#it was of an artificial race from a videogame (that is part of a big franchise)

[leidensygdom]

I need the world to understand that I'm not a general fantasy artist dabbling in robots, I'm closer to a secret robot artist who pretended for years to be into general fantasy finally revealing the truth-

I spent most of my early RP days playing artificial characters, to which someone in a forum had a very succinct message: "[Syg], have you ever played a character that has come out of a vagina?"

and now. now i'm finally coming back to my roots, a decade later.

[myfriendpokey]

subterranean modern

1. Modernism as a concern with being modern.

Which on the face of it is a weird and trivial thing to be concerned about. Who cares? Is the modern good, bad, does it have any specific qualities or objectives whatsoever? If it does, then why not address yourself to those goals directly, rather than having to fret about the merely temporal? The neoclassical and romantic don't strictly speaking have to worry about being modern, they  could always be justified on the basis of the eternal human verities, like such-and-such, or the other thing. The postmodern doesn't need to worry about being modern as "modernity" is something which has already happened, and which is inescapable, which is why we can safely afford to engage in pastiche. So what was the moment in between - when art could neither justify itself as something safely outside of history nor as something already contained within one which had already occured? A period of art trying to deal directly with historicism itself?

To be anxious to be modern is to see your life, beliefs, status and role in the context of a history where any of these things could abruptly or violently be changed by forces out of your control - it involves a sharp awareness of how poorly "history" will treat or has always treated those deemed to have been left behind. And it's an anxiety with no necessarily fixed political expression, which helps to explain why modernism itself could be so various (and sometimes dubious) in this regard. The Martian attack in War Of The Worlds is famously an extrapolation of the West's own colonial history,  turned back on itself: now we are the victims of genocidal, technologically accomplished marauders. But if this is a critique of the colonial mind it's also a kind of paranoid extension of it, imagining faceless alien hordes just waiting to swamp europe if we ever get lax or fall behind in the arms race: the common cold which eventually undermines and destroys the space invaders also mirrors western anxieties about foreign contamination (as syphilis had historically been viewed), or miscegenation. The awareness that a change in "history" could mean death or diaspora might just lead to trying to punch first and most brutally in the name of preserving some advantage, or trying to hold on to your spoils another few generations – but it could also mean trying to find another way of thinking, acting, writing which would break out of the cycle itself.

Literary modernism drew on and tried to position itself within a range of competing historicisms (Marx, Freud, Spengler, Carlyle, Darwin, etc) and in the process tried creating new ones. The results are in general not inspiring: Yeats’s gyres and cycles; Shaw’s mysterious “life force”; Joyce’s Vico-inspired circular history; Ezra Pound’s doggedly stupid efforts to construct a new theory of fascist political economy by crossing John Adams with dynastic China. But I think we also have to see these as scaffolding, to some extent, around a larger project: which is the idea of art as an intervention in history, an apparition of the future (or the uncanny past) which would burst in on the present with a set of new demands for everyday life. We currently live in an economic system in which the blood of the present is continuously drained to artificially prolong a possible, impossible future: one which attempts to pre-emptively shut any political act which would infringe on the right of rentiers to generate constantly increasing returns on their investments until the heat death of the universe. The avant-garde is the reverse – something which would take its energy from the future in order to extend the range of action in the present. When the neoclassical emphasis on the merely aesthetic (or the merely moral, the improving) palls into kitsch, when the postmodern emphasis on “challenging narratives” becomes a purely ritual form of defusing tensions so that business can go on as usual, the concept of the modern as an unsettled question still has capacity to startle.

2. Are videogames modern?

Emilie Reed has already explored this question from the perspective of visual modernism. But i think if we ask it using the definition that I started out with earlier in this post, the answer has to be: no, absolutely not. Videogames aren't anxious about modernity, not because they're so formally advanced (the whole videogame industry is largely an anachronism) but because they never had a sense of history to begin with. History in videogames is at most the history of the stylistic signifiers of videogames themselves - from 8bit to 16bit and so forth - but even then, there's no real sense of that transition being historical in nature, in being linked to some specific change in how people lived or worked or thought about their lives.

To some extent this is because videogames emerged and were propogated across a strangely uniform historical moment – the moment of neoliberalism, from the mid-70s to present, of a supposedly vindicated free market capitalism re-emerging throughout globalized economies worldwide. Videogames are up there with the IMF in terms of historical signs that you're living in this state of affairs: luxury commodities, consumer-grade electronic toys which take advantage of a busy tech sector, cheap manufacturing and shipping, and of course a progressive slackening of regulations around marketing to children. Videogames mean leisure as well as novelty - every videogame is an excess, a kind of portent of the easy abundance and constant progress that the market had to offer. They emerged without anybody much ever wanting them to, part and parcel of the range of spontaneously occuring new conveniences and devices that accompany consumer society.Twenty years too late, they nevertheless would have fit right into the famous “kitchen debates” of the 1950s, in which a model house filled with brand new appliances and recreational devices acted as showcase for a way of life that “anyone in America could afford” (start saving those pennies!!)

[The history of Atari is an interesting time capsule of videogames as aimless luxury doohickey rather than anything as essentialist as a “medium”. Atari’s other products from this time included a sort of proto-winamp skin, a music visualizer that plugged into a tv to display a limited range of soothing animations. It cost $170, which i believe would be over $600 in 2019 dollars – shades of the Oculus Rift, but also an interesting indication of the kind of commodity Atari thought they were making in general]

Videogames are “futuristic” but it’s in a sort of vague, unwilled way – nobody asked for these things to be invented. People behind the scenes were certainly struggling to produce and advance on them but the public representation is, as the Housers say, that videogames are made by elves. The famous “end of history” was still a few years off, but the sort of passive, ambient futuricity of videogames were part of the pitch, part of the idea that if history hadn’t yet ENDED it could at least be something that happened far enough away that you never felt the tremors.

3.

Why is videogame culture so hospitable to the far right?

Postmodernism is haunted by the notion of conspiracy, the idea that history lingers on in some subterranean way, continuing to exert a baleful influence upon the present; officially denied, but still working behind the scenes, a secret society of postal workers here, an albino papist assassin there... so perhaps it’s not surprising that something of the same paranoia would hang around videogames, or some of the specific targets it would end up revolving around. One weird thing is that the people paranoid about keeping politics out of the format never seem to be all that vocal when it’s, say, the US military working with these companies for explicit propaganda purposes, or weapon manufacturers looking for free advertising, or large companies involved with weird shady review practices, etc.... but it also makes sense when we consider that these things, the military, industry, big tech, are what have always supported the supposedly ahistorical  bubble that videogames exist within. If the US army does it, it can’t be political – because that army is exactly why we’ve been able to keep a certain form of “politics” at arm’s length.

If fascists find a home within these circles it’s partly because fascism is itself anti-political, or at least anti- the discursive and constructed nature of the political, anti-having to be political. It addresses itself instead to the inchoate realm of pre-existing essences and “natural”, i.e. historically unexamined, identities, posited as seperate from and superior to the ebb and flow of any given discourse. Which in fact is not dissimilar to how videogames have also presented themselves, and the affluent 1970s american middle class leisure patterns that they continue to preserve in  aspic through their design assumptions although they’ve dissolved nearly everywhere else.  To talk about the specific political meanings implied by such-and-such mechanics is not wrong per se but i think it does miss a broader picture: these things were sold, not as an artform or a medium of communication to begin with, but as the simple birthright of those lucky enough to have been included in the winner’s circle of 20th century globalization. And insofar as the gruesome escalating culture war around these objects is not really about them but about that birthright, about the right to not have to think about these things or what they cost or how they’re made or what they even really do, they will retain some character of the horrible idiot Boy’s Adventure rhetoric of fascist thought – traitors within, invaders without, take back what’s ours etc.

4.

It’s not like modernism proper was lacking in antisemites, misogynists, imperialists, fascists of every stripe. Although the real connection between the two has tended to be overemphasised: it doesn’t include, say, the painters exhibited as “degenerate art” under the nazis, or murdered jewish artists like Bruno Schulz, or the feminists, socialists, anarchists, homosexuals, etc etc (and even the most ignominous cases like that of the futurists don’t feel quite conclusive, unless you think Mussolini really was keen on abstract sound poems as the new and vigorous art of the future). But maybe the gruesomeness of that list is the point: everything bad about modernism is already here. We have the weird cultish adoration of a strictly pro forma version of “difficulty”, we have the idiot jingoism and “provocative” chauvinism, we have lots of dumb schlock about saving western civilisation and masculinity and etc. Like the scrapmetal cars in Mad Max all-new unified theories of history are or have already been constructed from the flotsam, junk science and vague prejudice of the previous century. At a point where gamer cults are watching youtube explainers of Carl Jung while drinking brain-enhancing nutrient paste i think we have officially lost the right to make fun of W.B. Yeats for hanging out with Rosicrucians and injecting ape glands into his scrotum to restore male vigour. It was good while it lasted.

But given that we’re here already, is there anything worth taking from modernism the first go round? I can think of a few different things. The internationalist qualities of the artist’s magazine and manifesto, both cheap and portable forms which could easily be adopted or changed, which served as hubs for local action and also as ways to exchange findings and ideas with other groups doing the same. Compare this to videogames where “local scenes” surely do exist but for the most part do so as ancillaries to a generic industry pipeline, making games for the same carefully featureless, anglocentric audience that this entails. Relatedly, how central translation was to modernism, not just as a way to introduce more works to the existing market but as a form of creative estrangement and of getting out of a limited market-based parochialism – a way to engage not just with singular decontextualised works but also with criticism, theory, arguments. Given how much more capitalised even alternative videogames still seem to be than alt comics, literature, etc, it’d be nice if we could achieve at least parity with those forms.

I could also point towards the modernist interest in material and the new working methods this opened up – the interest in what mass production could mean and what new relations to art it could entail – attempts to create new forms of audience, of public and public speech, and to imagine forms of popular art which didn’t necessarily abide by the gloopy poptimist ethos of the popular always equalling the profitable always equalling the ubiquitous (there were many false starts, but i believe poptimism finally died forever with the advent of the funko pop). And I could also point at the interest in combining the critical and the aesthetic – in the argument that style is itself a combination of the critical and the aesthetic, is also a way of thinking about history, rather than just being what gets swapped in over the programmer art when it’s time to show a build, or treated as the meaningless expression of some changeless pre-existing taste. Is taste changeless? Or to what extent? What does this mean for forms of public speech, like art, which themselves exist within the constraints of taste? Unfortunately, we will probably not be helped in our thinking on these questions if we only ever write about Red Dead Redemption 2.

***

Part of the reason videogames have tried pointing themselves away from the modern is to try to establish their own lasting importance; instead of a provisional tangle of different incongruous traditions and materials designed to fit a peculiar historical or economic context, these things are a medium, which is imagined as a sort of mysterious Stargate portal onto the realms of Systems or Empathy or Play or whatever other Panglossian catch-all helps get you some of that californian venture capital, or possibly a book deal. But part of the consequence has been a stunted dogshit format where art is downgraded for being anything other than an advertisement for itself and which acts as a haven for fascists looking to also naturalise their tiny bubble of seigneurial rights away from any consequence or critique. Videogames might not be modern but by now they’re part of our image of what modernity looks like, and as that modernity continues revealing itself to be frayed, collapsing, incoherent or wildly unsustainable these things will like it or not become another part of that stock heap of broken images pulled from at random to build the futures that you may or may not ever want to live in. We can start thinking about the past as a way to find alternatives within it; or we can outselves become that past, and have our bones incorporated into the deathmobiles of the new age. History is back baby! it’s still a sewer!! awooo!!! Get ready to die historicist, on the fury road!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leax63ullPE

[images: Modernism(1995), World History Quiz, My First Amazing History Explorer, Smart Mouse for Sega Megadrive]