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Preliminary Materials for a Critical Theory of the Player

Continuing some exploration into post-modern pastiches on critical e-theory. Fair warning: this one’s a bit bleak. And only has a few weird pictures.

On the other hand, here’s a really nice song to listen to:
La Vie Dansante




— I did love you once.
Hamlet






CONTEXT




Under the hypnotic gaze of official pacification, beneath the e-wars, another realer war rumbles. A war that one can’t really say is caused simply by economic inequality. Nor is its cause only social or humanitarian, as it encompasses a totality.

Even though each player well knows that their existence tends to become a zone of battle where nerves, phobias, nightmares, depressions and anxieties constantly advance and retreat, no one can clearly say if these originate in the body, or in the game, or elsewhere. Paradoxically, it is the overall character of this war, totalizing no less in its its everyday methods than in its apparent goals, which cloaks it in a sense of invisibility.

The playing-out of this war in everyday-life-ways, that is, whether it is in some sense, even a play-sense, waged ’for the Empire’, or one is engaged due to being drafted into it or simply having drifted into it out of boredom, it reveals its origins and its own self-corrections as we follow its main story-lines and watch the spectacle unfold as it tries to explain its own desires, rolling along to a jingle written by the monopolized bio-politics of an all-encompassing pharmaceutical-spectacular industrial complex, in a context where contention raised by any sort of ‘deviance’ is quickly countered by an army of psychiatrists, life-coaches, and other well-meaning ‘facilitators’ whose aesthetic-policing aims to control all biological determinations, first of all by means of never-ceasing imperative surveillance and ‘serious’ reproaches, and when that fails, by a stern and proscriptive ‘polling’ against ‘violence’ (meaning any questioning of the superstructure), all wrapped up in a techno-anthropological project created by the Empire for the Empire.

All of this is founded on a preset model of profiling the citizenry.

The citizen-players are less the vanquished in this war than those who, regardless of their individual realities, are rendered as an emblem, that is to say, who are left in the guise of an ‘existence’ rather than a life, an emblematic existence or model profile that can be rendered compatible with the aims and needs of the Empire, which in these days can only be an Empire of Dirt.

To breathe together — to con-spire — becomes an affair. To be passionate is to risk being perceived as promoting a criminal voice. There is an anarchist slogan that with a double irony mocks exactly this type of pre-set conditioning and its false consumerist remedy of identitarian liberalism: “Be Gay! Do Crimes!”

The imperial war strategy consists of organizing thought-patterns, inculcated by advertising, absurd nationalist political slogans, and reinforced with drugs, regarding the acceptable forms-of-life. This is the illiteracy of white privilege, for example, which relies on the psychiatric rendering of a barely-recognizable war-front which in the most critical times can be relied on to make over into a real war for waging all sorts of false conflicts in the interests of the filthy-rich oligarchs.

I am not telling you anything you don’t already know or feel. My sketch today is not so much to try to trace the reification of the Player as to seek out the the interesting hidden corners within the fractalized formation of playerdom. And there to look for the armaments for waging that kind of hand-to-hand battle, blow for blow, on a ground of our own choosing, where one might win a few rounds against the generalized ruse.



THE PLAYER as PHENOMENON



The player assumes some authenticity because it is all make-up. A masculine player is a paradox in that he is product of a kind of alienation by contagion, in much the same social position as young girls in nearly all non-revolutionary post-industrial societies. We can observe that the mythic feminine player appears as the incarnation of a certain type of imaginary alienated male, and that the alienation of this incarnation is itself nothing but imaginary. And in the end, it is obvious that there is an ironic epilogue wherein the virtualized “male sex” is both victim and object of his own alienated desire.

Not for nothing, people commonly assert that players incarnate a plenitude of improper existence, promoting a character consisting mainly of braggadocio, curiosity and equivocation. The player knows so well the value of things, but is good neither at consuming, nor at working, nor at providing. At the end of the day the player believes in nothing but self-regeneration.

The Spectacle insists that gamers must at some point become ‘real men’. In this dialogue, obviously, it is the players to whom the imperial machine is talking, and the becoming that it is calling them to, its ironic prediction, is only to engage in the cybernetic enslavement of the cubicle, of the work project, using the boss’s device, rather than of the play project over there in the corner or on your favorite device. It is ironic because this too is a game. Adolescence is a recently-created consumer category aimed at the market exigencies of global capital. The player is not simply unhappy, or a sullen teen, or unwilling to ‘work’: he is unhappy about being unhappy.

The mother and the whore are equally present in the character of the player. But the one is commendable only to the extent that the other is blamable for all troubles. Over time, a curious reversal of one into the other is observable and understandable. Players are fascinated by all of the things that make an impact on their selves, whether that’s a mechanical self-sufficiency or the discovery of the joys of indifference to the opinions of others. This becomes nourishing. It is Foucault’s pendulum.

Love between players is a kind of autism-in-pairs. What is called virility is only male infantilism, and femininity the infantilization of females. Perhaps eventually it will be possible to speak of a virility and of a femininity based on the totally voluntary acquisition of an identity, as in Bogdanov’s pioneering sci-fi. In the meantime, ‘good looks’ and ‘proper behavior’ are important primarily because advertising departments and administrative personnel attach supreme importance to being agreeable. In the irreproachably affective impermeability of it, in the extreme rationality that the players impose upon their sentimental e-life, in this carefully-placed step, so spontaneously military in essence (consider the manner in which a kiss takes place in this forum), there is the tenderest playing of a note, that sentimental touch upon the computer keyboard. But it is no different, also in essence, from washing a car.

The players mute themselves within a voluntary vocabulary of forgetfulness of Being, no less so than a self-blinding to the arrival of an Event. The player resembles his avatar. His appearance is his essence: the perfectly silenced and predictable mime, absolutely neutralized. The player is generated as a product, as the primary uncorking of the formidable crisis of modern capitalism, which in fact has no use for the player except as some ephemeral bubbly in its unlimited process of valorization that occurs when the process of accumulation itself has reached its fatal limit, and we are awaiting the extinction of the planet, an ecological catastrophe, or a social implosion.

The ‘love’ of the players, for the game, for each other, is just a word in the dictionary. The eternal recurrence of the same modes suffices to convince them; they are playing with nothing but appearances, and these appearances are playing with them. The means, the fashion of being a player is to be nothing. The player does not speak to power. On the contrary, the player is spoken to by the Spectacle.

The player is the spirit of resentment which smiles, the living and continuous introjection of all repressions. The ‘self’ of a player is cut out of a magazine. The player doesn’t give a shit about being free, as long as he is happy. The ‘beauty’ of a player is never particular or unique; it never really belongs to the player herself or himself. On the contrary it always a beauty, a handsomeness, a desirable quality without actual content, free from any personality, a pure and fantastical objectivity.

The modeled, molded player offers the example par excellence of the metropolitan ethos of the Empire, a refrigerated conscience living in exile within a virtualized, plasticine body.




THE MECHANISM of PLAYER as SELF



The virtual body of the player is his or her world and his or her prison. The e-physiology of the player is the ever-so-slow-moving glacial offensive of a bad substantiality. The player desires the player. The player is the ideal player. The tautological nature of the being of the players leads them to consider that there is no alternative, only an ideal representation of player-ness.

The player has a sexuality to the exact measure that all sensuality is estranged from him or her. A player’s butt suffices as the sole foundation of sentiments within an incommunicable singularity.

It’s quite a bitter presentation of “youth” which the Spectacle molds for the gratification of the players because this “youth” is always presented as something to be lost. Between the player and the world there is a locked glass show-case. Nothing touches the player and the player touches nothing. The players are their own jailers, imprisoned in virtual bodies made with the signs of a language constructed for corpses.

The player cannot love, only love for herself or himself to love.

The player sits next to a point of view that sees the passage of time, but it is a point of view that incarnates itself, not the player.




THE PLAYER as a POLITICAL DEVICE




Most distinctly, but not fundamentally, given all the other kinds of merchandising, the game player constitutes a device for offensive neutralization. How capitalism is able to mobilize effects, to molecularize its power to colonize sentiments and emotions, can be seen in how the players offer themselves as relays for this mechanism.

Seduction is the opium of the masses. It is the liberty of world without liberty, the joy of a world without joy. The terrifying example, mostly in the past, of a few liberated women and men has sufficed to convince power of the necessity to dominate all opportunities for conjuring up the total liberation of women and men. The player is advanced as a living engine directed by and directing itself for the Spectacle. The player represents elementary individualistic bio-politics, with no history, with no desire for a history.

The arch-revisionist and capitalist-roader Deng Xioping put it as succinctly as possible: “We must instruct the Propaganda Organs to only briefly sketch out a history of the Great Cultural Revolution, so that people won’t try to cause trouble again.” Mass consumption is the ideal form for containing the modern menagerie, where even a specialized worker is less desirable to power than a life-style entrepreneur.

“Liberty does not exist,” is what they want the player to say, on his way into the pharmacy, feeling that he wants to be “independent”, which is to say, in his spirit, dependent only on himself.

The player is the central article for constructing a culture of unlimited, permissive consumption to benefit the hobbies of the market-mentality. The symbolic privileges that the Spectacle accords to the players turns them into active counter-parties in a contract for the absorption and diffusion of ephemeral codes, supposed new ways of working, of a general semiology in which one is obliged to be politically inoffensive and one’s free time is contributed to the ‘progress’ of the social organization of work. The player is an ambient agent for the dictatorial gestation of the hobbies of the oligarchs.




THE PLAYER as a MACHINE FOR WAR




The frozen smile of the player always reflects the existence of a colonial penitentiary. The player knows no other legitimacy than that of the Spectacle. His or her submission to the impersonality of the Spectacle gives him or her the right to expect submission from others.

Everything that succeeds in neutralizing a player prepares his place in the world as an accessory. The seduction is itself a war. Players form the infantry troops in the occupation of invisibility, the battlements of an actual dictatorship of appearances. The violence of the player is in proportion to his degree of fragile vacuity. It should be noted that for a deeply committed player capitalism has already learned how to exercise its hegemony over the totality of his or her social life.

It is precisely because the player configures a total acculturation of self, because he defines himself in the fixed terms defined by a stranger, that player constitutes the most advanced form of a spectacularized ethos, and embodies the Empire’s abstract norms of comportment. The normal vocabulary of player is that of Total Mobilization. The players don’t love war; they create it.

As is appropriate to a symbolic hegemony, the players tends to condemn as barbarism any physical violence aimed against their ambition for a total pacification of society. They willingly participate in the obsessive domination by security forces.



THE PLAYER as COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY



Game players privatize all that they apprehend. So, for them, a philosophy is not a philosophy, but an extravagant erotic object. At the same time, for them, a revolutionary is not a revolutionary, but a fantastic jewel.

The player is a constructed identity of consumption, a device for maintaining order, a producer of sophistical merchandise, a propagator of un-edited spectacular codes, a vanguard of alienation, and, also, a distraction.

When players talk of community, they are using the last resort available in this space, within the context of life as a whole, to make it seem human and real, they think. But it is never a determined and meaningful community, always and necessarily an exclusive one. Players are the privileged vehicle of social-market Darwinism. The agitation for ‘activity’ is given a sense of participation, of the most generic and meaningless type, which only reproduces this same space. Players are the incarnation of the Spectacle.

The “youth” of the players only designates a certain entitlement regarding the negation of finitude, as if the lazy butts of the players represented a global village.

When a player talks about “peace” and of “goodwill”, the face of the player is that of death. It is not only a negativity of the spirit, but an inherent inertness. Players entirely recreate in human form the mechanisms for managing captured fish. At the front of the line is this utterly cute calligraphy: “Solitude”.

The player swims in the apnea of immanence.







Un-related bonus link:
Peking Review, Sept. 13, 1968 “Hail Establishment of Revolutionary Committees…”