Agony
 
 
Allegory
 
 
America
 
 
Analog
 
 
Atopia
 
 
Battle
 
 
Boredom
 
 
Complex
 
 
Conclusions
 

When the lines of telesthesia — telegraph, telephone, telecommunications — connect topics into a topographic space, extensively mapped and storied, utopia is recruited out of the page and comes out to play. Utopia uncoils, spreading its tendrils out of the book, along the lines of the topographic, into the world. Rather than a retreat from the world, showing in its positive creation of a new world what the actual one beyond its line lacks, utopia becomes something else. The book becomes an alibi for more worldly lines of communication, some with the power of an order: diagrams, memos, reports, telegrams. Utopia becomes part of something instrumental, but thereby loses its power. Topographic lines are there now to make the world over by the book, but in the process they make the book over as well, reducing it to just another line. The smooth plane of the blank page is the green-fields site for delineating a pure topography of the line. But that page could be any page — a page of a novel or of Eichmann’s orders. Utopia’s problem is not that it is self contained, but that it is not self contained enough. Signs and images leak out of this bound-paper enclave, and are captured by other powers, connected to flows along other lines.

The power of topography is foreshadowed in dystopias. Russell Jacoby: “Utopias seek to emancipate by envisioning a world based on new, neglected, or spurned ideas; dystopias seek to frighten by accentuating contemporary trends that threaten freedom.” What they have in common is a belief in the power of the line of writing and the book as a topic, separate from but in a privileged relation to the world. Utopias dream of what is possible within that topic as a critique of what is beyond it. Dystopias are the nightmare of the loss of power of the line of writing, overcome by other lines. Jack London, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin — all recoil from the lines that supercede those of writing. Dystopians pay close attention to the control of topography by various lines of analog signal — radio, television — threading topics together, making space transparent to an all seeing Big Brother or the cult of Ford.

The rise of dystopian forms might have less to do with the pernicious power of the utopian text than with the declining power of the text in general as a kind of line. Dystopian texts are the sign that the book has lost its capacity to function as a separate topic, from which to negate the world. Dystopias are writing’s guilty conscience. Their secret utopia — like Winston Smith’s diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four — is still the book. The failure of utopia might point to nothing so much as the inadequate properties of the lines employed to make it operational. The passage from utopian to dystopian texts charts the rise and fall of the book as the line that might negate this world through its positive description of another world. The book gave way to other lines, courtesy of IBM and other avatars of the military entertainment complex — creating topologies which colonized the world in different ways. All dystopian writing is also utopian. It cannot help reminding itself of the limits of writing and a lost world of the sovereign text before other lines sublimated its power.

Topography learned to live without its utopias, and settled in to a mundane resignation to the here and now. It assuaged its boredom in special times, special places, where different rules applied. Post-war play theorist Roger Caillois’ answer to the Nazis was agon mixed with alea — games of chance and competition — each in its proper place and time alongside but not above everyday life. They would take place outside of the uncertainties of mundane time and space, in special zones where consistent rules apply. Such spaces are ‘heterotopias’. Michel Foucault: “Their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed and jumbled.” Heterotopias are at some remove from the dull repetition of meaningless labors with incalculable purpose in workaday life. They are spaces and times which lie along other lines.

Heterotopian spaces are very varied. Each has its own particular rules and seasons. There are heterotopias of bare necessity: prisons, hospitals, schools. These need not concern gamer theory much. More interesting are the heterotopias of useless luxury: galleries, arenas, sports domes. These in turn subdivide into heterotopias of aesthetic play and of the calculated game. One is a space of pure qualities; the other — pure quantities. One creates new values; the other pits given values against each other. In one, the ideal is that play is free; in the other, that the game is fair. In both heterotopias, these values have their limits. One is an artifice of rank and the other — of rank artifice. Outside the heterotopia that makes their autonomy possible, they amount to nothing.

(2) Comments for 106.
posted: 5/25/2006

I ask only slightly jokingly to the list of telegraph, telephone, telecommunications, could one also add telepathy? I am not sure that the “tele” effects are limited to the teletechnologies, in one sense I would put writing itself in this category. Thus the Utopia uncoiling was already happening from the moment of tele-writing.

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/25/2006

heh — might use the telepathy idea.

Yes, but i think there’s qualivative differences between the leap into writing, the broadcast era, and the digital era. Harold Innis rather than Derrida here.

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(2) Comments for 107.
posted: 2/13/2007

If, as Suits explains it, game is an activity that incorporates rules that are not necessary in the outside world, but are accepted to make the game possible, is utopia only possible in game? Is utopia even possible in game space, when there is the possibility of poor sports and cheaters? Maybe we play games as part of an attempt to create a controlled environment where utopia is possible.

McKenzie Wark responds to sarah loyer
posted: 2/17/2007

Sarah writes: “Maybe we play games as part of an attempt to create a controlled environment where utopia is possible.” That is in essence my argument. Only it is not quite ‘utopia’. Utopias are traditionally thought of as ‘elsewhere’ (in time or space), but really the special place for them is the page. I think they are an artifact of writing. In relation to gamespace, perhaps the best we can manage are atopias, which are nowhere, rather than elsewhere.

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(2) Comments for 109.
posted: 5/25/2006

At first I was thinking of these “lines” as absolutely seperate, that is parallel (not crossing). I went back and read this section and did not see anywhere they were described as parallel in fact they seem to be crossing and intersecting, but this might contradict with Foucault as “other space.” And I think the places where these lines cross might be productive spaces of inquiry, where one gamespaces rules come in conversation/conflict with another. More on this in later comments in this section, for I think GTA serves as one of the paradigms for thinking this thru.

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/26/2006

yes, that’s a good lead. thanks.

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(4) Comments for 110.
posted: 5/25/2006

I think there are places where this “rank artifice” crosses over from one heterotopia into another, where it doesn’t amount to anything quantifable, but than again it does amount to a change. I am thinking here of one of the things I find fascinating about GTA is the way that players create their own value in the game. Certainly within the rules of the gamespace (ie the algorithms) but outside the rules of the “missions.” A sort of re-negotiation of the gamespace. But this re-negotation doesn’t take place solely within the gamespace either. Often it bleeds over (in fact I think it it is only made possible by) discussion boards and a proliferation of text around GTA. So players come to debate and rehash the value, what constitutes a “good playing,” but this is never really finally determinate, there is nothing within the game world to measure this. Not only did I rob the bank, but I did so wearing an outfit from the Gash wielding only a golf club. . .

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/25/2006

This is Henry Jenkins territory — the social life of games.

posted: 6/18/2006

I think this sort of thing goes beyond Jenkins’ social life… and gets at what to me is a difficult and attractive notion to tease out, what is the relation between style and play? Or is the fun we have with and through GTA vice city affect plus effect in order to create an event or goal in a space which either has them or where they are boring (assigned missions)?

McKenzie Wark responds to sam tobin
posted: 6/19/2006

In the terms Bernard Suits offers, it makes trifling the main event of the game. But then it tries to capture and channel the triffling impulse back into game play

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