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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Why insist, against all hope, on the communist idea? Is such insistence not an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost cause? And does such narcissism not underlie the predominant attitude of academic Leftists who expect a theoretician to tell them what to do?—they desperately want to commit themselves, but not knowing how to do so effectively, they await the answer from a theoretician. Such an attitude is, of course, in itself false, as if a theory will provide the magic formula, capable of resolving the practical deadlock (Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, 88).

There were a number of excellent papers at the Waiting for the Political Moment conference in Rotterdam last month, among which were keynotes from Benjamin Noys (which he’s put on line) and Jodi Dean (some of the key arguments of which are in this blog post). These two papers are interestingly read together, I think. Jodi argues that our concern about complexity and the difficulty of knowing enough functions as a kind of theoretical alibi for political inactivity:

The recourse to complexity is a move that says there is always more that needs to be known as well as unknown unknowns and unintended consequences of whatever it is that we end up doing. Such a move says, wait, stop, do you know what you are doing?

Benjamin, meanwhile, criticizes the tendency among political theorists to call for a (return to) concrete politics, a call often made by denigrating the abstraction of theory. Now, these two criticisms of contemporary political thought might seem to be in opposition to one another: Jodi calling for just the kind of concrete politics Benjamin considers inadequate, while Benjamin invokes, in the form of abstraction, the complexity Jodi is suspicious of. I don’t think that’s the case, though; in fact, the turn to the concrete and the retreat into complexity are two aspects of the same process.

As luck would have it, on the flight over to Rotterdam, I saw a film which helps clarify the connection between these two perspectives. Roman Polanski’s The Ghost is quite entertaining and extremely stupid (as befits something based on a book by Robert Harris—I’m not sure it’s either as stupid or as entertaining as Archangel, though). The most interesting thing in the film, though, was the particular way in which the moment of revelation was delayed. At one point, the ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) follows the GPS directions left in his predecessor’s car, ending up at the house of an academic who knew the prime minister (for whom McGregor and the previous ghostwriter were ghostwriting). The revelation, however, does not come through discussion with the academic, who, simultaneously avuncular and guarded, skillfully answers all the ghostwriter’s questions without revealing anything. The revelation occurs just a little bit later, when the ghostwriter types the academic’s name, along with “CIA,” into Google (there’s actually a further, even more hilarious, twist, which involves Ewan MacGregor solving an acrostic in the back room of a bookshop). A montage of link-clicking follows, in which the secrets of the film are laid bare.

This is the fantasy that links together the embrace of complexity and the rejection of abstraction. First of all, the call for concrete politics is always a philosophical or political-theoretical call, and, as a call, it is always at least one step removed from the concrete politics it desires (or purports to desire). Furthermore, what is supposed to allow us to take that step is one last theoretical effort, and it is this idea of the final resolution of theory through one last effort which underlies our relation to complexity: the idea is that we cannot act yet, but if we could finally master complexity, we would, at last, be able to act. As Jodi puts it in Publicity’s Secret:

A key technocultural fantasy is that “the truth is out there.” Such a fantasy informs desires to click, link, search and surf cyberia’s networks. We fantasize that we’ll find the truth, even when we know that we won’t, that any specific truth or answer is only a momentary fragment. Still, the fantasy keeps us looking. (8)

The fantasy, that is, is the one that Žižek criticizes, of a theory that would unravel complexity in such a way that it would immediately resolve itself into action, without us having to ever deal practically with this complexity (to choose, to act, to take a risk). This is also the kind of theory that Benjamin resists; the theory he proposes, a theory which attempts to understand abstraction rather than calling for the concrete, for all that it might assist us in deciding how to act, would not provide the alibi for action (or inaction) that, as Žižek says, is all to often what leftist academics look to theory to provide.

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The way in which a schoolmaster-supposed-to-be-wise can be authoritarian is fairly clear: the master posits a knowledge to which they alone have access, and they control the student by regulating their access to this supposed knowledge. But a pedagogy based on knowledge can also be egalitarian, if the knowledge of the master marks a purely contingent difference: the teacher happens to know something which in principle anyone can know, and the process of teaching consists in offering this knowledge to the student, for the student to do what they wish with. In the case of the ignorant schoolmaster, such equality is not possible. If the schoolmaster and the student are equally ignorant, what differentiates them? Either a purely arbitrary authority, or an authority grounded not in knowledge but in technique; the ignorant schoolmaster does not know what is being taught, but nonetheless knows how to teach it. This supposedly subject-neutral technique is the domain of Department of Education civil servants planning the National Curriculum, or university administrators deciding which departments to ax. Our contemporary Jacotot is Michael Gove.

That a supposed egalitarianism ends up underwriting a marked authoritarianism is consistent with a more general failing of Rancière’s work, which is that his radicalism seems to be limited to that of early 19th century republicanism. The axiom of equality is, after all, an axiom of liberalism, and Rancière’s equality is, like liberalism’s, formal and ultimately obfuscatory. This is illuminated by the connection Nina draws between Rancière’s positing of educational equality and Virno’s discussion of the “general intellect” in post-Fordist, communicative, capitalism. This is an extremely interesting connection but not one which is, I think, ultimately to Rancière’s credit. The fundamental difference between Rancière and Virno is that Rancière’s equality is a posited universal indifferent to any actual realization, while the general intellect is a real abstraction, something that develops through a specific set of material circumstances.

Politically, this means that Rancière focuses on discursive strategies that supposedly obscure this fundamental equality, ignoring the problem of real inequalities, and the material and institutional arrangements that reproduce them, and which might be reconfigured to produce a real equality. When Rancière attempts to show the denial of equality that produces the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he admits that “it had doubtless ceased  to be said that the members of the modern proletariat, the equivalent of the plebians of antiquity, are not speaking beings. It is simply assumed that there is no connection between the fact that they speak and the fact that they work” (Disagreement, 51). I’m not sure that this was ever true, but it’s surely not true in today’s capitalism, where communication is a crucial instrument of proletarianization.

More generally, Rancière’s focus on an equality that is prior to any actual arrangements of inequality means that he abandons class politics in favor of the kind of liberal universalism criticized by Marx in “On the Jewish Question.” Yes, Rancière claims that equality introduces the political division between the community and the part-with-no-part which has nothing in common with the community but this bare equality. But this assertion of equality works as an assertion of equality of the excluded with the rulers; the plebians “execute a series of speech acts that mimic those of the patricians” (Disagreement, 24). This is an assertion of equality purely on the patricians terms, not one which challenges the structures that produce patricians and plebeians. It is the same politics of dressing-up that Marx identifies in the republicans of 1848, who could only act by mimicking a reflection of a reflection of ancient Rome. What’s missing from Rancière is an understanding of a social revolution which would involve a genuine reconfiguration, rather than a shuffling of appearances: a political movement where “the content goes beyond the phrase.”

(I seem to remember Nina once describing Rancière as a “grumpy anarchist.” I suppose one could see this post as a grumpy—probably too grumpy—Marxist response.)

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Similar considerations could be made with respect to the role of the state, which, after years of being demonized, has recently been reevaluated.

…

Capital was able…to neutralize the subversive potential of the aesthetic strategies and ethos of the counterculture…. To this hegemonic move by capital, it is urgent to oppose a counterhegemonic one.

In other words: once upon a time capital was in favor of the state, so the left was against it; now capital is opposed to the state, so the left should be for it. This tells us a lot about why Mouffe’s conception of hegemony is so wrong.

First, we have the idea of counter-hegemony as a simple inversion of hegemony, which renders any counter-hegemonic project simply reactive. To be fair to Mouffe, she doesn’t always consider counter-hegemony to be quite such a straightforward inversion; nonetheless, I think her concept of hegemony always leaves the initiative to capital. Mouffe defines a hegemonic project as a process of dearticulation and rearticulation, but note that what gets dearticulated and rearticulated are elements of an already existing hegemony. Now of course it’s true that we have to start from where we are, but I don’t think left-wing politics can let the coordinates of its imagination be limited to the coordinates of the existing order. Despite a few quasi-structuralist gestures towards the way in which the meaning of a term depends on its position in a chain of signification, blah, blah, blah, I’ve never seen Mouffe pay serious attention to ways in which left politics might create genuinely new ways of thinking and acting. Should any such novelty occur it is, apparently, both fortuitous and extra-political.

Second, this view of hegemony sees the terrain of struggle as being purely that of capitalist ideology, and so ends up taking capitalist ideology at its word, undermining any possibility of critique. The idea that capital before 1970 was “for” the state, and since 1970 is “against” it, comes from a Reagan speech, not a Marxist analysis; in fact, neoliberalism depends on the state just as much as Fordism did, but it depends on a different kind of state. To fail to realize this, and to simply posit the left as being “for” the state, both supports neoliberal ideology and precludes the kind of rethinking of organizational forms that the left so desperately needs. Mouffe actually makes more-or-less this point in The Return of the Political; the reason why she fails to follow through on her own advice, I think, can be found in a further weakness of her theory of hegemony. Mouffe emphasizes the contingency of the articulation of different elements within hegemony, which is not a bad thing in itself, but it seems to me this contingency is made such a central feature of the ontology that supports hegemony that there is no space to analyze the constraints that operate in any actual political practice. Despite the lip-service paid to the importance of power in constructing hegemony, actual operations of power seem to drop out of the theory: contingency becomes an arbitrary recomposition of given political elements according to the whims of the theorist.

And so, Mouffe’s theory of hegemony ends up turning politics into something like playing with stickle-bricks.

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In fact, however, the concept of politics is essentially problematic, and there is no aspect of it that can be protected from this difficulty. If politics as a practice is good, that depends in part on an ability to distinguish political practice from non-political practice, which is to already invoke an incipient reification of the political; if the political as an ontological condition is good, we need to explain how it can give rise to the bad institutions of politics. No. Better to recognize that politics or the political, whichever term we choose, is a fundamentally ambivalent category: a practical illusion, as Marx puts it, and we need to wrestle with  the practical need to engage with politics, as we try and overcome the illusions that are cast by it.

As an illustration of what this vacuous distinction covers over, consider Rancière’s theory of politicization as the appearance, or making-appear, of the excluded part of the people. What this misses is the dialectical ambiguity of appearance, which is always both the specific appearance of a thing, and an appearance in contrast to the reality of the thing. The appearance of something new on the political scene is never the full presence of that thing, but rather the production of a gap between the thing and its political appearance.

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This confused me when I first moved to the US; looking for the left in the Bay Area it seems at first like there’s no there there. The general left-wing sentiment in the area doesn’t seem to be matched by the existence of left-wing organizations. It turns out that that’s not quite right; it’s just that these organizations aren’t political organizations but are, rather, community organizations and non-profits. Some of these have radical rhetoric and a revolutionary pedigree, but they all share the weakness of the Alinskian (non-)understanding of power, where power is not conceived of as something that could be appropriated collectively and used creatively to common ends, but where power is something someone else (the state) has, and the limit of collective action is to force concessions from those who do hold power.

The limitations of this lack of understanding of power were starkly illustrated in an event in last week’s walkout at Berkeley. Some participants in the action suggested the possibility of using the pre-planned General Assembly as the starting point for an occupation. Unfortunately, this suggestion was shot down by the facilitators of the General Assembly, who had already decided on their own structure for the meeting, and weren’t about to have this disrupted by a debate on the possibility of an immediate occupation. What was so frustrating (both in the sense of being annoying, and in the sense of working to frustrate the attempted occupation) is that the moderators resolutely refused to make explicit and take responsibility for the power they were exercising. This made it very difficult to contest their power, as they were able to present all their decisions as necessarily already democratically pre-authorized.

Nonetheless, a similar reticence about power was also in evidence among those proposing the occupation. The one thing I would disagree with in the IndyMedia account linked above is the description of those proposing the occupation as the “occupation committee,” which implies a level of organization and explicit self-presentation that was regrettably absent. With one honorable exception, the pro-occupation people didn’t really present themselves explicitly as a collective making a demand or proposal to the group; there was, again, an unwillingness to take responsibility for an attempt to wield power. In the hurry of the moment, and against the backdrop of the interplay of the moderators pseudo-democracy with the genuine democratic energy of the assembly, this failure of the pro-occupiers is, I think, understandable (I should myself take responsibility for failing to understand this, and act on it, at the time; it’s taken me this long to develop this understanding of what was happening). However, it will be important to avoid this mistake in the future.

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On the strength of Adam’s recommendation, I’ve been making my way through the show over the past month. Although from the beginning it was clear that the show looked beautiful and was marvelously acted, some of my initial concern remained: was the show’s 1960s setting anything other than window-dressing?It wasn’t until eight episodes into the first season that the thematic significance of the 1960s advertising industry became clear. The crucial scene comes when Don Draper drops in on his bohemian mistress and argues with her beatnik friends, who tell him that the adverts he creates are merely lies. Don’s response, that “there is no big lie, there is no system,” is quite correct. Advertising doesn’t simply lie about the world, on the contrary, as Don’s practice throughout the show makes clear, it tells, or rather constructs, a particular sort of truth, a kind of dream image of capitalism. In Mad Men, however, this accusation of lying strikes Don particularly closely, because he is a liar, who has been passing himself off under an assumed identity, that of Don Draper, which is not his own. Don has used this name to “make something of himself,” to recreate himself as a different person, but the falsehood leaves a stain of uncertainty, perhaps only visible to himself, in his identity.

Žižek argues that contemporary capitalism is not based around demanding that subjects conform to a specific identity, but rather demanding that they answer the question, “what do you want?” While the classical liberal subject was based on identity defined in relation to a structure of authority, the contemporary subject requires a continuous self-questioning based on a fundamental insecurity. Don Draper is precisely this subject, involved in the dream-construction of capitalism at precisely the time when symbolic authority was eroding and the subject of fixed identity was being replaced by the flexible subject. Mad Men is, in part, a dramatization of this transformation, and so is not about how different the 1960s were, but about how similar they are.

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The more powerful a state and hence the more political a nation, the less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social ills and to seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the state – i.e., at the actual organization of society of which the state is the active, self-conscious and official expression. Political understanding is just political understanding because its thought does not transcend the limits of politics. The sharper and livelier it is, the more incapable is it of comprehending social problems. The classical period of political understanding is the French Revolution. Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, the heroes of the French Revolution held social ills to be the source of political problems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as an obstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal system of Spartan frugality. The principle of politics is the will. The more one-sided – i.e., the more prefect – political understanding is, the more completely it puts its faith in the omnipotence of the will, the blinder it is towards the natural and spiritual limitations of the will, the more incapable it becomes of discovering the real source of the evils of society. (“Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’”)

I wonder if a lot of this doesn’t also apply to Badiou (perhaps the RCP were right to call Badiou a Rousseauist). Of course it’s not true to say that Badiou believes in the omnipotence of the will, but a blindness to natural and spiritual limitations does sound more on point, particularly as manifested in a difficulty in seeing the sources of social problems. Now, you might object that Badiou, with his advocacy of a critical distance from the state, is in fact doing precisely what Marx advocates here; but this isn’t so, becauase Badiou’s rejection of the state “does not transcend the limits of politics.” Instead, Badiou rejects the state because, in his analysis, the state is not political. This position is not that uncommon among post-Marxists (you can see it in Rancière and Mouffe, too; Jodi Dean discusses this tendency in her recent article on “Politics Without Politics”), but the more I think about it the odder and more indefensible it seems to me.

(I’ve posted a few critical things about Badiou recently, and will post more shortly, so I kind of want to distance myself from the recent-ish Badiou blog backlash; I’m tarrying with the negative here in the process of hopefully coming up with a  discussion of Badiou and Marx at some point in the future that does something more interesting than just criticizing; on the other hand, I’m hoping to get in on the ground floor of the Rancière blog backlash.)

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This is not to deny, of course, that there is a great deal of evidence in the film that suggests that Deckard is a replicant. But what blurs the distinction between human and android is the film’s refusal to confirm what it constantly implies about Deckard, which is the best illustration of Žižek’s point that “the difference which makes me ‘human’ and not a replicant is to be discerned nowhere in ‘reality’” (40). One could even defend the original ending in these terms (which Žižek calls an “imbecile happy-ending”); even if Deckard and Rachel did escape to live a complete life together, it would never be long enough to prove them human.

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This discussion of the relationship between biology and capitalist ideology reminded me of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin exhibition, which I went to see in London over Christmas. While the connection between Darwinian evolution and a Malthusian economy of scarcity and competition is often remarked on and fairly obvious, there are other ways of construing the capitalist economy that also have interesting parallels with Darwin’s understanding of evolution. What struck me at the Darwin exhibition was the importance of abundance. What caused Darwin to look for an alternative to a religious account of creation was the huge number of subtly different species he encounted. This struck him as excessive: why would God have created so many species? Doubtless one reason this occurred is because a 19th century scientist was in a position, unlike most people throughout history, had the opportunity to travel the world and see a greater variety of animals than would usually be seen. But I wonder, too, if Darwin’s ability to see the excessive creativity of biology wasn’t also due to the unprecedented productivity of industrial capitalism.

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