Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND MEDIA SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant, Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne, University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming, University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng, University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward, California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning, University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware

Walter Metz, Southern Illinois University

© 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

19 18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Cataloging Control Number: 2015933201

ISBN 978-0-8143-3488-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4144-5 (ebook)

Designed and typeset by Bryce Schimanski

Composed in Chapparal Pro and Trade Gothic

Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. Gadamer, Truth and Method

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Preamble: The Birth into the Posthuman

Posthuman Subjects

Posthuman Melancholy

Postscript: Play and the Archive

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For Mitra Foroutan.

My thanks to: Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press, for her patience and guidance.

Barry Grant, for suggesting that I write this book.

Sherryl Vint, for support both practical and intellectual.

Denis Dyack and Silicon Knights, for kindly inviting me to speak about posthumanism and gaming.

Students, former and current, from whom I have learned a great deal about gaming.

Chad Peck, a true gaming companion.

INTRODUCTION

Nothing is gained without loss.

Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst

PARABLES OF THE POSTHUMAN grows out of a sense that the digital game has yet to receive the kind of critical attention it deserves. Certainly there is a burgeoning academic industry surrounding gaming, but I am yet to be convinced that these approaches ever fully come to grips with the philosophical importance of gaming. And indeed, in brief, this is what this book will be proposing: that we take gaming seriously, philosophically. I mean to approach gaming asking some key philosophical questions, all in an attempt to make sense both of the experience of gaming and the nature of the player-game/console/narrative experience: In what ways does gaming alter our perception of the human subject? What is happening to consciousness when one plays? How does the experience of the virtual come to be translated by the player into real, phenomenal experience? Can we talk, sensibly, philosophically, about categories such as temporality and subjectivity, within the parameters of the experience of gaming? In a large sense my primary assumption here, my philosophical beginning point, is that gaming is a radically strange experience, an uncanny experience, completely unlike any other experience of play. It is the intimate conjoining of self and machine, of human and other, that requires some sustained thinking because, as I will argue, this conjunction radically alters a traditional view of what it means to be human. Gaming, the practical event of gaming, works to extend the human and its conception of itself; gaming enacts—and this term is crucial—a practical realization that the human is a fluid, dynamic, unstable, discontinuous entity. The digital game thus, in its radical critique of the idea of a transparent, unified self, becomes a site of interrogation and sustained philosophical analysis. We need to be clear about this: what other form of play, of entertainment, effects this kind of extension of the self? We need, to speak simply, to think about what it means to enter a relationship with the game machine, to think, that is, about what it means to assume (or to have conferred upon you) a machinic, posthuman identity. Gaming is an event that radically calls into question the nature of experience and self; it is an event that may in fact be creating an entirely new kind of experience of the self. Surely we need to give this event some serious thought.

POSTHUMAN SUBJECTS

My purpose here is ultimately to demonstrate my general thesis, that games realize a practical, material demonstration—instantiation is the stronger term—of the philosophical notion of the posthuman. The game locates the player within a complex network of exchanges, all mediated by technology: player-console/computer, player-avatar, player-narrative. This economy of technological exchange initiates a practical experience of what I term the posthuman: the game enacts the fantasy of extending past the limits and limitations of the human. Ultimately I am interested in exploring the philosophical implications of digital play because it is here, in these sites of cultural imagination, that new ways of conceiving the self occur. I argue that the digital game is a site where hypotheses and questions about the nature of what constitutes the human as such are raised and worked out. That is to say, the digital game—and I am here interested in games involving practical role-playing elements involving modifying the body (BioShock, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3, to name only a few)—poses challenges to ideas like the fully integrated, singular, stable self, a constituted interiority without flux. The game invites the player to create a self—a version of the self, a version that carries with it an extended version of the self in the real world—as fluid and open to the possibility of prosthetic and cyborgian extension. The digital game, as it makes a structural necessity of prosthetic extension (adding machines to the body), stands as a parable for the posthuman: the game becomes a fantasy site—fantasy because fundamentally unreal, but also because fundamentally limited (one cannot sustain play indefinitely)—where one’s avatar plays out the central posthuman fantasy of extending the human subject beyond itself.

I am using the term parable here in a variety of senses. In the first, and most prosaic, a parable is simply a story. The digital game, as I am envisioning things here, is telling a story of what it means, or might mean, to enter into the posthuman condition. Like all parables, however, the game-as-parable has a kernel of resistance to it. We may recall how Frank Kermode characterizes the parables in The Genesis of Secrecy. He suggests that one of the enduring seductions of Christ’s parables is their resistance to full understanding: those in the know may understand the parable while those not part of the elect will not. But even for those elite readers (or hearers) the parable may be elusive: Insiders can hope to achieve correct interpretation, though their hopes may be frequently, perhaps always, disappointed; whereas those outside cannot. There is seeing and hearing, which are what naïve listeners and readers do; and there is perceiving and understanding, which are in principle reserved to an elect (3). A parable thus is a story that essentially hides itself from those who do not have the capacity to see. A parable, in other words, has something essentially secret about it. I am attracted to this idea in its relation to the digital game because, as I will show in my readings of specific games, the game is not consistent in either its fetishization of the posthuman fantasy or its critique of this same fantasy. This is to say that some canonical games about the entry into the posthuman condition do not tell their stories straight: we need to attend carefully to how the game, as narrative, and as a confluence of player and console/machine, is, perhaps, at odds with itself, unable fully to come to terms with the lineaments of its own fetishistic desire.

I am also using the term parable for a specific reason having to do with the term’s relation to temporality, specifically to futurity. As I will detail in my Conclusion, the parable always sets up a narrative of a world to come. Christ’s parables again are exemplary; as J. Hillis Miller argues in Tropes, Parables, Performatives, the parable posits a utopian world to come and as such sets itself up as a story of present impossibility. This is to say that the parable always has something of the economy of desire to it: it sets up expectations for something that has not yet been instantiated, may never be instantiated. It is in this sense that I read the digital game as having a fundamentally spectral quality to it: it sets up a vision of what the posthuman might be, not what it is. The digital game, insofar as it instantiates, thematically, the narrative of becoming posthuman (I think here of games likes Crysis 2 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and as it instantiates the player’s own coming-into-being as the posthuman (as he plays, that is), holds out the state of being posthuman only as a state of possibility, which is always to say, an impossibility. Another way of putting this, and Deleuze and Guattari will be my point of inspiration here, is to suggest that the posthuman, the state of being the posthuman, is a state of becoming: we enter into the cyborged relation with the game console in order to alter what out present reality is. This entry into a temporary posthumanism (play must end if it is to be understood as play) articulates the player always in a structure of loss and return: we lose the sense of posthuman extension and power when we break off from the game, but we can always return. It is here, in the dialectic of loss and return, in the repeated dialectic of loss and return, that the posthuman state of becoming comes into being. And, finally, in this sense, of positing the posthuman thematically as a state that is always already to come, the game comes to reflect the very structure of cyborged being that occurs when I, as a player in the real world, enter into play. Hence the game, as a story of what it might mean to be posthuman, and as a story of what can only occur at some point, not now, becomes a parable. As I play, as I enact the game’s very thematization of being the posthuman, I become that parable of possible futural being.

The game, I argue, puts into specific practice the theories of the posthuman found in writers as various as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Paul Virilio, and Maurice Blanchot. A dominant image in this first section thus will be the cyborg. In the games I will analyze over the course of this study, it is often the case that one’s avatar is, for the purposes of the game’s narrative, a cyborg. A confluence of human flesh and machine, the central figure of the game serves as a phantasmatic realization of the desire to be cyborg. As crucial, however, is the idea that the gamer herself is articulated as a cyborg in her entry into the gameworld, in her entry into play. The player-game relationship instantiates the gamer as cyborg insofar as she must conjoin with the machinic materiality of the console (or computer) in order to enter the space of play: the console thus operates as a practical prosthetic device, extending the player’s limited physicality (one can do anything within the economy of the game’s design) and subjectivity (one can become anything within the economy of the game’s design). Indeed, the idea of the prosthetic is crucial and central here for a number of reasons. I am fascinated by the specular effect of the gamer-game relationship when read along the thematic of cyborgian extension: the game, with its thematization of the self becoming more than human (think here of games that thematize the acquisition and application of biomodifications [BioShock] or nanotechnological enhancements [Deus Ex: Human Revolution]), in some sense becomes an allegory of the gamer-console relation. Certain ethical questions thus become important here: if a game offers itself as a critique of the idea of prosthetic extension (Deus Ex operates in this way) can we see this critique extending (in an almost Brechtian sense) to the real experience of the gamer-console relationship? Can games in fact operate—in classic postmodern style—as a critique of the conditions of play itself? Of the fantasy of play? Of the implications of play?¹ It is important, however, to see how these ethical questions only reveal themselves after we enter into a consideration of the cyborg, the posthuman. It is only after we begin seeing how the game operates to bring about a practical demonstration of the extended, posthuman self, that the questions about the implications of agency under erasure, of the implications of extended, violent subjectivity, become clear. Thus, before we enter the space of ethics, we must first answer questions of a more practical, philosophical, nature: What happens to the player as a subject as she games? What does the console as prosthesis do to our understanding of what it means to be human?

THE POSTHUMAN: PATHOLOGY OR UTOPIA?

In my conception of the posthuman, I will keep a variety of theories in suspension, all of which help me think about what is occurring within the game experience itself. Theories of the posthuman, of the cyborg, help me think about what is happening in terms of a game’s plot, about what is happening when a game asks me to modify and build characters. But these theories also help me to think about the nature of my own phenomenal, real, affective relationship to gaming itself, to my relationship with my controller, my console, my screen. It is here—as we begin to think about the complex relation between the real player and her avatar, the way these two entities become extensions of each other—that we really enter into what I would call posthuman play.

Although it is not my purpose here to offer a genealogy of posthumanism as such, it is important to trace the modern/postmodern conceptualization of the posthuman-as-cyborg back to its ultimate origins, which I suggest must be found in Nietzsche and Freud. In various writings these two practitioners of what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion turn their withering gazes on the notion of the human subject as such, arguing that the self—essentially the Renaissance Humanist conception of the self as rationally transparent to itself—is not self-producing but is a product of the culture, the history, the drives that precede and exceed it. Nietzsche will speak of the posthumous man (Anti-Christ; Twilight of the Idols) and of the human as artificial, arbitrary . . . a recent abortion (The Will to Power 214); Freud, especially in the seminal Beyond the Pleasure Principle, will argue that the human is not self-producing, transparent to itself, but is rather a complete mystery to itself insofar as s/he is controlled by the compulsion toward achieving an end to the self, an end to subjectivity as such: if there is a subject, in other words, the subject is defined by its desire to vanish. The human, the humanist subject, for Freud and Nietzsche, is a myth: the idea that there is an essential core subject—a subject that persists in the face of culture and history, persists to define itself as the sole agent—is only ever a construct of culture (artificial, arbitrary), of an idea what constitutes the human as such. In some deeply ironic ways, the posthuman fantasies of the digital game—the way you choose to become more than human, extend yourself through biomodifications—is really a nostalgic return to the (illusory) idea that the self is fully in control of herself, constructing her identity as she will.² We need, however, to keep in mind how often these games make clear that these biomodifications are produced for the subject to use: in Deus Ex: Invisible War, biomodifications proceed directly from a capitalist system that manipulates the subject to its will, all the while providing only the illusion of agency and choice.³ We should also bear in mind that even the real experience of playing, which sees me extended into space—thus becoming in some senses a cyborg—is one authorized beyond me: that is, game designers place limitations on what I can do. These limitations in fact authorize my experience; I construct myself based on what is given to me.

More recent theoretical conceptualizations of the posthuman are fully dependent on the insights into the human offered by Nietzsche and Freud. In other disciplines, sites, and cultural zones—sf-inflected film and narrative—the posthuman emerges out of similar speculation about the ontological nature of the self, about what constitutes, what could constitute it, as such. Sfthemed narratives, from Frankenstein to Blade Runner, from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau to Battlestar Galactica, look at the idea that the human, the body, can be modified, constructed, extended, and manipulated, all to the point where the question of what constitutes identity as such becomes problematic, becomes the point of fetishistic departure and interest. What does the idea of downloaded consciousness suggest about human identity and memory? Is a replicant with implanted memory human? Is a Cylon who does not know it is