by Rob Gallagher
I ran into an old schoolmate the other day who, it transpires, is now part of a breakaway Islamic sect based in Norwich, and is working to reinstate gold and silver coin in an attempt to throw a spanner in the works of the usurious Masonic/Jewish conspiracy that is paper money. Fascinated (if perturbed), I tried various ways of drawing him out while demonstrating what an enlightened guy I am: adopting a Derridean approach, I asked whether gold’s got, like, any inherent value; taking a feminist tack, I engaged him in a whole “so… women: fully human?” discussion; raising an eyebrow, I enquired as to whether he’d entertained the possibility that people, for the most part, weren’t the dupes of a hegemonic conspiracy but, just, like, fancied a bit more money, a bit more pleasure, a bit less guilt and responsibility than they had?
A good anti-humanist, I resisted the urge to read familiar traits or expressions as evidence of the ‘real’ person peeping out from under the programming. He, in turn, was very personable despite my parlous situation soulwise. Each of us was polite if slightly patronising, and we found we both had beef with consumerism and social atomism and our era’s ideological rudderlessness. He’d obviously been working out, and explicitly and repeatedly referred to his project of becoming a man - wise, strong, multi-spoused, the emir of his own household. He’d follow this sort of statement of intent with little under-the-breath Arabic formulae, presumably like when my mum’s mum’s Catholic mum would put ‘D.V.’ (Deo Volente – God willing) after such statements in letters. Tariqah Islam had given him discipline.
The encounter kind of shook me up, as did belatedly hearing, around the same time, about the death of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, godmother of queer theory and author of classics like ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ Sedgwick’s stuff falls nicely under the rubric of ‘discipline,’ both because of her early preoccupation with performativity (the rules governing how we ‘do’ identity) and her concern, towards the end of her writing career, with paranoid modes of understanding – something she associates with conspiracy theorists (hello there, godly schoolmate) but also with avowedly ‘interdisciplinary’ cultural theorists (hello there, me getting all pseudo-academic on my godly schoolmate). If my mate’s now trained to pin everything on infidels and Masons and Jews,* my own education has taught me to see phallogocentricism and liberal humanism and the machinations of Power and capital etc. wherever I turn. And while I’d like to think my finger-pointing tends to be a little less rabidly ignorant, there’s definitely a case to be made that we’re both being paranoid, employing handy but ultimately insufficient systems for understanding the world ‘really’ works.
- Bentham’s paranoia-inducing panoptical prison, bygone Tariqah bigwig Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, Eddo Stern’s ‘Waco Resurrection’
Sedgwick’s been central to my recent thinking about videogames. Because they train you to succeed at playing them** games are peculiarly well-suited to tackling control, obedience, indoctrination and detection – i.e. all the stuff Michel Foucault harps on in Discipline and Punish, the compelling but problematically reductive text (rough synopsis: society’s a prison and we’re all marionettes subject to the sway of impersonal and inexorable forces) which is still a cornerstone of the academic culture Sedgwick worried had become paranoid, rote and impotent.
This is true of commercial titles like Forbidden Siren (a horror game which – displaying very Japanese preoccupation with how institutions condition behaviour – tasks players with negotiating schools, hospitals and factories patrolled by zombiefied cultists, and has you play as nursery school teachers and 50-something farmers and surgeons) or the Hiroshima-born Hideo Kojima’s (kinda self-important) games about what it is to become soldier. It’s also true of game-based art like Eddo Stern’s. Stern has worked with various collaborators on pieces likeWaco Resurrection – which puts you in the shoes of David Koresh during the Waco siege – and Tekken Torture Tournament, a modified version of a mass-market beat-‘em-up which deals electrical shocks to players when they mess up in-game. Some critics have suggested videogames are themselves a sophisticated vehicle for social conditioning,*** but these works demonstrate their capacity to explore and critique ideas about discipline, control and conspiracy, to suggest - by dramatising and literalising them - how appealing but also how limited worldviews like my Norwich-based mate’s are.
Academic ‘interdisciplinarity’ often means little more than importing the language and practices of cultural theory into new contexts. The study of interactive media, though, represents an area where the humanities can follow up on Sedgwick’s hunch that a meaningful engagement with mathematics and cybernetics and systems theory might open up ways out of theory’s paranoid cul de sac. Maybe then we can find ways to discuss and address the inequality and anomie and societal waywardness my ex-schoolmate couldn’t hack and the iffy cocktail of dogmas, hatreds and suspicions he’s taken to cultivating as a response.
*While trying to sell me on how cultured and humane the founder of his sect is, he straightfacedly informed me the guy’s a Wagner fan, which after I’d uncreased myself and stopped cackling I suggested it might be a P.R. misstep to reveal. This didn’t seem to have occurred to him. Incidentally, the founder in question’s pretty interesting, and shares with Nico (another notorious anti-Semite) the distinction of having had a cameo in a Fellinni movie (the link’s to Nico’s cameo because she at least had nice hair and put out one of the 20th century’s best LPs, which you’d think this guy might’ve had the decency to balance out his Jew-hate by doing, but no).
**Videos made by obsessional players reveal that they’re playing against the code itself, exploiting glitches and idiosyncracies programmers failed to catch – i.e. to beat the game you have to think like it does. Such ‘to catch a thief’ second-guessing is, of course, classically paranoid (look where it got Rumsfeld)
*** e.g. It’s been argued ‘survival horror’ games like Forbidden Siren, with their emphasis on scavenging, resource management and kill-or-be-killed combat, should be read as allegorising/endorsing capitalist dog-eat-dog self-interest.
