A few months ago I posted a lengthy entry on a small socio-political experiment I performed in the turgid world of MMORPGs, “Prelude to Cataclysm: What Happens When Bartleby Inhabits the World of Warcraft.” Needless to say, this writing marked a kind of terminus in my experience of Azeroth. I have been more-or-less entirely absent from WoW since then, but for whatever reason last night I got a burr in my nose and re-visited Thescrivener.[1] As before, I did nothing but hit the number 8, uttering “I would prefer not to.” (There were also a few variations of this general statement. What they might have been will become apparent.) The evening turned out to be disturbing, upsetting, vile, and depressing.
To put it as simply as possible: the political exigencies of a fictional character created by one of the most impressive American writers of the 19th C., when actually explored, turn out to have been perhaps over-stated by some of the very impressive thinkers of the late 20th C. (Again, see above link.)
To put it even more simply: when Bartleby inhabits the World of Warcraft she gets raped. Repeatedly.
Last night I made Thescrivener sit in the AH doorway, uttering “I would prefer not to” on occasion, and quite quickly another character came along and began dancing right on top of her. This would have been funny/fairly innocuous, if not for the fact that a) he was basically rubbing his crotch in her face, simulating fellatio, and b) that this character’s actions were picked up by some less savory folk. (He disappeared, and I regret, esp. considering what happened afterward, not paying more attention to who he was initially.) Taking a cue from this man, one Eroza,[2] a female toon (but clearly a male player), proceeded to rub her crotch in my face on and off for well over an hour. Following this, a whole group of players (see n.2 below), for a really obscenely extended period of time, took turns, well (there’s no easier/less-blunt way to put this), fucking Thescrivener’s face.
The following is some of the dialogue from these unsavory folks:
“I think she’s a keeper.”
“She’s not much of a talker. . . she’ll be too busy w/ this.” (“This” should of course be obvious.)
I am in no way claiming I was raped, nor do I feel like I was raped, but Thescrivener was repeatedly. And statements like, “I would prefer not to be raped,” and “I would prefer not to give you fellatio,” were not only ignored but laughed at.
Sure, these acts were vile, obscene, wrong, disturbing, and ultimately depressing. And of course who could expect anything more from people playing WoW, probably teenagers getting their rocks off. But it does reveal something quite profound about “humanity,” I feel. Namely, that rape and other violations are assuredly a possible outcome of a Bartlebian stance. The fact that I was able to maintain the purity of this stance—i.e. I said/did nothing other than expressing my preference not to do what I was being forced to do—leads, quite logically, to horror. (One can easily extend this in all sorts of hyperbolic ways.) And though this is assuredly something I considered initially, I was blinded by the politico-theoretical questions posed by the Bartlebian stance to see how Thescrivener could actually be treated in “reality.” In other words, w/o many people mobilizing to enact Bartleby, a lone Bartleby will be submitted to tortures of whatever imaginable kind, simply b/c people can. The question then may very well be, how is Bartleby simply not a perfect object for unadulterated sadism?
And this is a question I’m frankly too unnerved to answer, as I woke up this morning profoundly doubting humanity capable of much else beyond rapacious horror. Kurtz was right. When you confront the hard kernel of the Real, there is nothing else to say then simply acknowledge it w/ the phrase: “The horror. The horror.”
Don’t get me wrong, I realize WoW is virtual, a simulation, and that one of its attractions is that people can enact all sorts of fantasmatic desires they can’t in “real” life (like killing hordes of goblins/trolls/zombies/etc.). But at the end of the day, there are still humans on the other side of the screen doing things to other humans. The simple fact that these acts have no consequences (legal or otherwise) should in no manner lessen the brutality of the experience. If anything, it should make it worse. For if we take the famous Assassin at his word, “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” then WoW is the hyper-extension of this truth. It doesn’t, however, mean that we should take the Assassin at his word. If Azeroth is a world where “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” then I truly wish there were far more Bartlebys there.
[1] Seriously, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, read the first post. Link above in the first sentence.
[2] I have no desire to really research the perpetrators of what could be called nothing less than a heinous crime if it occurred in a(nother) World, but I did find these comments by Eroza online. The other toons involved, if anyone cares (and I urge you to, if at all possible), were the following members of the Galakrond community: Arcangle, Gabrius, Edanna, Galistin (esp. bad), Gonthorean, Malgant, Orhide, and Pathagarus. Most of them were b/t lvls 60-70.
[3] Thescrivener was also turned into a bunny rabbit for a period of time, and the violation continued. Why it was necessary to make an already passive creature into an even more passive object for the purposes of degradation were, it seems to me, unnecessary. But then how necessary is any of this anyway?
(Note: for many the following may not come as news whatsoever, as the important events occurred in 2004 and 2009 respectively. For the rest, enjoy.)
Just read Jay Murray Siskind’s review of Boswell’s Understanding DFW and DFW’s Oblivion, “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent,” from a 2004 issue of Modernism/modernity. And the thing is, it took me all of, oh, four seconds to realize that this review was “written” by the same Jay Murray Siskind who so famously described the Most Photographed Barn in America in Don DeLillo’sWhite Noise. What is so incredible about this very small “hoax,” is that it took almost 5 years–and many serious citations of the review by graduate students, mind you–for anyone to notice it, namely Mark Sample over at Sample Reality. (Also read about it here and here and here.) Even more surprising w/r/t this “hoax” is the clear fact that Hal Incandenza is referenced as an author in the first footnote! For anyone working on DFW to not notice this, nor, perhaps even more criminally, to not read footnotes in an article on DFW (!), well. . . .
Sample and others are clear to point out that this “Littlest Literary Hoax” suggests some fairly dark things about academic publishing and scholarship–i.e. did anyone actually read the article in the first place (or does anyone even read literary scholarship much at all, for that matter); that more people have responded in the electronic realm (i.e. no published self-account in Modernism/modernity); and that a whole army of grads and undergrads referenced the article w/o any awareness whatsoever of White Noise (seriously, isn’t White Noise, like, as close to required pomo reading as it gets [w/ the exception, say, of Beloved]? Like Cont. Am. Lit.’s version of Relativity for Physicists?). But, then again, I wonder how many people, like myself, quickly caught the hoax, laughed a bit to themselves, found it clever, and immediately suggestive of a whole host of interesting pomo/popomo(/not to mention mo) debates that DFW is so clearly involved in, and then simply moved on, for it was essentially nothing more than a (fairly good and funny) book review–these various (fictional) readers not feeling the need, unlike my current self, to comment much further on it in any other forum.
Either way, though, the archival implications of this are fairly interesting, if for no other reason than DFW’s clear affinity for DeLillo; my own sense is that the very explosive archival nature of DFW’s work almost calls forth or demands that Hal Incandenza enter into the real world of ideas through a footnote to some obscure and (clearly) overlooked academic article. Hyperachivization indeed. (Also, Incandenza’s title is telling: How I Conquered Analysis: Ten Ways to Dupe Your Therapist [Elisingborg: Yorick Press, 1998], or perhaps a better title would be: Ten Ways to Dupe Literary Scholars Who Clearly Haven’t Read Enough (of What They’re Supposed to be Getting Paid to Read) and Didn’t Even Get the Hamlet! References in the Footnote.)
Anyway, just thought I’d (re-)share. And now, (back) to the archive, and step on it!
Wittgenstein Week is over, something I perhaps shouldn’t have been looking forward to as much as I was; cf. now working through David Foster Wallace’s[2] uncollected and less-well-known oeuvre[3]as quickly. For my sensitive summer nerves, w/ nothing to do but sit around reading short story after short story for days, I must say I’m missing good-ole Wittgenstein Week. For instance, I can now, w/ the exception of most book reviews, say confidently that I’ve read pretty much everything DFW has published, in whatever venue (say, even including letters to the editor in The New York Timesand Harper’s, and a story in an obscure journal printed on dot-matrix paper [if you can believe it]). (This is also to say that when I sat down to write just now I hadn’t even quite considered the archival implications of this last statement.) I thought I’d be glad, that getting through all of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Investigations in a week would be the “hard,” “taxing,” “draining,” “etc.” work;—and believe me, it was—that I’d come out the other end primed and ready for the “fun” work of reading DFW. Boy was I wrong.
I am currently quite eager to read one of the first collections of essays on DFW coming out next month, Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering, specifically an essay on what is being called the “new sincerity” by Adam Kelly. I feel the DFW that gets read the most—his novel(s) and his journalism—continually hint at or give great meaningful gestures toward sincerity, but perhaps b/c of their form never really achieve what so many of his short stories do so devastatingly, howling-fantod-inspiringly well: they are un-dauntingly sincere. Painful sincerity. So sincere that reading the deep ironies of something like John Barth’s much anthologized “Lost in the Funhouse” acts like a kind of balm. For the sensitive summer soul, the cold analysis of Wittgenstein is far preferable to the at times crushing-lack-of-irony in some of DFW’s short fiction. Esp. when one reads story after story of people who simply cannot connect w/ one another, for every reason under the sun; or else people who are almost supernaturally connected[4] and subsequently get dramatically, heart-wrenchingly sundered from one another.[5] Basically, where’s Paul de Man when you need him?
His work is just so sad. The humor found in Infinite Jest or his journalism is muted at best in his short work, and it becomes at times so dark that I’ve literally had to simply put down the book, copy-paper, or computer. Many people have argued that this is DFW trying to transcend/go one step past postmodernism, and though there may be a distinctive ring-of-truth in that claim, his brutal sincerity—perhaps sincere b/c, like some dialectical parallax, his irony can be equally brutal—seems to simply come from a complete lack of belief in the possibility of real sincerity (; the only way to even begin to hope to construct something authentic is to be so brutal w/r/t emotion etc. b/c the “real” emotions he is trying to construct simply don’t exist in the real world). His piece on The David Letterman Show, “My Appearance,”[6] demonstrates this quite nicely. The ground of any sincerity being possible anywhere w/in the space of the story has been more-or-less annihilated, as the last sentence (among others) clearly implies: “And so I did ask my husband, . . . just what way he thought he and I really were, then did he think. Which turned out to be a mistake.”[7] Or for instance, consider one of the character’s take on Mr. Letterman himself: “‘He’s making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things.”[8] To perhaps oversimplify, what DFW is so clearly criticizing throughout this story is the hipper-than-thou, against all clichés, ironic, detached, cool, postmodern, always-apt-to-ridicule stance (toward pretty much everything) par excellence. (And furthermore, never celebrating anything, god forbid.) Of course there’s really no foundation in anything true to back up this stance that perhaps most of us are more familiar w/ than we’d like to be.[9] The general malaise over truth(s of any kind) has been so infectious to simply create an entire simulacral culture w/ no authentic grounding in anything except its own irony. (And of course) This is an old story (simulation, etc., esp. for the late 80s).
But that’s not the kicker. DFW is trying so mightily to repair or at least construct the scaffolding for grounding something, anything, in sincerity. And he never does. The world is (almost) always more-or-less freaking bleak w/r/t sincerity, connection, compassion, warmth, mindfulness, love, etc. etc.; and not always b/c they simply don’t exist, but rather b/c they get absolutely crushed. (This is also why perhaps his 2005 Kenyon Address was received so well. It was so [frankly] crazily sincere; and, unlike his fiction, suggests an “answer” to this problem.)
Suffice it to say, the hyperarchivization of DFW is not an experience I would recommend in a(n overly-)short period of time. It, combined w/ general summer-nervousness, is getting me quite down. For at the end of the day, a writer I absolutely respect and enjoy often answers the questions in the epigraph that began these brief notes quite simply: nowhere.
[1] “Honey, Drop the Knife,” Blanket Warm (Omaha: Lumber Jack Records, 1996).
*On a side-note: a brief perusal of The Hyperarchival Parallax will quickly reveal that I am quite footnote-happy, a clear indication of a gratuitous and acknowledged influence by one DFW, so it should probably come as no surprise whatsoever that I am heavily reading him right now for various projects. This is an influence I’m clearly aware of, to the extent that I am more footnote-happy than DFW ever was, and he is an influence I’m not terribly concerned about having one way or the other. As Tomaž Šalamun once told me in personal conversation, “It is important to have fathers. DFW is clearly your father. Do not shy away from this” (paraphrase; also of note: I was getting a poetry degree. . .). I cannot quite recall who Tomaž said his father was (perhaps Pessoa or Milosz or Ashbery), but it really could have been any of the (dauntingly-)numerous poets he knew, loved, recommended, etc. He was a sheer encyclopedia of generous appreciation and warmth re: pretty much anyone who scribbled poesy, so I suppose it could have been a mish-mash of people. Not even to really mention what Harold Bloom said in The Anxiety of Influence—for surely pretty much any writing-like-undertaking is anxiety-producing—but influence is not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact one to (perhaps) be embraced (at times). (I’m like the early Cave-In: I wear my [one] influence on my sleeve.)
[3] I owe the easy acquiring of a complete set of bibliographic links to the quite fantastic The Howling Fantods, the site perhaps attending the most carefully and encyclopedically to anything re: DFW.
[4] For instance Lyndon Baines Johnson and “Lady Bird” Johnson in “Lyndon” (The Girl with Curious Hair [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989], 75-118).
A quite interesting passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:
“55. ‘What the names in language signify must be indestructible; for it must be possible to describe the state of affairs in which everything destructible is destroyed. And this description will contain words; and what corresponds to these cannot then be destroyed, for otherwise the words would have no meaning.’ I must not saw off the branch on which I am sitting.
“One might, of course, object at once that this description would have to except itself from the destruction.–But what corresponds to the separate words of the description and so cannot be destroyed if it is true, is what gives the words their meaning–is that without which they would have no meaning.–In a sense, however, this man is surely what corresponds to his name. But he is destructible, and his name does not lose its meaning when the bearer is destroyed.–An example of something corresponding to the name, and without which it would have no meaning, is a paradigm that is used in connexion with the name in the language game” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe [Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1997 (1958)], 27e).
So I have most assuredly reached those annual halcyon days of summer when I turn into a zombified eating, sleeping, drinking, smoking, writing, media-consuming machine. The evidence for this is that I just watched both seasons of Dollhouse (Joss Whedon, 2009-10).
It happens every summer like the monsoons,[1] and when it hits, the force is equal and the downpour as brief. For instance, I quite literally had the following thoughts today: “well, if I go get food, and I walk at a fairly brisk rate while reading Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books, I not only can get multiple functional activities done at once—1) eating, b/c that will help me go back to work refreshed (maybe I’ll even take a nap), 2) reading, b/c that is what I’m doing right now and I would actually waste more reading time getting in and out of the car than if I just walked and read at the same time—but (less) importantly, I can get 3) exercise. Though exercise probably should have been one of the first thoughts about my walking/reading/eating, or at least just leaving my fucking house for pretty much any reason whatsoever should have occurred to me as a “good thing,” it not only came in as a firm third in my thinking, it was an incidental thing, an added bonus for my over-caffeinated robot-body.
But the tragedy is actually not my becoming-machine, for that is surely something to aspire to at times,[2] but that this moment of summer also always entails (desperately) finding something I can spend mind-numbingly countless hours doing. Many things, of course, have served this function, and surely not all bad, but more-often-than-not I read too many comic books, or play too many video games, or watch too many sports, or watch too much internet tv. I tell myself: I’m still consuming media, so how could it possibly be detrimental to do these activities, but the fact of the matter is, in what sick-and-twisted world does one come to the point, after seriously, rigorously, and carefully consuming media all day, where “wind downing” or “relaxing” is accomplished by consuming more media?Well, I’ll tell you. The kind of world where I feel guilty for doing anything else, like, the crippling question: “why am I wasting so much time not working?” but simultaneously experiencing the full awareness of guilty-type media-consuming (I’m like a really bad media-vegan [or vegetarian, like I eat media eggs, fish, and cheese]), as in, “why am I wasting all this time watching [insert crappy shit here.]” Most of the time this doesn’t bother me, b/c a 2 hour (at most) crappy SF movie is at least only 2 hours, but all of Dollhouse in a week? That is many, many more hours spent. Damn summer.
But anyway, so I of course have something to say about it. Dollhouse, that is. (Gotta get something out of it [for my troubles and anxieties, and esp. as a way of celebrating these halcyon days—in other words, make guilt work[3]]).
The first thing to say is that Dollhouse is overwhelmingly a “tale of archival crisis.” No two bones about it, and though of course much of what I say here will be informed by this insight, I would not like to make it the meat of the matter.[4] But to bring us up to speed. . . .
Dollhouse is a Josh Whedon affair (Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2003] & Firefly [2002]), and I must admit two things: 1) his affairs are not one’s I find all that appealing, and 2) I’ve never seen Buffy.[5] It’s set more-or-less in the present in a panopticon for dolls—i.e. humans who are able to be imprinted w/ any personality whatsoever. The protagonist, Echo, is able to incorporate many personalities at once by the end (for “good,” as opposed to her male counterpart Alpha, for “evil”), and she ultimately kills the head of the evil corporation. Two episodes show us 10 years in the future, where the technology to imprint humans has made pretty-much-everyone into mindless killing machines, and postapocalyptic-savior-type-stuff occurs. Yeah, that’s about it.
The narrative aside, the place I think Joss Whedon excels is that he makes clear some possibilities for the future of serial television w/ this show. For the past few years all the really good television, though somewhat serial, resembled really ambitious comic-books more than they did the A-Team.[6] (Plots where you pretty much had to see every show to keep up, epic world building, etc. You can picture it.) What is interesting about Dollhouse is that it is the very fact that it is a tale of archival crisis that permits it to be semi-successful in heavily serialized form. Whedon has allowed himself the opportunity for his main actress, the surprisingly good Eliza Dushku, to play a different role in each episode. Couple this w/ a clear eschatology to the show, and you’ve effectively made it possible for anyone to tune in to any episode, even knowing that the series is moving toward some clearly defined end,[7] and not only understand more-or-less what is going on, but even be entertained (and perhaps think a bit). There are, of course, some really striking episodes that wholly stand out on their own, and for something that is as, well, I’ll say it, archival as Dollhouse, this feels like quite an achievement to me.
To extend my discussion, I’m tempted to talk about: identity as archival in the show, which it surely is and it’s freaking obvious; the panopticon they put the dolls in, where they’re imprinted as infantile, passive, and accepting, i.e. all sorts of (whomever) undertones; having someone yet again messianically save the world who is a multiplicity; and . . . well, I guess there really aren’t really an books[8]—but anyway, these are all surely there and deserve to be commented upon. But I will refrain, and really for one reason.
No matter how many interesting things Dollhouse may be doing, I never get the sense that Whedon even remotely intends them. Not even to get into any New Critical territory, but (and this is something I rarely say) Whedon is just bad. His actors are terrible. The writing is horrible. The cinematography under-realized. And, sad to say, he has very low production value b/c of his low budget.[9]Firefly was the same. And I say this fully realizing that there are drone-cells of fans out there who worship the guy, and I think ultimately for good reason, but, b/c I feel no reason to even justify this remark w/ pretty much anything, I know he’s in the realm of Adult Swim or Bob Dylan for me.[10]
Whedon is popular b/c he’s the only person who’s shown how one might still do a serial, Law & Order-type show w/ an over-arching, compelling, long (SF) narrative. He’s bad b/c he’s the first(-ish).[11] His television sometimes feels like a naseous mix of Bionic Woman, Bewitched, Kafka and General Hospital, w/ enough Star-[something] thrown in for good measure. Don’t get me wrong, I was fucking entertained. (I mean, I watched the whole series in a week for chrissakes.) And this will be the ultimate success of this type of serial, for, deep down, our true desire is for a Knightrider remake (w/ David Hasselhof) or else a new Lynch tv show where they give him, like, billions of dollars to make a ten-season show.[12] Someone is gonna come along who learned from Whedon and perhaps give us a good mix of this. No reason to watch Dollhouse in the meantime, unless you’re interested in the intersection(s) of archives and the Apocalypse.
[2] And I mean this w/ no sense of irony, esp. not the irony of the footnote.
[3] It used to be, “make anxiety fun,” what has happened to me!
[4] If you want my take, definition, or defense of this term (as a sub-genre of SF), email me at bradfest@gmail.com for a copy of a conference paper I recently delivered.
[5] So whatever I have to say, keep this in mind. (This is also to suggest I’ve perhaps found my major summer time-suck.)
[6] I.e. a show w/ a high production value. A challenge: what year do you think they’ll remake Lost?
[7] Much clearer and more satisfying than Lost btw (but of course also not).
[8] Though learning to read is certainly an important step for Echo.
[9] I would love to see what he would do if he was given a blank check. C’mon Guggenheim.
[10] Things I simply don’t like at all that many people I very much respect enjoy w/ seeming (over-)enthusiasm.
[11] Okay, not even close to being the first. Just go w/ me.
[12] Do I hear: Television Event of the Decade? I mean, as the title?
So, b/c I’m trying to be a responsible scholar, I realized that I needed to read a whole bunch of Wittgenstein in order to talk about DFWs The Broom of the System with a modicum of sense. In honor of this, I am designating the amount of time to read this amount of Ludwig, “Wittgenstein Week.” This may, of course, take more than a week. So, to be wholly participating in WW, I would like to present a brief snippet of the Tractatus. Like everything, I even found W. talking about apocalyptic-type stuff (of course):
“6.43–If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts–not what can be expressed by the means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different on from that of the unhappy man.
“6.431–So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
“6.4311–Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuiness [New York: Routledge, 1974 (1961)], 87).
Need to read more W. before I can coherently say much else.
I just recently attended the annual Science Fiction Research Association Conference held this year in Carefree, AZ,[1] where I delivered a paper entitled: “Tales of Archival Crisis: [Neal] Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier.” I argued for the existence of a significant and unnoticed sub-genre of SF therein by way of Stephenson’s Anathem: what I call the tale of archival crisis. Though I cannot present that paper here, primarily for reasons that I still have some work to do on it and b/c I want to develop it into a slightly longer piece, I had the great luck to stumble across Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009) one night at the conference,[2] via the instant play available on Netflix, and was shocked at the resonance it had w/ my more general theoretical constructions of the tale of archival crisis.[3] It, mixed w/ the rather disappointing Living in the End Times, by Slavoj Žižek—my primary reading recently during various decadent kinds of vacation—has unavoidably occasioned some kind of brief commentary (following).
Pandorum is the kind of (excellent) B-SF-movie[4] that I was surprised to see Steven Shaviro has yet to comment upon.[5] And in lieu of his perhaps much more perspicuous take on it, I submit that it captures many of the features of what I call the “tale of archival crisis” very well. In short, Pandorum is a film in which the archive mutates/evolves, and this change threatens the very survival of the human species. In other words, the archive itself produces an apocalyptic-type crisis.
Pandorum is set in a far future where, of course, humans have “exhausted” the earth, have found another planet, and sent an ar/-chive/-k to populate it. This ship is filled w/ tens-of-thousands of cryogenically frozen humans who have been injected w/ something that causes their mutation/evolution to speed up exponentially[6]; in addition to this, the ship holds the “entirety” of the earth’s biological archive (i.e. DNA, seeds, animals, etc. etc. [one can imagine]). But (again, of course) things have gone terribly wrong. (Spoilers.) For whatever (dumbass) reasons, they’ve only left 3 people in charge of the ship at any time, and one of these people (for reasons that remain scientifically unclear[7]) has gone batshit insane, and killed the other two on duty w/ him. The film explains this man in mythological terms—i.e. he took total control of the ship, became a sort of god, but got bored so went back into cryo-sleep.
So, the film opens w/ two men awakening from cryo-sleep and, of course, it induces temporary amnesia.[8] One of these men is the god-man reawakened, but we don’t “know” that till the end. (There’s all sorts of hallucination, psycho-camera-work in between.) The other is our necessary hero/messiah/whatever. All this aside, there are 3 striking things about this film:
1) Near the end of the film, shortly after we have learned that the earth has been utterly destroyed, the characters open the observation windows and cannot help but see an inky blackness. Dennis Quaid’s character (the god-man) immediately assumes that all creation has been wiped away, that this little ship is the only thing left. I’m not sure if horror has ever been so effectively boiled down to its pure “essence” than in this scene.
2) Ben Foster’s (the hero’s) character, Bower, drops into a pit of mutated, sleeping demi-humans, who are usually engaged in constantly cannibalizing everything in sight b/c of the general lack of any food-stuffs on the ship, but at this moment are sleeping. These “humans,” b/c of the injection for exponential adaptation and evolution they’ve received, have quite effectively “adapted” to the ship. Their sense of smell is incredible, so Foster has to drape himself in the skin of their cannibalized victims in order to cross their mass of (orgiastically) sleeping bodies.
3) We learn near the end of the film that, though this journey was only supposed to take b/t 100-200 years, they’ve been asleep/traveling for nearly 1000. Meaning: plenty of time for evolution and whole new cultural paradigms have been provided for these “humans” to pretty much change into an apocalyptic threat b/c of their archival nature—i.e. they “awake” on occasion from the vast farms of cryogenically frozen humans and “contribute” to the various species’ changes that take place in the film.
Some things should be clear about the above information. What is encountered in Pandorum is humanity itself encountered as archive. Both in their spatial orientation—they’re stored cryogenically for populating another planet—and at the very root of their genetic code—they can adapt to whatever their surroundings are, and if they inhabit a dark, far-past its expiration-date-ship, they’ll develop cannibalism to its nth degree. In addition, the universe itself, for the brief moment when they think creation has been deleted, can be seen as archival—in terms of the “archival remainder”: what is left after the archive has been deleted (meaning everything has been deleted) is merely this part-of-no-part, this piece of humanity left to experience its horrific dying gasps. Lastly, to traverse the ground[9] of the posthumanity that develops in the film, one must quite literally cover themselves in the archive of the dead, in the skin of those who have gone before.
So it is no wonder that the final scene of the film is the hero “ejecting” the archive from this thoroughly apocalyptic archival-formulation, b/c he’s realized they’re all actually at the bottom of the ocean on the planet they meant to go to in the first place. So when we get a wide-digital-shot of archives of human beings breaching the surface, with the implied semi-utopian reading that paradise has not only been found, but achieved, we should be skeptical. What has been released is nothing less than the part-of-no-part, the ineluctable remainder of the archive that just “happened” to be saved from the very logic of the archive itself. In other words, the archive of Pandorum has virtually no hopeful limits. The film makes very clear that when you categorize, inject, and “break-down” human beings into their constituent parts (reify them), only their end is assured. Consequently, the film’s ending is thoroughly ambiguous, b/c to take it as hopeful, we would have had to ignore the entirety of the film, and only participate in whatever ideological illusions still hold today. We should emerge from its fantasmatic archive-destroying-the-human-species-images w/ another thought in mind entirely: perhaps the only solution is to eject our archive into the void, eject the totality of human “knowledge” (and other stuff) into the void, b/c we’re absolutely doomed (unless we all become bartleby[10]), and that is the only hope we have. And this, of course, is depressing. Thank you Pandorum.
[2] After watching Allison de Fren’s excellent, disturbing, and timely Mechanical Brides (2010, unfinished), which I excitedly hope is finished and released sometime soon to the general public (i.e. festivals take note).
[3] As in: I just finished a piece delimiting exactly what is going on in Pandorum. Synchronicity like this should be outlawed.
[4] Btw, one of the arguments used during this conference was that SF represented a significant amount of the highest grossing films of all time, an argument that, if any sort of critical work was applied, would clearly be seen to be an over-generalization at best, and a total ignorance of the really interesting SF that is being made today that doesn’t really gross anything at worst. In other words, you SF scholars cannot justify yourself by referencing how much Harry Potter Whatever made, but should be consciously and responsibly investing yourselves in the actual interesting and relevant SF that is pecuniarily worthless. Sorry, this sort of polemic could not help but be occasioned by this gathering.
[5] In other words, I finished watching the film and immediately went to The Pinocchio Theory expecting to see something interesting on it. It wasn’t there, so in lieu of this imagined document, see his excellent discussion of Gamer (Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, 2009), here.
[6] I.e. going to a new planet necessitates quick adaptation.
[7] Suffice it to say that “being in space for inordinate, hopeless amounts of time,” is enough to drive one insane.
[8] I.e. it is thus very easy for the film to insert instantaneous memory recovery at appropriate narrative moments.
I will be attending the annual Science Fiction Research Association Conference in Carefree, AZ, taking place between June 24th-26th. I will be delivering a paper from the abstract below on the 26th at 4:00. A link to the program. Hope to see you there.
“Tales of Archival Crisis: Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier”
With the recent publication of his novel Anathem (2008), Neal Stephenson has coherently solidified the presence and importance of what may have been until this point an unnoticed tradition within Science Fiction: what I would like to call the tale of archival crisis. In labeling the novel as such, it finds clear forerunners in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973), and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye (1974). In each of these works, an archive plays a central role in the narrative space. This space functions in two important ways. The tale of archival crisis is thoroughly eschatological. The archive is a site of both preserving something after the apocalypse, as well as a mode of bringing another catastrophe about. More importantly, perhaps, this space is also thoroughly liminal. Each of these narratives depends upon the archive’s location at some limit, situated on the frontier of the represented world. Not only does the tale of archival crisis complicate common representations of post-apocalyptic landscapes as a sort of neo-American West, it does so by drawing complex relationships between knowledge, space, destruction, and civilization, relationships whose importance Anathem brings to bear in exploding the very notions of liminality any eschatological narrative depends upon. This paper will explore the significance of Stephenson’s reimagining of temporality and spatiality both in terms of the tale of archival crisis and, more broadly, in the radical contribution he has made to post-apocalyptic Science Fiction.
In a quite busy part of Galakrond there is a toon[1] who appears from time to time. On her first day of existence, the following things happened to her:
She attempted to form a macro that said: “I would prefer. . . I would prefer. . . I would prefer,” and then, understanding that this macro worked, said, “I would prefer not to.” This, of course, was after she entered a vale full of aggressive elementals where she was wounded by one who had bested her blood-ally. “Her skill in defense rose to 4.” She discovered Azure Wash where a letter was waiting from a friend (though a friend she could never meet.) She went to the inn to ponder awhile her next action, for the letter contained 100 gold. After having taken a short nap, she re-emerged. On the road to somewhere, she was attacked by a giant fern; her defense increased to 5 and then she died; she was resurrected. To go to Odesyus’ Landing or to The Exodar?[2] She died afk; she was resurrected. There were horses loaded w/ supplies in an encampment walled by spiked logs. (She thought: “Power work is never over.”[3]) She “followed” him. She was on a boat; they danced. She told him to wait around, for he was about to see something he’d never seen before. He followed and didn’t leave for quite a while. . . . She arrived in Stormwind and went to the auction house to buy new clothes. Newly outfitted, she sat in the door of the AH[4] and said, many times, “I would prefer not to.”
For awhile there this draenei mage (lvl 1) remained. Wearing a beat-up hat, a rust-colored shirt, and what appeared to be Capri Pants, she kept saying the same thing over and over; no one would respond to her (in any meaningful way). Even her recent travelling companion got fed up and left. Soon after that, she disappeared. She has been spotted only occasionally and randomly since, but has not been observed to move nor say anything except, “I would prefer not to.”
The Scrivener in the Doorway: The Commentary
The brief narrative presented in “Thescrivener in the Doorway,” with a few emendations and a bit artistic-license on my part given to the recounting of events, well, actually happened. After an excellent conversation one evening w/ a good friend about the totalizing reification of the player/subject that takes place when one plays World of Warcraft, I came home eager to institute a literary—and recently politically celebrated—hack into the game. I wanted to exploit the very structure of being-in-the-game. And the “Thescrivener” is what resulted from this.
What is quite clear from playing WoW[5] for any amount of time is this: one is paying about $20 a month for the privilege of working. Though WoW can be fun, exciting, challenging, carnivalesque, etc.—pretty much like any really good (video) game—most often it really isn’t any of those things. Quite often, in fact, it can be quite boring. And, like a lot of really mindless jobs that lack any real skill, it is ridiculously, obscenely repetitive.
Scott Rettberg puts it nicely: “World of Warcraft is both a game and a simulation that reinforces the values of Western market-driven economies. The game offers its players a capitalist fairytale in which anyone who works hard and strives enough can rise through society’s ranks and acquire great wealth. Moreover, beyond simply representing capitalism as good, World of Warcraft serves as a tool to educate its players in a range of behaviors and skills specific to the situation of conducting business in an economy controlled by corporations. While it’s certainly true that some students are failing out of college, some marriages are falling apart, bodies are slipping into flabby obesity as a direct result of World of Warcraft addiction,[6] in a larger sense the game is training a generation of good corporate citizens not only to consume well and to pay their dues, but also to climb the corporate ladder, to lead projects, to achieve sales goals, to earn and save, to work hard for better possessions, to play the markets, to win respect from their peers and customers, to direct and encourage and cajole their underlings to outperform, and to become better employees and perhaps, eventually, effective future CEOs. Playing World of Warcraft serves as a form of corporate training.”[7]
What is really insidious about WoW, is that the game wholly depends upon what Rettberg so accurately calls a “capitalist fairytale.” The game requires players who are producers and consumers. W/o people actively pursuing their individual goals, their unique professions,[8] and exploiting their individual talents, the fabric of the game is entirely hollow. To really advance in the world, to make it into further “end game” content requires synergistic cooperation b/t many actors. Of course one can play WoW w/o interacting w/ others, but this greatly limits one’s experience and the possibilities presented w/in its world. The capitalist fairytale the game so wholly relies upon is that there is a kind of one-to-one relationship b/t time spent in the game and money made, w/o the interference from banking trusts, stock markets, unstable import and export taxes, union laws, governmently mandated hourly wage, etc. It is an Adam Smith wet-dream. B/c WoW purports an entirely circumscribed, self-enclosed and self-sufficient world, it presents the illusion of an economy totally divorced from “real” economies in the “real” world. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. It is brilliant, really. Blizzard is ultimately playing on the most basic interpellations of the postmodern, late-capitalistic subject. To make money, they’ve structured an economy (more than even a game) that directly plays upon the subject’s position w/in that economy. To “enjoy” the game, one has to participate whole-hog in the economy: one has to be a productive, dedicated, not-easily-distractible worker. One has to act, to participate. Always.[9]
This constant imperative to act should not be surprising, either, as all video games rely on this imperative for the realization of their game-space and their unfolding. The quite distinct thing about WoW, however, is that in terms of narrative, the game is wholly non-teleological. Yes, there is a loose, flimsy framework of a narrative that structures one’s course through the game, and one is constantly interacting w/ narrative when one performs various tasks and quests. The fact, however, that one can kill the Lich King (or whatever) again and again and again, ad infinitum, provides no narrative closure to the game. Furthermore, the sudden appearance of your toon in the world, cannot really be said to constitute a “beginning” either. Where the “middle” is, where the moment of conflict or resolution is, can also be shown to be almost entirely lacking. Instead, Blizzard, by making the game primarily about one’s economic relationship to the world and its inhabitants, has effectively inserted the myth of capitalist teleology as the game’s goal—i.e. the “good” life, when one has all the goods one could want, and of course Blizzard has been very good about making this goal eminently unreachable.[10] There is always something more one could do, procure, purchase, achieve, etc.[11] You know, like “real” life.
Despite this totalizing imperative to act and participate that the game presents, WoW has also been a singular phenomenon in presenting chances for play and creation w/in the parameters of the game that the creators could not really have (easily) anticipated. There are many examples of this subversive or anti-gaming, machinima creations being perhaps the most notable (and interesting). (There are many of these, but I urge you to consider the following, as to document the sheer archival accumulation of WoW-related cultural production would be a dauntingly thankless task indeed.):
The thing about all the “alternate” ways of “playing” WoW, is that they are all wholly permitted, and oftentimes even sanctioned by both the game logic and Blizzard itself. B/c it is a World (something that I will assume here as a given, though not one I have the space to develop), a massive space w/ strictly defined rules of action, the possibilities for exploiting the game and its algorithm are equally massive (and, even now, probably mostly unexplored). In other words, b/c the game is so non-teleological and “infinite,” play can easily appear to step outside the imperative to act, and the imperative to act w/in the economy.
What should be immediately apparent about both these videos, however, is that they took a massive amount of time to put together and an incredible amount of logistical cooperation b/t participants. Yes, they are modes of play not strictly w/in the parameters of the game, but their sheer ubiquity and availability on the interwebs, how they further the appeal of this already addictively appealing game, and how they continue to reproduce Blizzard’s ideological project of presenting a World in which one can “do anything,” in which “anything is permitted” (as long as you play by the rules, which are both quite clear and completely hazy simultaneously)—all of this ultimately only reinforces this imperative to act. Even when one is playing the game in ways not defined by the game, one is still acting w/in the game, and, perhaps most importantly, contributing to the game’s economy (as well as Blizzard’s bottom line). In other words, there is, fairly strictly, no outside-the-game(’s economy). The only way to avoid the totalization the game imposes upon its reified participants, and many people have quit the game for precisely these reasons, is simply to not play. Yes or no. Act or not. Participate or not. These binaries all boil down to: either one is playing WoW or one isn’t.
If one grants me the preliminary claim that WoW does in fact constitute a World, then the analogue for the “real” world would be: one either is or isn’t. The only way not to play the world is to commit suicide. This would be equivalent to not playing WoW.
Though this may be a slightly hyperbolic and extreme analogy to draw, players who have quit the game have often done so by annihilating their character so as to make it less attractive to come back to the game for themselves. Once one is in the World of WoW, oftentimes the only way out is simulated suicide (deleting your character, giving away all your gold and possessions, etc.).[12] Yes, for many people, it is probably quite easy to simply stop playing, but because your character remains w/in Blizzard’s database (one suspects forever, or at least until WoW 2 comes out. . . .), there is always the possibility of coming back. One’s avatar is still a possibility w/in the game-space, even if one hasn’t played in years. Thus the self-annihilation that so often takes place: the fact of an avatar’s continued, or possibility of existence is too tempting. (Though I realize the analogue b/t deleting one’s character and suicide is perhaps a bit of a stretch, the biggest reason this analogue suggests itself is that one has to actively delete one’s character—it will never disappear on its own.)
Consequently, WoW presents a very curious “truth” (or aporia). In short: to be in the World is to act in the World. And of course this is something presented by any World. What makes WoW (perhaps) so interesting, is that it reveals not merely the potential impossibility of the political effectiveness of the Bartlebian stance w/in such a structured, controlled, networked, and totalized world such as WoW, but it simultaneously reveals what is so often overlooked in much of the recent commentary on “Bartleby, the Scrivener”: that the ultimate outcome of his stance is death.
In terms of WoW, we might understand this as the “30 minute Bartleby” problem. To understand this problem, first let me give you a bit of background on my thinking about Thescrivener.[13]
Initially I had it in mind that Thescrivener[14] could be rigged up to simply sit in front of the auction house, answering “I would prefer not to” to any request made of her. I quickly realized I had neither the time, patience, nor know-how[15] to make this happen, so instead I hardwired a macro to button 8 (quite easy to do) that would cause Thescrivener to “say”: “I would prefer not to” anytime I pushed it. The main reason for this is that it also became quickly apparent that I could not just leave her to sit “unattended”: it would log me out.
The implications of this last sentence are, of course, significant. If one could simply log into World of Warcraft and let their character just sit, not act, the servers could quickly jam. It would be an efficient, manageable hack to make—i.e. simply convincing so many people to log on at once that it would overload the system (I’ve been in Dalaran, I know what happens. . . ). People wouldn’t even have to do anything. They could log on and go to work for weeks. Furthermore, it would be totally w/in the parameters and rules of the game. So, to maintain optimum bandwidth efficiency, Blizzard automatically logs you out after a pre-determined length of inactivity, about 30 min. W/r/t my plan for a Bartlebian “hack,” this would ruin the basic fundamental idea of the toon: that it would only respond. Not addressed specifically, it would just sit there, in front of the auction house, robotically-(im-)mobile, but only for a short time, before disappearing (since ultimately, a low-lvl toon sitting in the auction house entrance is a thoroughly uninteresting thing, and not a lot of people would bother to address Thescrivener, esp. if she wasn’t bothering anyone).
Not feasibly and quickly being able to find or make what would ultimately make her a “bot,”[16] I realized that I could still make her say “I would prefer not to” quite easily, and so, if I ever “choose” to inhabit her on that particular server, I simply cause my character to sit there, saying “I would prefer not” to at my whim. This toon has a single purpose in the world, and it is to utter this phrase. Furthermore, since her active refusal to participate is not automated, she more clearly resembles her name-sake—i.e. Bartleby, though perhaps in- or non-human, is not presented as an automaton in “Bartleby.” She is what I affectionately call my “Bartleby alt.”
For those perhaps unfamiliar w/ Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” let me provide a (very) brief synopsis. Bartleby, a clerk, has recently been hired by the narrator. Over the course of the story Bartleby stops really acting at all, let alone doing the work he was hired to do, replying to all questions regarding his actions with his famous formula: “I (would) prefer not to.” This ultimately causes the narrator to leave his offices, since Bartleby has ceased to move from them. As a result, Bartleby is thrown in jail for not vacating the premises. In jail he ceases to eat and dies.
The “30 Minute Bartleby” problem might be understood as follows: b/c WoW logs a character off after 30 min. of inactivity, the entirety of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” indeed, of Bartleby’s entire life is boiled down into a half-hour. The Bartlebian act of preferring not to act in the game[17] results in the player’s disappearance (though not death—you cannot really] die in WoW[18]). The stakes of this problem are many, but I would like to submit a somewhat lengthy reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Gilles Deleuze so as to also gesture toward all the other people who have chimed in on Bartleby:
“The formula I PREFER NOT TO excludes all alternatives, and devours what it claims to conserve no less than it distances itself from everything else. It implies that Bartleby stop copying, that is, that he stop reproducing words; it hollows out a zone of indetermination that renders words indistinguishable, that creates a vacuum within language [langage]. But it also stymies speech acts that a boss uses to command, that a kind friend uses to ask questions or a man of faith to make promises. If Bartleby had refused, he could still be seen as a rebel or insurrectionary, and as such would still have a social role. But the formula stymies all speech acts, and at the same time, it makes Bartleby a pure outsider [exclu] to whom no social position can be attributed. This is what the attorney glimpses with dread: all his hopes of bringing Bartleby back to reason are dashed because they rest on a logic of presuppositions according to which an employer “expects” to be obeyed, or a kind friend listened to, whereas Bartleby has invented a new logic, a logic of preference, which is enough to undermine the presuppositions of language as a whole.”[19]
The reason I call the “30 Minute Bartleby Problem” a problem, is b/c the effects of Bartleby’s formula are simply not possible in 30 min. The formula requires the persistence of its inflexibility to be repeated over and over again for it to begin to operate. Esp. if I decide that I will only say this into the game-space of WoW as a response, 30 min. simply isn’t enough time for someone to bother to interact w/ your sitting toon.[20]
Considering all the other reasons that Bartleby’s formula is inapplicable to true revolutionary inaction in WoW, the simple fact of the game logging you out is the most important. B/c of this aspect of the game, it (perhaps unlike the world) does not permit Bartleby—he is an impossible figure. Giorgio Agamben argues that Bartleby opens up a third option to Hamlet’s yes or no to being[21]; WoW, however, firmly removes this third option. To illustrate, I would now like to turn to a little self-reflexive exegesis of the narrative that began this discussion. The narrative presented is, more-or-less, a faithful representation of some of the actions that took place while I attempted to present Bartleby into WoW. It is austere, sure, but considering that the subject was Bartleby, I felt that austerity was of the essence. (See the beginning of this post for the tale.)
The first action, the forming of a macro, directly places us w/in gamic action. Sure, I could sit there and type “I would prefer not to” every time anyone addressed me, but automating this response stripped down Bartleby to a kind of pure action: hitting number 8. (This is perhaps similar to the manner WoW shares some of the basic structures of the real world, but they are like a pale shadow, where only their framework is necessary.) Pressing the 8 button on my keyboard was as close, easy, and repetitive of an action I could come up w/, since I cannot say (only “text”)[22] this response.
The narrative then immediately takes us to the fact that this macro was only formed after the fact of some action—i.e. it was not the ur-moment of Thescrivener’s experience of the game-world, in the same way Bartleby didn’t start off saying “I would prefer not to.” More to the point, however, is that I had to move in the world, travel to my intended location—the steps of the AH. I’m a Draenei mage, so this required getting on a boat, among other things.
The very next thing that happens is that Thescrivener gets attacked by an elemental. I did nothing to provoke this whatsoever, beyond getting w/in a certain radius of the elemental. Usually, sticking to the roads prevents random encounters, but this is not always the case. This reveals two things: 1) The world of WoW will accost you. No matter how much you remain inactive, at some point (I also have PvP[23] enabled), the world will impose an aggressive action upon you. 2) In the case of the specific aggressive action taken toward myself, the result of this, even w/o fighting back, is that your character’s stats will improve. My “defense rose to 4.” This is incredibly significant, b/c even when you’re not trying to improve or advance in the game, you cannot help not advancing.
Thescrivener then goes to a mailbox, where she has received, from Slothrop (my main toon), 100g. The reasons for my doing this are important. I wanted her to have a significant enough amount of money so that her lack of participation in the economy could at least have an effect: keeping 100g out of circulation. Also, ontologically, it is fascinating that you can send another version of yourself, an other (self), something immediately through the mail—a total non-diegetic act—but never the twain selves shall meet in the World. They are ontologically prevented from doing so. Also, to be sure, despite the “purity” of my Bartleby experiment, for an experiment is surely all that it really was, I wanted her to look the part. A mage in a robe a Bartleby does not make.
The next thing that happens, is that Thescrivener is attacked again, though this time she dies (one rule: she never, ever attacks anything). Here is where trying to draw an analogy b/t WoW and the real world hits really shaky ground. Yes, I could leave her dead, but if I did so long enough (a week) the game would resurrect me. The only way to truly die would be to delete her character, and that would of course be an action, and far closer to suicide than any other kind of death (suicide is a thoroughly non-Bartlebian action).
The next detail of the narrative is perhaps one I just felt to be amusing: “Odesysus’ Landing or Exodar.” One of the redeeming features of WoW to me is the sheer hyperarchival nature of the game’s content. Literary, pop-cultural, and other references abound.[24] So I couldn’t help but feel a bit like Odysseus here, carrying the oar of Bartleby into a land where it may be mistaken for a winnowing fan.
Nor is the insertion of the quote: “Power work is never over,” merely an insignificant detail. In all honesty, I was listening to Daft Punk’s Discovery at the time, and, from this simple detail it should be made obvious that, no matter what the experience of Thescrivener be for other characters, for “me,” it would always be one of mediation—things would be going on around me, acting would be occurring (in the real world).
And this insertion of Daft Punk’s tongue-in-cheek celebration of the capitalist work-ethic, even if those workers be robots, reveals the essential problem of the rest of the text.
In short, I had to get to Stormwind. To not act in what I felt was a particularly illustrative manner at the door of the AH—the very gate of the economy—required all this other stuff. A dude started hitting on me, which was interesting b/c I’d never really experience this as a male toon,[25] so I danced w/ him. He started blowing me kisses, I was my coy Bartleby self until—the controller me not able to help myself—I told him, follow me and I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before. He did. All the way to the door of the AH. He stuck around for a while, despite the fact that all I was doing was “spamming.”[26] But this is my last experience of anyone interacting w/ The Scrivener. She is invisible to others. Her preferring not to is completely impotent.
And this is where I understand the recent invocation of this act as the one politically necessary right now by the likes of Hardt and Negri, and Žižek: within WoW, for this action to have any real effect, many, many more people would have to actively not participate in this manner. Given enough people, it would clog the game. Its logic would be pushed to a breaking point. Perhaps, even at some point, Blizzard would have to take action despite the fact that sitting around doing nothing in the game is not only permitted e, it is at times necessary for the game to function at all, for example, waiting around for people. But, not to get utopian here, even a small group of people committed to Bartlebian play would have influence on the social network of people interacting (all over the world) with the game.
Now, the craziest part of Bartlebian play, is that one can make a “Bartleby alt” that would not significantly impact how one played the game in other ways. No one has to know that Thescrivener and Slothrop are related. Indeed, no one at the time of this writing does. I can play the Bartleby alt or not, but I have one. If I want to play big, mean,[27] active Slothrop, I can. And potentially, no one would be the wiser (except Blizzard).
What should be clear about Thescrivener is that, b/c I’ve chosen one method of play for her, she is immediately and clearly thrust into many of the basic structural, algorithmic, and formal aspects of the game which, used w/ some amount of collective direction, could result in real effects w/in the World of WoW. What these might in fact be, at the moment, remain unclear, for having a goal toward which such inaction is directed would defeat the whole purpose. The stance, however, even only taken when one feels like it (prefers to), remains a total one. It needs no goal. It justifies itself by its own radicality—to be simultaneously participating, even giving the perception that one would participate if they so preferred to, while actively not participating (rather than passively), neither saying no nor yes, but “I would prefer not to” (what. . . ?). Though in theory all games give us just this type of Bartlebian possibility, even games as simple as Pong or Super Mario Bros., WoW is a singular example in that it provides an environment to experiment w/ the very real possibilities of the gesture.
As with what might result in the game world from such a stance by necessity remains unclear, I will save how any of this affects or could affect the “real” world for another time, or else let someone else take up this question, for to fully precede with such an analysis would require more rigor than this forum affords, but suffice it to say, this stance intervenes directly into the apologia that began this essay, but has subsequently been removed. Simply put, the shame/nerdiness one feels from the many instances of cultural criticism about participating in such virtual action as WoW affords,[28] is radically upset and complicated by having a “Bartleby alt.”
On the one hand, one feels even nerdier and more embarrassed for realizing that they’re using this game for such a ridiculous pursuit (like trying to create a virtual Bartleby). On the other, it is mildly, to use a quotidian phrase, “empowering”; I feel like I am making criticism into an action w/in the game, and WoW gives me the chance to do this in a fairly large World (as opposed to other games). Though this ultimately may be more terror-inducing in regard to what is called, and for good reason in this context, a “control society”; and I might have to reassess the fact that I have to use the word “feels” in the previous sentence, for I am surely doing this virtually, even if it is still real; the Bartlebian stance does open a horizon for a clear, code-based exploit. WoW has squirreled away in it the very thing that might upset its smooth functioning (like its permissiveness re: add-ons); also, and this is of singular significance, no rules are broken.
Perhaps, if nothing else, the thing that is opened up by this discussion is simply the awareness that WoW, like so many time-sucking entertainments, jobs, families, social groups, etc., contains w/in it the possibility for a kind of criticism, and a kind of criticism unique to its formal aspects. Rather than immediately and unproblematically dismiss WoW upon its many glaring and obvious drawbacks, faults, and problems (which are myriad), what a game like WoW produces as an important site of cultural debate, revolves precisely around what is going on (or not) when we immerse ourselves into an online World. If many of the questions we ask are the same, and the stakes of problems posed remain equally significant, perhaps the question to ask is of a different, more clearly aesthetic nature: what happens when Entertainment becomes a World and vice versa? I will, however, refrain from answering this question in here, for various and complicated reasons, but let it be said that it will be answered one day. . . .
And of course all of this is to suggest, as this post is indeed titled “Prelude to Cataclsym,”–Cataclysm being the forthcoming expansion pack in which a major, apocalyptic-type event takes place in the world (simply unprecedented really. . .)–all this is to suggest that there are many more things to explore w/r/t Archivization and Apocalyptics in WoW. . . .
[1] Note: what follows will contain liberal use of a specific lexical lingo.
[2] This must have been where he brought the oar, for there are surely many men chopping trees.
[5] The common acronym for World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004-10).
[6] Note Rettberg’s: “I am nearly certain that the term ‘addiction’ will be unpopular with my fellow players, because the popular media have used the term while terrifying us with stories of teenage World of Warcraft players (these stories are typically set in China, and like horror movies, the victims are always teens) literally dying because they forgot to eat while playing a MMORPG. While I’m sure that at least one of these stories is true, I doubt it’s a widespread phenomenon. Your child can and likely will survive World of Warcraft. Intelligent adults can spend hours a day play [sic] MMORPGs without becoming pale-faced, sunken-eyed, self-destructive shadows of their former selves. While playing World of Warcraft has the hallmarks of psychological addiction, it may in fact also be a kind of cure. Like MOOs, MUDs, and many other types of online activities, World of Warcraft is a social activity, a cure for the deadly human disease of loneliness. Nonetheless, we can crave human contact in a particular type of structured way just as much as we can crave a cigarette” (Scott Rettberg, “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraf,” Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, eds. Hilde G. Corneliussen & Jill Walker Rettberg [Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008], 34-5, n. 3.).
[8] Tailoring, hunting, leatherworking, mining, herbalism, alchemy, inscription, enchanting, engineering, and jewel-crafting. One can select two of these professions. Cooking, fishing, and first aid are available to all. (Archaeology is also forthcoming. . . .)
[9] Furthermore, the in-game economy has direct a relationship to the “real” economy, as in-game gold is bought and sold on the internet; there are the semi-mythical MMORPG farms in places like China; the individual unit currency (gold) even has real market value, and is, in fact, more valuable than some national units of currency in terms of real-world money! None of this is novel or striking to say, however, as these are fairly widely-known and well-documented in-game-to-real-world economic relations. My purposes here, as should be apparent, are differently directed.
[10] For instance, my quite reachable goal in the game, getting to 80, obviously presented itself as an illusory one at best, for certain aspects of the game are still unavailable to me until I get better gear, which translates into: I need to spend a lot more time working to be able to purchase or procure the necessary items to continue playing the game, to continue advancing along its pseudo-narrativistic lines. Anyone who wants to send me gear, w/o compensation, feel free, but realize that though this act may be slightly subversive to the in-game economy (something for nothing), you should concomitantly realize that whatever you send me is the result of many hours of your labor.
[11] For example, there is the supposedly accurate account of one player who has earned every single in-game achievement (see here), but this is really so fantastically impossible—i.e. it really would take a herculean amount of time spent playing the game, probably to the detriment of virtually anything else—that it stands out as a news item in something like Wired. It is remarkable that someone could achieve everything there is to in the game.
[12] See WoW Detox for firsthand accounts of such activity.
[13] The avatar I’ve created to enact a Bartlebian stance. Her name in the game is “Thescrivener.”
[14] See Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener,”Piazza Tales (New York: Modern Library, 1996 [1856]), 21-68. Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, among others; all have things to say about Bartleby, for those interested.
[16] A toon who has been given certain software commands to make it endlessly do one activity, like farming leather from wolves. This is also highly against the rules. Though I’m not sure Blizzard would really look down on my activity—they’re still making their 20 bucks. The problem would be, of course, if many, many more people started a “Bartleby alt” . . .
[17] Of course, a “pure” Bartlebian stance is not available if one is already paying for WoW, this goes unsaid—and also suggests something about the impossibility of a pure Bartlebian stance in any world.
[18] Another significant complication of the Bartlebian stance.
[19] Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 173. For another, slightly more extreme take, Giorgio Agamben says: “In the place of the Prince of Denmark’s boutade, which reduces every problem to the opposition between to be and not to be, Being and non-Being, the scrivener’s formula suggests a third-term that transcends both: the “rather” (or the “no more than”). This is the one lesson to which Bartleby always holds. And, as the man of the law seems to intuit at a certain point, the scrivener’s trial is the most extreme trial a creature can undergo” (“Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. & ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 259).
[20] One of the reasons for this is also that many inactive toons are the results of their controller being away from the computer—i.e. the Bartlebian stance in WoW, unlike in the real world—may imply there is no one there to respond at all.
[23] Player versus Player. I am on a PvE (Player versus Environment) server, where, if one so chooses, other characters cannot attack yours without you agreeing to a duel. This is also the default setting of this world. You can, if you so choose, turn off this restriction, and players from the opposing forces can slaughter you w/o compunction, esp. if you’re a lowly lvl 1 mage. (That said, since the AH is in a fairly populated area, w/o reinforcements it would be very difficult for someone to kill me w/o getting killed in turn by someone else.)
[24] For instance, the other day I played a quest called: “Crank it to 11. . . ,” or something like that.
[25] There are of course many interesting things to say about how gender is constructed in WoW.
[26] Writing stupid, senseless text over and over into the chat channels. It is my belief, however, that my kind of spamming is slightly more interesting/serious.
[27] Seriously, he’s killed so many animals he might as well be the entire U.S. whaling fleet b/t the years 1840-60.
[28] Btw, most of these critiques focus on the inaction, sitting at your computer for hours on end—like we don’t do that anyway. . . .
The Hyperarchival Parallax 