Category: Books

 Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man is a stupendous text, a pornographic fantasy and a philosophical meditation at once. I reread it because I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I had said about it in my previous post on porn.

Delany calls the book (in his opening “Disclaimer”) a “pornutopic fantasy: a set of people, incidents, places, and relations among them that never happened and could not happen for any number of surely self-evident reasons”; he adds that the book is “specifically… about various sexual acts whose status as vectors of HIV contagion we have no hard-edged knowledge of…” Anid indeed, there is no anal sex in the course of this narrative of sexual relations between men; but the book contains copious, epic descriptions of cocksucking, piss-drinking (and occasional shit-eating) together with oceanic spurts of semen (as well as piss)erupting from truly gigantic cocks. Various sorts of fetishism are also on display, especially involving racial stereotyping, and the narrator’s idealization of homeless men. (Delany also remarks in his “Disclaimer” that a novel that truly focused on the homeless “would have to be substantially darker than this one”).

But I also said that The Mad Man is a philosophical meditation. Quite literally: the narrator, John Marr, a gay black man in his 20s, coping with the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s, is a graduate student in philosophy, investigating the life and works of a (fictional) great philosopher, Timothy Hasler, a Korean-American thinker who was murdered, at age 29, in a gay hustler’s bar, almost a generation before (in 1973, post-Stonewall, but pre-AIDS).

Marr reconstructs Hasler’s life even as he comes to terms with his work, which involves the relation between “formal” and “informal” systems: the way that the logic of description abstracts from, and thereby simplifies, an initially chaotic and complex intermingling of multiple particulars. Hasler reverses the traditional assumptions of classical empiricism and 20th-century positivist and analytic thought. For those traditions, i.e. for thinkers from Locke to the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the world is analyzable into a set of discrete, atomic, entities (“ideas” or “facts”), and complexity results from the ways that, on a higher level, these entities interact, interfere with one another, form into intertwined combinations: “the first three quarters of our [20th] century has been dominated by the unquestioned conviction… that reality was built up of atomic perceptions, that language was built up from the meanings and grammatical potentials associated with individual words. Only when things got too complicated — in the interaction of system on top of system, system against system — did the appearance of systematicity break down.”

But Hasler argues pretty much the opposite: he argues that “large-scale, messy, informal systems are necessary in order to develop, on top of them, precise, hard-edged, tractable systems… the human mind, and possibly nature herself, master generalized, messy pointing, inexact indication, and flailing well before they learn to individuate and count.” And more, “the messy is what provides the energy which holds any system within it coherent and stable.” In this way, Hasler is closer to the later Wittgenstein, and to Whitehead, than he is to the mainstream of Anglo-American logical and linguistic analysis. (I mention these thinkers, rather than Derrida and Deleuze, because it’s important that Delany represents Hasler as coming out of — and deviating from, or radicalizing — the analytic tradition, rather than participating in “continental” thought).

The question, of course, is what to make of a book in which passages like the one I have just quoted alternate with lengthy descriptions of golden showers night at the Mineshaft, or orgies in the narrator’s apartment that end with cum, piss, and shit smeared over everything, and suffusing the space with their pungent odor. Is the book based upon the notorious Cartesian split between mind and body, as between philosophical asceticism and the corporeal pursuit of pleasure? To the contrary, it is evident that the “informal system” of sexual energy that the book depicts is necessary to the emergence of any “formal system,” any logic and order, of the sort that the novel’s philosophical passages explore. Delany has long written about the ways that “paraliterary” genres can accommodate possibilities foreclosed in more mainstream and “proper” forms of literature. Delany accomplishes this with pornography in The Mad Man, just as he did with science fiction and fantasy in many of his earlier writings. (Hasler himself alternated his philosophical publications with a series of science fiction stories, which are described as pulpy space operas — pre-1960s SF New Wave in content — that nonetheless embody his philosophical themes).

In the course of the novel, as Marr traces Hasler’s life, he also finds himself in effect replicating or repeating it — despite the vast difference between Hasler’s experience as a gay man in the post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS era, and the more circumscribed conditions that Marr faces living in the midst of the epidemic. Hasler and Marr share, among other things, an attraction to homeless men; they each fall in love with one such man; and Marr finally finds himself unwittingly recreating the situation that led to Hasler’s murder; only this time, a homeless man is killed, as Marr fails to substitute himself (as Hasler, it turns out, did, in a true act of love) for the intended victim. Marr’s growing identification with Hasler makes possible the traditional pornographic pattern of a series of sexual scenes or episodes, almost detachable from the surrounding narrative, and yet increasing in intensity as one moves through that narrative, with a culminating orgy that  provides a sort of emotional climax to the narrative as a whole. I don’t know how many readers will really get off on the pornographic scenarios that make so large a part of the novel (I have to admit that it didn’t do much for me in that regard); but it’s crucial to note that Delany does not endeavor to “redeem” or “transcend” pornography, to turn it into something “higher.” He insists on the aim of physically arousing the reader: which of course is what makes pornography a “low” and scandalous genre; in polite society, rhetorical effects are supposed to work only on the mind, not on the body. Thus again, the philosophical themes of the novel are energized and given form by the pornographic depictions, rather than standing in opposition to them.

What’s truly radical about Delany’s pornography — as I have noted several times before (e.g. here, here, here, and here) — is that its intensities are never presented as transgressive; the entire tradition of pornographic transgression, which stretches from Sade to Bataille and beyond, and which is often echoed in the naively liberationist rhetoric of much commercial porn — holds no interest for Delany, and in fact is something that his books explicitly critique. Even the great piss- and shit-stained orgy that is the culminating sexual scene of the book (that is followed by the murder that Marr unwittingly sets the stage for, and that replicates an orgy in Hasler’s apartment, 18 years earlier, that had taken place just before Hasler’s own murder) is depicted (I’m not sure that I can say this the right way) in naturalistic terms rather than lurid ones. By which I do not mean that its intent is not to arouse — since clearly it is — but that it presents such arousal in a continuum with all the other aspects of life (the narrator’s, the writer’s, and the reader’s) rather than as some sort of rupture with them. There’s a bit of comedy, even, as Marr has to explain away the remnants of the scene to his straight-laced, hetero academic advisor (who unexpectedly pops by for a visit the next day); but the whole point is that this embarrassment is a function of the advisor’s narrowminded-bigotry-clothed-in-liberal-goodwill, rather than any intrinsic aspect of the scene itself.

To say that Delany’s view and account of sex, and his “pornutopic fantasy,” have nothing to do with transgression is to say that they cannot be comprehended in the terms of any dialectic of contradiction, or even of any post-Kantian questioning of limits. Sexual exchanges — and there is a lot here, which I lack the space and energy to get into, about the logic of sexual exchange, and how it relates to, and potentially differs from, the ubiquity of market exchange — in fact this difference is the key to Hasler’s murder, and to that of Marr’s homeless friend — are for Delany a form of civility and collectivity, as well as a series of pleasures, or improvements of sensual enjoyment. This doesn’t mean that such sexual exchanges are tame or limited. The point is, rather, that there is no limit — no boundary to be transgressed, or that would mark a zero point, a void or lack, an encounter with death. The Mad Man is a novel quite cognizant of, and continually haunted by, death: in the form of Hasler’s death which is the starting-point of the narrative, and the homeless man’s death which is its conclusion, and more generally in the ever-present reality of AIDS in the world of its narrator. But this death is in no way intrinsic to or carried by the sexual acts that the narrative describes; rather, death always comes from outside (to use or abuse a phrase from Deleuze). Death arrives in The Mad Man, and the book thereby takes on a fully tragic dimension. But although death is inevitable, for we are all mortal, and it is more of a danger for gay man than for many other groups of people (because of the sort of society we live in), nonetheless death is also inessential. It is not a constituent and motor of sexual desire. One cannot imagine a greater contrast to the transgressive — Kantian or Hegelian — logics of Sade, Bataille, and so many others.

In this way, Delany’s pornography leads us to think — forces us to think — in ways that are so far from our cultural norms as to be virtually unimaginable. We don’t have the language — outside of the language provided in Delany’s own writing — to conceptualize what he is proposing to us. (It is something that the late-period Foucault pointed towards, with his ideas about “bodies and pleasures” replacing the transgressive logic of sexuality;  but I think Delany points us much further in this direction than Foucault did). Delany breaks with the utopian, 60s idea of sex as redemptive; but he also breaks, I think, even with the anti-redemptive arguments offered by such queer theorists as Leo Bersani and (more recently) Lee Edelman. Another way to put this is to say that Delany’s pornographic vision — the way bodies and pleasures are intensified to a point of impersonality and anonymity — cannot be described in terms of the Freudian/Lacanian “death drive.” It’s hard for me to express this as clearly or theoretically as I would like; but it has something to do with the way in which “extreme” sexual acts are described both — and simultaneously — as attaining a point where the ego, or the limits between one self and another, are dissolved, so that the experience of sheer intensity is all that remains, and as being experiences of intimacy, ease, togetherness, and (dare I say it?) even a certain homely coziness. This sense suffuses even, and especially, the one passage in the novel where the narrator cites both Sade and Marx (!) in order to explain “all the combinations and permutations of everyone hooking up with everyone else” in the culminating orgy scene. In the logistics of the orgy, we get the intertwining of Hasler’s informal and formal systems, as we get both a push to the point of physical exhaustion, and a sense of free and easy comraderie, one in which the odors of sweat, piss, and cum feel “familiar and comfortable,” and the exchange of bodily fluids are the nicest and sweetest thing one human being can do with another. Sexuality for Delany is a kind of communism, where anonymous relations with multiple others coexist with the exclusivity and special passion of (romantic?) love for one particular other person. As the narrator himself announces quite explicitly, The Mad Man is finally a love story. The pornutopian dimension of the novel has to do with the fact that it is, in the special sense I have been describing, a “communist” love story.

That The Mad Man is inadmissible in just about any discursive or social context one could imagine today is not a fact about the book, but a fact about the our society and its grim deficiencies.

I read Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road just as soon as it came out, which is now more than a month ago. But I’ve hesitated to write about it, because I felt that I didn’t have anything to say. It seems to me that the book actively repels commentary; it is so utterly self-contained, so hermetically sealed unto itself, that anything anybody does say about it is at once both superfluous and wrong.

I mean this both with regard to the novel’s content, and with regard to its form, or its prose. It’s a harsh and powerful book, depicting a post-apocalyptic landscape so severe, so totally ravaged, and so enclosed, that it offers no escape. It’s a world in which there are no resources left. The utter lucidity and precision with which McCarthy describes the characters’ careful scavenging of whatever pitiful remnants of food, clothing, shelter, tools, etc., that they can find leads to a sort of exhaustion. I love sentences like this one, referring to the main character, the father, who, together with his son is endlessly on the road: “Mostly, he worried about their shoes.” This, finite and limited material, material always in short supply, in deficit with regard to human needs, is all there is. Once it is gone, there will not be any more, since civilization of any sort, or economic production of any kind, has long ceased to function. The rest is just lifeless ruin, or else cruelty and cannibalistic horror.

The prose is polished to a point of minimalist perfection; blinding in its clarity and yet (or, I should say, and therefore) almost devoid of metaphorical or metaphysical resonance. There’s no splendor here; echoes are muffled, even as the sky is a perpetual gray. The few hints of metaphysics that manage to penetrate the murk entirely confirm my old friend Leo Daugherty’s assertion (in an article available here) that McCarthy’s vision is basically a gnostic one. The semi-miraculous ending to the book is itself only intelligible in such terms; salvation is not of this world, but is radically other, and is a matter of “carrying the fire” (the phrase that comes up again and again in The Road) in a world that is utterly hostile to it, and that continually threatens to blow it out.

I suppose that this extreme closure, this more-than-granite hardness and power, is one definition of the sublime. But for me, it is something that ultimately limits the novel. I read the book with avidity and intense attention; but once I finished, it almost entirely slipped from my mind. I do not brood over it, the way I have brooded for years over Blood Meridian. That was a book of almost infinite resonance and depth, one that will not leave me alone and that I am impelled to reread every couple of years. Blood Meridian is filled with horror, and that horror reveals something powerful and true about America, and the way that its claims to both exceptionalism and universality are drenched and rooted in blood. Blood Meridian offers no release from negativity, no sense of an ending no matter how total the destruction. In contrast, I do not think that I will every read The Road again. It doesn’t have the same affective power, the same ability to insinuate itself into my dreams. Instead, it feels like a dead end; even the horror is finally dampened down into entropy.

Peter Watts’ new book Blindsight is the best SF novel I have read in quite some time. It’s a space opera, and a First Contact novel, and a vampire novel — and also a philosophical novel about the nature of consciousness. [The usual warning applies: this review unavoidably contains SPOILERS).

Watts is a hardcore sociobiologist, in outlook. Which is often something that drives me up a wall. But he has enough conceptual audacity that he makes it work, chillingly and powerfully, in Blindsight.

To explain about sociobiology: I despise it when those “evolutionary psychology”‘ types tell us that women are “hardwired” to be attracted to older, wealthier men; or that “criminality” (a word or concept left carefully undefined) is significantly genetic, since children of “criminal” parents adopted into “non-criminal” families are (supposedly) much more likely to become “criminals” themselves than children of “non-criminal” parents adopted into “criminal” families. (Both these assertions come up, for instance, in Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene, which I recently had my students read). Such blatant projections of contemporary social prejudice and unequal conditions into “nature” are beneath contempt, not even worthy of the energy it would take to refute them. On the other hand, I admire the audacity of Richard Dawkins, when he starts to sound a lot like William Burroughs, suggesting that we are lumbering robots struggling to escape the control of having been programmed by ruthlessly “selfish genes,” and that our most cherished ideas are viral infections that have taken over our bodies and minds (“memes”).

Now, Watts is sociobiological in this latter, audacious and scary, sense. He knows that we live in a “war universe” (as Burroughs would puts it) — all the more so in that this condition is the result, not of some active, Manichean malice (as it seems to be, for instance, for Cormac McCarthy), but simply of the blind forces of natural selection. For Watts, natural selection is no benevolent “invisible hand,” automatically producing “optimal” outcomes — which is how the current fashion for drawing parallels between Darwinian evolution and Adam Smith’s vision of “perfect competition” would have it. Rather, natural selection is nasty, brutish, and short — and it frequently leads to messed-up results, not only for those individuals and groups that “lose” out in Darwinian competition, but also for the “winners,” who may well have developed the way they did either because of random genetic drift, or because they were (temporarily) lucky enough to develop without encountering the changed conditions that, in the long run, will wipe them out. That’s what happened to the dinosaurs, and it’s also what may well happen to us sooner or later.

Watts’ sensibility is, not cynical exactly: since cynicism implies a kind of apologia for, or complicity with, things as they are, on the grounds that we can at least be certain of the worst, and anyone with illusions to the contrary is dismissed with a smirking “what did you expect?” That isn’t really Watts’ tone. Rather, he is downbeat and grim, looking into the abyss with the full consciousness that the abyss looks back at us. Reading Watts is always quite bracing, as was the case for his previous works of SF, the Rifters trilogy — which I wrote about here, here, and here. But I think that, in Blindsight, he has surpassed himself.

Start with the people we encounter in the novel. Watts’ characters are quite memorably drawn; they are nearly all sociopaths to one extent or another, as well as being thoroughly “posthuman.” In the year 2082, most human beings have become redundant, because — whatever skills they have — computers can perform their tasks better than they can. Lots of people have checked out entirely, putting their bodies in storage and letting their minds wander freely in Heaven, a virtual reality space of blandly narcissistic wish-fulfillment. The others have loads of genetic and neural tweaks, and prosthetic enhancements to their bodies and their senses; they tend to remain as much as possible in physical isolation, using VR for messy things like sex. It’s just safer (both physically and emotionally) than coming into actual physical contact. There’s always the danger of terrorism by the Realists, a faction that objects to this “posthuman” condition: they specialize in nasty retroviral attacks.

Blindsight takes place, however, among a small group of people who are stuck in close physical proximity on a spaceship that goes out to the Kuiper belt to make contact with, or at least to study, aliens who have apparently arrived from another solar system, and who may or may not pose a threat to humankind. The commander of the spaceship is a vampire (and Watts provides a brilliant account of vampires as a near-human subspecies, different from “baseline” Homo sapiens in a few crucial genetic and physiological respects). The crew includes a linguist with (technologically generated) multiple personality syndrome, a biologist who has had nearly all his senses overlain with extensive prosthetics so that his proprioceptive feelings — his feelings of self — reside much more in long-range mechanical extensions than they do in his own flesh; and a military officer whose sensorium similarly extends into a whole range of killing machines that she manipulates by remote control. And the (unreliable) narrator has had one of his two brain hemispheres removed and replaced by machinery; he is constitutionally incapable of any sort of empathy.

All that is the baseline condition the novel starts with. Things get seriously weird when we encounter the aliens, who turn out to be quite beyond human understanding. I will skip over their biophysiology, though Watts is amazingly inventive in this respect (he is helped by his background as a marine biologist, who is therefore with all sorts of weird invertebrates). What really distinguishes the aliens is that they are zombies: not in the George Romero, living dead sense, but in the sense that the term has been used by cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. A zombie is a being who acts just as you or I do, who shows clear signs of language, intelligence, and so on; but who is inwardly devoid of sentience or consciousness. It’s the old Cartesian/solipsist dilemma: I know that I have consciousness, interiority, and a sense of self; but how do I know that you have all these things? For all I know — since all I really know (according to Descartes) comes from introspection, everyone else in the world may well be a machine, or an automoton, only simulating consciousness.

Now, most philosophers don’t take this paranoid fantasy very seriously. Turing, Wittgenstein, and Dennett all suggest, pretty much, that if something (someone?) acts intelligent and conscious, we should assume that he/she/it is intelligent and conscious. The hypothesis that zombies could exist is –even when just floated as a possibility, and not pushed to the point of solipsist paranoia — is predicated on the idea that some precious internal essence of consciousness is not captured by behavioral criteria, so a zombie who behaved like a conscious person is at least conceivable. But if you reject this sense of transcendent interiority as a mystifcation — as Turing, Wittgenstein, and Dennett all do — then you will reject the zombie hypothesis as well. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc…

It nonetheless seems to be true that people who are usually conscious can nonetheless perform cognitively complex acts while in a state of unconsciousness: this is what happens, presumably, when people sleepwalk or when they are under deep hypnosis. There’s also the phenomenon of blindsight — which is the title of Watts’ novel because it is his main conceptual metaphor throughout the book — where people claim to be blind — they cannot consciously see — and yet, when asked (or forced in situations when a quick reaction is necessary) to guess where something is in the visual field, do so with a high degree of accuracy. This suggests that they in fact can see, at least on a certain level — even though they do not know that they can see.

Zombies would then be possessed of blindsight, not only where vision is concerned, but for all sensory and cognitive modalities. And this turns out to be the case with the aliens in Blindsight. By any possible measure they are vastly more intelligent, and more technologically advanced, than human beings (and even than prosthetically enhanced human beings). Yet they are entirely devoid of consciousness or sentience. They simply do not know that they know; they know not what they do; yet their knowing and doing is all the more effective and efficient for all that. Indeed, the novel suggests that consciousness is an evolutionary accident. We’ve developed conscious minds because we have been lucky enough (for a while) to develop in a sort of evolutionary backwater, without meeting competition from intelligent, non-conscious organisms. But consciousness is an ultimate disadvantage in the struggle for survival, and Watts suggests that it could well be weeded out, even in the future course of our own development. Sociopaths are already half the way to zombiehood; and sociopathy — which allows for competitiveness without the hindrances of empathy, remorse, or self-consciousness — is (as Watts acerbically notes) already being actively selected for, today, in the higher realms of corporate culture. Blindsight is a brilliant, and chilling, thought experiement about the possibilities of non-sentient intelligence, a prospect that is likely to come up for us in the future as a consequence of robotics (and of corporate culture), even if we never actually enounter non-sentient intelligent aliens.

Dennett argues that the possibility of zombies is self-contradictory and incoherent, because its proponents are simultaneously positing a difference (we are conscious, they are not) and positing that this difference is empirically undetectable (in every possible respect, zombies appear to be exactly like us). But then, Dennett doesn’t think much of the existence of interiority and consciousness in the first place. (In this respect, Dennett lines up with Rorty; though I would argue that both of them are misreading Wittgenstein. But that is a matter for a different post). However, Watts is approaching the question from a somewhat different angle. If we take it for granted that consciousness does exist, at least in us — Watts asks — then what evolutionary purpose could it serve, that makes up for its (pragmatic and cognitive) inefficiency? What is our consciousness good for? In suggesting that “we” are conscious, whereas the aliens, vampires, and CEOs of Blindsight are not, Watts poses that the difference between conscious beings and zombies matters, in some sense, and that therefore it is empirically detectable. The difference is extremely subtle, yet it is ultimately apprehensible (at least, it is by we who are conscious).

By the end of the novel, the difference between conscious beings and zombies seems to be that only conscious beings possess aesthetics. The aliens in the novel are a bit like logical positivists: they have no aesthetic sensibility, and find aesthetic and affective statements to be, strictly speaking, meaningless. They can carry on complex conversations, despite not “understanding” what the words mean; but they can only regard non-functional expressions as a sort of spam. In this way, Watts’ Darwinism ends up confirming Kant: the defining attribute of the aesthetic is that it is unavoidably “disinterested,” that its purposiveness of structure serves no actual (empirical or utilitarian) purpose. In other words, an aesthetic sensibility — which at this point we can pretty much equate with consciousness tout court — is not an evolutionary adaptation, but mere nonadaptive byproduct.

And this brings us back to the arguments about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The opponents of the sociobiological approach, like Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould, argued that many important features of our existence are in fact not in themselves adaptive, and only arose as byproducts of other processes. This is why cultural variability matters, and why not all aspects of human existence are biologically fixed, “hardwired,” and “in our genes.” To the contrary, hardcore sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists — like Steven Pinker — argue that nearly every feature of human existence and human nature, to an extremely high degree of specificity, is biologically universal and not culturally variable, because it is directly adaptive (if not for us, then at least for our ancestors in the Pleistocene). Indeed, nearly the only aspect of human life that Pinker will concede to be a mere, nonadaptive byproduct, rather than a “hardwired” trait of evolutionary significance, is precisely… art and aesthetics. Of course, this is just Pinker’s way of saying that art and aesthetics are trivial and of no worth or importance whatsoever. However, I’m inclined to think that Pinker thus expresses, unbeknownst to himself and in inverted form, the Kantian insight that aesthetics is non-utilitarian, non-cognitive, and hence disinterested; which is why aesthetic judgment is the key to any sensibility whatsoever. By equating an aesthetic sensibility with sentience itself, and relegating both to evolutionary dysfunctionality, Watts pushes this line of thought in a startling direction. It sounds fatuous to claim that aesthetics is what makes us “human”; doubtless Watts would reject my turning this assertion into the “theme” of his novel. Nonetheless, this seems to me to be the unavoidable correlate of his radical dystopianism. Consciousness is little more than a fugitive, wavering doubling of what happens (cognitively and affectively) in the depths of our bodies. But in this way, consciousness, aesthetics, and unadaptiveness or dysfunctionality go hand in hand in our species — and this, rather than any supposed goodness or nobility, is what distinguishes and defines human life…

J. G. Ballard‘s new novel, Kingdom Come, is something of a pendant to his preceding novel Millennium People (which I wrote about here). That book was about an abortive “revolution” of the upper middle class; while Kingdom Come tracks a similar process in a somewhat lower social stratum: the inhabitants of “motorway towns,” anonymous suburbs ringing London, but at too great a distance to be really integrated into the life of the city. (Ballard himself, I believe, has long lived in such a suburb). A suburb of this sort, strung out along a motorway, is “a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was an end state of consumerism” (8). The only human need well provided for is parking, which is “well on the way to becoming the British population’s greatest spiritual need” (7).

There is nothing to do in the suburbs except root for the local sports teams, and go shopping at the Metro-Centre, a vast indoor mall whose enormous dome dominates the landscape, and whose central atrium is dominated by three enormous bears who inspire veneration from the shoppers. Everyone’s life is dominated by the twin vicarious activities of consumerism and sports fandom; and there’s a strong synergy between the two, since the Metro-Centre sponsors special sports nights, and organizes its promotions around the matches.

Ballard presents consumerism as an ever-accelerating, positive-feedback cycle. Shopping is immediately satisfying; but once you bring the products home, you feel empty and disappointed. Consumerism thus gives rise to disaffection and boredom. But the only cure for such dissatisfaction is still more shopping. And so the cycle replicates itself, on an ever-expanding scale.

Sports fandom, meanwhile, works as an intensifier. “People don’t know it, but they’re bored out of their minds. Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people’s lives you can be sure they’re bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture” (67). Destruction and violence are just the flip side of accumulation. Where Bataille and Baudrillard seem to imply that excess, expenditure, and violence mark a line of escape from the sterility of bourgeois accumulation, Ballard is far more pessimistic. Expenditure, or potlatch, is really just another part of the same logic.

What, then, do the white, lower-middle-class British suburbanites do, after getting pumped up by an afternoon of shopping, and an evening of rooting for their team? Why, they go out and engage in a racist mob rampage — targeting South Asians and Eastern Europeans — under the cover of that old British standby, football [i.e. soccer] hooliganism. The police basically stand by during these riots, and do nothing. For they, and the politicians who command them, know that such outbursts are, ultimately, useful to the social order. “Secretly, they [the police and the town council] want the Asians and immigrants out… Fewer corner shops, more retail parks, a higher tax yield. Money rules, more housing, more infrastructure contracts. They like the bands playing and the stamping feet — they hide the sound of the cash tills” (169).

In the 1930s, Bataille held out the hope that the violent, convulsive, extravagant expenditure — which he presciently saw as the motor driving fascism — could be turned against itself, detourned for revolutionary ends. From the perspective of the early 21st century, however, such a hope seems naive. Sports and shopping might seem like domesticated (castrated?) versions of violent expenditure, but for that very reason they absorb all possibility and all hope, and therefore cannot be mobilized as tools of liberation.

In short, Ballard tells us, “consumerism creates an appetite that can only be satisfied by fascism” (168). But this is a ‘soft’ fascism, a “new politics” with “no slogans, no messages… no manifestoes, no commitments.” Instead, it is all about “people’s dreams and needs, their hopes and fears,” as these are manifested in the purchase of more commodities (146). A politics of affective modulation — such as Brian Massumi describes — rather than one of (classically fascist) mass hysteria. The crowd of fans and shoppers gives way to its own moods, its own feelings, like “a herd of wildebeest on the African plain” (146), with no predetermined direction, and no need for a Duce or Fuhrer to stir them up.

Actually, there is a figure who works as a catalyst or enabler; he helps to provoke the crowds into motion, by urging them to shop. But instead of being a ranting, charismatic figure with an apocalyptic message, this enabler is a washed-up TV actor turned low-affect cable talk-show host, “a ‘virtual’ man without a real thought in his head” (168), who adds a vague sense of disquiet to his otherwise bland and affable persona.

The narrative, as is often the case in Ballard’s novels, builds to a point of destructive, degenerative implosion. Eventually, fanatical shoppers and boosters take over the Metro Centre, holding hostages to fend off an attack by the police. From that point, everything decays: entropy takes over, rather than any sort of energizing explosion. The revolution, when it comes, is disappointing, and ends up reinforcing the very order against which it was directed. The old gentry of the suburban town despise the lower-middle-class crassness and vulgarity of the mall; but they end up revealed as the instigators, and the beneficiaries (except for those of them who get killed in the blowback), of the very processes they so much deplored.

The entropic ending thoroughly demystifies destruction and excess as (supposed) forms of transcendence. There’s no such thing as transgression in late-capitalist society: “we’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach”; instead, “we worship our barcodes” and rely on advertising to supply us with “cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt” (263).

Kingdom Come has so far only been published in the UK, not the US. And it has gotten mostly negative reviews — even from speculative writers like Ursula LeGuin and M. John Harrison, who ought to know better. The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have. His insights could not be communicated in the form of the artfully structured literary novel. His seeming repetitiveness, his clumsy prosaicness, and his insistence on a kind of pop-culture (so-called) ‘kitsch’ are necessary tools of insight. In a thoroughly Modernist way, his form coincides with his themes; though, as an anatomist of our “postmodern” condition, his forms/themes are such as the classic Modernists could never have imagined.

Shelley Jackson‘s Half Life is a dazzling and amazing book — the first print novel by the author of the hypertext fictions Patchwork Girl and My Body, the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, and the short story “Skin,” which is being tattooed one word at a time on the skin of volunteers (also see here).

Half Life is ostensibly, or overtly, about a pair of conjoined twins, Nora and Blanche Olney, who have separate heads but share a single torso and set of limbs. “Twofers,” as they are known, are common in the world of the novel (which in other respects is naturalistically depicted, and indistinguishable from our own). The twofers born in great numbers ever since the mid-20th century, they seem to be the result of mutations caused by nuclear radiation. (The novel describes the desert of Nevada, where in fact nuclear tests were frequently carried out in the 1950s and afterwards, as the “National Penitence Ground” — in this account, the US Government staged explosions, destroying simulacra of American houses and towns, as expressions of guilt and remorse for Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Twofers or conjoined twins are sufficiently present and visible that they form a distinct minority group, demanding civil rights and proclaiming pride in their identities — San Francisco, in particular, is a haven for twofers, just as it is in actuality for gays and lesbians.

Half Life is narrated (or, more accurately, written, since the process of writing the text we read is itself narrated within that text) by Nora, who feels alienated both from the twofer community, and from “singleton” (i.e. “normal,” unicephalous) society. Her twin, Blanche, has been asleep since childhood (since puberty? this is hinted but not made entirely clear), leaving Nora in sole control of their joint body. But now Blanche shows signs of awakening, and this puts Nora into a panic. She seeks out the shadowy “Unity Foundation,” an illicit organization that apparently offers to cut off one of a twofer’s heads, thereby restoring the body to singleton normativeness. The narrative follows a double track in alternating chapters: on the one hand, Nora’s account of her quest to rid herself once and forever of Blanche; on the other, the story of Nora’s and Blanche’s childhood, from an account of their conception to the traumatic moment when Blanche lapsed into silence.

Nothing quite goes the way we expect; but plot is not really the point of the novel. It is long (437 dense pages) and expansive; and I found it so absorbing that, when I was done, I only wished it were even longer. Despite the outrageous premise, the surfaces of life (both physical and social-cultural) are naturalistically depicted; the streets of San Francisco and London, and (as far as I could tell) the deserts of Nevada are all recognizably rendered, in loving detail. This is not to say, however, that Half Life in any way resembles either mainstream naturalistic fiction, or the sort of “world-building” fantasy that seeks to create an alternative world as rich and consistent as possible. Rather, Jackson creates a text in which ontological distinctions are abolished. There is no opposition here between the real and the fantastic, between actuality and mere possibility, between fact and fiction, or — most important of all — between language as a description of some extralinguistic real, and language as a dense, reflexive medium that performs and produces itself, rather than referring to anything outside itself.

That is to say, the novel is “postmodern” in the quite literal sense (rather than in the more prevalent extended senses of the word “postmodern”) that it doesn’t reject these modernist distinctions, nor take one side of them against the other, but rather subsumes them all into itself, and speaks unresolvable multiplicities with one voice — what Deleuze calls the “univocity” of being. We move, in a single paragraph, from, say, a description of London streets, or of the rocks and sparse vegetation of the desert, to a description of twofer anatomy or psychology, to pure linguistic play, to outright, florid hallucination: and none of these is marked out from the others, they all share the same degree of actuality and presence within the world or body of the text.

Half Life is filled — as indeed Jackson’s earlier writings were also — with such peculiar objects as dolls and dollhouses, automatons, prosthetic limbs (including prosthetic heads!), and “medical curiosities” and “freaks of nature” (like the two-headed animals and deformed fetuses on display in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, described at great length in the novel). But there is really nothing “perverse” or willfully weird and shocking (a la the “freak show” films and documentaries which seem almost timelessly popular) about all these — I hesitate even to call them obsessions on the author’s part. Because Jackson so powerfully suggests that these strange objects are not exceptions to some pre-assumed “normality,” so much as they are themselves constitutive of what we blindly take for granted as “normal.” The uncanny strangeness of dolls and automata and freaks — and, in Half Life, of twofers themselves — comes not from their being exceptional, or alien to “us” (however we use the category of we/us), but precisely from being so intimately close and recognizable to “us” — they cause the recognition that the “normal” singleton state — or the state of being heterosexual, or male, or white, or whatever else is socially dominant and thought of, by those who fit into these categories, as “normal” — is itself as much a contingency, as arbitrary and “accidental,” as inessential, as the “freaks” themselves are, or as anything else. Hierarchy unravels, not only in language (which we post-deconstructionists know to be slippery and unreliable), but in the depths of the body, in “nature,” as well.

Part of the novel’s univocity is that it theorizes its own allegories and metaphors, without these theoretical suggestions being anything like a master key to the rest of the book — the theories are on the same level as the narrated events and bodies and languages that they theorize. There is much about “transitional objects” (a psychoanalytic term originally from Winnicott — 136) that mediate the exchanges between Self and Other, or Self and World, and whose very presence ought to remind us that Self/Other or Self/World are not resolutely opposed categories, but ones that have overlaps and very leaky boundaries. Half Life also plays at great length with a quasi-poststructuralist theory based on Venn diagrams (those pictures of two overlapping circles, in which the logical relations between two realms — exclusion, inclusion, union, separation — or, the logical operators NOT, OR, AND, and XOR (exclusive or) — are mapped out. The diagrams represent the relation between the two individuals (or the two heads) of a twofer; but we are told repeatedly that such multiplicities — disunities of the self, or overlapping selves and others — are basic to all selves, those of singletons (with or without twins, with or without sibilings) as much as they are to those of conjoined twins.

In this way, Half Life‘s conjoined twins, and specifically the narrator(s) Nora and Blanche, are metaphors for selfhood or subjectivity in general — which is never unified but always sundered, and which is always somewhat fictive, but never able to be definitively discarded. “A cleft passes through the center of things, things that do not exist except in their twinship. That cleft is what we sometimes call I. It has no more substance than the slash between either and or” (433). The slash, the cleft, is barely there; but it is a material presence nonetheless, albeit a rather minimal one. This slash or cleft is something that happens in language, Jackson (or Nora) says, in the doubleness, or the gap, between actual events and their telling. But it is also something that happens in the body, in the foldings of our flesh and viscera, and in the detours and delays of chemical-electrical signals coursing through our neurons. (The subject-as-gap, located in language, sounds rather Lacanian. But this gap is also something physical and visceral, a material barrier and membrane, a physical experience and limit, rather than a “lack”).

Another way to put this is to say that, for Jackson, language and body are two sides of the same thing (two sides of a Moebius strip?). The pleasure of reading Half Life comes largely from its playful and extravagant language — a writing that couldn’t be further removed from naturalism. In a blurb on the rear jacket of the book, Jonathan Lethem (rightly) praises Jackson’s “Nabakovian verbal fireworks”; but in fact, her prose reminded me as much of Lewis Carroll as it did of Nabokov. There’s a Carrollian air of gleefully demented logic running throughout, alongside a very modernist/postmodernist metaphorical extravagance. The book is actually quite hilarious, page by page — even as its subject matter mostly involves morbidity, alienation, and a certain inexpugnable sadness.

It is important to note, therefore, that Jackson’s prose style is not just self-referential; her metaphors are not just metaphors; even as Nora and Blanche, or conjoined twins more generally, are not just metaphors for (singleton) subjectivity and self-consciousness. For Half Life determinedly literalizes its own lingustic and conceptual extravagances (“literalizes” is not quite the right word, but I cannot think of a better one). Its metaphors and its characters and its situations have to be taken as absolutely given, in the same way as the cleft of subjectivity has to be taken as something inscribed in the body, and not just in language. (“Not just” is again a wording that isn’t quite right; because language also has/is a body). And the novel’s conceptions and conceits are as powerful as they are because they also and simultaneously work on an affective level — this is the odd mixture (though “mixture” is once again not quite the right word, because it implies the combination of previously independent elements, whereas here the elements do not and cannot exist independently of their combination) — the mixture of gleefulness and melancholy that I have already mentioned. And also a mixture (with the same reservation about the word) of full-fledged delirium with a kind of reserve or detachment, a simultaneous participation and extreme distance. Half Life is all at once a mind-blowing derangement of the senses, and a cool display of carefully calibrated literary pyrotechnics. I can only describe the affective impact of the novel (which is also its style) in the terms of these inextricable pairs of gleefulness/melancholy and delirium/cool-detachment.

For all these reasons, I don’t find it in the least disappointing that Jackson has moved from “new media” like hypertext (and bodily inscription, for that matter) to the older (or supposedly “more conventional) medium of the novel. I don’t see this as in any way a “retreat,” but rather as another way to explore the same ramifying conjunction of flesh and language, or of desire and disappointment, or of connectedness and singularity, that has always been Jackson’s subject.

Julian Dibbell‘s Play Money, Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot is his account of a year spent, not just on the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) Ultima Online, but actually trying to make a living buying and selling Ultima Online artifacts on sites like eBay, for “real” US dollars. Dibbell endeavors to earn as much money through virtual artifact-trading as he ever did as a freelance journalist (which is his regular day job); and, though he doesn’t quite succeed, he does enter and explore a shadowy world, having to do with money and commerce, and blurring the lines between virtual and actual, reality and fantasy. Working in these markets is as strange an experience as anything he could have encountered purely online, in Ultima or elsewhere.

Play Money is something of a sequel to Dibbell’s earlier book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, which recounted his time spent, in the mid-1990s, in LambdaMOO, a text-based virtual world. (I discussed that earlier book briefly here). The difference between the two books speaks profoundly to how our experiences of “virtual reality” have changed over the last decade or so.

Much of the difference between the two books is encapsulated in their very different subtitles. Dibbell has moved from “crime and passion” to money-making schemes. My Tiny Life is mostly about what it felt like to live in a virtual, online environment, at a time when not many people had ever done so. The book has its roots in Dibbell’s celebrated 1993 Village Voice article, “A Rape in Cyberspace”, which was revised to become the book’s first chapter. This article recounted an incident on LambdaMOO in which one of the players hacked the system in such a way as to control the actions of other characters, so as to subject them to various sexual indignities. My Tiny Life went on to narrate the aftermath of the incident: how the virtual crime was sanctioned by a virtual punishment, the banishment of the offender from LambdaMOO; and further, how the whole order of things on the MOO was turned upside down, and something like an experiment in virtual democracy was born. Dibbell explored the rich texture of life on the MOO in the years following the incident. He described the social, sexual, and aesthetic aspects of virtual life, its often intense satisfactions and equally insistent annoyances. He raised questions about how virtual identities and virtual experiences related to physical ones, and about the gender fluidity, multiplication of identities, and strange emotional intensities that seemed to characterize life in cyberspace. Above all, he sought to persuade his readers — many of whom might have never experienced it first-hand — that a life lived as a made-up persona in a world composed only of bits and texts was nonetheless “real” in any way that really mattered: in terms of time and interest, emotional experience, relationships with other people, creativity, and even a sort of physical engagement.

Play Money, on the other hand, comes at a time when immersion in the Internet — whether in the form of game-playing on MMORPGs and on networked servers, or in the forms of email, chat rooms, P2P filesharing networks, blogs, social networking sites like myspace.com, and personal media distribution sites like youtube.com — has become a commonplace for most of the population of the United States and other industrialized countries. It is no longer a question of convincing people that an online, virtual “life” is “real,” as of tracing the ways that the “virtual” aspects of our lives intersect with other aspects. Today, there is basically a continuity between physical contact, contact over the telephone, and contact online — it no longer makes sense to oppose one of these to the others, as Rl (“real life”) used to be opposed to VR (“virtual reality”). It no stranger that people should spend much of their leisure time slaying dragons and making artifacts on Ultima Online, than it is that they should spend their leisure time going to baseball games, or watching DVDs, or knitting sweaters; and indeed, all these other activities increasingly have online components as well. So it’s not surprising that, in his new book, Dibbell writes about how an online virtual world intersects with the rest of his life, rather than how that online world is a self-enclosed place of its own.

Play Money is about the trade in virtual artifacts. The economist Edward Castronova has written about how MMORPGs have virtual economies that, translated into “real world” dollar terms, are larger than those of many developing nations. People spend much of their time in Ultima Online, and other such worlds, making virtual artifacts, like houses to live in, armor to fight better, objects that allow one to cast spells, and so on. These artifacts can be made by doing a lot of pointing and clicking. Sometimes it is purely mechanical, other times it involves real creativity (writing, or programming, new features that appear in the game’s visuals, and that have actual effects on character behavior). Within the game, these artifacts can be bought and sold for virtual gold. (You can also earn virtual gold by doing such repetitive tasks as killing monsters for a bounty). Ultima Online thus has a virtual or simulated economy, arising (as mercantile and capitalist economies do in the ‘real world’) as a result of scarcity.

But why is there scarcity in Ultima Online? The answer is, that it is programmed in. In My Tiny Life, Dibbell had already written about the “economy” of LambdaMOO. Since this virtual world ran on a single server, hard-drive space was necessarily limited. Each player was given a certain number of bits: you could use these to program, or to make virtual objects and spaces. If you wanted more hard drive space than was allocated to you, you had to present your plans to a democratically-elected review board, which decided who would get the scarce additional quota. LambdaMOO thus had a non-market, socially administered “economy” of sorts.

Ultima Online and other MMORPGs run on multiple servers, profitably funded by the players’ monthly account fees; so this sort of scarcity doesn’t need to exist. And online, as many theorists have noted, “information” is plenteous and (aside from the scarcity enforced by copyrights and the like) nearly free, because — once the system is in place — the marginal cost of generating and reproducing additional information is vanishingly small. Nonetheless, Dibbell suggests, people enjoy scarcity, enjoy the experience of struggling to overcome constraints. Online games in which anything was possible haven’t done very well. But lots of people will pay to be stimulated by the challenges of scarcity in games. “In an atmosphere of oxygen, our bodies learned to breathe; in a world of scarcity, the soul might just as likely learn to need the universal obstacle to its desires” (43). I always think of this as the Captain Kirk principle: again and again, the Enterprise comes upon what seems to be a utopian world, a world of effortless play. But Kirk always ends up destroying these worlds — in direct violation of the Prime Directive — for the worlds’ peoples own good. Since if they don’t have obstacles, if they don’t have something to strive for, they are decadent and ultimately doomed. This is the anti-utopian side of MMORPGs (in contrast to the utopianism that suffused places like LambdaMOO in its glory days, over a decade ago). There’s something weirdly perverse about all this, as Dibbell freely admits. But perversity, of course, is itself endlessly fascinating, as so-called “normality” is not.

Anyway. So scarcity is built into worlds like Ultima Online. And people willingly do a lot of what might be thought of as work — even though it is taking place voluntarily, inside a game — in order to increase their virtual wealth within the game, to have a nicer house, a more prestigious social position, cooler or more aesthetically pleasing artifacts. But what’s more — and this is really where Dibbell’s own experiences come in — there’s a spillover between the play (or simulated) economy of the game, and real-world money and economics. If you want a nice mansion in Ultima Online, but don’t have the patience to spend 800 hours of game-playing time killing monsters in order to accumulate enough virtual cash to be able to afford to buy and furnish the mansion, you can take a shortcut and buy the mansion in eBay with real US money. Thus, as Castronova explains, you can calculate an exchange rate between Ultima Online’s virtual money and real-world currencies; most of the stuff never gets sold off-world, but you can calculate its value all the same, which is how Castronova compares the virtual economies of MMORPGs to the actual economies of developing nations.

Pursuing this thread of virtual economies, Dibbell uncovers a strange world of mercantile activity related to Ultima Online and other MMORPGs. There are brokers who make a living by acting as middlemen, buying and selling Ultima Online artifacts on eBay, and pocketing the difference. There are “gold farmers” who discover loopholes in the virtual world’s programming, which allow them to produce virtually valuable articles easily; they run bots to perform the repetitive tasks necessary, exchange the virtual goods thus produced for virtual gold; and sell the virtual gold on eBay and other sites for actual US currency. There are even, apparently, entrepreneurs who set up virtual sweatshops: hiring workers in developing countries like Mexico and China to play the games eight to twelve hours a day, making virtual artifacts or earning virtual gold; the entrepreneurs pocket the difference between the (real currency) wages they pay and the (real currency) money they get for selling the virtual artifacts and gold outside the game. This last scenario is one that Dibbell spends the entire book trying to track down; he hears tantalizing reports and rumors, but is never able to verify it; finally the New York Times reports it as fact. It’s a mind-blowing scenario, really; it involves a process of production, and an extraction of surplus value, that is entirely based on virtual activity; and it suggests that leisure and play, as well as work — or more precisely leisure-as-work — can itself be exported to the Third World by corporations seeking to maximize profit.

Most of Play Money is mostly autobiographical, as Dibbell adopts the purchase and sale of virtual artifacts as his full-time profession. There’s something gripping in his narrative of profit and loss, of economic ups and downs, of profitable coups he made, and of the ones that got away. My Tiny Life was all about community and social life online. But in Play Money, as Dibbell gets more involved in these economic pursuits, he increasingly loses interest in the social, community, and networking aspects of life in Ultima Online, and indeed in the Dungeons-and-Dragons-like gaming aspects as well: “as I invested myself more and more in the economy of UO players, I could feel myself drifting further and further from their community”; he is no longer interested in “the dungeon quests, the crafting trades, the big houses and the little chunks of fame that came with owning one”; all he is interested in is the money (149).

But interwoven with the personal narrative, Dibbell offers a number of provocative theoretical asides on the relation of work to play, of the real to the virtual, and of money to the activities it makes possible, and for which it substitutes. He eventually suggests that we are entering an era of “ludocapitalism,” in which work and play merge, and Weber’s “iron cage” of the capitalist economy’s “meaningless hyperefficiency” gives way to an economy based on “contriving meaningful activity… through the mechanisms of play” (298-299). This is a prospect that I find considerably more disturbing than Dibbell does — though I cannot give good reasons for explaining why I am disturbed without lapsing into a sort of Adornoesque melancholic moralizing.

Dibbell demonstrates convincingly, in any case, just how real the virtual economy — or play economy — actually is. Of course, from a global perspective, corporations and individual entrepreneurs or arbitragers who make money from the commercial activities surrounding MMORPGs are pretty small-potatoes. But the world economy of “casino capitalism” is increasingly driven by virtual wealth, by speculation in things like derivatives, the money value of trades in which exceeds by several orders of magnitude the value of the world’s physical economic production. Such money is entirely virtual — there is way too much of it to be used in purchasing physical goods or investing in physical production — yet it has powerful effects on “real” economic conditions, as trade in derivatives can easily crash whole economies, and relegate millions of people to very real misery, through a short series of nearly instantaneous computer-mediated transactions. Something further may follow of this masquerade.

Cormac McCarthy has a new novel coming out on Septemer 26: The Road. It sounds pretty science-fictional to me: “Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a ‘long shear of light and then a series of low concussions’ that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea.”

And then, Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out on December 5: Against the Day. “Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.” And it’s nearly a thousand pages long.

Two of my favorite living authors coming out with major works; I can’t wait.

Alexander Galloway‘s new book, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, has recently been published. And McKenzie Wark has made his forthcoming book, Gamer Theory (or, rather, GAM3R 7H30RY), available on the Web. These books are quite different from one another, but both provide considerable insight on the subject of video games or computer games. Both rightly regard these games as the major media form of the early 21st century, playing the role for us today that film and television did for most of the 20th century. I will comment about Galloway’s book here, and Wark’s in a subsequent post.

Gaming is a useful and thoughtful investigation of some of the formal properties and political possibilities of computer games. His five chapters are pretty much separate essays. “Gamic Action, Four Moments” presents a typology of the kinds of activities that take place in computer games; such activities can be initiated either by the “operator” (i.e. the person playing the game) or by the machine itself; and these activities can be either diegetic or not. (“Diegetic is a term taken from film theory; it refers to the parts of the movie that are parts of the actual action; i.e., something we see a character do is diegetic, but the theme music playing while she does it is nondiegetic, since the character doesn’t hear this music, only we do. Similarly, in a first-person shooter game, firing a gun and killing a monster is diegetic, but the readout of the player’s points, energy level, etc., is nondiegetic). This first chapter is useful simply on formal grounds, because it gives us a more precise vocabulary for talking about what actually happens in various games. It also begins to explore some of the deeper issues Galloway is interested in; particularly the import of “play” as a human activity, and the question of what it means to be in a space governed by algorithms and the programmatic reduction of ambiguity.

The second chapter, “Origins of the First-Person Shooter,” considers the history of the “subjective shot” in film — the shot taken directly from through the eyes of a character — and follows the mutation of this unusual sort of shot into the predominant point of view of shooter games like Doom. In film, it is quite common to see things from a particular character’s point of view (POV); but this shot is usually not literally equated with what the character sees with his/her own eyes. Rather, we are “sutured” into the character’s POV precisely by seeing the character’s act of seeing, together with what he/she sees. We look from over the character’s shoulder, for instance, or we have a cut between a shot of the character looking, and a shot of what he/she sees. Actual subjective shots, on the other hand, are quite rare. They often seem awkward, and fail to get the audience to identify with the character through whose eyes we are seeing. A classic example is Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1946): nearly the whole film is shot through the eyes of Philip Marlowe, and the effect is weirdly (and unintentionally) alienating. Probably because they seem alienating or unnatural, subjective shots were often used in the 1970s and 1980s to give us the POV of the monster in horror films (like the shark in Spielberg’s Jaws, and the killer in the Halloween films). And Galloway points out how these shots have also been used to signify machinic, robotic, or otherwise inhuman vision: as in the Terminator and Robocop films. But if these shots are alienating in the cinema, why are they so successful in first person shooter computer games? Galloway suggests that this is because computer games involve active movement through space (whereas films are more about the passive contemplation of space, or — a la Josef von Sternberg — of patterns of light). Gamespace must be “fully rendered, actionable space” (63); the operator/player must be able to roam through this space at will (as is never the case in film, where the camera angles and shots are all determined in advance). This gamic sense of active space makes montage superfluous (64), and instead demands full freedom of movement. So the subjective shot works in games, as it does not in films, because the gamer is active in ways that the cinematic spectator cannot be. All in all, I found this chapter powerful and persuasive from my own point of view, or subjective stake, as a film scholar (but as someone who is determined not to see film as the be-all and end-all of media evolution).

The third chapter, “Social Realism,” and the fourth, “Allegories of Control,” go more deeply into the political consequences of computer games’ formal properties. In the former, Galloway considers the various senses in which computer games might (or might not) be thought of as “realistic.” He tries to shift the emphasis away from mere representational naturalism (that the world of the game looks, as much as possible, like the “real world”) and towards the more interesting questions of how games might intervene in social reality, or relate to the outside-the-game experiences of the people who play them — how they might have “a special congruence between the social reality depicted in the game and the social reality known and lived by the player” (83). This leads, on the one hand, to further questioning of the concept of “play,” and on the other, to a consideration of games and war. Though “play” is supposed to be, by definition, apart from the “serious” business of living in the world, in fact, “with the growing significance of immaterial labor, and the concomitant increase in cultivation and exploitation of play… as a productive force, play will become more and more linked to broad social structures of control” (76). War, similarly, has become progressively more entwined with gaming: from the presentation of bombing raids as being like video games in the First Gulf War, to the promotion today of games like America’s Army as recruitment tools for the actual US Army. In both these ways, the question of “realism” in games is tied up with the question of action: of what actions players can take in the games, and how these resonate with actions we are allowed or incited to do in the real world.

“Social Realism” is really just a preparation for the larger arguments of the fourth chapter, “Allegories of Control.” Here Galloway points up the insufficiency and lameness of content criticism of games (e.g. that they are too violent, misogynistic, Western-centered, etc.), and points up the need instead for a more system- and media-based (I am inclined to say McLuhanist, though Galloway himself does not say this) form of critique. The real limitations of a game like Civilization reside less in its dubious, ethnocentric assumptions about world history, than in the way in which, precisely, Civilization embodies “the logic of informatic control itself” (101). What’s crucial is not the particular content, but the basic algorithmic logic of computer games, the way that they reduce everything to quantifiable bits of “information.” It is in this formal dimension that computer games not only reflect, but actively participate in, what David Harvey calls the regime of “flexible accumulation,” and what Deleuze calls the “control society.” Gameplay promises freedom, at least imaginatively and allegorically — that is to say, at least in “play” — to the gamer; but at the same time it reproduces the very structures of domination that are becoming increasingly prevalent in postmodern, or “late” capitalist, society. “A game’s celebration of the end of ideological manipulation is also a new manipulation, only this time using wholly different diagrams of command and control” (106).

Galloway’s final chapter, “Countergaming,” describes the (would-be) subversive strategies of net artists who have made works that try to mess with, or actively subvert and critique, the formal structures and political implications of mainstream games. He compares the work of JODI and other “countergaming” artists to the “countercinema” of Godard and others in the 1960s. His account of these artists, and their work, is detailed and sympathetic, but he concludes (rightly in my estimation) that they do not succeed in their subversive mission, either aesthetically or politically. Works by JODI, for instance, mimic the look and feel of games, but frustrate the gameplayer’s expectations, because progression through the game becomes impossible; instead, you get simulations of crashes and breakdowns and random output on the screen. But this means that “countergaming is essentially progressive in visual form but reactionary in actional form” — and in games, actional form is the most important thing. “It serves to hinder gameplay, not advance it. It eclipses the game as a game and rewrites it as a sort of primitive animation lacking any of the virtues of game design” (125). Galloway concludes, therefore, that JODI is no Godard, and that countergaming is still “an unrealized project” (126). I find this harsh conclusion both sobering and extremely important. Computer games are a relatively new medium; and we still do not really know what they can do, or what we can do with them or to them. When it comes to creative resistance, or radical re-creation, we still haven’t caught up with them.

Galloway’s own book, I think, itself participates in the very dilemma it describes. Galloway declares in his Preface that “this book is about loving video games. It’s about exploring their artistry, their political possibility, their uniqueness” (xii). And clearly his lucid and powerful formulations could only have come from somebody who has spent a lot of time with video games, who has lived them and loved them, who has experienced them from the inside. Yet ultimately Gaming testifies to a kind of blockage, and failure of imagination — not on Galloway’s part so much as on that of all of us. For the book points to a political deadlock — the ubiquity of the new systems of control — and to the inability of gamers (of players, designers, artists, and activists) thus far to oppose, to work through and work out of, these systems of control. Galloway powerfully describes some of the parameters of the new media environment in which we (even those of us who don’t play computer games) find ourselves living today. But he also testifies to our continuing inability to think — or to act — with it, through it, and around it.