Re: [-empyre-] escape Artist

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Greetings everyone -

I'd like to say with appreciation and pleasure that this thread on 
"Escape Artist", and the one on "Critical Spatial Practices" from which 
it emerged, have been remarkably interesting. Thanks to all those who 
have contributed. There are too many things to talk about in all the 
points that have been raised, but what roped me in, beyond the initial 
draw of a little insight into Ryan's and Kevin's work, was the 
discussion of "criticality."

Now, that's one of those words which to me is very strange - an American 
word I don't remember from my youth not so awfully long ago, but that 
everyone in art circles seems to use these days, kind of like when you 
go back to your home town and there was a little library or bookstore or 
cafe which used to be called "criticism" or "critique" or whatever, and 
now in that same place which doesn't look the same at all anymore there 
is a huge mirror-glass skyscraper with elevators and escalators and 
people rushing around talking about how great (or how tasty, or how 
smart or how appealing) the "criticality" is. Well, you can't go back 
home I guess, so let's talk about criticality. What is it good for? Is 
it good for anything at all? Isn't it radical change we want, direct 
action, or maybe, from some other perspective, just a little real honest 
fun once in a while?

Pursuing that question I came upon Hugh Davies' post, and from there I 
followed a link to something downright impressive and interesting, which 
is Jane McGonigal's article on "Real Little Games." Thanks for that, 
Hugh. It can be found right here:

http://www.avantgame.com/MCGONIGAL%20A%20Real%20Little%20Game%20DiGRA%202003.pdf

Jane McGonical has written an article which is full of things I know 
even less about than "criticality," namely, long and informed 
descriptions of an immersive game called "The Beast" which sounds 
intriguing to say the least, when it's a matter of people running around 
and even between cities with missions to carry out this or that 
arbitrary action in mysterious circumstances populated (or not) by 
noncommittal accomplices who are actually "plants," or actors hired by 
the corporation or PR firm behind the game which no one wants to know 
too much about, because the whole thing is too much fun to be ruined by 
the details. And it sounds pretty fun! But not only that, Jane McDonigal 
also provides a great discussion of the whole phenomenon of games as 
such, and above all of belief in games, with a key distinction borrowed 
from the performance theorist Richard Schechner: "In make-believe games, 
he suggests, players pretend to believe; in make-belief games, players 
willfully 'forget' or deny their own performance and thereby enable 
themselves to believe for real." McDonigal herself wants to displace the 
accent a little, and this is where it gets so interesting: "I want to 
resist this emphasis on the degree to which players are conscious of 
their performance, as if this self-awareness were a kind of 
psychological safety net always in danger of falling (or being 
intentionally tossed) away. I propose, instead, that the frame of 
representational play remains visible and sturdy to players in even the 
most believable performances of belief... Instead of asking to what 
extent players come to believe in the fictions they perform, we should 
ask: To what ends, and through what mechanisms, do players pretend to 
believe their own performances?"

I find the whole question great, and it's hard to resist McDonigal's 
discussions of the overwhelming desire that one can feel to believe in 
the vital interest of games whose fictional "frame" is nonetheless 
totally evident and acknowledged. After all, art is clearly part of 
life, and one of the best parts, even though itÅ  fictional; good art 
makes life a lot more worth living, and certainly I myself have accepted 
letting many waking hours and even years go by immersed in a novel like 
Don Quixote, which in its time was considered totally immersive and 
which, in its second volume, even staged scenes of characters being 
caught up in the game of novel's own fictions (the Duke and the 
Duchhess, for example, who have such a great time playing games with 
poor old deluded Don Quixote). Already in the 17th century, the 
paradoxical relation between the distancing critical frame and the 
beckoning fictional life is pushed to a paradigmatic extreme that has 
been fundamental to western culture ever since; and so I find fresh 
considerations of the whole problematic to be eminently worth reading. 
If you're crazy enough to believe, for example, that ten thousand people 
can go out into the streets and hold up their hands to STOP CAPITALISM 
NOW (and I have been crazy enough to do that) then you've gotta know 
that the fictions of art, of which you are totally conscious, really do 
have an incredible importance in real life, with consequences 
too--something that came home to me very early one morning in the city 
of Prague when I watched people around me, really just right there at 
arm's length, being arested by some very sinister-looking plainclothesed 
police for having demonstrated their willingness to make believe in 
those selfsame idealistic fictions. So the question, then, is exactly 
the one that McDonigal poses, namely, "To what ends, and through what 
mechanisms, do players pretend to believe their own performances?"

What seems to me on the contrary very much less interesting in 
McDonigal's piece is that even after quoting Gregory Bateson she doesn't 
seem to acknowledge that the very conventions of behavior which make up 
so-called "real" society in all its multiple factions and aspects have 
something about them of this "fictional" quality, and that our adherence 
to them is inevitably colored by the degrees to which we pretend to 
believe in them, and therefore, by how we we play the game. After all, 
"game theory" was _the_ great cultural and diplomatic trope of the USA 
and its ruling elites just a generation ago, as Bateson among others 
knew so well. Because of this missing consideration, there ends up being 
something very puerile in the discovery McDonigal makes, namely, that 
through pervasive gaming scenarios like "The Beast" people manage to 
create for themselves "a real little game," or in other words, something 
which they do indeed find real and important. To me, however, what 
finally seems "perversive" (her own slip of the tongue) about these 
self-consciously pervasive games is how their very triviality crowds out 
any reflection on all the other games one is pretending to believe in. 
The involuntary paradox of believing in a little reality and ignoring a 
big one comes out most clearly in the otherwise extremely clever use she 
makes of an idea by someone called Apter, whom she brings up in a 
conversation with Elan Lee, the "puppetmaster" who organized the 
pervasive fiction of The Beast: "Michael J. Apter, a psychologist who 
studies adult play, proposes that pleasure in play is dependent upon a 
sturdy 'protective frame' around a perceived challenge. According to 
Apter, this frame assures the player that real world problems cannot 
intrude on play and that the game will have no real world consequences 
or effects. A kind of guarantee in the vein of Bateson's 
metacommunications ('Don't worry, this is only play'), it allows players 
to enjoy what would in everyday life be experienced as painfully 
frustrating or disturbingly risky. Apter uses a three-part analogy 
involving a crowd, a tiger and a cage to make his point, an analogy that 
I find quite relevant to immersive game design. An empty cage, Apter 
suggests, will produce boredom in a crowd of spectators; a tiger without 
a cage will produce anxiety; and a tiger in a cage will produce a 
pleasurable excitement. This pleasure, for Apter, represents the safe 
arousal we experience during play."

As someone who writes, I find it really cool to come up with this 
metaphor of tiger-and-cage, concerning a game called "The Beast." On the 
other hand, as someone who hails from that land called America, and who 
lives in that land called global-capitalism-at-war, I find it spooky to 
be talking about enjoying a game that is all about trusting in the 
robustness of a cage. The spooky feeling grows a lot more intense when 
McDonigal reports the exchange she had with Lee about all this: "I 
offered my own interpretation: that perhaps the central goal of 
successful immersive game design is to communicate to players that a 
cage is in place, while making it as easy and likely as possible for the 
players to pretend that they don't see the cage. In other words, I 
suggested, give the audience a tiger, build a sturdy and always visible 
cage, but give the crowd both the means and the incentive to say, 'What 
cage? I don't see a cage' even as the spectators are oohing and aahing 
over the cage's lovely gilt design and breathtaking size. This slight 
twist on Apter's analogy resonated deeply for Lee. 'It's a really 
beautiful way of describing many of the thoughts I've had for such a 
long time,' he said, vowing to keep it in mind during future projects 
[personal correspondence]. The key to immersive design, we agreed, is to 
realize that the clear visibility of the puppetmasters' work behind the 
curtain does not lessen the players' enjoyment."

I have not read "Foucault's Pendulum," by Umberto Eco, which McDonigal 
says is an exemplary meditation on this whole business of being caught 
up in the games you play. However, I have read Borges' story, "Tlon, 
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", upon which Eco's novel is apparently based. 
Borges tells of a forty-volume encyclopedia, written by a team of 
specialists gathered around a cynical American millionaire. The 
encyclopedia describes in exacting and totalizing detail the 
civilization of Tlon in the land of Uqbar on Orbis Tertius. It is 
discovered in, of all places, Nashville (a media town, you see), and it 
provokes such a huge enthusiasm that pretty soon, everyone takes it as 
the very reference of reality itself. As Borges relates quite acidly: 
"Manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized 
re-editions and pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and 
still flood the earth. Almost immediately, reality yielded on  more than 
one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten  years ago any 
symmetry with a semblance of order - dialectical  materialism, 
anti-Semitism, Nazism - was sufficient to entrance the  minds of men. 
How could one do other than submit to Tlon, to the minute and vast 
evidence of an orderly planet?"

The function of pretending to believe in the work of a puppetmaster 
whose cage is on display for everyone to see but which nonetheless 
remains conventionally invisible and inaudible in playful conversation 
seems to me to be one that I would treat with a little more respect and 
even, dare I say, "criticality." Some of you may think that I exaggerate 
to bring this up right now (after all, there is no beast, there is no 
cage) but Adorno's interpretation of the way that people pretended to 
believe in Hitlerian fascism jibes quite strikingly with the Borgesian 
parable, and indeed with McDonigal's own formulations. On the concluding 
page of his text "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist 
Propaganda," Adorno writes this: "The category of 'phoniness' applies to 
the leaders as well as to the act of identification on the part of the 
masses and their supposed frenzy and hysteria. Just as little as people 
believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do 
they completely believe in their leader. They do not really identify 
themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own 
enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader's performance. It is 
through this performance that they strike a balance between their 
continuously mobilized instinctual urges and the historical stage of 
enlightenment they have reached, and which cannot be revoked arbitrarily."

The willingness of Americans to indulge themselves in social games right 
now is very impressive and a little sinister to me, and I find myself 
dismayed that "criticality" is apparently not just relegated like a 
discarded crumb to people teaching art, but also considered somehow 
outdated and useless among those people, at the very moment when the 
modes of adherence to the most pervasive and, for that matter, 
"perversive" social games is exactly what should be discussed by anyone 
speaking in public about what public behavior is, can be, and ought to 
be. There is a real question about what kinds of games we are playing, 
who the puppetmasters are, what the modes of engagement are and where 
it's all leading. In light of that, McDonigal's satisfaction with what 
the Surrealists used to call "le peu de reel" seems to me kind of sad 
and foolish and typical of what's happening everywhere you look. The 
point came home to me while I was writing my article, "Disconnecting the 
Dots of the Research Triangle", which has to do with the means and ends 
of university research in a very densely institutionalized corner of 
North Carolina. What struck my eyes when I visited the place was the 
process of flexibilization, corporatization and militarization that 
proceeds apace, without anyone really knowing what to do about it or 
even noticing it, for that matter. Wishing to be clever and find the 
little tag line, the little metaphor that would somehow clinch this 
perception in order to finish my article like a good boy who wants to 
play the article-writing game, you know, in order to perform the whole 
thing cleverly and seductively on stage in Amsterdam, I googled around a 
little and what did I find but some news from our old friend DARPA which 
is so active wherever there are creative minds at work. They wanted to 
unleash a tiger somewhere far away, and in supreme confidence that 
everyone would trust in the robustness of the glittering gilt cage 
which, in effect, looks very believable and eternal on those 
well-endowed campuses, they set up something called the DARPA URBAN 
CHALLENGE, which is a beautiful pervasive game for any engineering 
department, corporate lab or even garage-kit hobbyist. It involves 
building a car that can navigate on autopilot through a crowded urban 
environment, and by golly, Americans by the hundreds and thousands, 
including a few on one of the Research Triangle campuses, are finding a 
lot of pleasure in making those little tigers and racing them in perfect 
safety, to the copious oohing and aaahing of crowds, out in the 
bountiful deserts of which there are so many in our fair land. The 
vehicles, when perfected thanks to this crowd-sourced ingenuity, will be 
robotic tanks, armed with death-dealing weapons, that will be sent into 
cities like Baghdad to subdue the local populations without any of our 
boys and girls having to be hurt, or any opposition arising among the 
voters, or anyone having to be distracted from playing The Beast in the 
lovely cities of the homeland. The balance struck between the historical 
stage of enlightenment and the historical stage of barbarity is 
extraordinary. Or rather it's all too ordinary today.

Criticality as an inherited formalism that gains you brownie points in 
somebody's abstract book of virtues might not be worth very much. But 
any kind of critical artistic practice that touches another person in 
their intimate perception of the qualities of belief and make-belief 
that bind them to the social space which they inhabit seems to me worth 
exploring, deepening and extending in times like these. The place 
inside, where you decide to perform your disbelief and your little 
reality, makes the space that you and others will live in.

all the best, Brian