As representative of the general form of wealth—money—capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital—money as self-reproductive. (Grundrisse)

This is, rather unexpectedly, one of the main themes of recent computer game Portal 2. The first game placed the player in the role of Chell, who finds herself at the mercy of an insane computer that insists on running her through a series of scientific tests long after the scientists at the facility have disappeared. The second game pushes this undead persistence of capitalism further, beginning with Chell awakening an indeterminate amount of time later, after an indeterminate catastrophe has left the testing facility ruined and overgrown. It turns out this does not effect the testing, however, as recorded announcements inform you of “emergency testing protocols,” put in place to ensure smooth corporate functioning in the case of, as the announcements make clear, increasingly unlikely disasters, including massive space debris and the takeover of the Earth by “some manner of animal king, sentient cloud, or other governing body that either is incapable of or refuses to listen to reason.” The imperturbability of the company in the face of disaster is reminiscent of apocalypse insurance, real-world financial products which guarantee a payout in case of some particular catastrophic event, such as the collapse of the financial markets; always assuming, of course, that the financial markets have continued to function past the apocalypse.

The series of recorded announcements and informational graphics through which the game shows you this capitalist hubris, and indeed explains most of its plot, is an example of the incredibly careful way the game is crafted. The details of the setting, from way plants colonize the previously pristine setting of the first game, to the period details through which the game communicates the age of the abandoned company properties through which you  end up traveling, are all pitch perfect. More subtly, perhaps, the way the game plays exhibits the same attention to detail. The game is largely pedagogical, carefully introducing gameplay elements (the portals of the title, deadly lasers, various gels which alter the properties of the surfaces on which they land) in such a way that you are gradually encouraged to figure out first, what these things are, and then, how to use them to solve increasingly complicated problems.

The smoothness with which the game leads players through these gaming challenges perhaps means that an interesting point that the game makes about the concept of “game” may pass unnoticed. For much of the game, the player guides Chell through series of “testing chambers”; in each of these, Chell is presented with a nominal goal – to open a door, or get  a platform to rise, or project herself across a vertiginous gap. But these are never her actual goals; her actual goal is to escape the testing facility entirely. Meanwhile, the player has a whole other set of goals; perhaps to “beat” the game, but also to explore it. In this counterplay of different motivations there’s a reminder of the strangely abstract character of “interest” in game theory. People often criticize rational choice theory for imaging human beings as purely selfish, but “utility maximization” isn’t even selfish in any kind of moral sense, because the utility to be maximized is completely separate from any specific content; it’s a purely formal, and limitless, drive.

With these themes – neoliberalism, the perversions of scientistic approaches to human behavior, game theory – Portal 2 comes across as a video-game adaptation of the work of Adam Curtis. One big advantage of the video game form, however, is its ability to literalize Curtis’s metaphors. While Curtis engages in a kind of archeology, unearthing the layers of political consequences built up on earlier ideoligical inventions, Portal 2 has Chell fall down a giant tunnel. She finds herself in the earliest established parts of the Aperture Science corporation, up through which she has to climb to reach the neoliberal present. In the process, the player gets to see the development of corporate forms over the past 50 years. The parts of the facility built in the 50s represent a heroically modernist vision; the test subjects involved in the grand progress of science are astronauts and athletes, chosen for, in the strikingly Randian phrase, “the way they have bent the world to their will.”

Traveling through the remains of the development of the company, the player discovers the demographics of the test subjects changing, first to waged employees, and later to temporary workers, lured in off the streets with the promise of six dollars for each test completed. In the short comic that was released alongside the game, we discover that Chell herself became a test subject after filling in a recruitment questionnaire asking, “would anyone file a police report if you went missing?” (An announcement in the game informs us that “All safety devices have been disabled. Aperture Science respects your right to have questions or concerns about this policy” – a fine depiction of democracy under neoliberalism). The conditions of neoliberal employment are also shown in the attitude of GLaDOS, the deranged computer in charge of the facility, to Chell. GLaDOS mounts a sustained psychic assault against Chell, finding inventive ways to call her fat, and expressing a great deal of concern over the supposed fact that she is an orphan (which, GLaDOS caringly insists, is terrible). The combination of disposability and intimate psychic involvement is what Nina Power describes as immaterial capitalism’s insistence that we each be an advert for ourselves (it’s perhaps significant here, too, that both GLaDOS, the personification of capital, and Chell, the personification of the proletariat, are female).

The move from the 50s to neoliberalism is neatly prefigured in the opening sequence of the game. Chell wakes up in what appears to be a motel room, a classic signifier of American popular modernism. As tremors cause the room to shift and break down, we see that it is in fact merely one among a vast series of towers of shipping containers, each of which contains a test subject in “long term relaxation.” Another literalization of a metaphor, this time of Ed Schultz’s description of towers of empty containers as “a monument to the unemployed in America.” In the debris of the now deserted corporate headquarters, we can see hints of capitalism and its attitude to the living labor that produces and reproduces it. As GLaDos says, explaining why she is unconcerned about the waste involved in destroying countless Aperture Science Weighted Cubes throughout the game, “they are sentient of course. We just have a lot of them.”

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The problem is the way in which this kind of implicit sociology makes a move towards a premature totalization. The sequence of photographs conjure up a production process, and the society it is embedded within, as a closed and fixed whole, something which can be encompassed, and explained, by the exhibition. The exhibition provides its own metonym for this process in a picture of the cyprus trees growing at the edge of one of the tea plantations, viewed from the factory yard in which the cyprus wood is stacked up prior to being used to fuel the drying and fermenting of the tea: the whole production process is represented as an organic whole which grows its own preconditions from the soil. The falsity of this closure is particular visible in this exhibition, which wouldn’t exist without the funding that derives from the profit Taylors makes selling the tea grown in this area around the world.

This premature totalization separates us from Rwandan tea production in two ways. One is by suggesting that we are unimplicated in it, except perhaps to the extent we choose to involve ourselves philanthropically; the world market of course renders that false. The other way this presentation separates us from Rwandan tea growers is perhaps a bit more subtle, but perhaps also more harmful. This system of social production is something we tend to only see when we are being shown other societies, which works to make the systematic nature of production in our own societies invisible. As I walked around the Mercer Gallery, I imagined a ghost exhibit on the same walls, a series of photographs purporting to explain to us the UK through the interlinked economic process of call centers and mobile phone shops.

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The editors conclude, on the basis of their own experience of computer games and a spritz of Kant, that games cannot be art because they cannot be disinterested: they always focus on winning. Here the n+1 editors confuse interaction with interest, but it is the former, not the latter, which is the hallmark of computer games (note the slippage when they quote an argument about games offering  “a world in which the player is free to act and to choose,” which they then paraphrase as being about “goal-oriented participation”; the goal orientation is introduced, without argument, by the editors). The distinction is made clear by the existence of games which, although you can complete them, you can’t win: Rameses is probably the most conceptually perfect illustration of this, although Photopia is a more aesthetically successful example (both games can be played directly at the pages linked to, and only take something like twenty minutes each to complete, which I highly recommend you do).

The problem with n+1‘s regurgitation of Kant is that they don’t consider how the construction of an experience of interaction might require that Kant’s arguments be opened up and rethought. They don’t ask how “purposiveness without particular purpose” might be modified when the purposiveness exists in the spectator as well as in the object; they simply apply prefab Kantian categories and, finding that contemporary aesthetic appreciation doesn’t fit, conclude with an ostentatious snub of the contemporary world.

How to make a post about a three-month old controversy more relevant? Perhaps with references to a nine-year old game: Metal Gear Solid 2, with its plot hinging on a faked oil spill being used to further all kinds of elite conspiracies, suddenly seemed relevant after the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Recently playing the game, it struck me that it is an interesting example of the relationship of games and art because it presents a quite passionate argument for the importance of artistic expression, and it does so by frequently sabotaging the more utilitarian aspects of its own gameplay. The neatest example of this occurs when, after a fairly long cut-scene, the villain approaches the hero and control is returned to the player while a timer counts down frenetically in the corner of the screen. The player is thus encouraged to try increasingly hard to find away to avoid the villain, but the trick is that the only way to avoid capture is to avoid drawing attention to oneself, that is, to do nothing until the countdown is finished: the game doesn’t merely illustrate, but forces the player to discover, the zero-degree of interactivity.

This takes place on a rather larger scale throughout the second part of the game as key choices are gradually taken away from the player as the constructed nature of the protagonist’s existence and experience is revealed. This culminates in a bizarre and, from a straightforward game design point of view, untenable, 30-minute cut-scene that occurs just before the finale of the game which involves, among other things, two different explanations of the plot being put forward and overturned. What makes this strange game-design decision work, however, is the interplay between the ideas being put forward in this period of enforced noninteractivity, which concern the possibility, if any, of self-creation and self-determination, and the experience of different modes and degrees of interactivity which surround it. The game effectively puts forward a justification for its own status as art, and for the value of art as a practice of self-objectification and self-externalization, which is moving precisely because of the experience of a world of choices in which it is embedded.

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Benjamin himself describes this as the construction of “an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly,’” the activity of the collector. Benjamin writes:

What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this “completeness”? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. (Arcades, H1a, 2)

How new is this system of collection, however? Is it not, in fact, the strange unmooring of a rather older system? In his chapter on “Classifying” in The Order of Things, Foucault describes “a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history“:

The documents of this new history are not other words, texts, or records, but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed: herbariums, collections, gardens; the locus of this history is a non-temporal rectangle in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analysed, and bearers of nothing except their own individual names…. The natural history room and the garden, as created in the Classical preiod, replace the circular procession of the “show” with the arrangement of things in a “table.” (131)

Cornell presents a kind of parodic fulfillment on this sort of natural history, producing “tables” displaying, not natural objects, but the ephemera of history itself. The collector is a parody of the scientist because, by the late 19th century, this method no longer makes sense to us; and Cornell is a parody of the collector because his assemblages of objects no longer have any purpose except to display what he knows is “a surprising and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection” (Arcades, H2,7).

Something similarly incomprehensible greets the visitor to SFMOMA’s Olafur Eliasson exhibition. His piece “Model Room” is like a department store run by a mad scientist. Shelves overflow with imaginative pieces of solid geometry, stellated dodecahedrons, strange wire toroi, a kaleidoscope with the mirrors angled just so, reflecting the couple of pieces of wire at the end into a copper sphere. But Eliasson’s madness is, I think, different from Cornell’s; a collection not based on obsession, but on exuberance.

If Cornell’s work appears so fantastical because of its relation to a now impossible science, Eliasson’s is almost spookily up to date. Perhaps the clearest example of this is “Remagine,” a painting that isn’t there, as it were, formed by the overlapping light cast by a series of lamps. As with many of the works on display here, the art is intangible, immaterial, rarefied like information theory, particle physics, or cosmology. Other of Eliasson’s works emphasize nature, as with the both beautiful and rather eery “Moss Wall” (a wall of the gallery covered in still-living moss) and his photographs of stark Icelandic landscapes. Perhaps the most charming installations combine both these qualities. The rainbow-in-a-room of “Beauty” is a painstaking re-building of nature as artifice. I find myself standing in the middle of an art gallery suddenly thinking of Heston Blumenthal’s molecular gastronomy.

(The title of this post comes from a very different, but equally entertaining, idea of science, Jonathon Coulton’s song, “Still Alive”)

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Adorno and Horkheimer criticize mass culture on the basis of a particular understanding of art. True art is autonomous, and so negative or critical. True art is purposeless, and so provides us with an image of something outside of instrumental reason (which is, for Adorno and Horkheimer, always a logic of domination). However, this autonomy involves a contradiction, and hence a dialectic. Art’s purposelessness comes to be construed in terms of an inability to act, and so freedom, paradoxically, becomes equated with inaction. This is the point of the story of Odysseus and the Sirens: Odysseus is free in the aesthetic sense, he can listen to the Sirens, only because he is tied to the mast and unable to act; his crew, reciprocally, are able to act only because Odysseus has prevented them from hearing the music of the Sirens. This impotence becomes art’s condition of existence under capitalism: “so long as art declines to pass as cognition and is thus separated from practice, social practice tolerates it as it tolerates pleasure” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 33).

This disconnectedness of art from practice is completed by mass culture, which thereby in a sense completes, by abolishing, art: “The regression of the masses today is their inability to hear the unheard of with their own ears, to touch the unapprehended with their own hands” (DE, 36). So mass culture is something that looks like art, but isn’t—it’s the culture industry, a culture subordinated to technical rationality, not autonomous from it. Culture thus becomes a part of the total system of capitalism. Art becomes a commodity, and takes on the formal qualities of the commodity. Cultural objects become interchangeable, replaceable: “Not only are the songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change” (DE, 125).

This commodification is not just a feature of “low culture.” Adorno and Horkheimer insist that all contemporary culture is being integrated into capitalist production. Low culture is not separate from high culture, but is “the social bad conscience of serious art” that reminds the serious artist that she too is just producing commodities for the art market. Adorno expands on this in a letter to Benjamin, where he congratulates Benjamin for defending “the kitsch film against the quality film” (Aesthetics and Politics, 122), thereby puncturing the illusion that high art is autonomous.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, the complaint is not, or not just, that people listen to jazz instead of Schoenberg, but also that they watch Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. This suggests that Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding here is more dialectical than it sometimes appears. If there is liberation, it doesn’t exist outside the culture industry, because there is no such outside. Instead, we occasionally see moments of liberation within mass culture. Probably the most poignant example:

In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theatre a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening (DE, 139).

But even here, the culture industry functions as, at best, a poor substitute for something that has been lost. The underlying logic of Dialectic of Enlightenment does seem to be one of an increasing subordination of culture to technical rationality. It’s hard, than, to see how even such momentary liberation is possible.

I want to suggest that Benjamin can help us here. Benjamin’s unusual interpretation of commodity fetishism is particularly interesting when applied to commodified art. The central feature of the commodity, in Marx’s account, is exchange, an indefinite chain of equivalences: “A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat, is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c” (Capital, vol. 1, 44). The interesting part here is the “&c,” the limitlessness of the exchangeability or communicability of the commodity. More explicitly, we can see this in Marx’s description of the passage between three different forms of exchange: the elementary form, the total form, and the general form.

The elementary form expresses the exchange value of one object in another determinate object; this implies to possibility of exchange with an indeterminate array of objects, and this is the total form of exchange. This is superseded, however, by the general form, in which the equivalent again becomes determinate, but a determinate commodity, not a concrete object. In the elementary and total forms, exchange value is defined by opposition to use value. In the general form, however, the exchange value of one commodity is defined by the exchange value of other commodities, with no reference to use value. As Marx puts it: “The general form results from the joint action of the whole world of commodities and from that alone” (C, 71, my emphasis). The general form produces a kind of mirror-world, in which commodities endlessly reflect one another.

This is the completion of commodity fetishism; no reference is made any longer to labor, and the commodity is liberated from any dependence on use value. This recalls Adorno’s comment about “the liberation of things from the curse of being useful” (AP, 110), a comment which links the account of art in Dialectic of Enlightenment to Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire, which is entangled with the Arcades project (it’s interesting to note in passing that Benjamin in the Arcades Project, writing about the 19th century, was at about the same historical distance from his subject matter as we are now from the popular culture that Adorno and Horkheimer were writing about).

Another example of liberation from the curse of being useful occurs with the world exhibitions; as Benjamin enigmatically describes them, “the world exhibitions were training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value” (The Arcades Project, 201). The point here, I think, is that, at world exhibitions, where commodities were on display, not for sale, the masses were barred from consumption and the commodity barred from being consumed. Hence the commodity appeared more purely in its general form, as exchange value with no relation to use value. The “empathy with exchange value” here is an empathy with the idea of exchangeability, transmissibility, or communicability: the world fairs appear at the same time as the proletariat assumes a new subjectivity as international, universal and universally equivalent. It’s worth noting that, according to the sources Benjamin quotes, some workers recognized this connection, using the world exhibitions as opportunities for international organization (and, I wonder, is there any similarity here with the cycle of summit protests?).

Empathy with the commodity also appears in cultural forms, for example advertising. Through posters, advertising is “emancipated” and spreads out to cover the whole city. As with the world exhibitions, as the commodity form spreads through advertising, it takes on an ambiguous character, and becomes form in which alternatives to capitalism can be articulated, as well as a form that reinforces capitalism. Benjamin discusses the deep affinity between advertising and revolutionary propaganda. He quotes a description of revolutionary posters from 1848, which attributes them to “Monsieur Everyone.” This universal revolutionary subject is an abstraction, like the commodity, but also like the commodity, a materially produced abstraction.

This kind of universalism as unrestricted exchange is also present within advertising. Benjamin connects advertising back to Grandville‘s comically utopian visions such as a the solar system represented as a bridge lit by gaslamps, and forward to the surrealists who “treat words like trade names, and their texts are, at bottom, a form or prospectus for enterprises not yet off the ground” (A, 173). The Coke ad above, called “Happiness Factory,” also reminds me of Benjamin’s description of an advert as “an image of the everyday in utopia” (A, 174). The ad is an astounding image of commodity fetishism, but commodity fetishism almost as parody; or commodity fetishism as seen by a utopian imagination that almost immediately points beyond capitalism.

This can help explain the glimpses of liberation that Adorno and Horkheimer see in commodified art. For example, returning to their description of mass cultural products as interchangeable, they write that “even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the settings in which they are placed” (DE, 125). But the image this brings to mind is not dystopian; it’s the image of a Buster Keaton film, where the calculation and inevitability of the gags is emphasized, precisely as a parodic liberation from mechanism and fatality. I’m also reminded of Judith Butler’s description of Hegel’s dialectic as a burlesque.

If the commodity form is, as Marx tells us, continually coming up against its own limits, we might expect to find the same thing in the forms assumed by commodified art. Hence the culture industry is not just the ever increasing subordination of art to technical reason, but also the expression of the dialectical overcoming of technical reason through its own contradictions. This suggests a Marxist approach to mass culture that emphasizes two things that are too often ignored. One is the changes mass culture produces on its consumers (and there’s interesting material here in Benjamin’s work on fashion); the other is the attempt to understand mass culture in terms of its contradictions. Both would allow us to see mass culture not as something that is simply employed by capitalism, but rather as something potentially reversible, existing both within and against capital.

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