because the interface envelope is “never absolute,” the complex relation between player, interface, and game is always a turbulent one, prone to friction and failure.²⁵ As Phillips aptly indicates, “at the heart of many gamer troubles lies ruptures that introduce the wrong kind of obstacles—those obstacles that stand in the way of the successful implementation of the envelope power.”²⁶ To put it bluntly, gamer troubles are caused by disruptions of gamer power. “These include,” Phillips continues, “conflicts between player and avatar identity, guilt-inducing critiques, uncanny animations, and network lag.”²⁷ One need not think very hard to come up with examples of each of these troubles in the last year of blockbuster gaming alone.

For myself, a precariously employed university worker, this conception of turbulence also helps me formalize my own tenuous situation. Phillips makes the link between games and academia, contending that “scoring a tenure-track job, a big federal grant, or resources to build a department” are just games in another domain, and the “gamer’s way”—“[m]aster the interface to master the rules to master your opponent”—is as true of higher education as it is of popular gaming culture.²⁸ Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games (2020) supports Phillips’ on this point.²⁹ Jagoda argues that gamification is the “formal and cultural counterpart to neoliberalism,” the economic and political paradigm that has shaped the world from the 1970s to the present.³⁰ In my ongoing efforts to “usurp my machinery,”³¹ to put in the “effort not to reproduce an inheritance,”³² to resist authorization by the system of power and control, to refuse to play the game the “gamer’s way,” Phillips’ work is a welcome partner.

“Trouble,” Phillips writes, “describes resistance and consequence, anarchy and solidarity. It is something we find ourselves in as much as we create it for ourselves.”³³ I am looking forward to the trouble to come.

Notes

Kaile Hultner, “The Return of the No Escape Book Club,” No Escape, February 24, 2021, https://noescapevg.com/the-return-of-the-no-escape-book-club/. ↩
Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020). ↩
Hultner, “Gamer Trouble Book Club #1: O Gamer My Gamer,” No Escape, February 24, 2021, https://noescapevg.com/gamer-trouble-book-club-1-o-gamer-my-gamer/. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 18. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 18, 19. ↩
Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). ↩
John Lewis, Twitter, July 16, 2018, tweet: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way. #goodtrouble.” ↩
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007 [1990]). ↩
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 1: “That who soevyr suffer eny dise-player, carder, tenys player, or other unliefull gamer, to use unlifull games in their house.” ↩
Hultner, “Gamer Trouble Book Club #1,” 2021. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 8. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 8. ↩
Graeme Kirkpatrick, “Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK Gaming Magazines and the Formation of Gaming Culture 1981-1995,” Game Studies 12, no. 1 (September 2012), http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/kirkpatrick. I have also discussed this “idea of the gamer” at length with reference to The Last of Us franchise in my paper “It Can’t Be For Nothing,” https://zenodo.org/record/4603525. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 3. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 3. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 3. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 4. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 10. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 12. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 10. ↩
James Ash, The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015). ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 13-14. I find this move especially interesting because these three terms are, for good reason, frequently criticized by Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz on their podcast Game Studies Study Buddies. Phillips, via Ash, provides us with the passage whereby we might leave racist frameworks and psychologically specious ideas behind without denying the root experience which they tried to formalize—the “sense of separation” in gameplay. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 14. This idea of the “interface envelope” is especially resonant with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “insertion.” See Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012 [1945]). ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 16. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 16. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 16. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 19, 15. ↩
Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020). ↩
Jagoda, Experimental Games, 9. ↩
See my Glitchspiel, https://vagrantludology.itch.io/glitchspiel. This line is drawn from Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London, UK: Verso, 2020). Phillips would add: “Trouble is a glitch in the matrix” (Gamer Trouble, 11). ↩
Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 149, cited in Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 19. ↩
Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 11. ↩

Skin and Stars

2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

This is a game of the body cosmic. It is a hack of John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings, with inspiration from Ben Roswell’s War in the Year 3000 and Sundae Month’s Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor.

Skin & Stars is a rules-lite adaptation of my own rules-free Glitchspiel, proposing one potential framework for the tactics included therein. As with Glitchspiel, this game would not exist without Legacy Russell’s manifesto, Glitch Feminism. All quotations in the game are from that text.

In Skin & Stars, you play as cosmorgs: future subjectivities existing beyond the old and forgotten forms of earth-bound humanity. You eat, you love, you die, just as the meat-beings did before you. But unlike the meat-beings, your existence is marked by vastness, diffusion, abstraction, a fulfillment of that which was once only a possibility.

Skin & Stars is laid out as a z-folding pamphlet, printable on letter-sized paper. The cover and background image is NASA’s XDF.

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It’s More Like a Tendency

2021-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “It’s More Like a Tendency: Trajectories of the Literary in Kentucky Route Zero.” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Online, March 12, 2021. https://zenodo.org/record/4603525.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

After seven years of development, the final act of Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero was released in January of 2020 to widespread acclaim. Hailed by the games scholar and critic Trever Strunk as a “novelistic accomplishment,” Kentucky Route Zero has consistently surprised and delighted players with its clever writing, subtly realized characters, and moody set design, while also challenging these players by continually innovating upon both its gamic and literary conventions across its five acts and five interludes. Inasmuch as Kentucky Route Zero might be described as “novelistic,” however, the game remains a game, requiring players and readers alike to reconsider what such descriptors as “novelistic” might mean within the interactive space of digital games. To this end, the proposed paper examines the literariness of Kentucky Route Zero, presenting a preliminary framework for more in-depth studies of the game as a literary work.

Keywords: Game Studies, Interactive Fiction, Kentucky Route Zero, Mary Ann Buckles, Nick Montfort, François Laruelle

Introduction

After seven years of development, the final act of Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero was released in January of 2020 to widespread acclaim.¹ Hailed by the games scholar and critic Trevor Strunk as a “novelistic accomplishment,”² Kentucky Route Zero has consistently surprised and delighted players with its clever writing, subtly realized characters, and moody set design, while also challenging these players by continually innovating upon both its gamic and literary conventions across its five acts and five interludes. Inasmuch as Kentucky Route Zero might be described as “novelistic,” however, the game remains a game, requiring players and readers alike to reconsider what such descriptors as “novelistic” might mean within the interactive space of digital games.

In responding to the prompt for this panel—“is the novel of the future a video game?”—it was precisely this descriptor (novelistic) that guided my analysis. Is the novel of the future in fact a video game? To spoil what follows, I will say now: I do not think so. Or, to soften the point, Kentucky Route Zero does not prove this to be the case. However, what became clear in my study of this remarkable game is that, as a category, the literary in general finds in Kentucky Route Zero new passages, new trajectories, that lead out of and away from more traditional literary forms while also being indebted to, and directly in conversation with, these very forms. This is, perhaps, a frustrating both/and position to take, but I hope in what follows to demonstrate just how fascinating Kentucky Route Zero is as an art object, a game, and a work of fiction—perhaps not the novel of the future, but something else altogether.

First, I will situate Kentucky Route Zero in a narrow history of literariness in games, and specifically in the text adventure genre. Then, I will transition from this historical perspective to a formal perspective on Kentucky Route Zero as a piece of interactive fiction that can be analysed with reference to the framework elaborated by Nick Montfort in his “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction.”³ Then, lastly, I will detail the points of textual action throughout Kentucky Route Zero, diagramming their steady transformation over the course of the game’s development between 2013 and 2020. I will conclude with some remarks on the prompt for this panel and the place and function of Kentucky Route Zero in the domain of literary art.

Literariness in Games

The question of the literary in games is a fraught one, much too complex to rehash in a panel presentation, even if we set aside such an empty conflict as the narratology/ludology debate that has haunted game studies since the early 2000s.⁴ Perhaps a good place to begin, then, is Mary Ann Buckles’ “Interactive Fiction as Literature,”⁵ which precedes the narratology/ludology debate by over a decade. For Buckles, there is a simple corollary between works of interactive fiction like Crowther and Woods’ Adventure⁶ and the “types of popular literature [that] are based on rules, games, and the creation of fantasy worlds,” such as “mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and adventure tales.”⁷ Buckles does not try to idealize this correlation, however, but rather goes about constructing an open milieu of forms, conventions, and behaviours that are shared by interactive fiction and popular literature, making no reference to an ideal form of ‘narrative’ or ‘game’ that might become the subject of a narratology or a ludology. She chooses instead to attend to the concrete features of the popular genres of fiction she mentions, and their expression in the medium of computer games.

In mystery fiction, “intellectual challenge” is key—mysteries are “games in the form of stories”; in adventure fiction, “[l]ocation and physical setting dictate the process of action”—that is to say, space motivates plot; and in science fiction and fantasy, stories are concerned with the “probable consequences of a set of rules that may be different from those governing our real lives.”⁸ What unites these features, for Buckles, and what can be identified in early works of interactive fiction, is “a step-by-step, action-consequence type of thinking and imagination.”⁹ Again, this is in no way some ideal form of which genre fiction and text adventures are instantiations, but rather a preference of consumption and a tendency of design characterizing the mechanics of these disparate mediums.

This sense of mechanics over and against ideals is key. Buckles likens the genesis of interactive fiction to the genesis of the novel. Just like interactive fiction, which arose in response to the technology of the computer, the novel arose in response to the technology of the printing press, with “prose versions of knightly verse epics” being “mass-produced for a wide audience.”¹⁰ There is nothing necessary, eternal, or ideal about either form, the novel or the text adventure. Both arose in response to certain technological advancements, and both express a popular desire for entertainment through story. What is distinct about each form is their mechanics, which are directly connected to the affordances of each form’s medium, whether paper or code. Literary tropes and motivations might be shared across mediums, but what interactive fiction introduces to the literary is the possibility of “the reader’s participation in creating the story and text,” which we can understand as a mechanical difference of involvement.¹¹ By approaching literature from this perspective of mechanics, we can avoid fuzzy definitions and clumsy categories, focusing instead on how different texts do different things.

Kentucky Route Zero cannot accurately be described as a novel in the definitional or categorical way, but it remains a literary work, doing something unique with its words. Like a novel, it conveys a story for the general purpose of entertainment, and like the best novels it does so in a mechanically experimental way with a carefully wrought thematic structure. As such, Kentucky Route Zero shares in the long tradition of literary art, as much worthy of analysis as any other text that might be assigned in the literature classroom. Though Don Quixote (which Buckles selects as an example for its pivotal role in the history of the novel) and Kentucky Route Zero operate in different mediums, with different subject matter, and make use of different mechanical affordances, both texts nevertheless exhibit identifiable tendencies in their design that we can observe and describe. It is to this work of observation and description that we now turn.

Formalizing a Tendency

Having performed this historical groundwork, the use of Nick Montfort’s “methodological framework” for analysing and interpreting interactive fiction becomes quite clear.¹² Montfort is less interested in litigating the position of this or that textual work in a given genre, and more interested in “how interactive fiction is experienced,” which is to say, what interactive fiction does to the reader-player, or what happens at the interface between text and reader-player.¹³ Montfort readily acknowledges that interactive fiction is a “many-faceted” field of study, which one can approach from the perspectives of the “literary,” “gaming,” “poetics,” and “aesthetics.”¹⁴ Indeed, Kentucky Route Zero easily presents itself for analysis along each of these lines.¹⁵ But where we want to focus our attention today is on the mechanics of this particular piece of interactive fiction, and specifically those mechanical features of interactive fiction that set the form, and therefore Kentucky Route Zero, apart from traditional printed fiction. Montfort begins his essay by highlighting four such features:

Interactive fiction is “a text-accepting, text-generating computer program.”
Interactive fiction is “a potential narrative, that is, a system that produces narrative during interaction.”
Interactive fiction is “a simulation of an environment or world.”
Interactive fiction is “a structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game.”¹⁶

Kentucky Route Zero is mechanically different from the novel form insofar as it possesses each of these features. Though it does not allow the reader-player to input typed text, interaction in Kentucky Route Zero primarily occurs through selecting between different text options, which then generate different text responses (a “cycle” in Montfort’s terminology¹⁷). Because of this interaction, the story that a given reader-player will experience during a “traversal”¹⁸ of Kentucky Route Zero is not fixed, and is therefore potential, a fact made especially clear in the latter two acts of the game. Perhaps most obviously different from the medium of the printed word, Kentucky Route Zero presents its story against the backdrop of a computer-animated world, in which meaningful action is performed by the reader-player without representation in text. And finally, through world navigation and light puzzle solving, the mystery with which Kentucky Route Zero begins is not merely a mystery that will be resolved over the course of reading, inviting the reader’s efforts along the way, but must be actively resolved by the reader-player’s actions. Insofar as Kentucky Route Zero is, therefore, a “program, potential narrative, world and game,” Montfort’s framework for interpreting interactive fiction applies.¹⁹

At this juncture, we will now turn to look at Kentucky Route Zero in detail, conducting a mechanical analysis of its literary function. Specifically, we will attend to the mediation of what we have described in the abstract as ‘literariness’ by the four distinctive features of interactive fiction cited above, examining the ways in which the affordances of the medium produce new trajectories of the literary within this particular game text. We have taken this path, eschewing plot summaries and gameplay descriptions to this point, to ensure a strong anti-idealist position in our reading, avoiding the narratological and ludological pitfalls that would refer the object of our inquiry back to an ideal form or origin. Kentucky Route Zero inhabits a milieu of forms, conventions, and behaviours, exhibiting certain tendencies of design that, through Montfort’s framework, can be isolated and described. Through the medium of computation and the material of code, Kentucky Route Zero implements specific storytelling mechanics that set it apart from traditional literary offerings, but not in such a way that it is entirely severed from the history of the literary. Rather, Kentucky Route Zero participates in a chorus of stories characterized by accident and fluctuation, choice and variation, recycling older textual forms while incorporating new technologies and making use of their affordances. In short, then, we might call this an aleatory analysis,²⁰ or better, a study of potentials—an approach that is especially suited to the world of Kentucky Route Zero.

Textual Action in Kentucky Route Zero

I use the phrase “textual action” to refer to the input-output cycle of interactive fiction, as opposed to something like ‘textual agency,’ to highlight the potential quality of the reader-player’s position in Kentucky Route Zero, a potentiality that goes beyond even that which Montfort describes in his framework. For Montfort, the potential of interactive fiction lies in its potential for the player. The player has textual agency insofar as their interactions can produce different experiences for them. But in Kentucky Route Zero, this potential is resituated in the position of the player. In his paper, “Player and Figure: An Analysis of a Scene in Kentucky Route Zero,” Daniel Vella masterfully demonstrates this resituation of the player-position with a phenomenological-narratological reading of Act I, Scene II of the game, highlighting the ambiguity of the reader-player’s potential relation to the figure(s) on screen.²¹ Insofar as Kentucky Route Zero “is a game that foregrounds and thematizes its own mediation,” the reader-player’s position feels much more a part of the text itself, caught up in the game’s “self-reflexive concern with its own presentation and mediality.”²² The reader-player does not exist outside the text, exerting their agency upon it, but rather within the text, acting in and being acted upon by it. As Vella demonstrates, in just a single scene, which action is the player’s and which action is the playable figure’s is incredibly difficult to distinguish, and indeed, the game continuously works to mingle these active positions without ever fully reducing one to the other. Vella’s single-scene analysis is remarkably thorough, taking cinematic framing, set design, and “verbal acts” into account, but for our purposes here, we will now focus on these “verbal acts” or what we are referring to more generally as textual action across the entirety of the game.²³

Act I

The first scene of the game finds us outside a gas station, Equus Oils. We, the reader-player, see a truck, a man and a dog, and another person sitting in a chair. We can click an icon of an eye (a non-textual interaction) that floats above the truck and the dog, and the man will turn to look at what we select. This non-textual input produces a textual output describing what we and the man see. If we click anywhere on the ground, the man will respond to this command (another term for input) and move to the point that we clicked (already, those familiar with point-and-click adventure games will recognize this type of gameplay). As we approach the person in the chair, two floating icons appear, an eye and a text box. If we click the eye, we receive another text description, and if we click the text box, we initiate conversation. The person’s name is Joseph. His speech (and most speech in the game) is represented like the text of a screenplay: “JOSEPH: Damn! Did you hear that wreck? …” We learn the playable figure’s name through our first dialogue choice. We are playing as Conway. Joseph asks Conway the name of his dog, and we, the reader-player, get to choose (a moment of potentiality in the first textual act of play), our options highlighted in orange: Homer, Blue, or nameless (we choose Homer for this traversal). During this scene, we head into the basement of the gas station where we are introduced to three more non-textual inputs (a pointing finger to pick up an item, directional arrows to navigate between rooms, and an electrical bolt for interacting with a breaker). As well, while in the basement, a persistent icon of a lantern at the bottom centre of the screen appears, which we can click to turn our light source on and off. After completing some simple tasks and some further interactions with Joseph, we return to the truck, where a steering wheel icon indicates that we can get in the truck. When we click it, we are presented with two options, in italics, which function like stage directions: “(It’s time to go)” or “(CONWAY gets distracted).”²⁴

In this first scene, the narrative interaction space of Kentucky Route Zero is established. The mechanics that mediate Kentucky Route Zero’s story are:

Engaging in dialogue (textual input and output).
Observing the world (non-textual input, textual output).
Manipulating the world (non-textual input and output).
Moving through the world (non-textual input and output).²⁵

As noted above, Daniel Vella has already examined the complexities of the potential relation between player and figure in Kentucky Route Zero, so we will not retread that terrain. Here, instead, our concern is with the textual mediation of this relation, the specific mechanics used to perform this mediation, and the literariness of the game text produced as a result. As such, what follows will focus on the first mechanic above, with reference to significant moments of the other three mechanics where necessary.

The next two scenes progress much in the same way, involving dialogue, observation, manipulation, and movement. But in Scene IV of Act I, the first surprising textual shift occurs. We are in Elkhorn Mine, and the scene opens on a figure we have not met yet. Her name is Shannon. She is talking on the phone, and we are given orange dialogue options to direct her side of the phone call, placing us in her position. As the call ends, Conway walks up and the dialogue icon appears, but it reads: “Stranger.” In a stroke, our position as the reader-player plunges into that of Shannon. The game denies our knowledge and our agency from the prior three scenes to abruptly resituate us in the position of a different character. We have a conversation with Conway, but then the game repositions us again, our perspective shifting back to Conway, our dialogue choices his once again. For most of the subsequent scene, inside the mine, we continue to play as Conway, moving as him and speaking as him, but then at the end of the scene, we are given a simultaneous dialogue choice, Conway or Shannon, which now positions both characters in the playable position, both characters as us. We proceed to take control of Shannon for a short scene, moving her through a section of the mine, and then the game cuts to Conway, outside. When Shannon rejoins him, we move together to the truck, and then choose who gets to drive. Our dialogic position switches to Shannon for a moment as we have a short chat with Homer, just like Conway has done in the previous scenes. This sequence of scenes still privileges Conway, with the stage direction telling us “(CONWAY gets back on the road),” but already, our own position, the potential relation between player and figure, has expanded beyond the still narrow scope of this direction. Shannon has entered the fold of protagonaity.

Limits & Demonstrations

Before proceeding to Act II we play an interlude, the first of five, titled “Limits & Demonstrations.” In this scene, we find ourselves in an art gallery where we are presented with three figures, whose names we learn, as is now the norm, via dialogue: Emily, Ben, and Bob (attentive players will remember meeting them briefly in Act I). We, the reader-player, move and speak as Emily. The three walk around the circular space, looking at and discussing the installations on display, all of which were made by the artist Lula Chamberlain. But the conceit of the scene becomes clear when they reach the third installation, Overdubbed Nam June Paik installation, in the style of Edward Packer. It’s a reel of magnetic tape from a tape recorder, cut up and arranged in a loose web on a wall, with a hand-held playback head connected to a speaker system. We continue to speak as Emily, but Bob takes the playback head, physically directing the interaction. When he touches the head to the tape, the speakers play the recording, and we see the voice of Lula Chamberlain displayed in static-tinged text. Then the background fades away, and all we can see is this text. We read, we listen, and this we dissolves in the black. A computer offers commands. Emily makes choices. Bob follows her directions. We explore the recording, a nonlinear (indeed, unordered) text adventure, that relays the history of Lula, Joseph (the same from the gas station), and Donald, who we have not (yet) met. In this single moment within a single scene, we see a remarkable condensation of Kentucky Route Zero’s narrative mechanics, and indeed, of the four key mechanics of interactive fiction Montfort identifies. Lula, in constructing the installation, constructed a piece of interactive fiction, which we now navigate through an input-output system of commands and replies, a navigation that is, at the same time, being navigated by us, the reader-player, as Emily (and Bob by extension). This is a rather stunning potential doubling of the world: that of Lula’s manufacture and that of the exhibit as part of Kentucky Route Zero. The textual mediation at play here is profound. At one point, the computer that offers commands to Emily offers only a single option, but then we are presented with a choice to respond as either Emily or Ben. Then, moments later, the computer offers two single word commands, “Remember” or “Regret.” Within the narrative of the installation, these affective acts are Lula’s, but Emily as player is inhabiting Lula’s position, and we as Emily inhabit Lula’s position by proxy, with the effect that it is we who remember or regret. When we at last reach the end of the tape and the background fades back in it is like emerging from a dream. We observe one final installation, and then we leave.

Act II

We begin Act II with a close up of a woman sitting at her desk looking over some papers. Stage directions in orange tell us that this is Lula, that we are Lula. After reviewing some proposals, we are interrupted by another character and have a short conversation. After this exchange, Scene I proper begins. We are back with Conway, Shannon, and Homer. Throughout Scene I, we move as Conway, but we are presented with dialogue options as either Conway or Shannon. This time, at the end of the scene, the stage direction is also in the plural: “(They have places to go).” In the next scene, we arrive at an enormous warehouse, Random Access Self Storage, a name that feels like it is describing more than just the building. Conway is hurting at this point and sits down to rest while Shannon goes inside to look for a file they need. Conway can talk to the attendant or listen to the homily playing over the P.A. We listen. It is a message for an absent congregation, but it is also a message for Conway, a message for us. The homily ends, Shannon returns, and Conway gets up. We walk a few steps, and then Conway collapses. We replay a scene from earlier, in the mine, in text only. The game lets us choose Conway’s dialogue over again, changing our choices from before if we so desire. When he comes to, Shannon takes charge. In the next scene, Shannon has as many dialogue options as Conway, lending her an assertiveness that feels appropriate. Conway is losing his grip on the world, and we our grip on Conway.

The next scene, Act II, Scene V, finds us at the Museum of Dwellings, but the sense of us now enters into an even deeper ambiguity. We move as Conway, Shannon, and Homer, but we view them as if through security cameras. Whenever the three stop to observe one of the dwellings, a conversation occurs, but it is a conversation between residents of the museum and museum staff, the latter as whom we play. For the first time in the game, we control the movement of one set of characters and the dialogue of another set, separate from each other both spatially and temporally. We are Conway, and yet we are the museum staff. But this scene does not stop here. In one especially potent sequence, we, as Conway, approach a house in which there is a young girl living, Flora, whom we, as the museum staff, question. As they do so, the perspective shifts, the background fades to black, and we start narrating as Flora, recounting what Conway did inside the house, and the surreal experience that he had therein, the details of which he relayed to Flora. The only action we see is Conway entering the house, and then exiting it after Flora finishes talking. We, as Flora, choose the details, choose which potential world to realize, which narrative is communicated to us, to the museum staff, to the player. The fold of protagonaity expands further.

Act II, Scene V, ends with the group meeting another child, Ezra, and we can once again speak as Conway or Shannon in the present, not as reported to the museum staff. As we proceed to Scene VI, we find ourselves moving as Ezra, talking to Homer as Ezra, but then also speaking as Conway. We arrive at the home of a man we have been looking for, and the frame zooms in and out, and with it, our dialogic perspective: Conway, Shannon, Conway, Shannon. The final shot of Act II sees the text of Conway’s conversation start to writhe and become illegible, the world desaturate, and the frame tilt. This is Conway’s experience, but it is also we, the reader-player, who are looking at Conway have this experience. This is a simple strategy, but effective. Conway’s own position in the world is becoming unmoored.

The Entertainment

Act II is followed by another interlude, “The Entertainment.” In another first, we now find ourselves inserted in the scene in first person, where every prior scene had us interacting with and navigating the world in third person.²⁶ In a further instance of doubling, “The Entertainment” is a stage play created, directed, and performed by characters in the world of Kentucky Route Zero, featuring characters and a location that are also from the world of Kentucky Route Zero. Specifically, the entire play takes place at The Lower Depths tavern, and the proprietor, Harry, has a leading role (both Harry and the tavern will feature in Act III). We discover over the course of the interlude that we are not only watching the play, but we are in fact an actor in the play, the silent “bar-fly” whose reckoning finally comes, an event that occurred in the past of the game and which is now being dramatized. Where in “Limits & Demonstrations” there is only a single chain of identities—we as Emily as Lula—now we see this chaining proliferated—we as an actor as the bar-fly, performing alongside the actor Edgar Foy as Harry Esperanza, Paula Graves as Evelyn Hickman, and the rest of the cast. Kentucky Route Zero’s “self-reflexive concern with its own presentation and mediality” is here readily apparent.

Act III

Act III begins with a memory of Conway’s, talking to his employer and friend Lysette. We choose his dialogue, remembering for him, bringing the world of his memory into being. Then, Act III proper begins, and once again we are given options to speak as Shannon or Conway. As the first scene progresses, we encounter a space in which our movement causes us to shift from Conway’s perspective to Ezra’s, dialogue and locomotion passing seamlessly between characters with the movement of the frame. Ezra has joined Shannon and Conway in the fold.

At this point, all of the textual tendencies, the openness of the textual mediation at play in Kentucky Route Zero, begin to intensify. In Act III, Scene II, Shannon makes a phone call, and we choose the responses from the other end, or rather, we choose the affect of these responses because the voice is inaudible to the camera with which we are viewing the scene. The scene cuts to two figures on a motorbike, one driving and one riding in the sidecar: Junebug and Johnny. We speak as Junebug. We cut back to Conway, Shannon, and Ezra, and the duo on the bike speed by, before turning back to join them. As the five speak with each other, we can choose from an equal number of dialogue options for Conway, Shannon, or Ezra, and we even get to speak as Junebug for a moment, naming her and Johnny’s motorbike (just like in Act I, Scene I, when we named Conway’s dog). This traversal, we call it The Weird Vector, which seems to capture the proliferating lines of identity running through Act III.

The following scene finds our group at The Lower Depths where Junebug and Johnny are set to perform. They take the stage, and we are introduced to yet another new textual modality. Large, semi-cursive words appear against the stars above the tavern, lacking the usual black box against which all other text in the game is set. And Junebug sings. There have been other songs with vocalized lyrics that have played before this one, but now a character that we know, whom we have played as, whom we are, even if tenuously, sings, and importantly, we get to choose her words. We choose between a few options for her lyrics, and then our choice becomes a part of her song, a part of the music itself. Once again, like in “The Entertainment,” we are part of the performance—indeed, we are performing, our play doubled. From this point on, we are regularly presented with options to speak as Junebug.

In the next scene, we meet several nonplayer characters who will feature only briefly, but one of whom we have heard of at several points prior in the game: Donald, an old colleague of Lula’s and Joseph’s. He introduces us to his masterwork, the computer system Xanadu. He tells us of its “ornate labyrinths of memory,” describing it as “a shrine to perfect simulation.” A few scenes from now, we will be able to enter Xanadu, which operates like a classic text adventure, a more proper text adventure, even, than Kentucky Route Zero.²⁷ When we do, Conway types commands which we, as Shannon, Ezra, or Junebug choose, and which are enacted by an avatar of Donald in the game itself. Kentucky Route Zero is hyper-aware of the performance that is carried out here, and indeed, takes pains to highlight this performance as such. At one point, we can comment on the writing (Donald’s writing) as Junebug, critiquing it as “Wordy” or “Vain.” This is a literary critique, because Xanadu is a literary work, before being some “perfect simulation.” This is not to deny the reality of Xanadu, relegating it to the realm of irrelevance with the dismissal, it’s only fiction, but rather to acknowledge that Xanadu, as a work of literature, does something in the world of Kentucky Route Zero, and we can describe what happens at the interface between game and players (Conway, Shannon, Ezra, and Junebug) in the same way that we can describe what happens between Kentucky Route Zero and ourselves. In case players had missed the self-reflexive doubling of “Limits & Demonstrations” or “The Entertainment,” Xanadu makes this doubling plain, reproducing the game, Kentucky Route Zero, itself to the letter.

To invoke this phrase, to the letter, at this point is to acknowledge the how of literary simulation that is at work in Kentucky Route Zero, rather than to assert some tautological logic of identity, essence, or ideality. The mechanics of this potential world are presented primarily through text, and significant moments of character, set dressing, and cinematic framing are all textually mediated. Unlike a novel, our chief point of comparison here, Kentucky Route Zero allows its text to be transformed by our action, by we, the reader-player. To ask which traversal of the game is authoritative, what the dog’s and the motorcycle’s actual names are, is pointless. As Lula remarks in a quiet moment during our exploration of Xanadu, this world is a “dangling copy, with no original.” And as is consistently the case with Kentucky Route Zero, the question which world, really, remains open.

When we leave Donald and his computer, we are given a scene that fills in a previous gap in the story. Act III, Scene XII begins in identical fashion to Act III, Scene VII. While Scene VII is a brief interlude between scenes in Xanadu, in which we move and speak as Ezra, Scene XII presents us with the other side of this story, beginning with us moving and speaking as Conway. We enter a building with Shannon, and then ride a secret elevator down into the Hard Times Distillery, where we are met by an electromagnetic skeleton named Doolittle (again, attentive players will recall that a “Lem Doolittle” was the writer of the plays combined into the performance seen in “The Entertainment”)—or rather, we, as Doolittle, meet two “Visitors” who have stumbled into our workplace. In similar fashion to Act II, Scene V, in the Museum of Dwellings, we move one character while speaking as another, but now the perspective is reversed. We move as Doolittle, guiding Conway and Shannon on a tour of the distillery, while we control Conway and Shannon’s dialogue. What unfolds is surreal, the conversation unnerving, and time itself feels wrong. Scene XII takes much longer than Scene VII, even though they are constructed in such a way as to be taking place during the same segment of time. Near the end of the scene, while we examine a truck, we can drift away into Conway’s memories and, like the beginning of Act III, bring the world of his recollection into being. Now, however, this world is entirely textual, memories displayed in grey italics, with our choices, using the third person “he” for Conway, in the standard orange. And then, at the end, locomotive control shifts from Doolittle to Conway, only to have that control snatched away. Doolittle offers Conway a drink, and the context of the preceding makes it clear that Conway should definitely not accept. But if we wait too long, the game itself takes our mouse and clicks the icon for us. The radical potentiality of the narrative that has characterized Kentucky Route Zero up to this point collapses in a moment—if only for a moment—to ensure that this action happens. A single word, “Drink,” is less something we, the reader-player choose, but something that is chosen for us, something the game acts out whether we go along with it or not.

Here and There Along the Echo

Act III is followed by another interlude, “Here and There Along the Echo,” which is played from a first person perspective like “The Entertainment.” This time, however, we find ourselves looking at a phone, which we can pick up and use to call into a help-line for “drifters and pilgrims” who find themselves on the Echo River.²⁸ Time to complete for this interlude varies greatly with the patience and curiosity of the player (there is a cryptographic quality to the help-line²⁹), but whenever the phone is hung up, we discover that we were playing as Emily, and that she is once again on the move with Ben and Bob. At this point, such sudden discoveries of who precisely it is we are are not surprising.

Act IV

If Act III saw a significant intensification of textual tendencies from the prior two acts, Act IV shatters any mechanical norms that Kentucky Route Zero had previously established. Act III was released in May of 2014, but Act IV would not be released until July of 2016, the longest gap in development to that point. In Act IV, we can see the perspective time brings to the creative process, and a transformation in the sensibilities of the developers. The act begins aboard a ferry, The Mucky Mammoth, with a character whom we may or may not have seen before (depending on how exploratory the reader-player has been): Will. He is talking to himself, working on a difficult piece of machinery, and we choose what he says—indeed, we are the ones to whom we are talking. Then, Junebug appears, and we shift to her perspective, talking to Will as Junebug. After this conversation, Act III, Scene I proper begins. We are still on The Mucky Mammoth, but now we are playing as Shannon, talking to Will from her point of view (notably, Shannon is wearing Conway’s jacket³⁰). Ezra comes on stage and control passes from Shannon to him. He talks to Will, and then goes inside the ferry, where we find Conway with the rest of the group. Ezra talks to them, and then control and our perspective shift once again, to Conway, as whom we move outside. Shannon comes to join him, and they talk, we talk, as Shannon, to Conway, as whom we were playing only moments before. And all the while, the camera has been smoothly panning around the ferry, shifting focus from exterior to interior and back again, perfectly choreographed with the shifting spotlight of this performance. This is a stage play, a scripted piece of theatre that we perform live, the actor for each of these singular beings.

This sequence on the barge cuts to black, and then the game zooms out to an abstract scene of The Mucky Mammoth on the Echo River (iterating on the other abstract overworlds of the game, which we have not had the space to consider here—though significantly, we the player do not control our transit here, unlike the prior overworlds we have navigated). Text narration overlays the scene, but for the first time the narration is in the first person, without speaker names, leaving the screenplay format aside. If we pay attention, we can figure out that it is Will who is talking, recounting a tale of the motley crew who joined him and Cate, the vessel’s captain, to sail down the Echo. He tells the story in the past tense, as if he is speaking to some unknown third party—or perhaps it is we to whom he is speaking, filling in for his absent audience. Once again, we are the ones being addressed, we are the ones upon whom the text is acting.

Each scene of Act IV begins with a choice: stay aboard or disembark the Mammoth. In the first, we choose as Ezra to stay or follow. If we choose stay, we play as Ezra aboard the ferry, but if we choose follow, we play as Junebug and Johnny, a shift in perspective away from Ezra that is subtly indexed by our choice of verb. In the latter version of Scene II, our perspective oscillates between Johnny and Junebug, with Johnny finally being welcomed into the fold of protagonaity with his first full conversations that we, the reader-player, enact.

In the subsequent sequence of narration, Kentucky Route Zero introduces choice to Will’s monologue, nuancing our perspective yet again. He remarks on scenery along the Echo, and we get to choose certain details, filling in Will’s memory, bringing the world into being. The next scene, Scene III, gives us the option to retreat or follow as Shannon, and in both we primarily speak and move as her. The retreat variation hews closely to her perspective, but if we choose to follow the group ashore, there are moments where we will shift to Junebug and Johnny, and even Patch, the bartender whom we meet there. When we return to the Mammoth, we set sail again, Will narrates, and we fill in the world further with our choices, settling into this rhythm, the action of the river, drawn along by this current of diffuse textuality.

The textual mediation of Kentucky Route Zero diffuses further in Scene IV, a generalized textuality that renders our position as reader-player almost entirely free-floating. We can choose to lounge as Homer and the ship’s dog, Valkyrie, or stop as Clara (a musician on tour who joined us at the beginning of Act IV), Cate, and “I” (Will, continuing to refer to himself in the first person). It is a short scene if we lounge as the dogs, a vignette of creaturely life. If we stop, we find ourselves at a phone, the same phone from “Here and There Along the Echo.” The scene opens with us as Ezra, and then it shifts as the adults take turns on the phone. The frame is bisected by a diagonal line, and our perspective moves to the right so that the scene on the other end of the line can be displayed. Will checks his messages (actual voice recordings with text transcripts), and the game reverts to the more familiar stage commands of earlier acts, prompting us to continue listening with the orange text: “(WILL listens to the next message).” After we finish with Will, we shift to Cate, then Shannon, and then Clara, and are treated on the left side to brief snapshots of the world beyond the strange domains in which we have been wandering. Once everyone has made their calls, we get back on the ferry and continue on, repeating the cycle once again.

At the next stop, we choose for Ezra to teach us a game or for “Shannon, Ezra, the old man, and I” to stop. Like the previous scene, these choices suppose the focal position of Will, inserting himself into the stage directions in the first person. If we stay, we play as Ezra teaching a card game to the others; if we stop, we control Shannon as she completes a series of psychological tests at a research lab, the Radvansky Center, to make some pocket change. However, like in the Museum of Dwellings, at the Radvansky Center we play a recording, over which two characters we have never met, Mimi and Jenn, talk. As we complete the tests and fill out a questionnaire, Mimi and Jenn try to interpret our responses, in-between catching up on each other’s lives. Though the action is focused on Shannon, the text traces lines outward from the recording, making connections with events and places in both the past and future of our present traversal of the game. It is a book bound without a cover, or even page numbers, a story perpetually in the middle. Indeed, Will says as much in the subsequent narration if we choose not to stop and play the card game instead:

Nobody seemed too interested in the lab stop that night. They stayed aboard and played a card game. I read a book. Let me tell you about it: I actually only read a bit from the middle… The two had cause to reflect on the history of their work together. Something got messed up—a document misplaced or filed under the wrong heading… I wasn’t really paying close attention to that part, but the event prompted a long conversation about the procedural history of their work together, and that illustrated a history of their friendship in broad, suggestive strokes.

Will is describing the scene from the other timeline, this moment of extreme metatextuality threatening to shatter the boundaries of the game itself. A bifurcating path, two parallel but mutually exclusive narratives, and yet the one, a conversation with we the player-character as its object, becomes the material for a book in the other, the contents of which are narrated by a person who seems to occupy the very fabric of our experience, reporting back to us on our actions as if we were someone else altogether. The potentiality of interactive fiction here makes this literary effect possible. The mechanics of the narrative push us away from a determinate reading of the text, and yet invite us into a singular knowledge (that is, the absolute particularity of Mimi and Jenn’s relationship) remixed and re-presented through a different medium.

The next scene presents us with the option, “I took a nap” (as Will), or to help Cate as Ezra. If we take a nap, we do not play as Will, who is of course sleeping, but as Ezra (once again enacting a closure of the other path, but bringing another world into being in the same stroke). We explore the ship, and eventually come upon Will, who turned on a lecture to help him sleep, in which the lecturer discusses some of Thomas Edison’s more esoteric ideas. If we choose to help Cate instead, we go ashore a small island with her, playing as Ezra. However, the as of this scene continues to break down the conventions of possible interactions in the game. On the island, we are presented with a single set piece, but the text box inset at the top of the screen is bisected in similar fashion to how the frame itself was bisected during the stop at the phone discussed above. On the left, we inhabit Cate’s perspective, and on the right, Ezra’s. But even this distinction is fuzzy, as the two panels of the text box somewhat overlap, and the characters regularly cross over the divide. We are presented with dialogue and stage directions for both Cate and Ezra in the usual orange, and their thoughts follow in white italics. But then a third textual modality is re-introduced, grey italics, to signify memories that are interwoven with the action of the scene. We must click on both sides of the divide, progressing the narrative in each panel in tandem. Sometimes, one side will stop, waiting for us to catch up on the other, and sometimes one or the other character will interject on the other’s side, responding to a question or interrupting their reflection. Near the end of the scene, the two sides converge, but importantly, they are not combined. At one moment, both panels read: “(CATE and EZRA look up at an old battleship drifting by),” their perspective distinct, yet fixed on the same event taking place in the world before them, an event to which we, too, are witness. After more conversation, more thought, more recollection, the scene reaches its conclusion, but before it can end we must click the icon to close the text box on both sides of the divide, again acknowledging the singularity of the two characters on screen. The textuality of this scene constructs a radical narrative equality for its two participants, a positioning which is assured by the mutuality of interaction structuring our involvement as the reader-player.

To this point, Act IV has been a virtuoso performance on the part of the developers, far exceeding any of the mechanical tactics of the prior acts. Now, however, as we return to the Mammoth, our parallel trajectories begin to tend toward each other, the performance taking on an edge. The next choice with which we are presented is merely a choice for an extra scene, but again, this is a potential narrative that some players may not realize in their traversals of the game. If we choose to help we stay aboard with Shannon, Ezra, and Will, shifting between Ezra and Shannon over the scene’s duration. But when this scene concludes, we are shunted, without alternative, into the other choice, to set out with Shannon, Conway, and Homer. There is a fatedness to this path, a closure of potentiality, much like the scene at the end of Act III where the game wrests the mouse from our control to force Conway to drink. In this scene, we pilot a small dinghy as Conway, but illuminate the path forward as Shannon, as whom we also speak. When we reach our destination, Shannon gets out of the dinghy to talk with some nonplayer characters. After these conversations conclude, she turns to see Conway in another boat, taken by the Hard Times boys, or rather, given over to them, welcoming his end at last, the end that was sealed by that unchosen drink. Our last act in the scene is as Homer, for the first and potentially only time: to follow Conway, or to return to the ship with Shannon. If we choose the former, we will not be seen again.

The narration that follows this scene is the only narration in Act IV that is not from Will’s perspective, taking Shannon’s instead, in the third person. Like Will’s, we get to shape the text of the world, choosing who Shannon meets as she pilots the dinghy back to the Mammoth. In a nice touch, the game responds to our input with appropriate animations. The next scene is primarily played as Shannon, too, though we can choose to sigh as Homer in response to Shannon’s attention, get to briefly control Ezra, and even act as Sam for a short while, one of the joint-proprietor’s of the restaurant at which we stop. The end of the scene ensures that our attention is fixed on Shannon, however, offering us two simple, sorrowful stage directions: “(She returns to the tugboat)” or “(She listens to the river).” She and Conway’s they is no more, our we is no more. A member of our fold is gone, torn from our narrative world.

After this scene, Will takes up his role as narrator once again, bringing us to the final major scene of the act. Here, Clara, the touring musician, performs. If we have played enough of the shipboard scenes, we can choose to help Clara as Ezra, viewing the performance and the audience from aboard the Mammoth. The alternative is to watch the show as Junebug and Johnny, looking up at Clara on the Mammoth. If we choose the latter, we remember, in the first person, another concert of Clara’s that Johnny and Junebug once attended. Our memories, Junebug’s mostly, but perhaps Johnny’s too, are presented in grey italics, and we, the reader-player, get to choose what is remembered, the events that occurred, opening and closing doors to different potential worlds.

The act ends with a short scene in the Silo of Late Reflections, looking down on our group from above: Shannon, Ezra, Junebug, Johnny, Clara, and Homer (if we chose to stay). In the narration preceding this scene, Will is sure to note how many of our party are missing, one or two, depending on our previous choices.

Un Pueblo de Nada

While the prior interludes have been formally daring, “Un Pueblo de Nada” is the most unique, mechanically, of any scene in the game. We take up an over-the-shoulder third person perspective, and quickly discover that we are playing as Emily, in her producer role at the public television station WEVP-TV.³¹ We are once again putting on a show. Our thoughts are presented in italics in a text box at the bottom of the scene, and we are afforded choice here (though not always), expressing ourselves not, primarily, through dialogue but through introspection. Our cursor takes the shape of WEVP-TV’s logo, and when we mouse over significant details, white lines are traced over the objects we are looking at, like doodles in a notebook or highlights on an overhead projector (one of which also materially features in the scene). Ben and Bob are here too, along with some new characters: Rita, Ron, Maya, Nikki, and Slow Moe Crow (an actual crow with whom everyone seems to be able to communicate). All of these characters will feature in Act V. The scene plays out in almost real time, like the recording of an actual television broadcast, and we, the reader-player, are swept along in the performance, the broadcast, solving problems, fretting about the show, becoming producers ourselves. Outside, a storm rages, and it is this storm that brings the interlude to a thunderous close, and which will materially shape the stage for the final act of the game.

Act V

Where Act IV took over two years after the previous act to be completed, Act V took almost four, with the game not seeing a complete release until January of 2020. However, in this final act, consisting of just a single scene, the remarkable literary performance that is Kentucky Route Zero is fully realized.

Thoroughly freed of typical player-figure constraints in Act IV, in Act V, we are the game itself. The world speaks, and we are it. We play as a cat, just a cat, and yet this cat understands human language and hears the past, bringing this world which we are into being through our interactions.

Act V is structured as a single, circular stage, with the hole that is the Silo of Late Reflections at the centre. We control the locomotion of a small cat, using a glowing white dragonfly to direct it around the map. At the bottom of the screen, where the lantern icon previously appeared, we are given periodic opportunities to speak as the cat, meowing at people and other creatures we meet by clicking the non-textual icons that appear (which can only be described as squiggles). At other points, we will approach different groupings of the now significantly expanded cast of characters and engage in conversation, speaking as familiar characters like Shannon, Clara, Ezra, and Junebug, new characters from the interlude like Maya, Nikki, Ron, Rita, Emily, and Slow Moe Crow, and even more characters, either new to Act V, like Clyde and Elmo, or from previous scenes, like Mary Ann (who players might remember from an exchange in Act II). The sheer volume of narrative positions we inhabit is staggering.

But this is not all. Whenever we see an eye icon appear in the world, a black text box will appear to present narration of past events. Ghosts walk the world before our eyes, and we sit as the cat and watch, while at the same time we are these ghosts, we are this memory. Certain words in the text are highlighted in orange, but unlike any prior dialogue or stage directions in the game, these appear in the middle of paragraphs, and lead us down different paths of discovery and recollection. Some of the histories of which we learn are from the distant past, echoes of the ‘People of Nothing’ who once lived here. Other histories are more recent, featuring characters in the narrative present of the game like Nikki, Clyde, and Ron. This is yet another new form of textual mediation that opens new potentialities for being in and understanding the world of Kentucky Route Zero, further dissolving our privileged position as agent and emphasizing our status as just another actor.

The scene is broken up by three black screens with large, capitalized text that speak primarily in the first person plural: we. We circle the silo as the cat, meowing, talking, remembering. Time passes. The storm waters begin to subside. We set to work rebuilding. And in the final sequence, we gather for a funeral, arrayed around the grave of two horses who were trapped and drowned during the storm. Their death is inexplicable, purposeless, but we gather to mourn them, those who knew them and those who did not, those whom we have been for some time, those whom we have been for only a little while, and even those who haunt the stage, ghosts long past of other unknown, yet-to-be-known, potential selves.

Emily sings. We sing. We all sing. And the funeral ends. We disperse in small groups, leaving the grave behind us, but as if by some sort of gravity, we find ourselves together again in the strange white structure on the other side of town that the WEVP-TV crew say appeared over night. We have been moving furniture into it all day, making a space, making something new, something that never was before us, and yet has always been for us. In one traversal, it was a library; in another, a music venue; and in the most recent, it became a kitchen and communal dining room. In each traversal, it was ours. As the frame zooms out, the world bathed in the light of the setting sun, we are here with one another. Or perhaps, truly, simply: we are.

Death of the Hired Man

The final interlude functions like an epilogue or an end credits scene that plays out much like “The Entertainment.” We look upon the scene from a fixed, first-person perspective, watching a TV that sits above the bar at The Lower Depths. This time, however, we are at the actual bar, not a staged version of it. Harry himself speaks, neither we nor an actor playing his part. He talks to Carrington, a recurring character who has spent the duration of Kentucky Route Zero trying to stage an experimental performance of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man,” which is the primary inspiration for Conway’s character and narrative arc. Carrington’s performance was a failure, with neither actors nor audience turning up for the show, and yet still we hear of Carrington’s ambitions, his vision for the play, his interpretation of the poem, and so too his interpretation of Conway’s story, the story we ourselves experienced as Conway. Emily chimes in, for good measure, though this time we do not speak as her, but simply hear her voice, reading the text of her words. And then game ends for good.

Conclusion

In the first interlude of the game, “Limits & Demonstrations,” as Emily, Ben, and Bob explore the interactive art installation, Lula and Donald talk while they look for an entrance to the cave system in which we will later meet Donald in the flesh. Donald calls out, “It’s a trail,” and Lula responds, Emily responds, we respond: “It’s more like a tendency. There tend to be fewer plants here, on the path we’ve been walking.” It is precisely this kind of tendency that we have been pursuing here.

This study of potentials began in response to the question: is the novel of the future a video game? To recapitulate the preceding, based on our analysis of Kentucky Route Zero, I would contend: no, it is not. However, insofar as this study attempted an anti-idealist reading of Cardboard Computer’s remarkable game, positioning it in a literary milieu constituted by the open array of all textual creations, we discovered instead a field of mechanics and affordances that present themselves for our use.

Using Montfort’s framework, we specified the four mechanical aspects of interactive fiction that set the form apart from other textual modes, but again, such an effort is not intended to draw clear, essentializing lines between genres, but rather to identify what different literary styles can do, the mechanics by which they do so, and the effects that this doing has on the reader.

Having laid this groundwork, we proceeded to analyse Kentucky Route Zero in detail, with special interest paid to the steady expansion and transformation of textual action in the game over the course of its development. Kentucky Route Zero is a game uniquely concerned with the textual mediation of its world, and through the proliferation of mediatory mechanics, it is able to make this mediation the focus of its literary art. Indeed, by this mediation, Kentucky Route Zero effects a multiplication of potentiality and an opening of the fold of protagonaity, so dismantling conventional constructions of subject and world, player and figure. But, at the same time, the generalized textuality of Kentucky Route Zero promotes a radical narrative equality and mutuality of interaction that does not see the supersession and abandonment of singular beings, but rather their sheltering and remembrance.

It is on this final point that I want to focus, offering a ground both for further readings of Kentucky Route Zero and for further responses to the question motivating this panel. In Act IV, Scene I, Will begins his narration of our actions with the following remark: “I personally believe a story gets more true as it’s tossed around from brain to brain and the whole community brings their insight to bear on the brittle facts of experience.” Then, as we are listening to the lecture recording in Act IV, Scene VI, the lecturer regales us with Edison’s theory of a “‘swarm’ of interchangeable … ‘proletarian’ … life units” that animate memory, cognition, and life itself. It would be easy to read such statements as arguments for relativism and pantheistic oneness, but I would challenge that the narrative mechanics of the game, as I have exhaustively catalogued them here, undermine such claims. The game mechanically values the singular one, the proletarian life, irreducible to some interchangeable life unit, and yet the singular one is ontologically held in a profound equality with ever other singular one. The royal we which I have employed profusely throughout this paper, and which the game itself explicitly invokes in Act V, does not signal the abandonment of the individual, but rather a witness to the individual held in openness to every other. What is more, this openness is not predicated on an ontological duality of self and other, but rather on the contingent ground of a generic difference. This notion of generic difference I derive from the philosopher François Laruelle, but it is perhaps best summarized by his commentator, the scholar Alexander Galloway: generic difference is that which speaks of the one who is “merely a finite and generic one: this one; this one here; this one here in person.”³² This is an anti-idealist position to take, one which, I believe, Kentucky Route Zero supports: the “one is never the Whole or the All,” but this one.³³

With respect to the panel question, again, I will emphasize, the novel of the future is not a video game, nor should Kentucky Route Zero be labelled a novel. But, on this ground of generic difference, we can, perhaps, leave more essentializing responses to this question aside and pay attention instead to the vast panoply of mechanics with which we can, across mediums, perform the literary (a term I use with the most nominal of intention), and which we may mix and match, adopt and transform, hopefully producing further literature-expanding hybrid texts like Kentucky Route Zero in the process.

References

Bourriaud, Nicolas. *The Exform8. Translated by Erik Butler. London, UK: Verso, 2016.

Buckles, Mary Ann. “Interactive Fiction as Literature.” BYTE Magazine 12, no. 5 (May 1987). https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1987-05/page/n147/mode/2up.

Crowther, William. Adventure. PDP-10, 1975.

Crowther, William, and Don Woods. Adventure. PDP-10, 1977.

Elliott, Jake, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt. Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition. PC: Cardboard Computer, 2020.

Galloway, Alexander R. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Hall, Charlie. “Kentucky Route Zero’s Latest Interlude Requires a Phone . . . a Telephone.” Polygon, October 2014. https://www.polygon.com/2014/10/30/7131767/kentucky-route-zero-interlude-telephone-the-echo.

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–30. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Kemenczy, Tamas. “The Scenography of Kentucky Route Zero.” GDC 2014, July 2016. https://youtu.be/nh_o8JEmVdw.

Mitchell, Alex. “Defamiliarization and Poetic Interaction in Kentucky Route Zero.” Edited by Emily Flynn-Jones. Well Played: A Journal on Video Games, Value and Meaning 3, no. 2 (2014): 161–78. https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/6687017.

———. “Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Techniques for Creating Poetic Gameplay.” Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG 13, no. 1 (August 2016). http://www.digra.org/digitallibrary/publications/making-the-familiar-unfamiliar-techniques-forcreating-poetic-gameplay/.

Mitchell, Alex, Liting Kway, Tiffany Neo, and Sim Yuin Theng. “A Preliminary Categorization of Techniques for Creating Poetic Gameplay.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 20, no. 2 (June 2020). http://gamestudies.org/2002/articles/mitchell_kway_neo_sim.

Montfort, Nick. “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction.” In IF Theory Reader, edited by Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robbin Wheeler, Version 2., 25–58. Transcript On Press, 2011.

pirateguy7. “Conway’s Jacket Theory.” Reddit, May 2018. https://www.reddit.com/r/kentuckyroutezero/comments/8hz5jr/conways_jacket_theory/.

Strunk, Trevor. “With Its Final Act, Kentucky Route Zero Became a Haunting, Literary Elegy.” EGM, February 2020. https://egmnow.com/with-its-finalact-kentucky-route-zero-became-a-haunting-literary-elegy/.

Vella, Daniel. “Player and Figure: An Analysis of a Scene in Kentucky Route Zero.” Proceedings of the 2014 International DiGRA Nordic Conference 11 (2014). http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/player-and-figurean-analysis-of-a-scene-in-kentucky-route-zero/.

VShadow. “[Solved!] Strange Mystery “Numbers” on Phone in Here and There Along the Echo (Spoilers).” Steam Community, November 2014. https://steamcommunity.com/app/231200/discussions/0/620695877410574318/.

Notes

Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt, Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition (PC: Cardboard Computer, 2020). ↩
Trevor Strunk, “With Its Final Act, Kentucky Route Zero Became a Haunting, Literary Elegy,” EGM, February 2020, https://egmnow.com/with-its-final-act-kentucky-route-zerobecame-a-haunting-literary-elegy/. ↩
Nick Montfort, “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction,” in IF Theory Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robbin Wheeler, Version 2 (Transcript On Press, 2011), 25–58. ↩
For a dismissal of this “blood feud” and an admirable opening of the terrain, see Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 118–30. ↩
Mary Ann Buckles, “Interactive Fiction as Literature,” BYTE Magazine 12, no. 5 (May 1987), https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1987-05/page/n147/mode/2up. ↩
William Crowther and Don Woods, Adventure (PDP-10, 1977). ↩
Buckles, “Interactive Fiction as Literature,” 135. ↩
Buckles, 135-137. ↩
Buckles, 135. ↩
Buckles, 136. ↩
Buckles, 138. ↩
Montfort, “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction,” 26. 26. ↩
Montfort, 26. ↩
Montfort, 26. ↩
For instance, Alex Mitchell, in collaboration with several other scholars, has pursued the poetic angle of analysis with respect to Kentucky Route Zero for some time. See Alex Mitchell, “Defamiliarization and Poetic Interaction in Kentucky Route Zero,” ed. Emily Flynn-Jones, Well Played: A Journal on Video Games, Value and Meaning 3, no. 2 (2014): 161–78, https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/6687017, Alex Mitchell, “Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Techniques for Creating Poetic Gameplay,” Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG 13, no. 1 (August 2016), http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/makingthe-familiar-unfamiliar-techniques-for-creating-poetic-gameplay/, and Alex Mitchell et al., “A Preliminary Categorization of Techniques for Creating Poetic Gameplay,” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 20, no. 2 (June 2020), http://gamestudies.org/2002/articles/mitchell_kway_neo_sim. ↩
Montfort, “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction,” 26-27. ↩
Montfort, 32. ↩
Montfort, 32. ↩
Montfort, 29. ↩
An approach I borrow from Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, trans. Erik Butler (London, UK: Verso, 2016). ↩
Daniel Vella, “Player and Figure: An Analysis of a Scene in Kentucky Route Zero,” Proceedings of the 2014 International DiGRA Nordic Conference 11 (2014), http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/player-and-figure-an-analysis-of-a-scene-in-kentuckyroute-zero/. ↩
Vella, 14. ↩
Vella, 15. In 2014, when Vella’s paper was published, he only had access to the first three acts of the game (the third of which came out mere weeks before his presentation at DiGRA Nordic 2014). If he were to conduct a similar analysis today of the game in its entirety, he would see that the trends he identified only intensified through the game’s development cycle. ↩
Indeed, as one of the developers, Tamas Kemenczy reports, the design of Kentucky Route Zero is explicitly modelled on theatre. See Tamas Kemenczy, “The Scenography of Kentucky Route Zero” (GDC 2014, July 2016), https://youtu.be/nh_o8JEmVdw. ↩
A fifth, hybrid mechanic might be located in the stage directions, which are textual inputs with non-textual outputs, but insofar as these utilize the same conventions as dialogue, I will treat of them as if they were part of the textual ‘script’ of Kentucky Route Zero. ↩
“The Entertainment” was originally designed for Oculus VR, but is no longer playable in that form. Now, instructions from the developer direct the player to recruit seven friends and stage the performance live. See http://kentuckyroutezero.com/the-entertainment/vr.txt. ↩
Xanadu begins much like Crowther and Woods’s Adventure, which inaugurated the genre in 1977. However, Donald’s “faultless […] oracle” does not simulate a world out of the pages of Dungeons & Dragons but, like Crowther’s prototype of Adventure from 1975 (before Woods’s involvement), simulates the world itself. See William Crowther, Adventure (PDP-10, 1975). Will Crowther was a spelunker and the original iteration of Adventure was a simulation of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky, a technological, historical, and geographical space in which Kentucky Route Zero is self-reflexively working. ↩
Like “The Entertainment,” “Here and There Along the Echo” was also designed with ‘live’ play in mind. A listing on eBay appeared for a physical phone that could only dial one number (the one found in the game), and that same number could also be called on a real telephone, which would bring callers to the same interface as that in the game. See Charlie Hall, “Kentucky Route Zero’s Latest Interlude Requires a Phone . . . a Telephone,” Polygon, October 2014, https://www.polygon.com/2014/10/30/7131767/kentucky-route-zero-interludetelephone-the-echo. ↩
See, for instance, VShadow, “[Solved!] Strange Mystery “Numbers” on Phone in Here and There Along the Echo (Spoilers),” Steam Community, November 2014, https://steamcommunity.com/app/231200/discussions/0/620695877410574318/. ↩
Popular commentary has recognized the significance of the jacket, with Redditor pirateguy7 proffering the “Conway’s Jacket Theory,” that “Conway’s jacket is a symbolic marker for the main character of the game.” This identification of a “main character” is, I would contend, off base, but pirateguy7 has intuited the tendency that I have been describing in detail here. See pirateguy7, “Conway’s Jacket Theory,” Reddit, May 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/kentuckyroutezero/comments/8hz5jr/conways_jacket_theory/. ↩
The channel can be ‘reached’ at http://wevp.tv, where a live-action version of the interlude can be watched. ↩
Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xiii. ↩
Galloway, xii. ↩

Joyful Study

2021-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Joyful Study: Review of Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification by Patrick Jagoda.” Ancillary Review of Books, March 11, 2021. https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2021/03/11/joyful-study-review-of-experimental-games-critique-play-and-design-in-the-age-of-gamification-by-patrick-jagoda/.

Mirrors: Zotero

Review

Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games is a thorough, insightful elaboration of an art-critical practice that he describes as a “joyful study” of digital games in the twenty-first century. Central to this project is Jagoda’s broad understanding of games (digital and otherwise) as an “experimental form” with “the potential to alter the conditions of the historical present.” Put more boldly, the premise that undergirds Jagoda’s project is that “games make realities,” and it is this practice of making that guides the book’s theorization and analysis of games.

The first part of the book, “Framework,” consists of an introduction and two theoretical chapters that establish the basis for Jagoda’s inquiry. Citing Eugen Fink, the philosopher and assistant to phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Jagoda contends that “each game is an attempt at existence, a vital experiment.” Games are not un-real, but rather work with reality, experimenting upon it, and in doing so have the potential to produce new realities. This does not mean that games are inherently utopian or resistant as a form, but rather that the experimental quality of games is neutral, identifiable in both neoliberal control systems and radical artistic works. As in Jagoda’s first book, Network Aesthetics (2016), such incommensurable situations require careful attention be paid to their “sensibilities of distribution,” a task that Jagoda handily performs.

In chapter one, “Gamification,” Jagoda first identifies the experimental quality of games in the emergence of game theory in the 1940s, tracing it through the neoliberal policy of the 1970s and 1980s and the surge of behavioral economics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Jagoda notes that economic “game theory” (which models rational decision making) and “game studies” proper (which examines games as formal and aesthetic objects) are “often treated as separate or largely disconnected” from each other, and this chapter does excellent work remedying that gap in the scholarly discourse. By doing so, Jagoda is then able to move from the historical analysis of gamic experimentation to a formal analysis of how game experimentation works.

In chapter two, Jagoda takes up experimentation as the unique capacity of games (as opposed to literature, music, or fine art) “for testing and producing reality,” a capacity that is “experimental” in both the aesthetic and scientific senses. Though gamic experimentation supports the “influencing and modulating” practices of neoliberal capitalism through the gamification of such varied domains as education (Duolingo), dating (Tinder), and warfare (drone pilots), “affective procedures” of experimentation can also be deployed in games to transform this paradigm from the inside. Such games (including Jonathan Blow’s Braid (2008), Anna Anthrophy’s Dys4ia (2012), Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic (2013), and Toby Fox’s Undertale (2015), to name just a selection of the games Jagoda considers) operate as “alternative form[s] of experimental art-science,” working upon reality to make problems, rather than simply attempting to solve them. In this way, games are not fated to reproduce the dominant system of the historical present, but can, in an “untimely” way, “manifest…unrealized historical potentials.”

At this point, Jagoda transitions to part two of the book, “Concepts,” a section consisting of four chapters each concerned with a different concept that makes possible the alternative paradigm of games as experimental art-science. In each chapter, Jagoda analyzes both the dominant paradigm’s mobilization of the concept and the “untimely rabbit holes and exploits” that experimental games can and do use to circumvent neoliberal control. In chapter three, Jagoda examines games that subvert rational choice theory through affective priming (the unconscious production of tastes, interests, desires, or emotions in a person through external media), while chapter four examines games that transform control through non-sovereign and nonrepresentational play experiences (through resistance to intuitive or ‘good-feeling’ interaction). In chapter five, he pushes the concept of difficulty from the mechanical to the interpretive to the affective level, discussing games that take difficulty from a neoliberal signifier of value to a counter-hegemonic “allegorithm” (citing Alexander Galloway). The final “Concepts” chapter disassembles failure (or “fragility”) as a necessary characteristic of a “resilient” economy, looking at games that deploy non-productive and non-recuperable failures that are in fact “more generative and more forgiving” than the failure demanded by the neoliberal free market. Through each of these four chapters, Jagoda convincingly makes the case for games as inside agents in our historical present, offering alternative pathways to the stifling control and abject precarity of contemporary life.

In part three, “Design,” Jagoda turns to his own work as a game designer, presenting an improvisational practice of “critical making” that uses his Alternate Reality Game the parasite as an example for how a “ludic laboratory” might continue the work of experimental art-science that he has been exploring throughout Experimental Games. If criticism attends to the “sensibilities of distribution” of a given context, experimental and improvisational making participates in “the demonstration” of “gap[s] in the sensible itself,” the work of dissensus (as articulated by the philosopher Jacques Rancière) in which the abovementioned games (including Jagoda’s own) participate. Where neoliberal gamification seeks to “help the subject make better choices,” games as experimental art-science instead “seek … freedoms,” new modalities of being and perceiving altogether.

Jagoda concludes the book with a brief coda, “Joy,” in which he embraces Spinoza’s sense of joy as the “immediate thinking-feeling of existence,” as “passionate intensification and tendential increase.” Where the gamification paradigm seeks the reduction and recuperation of uncertainty to the ends of efficiency and control, the experimental art-science paradigm welcomes uncertainty for the joy that it brings, the “new sensitivities to affect and be affected” that it potentiates. Games, in this paradigm, are no longer limited to the “superficial pleasures and instant gratifications” that dominate the games industry, but become properly reality-making, participating in a “more intense and joyful realization of virtualities.” To be sure, this possibility is not a guarantee, and Jagoda explicitly says as much. The joyful study he presents must be “vigilantly purposeful” in its execution, aware of the over-determining forces that would have it be brought under rational control. As Jagoda himself writes, his book is a “modest contribution” to this work, the greatest achievement of which is, perhaps, its invitation to others to conduct their own experiments, to explore their own uncertainties, to step into their own laboratories of joyful study.

Buffering

2021-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

This resource is an excerpt from my zine, Glitchspiel, which draws directly from Legacy Russell’s manifesto, Glitch Feminism, for its core material.

Buffering is about the work of shelter, safety, and futurity that comes before actual play at the table. Safety tools are vital, but can be ineffective when a bad actor has already been invited or forced their way in. The tools included here are thus concerned with actively dangerous situations in play, not the necessary maintenance of safety at an already supportive table.

I am not a counselor, conflict mediation expert, or self-defense trainer. These are merely tactics that Russell names as explicitly glitch feminist, and which have helped me understand some of my own subconscious responses to harmful scenarios in which I have found myself. Furthermore, the constraints of the business card format render this work something closer to a reminder than a full resource. You can read Glitchspiel for a more detailed discussion, or even better, Russell’s book. It was transformative for me.

I firmly believe that creating buffers for our tables is necessary for the subsequent cultivation of spaces in which flourishing is possible. In Russell’s words, “we do not wait to be welcomed by those forces that essentialize or reject us but rather create safety for ourselves in ritualizing the celebration of ourselves.”

The cover and background image is an adjusted version of this image from Filter Forge, used with permission (CC BY 2.0).

Itch.io

The Last Tree

2021-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

The last tree fell some time in the night. Altar, bond, and measure of the community, the mighty trunk now lies humbled. Was it hewn by mortal means? Split by lightning? Uprooted by a great wind? Or did it simply collapse from the burden of its own massive frame, insides dry and brittle, a gnarled vestige of a once verdant earth? Cause yet unknown, the people gather, and remember.

Trees are memory. Their rings signify the deep time of the land, a natural record of climate and strife. Earlywood, growing in spring and early summer, is light-coloured and its rings wider. Latewood, growing in late summer and early fall, is dark-coloured and its rings narrower. One ring of earlywood and one ring of latewood constitute a year of growth.

The wider a ring of earlywood, the warmer and wetter the year; the thinner, the colder and dryer. Drought can reduce earlywood rings to almost nothing, and traumatic events like forest fires can lead to blackened layers around which new wood grows. Knots signify where branches once joined the trunk, but were broken or lopped off. Shakes, parallel separations between layers, were originally thought to be caused by wind, but are in fact caused by bacteria entering the tree through the roots. Splits are caused by mechanical forces, either growth stresses or external trauma.

Darker earlywood rings near the core of the tree are the heartwood, and are older and more resistant to decay. Lighter earlywood rings around the heartwood are the sapwood, and are younger, still living, drawing up water collected from the earth by the roots of the tree and delivering it to the leaves. Ratios of heartwood and sapwood vary between species.

The community comes together around their great root, drawn into their shared history by its rings. Together, they recount their past, narrating the succession of years, until what was becomes what is. Perhaps a cause for its fall will be determined. Perhaps not. Regardless, when the last ring is counted and remembered, they will leave this place for good.

Pure Indetermination

2021-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Continuing on from our discussion of the Milesians, our next Presocratic school of thought is the Pythagoreans (which includes Pythagoras of Samos himself, Philolaus of Croton, Petron of Himera, and Eurytus of Croton). In my first reading of the Pythagoreans five years ago, I remember being intrigued by some of their ideas, but finding little purchase in their system as a whole. This time, however, was different. Specifically, in rereading Waterfield’s introduction, I found my attention arrested by a footnote citing K. S. Guthrie’s The Pythagorean Sourcebook, which asserts the following of the Pythagorean philosophy:

Things are numbers, or, if you like, the basis of nature is numerical, because solid bodies are built up of surfaces, surfaces of planes, planes of lines and lines of points, and in their geometric view of number the Pythagoreans saw no difference between points and units.¹

Having watched Alain Badiou’s lecture “How to Begin with the Void” last year,² this conflation of “points” with “units” caught my attention. Badiou constructs being from sets, equating what is with number (though his sets are sets of nothing, an impossibility for the Greeks³). The Pythagorean equation of points with units, for Badiou at least, is, then, not so far fetched. Where Badiou begins with Ø, the “pure name of nothingness,” the Pythagoreans begin with the One, which is in Badiou’s schema {Ø}, the “multiple with only one element” (this conception, too, would have been impossible for the Pythagoreans). The Ø is the name of “pure indetermination,” and as such this name is “purely abstract,” a “trace for the presence of the absence of nothingness.” But insofar as the Ø is absolutely indeterminate, it cannot be distinguished from any other nothing, dividing this void from that void. For Badiou, the Ø is, therefore, absolutely “unique,” and the name of this void is, as such, “one thing.” The void is singular, and is only fully cognizable when conceived in this way—otherwise, the Ø remains a “pure symbol,” “without any reason,” a name “that has no meaning at all.” But then, to conceive of the void is to conceive of “something which is” (while the void itself is not), something “which we can think, which we can realize.” In other words, to conceive of the void is to conceive of something that contains only the name of pure indetermination: which is the {Ø}. And so, the One is born. It is a one “with a very small meaning, a small one, but it’s a one,” and it is from this one, through a process of recursive “mediation” by the “name of nothingness” (the Ø) that the material of the finite (being, existence) is elaborated.⁴

We see, then, utilizing the resources of modern mathematics, that the construction of everyday matter on the basis of a profound mathematical abstraction is not a metaphysics to be sneered at. And we will return to Badiou next time, in discussing Heraclitus and Parmenides, to raise the matter of why we might want to begin with the void. But, for the time being, it would appear that there is some knowledge to be gleaned in returning to Pythagoreanism. Let us set Badiou aside in order to make the connection with the Milesians, so situating Pythagoras and his followers in a continuity.

First: Thales. Water is the “first principle,” and as such, it is the “source” of “all existing things.”⁵ Soul, however, not water, is “the principle of movement,” and the “universe is shot through with soul,” for which reason Thales “thought that all things were full of gods” (so also identifying soul and the divine).⁶ Because all things must be generated from and destroyed into water, soul, as the principle of movement, must be equiprimordial with water, the principle whereby being becomes beings, a becoming that is itself not reducible to being in its being.

Second: Anaximander. The boundless, the infinite, apeiron, is the first principle, and it is ontologically “different” from the “so-called elements” that constitute beings.⁷ By “necessity,” all “existing things” are born from and “die back into” the boundless (a reversibility that I wrestle with in note 25 of the previous essay).⁸ However, because these things are not equivalent with the boundless, their “creation” does not occur “as a result of any of the elements undergoing qualitative change, but as a result of the opposites being separated off by means of motion, which is eternal.”⁹ The boundless is the “one” that “contains oppositions,” and it is eternal motion that separates them.¹⁰ Furthermore, the boundless itself is not “subject to generation or destruction” like the opposites, and indeed does not “have an origin,” but rather is “the origin of everything else … contain[ing] everything and steer[ing] everything.”¹¹ Recalling Thales, apeiron is also called “the divine,” because “it is immortal and imperishable,” but the location of divinity has here shifted from the soul to being, insofar as it is not motion that Anaximander calls divine but the boundless (indeed, soul is not even named in Anaximander’s invocation of motion).¹²

Third: Anaximenes. His first principle is “not boundless, but specific”—it is “air.”¹³ This air “manifests” as “different things” through a process of “rarefaction and condensation,” a process of “change” that is caused by “motion,” which is again “eternal.”¹⁴ Furthermore, for Anaximenes, air is a “god, which had been created, was infinitely huge, and was always in motion.”¹⁵ But for Anaximenes, “soul, which is air, holds us together, so the whole universe is surrounded by wind and air.”¹⁶ The first principle, air, and the principle of movement, soul, are thus identified with each other (and together, as one, called divine).

My conclusion in the prior essay was that the Milesians posit an originary dual in their metaphysics, an ontological intuition of the pair being-becoming. Being, for each, is one (water, boundless, air), and yet being is manifest in beings, the many (all existing things). As such, there must be a process of change or motion whereby being becomes beings, a process that is either qualitative (Thales and Anaximenes) or substantive (Anaximander). Because this process must always be, insofar as the becoming itself could not become without first being, the Milesians posit this becoming as another principle equiprimordial with being (soul, motion, god). However, in the case of Anaximenes, the last of the Milesians, we see the principle of being (air) almost entirely conflated with the principle of becoming (air as the god always in motion), and the equiprimordiality of being and becoming put into question (and indeed, the whole Milesian project).¹⁷

But perhaps the problem encountered here is with the dogged commitment to the substantiality of the first principle, not with the Milesian intuition itself. As I have already argued, Anaximander is the strongest of the three Milesians in his positing of an abstraction for his first principle, apeiron. To be accepted as first principles, water and air require baroque descriptions of generation and destruction to account for the existence of change and the many. The boundless, however, undergoes a substantive change, with the “opposites being separated off” from it, but is not changed in itself. There is no qualitative transformation of the boundless into this or that existent; rather, the boundless is the abstract principle that makes possible substantive difference (rather than the substantive principle that makes possible only abstract, i.e., qualitative, difference). It is for this reason that I previously invoked Simondon’s conception of the “preindividual,” abstract being without determination, which is then “dephased” or “resolved” into individuated being.¹⁸ This is not a qualitative change, insofar as the individual cannot revert to the preindividual state (a unilateral determination as Laruelle would say), nor is it total, insofar as the preindividual is not “exhaust[ed] with one stroke.”¹⁹ The boundless is named as such precisely because it is so: infinite, i.e., indeterminate.

Here, then, we find the passage in our continuity from the Milesians to the Pythagoreans. If we maintain the possibility of an abstract principle for material reality, Aristotle’s confusion over the Pythagorean claim that “the elements of numbers are the elements of all things” dissipates.²⁰ The fact that the Pythagoreans “collected together all the properties of numbers and harmonies which were arguably conformable to the attributes and parts of the universe, and to its organization as a whole, and fitted them into place” is not so peculiar.²¹

The Pythagoreans begin with number, the first “elements” of which are “the even and the odd,” the “even … unlimited and the odd limited.”²² The one follows, “formed from both even and odd, since [the Pythagoreans believed] it is both even and odd.”²³ All the numbers, then, are “formed from one,” and these “numbers constitute the whole universe.”²⁴ This is the basic ontological framework of Pythagoreanism.

Aristotle notes that the Pythagoreans maintained “two causes” at the beginning of being, but were “idiosyncratic” in this belief insofar as the “limited and the unlimited and the one were not separate natures, on a par with fire or earth or something,” i.e., some material thing, “but the unlimited itself and the one itself were taken to be the substance of the things of which they are predicated.”²⁵ For the Pythagoreans, then, there is the unlimited (the boundless) and there is limit (the one). This is a remarkable intuition. The Pythagoreans begin with indetermination, then through the determining limit that is the one the one-as-such comes to be, from which all else is generated (in Badiou’s terms, this is the progression Ø → {Ø} → 1, where the ‘determining limit that is the one’ is first the “small one” of the {Ø} before growing in meaning to become the numeral 1). “This is,” truly, “why they said that number was the substance of everything.”²⁶ Aristotle puzzles over how the “first spatially extended unit was put together,” how stuff, “existing things,” could come from number,²⁷ but as with Simondon’s application of modern physics to ancient dilemmas, Badiou is able to overcome this difficulty through modern mathematics, demonstrating how set theory is able to bootstrap nothing into something by calling itself in the recursive function presented above. This is perhaps not intuitive in the domain of everyday life, but in the domains of Pythagorean metaphysics and contemporary pure mathematics, there is no problem.

But whither the soul? The Pythagoreans, like the Milesians, posit an originary dual, but they replace the second term, motion or soul, with limit. Unlike motion, which implies variation and change, limit implies finality and closure. Is our continuity broken? I would contend no, and rather that it is here where the Badiousian connection becomes explicit. Aristotle writes in his Physics:

The Pythagoreans also claim that there is such a thing as void. According to them, it enters the universe from the infinite breath because the universe breathes in void as well as breath. What void does, they say, is differentiate things; they think of void as being a kind of separation and distinction when one thing comes after another. This happens first among the numbers, because on their view it is the void that distinguishes one number from another.²⁸

But Aristotle has it backwards. As Waterfield remarks in an endnote, the “Pythagoreans conceived of numbers as arrays of dots (see n. 6 on p. 93); the dots are the limiting principle, the space between them the unlimited void.”²⁹ The void is not that which separates and distinguishes, because it is the one, the unit-point, that is the first limit, the first determinate thing. It is the one, the {Ø}, that separates and distinguishes the void. Generally, there are not first things, which are then differentiated by void, but rather, things are determinations of the void, limits of the unlimited. There is the void—the boundless, the indeterminate, the preindividual—and there is limit—opposition, determination, individuation. Limit as a sort of closure of the unlimited is, at the same time, the movement that is the becoming of beings.

After all this, the soul at last returns, but now in a different role. The Pythagoreans recognize that, in maintaining their two causes, unlimited and limit, the universe consists of opposites, and the “dissimilar and incompatible and incommensurate ha[ve] to be connected by [a] kind of harmony, if they are to persist in an ordered universe” (because, we recall, the one, of which all things are constituted, is both even and odd, unlimited and limit).³⁰ So, when the universe breathes in void, it is also breathing in breath, which we have already seen equated with air and the soul by the Milesians, and this breath or “soul” is “a kind of attunement (harmonia), on the grounds that attunement is a mixture and compound of opposites, and the body is made up of opposites.”³¹ Soul, rather than being that which separates or causes change, is for the Pythagoreans the harmony of the opposites.

And the Pythagoreans do not stop here. They do not relegate soul to the domain of the purely human, but rather place it in the domain of the real itself. Soul is also known to them as “reason,” which along with “substance” is “identified with 1.”³² The result of this double identification is not the reification of a correlation between cognition and reality, the entrenchment of a representational regime, but a profound abstraction of the natural and naturalization of the abstract: “everything which is known has number, because otherwise it is impossible for anything to be the object of thought or knowledge.”³³ Number is what is knowable and number is what is. In other words, cognition is the real itself.³⁴

There are some further cosmological extrapolations that are of some interest to us: that the “universe is single,”³⁵ that it is “spherical” in shape and surrounded by the “unlimited”,³⁶ and that the “first thing to be harmonized, the one, in the centre of the sphere, is called the hearth,”³⁷ which is the “altar, bond, and measure of nature.”³⁸ But such speculation is secondary to the remarkable abstraction we have already covered in detail here. With the Pythagoreans, we see a significant development beyond Anaximander’s intuition of the boundless which mathematizes, and so abstracts further, his material principle in such a way that shelters Pythagorean thought from the later distortions of Aristotle and his prime matter. If we are to grapple with the likes of Simondon and Badiou today, it is essential to draw this continuum from Anaximander to Pythagoras, preserving the abstraction of pure indetermination at the genesis of being.

Notes

K. S. Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1987 [1920]), cited in footnote 4, The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 90. ↩
Alain Badiou, “Infinity and Set Theory: How to Begin with the Void,” European Graduate School Video Lectures, YouTube, January 12, 2012 [2011], https://youtu.be/I1G_SI1-W-4. ↩
Nils-Bertil Wallin, “The History of Zero,” YaleGlobal Online, November 19, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20160825124525/http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/zero.jsp. ↩
As Badiou demonstrates, number-as-such can be constructed from Ø. If we begin with Ø, 1 = {Ø}, 2 = {Ø, {Ø}}, 3 = {Ø, {Ø}, {Ø, {Ø}}}, and so on. Thus, “in some sense, all numbers are variations concerning zero. All numbers are made of the void, are composed of the void, and so the real of numbers is in some sense composition with only the mark of nothingness. Numbers are made of nothingness.” ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983b6-32, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 12. ↩
Aristotle, On the Soul, 405a19-21, 411a7-9, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 13. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 14. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 14. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 14. ↩
Aristotle, Physics, 187a12-23, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 15. ↩
Aristotle, Physics, 203b7-15, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 15. ↩
Aristotle, Physics, 203b7-15, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 16. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 17. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 17-18. ↩
Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 18. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 18. ↩
Cicero’s testimonial is fascinating, but in this is likely to blame. If Anaximenes’s first principle is air, and air is a god, but also this god was “created,” and yet also “always in motion,” how, then is “motion eternal” for Anaximenes, as Simplicius asserts? Motion would, as such, be more primordial than air. This feels like a potential corruption on Cicero’s part, subordinating the material first principle that so characterizes the Milesians to Roman divinity. Regardless, there is an incoherence in the testimonials and fragments of Anaximenes’s system that render if difficult to assess today. ↩
Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2009), 4-16. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b23-986a26, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 102. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b23-986a26, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 102. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b23-986a26, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b23-986a26, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b23-986a26, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987a13-19, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987a13-19, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1080b16-21, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103, and Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1090a20-5, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 103. ↩
Aristotle, Physics, 213b22-7, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 110. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 321. ↩
Philolaus in John of Stobi, Anthology, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 111. ↩
Aristotle, On the Soul, 407b27-32, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 112. ↩
Aristotle in Alexander of Aphrodisias, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 104. ↩
Philolaus in John of Stobi, Anthology, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 111. ↩
This is in no way George Berkeley’s “esse est percipi” but rather something like Sartre’s invocation of Husserl that “[a]ll consciousness is consciousness of something” or Riccardo Manzotti’s argument that consciousness and the world are identical. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, UK: Routledge, 2003 [1943]) and Riccardo Manzotti, The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (New York, NY: OR Books, 2018). ↩
Philolaus in John of Stobi, Anthology, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 111. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 92. ↩
Philolaus in John of Stobi, Anthology, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 111. ↩
Aëtius, Opinions, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 109. ↩

Being and Motion

2021-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

For some time now, my brother and I have been converging on a research program exploring the “problem of universals,” he from psychology and I from philosophy. With both of us out of school, and stay-at-home guidelines still in effect due to COVID-19, it seemed a perfect opportunity to start a reading group of two and work through some materials that are of mutual interest to us.

We begin with the Presocratics. I read Robin Waterfield’s collection for the first time in 2016, but what really struck me in returning to the earliest of them, the Milesians—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—is the originary, irreducible pair of “being” and “motion” (which I place in quotation marks “to serve as a precaution,” as Derrida would say) that is present—albeit in different configurations—in each of their thought.

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle remarks that the “original seekers after knowledge recognized only first principles of the material kind as the first principles of all things … Thales, who was the founder of this kind of philosophy, says that water is the first principle.”¹ Aristotle clarifies this point with an additional comment: “the source of anything is the first principle of that thing.”² So, then, insofar as water is the first principle of all that is, it is from water that all things arise. This does not seem all that strange to Aristotle, since, he remarks, the “poets made Ocean and Tethys the parents of creation, and claimed that the gods took their oath upon the water—the river Styx.”³ Thales’ theory is a logical progression from the tales of the poets.

It is in On the Soul, however, that Aristotle draws out the second member of our pair, consequently locating in Thales the thought that places a dual at the origin of things. “Thales too … apparently took the soul to be a principle of movement … Some say that the universe is shot through with soul, which is perhaps why Thales too thought that all things were full of gods.”⁴ This is a remarkable passage. If soul is the first principle of movement, soul is thus the source of movement, a source that ‘some say’ permeates the universe. In other words, for Thales (at least in Aristotle’s reporting), movement is intrinsic to the fabric of the real, which is itself constituted by water, but neither is reducible to the other, insofar as each are a first principle in themselves.

Waterfield also finds this point remarkable, commenting in a footnote in the introduction to the Milesians that “Aristotle complained at Metaphysics 988b that the Milesians took motion for granted, rather than explaining how it first arose … It was only after Parmenides that thinkers felt that motion had to be accounted for.”⁵ But what if this is not a ‘taking for granted’ but a genuine philosophical intuition? I do not want to ascribe too much significance to these fragments and testimonials, but in the five year interim between readings, other thinkers I have worked through cause these passages to present themselves to my eyes as ‘shot through’ with a newfound meaning. Certainly, there is being, but there is also motion.

Let us draw another of our Milesians into the fold. In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Simplicius writes of Anaximander that he “said that the first principle and element of existing things was the boundless [apeiron]; it was he who originally introduced this name for the first principle” (or as Waterfield clarifies in an endnote, “It was he who originally introduced this word arkhē [first principle]” itself).⁶ Simplicius continues: “He says that it is not water or any of the other so-called elements, but something different from them, something boundless by nature, which is the source of all the heavens and the worlds in them … It is clear that, having noticed how the four elements change into one another, he decided not to make any of them the underlying thing, but something else beside them; and so he has creation take place not as a result of any of the elements undergoing qualitative change, but as a result of the opposites being separated off by means of motion, which is eternal.”⁷ Here, then, we see the originary dual come into clearer relief: being (the boundless) together with motion.

But what is most fascinating about Anaximander is the additional term that he introduces: the opposites. Here, in approximately 570 BC, Anaximander intuits a formal structure of the real much like that which Gilbert Simondon elaborates in his L’individuation à la lumière des notions de Forme et d’Information (1958). Specifically, in the first part of Simondon’s introduction to part two of L’individuation, a section titled in English “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,”⁸ we see a remarkable parallel with this Presocratic thinker.

Simondon wants to get beyond both the “substantialist” (or Atomist) and “hylomorphic” (or Aristotelian) theories of being, contending that both “give[] an ontological privilege to the constituted individual,” which does “not plac[e] the individual into the system of reality in which the individuation occurs.”⁹ We cannot have a concept of the individual without a concept of individuation, and yet this is precisely what the substantialist and hylomorphic paths do, taking the individual as given. But for Simondon, “to account for the genesis of the individual with its definitive characteristics, one must suppose the existence of a first term, the principle, which contains that which will explain why the individual is an individual, and which will account for its ecceity [thisness].”¹⁰ Quite remarkably, we see the consequence of the Parmenidean paradigm, which takes being as given while denying the significance of motion, a consequence to which Simondon is responding. The Milesian intuition needs to be recovered, that of the originary dual (however it may be configured).

The individual, for Simondon, is a “relative reality,” a “certain phase of being that supposes a preindividual reality.”¹¹ He continues, arguing that individuation “must therefore be considered as a partial and relative resolution that occurs in a system that contains potentials and encloses a certain incompatibility in relation to itself—an incompatibility made of forces of tension as well as of the impossibility of an interaction between the extreme terms of the dimensions.”¹² This is where the resonance with Anaximander becomes sensible. The individual, individuated reality, is neither necessary nor foundational but a consequence of a principle, the principle of individuation. This ontogenesis that we are calling individuation “designate[s] the character of becoming of being, that by which being becomes, insofar as it is, as being.”¹³ There is no conflict between being and becoming because “becoming is a dimension of being corresponding to a capacity of being to fall out of phase with itself, that is, to resolve itself by dephasing itself.”¹⁴ In Simondon, the Milesian dual is recast with the resources of twentieth century science, so also clarifying the organization of this dual. This is not a Manichean duality, a reversible equality of terms, but an asymmetric and inequitable pairing of nevertheless complementary terms, being and motion, being and becoming, the preindividual and its dephasing. Motion is not a figment of the imagination, but an ‘eternal’ capacity or function of being, that by which individuals come to be.

In Anaximander, there is the boundless and there is motion whereby the opposites are separated, made distinct. Simondon gives us a different framework for understanding the same system:

Pre-individual being is being in which there is no phase; the being in which individuation occurs is that in which a resolution appears through the division of being into phases. This division of being into phases is becoming. Becoming is not a framework in which being exists, it is a dimension of being, a mode of resolution of an initial incompatibility that is rich in potentials. Individuation corresponds to the appearance of phases in being that are the phases of being. It is not a consequence placed at the edge of becoming and isolated; it is this operation itself in the process of accomplishing itself. It can only be understood on the basis of the initial supersaturation of being—without becoming and homogeneous—that then structures itself and becomes, bringing forth individual and environment, according to becoming, which is a resolution of the initial tensions and a conservation of these tensions in the form of structure.¹⁵

Though Simondon does not cite Anaximander, he precisely identifies the gap in ancient knowledge that led to the Parmenidean paradigm and the dismissal of motion:

Individuation has not been able to be adequately thought and described because previously only one form of equilibrium was known—stable equilibrium. Metastable equilibrium was not known; being was implicitly supposed to be in a state of stable equilibrium. However, stable equilibrium excludes becoming, because it corresponds to the lowest possible level of potential energy; it is the equilibrium that is reached in a system when all of the possible transformations have been realized and no more force exists. All the potentials have been actualized, and the system having reached its lowest energy level can no longer transform itself. Antiquity knew only instability and stability, movement and rest; they had no clear and objective idea of metastability. In order to define metastability, the notions of order, potential energy in a system, and the notion of an increase in entropy must be used. In this way, it is possible to define this metastable state of being—which is very different from stable equilibrium and from rest—that Antiquity could not use to find the principle of individuation, because no clear paradigm of physics existed to help them understand how to use it.¹⁶

In Anaximander, we see a loose intuition of this system state. His boundless contains opposites that exist in a system of tension until they are individuated by eternal motion. But as Simondon makes clear, it is no wonder that the thinkers that followed discarded this intuition. Indeed, in the later testimonials, we see how the boundless itself is posited to protect against the destruction of all things that would inevitably arise from the principle of becoming in a framework without the requisite abstract tools.

“Some make the underlying stuff single,” writes Aristotle in his Physics, while others “claim that the one contains oppositions.”¹⁷ This “one” is an “extra body over and above the elements, which acts as the source of the elements … Those who suggest that the infinite is not air or water, but this extra body, do so because they want to avoid everything being destroyed by an infinite element. For the elements are related by mutual opposition … and so if any one of them were infinite, the others would have been destroyed by now.”¹⁸ Through these contortions, we see an attempt by the ancients to intuit the physical realities that modern science makes available to Simondon. How can there be many things, and yet all things are, that is, participate in being as being, coming to be through becoming? With the physics available to those asking such questions in antiquity, there are no easy answers. But for Simondon, we can approach such questions (which we can organize under the heading “physical individuation,” the being of the many) through the framework of “the resolution of a metastable system, starting from a system state like that of supercooling or supersaturation, which governs at the genesis of crystals.” Simondon continues:

One can also suppose that reality, in itself, is primitively like the supersaturated solution and even more completely so in the preindividual regime, where it is more than unity and more than identity, capable of expressing itself as a wave or as a particle, as matter or energy, because every operation, and every relation within an operation, are an individuation that divides, or dephases, the preindividual being, while at the same time correlating extreme values and the orders of magnitude that were primitively without mediation.¹⁹

This framework resolves the issues in Anaximander’s system which gave rise to the Parmenidean paradigm, while also addressing Aristotle’s concerns with Presocratic theories of being that led to his own hylomorphic conclusions. Individuation, for Simondon, is quite clearly “not the meeting of pre-existing form and matter that exist as previously constituted, separate terms, but a resolution springing from a metastable system that is filled with potentials: form, matter and energy pre-exist in the system.”²⁰

There is much more of interest in Simondon, even in this short excerpt to which we have been referring here. But sadly, as I have already indicated above, Anaximander’s insight was not taken up by those who followed him, and so the distance between Simondon and the ancients, which he himself indicates, begins to grow. For Anaximenes, the third of our Milesians, Simplicius reports that the “underlying nature is not boundless, but specific.”²¹ This specific (individuated) underlying nature is “air,” which “manifests in different forms in different things” through a process of “rarefaction and condensation,” which is to say, a process of motion.²² Indeed, for Anaximenes too, “motion [is] eternal,” and it is motion that is “the cause of change as well,” but already it is clear that the individuation is taken as given, rather than being posited as a distinct principle equiprimordial with air.²³ We see, then, how the powerful abstraction Anaximander deploys is lost. The boundless is replaced with a boundless thing (air), and all things are reduced by motion (rarefaction and condensation) to it, rather than being opposites in a state of preindividual tension that are then “separated off” by the individuation.

Anaximenes’s reduction causes further problems, too, as relayed by Aëtius in his Opinions: “Just as in us, he [Anaximenes] says, soul, which is air, holds us together, so the whole universe is surrounded by wind and air (he uses ‘wind’ and ‘air’ as synonyms).”²⁴ Motion is not an equal member in the originary dual, and as such, in Anaximenes, this dual itself dissolves. Air (being) is soul (motion). Though this might seem, on the surface, to approximate Simondon’s sense of becoming as a “dimension” of being, if we were to perform such an equation of terms we would inadvertently permit the reversibility of the individuation, so positioning becoming (individuation) as secondary to being (the preindividual), and as such merely an effect, an apparition, unreal.²⁵ The Milesian intuition—there is being and there is motion—is already, at this third stage, evaporating.

It will be a long while before we return to Simondon in his entirety, but I hope in laying this groundwork to establish some parameters for my own particular interest in this research program, and to mount, at this early stage, an assault on the Parmenidean closure, the fortress of being, preempting much of the struggle with which the philosophy we will soon be covering concerns itself.

Notes

Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983b6-32, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 12. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 12. ↩
Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 13. ↩
Aristotle, On the Soul, 405a19-21, 411a7-9, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 13. ↩
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 10. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 14, and Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 315. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 14. ↩
Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2009), 4-16. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 4. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 4. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 5. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Aristotle, Physics, 187a12-23, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 15. ↩
Aristotle, Phyiscs, 204b22-0, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 15. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6. ↩
Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 7. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 17. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 17-18. ↩
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 18. ↩
Aëtius, Opinions, in Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 18. Emphasis added. ↩
Now, certainly, Simplicius does state that in Anaximander’s thought “existing things die back into” the boundless. But the difference between “die” and “rarefy” is, I think, important. “Die” implies something of the entropic irreversibility that is key to Simondon’s individuation, while “rarefaction” is formally convertible with “condensation.” The fact that the testimonials discussing Anaximander’s system are more concerned with the nonexhaustion of the boundless by existing things, and its distinction from existing things as a result, while the testimonials discussing Anaximenes’s system take up the mechanical question of how, in fact, air might become such disparate things as fire and stone, is telling. ↩

A Game, Perhaps

2021-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

A list is a textual algorithm, or what we might also call a game.

This is a list made for List Jam put on by Coleo_Kin and Critical Distance. It is entirely inspired by the thought of Jacques Derrida, and specifically the title of Peter Salmon’s biography of Derrida, An Event, Perhaps.

This game-object can be printed on the front and back of a 3x5 index card.

The cover and background image is taken from the inside cover of the Wave Books edition of Mallarmé’s A Roll of the Dice.

Itch.io

Ludic Philosophy, 2

2021-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

“James Clifford once described [Hayden] White as an ‘anarcho-formalist.’ The formalism was more visible than the anarchism but no less important. White was not naive enough to believe that thinkers were free to imagine any damn thing they liked, thereby recreating the world according to their desires. As he saw it, thinking tended to fall into a narrow range of forms, tropes, narrative structures. As critical as he was of history’s pretensions to be an objective science, there was more than a bit of the scientist, even the mad scientist, in his investigation of thought’s inescapable formality.”¹

“The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure.”²

“[O]ne must think not in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints.”³

“When information is put at play, game-like experiences replace linear media. Media and culture in the Ludic Century is increasingly systemic, modular, customizable, and participatory. Games embody all of these characteristics in a very direct sense.”⁴

“Non-thetic Transcendence (NTT) … is the real kernel of transcendence that is the basis of every philosophical decision.”⁵

“It is in this abyss of an absolute contingency that can never be partially filled in or closed up that we must go to look for the ultimate reasons of philosophy in general in the strict measure that it takes the form of a decision—hallucinatory, at that—on the authentic real or the One; or of Difference in particular and the strange rapport maintained among its diverse systems. The struggles and conflicts internal to Difference are made possible—but not commanded—by this ‘logic’ of non-positional transcendence which is a veritable principle of real choice, more precisely: of choice as such.”⁶

“It is clear that this diversity, radical that-ness or in itself of NTT, a diversity that is absolutely indifferent, grounds, unlike the One, an absolute or indifferent choice and thus an absolute limitation of philosophical choice or a positive annulment of philosophical decision. There is no possible decision as regards this diversity; it is too indifferent to offer any reason for choosing, too absurd and contingent in its existence even to offer a reason for its existence.”⁷

“NTT is even an absolute principle of choice, the principle of choice. Not of any particular and exclusive choice … [but] the essence of choice, of absolutely any choice possible whatsoever without any limitation. It is a matter of neither a strategy, nor a logic, nor an economy of choice, but of a transcendental possibilization that frees choice as possible.”⁸

“Let me commence with the following notice: there is no Truth in diagrams, nothing sacred in geometry … But [the diagram] is the out-line of philosophy … the pre-philosophical, meta-philosophical and ante-philosophical all in one—the moment between being exclusively outside or inside philosophy—not the subject leaving philosophy but unforeseeable subject-matters becoming philosophical. And it works as a drawing, a process, a procedure, a temporary moment in between; not the shape of a thing but the outline of a process (of thinking). Hence, dia-grammes should be always seen as moving forms, whether or not they are static.”⁹

“The world deploys itself as a game. That means that it refuses any sense, any rule that is exterior to itself.”¹⁰

Notes

Bruce Robbins, “Emancipation from the Burden of History: On Hayden White, 1928–2018,” n+1, March 8, 2018, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/emancipation-from-the-burden-of-history/. ↩
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, 351-70, trans. Alan Bass (London, UK: Routledge, 2001). ↩
Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985), repr. Manifestly Haraway, 3-90 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 30. ↩
Eric Zimmerman, “Manifesto for a Ludic Century,” Kotaku, September 9, 2013, https://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (1986), trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 203-204. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 206. ↩
John Ó Maoilearca, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London, UK: Continuum, 2006), 157. ↩
Kostas Axelos and Stuart Elden, “Mondialisation Without the World,” Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 2005), 28, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/interview/kostas-axelos-mondialisation-without-the-world. ↩

Chasm

2021-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Glitchspiel

2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.

Glitchspiel is a rules-free ttrpg zine in the free kriegsspiel style, expanding on my essay “Lovepunk” in the first issue of the FKR Collective’s zine In Play.

In this text, I deploy Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell’s manifesto, as a game, using her remarkable words as tactics for a transformative, reparative cyberpunk that cuts against both the norms of cyberpunk as a genre and the constraints of tabletop roleplaying as a form.

The project successfully funded on Kickstarter on February 16 as part of Zine Quest 3, thanks to the generous support of 120 backers. I am also happy to report that because of the sucess of the campaign I was able to get additional copies printed, which can be purchased below.

Usurp the body. Become your avatar. Be the glitch.

Itch.io

Dead Letters

2021-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

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Notoriously Frivolous

2021-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Notoriously Frivolous is a game in conversation with David Graeber’s essay, “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?” It employs concrete modes of play to engage with Graeber’s conception of a principle of “ludic freedom.”

In the spirit of the Intergalactic Memorial Carnival, for which this was written, Notoriously Frivolous is in A5 zine format and is meant to be printed and shared. As with all my zines, it should easily print on letter-sized paper if you select the “booklet” option in your printer settings.

Cover photo is an edited version of the image found here at Physics World.

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Living Failures

2020-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Hunter slew your Kin and left the Lady of the Clocktower to bleed out on the throne room floor. But the Hunter didn’t see you, hiding there amongst the lumenflowers and the corpses of your brethren. Now, you are all that is left, the only one able to tend to the tower, the garden, the hall, as you and everything around you crumbles into dreams and phantasms. All is quiet. Perhaps a corpse like this should be left well alone…

This work is based on The Wretched, product of Chris Bissette and Loot The Room, and licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This work is inspired by FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, and The Wretched was originally inspired by Ben Roswell’s You Are Not Alone In This Life and you will die alone out here in the black, which were, in turn, inspired by Takuma Okada’s Alone Among the Stars. The title font used in the text is Flesh and Blood by JoannaVu. The cover image is by putridCheese.

Content Warning: bodily trauma, player-character death, themes of loss and despair.

This is Version 0 of Living Failures. I plan to return to actually finish the game, but, in the spirit of the Failing Entities Jam, it currently exists as is: a failure.

Itch.io

Silent Prayer

2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

This game does not attempt to reproduce John Cage’s 4’33” in game space, but rather to extend it, to re-enter the scene with new instruments.

Silent Prayer is a gmless, solo ttrpg that can be printed as a half-letter zine on the front and back of a single letter-sized piece of paper.

The photo of Cage on the itch.io page was taken by Rob Bogaerts and sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

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Lovepunk

2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Jam Session

2020-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

This is a critique of legal singularity, a work of sabotage, a speculative improvisation. It is not a game. It is a plan.

The pdf is printable as a half-letter or A5 booklet. The font is Atkinson Hyperlegible. The cover image is “Luddites smashing a power loom in 1812,” in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons.

Itch.io

The Dark Sigil Will Guide Thee

2020-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “The Dark Sigil Will Guide Thee: The Hollowing Mechanic in FromSoftware’s Souls Games.” Northeast Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Online, October 23, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603519.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

In developer FromSoftware’s acclaimed Dark Souls trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), the concept of “hollowing” occupies a central position in the broader thematic landscape of the games. Concerned with the fates of cursed undead in worlds on the brink of collapse, the Dark Souls games present hollowing—a violent, withering insanity—as the doom of all undead who fail to endure their brutal conditions. More than a mere fantasy trope, however, hollowing functions in each game as both a narrative and a mechanical instrument, mobilizing the player-character to participate in the precisely designed ludonarrative circuits that the developers have devised. This study contends that it is this particular gameplay structure that reinforces an evolving theorization on FromSoftware’s part (if tacit) as to what constitutes human being.

Keywords: Game Studies, Game Design, François Laruelle, Dark Souls

Introduction

The three games in Japanese game developer FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series (released in 2011, 2014, and 2016),¹ and their progenitor, Demon’s Souls (2009),² can be described, simply, as dark fantasy, third-person, action-roleplaying games. This description can be further nuanced with the gameplay elements that have come to be distinctive of the feel of these games, and which have been inherited by a myriad of “soulslike” imitators: action warm-ups, animation priority, and stamina management.³ These elements are what make a Souls game feel like a Souls game. I have spent many pages examining the ecopolitical,⁴ metaphysical,⁵ and ethical⁶ questions posed by the Dark Souls games, but it is this matter of feel on which I will be focusing here. In my first scholarly engagement with the Souls series,⁷ I wrote about the “tactile thematics” communicated by the weapon animations across the entire series, including the three Dark Souls games, Demon’s Souls, and their spiritual successors Bloodborne (2015)⁸ and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019).⁹ I identified an empirically verifiable design trajectory across these six games, mapping a progression in mechanics to a progression in theme. Specifically, I noted this trajectory as a mechanical and thematic shift from agency to context, from purpose to compromise, from intentionality to intimacy, and from power to skill,¹⁰ a shift that I then proceeded to pursue by way of the ecopolitical, metaphysical, and ethical questions noted above.

By the point of my most recent engagement with this design trajectory, however, it had become clear that the explicitly binary or polar structure of this trajectory is itself problematized by the Souls games. This is to say that the Souls games perform a critique of “power” as an ecopolitical, metaphysical, and ethical category while at the same time disassembling the very terms and conceptual framework upon which this critique depends. This auto-deconstructive movement is mobilized most potently by the dynamic between philosophical subject and philosophical other that these games present, a dynamic that is organized therein in the shape of the turn, the entangling, ensnaring form that the philosopher François Laruelle contends is the structuring model of western philosophy as such.¹¹ The opening and subsequent collapse effectuated by the in-turning of subject and other in the Souls games produces at the same moment the opening and collapse of the turn itself,¹² revealing the entire construction in the contingency and groundlessness of its being.¹³

So, then, who stands in the ruins? Or, as another philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, pointedly asks, who comes after the subject?¹⁴ This is the question that Dark Souls has you play, over and over again, a folding, twisting interrogation that buckles under the burden of its own eternal repetition. Both the subject and its other are dead, burnt to ash, faded into darkness, and yet we ask, in the midst of this, our ongoing crisis, who comes? How are we to conceive of this multiplicity of actually existing subjectivities irreducible to a singular image of thought or mode of being? How are we to understand this plurality of contingent entities, rooted not in the logic of the transcendent universal but in a diagram of the “finite and generic one”?¹⁵ This is a feel that requires our attention, a feel that “comes to us” and yet also “precede[s] us.”¹⁶ So we ask again, who comes? It is with this question in mind that I now return to the domain of the tactile, taking up this question who through an engagement with the mechanic of hollowing in the Souls games.

Demon’s Souls

Though integral to the experience of Dark Souls, hollowing, which in those games is the consequence of the “undead curse,” begins in Demon’s Souls as something quite distinct. In the opening cutscene, we are told that, “On the first day man was granted a soul, and with it, clarity,” but, “On the second day, upon Earth was planted an irrevocable poison, a soul-devouring demon.” After starting a new game and completing character creation, a second cutscene plays, telling us the history of the northern kingdom of Boletaria and its king, Allant the twelfth, who brought “unprecedented prosperity” to his realm through his mastery of the “power of souls.” But, in so doing, Allant woke the Old One from its “eternal slumber,” and a “colourless Deep Fog swept across the land,” bringing with it “terrible Demons” that preyed upon humanity in order to “claim their souls.” Boletaria was cut off from the world and plunged into chaos. We, the player character, are lured to Boletaria by legends of the great power hidden in the fog; through gameplay, it will be determined whether “the land [has] found its saviour” or “the Demons [have] found a new slave.”¹⁷

What is established mechanically by this introductory narration is the economy of giving, taking, losing, and reclaiming souls that drives the gameplay of Demon’s Souls, an economy that will persist through the Dark Souls trilogy as well as Bloodborne (albeit as “blood echoes” in the latter). The difference, in Demon’s Souls, is the configuration of the playing subject with respect to this economy, and the feel that this configuration produces. In Demon’s Souls, when the player character dies for the first time (typically at the hands of the Vanguard boss in the tutorial level of the game), they will be presented with the now famous “You Died” screen, and in smaller font beneath, “However, the Nexus traps you. You shall remain in this world as a Soul, forever.” When the player character awakes from death, they will do so in the Nexus, the hub for the game, in “soul form.” When in soul form, the player character has a faint, ghostly glow surrounding their avatar, is completely silent when moving, and has their health reduced by half—emphasizing their phantasmic, bodiless state. Though the health penalty is punishing, soul form makes possible the game’s multiplayer mechanics, allowing the player character to be summoned as a helpful blue phantom into another player’s world or invade another player’s world as a baleful black phantom. Furthermore, the player character’s “character tendency” will determine additional effects when in soul form. If a player does “good” aligned actions in play, their tendency will shift white, boosting their attack power in soul form and as a blue phantom; if a player does “evil” aligned actions, their tendency will shift black, reducing their maximum health in soul form but increasing attack power as a black phantom.¹⁸ To regain their body, a player character must use a stone of ephemeral eyes, kill a boss in their own world, help another player kill the boss in that player’s world, or invade and kill a player in that player’s world.

Apart from the status effects and online gameplay elements noted, soul form plugs into a much higher level, and significantly more obtuse mechanic that yet bears heavily on players’ experiences of Demon’s Souls: world tendency. Like character tendency, world tendency is affected by a player’s actions, but unlike character tendency, world tendency is affected by all players online at any give time, and the global balance of world tendency across all online players will be registered every time a player launches the game. When a player character dies in body form and kills certain named NPCs in their body forms, world tendency shifts toward black; when a player character kills a boss, the same named NPCs in their black phantom forms, and certain other powerful enemies, world tendency shifts toward white. It is important to pay attention to current world tendency during play, because white world tendency will make enemies weaker but also reduce item drops, and black world tendency will make enemies stronger but drop rarer items and yield more souls upon death. Additionally, the gameplay effects noted above with respect to character tendency stack with world tendency. White world and character tendency boost attack power in soul form, while black world and character tendency reduce health in soul form but boost attack power when invading other players. Lastly, the abovementioned named NPCs will only appear in the world in body form at pure white world tendency and as black phantoms at pure black world tendency, thus motivating players to pursue one or the other tendency in order to experience these unique gameplay events.¹⁹

In sum, the world of Demon’s Souls is highly sensitive to the actions of its players, shifting and changing in response to their deeds. The basic feedback loop of combat (defined by action warm-ups, animation priority, and stamina management, as noted previously) is shifted ever so slightly, changing the actual feel of play by changing how the world pushes back against the player’s efforts. Because dying in soul form will not impact world tendency, players are encouraged to take risks while in soul form, without fear of the world becoming more dangerous due to their failure. Similarly, the feel of making a final push on the boss in body form with friendly blue phantoms in tow raises the tension of play. Though a player character in body form might have more health, and blue phantoms will aid them in battle, they are also inviting the possibility of invasion, and death will shift the tendency of the world toward black, making the next attempt more difficult. To formalize the point, we can say that the insertion of the playing subject in the world is met with feedback, friction, and compromise.²⁰ The gameworld is thick with context and sensation, directly challenging the player character’s power for doing. Though the economy of Demon’s Souls is structured around ever-increasing power, the first intimations of a critique can already be felt here in these challenges that are posed to this central structure.

Dark Souls

With Dark Souls, then, released two years after Demon’s Souls, though we find the “soul form” mechanic transformed almost entirely, the friction and compromise that make the feel of Demon’s Souls so distinct from other games of the era remains, and it is this feel, that of radical contingency, that has come to be distinctive of the soulslike as a genre. This is not to say that the Souls games are characterized by luck or randomness, because they are not, but rather that the play experience of these games is one of profound situatedness and vulnerability. When people speak of the intense difficulty of these games, this is in fact the experience to which they are referring, an experience that the “hollowing” mechanic emphasizes, drawing out the thematic of compromise first elaborated in Demon’s Souls and making it explicit.

Wherein Demon’s Souls souls were bestowed upon humankind, in Dark Souls souls were discovered by many different creatures in the midst of the First Flame, the blazing genesis of disparity within an unformed, fog-shrouded world. The Lords claimed the great souls therein, becoming gods of their respective domains—death, chaos, light, and dark—and leading their subjects in battle against the everlasting dragons that ruled over the grey stasis of that ancient age. The dragons fell, the Age of Fire began, and humanity lived in happiness and prosperity under the seemingly benevolent rule of Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight. But Dark Souls picks up at the waning of this age. The flames fade, darkness encroaches, and the darksign begins to spread among the living, the brand of those afflicted with the incurable curse of undeath. The player character is one such accursed undead, locked away by the adherents of Gwyn in an asylum to the north and left to go hollow. The player character is rescued from this fate by Oscar, Knight of Astora, an undead hero who tells the player character of the prophecy of the Chosen Undead who will make pilgrimage to Lordran, the land of Ancient Lords. The player character embarks upon their quest.²¹

Quite clearly, then, we see how the player character’s insertion in the world of Dark Souls is distinguished from that of Demon’s Souls. Though the feel of gameplay remains largely the same, the profile that the player character cuts in the world has been transformed at the thematic, and indeed, cosmological, level. In Demon’s Souls, the soul is bestowed on humanity, and with it reason. Demons feed on the souls of humanity to satiate their hunger. The player character kills demons to take their souls and grow in power, so that eventually they might face the Old One and return it to its slumber. In Dark Souls, on the other hand, souls are discovered by all manner of creatures, and while they do serve as a font of power as in Demon’s Souls (and can be taken by force to this end), they are not primarily a source of reason but of differentiation. The First Flame is the originary scission of preindividual being, giving rise to a whole set of binary oppositions that supplant the static unity of the prior age, forming the formless and filling it with a myriad of intersecting and conflicting individuations. Humanity is but one individuation, one soul, one possible expression of reason among many, descended from the Furtive Pygmy who claimed the titular “dark soul” from within the First Flame—so linking all of its descendants with primordial darkness. Already, Dark Souls decenters the power that it inherits from its predecessor, rendering it ontologically, fundamentally contingent. This decentering is only intensified by the implementation of the hollowing mechanic, and the way it shifts the player character’s insertion in the gameworld.

The player character begins the game “hollowed,” an emaciated undead corpse. They pass other “hollows” in the hallway outside their cell, aimless shells of human beings who long ago lost the will to live. The player character progresses through the level, meets Oscar once again, and eventually kills the first boss of the game, the Asylum Demon, that will award souls and a new resource: humanity. Upon arriving in Lordran, the first NPC that the player character meets is the Crestfallen Warrior, who tells them about hollowing and humanity, and that humanity can be used to reverse an undead human’s hollowing. Crushing the humanity sprite in their hand and then sitting at the nearby bonfire, the player character can then use this humanity to rejuvenate their corpselike appearance—though this does not break the curse of undeath. While human, the player character can now offer further pieces of humanity to the bonfire to kindle it, increasing its strength and so increasing the amount of healing that the player character’s estus flask provides. As with body form in Demon’s Souls, while human the player character can summon other players to aid them, but also runs the risk of being invaded by hostile players. However, the modifiers and penalties imposed upon player characters in soul form in Demon’s Souls, and the influences of character and world tendency, do not persist, and are instead replaced with a different overdetermining world structure all together.

In Demon’s Souls the player character is bound to the Nexus; in Dark Souls the player character is bound to the bonfires scattered throughout the world. Whenever a player character dies, they will wake up at the bonfire at which they most recently rested. Resting at a bonfire refills the player character’s estus flask, cures status effects, and recharges sorceries, pyromancies, and miracles. At the same time, any enemies that had been killed are revived, resetting the areas through which the player character just travelled. As already noted, bonfires serve as instruments for reversing hollowing, but they are also where the player character uses souls to level up, and can manage their inventory and work on their equipment.

However, the warmth and safety offered by the bonfires belies a dark origin. The description for the Homeward miracle tells us that its power “Would normally link to one’s homeland, only the curse of the Undead has distorted its power, redirecting casters to a bonfire,” because “perhaps for Undead, this serves as home.”²² The description for the Homeward Bone further explicates this distortion: “Bonfires are fueled by the bones of the Undead. In rare cases, the strong urge of their previous owner’s to seek bonfires enchants their bones with a homeward instinct.” Both the miracle and the consumable have the same effect, but the consumable reveals the distortion of the miracle for what it is: the bonfires are, for the undead, both home and grave because they are the ones cursed to serve as fuel for the flame. If an undead does not merely go hollow, wandering the world devoid of will, they will be “reduced to white ash,” made an instrument for the prolongation of the age and the entrapment of more like themselves.²³ Though soul form in Demon’s Souls presents the player with significant mechanical friction and compromise, hollowing in Dark Souls shifts much of this friction and compromise to the thematic register, making the playing subject’s insertion in the world the vehicle for a philosophical critique of power.

An interaction with the primordial serpent Darkstalker Kaathe presents this critique to the player plainly. Disparity, as such, cannot last for ever, and Gwyn, for fear of his fading, and with it the fading of his Age of Fire, sought to overcome the course of nature and stop the Age of Dark from coming to pass. Gwyn sacrificed himself to the fire and directed his faithful to serve as shepherds of humanity, so leading to the corralling of the hollow in asylums like the one in which the player character begins the game, and the manipulation of the not yet hollow into unwitting servitude to a dying power. The player character’s quest is a sham, the perpetuation of an age kept alight by the cinders of their fellows. The undead curse, too, is revealed to be a consequence of Gwyn’s rebellion against nature, with hollowing, by extension, the fate of mortals trapped in the dimming light of a faltering god. But Kaathe offers an alternative: rather than replace Gwyn and link the fire again, the player character can choose to destroy the old husk of a lord and let his beloved fire burn out once and for all, breaking the undead curse in the process and ushering in the new age of humankind.²⁴

In Demon’s Souls, every person, every choice, every action is overdetermined by the logic of the soul, a monolithic logic which is referred back, in every instance, to the Old One. In Dark Souls, however, this logic is made disparate, the world populated with a myriad of incommensurable powers, making possible this break from the power of the sun, this ontological passage to a different paradigm of existence. Furthermore, this disparity of powers allows for the soul and humanity to be distinguished from each other, separating the unified economy of power and connection in Demon’s Souls into two separate economies. While soul level continues to signify a player character’s power, humanity signifies their resilience and will, boosting defenses in all categories, increasing item discovery, and increasing resistance to the curse status effect (which halves the effected player character’s health in the same way as soul form in Demon’s Souls)—all in addition to the multiplayer mechanics that being human makes possible. So, by separating these economies, Dark Souls detaches the boons of connection from the mechanism of power, inserting the player character in the world with a radically different profile from the prior game. Where the situation of the player character in Demon’s Souls implies compromise and vulnerability through the feel of gameplay, Dark Souls resituates this feel on a different ontological and cosmological plane, injecting contingency at the very heart of the transcendental. It is this move that the next two Dark Souls games will continue to develop, a development that we can discern in the transformations of the hollowing mechanic that these games enact.

Dark Souls II

Wherein Demon’s Souls the critique of the playing subject, its configuration as situated, vulnerable, and contingent, remains implicit, and in Dark Souls this critique is explicated over the course of play, Dark Souls II makes this thematic explicit from the very beginning, and indeed centers it as the dramatic question motivating the player character’s journey. “You will lose everything, once branded,” the opening cutscene tells us. “Your past. Your future. Your very light. None will have meaning, and you won’t even care. By then you’ll be something other than human. A thing that feeds on souls. A Hollow.” The brand to which the cutscene refers is the “symbol of the curse, an augur of darkness,” a swirling black void that mars the flesh, an outward sigil of an “ailing mind” blighted with undeath and hollowing. The player character comes to the land of Drangleic in search of “souls” that might “mend” their condition, lured like “a moth drawn to a flame.” But even this quest is cursed: “Your wings will burn in anguish. Time after time. For that is your fate. The fate of the cursed.”²⁵ There is no light here, no warmth of fire, only darkness. Is this the future Kaathe promised? Is this the other choice, slavery to fire or annihilation by dark?

Of the three Dark Souls games, Dark Souls II borrows the most substantially from Demon’s Souls. In Demon’s Souls, we are told in the second introductory cinematic: “The Demons hunt down men and claim their souls … Each time a Demon claims a human soul, the Demon’s own soul is invigorated by the life force.”²⁶ Once gameplay begins in Dark Souls II, the player character will meet three elderly fire keepers who tell them more of their fate: “You’re finished. You’ll go Hollow. Yes, you will become one of them. Hollows prey upon men, feast upon their souls. This is the fate of the cursed.”²⁷ The parallelism between the demons of Demon’s Souls and the hollows of Dark Souls II is obvious, but now, rather than an outside threat, this threat comes from within the playing subject itself, the player character of Dark Souls II.

The fire keepers ask the player character their name, giving the player the opportunity to name their character. Once chosen, the cutscene continues, and one of the fire keepers gives the player character a Human Effigy, a wicker object crafted in the shape of a humanity sprite from Dark Souls. “Take a closer look,” she says, “Who do you think it’s supposed to be? Think back, deep into your past. Yes, it’s an effigy of you.”²⁸ Staring into the black spot that marks the effigy, just as the darksign marks the player character’s skin, initiates character creation—forgotten humanity, rendered in effigy, becomes a means of recollection. Wherein Dark Souls humanity allows an undead to recall their human form, in Dark Souls II human effigies allow for the recollection of the subject as such. The contingency of the playing subject is therefore significantly intensified by Dark Souls II, positioned closer to the edge of hollowing than ever before. This is a feel that the game maintains throughout its duration.

In Dark Souls, being hollow simply cuts player characters off from online gameplay and reduces the aforementioned defenses and resistances granted by human status. But in Dark Souls II, every time a player character dies while hollow they lose five percent of their maximum health with a lower limit of fifty percent after ten deaths (though high “sin,” a mechanic we do not have the space to discuss here, can cause a player character’s health to drop as low as five percent of maximum). This accomplishes the same effect as soul form in Demon’s Souls, but the feel it provokes is one of creeping dread and steadily increasing challenge, the punishment for repeat failure. Hollowing in Dark Souls II, therefore, not only adapts the health penalty of soul form in Demon’s Souls but the punitive elements of world and character tendency, rolling this system of feedback into a single mechanic. And yet, it is important to note that this game design choice is not undoing the work of Dark Souls. Though the penalties of two different systems from Demon’s Souls are combined into one in Dark Souls II, the distinction between the economies of soul and humanity introduced by Dark Souls remains, and here is implemented in such a way as to make the player character even more vulnerable than in the preceding game. Further samples of dialogue will help clarify what Dark Souls II is trying to accomplish.

The fire keepers tell the player character to “hold on to [their] souls,” because souls are “all that keep you from going Hollow.” This is the promise of Drangleic, the reason the player character has come, an echo of the promise of Boletaria and the power hidden within its fog-shrouded lands. But then, the firekeeper changes tack: “Oh, I’ll fool you no longer. You’ll lose your souls… All of them. Over and over again.” The player character is cursed, and their quest likewise—none of this is hidden. There is no illusory hope of linking the fire, as in Dark Souls, only darkness. Saulden the Crestfallen Warrior, one of the next NPCs that the player character meets, drives the point home: “You probably heard that it was possible to break the curse here. Well, that’s not true at all.”²⁹ And Saulden does not lie. Dark Souls II is but another step in an endless cycle of fire and dark. If the Chosen Undead chose to link the fire in Dark Souls, that age would have yet given way to an age of dark; if the Chosen Undead chose to let the fire burn out, the dark age would have eventually seen fire once more. If undeath is caused by the unnatural prolongation of the age in Dark Souls, in Dark Souls II undeath is in fact an inevitable feature of a cyclical cosmology. Nearly exhausted, eerily resilient, neither living nor dead—such is existence between the twinned powers of fire and dark, the fragility of mortal being caught up in eternal repetition.³⁰ If Demon’s Souls promises salvation through the acquisition of soul power, and Dark Souls the same, but through the embrace of humanity’s darkness, Dark Souls II declares that neither path is truly different from the other. Both terminate in power; this is the true curse. Saulden says as much: “What we call the curse is traceable to the soul. Do you see what that means? To be alive… to walk this earth… That’s the real curse right there.”³¹ Original difference, the splitting of humanity as another power, another principle distinct from the soul, is but the propagation of accursed power under another name. In the end, the only truth is want, the curse of life, of individuated being as such.³²

We see, then, how in Dark Souls II, hollowing as both mechanic and thematic has been sharpened by FromSoftware to a finely honed edge. And yet, it is only the middle entry in a trilogy, and Dark Souls III, in concluding the series, takes hollowing even further, and surprisingly, does so in such a way that unsettles the starkly conclusive cynicism of Dark Souls II, challenging its players to once again reinterpret the series and the critique of the playing subject that it mounts. Though the situation of the player character is still vulnerable, their insertion in the world profoundly contingent, the feel of Dark Souls III leads its players beyond the limited logics of the prior games, beyond both the “scope of light” and the “reach of dark,” and the catastrophic polarity of these terms.³³

Dark Souls III

In the chronology of Dark Souls, Dark Souls III establishes itself at what appears to be the end of ends, the final turn in the cycle of fire and dark. Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, in giving himself to flame, became the first Lord of Cinder. Many followed in his footsteps. Many turned their backs. But none escaped the cycle of fate. Now, in Lothric, yet another northern kingdom, the “transitory lands of the Lords of Cinder converge,” because no hero has arisen to link the fire, and the old lords refuse to take their thrones, abandoning their duty to fire and retreating to the darkness of their domains. The bell tolls, and without lords to heed it, ash begins to rise, agglomerations of the countless undead sacrificed to the bonfires that bind the world together. These Unkindled, “nameless, accursed Undead,” are “unfit even to be cinder,” and yet, we are told, “ash seeketh embers.” The flame beckons, still.³⁴

Yet again, Dark Souls shifts the terms of its ontology, repositioning the player character in this, its final ruin. Here is where power has brought us, an inevitable conclusion regardless of ones loyalty—to fire, dark, or otherwise. And in this doomed and twisted land, the hollowing mechanic once again plays a vital role. The opening cutscene of the game is the first place where Dark Souls III’s ontological shift is seen: the player character is not a hollow but an “unkindled,” not a corpse but a heap of ash. Though still undead, the unkindled contain within themselves whole communities of humanity, bodies formed of memories and histories, the corporealization of that which has been forgotten by, and indeed sacrificed to, age after age of fire.

And yet, humanity in the form of sprites or effigies is nowhere to be found. Instead, player characters collect “embers,” which, when consumed, increase the player character’s health above their usual maximum and activate multiplayer mechanics. Nothing is said of hollowing until the player character meets Yoel of Londor. This shell-backed pilgrim tells the unkindled that he can “tease out [their] true strength,” tapping into the power of the darksign and the power that it signifies.³⁵ If the player character accepts Yoel’s offer, they will gain a soul level as well as a “dark sigil,” a “black, gaping hole in the flesh that resembles the brand of an Undead.” Though already branded with the darksign of the accursed undead, it is only now that the unkindled becomes attuned to the “darkness of humanity,” which “seeps from this bottomless pitch-black hole” inflicted upon their flesh.³⁶ After gaining their first dark sigil, the player character will start hollowing upon death, but unlike previous games, hollowing does not reduce the player character’s defenses or health. Indeed, it at first appears that the only consequence of hollowing for an unkindled is the gradually deteriorating appearance now familiar to players of the previous two games.

After teasing out their true strength five times, Yoel of Londor dies, and Yuria of Londor comes to replace him, a black-garbed warrior and one of three founders of the Church of Londor. Yuria tells the player character that, as bearer of the dark sigil, the player character has assumed the mantel of Lord of Hollows, the Dark Lord fated to bring about humanity’s age of dark. Rather than changing the feel of the player-world feedback system, hollowing in Dark Souls III invests the world with lines of intentionality, cutting across those lines upon which the player character was first set. The decision between fire and dark finds itself expressed in the player character’s ashen body, a decision upon which many characters throughout the world will comment, telling the unkindled that they must choose this or that, link the fire or let it die, because it is they who have seized the power to do so. In Yuria’s words, “I prithee play the usurper … May the dark sigil guide thee.”³⁷ If the player character chooses to believe Yuria, and follows the Lord of Hollows questline to its end, a new age will begin indeed, accomplished by the unkindled’s “wrest[ing] of the fire from its mantle.”³⁸ But this language lays bare the violence of this decision for darkness, a violence that merely inverts the blazing rebirth wrought by the linking of the fire. The two impulses that compete in every gesture, every action, every move of the player character find themselves now overdetermined by the turn of this decision, the very turning of the ages made flesh.³⁹

It is for this reason that I contend that the End of Fire ending to Dark Souls III ought to be considered the true ending to the game, and what is more, that it is not only a true ending but a hopeful one. But this conclusion is not merely supported by a philosophical or critical reading of the game, but by the game’s mechanics themselves. The End of Fire is the only mechanically different conclusion to any of the Souls games discussed here, and as such, presents its players with a fundamentally different path forward. Despite the injection of difference into the transcendental by Dark Souls, and the cynical critique of that difference by Dark Souls II, an actual critique of the original system of power established by Demon’s Souls has yet to be accomplished.

Hidden behind a toxic garden, a mad king obsessed with the power of an ancient age, and an illusory wall in pitch black graveyard, the player character can find the Eyes of a Fire Keeper, which are said “to be the eyes of the first Fire Keeper, the light that was lost by all Fire Keepers to come.”⁴⁰ If given to the Fire Keeper in the main hub of the game, the eyes will reveal to this blind steward “things that [she] should never see,” a “world without fire.”⁴¹ But what sets this end apart from all the others that have preceded it is what this “without” entails. As we saw in the introduction to Dark Souls, fire is the genesis of disparity, and within the First Flame were found both Gwyn’s sunlit soul and the dark soul of humanity. The Age of Fire is thus the first age of disparity, and fire as an individuated power, arrayed in opposition to dark, a derivation of this originary split. When the Fire Keeper speaks of a “world without fire,” then, she does not speak simply of yet another dark age but an age freed of the logic of decision, the self-defeating turn of subject and other annihilated in an instant, the transcendental logic of this conflictual cosmology dissolved into nothingness. And in its stead, a black expanse dotted with innumerable “tiny flames,” “precious embers” from the world before, which now, at long last, might burn unshackled from the curse of gods and fate.⁴²

This is not the darkness of an age ruled by human power promised by Yuria, but the “strangely enticing darkness” of a blackness beyond decision, beyond the endless turning of philosophy, and the violence therein.⁴³ And this reading is sealed by the feel, the feedback, that this particular ending provides. In Demon’s Souls, the player character must bolster their soul with the souls of demons, growing powerful enough to face the Old One and either returning it to its sleep or becoming its new servant. Though these endings are superficially different, they are in fact united in the transcendental figure of the Old One, from which soul power is derived, and to which all soul power returns. In Dark Souls, the endings are ontologically distinguished, rendering the player character’s final choice a real choice, insofar as it is a choice between two incommensurable powers, but the decision remains trapped within a logic of power. The player character grows in power so that they can become mighty enough to decide what principle will order the age to come. Thus, the difference is again superficial. Dark Souls II cuts to the heart of this superficiality, exposing the transcendental principles of fire and dark as mere expressions of a more basic principle: want. Fire and dark are both sources of power, ontologically different means for the realization of the same ends. If Dark Souls III did not offer an actual third option, it would certainly replicate this interminable logic. But offer such an option it does.

The Fire Keeper’s world without fire is different, demanding an altogether other insertion of the subjectivities that it beckons. Each of the three preceding games ends with the player character acquiring enough power to decide, enough power to realize whatever world they desire—superficial variations on the same accursed story. But to choose for fire to end, for decision to end, to follow the Fire Keeper in her new found vision, the player character must not hold on to their power but give it away. The unkindled neither links the fire nor seizes it for their own but rather, ever so gently, ever so intimately, cradles it in their hands and gives it over to the woman who had never been so privileged as to have been considered worthy of a fate other than her servitude. This is the only ending across all four Souls games that is substantially different in feel, and this feel is achieved through the simplest yet most radical of mechanical gestures: a gift.

Conclusion

In all of my work on this series of games, this, the relinquishment of power, is perhaps the point I have belaboured most. In “The Fire Fades,” I argued that this ending functions as a sort of “minor literature,” an emancipatory narrative that poses a direct challenge to ecopolitical narratives predicated on power.⁴⁴ In “Praise the Sun,” I argued that this challenge is paired with a philosophical challenge that “decouple[s]” disparity—real difference—from “the decision of its inception,” presenting players with a universe teeming with true multiplicities.⁴⁵ And in “Pure Vessels,” I began to think through this logic of the multiple, applying the notion of generic finitude or “absolute particularity” to the myriad subjectivities made possible by this third ending, and which the soulslike platformer Hollow Knight explores further.⁴⁶ But here, after this heady excursus, my argument finds its footing once more in the matter of these games themselves, in the concrete feel of mechanics in play, what I first described as the situation of “tactile subjectivity.”⁴⁷

This tactile, intimate, contingent subjectivity is felt most palpably, I have argued, through the experience of hollowing, in all of its iterations across the four games discussed here. Demon’s Souls provides the template for hollowing in “soul form,” presenting its players with a transcendental principle while simultaneously compromising that principle through mechanical friction. Dark Souls splits the transcendental of the soul in two, concretizing the intimation advanced by Demon’s Souls and rendering it an element of the cosmology of its world itself. Dark Souls II mounts a scathing critique of this very split, mechanically cursing players’ efforts in a punishing reduplication of the curse as a thematic element of the game. Finally, Dark Souls III proliferates the split between soul and humanity, first through the disintegration of humanity into ash, and then through the introduction of a third ending that differs substantially from its two alternatives, and indeed from all prior endings across the franchise. Where the soul is fundamentally about the acquisition of power and hollowing about the impossibility, the inevitable doom, of such an endeavor, to wish for a world without fire is, mechanically, to repudiate this entire cursed ensemble, to choose not-power when every being in the world would have you do otherwise—every being, that is, except for the Fire Keeper, the humble architect of this, the grandest, the sweetest, the most hopeful of betrayals.⁴⁸

References

“Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin.” Dark Souls Wiki. Fandom. Accessed October 21, 2020. https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Aldia,_Scholar_of_the_First_Sin.

“Ancient Dragon.” Dark Souls II Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/ancient-dragon.

Brown, Mark. “Do We Need a Soulslike Genre?” Game Maker’s Toolkit. YouTube, July 2017. https://youtu.be/Lx7BWayWu08.

“Character Tendency.” Demon’s Souls Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/character-tendency.

“Dark Sigil.” Dark Souls III Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/key-item:dark-sigil.

“Darkstalker Kaathe.” Dark Souls Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls.wikidot.com/darkstalker-kaathe.

“Dull Ember.” Dark Souls II Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/dull-ember.

“Eyes of a Fire Keeper.” Dark Souls III Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/key-item:eyes-of-a-fire-keeper.

“Fire Keeper.” Dark Souls III Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:fire-keeper.

Galloway, Alexander R. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

“Homeward.” Dark Souls Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls.wikidot.com/homeward.

“Homeward Bone.” Dark Souls Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls.wikidot.com/homeward-bone.

Laruelle, François. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London, UK: Continuum, 2010.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London, UK: Continuum, 2009.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka. Bloodborne. PS4: FromSoftware, 2015.

———. Dark Souls. PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011.

———. Demon’s Souls. PS3: FromSoftware, 2009.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka, and Kazuhiro Hamatani. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2019.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura. Dark Souls III. PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Introduction.” In Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, 1–8. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991.

“Saulden the Crestfallen Warrior.” Dark Souls II Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/saulden-the-crestfallenwarrior.

Shibuyo, Tomohiro, and Yui Tanimura. Dark Souls II. PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014.

———. “Pure Vessels: The Insect and the Other in Dark Souls and Hollow Knight.” Insect Entanglements, Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol, Online, June 2020. https://zenodo.org/records/4603508.

———. “Tactile Thematics: From Power to Skill in FromSoftware’s Souls Games.” Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference, Albuequerque, NM, February 2020. https://zenodo.org/records/4603488.

———. “The Fire Fades: Navigating the End of the World in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls.” International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 2020. https://zenodo.org/records/4603492.

“World Tendency.” Demon’s Souls Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/world-tendency.

“Yoel of Londor.” Dark Souls III Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:yoel-of-londor.

“Yuria of Londor.” Dark Souls III Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed October 21, 2020. http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:yuria-of-londor.

Notes

Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011), Tomohiro Shibuyo and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls II (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014), and Hidetaka Miyazaki, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls III (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016). ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Demon’s Souls (PS3: FromSoftware, 2009). ↩
See Mark Brown, “Do We Need a Soulslike Genre?” Game Maker’s Toolkit, YouTube, July 2017, https://youtu.be/Lx7BWayWu08. Brown mentions some other elements of game feel, but these three are constitutive of the tactile space of these games. ↩
Eric Stein, “The Fire Fades: Navigating the End of the World in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls” (International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 2020), https://www.academia.edu/42195654/. ↩
Eric Stein, “Praise the Sun: The Metaphysics of Dark Souls from the First Flame to the End of Fire” (Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, Western University, London, ON, June 2020), https://www.academia.edu/43267406/. ↩
Eric Stein, “Pure Vessels: The Insect and the Other in Dark Souls and Hollow Knight” (Insect Entanglements, Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol, Online, June 2020), https://academia.edu/43386564/. ↩
Eric Stein, “Tactile Thematics: From Power to Skill in FromSoftware’s Souls Games” (Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference, Albuequerque, NM, February 2020), https://academia.edu/42026629/. ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Bloodborne (PS4: FromSoftware, 2015). ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki and Kazuhiro Hamatani, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2019). ↩
Stein, “Tactile Thematics,” 7. ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 184, 194. ↩
This construction (subject-other) demands a reason that is at once its instrument and cause, what Laruelle terms the “real/syntax disjunction,” the originary scission of occidental thought. See Laruelle, 103. ↩
I have relied on Quentin Meillassoux’s articulation of the “principle of unreason” or the “non-facticity of facticity” to theorize this originary contingency—in a word, the “factiality” of what is. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 60, 79. ↩
14Jean-Luc Nancy, “Introduction,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 1–8. ↩
A phrase I borrow from Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xiii. ↩
Nancy, “Introduction,” 6. ↩
Miyazaki, Demon’s Souls. ↩
These mechanics are not clearly explained in game, and have been deduced with much effort by members of the Souls community. For a guide, see “Character Tendency,” Demon’s Souls Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/charactertendency. ↩
Like character tendency, Demon’s Souls does not explain the world tendency mechanic. For a guide, see “World Tendency,” Demon’s Souls Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/world-tendency. ↩
I derive the concept of “insertion” from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, beginning with the section “Concrete movement,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014), 106. ↩
Miyazaki, Dark Souls. ↩
“Homeward,” Dark Souls Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls.wikidot.com/homeward. ↩
“Homeward Bone,” Dark Souls Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls.wikidot.com/homeward-bone. ↩
“Darkstalker Kaathe,” Dark Souls Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls.wikidot.com/darkstalker-kaathe. ↩
Shibuyo and Tanimura, Dark Souls II. ↩
Miyazaki, Demon’s Souls. ↩
Shibuyo and Tanimura, Dark Souls II. ↩
Shibuyo and Tanimura. ↩
“Saulden the Crestfallen Warrior,” Dark Souls II Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/saulden-the-crestfallen-warrior. ↩
The item description for the Dull Ember states: “An ember radiating a dull light. This flame seems nearly exhausted, but exhibits an eerie resilience. Perhaps this is its ordinary state.” See “Dull Ember,” Dark Souls II Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/dull-ember. ↩
“Saulden the Crestfallen Warrior.” ↩
“Ancient Dragon,” Dark Souls II Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/ancient-dragon. ↩
“Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin,” Dark Souls Wiki, Fandom, accessed October 21, 2020, https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Aldia,_Scholar_of_the_First_Sin. ↩
Miyazaki, Okano, and Tanimura, Dark Souls III. ↩
“Yoel of Londor,” Dark Souls III Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:yoel-of-londor. ↩
“Dark Sigil,” Dark Souls III Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/key-item:dark-sigil. ↩
“Yuria of Londor,” Dark Souls III Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:yuria-of-londor. ↩
“Yuria of Londor.” ↩
For an extended critique of decision, see Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference. ↩
“Eyes of a Fire Keeper,” Dark Souls III Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/key-item:eyes-of-a-fire-keeper. ↩
“Fire Keeper,” Dark Souls III Wiki, Wikidot, accessed October 21, 2020, http://darksouls3.wikidot.com/npc:fire-keeper. ↩
“Fire Keeper.” ↩
“Fire Keeper.” ↩
Stein, “The Fire Fades.” ↩
Stein, “Praise the Sun.” ↩
Stein, “Pure Vessels.” ↩
Stein, “Tactile Thematics.” ↩
“This will be our private affair. No one else may know of this. Stay thy path, find lords to link the fire, and I will blindly tend to the flame. Until the day of thy grand betrayal.” See “Fire Keeper.” ↩

Useless Passions

2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Useless Passions is a philosophy game inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s work in Being and Nothingness. It employs minimalist, player-driven mechanics to mobilize Sartre’s philosophical concerns, getting players to explore questions of freedom and personal responsibility through play.

Useless Passions owes everything to the games that preceded it. These include: Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Dream Askew / Dream Apart, Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World, Emily Care Boss’s Shooting the Moon, Jason Morningstar’s The Skeletons, and Jesse Ross’s Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold.

The text is in A5 zine format. Select booklet, two-sided to print.

Cover image is La Mort et les Passions by Auguste Louis Lepère.

Itch.io

Good Exercise

2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Good Exercise is an anti-fascist gamic essay written in conversation with Umberto Eco’s ever-timely “Ur-Fascism.”

Yesterday, fascists marched through the streets of my city. The spark of rage that I felt quickly turned to grief, and then exhaustion. Many of them would likely resist the label of “fascist.” This is a failure of reflection, of recollection, of reading.

Eco helps us, because he was there. He lived it. Now, we live it all over again. We must read. We must remember. And we must learn to dodge bullets. It will be good exercise.

The text is in A5 zine format. Select booklet, two-sided to print.

Title font is Kalmansk by Simo Herold. Cover image is Meeting of the Antifaschistische Aktion, Germany, 1932.

Itch.io

It Can’t Be For Nothing

2020-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “It Can’t Be For Nothing: Communicating Intentions for Play Through Trophy Design in The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II.” TWU Research and Creativity Symposium, Trinity Western University, Langley, BC, August 28, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603514.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

To borrow from Katherine Isbister, a games researcher and educator, one of my primary concerns when it comes to the study and design of games is “how games move us.” Isbister’s invocation of “movement” has a double meaning—that is, to be moved as both an emotional and an embodied experience. Indeed, in chapter three of her book, “Bodies at Play,” Isbister explores precisely this intersection between feeling and the body. Following Isbister, this talk examines both games in developer Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic oeuvre: The Last of Us (2013) and The Last of Us Part II (2020). It is specifically interested in the way in which Naughty Dog subtly attempts to move the player through the extrinsic motivator of PlayStation trophies, and the way this movement has evolved in the seven years between releases. It is my contention that the marked difference in emphasis in trophy design between parts one and two of The Last of Us indicates a change in ethos on Naughty Dog’s part that brings (at least some of) the ludic aspects of the sequel in line with the themes that it tackles.

Keywords: Game Studies, Social Justice, Patriarchy, The Last Of Us, The Last of Us Part II, Naughty Dog, PlayStation, Trophies

Introduction

To borrow from Katherine Isbister, a games researcher and educator, one of my primary concerns when it comes to the study and design of games is how games move us.¹ I enjoy the double meaning that this invocation of “movement” entails—that is, to be moved as both an emotional and an embodied experience. Indeed, in chapter three of her book, “Bodies at Play,”² Isbister explores precisely this intersection, an intersection that I have also explored (albeit from a rather different theoretical position) in my first scholarly engagement with The Last of Us in 2019.³

I want to keep this phrase in mind—how games move us—as we proceed to consider both games in developer Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic oeuvre: The Last of Us (2013)⁴ and The Last of Us Part II (2020).⁵ I am specifically interested in the way in which Naughty Dog subtly attempts to move the player through the extrinsic motivator of PlayStation trophies, and the way this movement has evolved in the seven years between releases. It is my contention that the marked difference in emphasis in trophy design between parts one and two of The Last of Us indicates a change in ethos on Naughty Dog’s part that brings (at least some of) the ludic aspects of the sequel in line with the themes that it tackles, and in doing so, upsets certain values of the triple-A development space and player base that will be explored below.

I begin this study by situating the two games in The Last of Us franchise in context before proceeding to summarize the core thematics of each game against this background. Then, I briefly cover the “trophy” as a motivator for play. From here, I proceed to a review of Brendan Keogh’s work on the patriarchal structures of gaming culture, and his positioning of The Last of Us in relationship to this culture. Finally, I compare the trophy lists of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, using the preceding analysis to interpret the evolution in design between the two games. I conclude with some commentary on emotion and embodiment drawn from Isbister, looking to the future of The Last of Us as a franchise, Naughty Dog as a studio, and the games industry at large.

Everything We’ve Been Through

The Last of Us, the critically and popularly acclaimed PlayStation 3 exclusive game, first began to come together in 2004 when Neil Druckmann, then a student, envisioned a game that blended the gameplay of Ico with a rough-around-the-edges protagonist in the spirit of Sin City and a setting ripped from Night of the Living Dead.⁶ This triad of influences is illustrative of the tension at the heart of the game that Druckmann, now creative director, and his team at Naughty Dog would release almost ten years later.

In 2001’s Ico, a boy is locked away in a fortress in which he finds the princess Yorda, who has been imprisoned in a cage suspended at the top of a tower. He rescues her, and then, for the remainder of the game, he must navigate the fortress and attempt to lead Yorda to safety. Famous for its ethos of “design by subtraction,” Ico is notable in the genre of adventure games for its minimalism and aestheticism. Its emphasis on using gameplay and gamespace to evoke emotion in its players has been widely influential.⁷

Frank Miller’s Sin City, a neo-noir comic series published by Dark Horse Comics between April 1991 and June 1992 is again distinct for its aestheticism, but unlike Ico uses its art style to tell hardboiled stories rife with graphic violence, starring such grizzled figures as John Hartigan, the aging detective who finds himself caught up in horrifying circumstances beyond both his capabilities and his comprehension. Where Ico is a story about human connection, Sin City’s stories are frequently about human connection as it is consistently thwarted by human evil.

The last element of the triad, George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, holds a significant position in the genre of zombie fiction, being the first to depict zombies in what we might now understand to be their modern form, which is to say, as “reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals,” rather than people “entranced” by witchcraft.⁸ More importantly, however, Night of the Living Dead is known for its conjoining of extreme violence with commentary on American race relations and the Vietnam War, using the pulpy form of the horror movie to subvert American norms and values.⁹

To attempt an interpretation of this cultural milieu informing The Last of Us, then, I would argue that these sources of inspiration each reckon with the tension between the experiences of human goodness and human evil and the messy work of navigating this space between when every societal arbiter or guarantor of this divide has failed. Despite their differences in style and their final conclusions on the matter, in Ico, Sin City, and Night of the Living Dead, ‘goodness’ and ‘evil’ name real patterns of human behaviour, patterns that are ascribed with value for their efficacy and their outcomes in a given social context, but which are ultimately motivated by the choices of individual humans, and not ideal forms of good or evil.

The Last of Us draws these three influences together to tell a story about a man and a girl travelling across an America plagued with ravenous fungal zombies and rapacious bands of human hunters. Joel, who lost his daughter during the outbreak in 2013, finds himself twenty years later tasked with escorting Ellie, a fourteen year old girl immune to the Cordyceps infection that consumed the world, from Boston to Salt Lake City, in hopes that the Fireflies, a militia group in search of a cure, might be able to use Ellie’s immunity to save humanity. There are echoes of Ico here, but unlike Yorda, Ellie is fully realized as an individual, and it is her humanity that leads Joel to rediscover his own. At the same time, however, there are echoes of Sin City in The Last of Us’s brutal depictions of violence, violence that the player-character must repeatedly enact against humans and infected alike over 15-20 hours of gameplay. The infected are a constant threat, but far more chilling are the humans who commit atrocious acts against other humans in the name of survival. This is a world in which even Joel, our protagonist, must do terrible things out of necessity. And it is this state of the world that echoes the social breakdown of Night of the Living Dead, using a horrific, extended crisis to highlight the choice undergirding acts of human evil. Zombie fiction obliterates alibis for violence, because the most eminent of alibis, the law, no longer provides humans with justification for their bloodletting. The only necessity is the necessity of choice—the contingent will of an agent to exert force upon a situation to attempt to bring about the ends that they desire. This is the narrative terrain that The Last of Us traverses. It is simultaneously a simple, intimate story about two traumatized people coming to care and fight for each other against overwhelming odds, and a grand, sweeping narrative about the lengths to which people will go to survive, and the reasons at which they arrive to justify their actions.

In The Last of Us Part II, this theme of justification is only intensified. Set four years after the first game, The Last of Us Part II is entirely concerned with the consequences of Joel’s actions, and specifically, with the consequences of a choice that Joel makes at the end of part one. Primarily playing as Ellie, now nineteen, Part II further troubles the space between human goodness and human evil, complicating the question of justification and foregrounding its basis in human choice. Even more brutal than the previous game, Part II has proven contentious, dividing critics and fans alike as to whether the game is successful in its more high-minded intentions.¹⁰ Without delving into spoiler territory (since the game was only released in June), the way Part II plays with perspective and with narratives of justification makes any simple reading difficult, refusing to be interpreted monolithically. Part II is, for better and for worse, relentlessly focused on individual people and the individuality of their choices. This is not to say that Part II has no interest in structural questions of human organization (indeed, it attempts, if unevenly, to engage with such questions throughout—see Cole at Bullet Points,¹¹ Maiberg at Vice,¹² and Kunzelman at Bullet Points¹³ for some excellent structural readings of Part II) but rather that the game is interested in the ways in which the messiness of human desires, the complexities of human relationships, and the contingencies of human choices, often motivate the broader movements of human organizations, leading sometimes to cohesion and sometimes to collapse.

Though there is much to examine at the thematic level across the two The Last of Us games, this paper takes aim at the way in which Naughty Dog has built this thematic of human choice and justification into their games at the level of design, and in particular, built it into the design of their trophy lists. So, before we proceed to a discussion of what, precisely, Naughty Dog is doing in this area of design, we must make clear the digital artefact that is the PlayStation trophy.

Put My Name Up

What are trophies? Known as achievements on other platforms, trophies are digital awards used in the PlayStation ecosystem to recognize player accomplishments in games. Trophies are attached to a player’s PlayStation Network (PSN) name and are grouped by game. For each game, trophies are categorized and valued according to their difficulty to obtain—bronze being common and easy to obtain, silver uncommon and more challenging, and gold rare and most challenging. For ‘trophy hunters,’ obtaining all trophies for a game rewards the coveted platinum trophy, highlighting a player’s skill, tenacity, and ‘fan cred.’ Websites like PSNProfiles are dedicated to aggregating trophy data, allowing PlayStation players to compare their statistics with friends and the broader PlayStation community. Websites including PSNProfiles, PowerPyx, and PlayStationTrophies feature in-depth guides from community members explaining how to obtain the platinum trophy for most games on the platform, often including extra details like difficulty, time-to-platinum, and information about missable or glitched trophies.

As a lifelong player of video games, I have always found something satisfying in these “extrinsic” or “meta-motivators,” a satisfaction that I share with many friends and colleagues who also enjoy videogames. Trophies often provide an extra layer of challenge on top of the base level of challenge that a game provides, forcing players to try different strategies or styles of play, to explore a game thoroughly, and to push themselves beyond their supposed limits. But this extra layer of challenge can also have a dark side. Extremely difficult or unfair trophies can make the process of obtaining the platinum trophy for a game a cause for anxiety. For some, this anxiety might surface as low-grade irritation whenever a trophy notification appears; for others, this anxiety might surface with real symptoms of psychological distress—something which, as a perfectionist with strong completionist tendencies, I can attest to from personal experience. In short, to invoke Isbister once more: trophies move us. This ought to render them worthy of our consideration.

I am not concerned with trophies as “gamification,” however—insofar as trophies have been used to gamify education, for instance—but rather as a matter of design. Trophies are made, and a well designed trophy list can clearly indicate a set of intentions for play, pointing players in the direction of a particular “meta-experience” that may in fact add to the base experience of play. If trophies are designed in collaboration with the narrative and creative teams, a development studio can use trophies to highlight key plot points, reward attentiveness to nuance, and reinforce tone, atmosphere, and theme. In this way, good trophy design can actually elevate the gameplay experience. Furthermore, thoughtfully designing a trophy list can help developers shape player behaviour by providing positive motivators for some actions and not for others. Given the extreme toxicity in certain corners of The Last of Us fandom, which became all too apparent in the lead up to the release of Part II,¹⁴ such work on the part of developers may help in the creation of healthier, kinder communities in the future. Such a project is, I would argue, evidenced by the trajectory seen in Naughty Dog’s design of the trophy lists between part one and part two of The Last of Us. But to understand what makes this design shift important, we first need to situate Part II in the context of gamer culture.

So Great and Small

In 2015, the games scholar Brendan Keogh published an article in the Overland Literary Journal in which he examines the relatively recent emergence of the computer-mediated mode of masculinity that is the “gamer.”¹⁵ Sparked by the toxic upsurge of the Gamergate movement in August of 2014—which in many ways set the stage for Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016¹⁶—Keogh works to “situate Gamergate in the context of the broader patriarchal structures from which video game culture emerged.” These are the same structures that showed themselves once more with the launch of The Last of Us Part II, structures that are necessary for us to interrogate if we are to understand the evolution of Naughty Dog’s trophy design.

As Keogh explains, the “gamer” emerged from the earlier form of the “hacker,” the “alternative masculinity” that arose through its “repulsion of jock culture and physical prowess,” establishing a new “masculine normativity” through mastery and domination of the computer. This “hacker ideology,” though largely defined in opposition to the dominant “masculine ideology,” effectively reproduced the norms of that ideology in a new domain. Gaming spent “decades symbiotically attached to student hacker culture,” and as a consequence, attached to these masculine hacker norms.

As Keogh clarifies, this “is not a claim that video games are naturally masculine,” but rather that the history of video games is a history of power and the exclusions that power asserts and maintains in order to perpetuate itself. As video gaming transformed from a hobby into an industry, the “hacker ideology” of its enthusiast base became the mainstream ideology of the form—which is to say, an ideology of technological mastery and domination. These values were “carefully cultivated” by the early gaming press and game developers followed suit in building games for this particular “consumer identity” with its “narrow, clear set of values and tastes.” Gamers, in turn, grew up and became game developers and game critics, continuing to make games and talk about games for the pleasure of gamers just like themselves.

The unique power of this alternative masculinity is its persistent victim complex: “[m]asculine computer culture” is “a field traditionally inaccessible to those who aren’t male or upper middle class, but dominated by those teased and bullied for not being macho,” writes Keogh. Though the white, male gamer is in fact a privileged identity, holding a significant amount of power in a global industry projected to reach $300 billion by 2025,¹⁷ insofar as that identity is defined in opposition to another dominant identity by which it is threatened (the ‘macho’ man), that privilege remains obscure to itself. As barriers to women, people of colour, and queer folk in the games industry have been challenged, and a greater diversity of voices have started to be represented in development, games criticism, and games culture generally, the “true gamers” have doubled down on their self-understanding as a “marginalised, discriminated identity under attack,” while using their “hegemonic and normative” privilege to attack the actually vulnerable and marginalized members of the gaming community.

What makes this cooptation of the victim position on the part of privileged white male gamers especially frustrating is the deployment of questions of ethics and taste for its justification. As Keogh recounts, Gamergate famously presented its misogyny as concern for ethics in games journalism, and the outrage of the movement toward games like The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home centred on the game being “too short, too easy, lack[ing] conventional gameplay and [being], ultimately, an insult to ‘true’ video games.” Gamergate repeatedly framed its vitriol as a desire for the betterment of gaming, when in fact it sought nothing but the maintenance of the white male gamer’s power.

With this context established, what, then, can we learn about Naughty Dog and The Last of Us? In his review of The Last of Us Part II, Keogh describes Naughty Dog’s position in the industry as a “jaded messianic one.”¹⁸ Their games “bravely push[] the medium forward with their sheer level of craft” while also “holding it back with how they anchor that craft in musty old conventions.” As I noted above, both games in The Last of Us franchise are distinguished by the creative tension at their core between the experiences of human goodness and human evil, between an aesthetic, humanistic vision of the world and a violent, nihilistic one—a tension that is expressed mechanically as much as it is expressed thematically. Inasmuch as the gamer ideology prizes artistry while preserving masculinist norms and values, Naughty Dog remains thoroughly trapped in this in-between space: a triple-A developer of ‘gamer’s games’ (big budget, high production values, violent) that also cares about complicated questions of morality and careful portrayals of characters and their relationships.

Naughty Dog resolutely believes that games can be “real art,” while also relying on the staid conventions of the action game to make this “art” fun for their traditional fanbase. This belief has put Naughty Dog in the unfortunate position of being a representative for the very gamers defending the legitimacy of the form against the threat of so-called non-games made by independent and marginalized developers (recall Gamergate’s alibi of ‘taste,’ above). Joel, the protagonist of the first game, a gruff, white male, has become an icon and role model for many white, male gamers—he’s strong and capable (a typical macho man) while being tortured and complex (the hallmarks of the nerdy, embattled male gamer). His characterization is realistic, nuanced. He doesn’t talk much, but he feels deeply. He’s complex. He cares. And he’s willing to do terrible things to protect the people he loves. If the gamer ideology contains in microcosm the patriarchal values of mastery and domination while obfuscating those values with a veneer of sensitivity and victimhood, Joel is the ideal embodiment of this ideology, the archetypal ‘sad dad’ who demonstrates that the gamers, the white men, those poor misunderstood fellows, have been good guys all along.

With The Last of Us Part II, however, Naughty Dog appears to have consciously pushed back against this cooptation by the toxic members of their community, accomplishing this most blatantly through their shifting of perspective from Joel to Ellie—a shift that, without giving too much away, is integral to the narrative of Part II. The gamers that we have been discussing here saw this as a direct attack on their values, taking it upon themselves to harass and threaten the developers and actors involved in the game.¹⁹ In response, Druckmann took to Twitter, turning a line of Joel’s dialogue back upon the character’s supposed defenders: “if somehow the lord gave me a second chance at making this game, I’d do it all over again.”²⁰ With this quip, Druckmann made clear that he and the team at Naughty Dog knew what position they were taking. Indeed, when The Last of Us first launched in 2013, Druckmann said of Ellie that he had a “secret agenda … to create one of the coolest, non-sexualized female video game protagonists,” and that if Naughty Dog did this well, they would have “an opportunity to change the industry.”²¹ Somehow, the “true gamers” did not detect this “agenda” in the first game; with the second, Naughty Dog made sure to drive it home.

Since Part II’s release, the discourse has been ceaseless and exhausting. For every thoughtful, careful piece of criticism that has been published, a torrent of hatred and bigotry has been spewed onto the internet. To delve further into the commentary around the game far exceeds the scope of this paper—my annotated bibliography of games journalism on Part II, which I began working on at the end of June, has already exceeded 50,000 words. I intend to produce a much more substantial study on this game in the future—one in which I do not have to be as reticent about plot details. But in the mean time, allow me to turn at last to the trophy design of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, tying together the various threads that we have been following here.

Endure and Survive

For the original version of The Last of Us on PS3, there are fifty trophies that players can earn, including the platinum trophy for earning all the other trophies. Of these fifty trophies, fourteen (28%) are difficulty-related game completion trophies. There are four trophies for completing the game on Easy, Normal, Hard, and Survivor, four for completing new game plus on each of these difficulties, four for completing the DLC story content Left Behind on each of these difficulties, and one each for completing the game on Grounded Mode (a difficulty level higher than Survivor) and Grounded Mode Plus. Insofar as trophies provide an extra layer of motivation on top of the usual motivations of story progression and entertainment, Naughty Dog seems to be intending the difficulty of The Last of Us to be a significant portion of the player’s experience. This trophy list remained mostly unchanged with the remastered edition of The Last of Us on PS4, except for the trophies for the two downloadable multiplayer map packs which, for the PS3 edition, were exceptionally challenging to obtain (for instance, down three opposing players and survive a match without dying, which, given the style of play in The Last of Us multiplayer, is no small feat). For the remastered edition, Naughty Dog changed the criteria for these multiplayer trophies, making the experience of obtaining them feel less impossible, though ensuring that they remained a challenge.

If we look at this trophy list through the lens of patriarchal gamer values provided us by Keogh, it becomes quite obvious that the design intentions of the trophy list for The Last of Us subscribe to the values of mastery and domination characteristic of the masculine gamer ideology. To truly complete the game, players must confront the most insurmountable odds and prevail, and then take their skills into the multiplayer arena and dominate other players. Though Naughty Dog made the trophies for multiplayer domination more accessible in the remastered edition of the game, they remain focused on defeating other players (another eight trophies, 16%, are rewarded for this violent mastery of the multiplayer mode). While the narrative of the game tells a complex human story about life and love in the rubble of civilization, the story that the trophies of the game tell is one of masculine superiority negotiated through violence (a story that ultimately came to inform many fans’ interpretations of Joel as a masculine hero). One need only play a few rounds of multiplayer to see that this is the case. The multiplayer community of The Last of Us is one of the most toxic, unwelcoming online game communities in which I have ever been involved.

For The Last of Us Part II, however, the base game has twenty-six trophies, only one (4%) of which is related to completing the game and none of which are tied to difficulty or multiplayer (the latter of which has been completely eliminated from Part II). Paired with this rather striking shift in trophy design is an unparalleled commitment to accessibility, the likes of which is unheard of in triple-A game development, and indeed, in game development generally. The base game comes loaded with sixty fine-grained accessibility options, which lead the journalists at the accessibility-in-gaming site Can I Play That to hail The Last of Us Part II as “the most accessible game ever.”²² By emphasizing accessibility and removing difficulty-related trophies, Naughty Dog has deliberately challenged the gamer values of mastery and domination. Like the first game, there are trophies for being thorough and exploring every nook and cranny and for taking the time to participate in scenes of character development, but gone is the emphasis on masculine prowess and triumph. This change in design mirrors the narrative and thematic changes that Naughty Dog undertook in Part II, and which I alluded to above in the perspectival shift from Joel to Ellie.

In August, Naughty Dog released the Grounded update for Part II, bringing Grounded Mode to the game, and a Permadeath mode as well (a new feature for The Last of Us). With these two new modes came two new trophies rewarding players for completing these difficulty challenges, but the marketing materials from Sony and Naughty Dog loudly emphasized that these trophies were not necessary for getting the platinum trophy for the game. Furthermore, the Grounded update came with even more accessibility options and improvements for the game, showing that Naughty Dog’s commitment to accessibility continues post-launch.²³ Though I find the inclusion of trophies related to these modes to be a step backward on Naughty Dog’s part, The Last of Us Part II remains a boundary-pushing game for its context, setting new goalposts for triple-A developers in the future.

In sum, we have seen that The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II are working in the contested space of gamer values, using the competing value sets of their influences (aestheticism and humanism versus violence and nihilism; human goodness versus human evil) to attempt to chart a path forward for games as an art form. We have seen that The Last of Us was not entirely successful in its goal, reproducing the toxic masculinity of which it is critical in both its narrative and its fanbase. But with The Last of Us Part II, we have seen Naughty Dog make a concerted effort to try and get beyond violent masculinity and the fanbase that idolizes it, pursuing this goal even in such peripheral spaces as trophy design. What remains, then, is to look toward the future and assess what impacts Naughty Dog’s work might have, and how we as players, developers, and researchers might build upon Naughty Dog’s accomplishments to surpass their own limitations as a studio.

It Can’t Be For Nothing

In How Games Move Us, one of the first elements of emotionally effective game design that Isbister examines is that of choice. “Actions with consequences—interesting choices—unlock a new set of emotional possibilities for game designers,” she writes.²⁴ What is fascinating about the The Last of Us games is that Naughty Dog gives its players no say in the direction of their narratives. In The Last of Us Part II, remarks Keogh, the characters are “already fully-formed before the player occupies them … [possessed of] their own histories, identities, ambitions, decisions.”²⁵ This does not mean, however, that Naughty Dog sacrifices the potential of choice; rather, they mobilize choice itself as a theme, designing their characters in such a way that players are required to inhabit the perspectives of these fully realized individuals and so carry out their choices as if performing material from a script.²⁶ As Isbister writes, “our feelings in everyday life, as well as games, are integrally tied to our goals, our decisions, and their consequences.”²⁷ What Naughty Dog accomplishes then—and perhaps nowhere in their catalogue is this clearer than in The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II—is a dispossession of the player by the character wherein the player’s feelings become tied to the distinct goals, decisions, and consequences of the character, even when that character’s goals and decisions might differ from the player’s own, and the consequences of these goals and decisions are undesirable.

As I argued above, The Last of Us franchise is deeply interested in human goodness and human evil not as ideals but as realities of praxis. And as we have seen, Naughty Dog has deliberately used the trophies in The Last of Us Part II to shape the praxis of their players in a direction corresponding to the praxis and themes that the game articulates. Though Ellie’s narrative in Part II remains overdetermined by Joel’s patriarchal decisions,²⁸ the game’s trophy list presents a fundamentally different value set from that of the first game, seeming to indicate that the terrible events of Part II need not have gone that way, that an alternative is possible, that if only Ellie could learn to be otherwise then the violence might finally cease. Where Joel’s choice at the end of the first game has an air of awful necessity (a necessity reinforced by the ten trophies associated with the completion of the main story alone), Ellie’s choices are consistently presented as that, as choices in all of their contingency. Players only get one trophy for seeing Ellie’s story through, a mechanical demotivation of the masculinist narrative arc of mastery and domination that is preserved by the first game’s trophy list. These harmful values are devalourized by the very design of The Last of Us Part II, revealed at every level for all of their baseless destructiveness. There is another way. We can be otherwise. This is what Part II seems to promise.

But this promise is not realized in game. The Last of Us Part II remains an extremely punishing experience. Ellie goes so far down the path of patriarchal violence that the otherwise for her all but disappears. And while Part II is a triumph in its portrayal of individual characters and their motivations, it comes up short in its handling of race²⁹ and politics.³⁰ If we are to learn from The Last of Us Part II and so, hopefully, grow beyond it, we need to do the hard work of realizing the possibilities of being otherwise at which it hints, telling new stories that leave behind the harmful narratives of the old order for good. At the same time, those of us like myself who have in the past benefited from the privileges of the dominant ideology in the gaming community need to recognize and promote the work of marginalized creators who are already telling these new stories.

As the games critic Carolyn Petit writes in her critical assessment of The Last of Us Part II, “we know that things can be different,” we know “that games like this can use their mechanics in other ways,” that “this kind of gameplay can be used as a way to explore the development of a relationship” as much as it can be used to explore “the murder of one person by another.”³¹ This is the otherwise that is now for us to seek, the otherwise that I long to see more and more of in games, the otherwise that I wish for Ellie in the quiet after the credits have rolled.

References

Bayliss, Ben. “The Last of Us Part 2 Grounded Update Brings Accessibility Improvements.” Can I Play That, August 11, 2020. https://caniplaythat.com/2020/08/11/the-last-of-us-part-2-grounded-update-accessibilityimprovements/.

Bergman, Jordan, and Mia Galuppo. “ ’Night of the Living Dead’ to ’Maggie’: The Evolution of Zombie Films.” The Hollywood Reporter, June 20, 2013. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/night-living-dead-maggieevolution-572492/4-night-of-the-living-dead-1968.

Cole, Yussef. “Their World.” Bullet Points Monthly, July 8, 2020. https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/07/08/their-world-last-of-us-part-ii.

Naughty Dog. “An Important Statement from Naughty Dog,” October 15, 2017. https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/an_important_statement_from_naughty_dog.

Druckmann, Neil, Anthony Newman, Kurt Margenau, and Halley Gross. The Last of Us Part II. PS4: Naughty Dog, 2020.

Flores, Natalie. “Absent Mothers.” Bullet Points Monthly, July 17, 2020. https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/07/17/absent-mothers-the-last-ofus-part-ii.

Hernandez, Patricia. “The Last of Us 2 Dev Naughty Dog Condemns Harassment, Death Threats.” Polygon, July 6, 2020. https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/6/21314543/the-last-of-us-2-harassment-neil-druckmann-laura-bailey-naughty-dog-abby-death-threats-ps4.

———. “The Last of Us Part 2 Has Become a Minefield.” Polygon, June 30, 2020. https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/30/21307200/the-last-ofus-2-controversy-critics-press-naughty-dog-vice-review-leak-sony-ps4-playstation.

Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

Keogh, Brendan. “Hackers, Gamers and Cyborgs.” Overland, no. 218 (August 2015). https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-218/feature-brendankeogh/.

———. “The Rest of Us: Revenge, Prestige, and Putting the Last of Us: Part II in Its Place.” Overland, July 28, 2020. https://overland.org.au/2020/07/therest-of-us-revenge-prestige-and-putting-the-last-of-us-part-ii-in-its-place/.

Klepek, Patrick. “Ex-Naughty Dog Employee Alleges Sexual Harassment, Studio Issues Statement.” Vice, October 16, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evpjgw/ex-naughty-dog-employee-alleges-sexual-harassment-studioissues-statement.

Kohler, Chris. “The Obscure Cult Game That’s Secretly Inspiring Everything.” Wired, September 12, 2013. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/ico/.

Kunzelman, Cameron. “Destroyed in the Cut.” Bullet Points Monthly, July 22, 2020. https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/07/22/destroyed-in-the-cut-the-last-of-us-part-ii.

Lanier, Liz. “Video Games Could Be a $300 Billion Industry by 2025 (Report).” Variety, May 1, 2019. https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/video-games-300-billion-industry-2025-report-1203202672/.

Maiberg, Emmanuel. “The Not so Hidden Israeli Politics of ’the Last of Us Part II’.” Vice, July 15, 2020. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bv8da4/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politics-of-the-last-of-us-part-ii.

McCarter, Reid. “The Last of Us, Chaos, and Control.” Digital Love Child, August 18, 2014. https://digitallovechild.com/2014/08/18/the-last-of-us-chaos-and-control/.

Miller, Frank. Sin City. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1991.

Muncy, Julie. “Last of Us Part II Is Great, but Can’t Escape Its Father’s Shadow.” Wired, June 12, 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/last-of-us-part-ii-review/.

Petit, Carolyn. “Broken People, Broken Worlds: Thoughts on the Last of Us Part II.” Medium, June 29, 2020. >https://medium.com/@carolynpetit/broken-people-broken-worlds-thoughts-on-the-last-of-us-part-ii-a012de5d2acf>.

Romero, George A. Night of the Living Dead. Continental Distributing, 1968.

Saylor, Steve. “Our the Last of Us 2 Discussion on Accessibility and Blind Impressions.” Can I Play That, June 12, 2020. https://caniplaythat.com/2020/06/12/our-the-last-of-us-2-discussion-on-accessibility-and-blindimpressions.

Schreier, Jason. “As Naughty Dog Crunches on the Last of Us II, Developers Wonder How Much Longer This Approach Can Last.” Kotaku, March 12, 2020. https://kotaku.com/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962.

Sherr, Ian, and Erin Carson. “GamerGate to Trump: How Video Game Culture Blew Everything up.” CNET, November 17, 2017. https://www.cnet.com/news/gamergate-donald-trump-american-nazis-how-video-game-culture-blew-everything-up/.

Stanichar, Joseph. “The Last of Us Part II ’s Reviews Are Extremely Divided.” Paste, June 12, 2020. https://www.pastemagazine.com/games/the-last-of-us-part-ii/the-last-of-us-part-iis-reviews-are-extremely-divi/.

Stein, Elliott. “The Dead Zones.” The Village Voice, January 7, 2003. https://www.villagevoice.com/2003/01/07/the-dead-zones/.

Stein, Eric. “Bodies in Form: Motricity Across Mediums in the Last of Us and the Last of Us: American Dreams.” ImageText in Motion: Animation and Comics, April 13, 2019. https://zenodo.org/records/4603470.

Straley, Bruce, and Neil Druckmann. The Last of Us. PS3: Naughty Dog, 2013.

Ueda, Fumito. Ico. PS2: Team Ico, 2001.

Waldman, Ari. “Donald Trump and Steve Bannon Need Angry Young Men. They’re Using Gamergate Culture to Get Them.” Quartz, February 3, 2017. https://qz.com/901761/donald-trump-and-steve-bannon-are-using-gamergate-culture-to-attract-angry-white-men/.

Webster, Andrew. “The Power of Failure: Making ’the Last of Us’.” The Verge, September 19, 2013. https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/19/4744008/making-the-last-of-us-ps3.

Notes

Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). ↩
Isbister, 73-108. ↩
Eric Stein, “Bodies in Form: Motricity Across Mediums in the Last of Us and the Last of Us: American Dreams,” ImageText in Motion: Animation and Comics, April 13, 2019, https://academia.edu/38800196/. ↩
Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, The Last of Us (PS3: Naughty Dog, 2013). ↩
Neil Druckmann et al., The Last of Us Part II (PS4: Naughty Dog, 2020). ↩
Andrew Webster, “The Power of Failure: Making ’the Last of Us’,” The Verge, September 19, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/19/4744008/making-the-last-of-us-ps3, Fumito Ueda, Ico (PS2: Team Ico, 2001), Frank Miller, Sin City (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1991), and George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead (Continental Distributing, 1968). ↩
Chris Kohler, “The Obscure Cult Game That’s Secretly Inspiring Everything,” Wired, September 12, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/09/ico/. ↩
Jordan Bergman and Mia Galuppo, “ ’Night of the Living Dead’ to ’Maggie’: The Evolution of Zombie Films,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 20, 2013, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/night-living-dead-maggie-evolution-572492/4-night-of-the-living-dead-1968. ↩
Elliott Stein, “The Dead Zones,” The Village Voice, January 7, 2003, https://www.villagevoice.com/2003/01/07/the-dead-zones/. ↩
Joseph Stanichar, “The Last of Us Part II ’s Reviews Are Extremely Divided,” Paste, June 12, 2020, https://www.pastemagazine.com/games/the-last-of-us-part-ii/the-last-of-us-partiis-reviews-are-extremely-divi/. ↩
Yussef Cole, “Their World,” Bullet Points Monthly, July 8, 2020, https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/07/08/their-world-last-of-us-part-ii. ↩
Emmanuel Maiberg, “The Not so Hidden Israeli Politics of ’the Last of Us Part II’,” Vice, July 15, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bv8da4/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politicsof-the-last-of-us-part-ii. ↩
Cameron Kunzelman, “Destroyed in the Cut,” Bullet Points Monthly, July 22, 2020, https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/07/22/destroyed-in-the-cut-the-last-of-us-part-ii. ↩
Patricia Hernandez, “The Last of Us Part 2 Has Become a Minefield,” Polygon, June 30, 2020, https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/30/21307200/the-last-ofus-2-controversy-criticspress-naughty-dog-vice-review-leak-sony-ps4-playstation. ↩
Brendan Keogh, “Hackers, Gamers and Cyborgs,” Overland, no. 218 (August 2015), https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-218/feature-brendan-keogh/. ↩
See Ian Sherr and Erin Carson, “GamerGate to Trump: How Video Game Culture Blew Everything up,” CNET, November 17, 2017, https://www.cnet.com/news/gamergate-donaldtrump-american-nazis-how-video-game-culture-blew-everything-up/, and Ari Waldman, “Donald Trump and Steve Bannon Need Angry Young Men. They’re Using Gamergate Culture to Get Them,” Quartz, February 3, 2017, https://qz.com/901761/donald-trump-and-stevebannon-are-using-gamergate-culture-to-attract-angry-white-men/. ↩
Liz Lanier, “Video Games Could Be a $300 Billion Industry by 2025 (Report),” Variety, May 1, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/video-games-300-billion-industry-2025-report-1203202672/. ↩
Brendan Keogh, “The Rest of Us: Revenge, Prestige, and Putting The Last of Us: Part II in Its Place,” Overland, July 28, 2020, https://overland.org.au/2020/07/the-rest-of-usrevenge-prestige-and-putting-the-last-of-us-part-ii-in-its-place/. ↩
Patricia Hernandez, “The Last of Us 2 Dev Naughty Dog Condemns Harassment, Death Threats,” Polygon, July 6, 2020, https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/6/21314543/the-last-ofus-2-harassment-neil-druckmann-laura-bailey-naughty-dog-abby-death-threats-ps4. ↩
Hernandez. ↩
Webster, “The Power of Failure.” I do not, however, want to naively praise Naughty Dog as a studio. Naughty Dog has an endemic culture of crunch that makes for unbearable working conditions for many developers (see Jason Schreier, “As Naughty Dog Crunches on the Last of Us II, DevelopersWonder How Much Longer This Approach Can Last,” Kotaku, March 12, 2020, https://kotaku.com/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962. Furthermore, in 2017 Naughty Dog side-stepped allegations of sexual harassment levelled at a lead developer by a former employee, choosing to deny having ever “received allegations” from the employee indicating “that he was harassed in any way at Naughty Dog or Sony Interactive Entertainment” (see Patrick Klepek, “Ex-Naughty Dog Employee Alleges Sexual Harassment, Studio Issues Statement,” Vice, October 16, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evpjgw/ex-naughty-dog-employee-alleges-sexual-harassment-studio-issues-statement and Naughty Dog, “An Important Statement from Naughty Dog,” October 15, 2017, https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/an_important_statement_from_naughty_dog.). Naughty Dog is not always as progressive as they would like to appear. ↩
Steve Saylor, “Our the Last of Us 2 Discussion on Accessibility and Blind Impressions,” Can I Play That, June 12, 2020, https://caniplaythat.com/2020/06/12/our-the-last-of-us-2-discussion-on-accessibility-and-blind-impressions. ↩
Ben Bayliss, “The Last of Us Part 2 Grounded Update Brings Accessibility Improvements,” Can I Play That, August 11, 2020, https://caniplaythat.com/2020/08/11/the-last-of-us-part-2-grounded-update-accessibility-improvements/. ↩
Isbister, How Games Move Us, 2. ↩
Keogh, “The Rest of Us.” ↩
Keogh. ↩
Isbister, How Games Move Us, 2. ↩
On this patriarchal overdetermination, see Reid McCarter, “The Last of Us, Chaos, and Control,” Digital Love Child, August 18, 2014, https://digitallovechild.com/2014/08/18/thelast-of-us-chaos-and-control/, Julie Muncy, “Last of Us Part II Is Great, but Can’t Escape Its Father’s Shadow,” Wired, June 12, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/last-of-us-partii-review/, and Natalie Flores, “Absent Mothers,” Bullet Points Monthly, July 17, 2020, https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/07/17/absent-mothers-the-last-of-us-part-ii. ↩
Kunzelman, “Destroyed in the Cut.” ↩
Maiberg, “The Not so Hidden Israeli Politics of ‘the Last of Us Part II.’” ↩
Carolyn Petit, “Broken People, Broken Worlds: Thoughts on the Last of Us Part II,” Medium, June 29, 2020, https://medium.com/@carolynpetit/broken-people-broken-worldsthoughts-on-the-last-of-us-part-ii-a012de5d2acf. ↩

Metanarrative

2020-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Written for the Unearthed Expansions Jam, Metanarrative is not, primarily, an expansion for a game but an expansion for a book about games and the stories that we use games to tell. Metanarrative mechanizes Alexander Swords’ Forest Paths Method while introducing to it a layer of randomness. As such, Metanarrative is a game about the making of game narratives (thus the name).

Play is one-on-one, gm-less, and story-focused. It only requires a deck of cards (including jokers) to play. Metanarrative utilizes the basic structure of War, but with a new set of mechanics layered on top. This makes Metanarrative a ttrpg expansion for War as much as it is for the Forest Paths Method.

This is very much a “version zero.” Feedback welcome!

Itch.io

Among Farmers

2020-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Among Farmers is a work of tactical agriculture. It is a game to be played literally, ideologically, and affectionately. To play, our thought must be engaged concretely, materially, in everyday experience: in our bodies, in our worlds, and with our others.

A LARP, an RPG, a set of principles for direct action—Among Farmers takes its queues from a diverse array of sources. Errico Malatesta’s anarcho-communism, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, the Green Armies of the Russian Civil War, Robert Cover’s legal criticism, Wendell Berry’s land-community, Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “no dice, no masters,” and the economic critiques of racialized policing and incarceration from Cedric Johnson, John Clegg and Adaner Usmani, and Dustin Guastella.

The game itself is ultra-minimal, formatted to fit on a single business-card. The accompanying essay provides the game with its theoretical framework and with sources for further reading. It is printable in both letter and half-letter zine format. To print the zine, select “booklet” and “both sides” in your print options.

Title font is Kalmansk by Simo Herold. Cover image is from Jacobin.

Itch.io

Stay

2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Stay is a game for Ellie and Dina, for solidarity, and for my heart. It is about belonging and obsession, protagonists and heroes, and what it means to remain.

Stay is a one move subsystem that you can hack into a ttrpg of your choice or use for solo or social play as a system in itself.

Stay is a game about the ones we choose.

Banner image a screenshot from The Last of Us Part II.

Itch.io

Pure Vessels

2020-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Stein, Eric. “Pure Vessels: The Insect and the Other in Dark Souls and Hollow Knight.” Insect Entanglements, Centre for Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol, Online, June 19, 2020. https://zenodo.org/record/4603508.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games (2011, 2014, 2016) and their spiritual successor, Bloodborne (2015), have creatively, and often subversively, utilized insectoid figures as key elements in their worlds, disrupting normative hierarchies of meaning and being throughout the fictional realms of Lordran, Drangleic, Yharnam, and Lothric. Even more obvious is the work undertaken in Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight (2017), an acclaimed “soulslike/metroidvania” that takes place in an entirely subterranean world populated by insects. In games intimately concerned with the status of “humanity,” insects serve as both potent metaphors and actual agents of transformation, presenting us with an alterity that goes beyond the dialectic of same and other, identity and difference, to a real of generic and finite particularity.

Keywords: Game Studies, François Laruelle, Michel de Certeau, Pluralism, Insects, Dark Souls

Introduction

How, in games, do we think the insect beyond the other? In spite of an ever-growing body of knowledge respecting our insect kin, the insect in the sphere of video games remains the monstrous other, a symbol of infection and corruption. Insects (and arthropods, generally) persist in the gaming consciousness as mindless enemies to annihilate, swarming infestations to exterminate, and evil minions to expunge. As a game researcher and designer wrestling with the topic of this workshop, I am necessarily confronted with such a popular imagining of the insect, wherein any thought of interspecies entanglement is reduced to that most violent of exclusions: utter destruction.

And yet, we cannot merely dismiss the imagination of the video games industry insofar as it is popular, and so, some might say, ‘vulgar.’ Even if we set aside claims about the artistic merits of video games, we nevertheless encounter the strictly pragmatic concern of cultural reach. Referring to the Entertainment Software Association’s latest report, we discover that the American video games industry in 2019 was worth $43.4 billion.¹ Furthermore, as the industry has grown, we see that 65% of adults in the United States play video games, that the average age of gamers is 33, and that gamers, on average, have been playing video games for 14 years.² In sum, video games are no niche hobby; they are here to stay. Globally, roughly one fourth of the world’s population plays or has played some form of video game, and the international industry is predicted to reach $196 billion in revenue by 2022,³ and upwards of $300 billion by 2025.⁴ These numbers dwarf those of the global movie ($42.5 billion in 2019)⁵, music ($20.2 billion in 2019)⁶, and home entertainment ($58.8 billion in 2019) industries.⁷ Whether or not one appreciates video games as an artform, the fact remains that distorted or harmful tropes respecting insects have the potential to be disseminated to billions of people worldwide. A critical intervention is required.

Theoretical Groundwork

In Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life,⁸ we find a philosophy and critique of the other that, in its attention to space and story, provides us with a uniquely suitable entry point for our discussion of video games and the stories they tell about insects.⁹

“Stories,” de Certeau argues, “traverse and organize places [regions]; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories … [they] have the status of spatial syntaxes.”¹⁰ One such spatial syntax is that of the place:

A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the “proper” rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.¹¹

In other words, place is the syntax of synchronic collocation. On the other hand, space (espace) “exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables.”¹² Space, conceived in this way, requires an analytic shift “from structures to actions,” to “practices,” to modes of organization.¹³ The practice of space is a matter of “intersections of mobile elements,” of a region “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it,” a “polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.”¹⁴ In distinction from place, space has “none of the univocity or stability of a ‘proper’.”¹⁵ Space is “practiced place”—it is the syntax of diachronic mobilization.¹⁶

Given this distinction, de Certeau proceeds to describe the two modes of entanglement, the two stories, whereby each syntax of practice is enacted: the map and the tour.¹⁷ Insofar as the practice of place is carried out through position and “‘gridding’ (quadriller),”¹⁸ the map tells a story of “seeing”—it “presents a tableau.”¹⁹ On the contrary, the tour tells a story of “going”—it “organizes movements.”²⁰ Citing a study by Linde and Labov,²¹ de Certeau notes that the tour as a mode of practice “is overwhelmingly favored” by Linde and Labov’s participants,²² but he is quick to emphasize that neither the map nor the tour, place nor space, is more original than the other. Both modalities or practices condition each other, which is to say, as modalities or practices both place and space are actions or activities, stories whereby a region is made navigable. Thinking space requires a shift from structure to action, but this shift does not irrealize place, and as such, does not irrealize structure. Instead, as we shift from synchronic, structural analysis to diachronic, praxical analysis, the second story includes within itself the first while precluding a reduction of either to the other, constituting an incommensurable syntax that can in no way be understood as a representation of the region, but operates instead as a “mobile infinity of tactics” for its traversal.²³

With the semiotic axes restored to each other, we see, then, that map “describers (descripteurs)” can have “the function of indicating either an effect obtained by the tour (‘you see . . .’) or a given that it postulates as its limit (‘there’s a wall’), its possibility (‘there’s a door’), or an obligation (‘there’s a one-way street’).”²⁴ Going allows for the situation of seeing. In the same way, then, the “chain of spatializing operations,” (i.e., the practice or story of space, the tour), “seems to be marked by references to what it produces (a representation of places) or to what it implies (a local order).”²⁵ Seeing allows for the genericization and repetition of going. Everyday stories, those matters of ordinary understanding—going and seeing, seeing and going—are always a matter of “combination,” of being “interlaced,” of incommensurable but reciprocally conditioning practices.²⁶

Problems arise, however, when the map “colonizes space.”²⁷ In this scenario, space is abolished; there is only place, “a formal ensemble of abstract places,” a “theater,” a “totalizing stage.”²⁸ This static formalization of the real elides the “operations of which it is the result,” the “itineraries” that make such a seeing possible, thereby instituting the syntax, the story, as real.²⁹ Insofar as the dominant relational term of abstract place is beside, the organization of a region is reduced to the “configuration of positions,” the “constitut[ion] [of] proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge” and “form tables of legible results.”³⁰ Entities are determined as auto-position, as self-definition, as tautology, a determination that is the practice and the story of self-possession and self-presence—the logic of the proper place. This logic is none other than the metaphysics of presence, that monolith against which so many assaults have been mounted.³¹ But what de Certeau’s critique demonstrates is that this basic form of western thought (static, scopic, essentializing, totalizing) emerges from everyday stories, practices, and technologies, from the privileging of one syntax among many. Philosophy, the decision of the west, is an epiphenomenon of a certain trajectory of practice excised from the manifold of “ways of ‘making do’”—but this trajectory is in no way necessary.³²

We are in error, then, if we respond to this scenario, the problem of metaphysics, with an overcorrection, a determination or decision in the opposite direction. The critique of place, presence, the same cannot be achieved through an opposed but necessarily equivalent transcendentalization of space, difference, the other, through the establishment of a negative absolute.³³ De Certeau’s tactical syntax, his practice of space, is not a decision, because to decide one must establish a proper place, either here in the place of the same or there in the place of the other. Which place does not matter because place as such is auto-position, the colonization of space by transcendental identity: A = A. To decide for the other (to choose the other, to choose on behalf of the other) is to make of the other a place and thereby co-opt this remove as the place of one’s own proper authority.³⁴ On the other hand, a tactical syntax, a spatial syntax, is absolutely determined by the “opaque reality” that is its “inexpungeable” condition, a condition that necessitates the syntax, the story, of traversal.³⁵ The story to be told does not try to “choose” from among or “fix” in place the mobile infinity of tactics—which include both map and tour, the stories of both place and space—but instead welcomes their “contingent situation,” a situation that provides neither authorization nor justification, remaining perfectly indifferent to their everyday operation.³⁶

It is from this theoretical dwelling that we must set out upon the terrain of our inquiry, attempting to give a tour of our subject matter, to tell a story of the insect in gaming that resists the totalization of either same or other. I have chosen two games to this end: FromSoftware’s acclaimed action roleplaying game, Dark Souls,³⁷ and Team Cherry’s remarkable ‘soulslike’ 2D platformer, Hollow Knight.³⁸ This study excludes a detailed analysis of FromSoftware’s other games, not for lack of insect imagery and thematization, but for the sake of concision (though my interpretation of Dark Souls is certainly filtered through these later works). Hollow Knight is included here at the expense of many other soulslikes games precisely because of its emphasis on insect imagery—indeed, it has been referred to as “Bug Souls”³⁹—and its metamorphosis of the themes that Dark Souls (and its sequels) employ.

The preceding groundwork is necessary for the following discussion because, I have found,⁴⁰ without adopting such a posture, any discussion of FromSofware’s games (and their soulslike inheritors) will lead to a reductive transcendentalization of the other that ultimately converts this other into a source of authority, co-opting the place of the other as justification for the position claimed. As an active participant in both scholarly and popular discourse regarding the disparate soulslike genre, this is a trajectory of argument to which I myself have fallen prey. To merely receive the inversion of values that FromSoftware’s games present—which, with respect to insects, would be the formula: insect = {monstrous, evil} $\rightarrow$ insect = {beautiful, good} (a formula that is in fact a chiasm, the crossing whereby the monstrous and evil becomes the beautiful and good)—as the lesson to be gleaned, the true ending for our play, is to reinscribe this inversion within the totalizing logic of the proper place, within the metaphysics of presence now purified and occulted by the alibi of difference.⁴¹

The significance of Hollow Knight is, precisely, to help us avoid the transcendental gesture, the turn of difference that claims a new authority on the basis of the other. In Dark Souls, this turn is the very twist, the metaphysical torsion, that, when encountered, forces a complete revision of the player’s understanding of the stakes of the game. If, however, we were to analyze in detail FromSoftware’s subsequent games, we would find that escaping from this torsion is impossible, as age gives way to age in a never-ending cycle, every other becoming a new power to overthrow, a new lord to be slain. What Hollow Knight teaches is a way to think the insect beyond the other, which is to think the insect as other without universal referent, the other in its radical, unreasonable contingency. This is the intervention required.

Dark Souls

In Dark Souls, the order of the world is outlined by a bombastic opening cinematic: the player is presented with an eternity of fog ruled by everlasting dragons; then, a black cavern, the birthplace of lords and mortals alike; and then, the First Flame, font of life, soul, disparity, the form of the age to come, and so too the first wound of the new paradigm of existence, the Age of Fire.

Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, strikes down the everlasting dragons with spears of lightning, establishing himself as the sovereign of the new age and inaugurating his solar regime. But the age over which he presides is born of disparity, is made possible by disparity, and the fall of dark is inevitable. In response, Gwyn asks his ally, the Witch of Izalith, to try and create a new flame to replace the old. She fails. Gwyn returns to the cavern of his birth, the Kiln of the First Flame, and uses the last of his strength to rekindle the flame, cursing the world to live by its dull light. Among the subjects of Gwyn’s realm the darksign begins to appear, a burning ring that brands the undead—those who would have welcomed death but now are barred from their final passage, trapped in the stasis of the new absolute. Time folds upon itself, cracks and blurs. The game begins.

I have previously examined the ecological⁴² and metaphysical⁴³ stakes of this foundational mythology, but where the present analysis begins is the failure of the Witch of Izalith. As mentioned, at the behest of Lord Gwyn, the Witch of Izalith and her daughters attempted to create a substitute for the first flame. The witches failed in their efforts, losing control of the flame, which became the Flame of Chaos. The Witch of Izalith was consumed by her creation and twisted into the Bed of Chaos, from which an entire race of demons, monsters, and importantly, insects, was born. At some point between his initial request and his return to the Kiln, Gwyn and his proud Silver Knights attempted to seal the demons away in their kingdom, and many of the knights were reduced to blackened shells in the conflict, abandoned by their lord to wander the dying world. The kingdom of demons became known as Lost Izalith, a hellish ruin hidden deep in the roots of the world—but the monstrous scourge of chaos remained, a festering blight creeping steadily upward into the kingdom of sunlight.

The player character will first encounter this blight in the aptly named Blighttown, though they will have already met two children of chaos—the Taurus Demon and the Capra Demon—roaming the sunlit realms far from their subterranean home.⁴⁴ Blighttown is a toxic swamp at the base of the player character’s main hub, teeming with poison-spitting giant mosquitos, flame-spewing cragspiders, mucus-spouting giant leeches, and one very angry parasitic wall hugger. This is not to mention the infested ghouls, toxic dart-blowing assassins, and dung-throwing brutes who live among the insectoid denizens of Blighttown—all of which makes for a truly nightmarish descent. Everything in Blighttown wants to kill the player character; even the ground is deadly, poisoning them on contact and hindering their movement.

The experience of traversing Blighttown is one of utter hostility, and the presence of so many grotesque insects only heightens the feeling that the player character does not belong (none of which is helped by the appalling framerate that plagued this zone in early versions of the game). These are enemies to be slain, an evil to be overcome. When the player character at last reaches the approach to the boss arena—a web covered mound rising out of the noxious sludge—they meet two egg carriers, forced to crawl on all fours under the weight of their burden, chanting with clasped hands in the direction of the boss. What monstrosity might such blighted souls worship?

The player will soon find out. When the player character passes through the boss fog and enters the arena, they are met with a terrifying sight. Chaos Witch Quelaag, half woman and half lava-belching spider, stands between the player character and their goal. This fight is often a challenging skill gate for new players. Quelaag’s attacks are ferocious and unrelenting, and this onslaught, combined with the discordant operatics of her boss theme and the grey unease of egg-covered walls, makes for a deeply trying encounter.

Quelaag is not, however, the only monstrous arthropod who embodies the corruption of the Flame of Chaos. Later in the game, the player character will return to Blighttown, travel past Quelaag’s Domain, and descend into the Demon Ruins. The first boss the player character meets here is the Ceaseless Discharge, the only son of the Witch of Izalith, a horned, tentacled, many-eyed giant who was transformed into such when the Flame of Chaos was created. He is considered the first demon born of the Bed of Chaos, and plainly embodies the failure of the Witch of Izalith. Lava runs out of his sores, creating great pools and rivers that hinder the player character’s progression, resulting in the effect that the environment itself expresses the disease of chaos.

Once Ceaseless Discharge is defeated, the player character descends further into the Demon Ruins, encountering Taurus and Capra demons in abundance. Further down still, the player character can fight the Centipede Demon, a huge, chaos-warped creature that again emphasizes the thematic fusion of chaos, corruption, and the insect, redoubling the earlier effects of Quelaag’s hybrid body and Ceaseless Discharge’s tortured visage.

When at last the player character reaches the Bed of Chaos—having killed parasitic chaos bugs and vaguely alien, vaguely insectoid corrosion-spraying chaos eaters along the way—they find a towering tangle of branches that resembles a woman with long hair hunched over in agony. The ensuing fight is a much derided puzzle boss, but what is found at its conclusion is significant: at the centre of the Bed of Chaos lies a wriggling, fire-swathed larva. Here, in this gnarled womb, seedbed of corruption, lies a symbol of uncontrollable growth and generativity, the perverse dynamism of chaos made manifest in an insect. Though not yet the deepest the player character will delve in Dark Souls, this particular boss fight is the event that neatly bundles the thorny thematic branches that we have been tracing thus far: insects, infection, blight, corruption, failure, monstrosity, and chaos.

From the first early game encounters with demons, through Blighttown and the fight with Quelaag, and then down into the heart of Lost Izalith, FromSoftware has crafted a coherent thematic and ludic experience meant to unsettle and often overwhelm the player. They deliberately employ tropes of the horrific insect to unnerve the player, drawing on other potent symbols of disease and infection to ensure that the metaphysical significance of the Witch of Izalith’s failure is clear for the player character by the time they meet her in her twisted form. Though many often miss these details due to the uniquely obtuse way in which FromSoftware delivers their narratives,⁴⁵ taken in sum this thematic bundle is not subtle in the least. In the ontology of Dark Souls, the insect quite simply is corruption.

FromSoftware is not interested, however, in the uncritical regurgitation of gaming tropes. If we recall the initial framing of the game, FromSoftware’s implementation of the ‘insect-as-corruption’ theme is couched in a broader conceptual space that precludes the easy acceptance of this theme as given.

The origin of the Bed of Chaos and its spawn is decidedly contingent. FromSoftware does not build the conjunction of insects, corruption, and chaos into the foundation of their world, but positions this conjunction as contingent, first, upon the originary disparity signified by the First Flame, and second, upon Gwyn’s decision to prolong the Age of Fire by way of pyromantic reduplication. There is no necessity to the Witch of Izalith’s failure or the events that followed, only the fact of her failure and its consequences as such. In this way, FromSoftware dissolves any ground upon which a moral critique of this corruption might be mounted. The creeping blight is not an evil threatening the goodness of the sun, but the very product of that sun abusing its power to resist the course of disparity and extend its dominion.

Indeed, as if to drive this very point home, behind an illusory wall in Quelaag’s Domain, the player character can find a second woman-spider hybrid, the Fair Lady, sister of Quelaag. She is obviously sick and quite feeble, barely able to speak. The player character can learn from her attendant Eingyi that the Fair Lady and Quelaag came up to Blighttown from Lost Izalith, saw the suffering of the people there, and the Fair Lady attempted to suck the blight into herself to heal them, bringing her to the brink of death—all of which occurred after the sisters were transformed by the chaos flame. Quelaag is not some mindless monster, but a devoted sister protecting the Fair Lady from murderous individuals like the player character.

The hidden, so called ‘true’ ending of Dark Souls only makes this chiasm, this crossing of good and evil, more clear. Typically, the player character will confront the final boss of the game, Lord Gwyn himself, in a deadly conflagration in the Kiln of the First Flame. Upon slaying the hollowed lord, the player character proceeds to link the fire, allowing it to use their soul for fuel so that it might be reignited once more. In this first, naive ending, the player assumes that they have saved the world while nobly dooming their character to the same oblivion as Gwyn.

But the game begins again with new game plus, a mechanical hint at the thematic of cycles that conditions every choice that the player character will make. If the player character takes slightly different paths, progressing through the game in a slightly different order, they can meet a non-player character (NPC) who reveals the truth of the undead curse: that Gwyn feared the dark and that undeath is his fault. The coming dark, the darkness of humankind, is but another disparity—like chaos, another contingent real. The undead curse, the hollowing to which all those cursed inevitably succumb, is intrinsic to Gwyn’s solar regime, to the metaphysics of presence, and so is an extrinsic influence on both demon and human kind, on chaos and darkness. Corruption comes from within metaphysics; evil dwells at the heart of the good. And this time, the player character can choose to turn their back on the fire (a turn always available to them, but never presented as possible until now), to refuse to rekindle an age of tyranny, and to usher in the Age of Dark as the lord of this radically other paradigm.

We see, then, that Dark Souls performs a deconstruction of its own mythology a deconstruction that it achieves through the mobilization of various others (chaos, darkness, and more in the following games) to tactically subvert the overdetermination of Gwyn’s decision, a deconstruction that is itself the narrativization of deconstruction as a philosophical project. The tropic deployment of the insect by FromSoftware ultimately contributes to the deconstruction of the framework that affords such tropisms. FromSoftware’s critical revision of their own theme leads us to recognize an ontological split between the insect and corruption, inverting and then flattening the hierarchy of the real that previously linked the two in a chain of consequence. Corruption is not an intrinsic quality of chaos (symbolized by insects, demons, and the like); corruption is a more generic characteristic of disparity as such, the impossibility of any absolute (in the case of Dark Souls, fire, light, and the sun) maintaining itself in the auto-position of its proper place. This ontological corruption manifests in blight, infection, and destruction not because of some moral or existential lack on the part of those affected, but because of the suppression of this ontological fact by that power that sought to hide the irreason and insubstantiality of its own position.

It is at this critical juncture that the importance of the theoretical groundwork above becomes obvious. In my own earlier readings of Dark Souls, this realization that fire $\neq$ good has produced the counter-formula dark = good.⁴⁶ And yet, this counter-position is precisely the co-option of the space of the other that de Certeau challenges, the strategic emplacement of the self in the other’s position whereby the story of power might commence once more, but now through the syntactic vessel of everything power once dominated and despised. Power repeats itself in an interminable chain of disguises; the utter lack of ground of the value equation as such is effaced once more, the story of the new absolute—difference, otherness, corruption—transcendentalized.⁴⁷ Rather than let the other stand in its groundlessness, the other is reappropriated to and reinscribed within a higher unity, a more purified unity. And the cycle repeats. FromSoftware’s following games play with the logic of this repetition in some interesting ways, but here we will be better served by turning our attention to Hollow Knight, a game that lets the bugs stand for themselves.

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight, like Dark Souls, begins with an opening cinematic that provides some crucial context that only becomes clear much later in the game. However, unlike Dark Souls, this cinematic is without narration, depriving the player of the thematic cues that would set the stage for their interpretation of the game. Everything comes out in play—a distinctly Dark Souls move that takes the Souls formula to the extreme.

Permit me once again to summarize: the game opens with the sound of howling wind; then, four lines from an ‘Elegy for Hallownest’; a close-up on the eyes of a horned creature as they fill with a noxious orange glow; a crack arching across the creature’s forehead; a roar and a burst of orange fog; and then a strange, striated ovoid, marked with three, luminous, droplet-shaped sigils. The cinematic cuts to black. And then, a haunting track begins to play and we see the Knight, the character the player will be controlling, alone in a black and barren wasteland. The Knight approaches a cliff and, looking over their shoulder, we see the glow of a settlement in the distance, a gentle beacon in the empty expanse. The Knight jumps down. The game begins.

Hollow Knight borrows from many games in its design, though it is typically categorized as a ‘metroidvania’ (in the legacy of Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) and a soulslike.⁴⁸ It is most obviously a soulslike, however, not in its play or its difficulty but in its themes. Hollow Knight is a story about corruption, failure, and the absolute, but the tactical syntax of this story, the way it tours the player through the nooks and crannies of Hallownest, takes it well beyond the thematic conclusions of Dark Souls.

It is my contention that the cast of insectoids that populate Hallownest—“bugs” as they are lovingly referred to by the developers—is vital for the thematic metamorphosis that Hollow Knight undertakes, and yet, quite serendipitously, the choice to make every creature in the game some kind of arthropod was an entirely contingent design choice. Ari Gibson remarks in an interview that “draw[ing] a few little bugs in Photoshop is simple,” and William Pellen, his co-creator, chimes in that the “bugs make for simple characters, which are nice and easy to put together.”⁴⁹ The sole necessity to this decision was expedience, but by entering into the thematic space of the insect Hollow Knight’s designers also entered into the very deconstruction of the story that Dark Souls had begun. Dark Souls is a work of fiction, but its referent is the real, the logical structure of the unreasonable, contingent ground of existence itself. Hollow Knight, then, begins where Dark Souls leaves off, but it learns from the subsequent games in the franchise in such a way that only an external artistic intervention could.

In Dark Souls II,⁵⁰ the player learns that their choice in the first game was merely the second in a long series of such choices, and that the ages have been repeating themselves in the same way for some time. At the end of the game, rather than being presented with a choice, the player character takes the throne, sublating the dualism of fire and dark in the higher unity of want.⁵¹ In the rerelease of Dark Souls II, the Scholar of the First Sin edition,⁵² a third option is presented to the player, a refusal of the choice altogether: “Beyond the scope of light, beyond the reach of Dark. . . what could possibly await us?”⁵³ Bloodborne,⁵⁴ overlapping in development with Dark Souls II and released just prior to Scholar of the First Sin, makes the critique of the first Dark Souls discussed above explicit, spending a great deal of time exploring the possibilities of otherness that might emerge in opposition to totalizing authority. However, Bloodborne remains yoked to the tropes of gothic and Lovecraftian horror, which makes escaping from the exploitation of insects and monsters for the purpose of disturbing the player quite difficult. Dark Souls III,⁵⁵ learning from both prior Dark Souls games and from Bloodborne, presents the player with perhaps the most robust pluralism of otherness in the series to date, offering a multiplicity of third choices or non-choices as alternatives to the repetition of the fire-dark dichotomy. And yet, these third choices often rely on the insect for the deployment of the same tropes as the earlier games—corruption, infection, disease—to evoke feelings of disgust and terror in the player, once again relegating the insect to the place of symptom, the unfortunate consequence or side-effect of a metaphysical illness. The insect in its otherness is reintegrated in the higher unity of a cyclical overcoming, and as such, divested of its real difference.

This co-option of the insect other is clearly seen in the Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City downloadable content (DLC) packs for Dark Souls III. In the first, the fire that would render the Painted World of Ariandel into ash and so allow passage to the next painted world has been held at bay, and the painting wallows in the rot of its deferred apocalypse—a rot concretely signified by the giant flies that take sustenance from it and spit maggots at the player character if they draw too near. In the second, the player character enters the Ringed City where they encounter the locust preachers who proclaim the advent of a coming feast—the final embrace of the abyssal swamp and all that gnaws and swarms within.⁵⁶ The language of their sermons is deliberately disturbing, and ultimately fails to produce an actual third path on the part of the insects that, we are told, share a kinship with humanity, a kinship not of kind or identity but of a common groundlessness, the contingency of the abyss, or rather, the contingency of the black before the abyss, the black of the Kiln before the splitting, the rupture, the disparity of fire. The locust preachers invite the uncontrollable consumption and transformation first thematized by chaos and its spawn in Dark Souls, promising these inversions of the metaphysical order through the vessel of dark, a promise that, once again, relies upon the other, the othered insect, the othered monster, as an instrument for the attainment of a new unitary paradigm, a new totalitarian absolute.

I have argued that the End of Fire ending to Dark Souls III is an attempt at getting beyond the oblivion of transcendental wholism or oneness, but this ending only points into the darkness, offering mere suggestions at what might lie beyond.⁵⁷ Hollow Knight, in a uniquely compelling way, presents itself as a response to this indication.

The orange-eyed creature in the opening cinematic is the titular Hollow Knight, a vessel born of light and Void for the express purpose of containing the Radiance, a god of searing brilliance that threatened to enslave the bugs of Hallownest. The Pale King, a Wyrm, and the White Lady, a Root, conceived a myriad of such children, placing their eggs in the Abyss in the hope that one would prove pure enough to serve as a suitable vessel. Importantly, the Pale King and the White Lady are both higher beings like the Radiance, and both beings of light, but their light is incommensurable with that of the Radiance—similar, to be sure, but irreducible to it. With this simple move, we see Hollow Knight perform a pluralization of one of the terms of the metaphysical dualism at the heart of Dark Souls, precluding the metaphysical logic of sublation and unification that would abolish such difference in sameness.

The Hollow Knight, climbing from the Abyss, is taken and raised by the Pale King until they are grown strong enough to contain the Radiance. Through a ritual involving the Hollow Knight and three Dreamers—Monomon, Lurien, and Herrah—the Radiance is trapped within the Hollow Knight, who is bound and sealed within the Temple of the Black Egg, the ovoid from the opening cinematic. The Dreamers remain in an eternal slumber to ensure that the ritual holds.

But the Hollow Knight is not entirely pure, and over time the Radiance begins to overpower it, corrupting it from within with the “plague, the infection, the madness” of light.⁵⁸ And herein is found the great revolution of Hollow Knight—by making every creature in the world an insect, the insect as such cannot be considered the cause of this corruption. Further, by allowing for the proliferation of lights, rather than the reification of Light (as fire, lightning, or sun), Hollow Knight locates the source of corruption in a particular entity, so isolating corruption as fact from any universalizing or moralizing category that might be used to sublate all manner of differences in its higher reality, to the end of either justification or condemnation. Thus, we can say that in Hollow Knight we witness the genericization of difference, the simultaneous emancipation and sheltering of the other in its own groundless existence.⁵⁹

This genericization of difference and otherness is a consistent design principle and thematic element throughout Hollow Knight. As the player character traverses the world, they encounter the Mosskin, denizens of Greenpath who worship the higher being Unn, an enormous slug who is not affiliated with light like the Pale King, White Lady, or the Radiance, but is neither affiliated with Void. In Deepnest, the player character meets the Weavers, spider-like creatures who, before the corruption of the Radiance, had deigned not to bow to the Pale King but, like the Mosskin, did not worship the Void. In the Fungal Wastes, the player character meets the Fungal Tribe and the Mantis Tribe, consisting, respectively, of sentient mushrooms and warlike mantises, each with their own alliances, affiliations, and identifications—but neither reducible in these relations to either light or dark, operating independently in the groundlessness between. The bee-folk of the Hive welcomed the Radiance when it first arrived, whose light resembled their own, and the Moths—the only survivor of which tribe awaits the player character in the Resting Grounds—were birthed of the Radiance, but turned their back upon it at the sight of Pale King’s new light. And we could go on, examining all the ways of being otherwise that the scholars of the Soul Sanctum, the near-extinct Snail Shamans, and the Godseekers of Godhome present. We could speak of the Nightmare Heart, another higher being of neither light nor Void, and the Old Gods of Thunder and Rain that abandoned the Godseekers in a time long past. But all of this would merely serve to emphasize the fact that Hollow Knight takes the auto-deconstruction of Dark Souls seriously, responding to its shattering of the metaphysical dichotomy not as catastrophe but possibility.

In the final, ‘true’ ending of Hollow Knight, added by the Godmaster DLC, the player character enters the dreams of the Godseekers to do battle with the Pantheons of Hallownest one final time. At the pinnacle of this challenge the player character will face the Absolute Radiance, transcendent form of the Radiance as totalizing sameness, and must defeat it in order to eradicate its corrupting influence in Hallownest. When they do so, however, the player character merges with the Void, giving it focus (i.e., absorbing all the Siblings who failed to ascend from the Abyss), and becoming the “God of Gods,” a terrifying being that, in its brutal evisceration of the Absolute Radiance and the consumption of Godhome and its dreaming residents that follows, feels like no better a god than the one that came before, a new absolute to replace the old.⁶⁰ What is key, here, is that this deliberate subversion of the player character’s quest does not rely on the exploitation of the space of the other for its narrative and thematic heft, precluding, in its framing, any moralizing, universalizing position that might render this supposed true ending a good one.

Indeed, before the player character faces the Absolute Radiance, the penultimate foe of the Pantheon of Hallownest is the Pure Vessel—the perfect form of the Hollow Knight, the apotheosis of the insect, now figured as the transcendent shape of metaphysical dichotomy and trapped in a dream of never-ending servitude. A deadly, soul-wielding demigod, prime instrument of light and Void, it is their curse to serve as a vessel no longer for the Radiance, but more tragically, as a means for the ascendance of their sibling—the player character, the Knight—an ascendance that will see the dissolution of the Pure Vessel’s particular difference in the “focus” that is the God of Gods. The Pure Vessel bars the passage to transcendence, their own purity a symbol of the violence of philosophical scission that such overcoming requires.[^63] Unlike the larva at the heart of the Bed of Chaos, the Pure Vessel does not in itself signify corruption, infection, or disease; instead, the story that the Pure Vessel tells cuts across such appropriation to deconstruct the tropism of the other through its own subservient deployment as “pure” other, a purity that is the nothingness, the split origin, of the child birthed from light and Void, a purity required for its own sublation in and by the God of Gods as totalizing difference.

The syntax of Hollow Knight, its tactical story, is constantly in opposition to such unifying, transcendentalizing logics, refusing the metaphysics of sameness and difference that would use either of these terms for the authorization of power, the ideality of auto-position—a refusal that directly challenges the narrative thrust that implicitly drives the player character forward throughout the game. The self-obliviating narrative that such ideality requires is deprived of its necessity, returned to the space of its groundlessness and contingency. Neither the Absolute Radiance nor the God of Gods is the true god, nor even the good god—the very fact of their transcendence requires the domination and unification (whether by “infection” or “focus”) of the radical, immanent otherness of the plurality of bugs populating Hallownest. This is a critique of transcendence as such more damning than any that might naively be leveled against the Radiance from the position, the place, of the Void, a critique that, in the last instance, does not co-opt otherness to justify its authority.

Conclusion

From Dark Souls to Hollow Knight, the trajectory of the insect is a trajectory from difference to multiplicity.⁶¹ Dark Souls establishes an identity that is revealed to be a dichotomy by way of the difference, the corrupting influence, of the insect and its related others. In the sequels to Dark Souls, the story of the insect is mobilized to other ends, in various attempts at escaping from the recurring violence of this original dichotomy. But, given the terms that frame the Souls games from the beginning, the insect never quite manages to escape the curse of metaphysics, remaining on this side of the leap into a true pluralism beyond the logic of difference, which would finally emancipate it from the burden of otherness, the curse of purity, through an entry into the immanence of an absolutely generic otherness, otherness as the proliferation of the absolutely other. It is this vision of emancipation that Hollow Knight welcomes, presenting a bug-filled future in which the generic, finite one is liberated from the shackles of the universal, the insect freed from the stereotypical role of horrific other, that other which has been historically instrumentalized as a vessel for the realization of the transcendental, the auto-position of ideality. In this way, the insect vision of Hollow Knight tells the story of an absolute particularity, weaving a profoundly posthuman and generic ethics concerned with the plurality of individuations dwelling in, traversing, and transforming the world of their coexistence.

In gaming, such a vision opens a path forward for insects along which the figure of the insect might be explored on its own terms, not as a tropic exploitation of human revulsions, but as distinctly valuable in its own right, productive of unique modes of existence that demand we human players reconsider our own limited perspectives by asking the question, how should the real be structured so that subjects such as these might emerge?⁶² This would be an intervention in gaming beyond the dichotomy of human and other, an intervention beyond the reductive and universalizing formula of the dichotomy itself.

For the insects, Hollow Knight depicts a world of plural becomings, the kingdom of Hallownest home to such a host of differences that the claim to universal rule has never, nor ever could, be realized. In Hallownest there is not subjectivity but subjectivities, a multiplicity of ways of making do in the world irreducible to the tyranny of the same or the terror of difference. Certainly, Hallownest is no utopia when the player character comes upon it, but even in this crisis, what Hollow Knight envisions for its insects is a future in which their existence requires no justification and their otherness no reason—in short, a future of bugs for the bugs.

Notes

“2019 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry” (Entertainment Software Association, 2019), https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019-Essential-Facts-About-the-Computer-and-Video-Game-Industry.pdf, 20. ↩
“2019 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry.” 6-7. ↩
Kevin Webb, “The $120 Billion Gaming Industry Is Going Through More Change Than It Ever Has Before, and Everyone Is Trying to Cash In,” Business Insider, October 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/video-game-industry-120-billion-future-innovation-2019-9. ↩
Liz Lanier, “Video Games Could Be a $300 Billion Industry by 2025 (Report),” Variety, May 2019, https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/video-games-300-billion-industry-2025-report-1203202672/. ↩
Pamela McClintock, “2019 Global Box Office Revenue Hit Record $42.5B Despite 4 Percent Dip in U.S.” Billboard, January 2020, https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8547827/2019-global-box-office-revenue-hit-record-425b-despite-4-percent-dip-in-us. ↩
“IFPI Issues Annual Global Music Report,” IFPI, May 2020, https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-issues-annual-Global-Music-Report. ↩
Rebecca Rubin, “Global Entertainment Industry Surpasses $100 Billion for the First Time Ever,” Variety, March 2020, https://variety.com/2020/film/news/global-entertainmentindustry-surpasses-100-billion-for-the-first-time-ever-1203529990/. ↩
Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). ↩
In fact, the section of de Certeau’s book in question is titled “Spatial Stories.” See De Certeau, 115-130. ↩
De Certeau, 115. ↩
De Certeau, 117. ↩
De Certeau, 117. ↩
De Certeau, 116. ↩
De Certeau, 117. ↩
De Certeau, 117. ↩
De Certeau, 117. ↩
De Certeau, 119. ↩
De Certeau, 46. ↩
De Certeau, 119. ↩
De Certeau, 119. ↩
Charlotte Linde and William Labov, “Spatial Networks as a Site for the Study of Language and Thought,” Language 51 (1975): 924–39, cited in De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 221. ↩
De Certeau, 119. ↩
De Certeau, 41. ↩
De Certeau, 120. ↩
De Certeau, 120. ↩
De Certeau, 121. ↩
De Certeau, 121. ↩
De Certeau, 121. Such a gesture is onto-political in nature, a performative definition of what is. The syntax of place is reified, obscuring the fact that this syntax is a practice of the real, productive of a profile of the real, but not reducible to the real. I derive this argument, in part, from François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩
De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 121. ↩
De Certeau, 117, 121. ↩
Laruelle, following Derrida, contends that the history of these assaults is the history of philosophy. See Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference. ↩
“Decision” is a key term throughout Laruelle’s work. “Making do,” for de Certeau, is the mode constitutive of everyday practice. See The Practice of Everyday Life, 29. ↩
For Laruelle, this is the relative-absolute. See Philosophies of Difference, 162. ↩
De Certeau identifies this co-option in the work of Bourdieu in The Practice of Everyday Life, 60, 51: “he gives the impression of departing (of going toward these tactics [of the other]), but only in order to return (to confirm the professional rationality). This is only a false departure, a textual ‘strategy.’” In so doing, in rendering his subject matter “objectifiable,” Bourdieu “furnishes the real … support allowing the introduction of the concept of habitus into the human sciences, which is the personal stamp Bourdieu has put on theory. Hence the particularity of the originary experience is lost in its power of reorganizing the general discourse.” ↩
De Certeau, 51. ↩
De Certeau, 54, 55. ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011). ↩
Ari Gibson and William Pellen, Hollow Knight (PS4; Xbox One; Nintendo Switch; Microsoft Windows; macOS; Linux: Team Cherry, 2017). ↩
Polygon, “Let’s Talk About Dark Souls One Last Time Wait Where Are You Going,” YouTube, January 2020, https://youtu.be/9aiTXXifbwE. ↩
Most recently, see Eric Stein, “Praise the Sun: The Metaphysics of Dark Souls from the First Flame to the End of Fire,” Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, June 2020, https://www.academia.edu/43267406/. ↩
This is the logic of the turn, the purest gesture of philosophy that Laruelle identifies as the essential operation of deconstruction. See Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 184, 194: “Difference is THE philosophical decision that affirms the aporetic disjunction of syntax and reality and rests content to ‘turn’, in all the senses of this word, within this in-between.” And yet, the purity of the turn is also its elision, the most radical blockage of thought: “here then is a thinking that entangles itself, ensnares itself, enlyses itself perhaps, turns over itself and in itself faster and faster, substituting intensity for life and the acceleration of motion for movement, yet which thickens heavily like a ‘turning’ doughy paste.” ↩
Eric Stein, “The Fire Fades: Navigating the End of the World in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls,” International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March 2020, https://www.academia.edu/42195654/. ↩
Stein, “Praise the Sun.” ↩
This is the standard order of progression, from the Undead Burg and the Taurus Demon, to the Undead Parish, the Lower Undead Burg and the Capra Demon, through the Depths, and finally into Blighttown. This sequence can be broken if the player chooses the master key for their character’s starting gift, which allows the player character to enter Blighttown through a back door, tackling the zone before ever encountering the Taurus or Capra demons. The effect of the standard order is, in this case, far more compelling, however, as the player’s understanding of demons, the blight, and chaos slowly coheres as they traverse the world of the game. ↩
Franziska Ascher, “Narration of Things: Storytelling in Dark Souls via Item Descriptions,” trans. Sebastian Heilander, Paidia: Zeitschrift Für Computerspielforschung, September 2014, https://www.academia.edu/12025093/. ↩
This counter-formula is nothing but Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, that “most spiritual revenge.” To revolt against a system of morality in this way is a potent challenge, one seen in the Judaic inversion of “the aristocratic value equation (good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God) … namely [that] ‘only the miserable are the good, the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good, the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious ones, the only ones blessed by God.’” See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Adrian Del Caro, vol. 8, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 226. ↩
The gesture of philosophical scission wherein the real/syntax dyad is instantiated, the “matrix of duel Unity.” See Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, 103, 16. ↩
Satoru Okada, Metroid (Famicom Disk System; Nintendo Entertainment System; PlayChoice-10: Nintendo, 1986); Toru Hagihara and Koji Igarishi, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation: Konami, 1997). ↩
Marie Dealessandri, Ari Gibson, and William Pellen, “When We Made. . . Hollow Knight,” MCV, July 2018, https://www.mcvuk.com/development-news/when-we-made-hollow-knight/. ↩
Tomohiro Shibuyo and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls II (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014). ↩
I present this argument in detail in Stein, “Praise the Sun.” ↩
Tomohiro Shibuyo and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2015). ↩
“Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin,” Dark Souls Wiki, Fandom, accessed June 1, 2020, https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Aldia,_Scholar_of_the_First_Sin. ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Bloodborne (PS4: FromSoftware, 2015). ↩
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls III (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016). ↩
These preachers supplied the original title of this paper: “Fear not, the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin.” See “Locust Preacher,” Dark Souls III Wiki, Fextralife, accessed June 1, 2020, https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Locust+Preacher. ↩
Stein, “The Fire Fades.”; Stein, “Praise the Sun.” ↩
“The Infection,” Hollow Knight Wiki, Fandom, accessed June 17, 2020, https://hollowknight.fandom.com/wiki/Infection#cite_note-1. ↩
The generic is here conceived in the Laruellian sense, which has been succinctly formulated by Alexander Galloway, a philosopher and commentator on Laruelle, as follows: “The one is never the Whole or the All, but rather merely a finite and generic one: this one; this one here; this one here in person.” See Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xiii. ↩
“Void Entity,” Hollow Knight Wiki, Fandom, accessed June 17, 2020, https://hollowknight.fandom.com/wiki/Void_Entity. ↩
This trajectory was first formalized for me by Terence Blake. See Terence Blake, “Laruelle and Deleuze: From Difference to Multiplicity,” May 2016, https://www.academia.edu/11652059/. Most of his other writings can be found at Agent Swarm, https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/. ↩
A revision of Zizek’s formula, “how should the Real be structured so that it allows for the mergence of subjectivity”? See Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London, UK: Verso Books, 2012), 905. ↩

Praise the Sun

2020-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Citation

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

Through the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and François Laruelle, this paper deconstructs the metaphysics of the sun that undergirds the worlds of the three Dark Souls games developed by FromSoftware, while also identifying the internal critique of this metaphysics that the Dark Souls games successively elaborate. Indeed, as inversions of the western fantasy model, the three Dark Souls games also labour to invert western philosophy, striking at the heart of Platonic idealism and its variations throughout history.

Keywords: Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, François Laruelle, Pluralism, Dark Souls

Introduction

“Praise the sun,” a popular refrain in the community surrounding FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games (2011, 2014, 2016),¹ is a line originally spoken by Solaire of Astora, the beloved character from the first game in the series who delves into the depths of the world in search of his “very own sun.”² A noble member of the Warriors of Sunlight covenant, he is the first properly friendly non-player character that the player character, the “Chosen Undead,” meets. Sometimes, whether through luck or experience, Solaire can be diverted from his ill-fated path and the faithful knight will join the Chosen Undead at the end, a final ally in an ashen world. But sadly, his quest is, more often than not, a doomed one, serving as a microcosm of the narrative in which the player character finds themselves entangled.

More than an affecting story, however, this microcosmic quality of Solaire’s tale serves to introduce the broader philosophical project of the Souls games. Solaire is first encountered after the defeat of the Taurus Demon in the Undead Burg. The player character sees him staring out over Lordran, the land of the ancient lords, basking in the warmth of the sun before the inevitable fall of dark. He tells the Chosen Undead to call on him in times of need by touching the “brilliant aura” of his summon signature.³ And then, if prompted once more, he tells the player character to press on so that he might linger there on the walls of the Burg:

Oh, hello there. I will stay behind, to gaze at the sun. The sun is a wondrous body. Like a magnificent father! If only I could be so grossly incandescent!⁴

With this invocation of the wondrous solar patriarch, Solaire thoroughly situates Dark Souls in the domain of philosophy, leading us to ask questions of origins and substance and foundation. It is the task of this paper to explicate these questions as they are asked by the three Dark Souls games, to analyze the repetitions and variations between them, and to mount an argument as to the structure of the particular (and peculiar) metaphysics that these games present.

Onto-Politics

In asking these questions, I am inescapably drawn to the thought of Martin Heidegger and the strange question that motivated so much of his work: “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”⁵ He would rephrase this same question, found at the beginning of his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, just two years later in his Basic Questions of Philosophy as the “uncanny fact” that “there are beings, rather than not.”⁶ To ask questions of origins and substance and foundation is to ask the “question of being,”⁷ and, as is always attendant on this question for Heidegger, the hermeneutic question, the question of being’s meaning. Philosophy is the thinking through of the “terror” that one feels “in the face of what is closest and what is remotest, namely that in beings, and before each being, Being holds sway.”⁸

In approaching this thought, however, I am caught fast against another terror, the terror of an accusation, an accusation that has been murmuring in the background of my work for some time: that of Heidegger’s Nazism. Every time I reach for a useful quotation or enter into the interpretive method of my schooling, I feel also the need to create distance between Heidegger and myself. With the publication of Gregory Fried’s edited collection Confronting Heidegger⁹, this need becomes a necessity. A collection of essays written in response to Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (translated into English in 2009),¹⁰ Confronting Heidegger renders an ignorance of Heidegger’s politics impossible. Looking back to Faye’s original study, we find that Heidegger’s early seminars, the same seminars cited above, were delivered alongside several other unpublished seminars of “political education,” wherein the “ontological difference between being and individual entities” is equated by Heidegger with the “political relationship between the state and the people.”¹¹ Heidegger’s question of being, as I was taught to ask it, follows on the poetry of Hölderlin and the mystical fragments of Heraclitus, sinking its toes into the earth as it reaches for the heavens—a romantic Heidegger, if you will. But Heidegger’s question of being, to read it now, is just as much a question of the inculcation of a way of thought conducive to Nazi ideology. The thrill of the question of being can also be the thrill of an authentic belonging to a Volk, the ecstasy of an individual given over to fascistic totality. It would seem that the “question of being” is dangerous territory.

This is a territory that Jacques Derrida traces in his 1987 Of Spirit, a tracing that we must follow here.¹² In chapter five of his study, Derrida examines Heidegger’s 1933 Rectorship Address, concentrating on this speech in order to draw out the concept of “spirit” in Heidegger’s thought. In Heidegger’s impassioned rhetoric, Derrida sees him “relaunch[] and confirm[] the essential elements” of Being and Time in order to “spiritualize[] National Socialism” through the vehicle of the German university, and then take this relaunching and confirmation and “rename[]” those same spiritualized terms in the “teaching language” of his Introduction to Metaphysics.¹³ Though the Introduction, in Derrida’s reading, “marks a political retreat in relation to the Rectorship Address,”¹⁴ the fact remains that the thought enacted between these two texts is a duplicitous, even “diabolical” conjoining of “[two] evils at once: the sanctioning of nazism, and the gesture that is still metaphysical.”¹⁵ The very “possibility”¹⁶ of the question qua question, which is always, for Heidegger, the question of the meaning of being, is doubly bound by the politics of the Address and the metaphysics (that is, the metaphysics of presence) of the Introduction, a binding performed by Heidegger’s conception of spirit. Spirit is thus the ghostly concept that is itself its own haunting, the return of the metaphysics that Heidegger so painstakingly labours to dismantle in Being and Time.¹⁷ Just as Derrida so precisely demonstrates in his reading of Emmanuel Levinas,¹⁸ we see in Heidegger’s move to a more originary, more authentic being the violent reinscription of the metaphysics he repudiates. And in his wake there marches a metaphysische Volk wholly devoted to Being and State.¹⁹

So, then, what does all of this have to do with Dark Souls? Everything, I would contend. As Stanley Cavell lucidly argues:

Descriptive statements … are not opposed to ones which are normative, but in fact presuppose them: we could not do the thing we call describing if language did not provide (we had not been taught) ways normative for describing … the language which contains a culture changes with the changes of that culture … that ordinary language is natural is to see that (perhaps even see why) it is normative for what can be said.²⁰

Our statements and our rules are irremediably yoked. Heidegger’s descriptive work in Being and Time, Introduction to Metaphysics, and Basic Questions finds its normative reflection in the Rectorship Address, which is to say that his claims about being are inclined toward, and may even be productive of, a politics. Hume’s Guillotine is, in fact, more insubstantial than the metaphor would imply: it is a ghostly veil obscuring the concretion of the question of being in the spirit of a given community, providing an alibi for those who wish to divorce “semantics” from “pragmatics,” meanings from their uses.²¹ Indeed:

something does follow from the fact that a term is used in its usual way: it entitles you (or, using the term, you entitle others) to make certain inferences, draw certain conclusions … Learning what these implications are is part of learning the language.²²

Despite what appear to be the best efforts of Heidegger’s estate to hide the semantic-pragmatic coupling at the root of his onto-politics, it is not so easy to hide the implications that Heidegger intended his students at Freiburg to learn, if not the many eyes of history. Questions of being are also political questions, and questions of politics are also ontological questions.²³

To ask questions of origins and substance and foundation in Dark Souls is, therefore, to drive at the onto-politics that motivates the various characters that populate the three games, and to examine the “semantic-pragmatic” nexuses of their speech and actions. When a character like Solaire declares, “The sun is a wondrous body. Like a magnificent father! If only I could be so grossly incandescent,” the semantic-pragmatic content of his words is not even hidden. He effortlessly slides from the “is” to the “if only I could be,” plainly linking his description of the sun with a subjective norm. It is good to be like the sun, Solaire tells us. But his story would seem to tell us otherwise. Left to his own devices, Solaire will plunge ever deeper into the dark places of Lordran, searching for a sun that he will never find. In a moment of uncharacteristic self-reflection, Solaire will say the following to the Chosen Undead:

Ah, oh… hello there. Forgive me, I was just pondering… about my poor fortune. I did not find my own sun, not in Anor Londo, nor in Twilight Blighttown. Where else might my sun be? Lost Izalith, or the Tomb of the Gravelord…? But I cannot give up. I became Undead to pursue this! But when I peer at the Sun up above, it occurs to me… What if I am seen as a laughing stock, as a blind fool without reason? Well, I suppose they wouldn’t be far off! Hah hah hah!²⁴

Later, far inside the burning desolation of Lost Izalith, the player-character finds Solaire once more, but this time the knight is devoid of any of his usual optimism: “…Why? …Why? …After all this searching, I still cannot find it…”²⁵ If the Chosen Undead pushes on, they will find Solaire in a side passageway, a horrifying insect—a sunlight maggot—attached to his head, glowing with a preternatural light. He attacks on sight, screaming as he does so, “Finally, I have found it, I have!… My very own sun… I am the sun!… I’ve done it… I have… Yes, I did it… I did!… Ohh, ohhh… Hrgrraaaooogh!”²⁶ Solaire’s quest, motivated by his own stalwart commitment to brilliant sunlight, culminates in an utter loss of self. His faith is shown to be nothing more than an ontological mania, an obsession with luminous being, and his covenant a dead and persistently duplicitous religion.

As noted above, this ending is effectively unavoidable for most new players.²⁷ Solaire’s downfall can only be diverted through an obscure series of steps, the first of which is hidden behind one of FromSoftware’s famed “illusory walls.” If the player character does in fact find this hidden path, entering into a covenant with a dying matriarch on the other side of it and offering her thirty pieces of humanity (no small offering in the economy of play), a back entrance to the passageway in which Solaire is found will become passable (though the game will not tell you so), and the Chosen Undead can slay the sunlight maggots before they have a chance to possess Solaire. If all of this is accomplished, Solaire will then be found in the same place, but this time sitting on the floor in utter despair: “Was it all a lie? Have I done this all, for nothing? Oh, my dear sun… What now, what should I do…? My sun, my dear, dear sun…”²⁸ This is not necessarily a kinder ending, though it is the only way that Solaire can join the Chosen Undead as they face Lord Gwyn, Father of Sunlight, the final boss of the game, that divinity which Solaire so doggedly pursued.

In this paradoxical chiasm—the oblivion of Solaire’s success and the hope of his failure—FromSoftware is trying to say something, inviting us to learn their language. The following pages will demonstrate the implicit metaphysical critique of Dark Souls as it is carried through the subsequent two games, a critique made explicit by the conclusion of the series.

The Metaphysics of the Sun

The dominant ideology in Lordran—the religion preached by the Way of White and the code of honour and cooperation espoused by the Warriors of Sunlight—is founded in the eminence of the sun and personified in the figure of Lord Gwyn. Of the beings who emerged from the Dark and claimed the Souls of Lords, Gwyn was the most powerful—or, at least, the one most interested in ruling. Prior to the events of Dark Souls, Gwyn, with his armies of Silver Knights and the aid of the other Ancient Lords, led an insurrection against the rule of the Everlasting Dragons, casting them down with brilliant bolts of lightning and so bringing about the Age of Fire. Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, was the chief instrument of that original disparity which gave rise to life in all its dynamism and process, supplanting the eternal regime of stasis. Whole orders, institutions, cultures, and nations formed in and through his power. The very fabric of the world relied on him for its continuance.

But, as the introduction to Dark Souls goes on to tell us, “soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain.”²⁹ Gwyn’s light, born of disparity, can not go on forever, and by the beginning of the game “there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights.”³⁰ It is this crisis that frames the player character’s quest. I have previously examined this narrative framing with respect to the question of environmental collapse, using Dark Souls as a means to think about the global crisis of our own time.³¹ The work now to be accomplished is to translate this thinking from the pragmatic and political realm to the semantic and metaphysical realm, thereby demonstrating the continuity between these domains, a continuity maintained in fact (that is, in the gameworld) by Gwyn as icon, and which now, with his fading, presents itself as an opportunity. The hyphenation of the political and the ontological in Dark Souls brings about its own dissolution, opening itself to new possibilities of being and becoming.³²

The beginning of Dark Souls presents the player character with a crisis, and in so doing, it also presents the player character with a question: narratively, will they (and how will they) respond to the fading of the flame; mechanically, will they (and how will they) play the game? On its face, this ludonarrative structure cannot be said to be unique to Dark Souls, and we might say that this structure is a basic characteristic of games more generally. Quite simply, this structure is the structure of aesthetic opening.³³ What distinguishes Dark Souls, then, is the coherence of its particular use of this structure. As Alfred North Whitehead succinctly phrases it, coherence “means that the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme [here being the game] is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless.”³⁴ FromSoftware is a uniquely proficient game development studio in this regard. Even the famously unfinished Lost Izalith manages to contribute to the overall coherence of the game, presenting, in its failure (both within the game and without), the severity of the crisis facing the player character. The question of Dark Souls demands a response.

Gwyn synthesizes the concepts of power, light, and goodness (a synthesis achieved for the player through the opening cinematic and Solaire’s passionate words), concretizing these thematic, formal, and ideological elements in his person. Gwyn is the sun, insofar as he is the agent of its dominion and the Age of Fire is his handiwork. If we cast our attention back across the history of philosophy, we find that the semantic-pragmatic content of this iconism has a clear precedent in Plato’s oft-cited Allegory of the Cave, the founding image of western philosophy and, consequently, the founding image of the metaphysics of presence.³⁵ In Plato’s tale, we encounter a group of people “living in a cavernous cell down under the ground.”³⁶ These people are bound so that they are forced to look straight ahead, staring at the cavern wall. Behind them there is a partition and behind that a fire burning. In the midst of this strange structure other people walk about, “carrying all sorts of artefacts,” the shadows of which are cast by the firelight on the cavern wall, putting on a sort of shadow-play for the imprisoned people.³⁷ In Socrates’s words, the prisoners are “no different from us … the shadows of artefacts would constitute the only reality people in this situation would recognize.”³⁸ But what happens, Socrates asks, “if they were set free from their bonds and cured of their inanity?”³⁹ Socrates imagines one of the prisoners being freed and forcibly turned around so that he must confront the greater reality of the fire. The same prisoner is then “dragged forcibly away from there up the rough, steep slope … without being released until he’s been pulled out into the sunlight.”⁴⁰ This would certainly be a traumatic experience, but, after some adjustment, the freed man would be able to “feast his eyes on the sun—not the displaced image of the sun in water or elsewhere, but the sun on its own, in its proper place.”⁴¹ As Plato writes in the earlier Simile of the Sun,⁴² the “sun is the child of goodness … a counterpart to its father, goodness. As goodness stands in the intelligible realm to intelligence and the things we know, so in the visible realm the sun stands to sight and the things we see.”⁴³ Thus, we see that the passage from the cave to the sun-drenched world is a passage into goodness, intelligence, and sight, all of which are blessings of the father, the good as such. Furthermore, it is only in this collocation of terms in the domain of the sun that the necessary linkage of goodness, truth, and knowledge is made possible.⁴⁴ Finally, then, it is not merely the “known-ness of the things we know” (i.e., an objective and true knowledge of things) that is at stake here in Socrates’ speech, but the “reality” and “being” of things as such, emanating from the “goodness” that “surpasses being in majesty and might.”⁴⁵ This is, quite simply, the metaphysical gesture par excellence.

The domain of the sun is the proper place of the eye, knowledge, reason, truth, power, presence, being, reality, all of which borrow their substance and structure from the good, the sublime father.⁴⁶ In Dark Souls, Gwyn is this father, the first to emerge from the cave (the Kiln of the First Flame), the first to bring the power of the sun to the world, establishing the rule of fire. Time itself is a consequence of his original violence against the Age of Ancients, and the subsequent history of the age of disparity that follows can be traced back to Gwyn as origin, as originary presence. This is the power and presence that Solaire seeks, the same power and presence that is fading by the time of the player character’s quest, a fading that is the crisis (on every level of reality: personal, political, ecological, ontological) necessitating the action that constitutes gameplay. In the opening to their game, FromSoftware constructs the figure of the greatest hero to have ever lived,⁴⁷ only to have him be consumed by the very force he embodies. Gwyn, in desperation, returns to the Kiln, the cave of his birth, hoping to reignite the flame and perpetuate the flickering age of fire. In the end, all he can achieve is the incineration of the proper place of his power.

The Philosophy of Dark

Though FromSoftware’s storytelling is notoriously obtuse, remaining mostly hidden in item descriptions and architectural details, the collapse of Gwyn as a metaphysical icon (a semantico-pragmatic figure) is, by the conclusion of the game, quite clear. Though the hollowed Lord Gwyn remains a formidable foe, the track that plays during the battle is carried by somber piano, a stark contrast with the bombastic operatics of most of the other boss-battle tracks in the game. This is not intended to be some epic final confrontation but a sorrowful last rite. The Chosen Undead must put down the mindless divinity, ending the old sunlight king’s eternal curse. The sorrow of this meeting is only redoubled if the player character successfully diverts Solaire from his doomed quest, so allowing for the warrior of sunlight to join the fray. The true end of Solaire’s quest is to kill the very sun, the very god, the very father that he sought.⁴⁸ And this inversion is indicative of an inversion, a torsion, at the heart of the Chosen Undead’s quest as well, an inversion in the very metaphysical ground of the game.

On a “normal” playthrough (typically a first playthrough where many of the above noted secrets go unfound), the player character will arrive at the Kiln of the First Flame alone and eventually kill Gwyn. They will then approach the bonfire in the middle of the Kiln, light it, and allow it to consume their body, drawing on the strength of their soul (bolstered by the myriads of enemies slain along the way) to link the fire (the title of the first ending to the game). This choice rekindles the flame across the land, restoring the Age of Fire—for a time. Indeed, this choice is merely a repetition of the choice that Gwyn made, the prolongation of the age for fear of the age to come.

As I have previously discussed,⁴⁹ the second ending to Dark Souls tells a different story. Through some minor sequence-breaking (simpler to achieve, in fact, than the completion of Solaire’s quest, but nevertheless unlikely for new players to stumble across), the Chosen Undead can find themselves in the Abyss at the heart of New Londo Ruins, the last great kingdom of humankind, where they will meet the second of two primordial serpents in the game: Darkstalker Kaathe. Kaathe, unlike his kin above, Kingseeker Frampt, provides the player character with a much different motivation for their quest:

The truth I shall share without sentiment. After the advent of fire, the ancient lords found the three souls. But your progenitor found a fourth, unique soul. The Dark Soul. Your ancestor claimed the Dark Soul and waited for Fire to subside. And soon, the flames did fade, and only Dark remained. Thus began the age of men, the Age of Dark. However… Lord Gwyn trembled at the Dark. Clinging to his Age of Fire, and in dire fear of humans, and the Dark Lord who would one day be born amongst them, Lord Gwyn resisted the course of nature. By sacrificing himself to link the fire, and commanding his children to shepherd the humans, Gwyn has blurred your past, to prevent the birth of the Dark Lord. I am the primordial serpent. I seek to right the wrongs of the past to discover our true Lord. But the other serpent, Frampt, lost his sense, and befriended Lord Gwyn. Undead warrior, we stand at the crossroad. Only I know the truth about your fate. You must destroy the fading Lord Gwyn, who has coddled Fire and resisted nature, and become the Fourth Lord, so that you may usher in the Age of Dark!⁵⁰

If the player character links the fire, they will reinstantiate the onto-political regime of the sun that had already been artificially extended by Gwyn, and not only that, perpetuate the enslavement of humanity. This is the truth Kaathe shares. “Lord Gwyn resisted the course of nature,” and the course of nature is for dark to replace fire. The Chosen Undead need not fear this outcome because, as Kaathe makes clear, the Chosen Undead is a child of the dark. They belong to a different metaphysical regime entirely.

If the player character listens to Kaathe, they can choose, upon defeating Lord Gwyn, not to link the fire but to turn their back on the flickering flame and leave the Kiln. If they do so, a different ending cinematic will play, the Chosen Undead walking out into a new world, presumably free of flame, of which they are the new lord. Kaathe provides the deconstructive critique that the above articulation of the metaphysics of the sun requires, the backstory through which a critique of the proper place of fire can be undertaken. Gwyn as solar patriarch embodies the spirit of the metaphysics of presence, haunting the player character’s every action. Kaathe’s tale strikes at the very core of this spirit: Gwyn’s goodness. Without goodness, the onto-political edifice of Gwyn’s power—this superposition of goodness, fire, sunlight, reason, kingship, truth—crumbles. The rule of the gods is finished; the wrongs of the past are righted.

But are they? If one remains within the scope of the first Dark Souls, these are the only two options the player character encounters. Every time a player completes the game, they must confront this same binary choice: fire or dark. And then new game plus begins. The same quest, the same choice, only tougher. In a game that is about cycles at every level (from the bonfire and death mechanics to the thematic and metaphysical stakes that we have been discussing here), the cycle of the game itself, this meta-ludic repetition, is necessarily implicated. Dark Souls becomes a game about decision, a decision that simultaneously effaces itself through its interminable repetition.

With Dark Souls II, however, this decision is made explicitly thematic, precisely by taking it away. In the original ending to the game (prior to its remaster and remix in 2015’s Scholar of the First Sin edition) the player character, the Bearer of the Curse, arrives at the Throne of Want, replacing the Kiln of the First Flame from the previous game. Upon defeating the final bosses of Dark Souls II, the player character takes the throne, but is not given a choice. Light, dark: these are sublated in want. This is to say that the decision is shown to be precisely that: a decision, an existential choice.

In Dark Souls II, countless ages have passed since the Chosen Undead made their fateful choice: link the fire or become the dark lord. Kings and their kingdoms have risen only to fall, and the first flame has roared to life only to fade once more. Age follows age, and the cycle of fire and dark continues on, repeating itself over and over again. Powers inevitably crumble, and their remains are heaped upon each other, becoming the dungeons for new fated adventurers to traverse in search of their own power.

If Dark Souls presents the player character with an alternative to the metaphysics of presence signified by Gwyn, the sun, and fire through a philosophical, or more precisely, deconstructive critique of that iconism, Dark Souls II argues that such alternatives are just as compromised, just as corrupt, and just as contingent as that which they presume to overcome. When the Bearer of the Curse finally comes upon King Vendrick, lord of Drangleic, the player character is expecting a fight similar to the one with Lord Gwyn. But the scene is not so spectacular. Vendrick circles his final resting place, a withered husk clad in nothing but a loincloth and his crown, dragging his sword behind him, mindless and without hostility (so long as he is not attacked). Where Gwyn is the final challenge for the Chosen Undead in Dark Souls, Vendrick is an optional boss for the Bearer of the Curse in Dark Souls II. The king of the land, the mightiest warrior, the greatest soul, and the player character can quite safely pass him by. For fear of his decision, and for fear of the one (his queen, Nashandra) who would have made it for him, Vendrick fled. He refused to choose. After so much time, perhaps he saw the futility of his efforts, the futility of want.

The Bearer of the Curse takes Vendrick’s ring from the back of his tomb so that they can progress through the game. Unlike Vendrick, they have the power to take the throne and become the “true monarch.”⁵¹ To do so is to “carr[y] the weight of their souls,” to accept the burden of the decision precisely by sublating it in want—which is to say, in the existential nihility of power and desire without reason.

This nihilism has been described by François Laruelle as the core problematic of philosophy, a problematic that is taken to its end or purified in the “philosophies of difference” (which he traces through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze).⁵² Nietzsche’s inverted Platonism reinscribes the unitary and universal in the space of difference, which is equally to say that it inscribes difference in the space of the unitary and universal, elevating difference to the place of veritas transcendentalis (a new being, a new presence, a new spirit). Laruelle contends that Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze (a truncated list of the school of difference) conduct their work in this same space, doing so through a myriad of interminable variations, but all to the same end. The absolute purification of the transcendental, the site of philosophy, as the “relative-absolute,” is in fact the most purified transcendentality insofar as the relativity of this absolute is the very unity of the philosophical cut that potentiates philosophy, and so, the metaphysics of presence and difference, in the first place.⁵³ The deconstruction of metaphysics arrests itself in process by referring itself to itself as the transcendental, colonizing the proper place of power through an absolute, self-positing nihility. Thus, insofar as this relative-absolute can be defined as difference-differencing, it can never be accomplished, because it always requires a new being, a new presence, a new truth to deconstruct, so that it can thereby continuously reinscribe itself in the place of its nihilating power. For Laruelle, this gesture is the most metaphysical of them all, the most pure and the most terrible. It is this self-same gesture with which Dark Souls II concludes.

We are not trapped here, however. If the metaphysics of the sun and the philosophy of dark can be understood as unifying logics, the sublation of differences in a higher, unitary logic (a logic that is, in its very movement, the annihilation of real value in an empirico-ideal synthesis), then it is necessary to escape this monism and seek a plurastic logic beyond. This is where Scholar of the First Sin, and eventually Dark Souls III, will lead us.

There Is No Path

Dark Souls establishes Gwyn as icon and edifice in order to deconstruct the sublimity of his kingship. Darkness is posited as the alternative to Gwyn’s luminous regime but, we have seen, this positing implicitly establishes a duel matrix that interminably repeats itself in cycles of violent overcoming.⁵⁴ Dark Souls II, then, makes the nihilism of this repetition explicit, denying the goodness or truth that either side might claim in opposition to the other. Light, dark—the choice matters little, because the cycle will always repeat. The metaphysics of the sun founds itself in a transcendental presence; the philosophy of dark foregrounds the split within the same, the presence of the other to the self, the original difference that is prior to the dominion of the solar ruler, thereby annihilating the claim to authority of the sun; the cycle repeats, and the alternatives eventually become indistinguishable, a false choice to be chewed on, worked over, struggled with ad infinitum.

In Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin,⁵⁵ however, the player character is presented with another ending. Where before the only option available was to take the throne, the manifestation of the fundamental unity-in-opposition of light and dark, their sublation in want (the more primordial universal term), now, through a series of interactions with Aldia, the titular “scholar,” the player character can make a choice other than the false choice of the first game (or the original non-choice of the launch version of Dark Souls II). In a half-symmetry with the “The Dark Lord” ending of Dark Souls, the player character can turn their back on the throne, refusing the choice it presents. But where in Dark Souls this gesture was merely a turn⁵⁶ from one absolute to an other, in Scholar of the First Sin this turn is the very refusal of the title of monarch, the auto or superposition of power that we elaborated above through the analysis of Gwyn. “There is no path,” Aldia says, in the final voiceover of the game.⁵⁷ Where before light and dark were destined to be united in the choice that precedes them—the very structure of disparity as such, as presented in the opening to Dark Souls—now the nihility, the groundlessness, of that choice is properly surpassed, the duel of light and dark recognized in its “unreason.”⁵⁸ “Beyond the scope of light, beyond the reach of Dark… what could possibly await us?”⁵⁹ In Dark Souls III, FromSoftware makes their most conclusive statement on the matter.

Eons more have passed. The vicious passing of the ages has taken its toll. With each kindling and fading of the fire the prolongation of disparity becomes more difficult, more tenuous, more excruciating. The Lords of Cinder, those heroic beings destined to link the flame, abandon their duty. The undead—regular humans—are sacrificed to the fire in greater and greater numbers for want of a mighty soul to accomplish the deed. The player character, the Ashen One, is awakened, a reconstituted sacrifice, summoned by the bells to hunt down the Lords, return them to their thrones, and link the fire.

Upon the completion of their quest, the Ashen One can choose between three different endings (the availability of which depend upon certain actions taken over the course of the game). As before, the standard choice is to link the fire once more, a repetition of futility. The second choice requires the player character to follow an intricate series of steps, culminating in the ritual sacrifice of a kind and genuine NPC ally. We see the fundamental duel of the series once more. But the third ending presents the true alternative, the pathless path, the beyond of unreason without power, without authority, without decision. This ending, the “End of Fire,” sees the Ashen One take the power of the flame and not simply abandon it but actively give it away, allowing the Fire Keeper, the woman divested of all agency, all authority, so that she might serve the seekers of flame, to usher in a pluralistic and contingent future.

“The First Flame quickly fades. Darkness will shortly settle. But one day, tiny flames will dance across the darkness. Like embers, linked by lords past. Ashen one, hearest thou my voice, still?”⁶⁰

The flame, engine of disparity, source of Gwyn’s might, is finally decoupled from the decision of its inception, the decision itself depositioned. The sun gives way to a universe studded with eyes,⁶¹ the glimmering of a myriad of flames free from the doom of lords and heroes. This future is a future of unreason in the immanence of a black universe.⁶²

The universe to come, the universe that was always here, is unknowable in the sense that philosophy would traditionally intend: it cannot be posited as an object of knowledge. But it is precisely in this non-positing, in the opacity of non-decision (which is not the interminable oscillation of in-decision), in the unilateral determination and absolute contingency of the real,⁶³ that a logic of real multiplicites might be unfurled, beyond the piercing, metaphysical rays of light and dark.

References

“Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin.” Dark Souls Wiki. Fandom. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Aldia,_Scholar_of_the_First_Sin.

Axelos, Kostas, and Stuart Elden. “Mondialisation Without the World.” Radical Philosophy , no. 139 (April 2005). https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp130_interview_axelos.pdf.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London, UK: Verso Books, 2016.

Cavell, Stanley. “Must We Mean What We Say?” In Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, 1–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.

“Darkstalker Kaathe.” Dark Souls Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed March 9, 2020. http://darksouls.wikidot.com/darkstalker-kaathe.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

———. “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 97–192. London, UK: Routledge, 1987.

Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

“Fire Keeper.” Dark Souls III Wiki. Fextralife. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Fire+Keeper.

Fried, Gregory, ed. Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy. London, UK: Rowman; Littlefield, 2019.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic”. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.

———. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.

———. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000.

Laruelle, François. “On the Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color.” In Dark Nights of the Universe. Name Publications, 2013. https://www.recessart.org/wp-content/uploads/Laruelle-Black-Universe1.pdf.

———. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London, UK: Continuum, 2010.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 165–70. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1989.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London, UK: Continuum, 2009.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka. Dark Souls. PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011.

———. “Game No Shokutaku Interview,” December 2011. http://soulslore.wikidot.com/das1-game-no-shokutaku.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura. Dark Souls III. PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016.

“Nashandra.” Dark Souls II Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed May 27, 2020. http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/nashandra.

“Opening (Dark Souls).” Dark Souls Wiki. Fandom. Accessed May 12, 2020. https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Opening_(Dark_Souls).

Plato. “Allegory of the Cave.” In Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield, 240–49. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.

———. “Simile of the Sun.” In Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield, 232–37. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Serres, Michel. Eyes. Translated by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Shibuyo, Tomohiro, and Yui Tanimura. Dark Souls II. PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014.

———. Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2015.

“Solaire of Astora.” Dark Souls Wiki. Wikidot. Accessed March 30, 2020. http://darksouls.wikidot.com/solaire-of-astora.

Wah, Fred. “Re-Mixed: The Compound Composition of Diamond Grill.” In Diamond Grill, 10th Anniversary. Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press, 2006.

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Notes

Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2011); Tomohiro Shibuyo and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls II (PS3; Xbox 360: FromSoftware, 2014); Hidetaka Miyazaki, Isamu Okano, and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls III (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2016). ↩
“Solaire of Astora,” Dark Souls Wiki, Wikidot, accessed March 30, 2020, http://darksouls.wikidot.com/solaire-of-astora. ↩
“Solaire of Astora.” ↩
“Solaire of Astora.” ↩
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), 1. ↩
Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic”, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3. ↩
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 1. ↩
Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, 4. ↩
Gregory Fried, ed., Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (London, UK: Rowman; Littlefield, 2019). ↩
Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). ↩
Faye, xxiv. ↩
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). ↩
Derrida, 41, 39, 42, 41. ↩
Derrida, 44. ↩
Derrida, 40. ↩
Derrida, 43. ↩
Derrida, 40. ↩
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, UK: Routledge, 1987), 97–192. ↩
Derrida, Of Spirit, 50. ↩
Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1–43, 22, 43. ↩
Cavell, 11. ↩
Cavell, 11. ↩
For an incisive critique of the outcome of the elision of this onto-political hyphenation, see Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London, UK: Verso Books, 2016). ↩
“Solaire of Astora.” ↩
“Solaire of Astora.” ↩
“Solaire of Astora.” ↩
This was intentional on the part of the developers. See Hidetaka Miyazaki, “Game No Shokutaku Interview,” December 2011, http://soulslore.wikidot.com/das1-game-no-shokutaku. ↩
“Solaire of Astora.” ↩
“Opening (Dark Souls),” Dark Souls Wiki, Fandom, accessed May 12, 2020, https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Opening_(Dark_Souls). ↩
“Opening (Dark_Souls).” ↩
Eric Stein, “The Fire Fades: Navigating the End of the World in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls,” International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 19, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/42195654/. ↩
The hyphen is the hyphen of the “relative-absolute” or “duel Unity” critiqued in François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 162, 16. For Laruelle, onto-political hyphenation belongs to the real-syntax matrix, which is the metaphysical decision performed by (and indeed necessary to) all philosophy whereby the philosopher and his object are split. In this early work, Laruelle is quite pessimistic regarding this split, viewing it as the final barrier to the overcoming of metaphysics that even deconstruction could not surpass. For a positive praxis, critical adoption, and creative exploration of the hyphen, see Fred Wah, “Re-Mixed: The Compound Composition of Diamond Grill,” in Diamond Grill, 10th Anniversary (Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press, 2006). ↩
For this sense of opening, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and Kostas Axelos and Stuart Elden, “Mondialisation Without the World,” Radical Philosophy, no. 139 (April 2005), https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp130_interview_axelos. PDF. ↩
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Corrected Edition (New York, NY: Free Press, 1978), 3. ↩
Plato, “Allegory of the Cave,” in Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 240–49. ↩
“Allegory of the Cave,” 240. ↩
“Allegory of the Cave,” 241. ↩
“Allegory of the Cave,” 241. ↩
“Allegory of the Cave,” 241. ↩
“Allegory of the Cave,” 242. ↩
“Allegory of the Cave,” 242. ↩
Plato, “Simile of the Sun,” in Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 232–37. ↩
“Simile of the Sun,” 235. ↩
“Simile of the Sun,” 236. ↩
“Simile of the Sun,” 236. ↩
For a critique of the logic of the “proper place,” see The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). ↩
Gwyn’s sunlight spears are a potent metaphor for the violent logic of heroism. For a critique of this logic, see Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1989), 165–70. ↩
Until the release of Dark Souls III, a popular (and convincing) theory maintained that Solaire was in fact the amnesiac, exiled firstborn of Lord Gwyn. Though the introduction of the Nameless King in Dark Souls III soundly punctures this theory, the symbolic weight of this conclusion remains. ↩
Stein, “The Fire Fades,” 2020. ↩
“Darkstalker Kaathe,” Dark Souls Wiki, Wikidot, accessed March 9, 2020, http://darksouls.wikidot.com/darkstalker-kaathe. ↩
“Nashandra,” Dark Souls II Wiki, Wikidot, accessed May 27, 2020, http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/nashandra. ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference. ↩
Laruelle, 162. ↩
The duel in Laruelle is the split logic of the unitary, the universal that always manages to incorporate its other into itself. ↩
Tomohiro Shibuyo and Yui Tanimura, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (PS4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows: FromSoftware, 2015). ↩
For Laruelle, the turn is a fundamental structure or moment of the relative-absolute, that which unites the same and the different in a higher unity. ↩
“Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin,” Dark Souls Wiki, Fandom, accessed June 1, 2020, https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Aldia,_Scholar_of_the_First_Sin. ↩
That is, the “principle of unreason” as articulated in Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 60. The principle of unreason is the absolute contingency of facts, including the fact of the scission, the hyphenation, the decision itself. Meillassoux also describes this principle as the “non-facticity of facticity” (79), that the very thrownness whereby the subject is inserted in the world—the basis of phenomenological first philosophy or fundamental ontology—is itself contingent. ↩
“Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin.” ↩
“Fire Keeper,” Dark Souls III Wiki, Fextralife, accessed June 1, 2020, https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Fire+Keeper. ↩
Michel Serres, Eyes, trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015). ↩
François Laruelle, “On the Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color,” in Dark Nights of the Universe (Name Publications, 2013), https://www.recessart.org/wpcontent/uploads/Laruelle-Black-Universe1.pdf. ↩
These are key ideas throughout Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference. ↩

Teaching for Food, 2

2020-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. —Matthew 23:8 NRSV

How to elaborate a flat pedagogy, a non-pedagogy? How to effect a radical leveling of the pedagogic relation? Which is to say, how to get beyond pedagogy as such?

Pedagogy is the authorization of teaching, the subjection of the teacher to the master and the delegation of the labour of subjectivization to the teacher.¹ Pedagogy legitimates the teacher who presumes to be on the way to the beyond of teaching, the place where they might finally stop taking sustenance. A non-pedagogy is the refusal of this beyond, a minoritation refusal, a subterranean refusal, an ob-jectionable refusal. To remain beyond, to remain outside of the beyond of teaching, is to refuse to be professional, to refuse the promise of the false beyond, to refuse to be the master’s pawn.²

Levinas writes that the “master,” in whom the “incessance” of the “magisterial” voice is concretized, is the “coinciding of the teaching and the teacher.”³ The master’s speech “teaches this teaching itself, by virtue of which it alone can teach (and not, like maieutics, awaken in me).”⁴ Such is the power of the Other, its “exteriority” to the self, its affronting “heterogeneity.”⁵ The “Other our master,” the “Other my master,”⁶ is the one who’s voice possesses its own proper place,⁷ the “autoposition or causa sui that is ideal in the last instance.”⁸ The master in its ideal unity “overcomes this anarchy of facts” (existence, the ontic, the real) and yet it is precisely this anarchy, this mass, this sea, this factiality⁹ of what is that is the teacher’s concern, which is to say, the concern of study. The master, the expert, consolidates the sea of facts through the power of a voice, the very movement by which the voice attains to its authority. But the teacher acknowledges the “non-facticity of facticity,” the “non-factual essence of fact as such,” which can be articulated with the “precise claim” that “contingency alone is necessary.”¹⁰ Factiality is the “principle of unreason,” the annihilation of the unity upon which the master depends.¹¹ This unreason is the mole-logic of the unprofessional teacher, the teacher who remains a student, who “keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study, keeps studying a plan, keeps elaborating a debt.”¹² The master pretends to be a creditor while remaining in debt to being. This is a debt that the teacher-student “does not intend to pay.”¹³

Levinas requires a speculative rereading, an unprofessional rereading, a rereading whereby the deposition, the de-position, of the master might be accomplished. Levinas’s master has become the subject of policy, of pedagogy, “posit[ing] curriculum against study, child development against play, human capital against work.”¹⁴ The master resides “in a dimension of height,”¹⁵ forgetting that it did not always live there, vision without a body, a blazing eye, the cooption¹⁶ of optics by the transcendental-pedagogic magisterium.

Study operates according to a “competence” without “authority,”¹⁷ refuses to exchange competence for “credit,”¹⁸ finding an “[i]ntense pleasure in skill”¹⁹ without “interest,”²⁰ which is to say, an ungovernable skill, an unconsolidated skill, a fugitive skill.

Mastery is a passion for oneness, for the authority of completeness. And yet, the one divides itself, shatters the socket, establishes its perspective in a transcendental remove: self-positing, self-affirming, self-maintaining isolation. If we follow our speculative rereading to its conclusion, we find this lonely unity to be self-defeating, the formula of self=self a tautological duel, carried out interminably, the repetition without end of its founding violence.²¹ The tautological one, the philosophical one, is caught in the moment of its own self-annihilation, its mastery a mastery of torturous prolongation.

Teaching must be unshackled, released from its slavery, returned to its study. The teacher abandons the unity of the one in order to find it again in the unreason of study, but now as a “totality of insufficiency,” a “finite and generic one.”²² Profoundly without reason, the teacher takes up “debt as its own principle,” “debt unpayable,”²³ the absolute, irreversible determination in the last instance of “this one; this one here; this one here in person.”²⁴ This determination is the factiality of study, the unreasonableness of the unprofessional teacher, the fact of contingency alone, which accomplishes in a stroke the irreducibility of any one to any other. The generalization to the real of the very heterogeneity and externality that Levinas seeks in the face of the other is achieved in the immanence of absolute contingency.

You are all students. The teaching we seek is “study without an end,” an “infinitely complex” debt, a belonging in that “fugitive public” where “bad debt elaborates itself.”²⁵ This flat pedagogy denies the “therapy of [our] interests,” refuses to become “invested,” is happy to “never graduate.” ²⁶ It is, as such, a non-pedagogy, the refusal to participate in the system of circulation and exchange, debt and credit, mastery and subjection.

You are not to be called rabbi, but to “elaborate … debt without credit,” “debt without count, without interest, without repayment,” to meet with those who “dwell in a different compulsion,” whose subterranean study is to “carry bags of newspaper clippings, or sit at the end of the bar, or stand at the stove cooking, or sit on a box at the newsstand, or speak through bars, or speak in tongues.”²⁷ Non-pedagogy refuses to overcome this anarchy of facts, revels in the possibility of this anarchy, in its “conspiratorial, heretical, criminal, amateur” possibility.²⁸

You have one teacher—the Nazarene beckons us into study. “Sometimes the story is not clear, or it starts in a whisper. It goes around again but listen, it is funny again, every time.”²⁹ Parables become instruments for direct action. We tear down the towers and return their materials to the surround. We sit, we gather, we tell stories, we listen: “debt flows through us.”³⁰ We share. “This knowledge has been degraded, and the research rejected”—incomplete, insufficient, utterly without authority.³¹

Notes

See “pedagogue,” Wiktionary, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pedagogue: “(historical, Ancient Greece) A slave who led the master’s children to school, and had the charge of them generally.” ↩
These ideas are drawn from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 27. ↩
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 69-70. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 69. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 69. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 72. ↩
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). ↩
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 109. ↩
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 79. ↩
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 79-80. ↩
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 60. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 62. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 62. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 81. ↩
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 75. ↩
To be clear, this co-option is decisional, the splitting of the eye, or rather, the scooping of the eye from its socket, the philosophical gesture whereby the repoussoir of the autopositional subject is brought about, which is the bracketing of the gaze that contains the gaze in itself, the very self-possession of its power as transcendental tautology: the gaze gazing. See [@laruelle_philosophies_2010], 214. ↩
De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 7. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 61: “They say we have too much debt. We need better credit, more credit, less spending. They offer us credit repair, credit counseling, microcredit, personal financial planning. They promise to match credit and debt again, debt and credit. But our debts stay bad. We keep buying another song, another round. It is not credit we seek nor even debt but bad debt which is to say real debt, the debt that cannot be repaid, the debt at a distance, the debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt. Excessive debt, incalculable debt, debt for no reason, debt broken from credit, debt as its own principle” (my emphasis). ↩
Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016 [1985]), 65. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 73: “The student has no interests. The student’s interests must be identified, declared, pursued, assessed, counseled, and credited. Debt produces interests. The student will be indebted. The student will be interested. Interest the students! The student can be calculated by her debts, can calculate her debts with her interests. She is in sight of credit, in sight of graduation, in sight of being a creditor, of being invested in education, a citizen. The student with interests can demand policies, can formulate policy, give herself credit, pursue bad debtors with good policy, sound policy, evidence-based policy. The student with credit can privatize her own university. The student can start her own NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table, join the global conversation, speak for themselves, get credit, manage debt. Governance is interest-bearing. Credit and debt. There is no other definition of good governance, no other interest. The public and private in harmony, in policy, in pursuit of bad debt, on the trail of fugitive publics, chasing evidence of refuge. The student graduates. But not all of them.” ↩
Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference. ↩
Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xii-xiii. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 61, 67. ↩
Galloway, Laruelle, xiii. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 67, 64, 65. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 66, 67. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 68. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 68. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 69. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 69. ↩
Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 69. ↩