The Only Way We're Going to Get Through This is By Sticking Together
Cops Fail to Stop Thugs on Motorbikes Terrorizing Vice City
((Hey all! This is a piece I presented for a virtual conference at Villanova University — this is a transcript of the talk itself, so it’s a little more verbal than my usual work, but I think it’ll be interesting to you all. The two texts referenced in this are both by Giorgio Agamben — Homo Sacer and State of Exception. If anyone would like copies or excerpts, I can help just let me know.))
As this is my first academic paper in seven years, give or take, I hope you’ll permit me a little indulgence as I dip into some theory to start. There are few places inside the academy that a person can start with Giorgio Agamben and not be yawned out of a room, and your opportunities outside the academy drop dramatically, so I’m going to take my chance while I have it. Agamben is one of my favorite theorists, in part because he is a quintessential analytic philosopher: he’s historically sound, if a little messy, and he uses that rigor to create big ideas that kind of annoy people but demand to be addressed. His most famous ideas are bound at the hip, namely the concept of “bare life” and the “state of exception.” These concepts derive from a reading of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and for brevity’s sake we’ll leave Foucault and his triumphs and sins there other than to say that, like Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics (in short, the way the state uses health as a way to manage its citizenry), Agamben’s thinking regarding these two concepts resides at the intersection of the body and the state. Two quick quotes from Agamben will serve to nail down these concepts a little bit so we can move into games, though I’m happy to talk more about the nuances of these concepts if anyone’s interested after the talk. First, on bare life and the “homo sacer” or the Roman legal mystery of the “sacred man” who is banished from society and cannot be sacrificed, but can be murdered with impunity:
“The banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos [loosely defined in Latin as social law] that conditions every rule, the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and every territorialization…all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri… because the relation of ban [from the social space] has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power from the beginning.” (111)
In other words, the concept of the homo sacer is a constitutive requirement in the concept of the state’s ability to determine belonging as regards the communal protective space of the state. If you are not to be sacrificed, but can be killed by anyone without legal recourse, Agamben suggests, you have been made a non-citizen by the state, and therefore are no longer synecdochally connected to its logic nor under its protection. “The sacredness of life,” Agamben argues, “in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment” (83). The inability of the state to sacrifice the homo sacer is reflected in the citizen’s own bare life, which is the a priori state of the citizen under the sovereign and what Agamben via Hobbes describes as “the sovereign’s preservation of his natural right to do anything to anyone” (106).
But what happens when the state stretches this distinction between citizen and homo sacer to its limit? Well, then we get something like Guantanamo Bay, which Agamben spends his other most often cited text State of Exception examining carefully within terms of biopower and the war on terror. As valuable as this text is on its own terms, I’m going to bracket that larger discussion and instead use Agamben’s own definition of the state of exception as a jumping off point to our pivot to videogames. As Agamben describes the lives of Guantanamo detainees, especially during the War in Iraq’s early days, but continuing til today as well: they are “Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply ‘detainees,’ they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight.” It is an instance in which, he says qua Judith Butler, “bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy” (4). Put differently, if the sovereign citizen lives as an instance of bare life under the protection and whim of the sovereign, the state of exception is a space in which the detainee is punished by forced inclusion in the state via imprisonment, and can be materially and symbolically used as a sacrifice while “technically” still under legal protections. In this state of exception, the citizen and the prisoner are indistinguishable, effectively an amalgam that serves the purposes of a technocractic neoliberal state which thrives on propaganda, security theater, and shifting definitions of humanity.
And this is a big deal outside of the actual material decisions of our government and other world governments – although, if we look to Gaza and even to our own ongoing treatment of detainees in Guantanamo, it’s certainly enough to care simply about these actual material decisions – this concept of bare life and the state of exception matter in terms of artistic and cultural representation, as well. As an easy first example, consider the recent Top Gun: Maverick – totally fun blockbuster film that I undeniably enjoyed and had a blast watching with my family. I went in knowing the politics wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but I was surprised to see that there really weren’t politics to speak of…only some cool flying machines and a vaguely threatening foreign nation that was both somehow snowy and performatively Middle Eastern. There was something I didn’t quite know how to place about what I found off putting there: ostensibly, Tom Cruise et al had made a film in which there was no clear bad actor, and therefore no race or nationality that would take the brunt of the patriotic fervor the movie produced. However, that vague enemy nation really only makes sense if, dialectically, the well-defined problems of Cruise’s F-16 top gun flying aces are actually also just a vague positive projection of Americanness. In other words, the enemy nation can be legible as a credible-but-dehistoricized opponent if its counterpart is also dehistoricized and made into a kind of sine qua non of American values. Top Gun: Maverick, then – as part, yes, of being a phenomenal block buster film – launders patriotic propaganda by way of a nameless, faceless generality: a space and place that can be acted upon, but which can never be defined.
I want to suggest that this is a new sort of space of exception, outside the typical governmentality that defines the Foucaultian and Agambian approaches to the topic, but which perhaps has more reach as a result. Culturally speaking, the rise of the liminal – both in terms of the blockbuster film no longer relying on the Russian/Middle Eastern bogeyman and in terms of popular culture (see the wildly popular Backrooms series) – has corresponded with and in many ways sought to defang rising political awareness in younger consumers, who get much of their information outside of typical political hegemonies online and via social media. Now I don’t want to suggest that the CIA is producing our film or games (though as I point out in my book Story Mode, there’s a real conflict of interest when even our most critical games have to consult with the military in order to have real models for guns included), but I do want to suggest that there is a hegemonic pushback to mass cultural awareness happening by way of the removal of space and place specificity, primarily by removing historicity. The most successful versions of this gambit occur in videogames, though not necessarily from the sandbox games one might expect in Minecraft, Teardown, or Roblox. These games essentially occupy the same space as Mario Paint did in the past: a canvas for creative expression. The fact that these canvasses are shareable and can be experienced by not just the creator of the work is worth thinking further on, but for the moment, let’s focus instead on games like the recently announced Grand Theft Auto VI.
Long a victim of the “are games okay for our youth” debate, GTA has never really had a moment where it wasn’t a point of controversy or wild accusation, but at this point, even the controversy is a cultural tradition. When Elon Musk is pontificating with conservative bloviators about the deleterious impact of being “forced to kill cops” in GTAV, it’s safe to say that even the outrage has become mainstream. However, more than being angry at the violence or the wanton bad taste – both just hallmarks of AAA non-prestige-TV titles in gaming anymore – I’d like to look at the GTAVI trailer with an eye towards my proposed spaces of exception. The trailer opens with a pink, neon-saturated shot of sunrise overlooking an interstate, a lagoon with a speedboat, and a distant city framed by palm trees: we are clearly in Miami, but (lest we forget) it is the fictionalized Miami of the GTA franchise, Vice City. The shot maintains the sunset but shifts in a hard cut to the double fence, barbed-wire exterior of a prison, where we meet our main character, Luisa, who is about to be let out of prison and back into a life of crime in Vice City (or so we can assume). From here the trailer has the greatest hits of crime fiction and Miami fiction: beaches, car chases, the Everglades, a rain-soaked gas station gunfight, and, most importantly, a passionate plea to “stick together to get through this” from Luisa to her lover before we get a shot of them breaking into a liquor store, masked and guns drawn. You probably have an idea of where I’m going here – this is a compelling crime story, and it’s pretty great that there’s a lack of a specific city so that the typical media members and crime fabulists can’t get up in arms about how “those people” are ruining “our image.” But we have a Top Gun: Maverick problem here as well: Vice City can mean anything, really, so long as it has the veneer of the tropical and the seedy, which of course means that it ultimately stands in for nothing specific at all. The city expands and contracts as the game needs, with no real contextual boundaries. The dialectical corollary for its making any real sense as a dehistoricized and displaced space, on the other hand, is the player themselves, who are expected to act as judge, participant, collaborator, and critic of all of the actions in the game, a multi-tiered expectation only possible when void of contextual or historical judgment themselves.
In other words, the world of Vice City is able to operate as a placeless version of Miami, with none of the social, historical, or cultural issues that would have to be taken into account if the “actual” space were used. But this is only possible because the player is then stripped of context as well: anything that happens in GTAVI is not subject to critique or applause or any kind of interpretative impulse because any action in the game is delimited by the space in which it takes place. As critics and as readers, we have to take into account the historical and literary context of the texts we are interpreting, but when all of that context is evacuated, what we’re left with is not a material context but a shifting signifier that can only be “fun” or “dull” – any action the player takes can be recontextualized on the fly based on how they feel about the historically adrift world of Vice City. That this approach to a massive, sprawling, seemingly diverse world echoes an ideal counter-protest position of a politics of feeling instead of materiality is not, I would argue, a bug but a feature.
The bland unspecific politics and place of massive open-world games are always at peace with the devaluation of politics in general, a turn towards ignoring materiality for the sake of subjective interpretations of history and struggle. However, videogames don’t have to be beholden to such a figuration; indeed, the recent Case of the Golden Idol is an instance of how fictionalized spaces and places can remain grounded and contextual, without the active nothingness of Vice City or “enemy nations.” In the vaguely British, vaguely American land of Albion, Golden Idol follows a series of unappealing men fighting over a golden idol which has the power to perform some alchemical actions. As the player, your job is to view a tapestry of a murder, search for clues, and use the words you find to fill in a story that explains what is happening to the unappealing men (and sometimes women) you are looking at. However, as the story moves on, the idol keeps falling into different hands: people scheming for power, for love, for lust, etc, and eventually an ambitious grifter named Lazarus obtains the idol and uses it to rise through the ranks of a secret society and eventually to take power in the nation at large. The player can do nothing but explain that this is happening as it is happening; you get to watch as the undeserving are rewarded, the kind are killed off, and the little people get smashed. And far from being able to watch impassively, you are forced to accurately describe the actions of these openly vile men. It’s hard not to feel a little complicit, like an historian instantiating the specific details of these people who should really be stopped before they needlessly hurt others and simply can’t be. Unlike the “freedom” of GTA, the constraints of Golden Idol speak to the very real frustrations of seeing the material realities around you and being entirely unable to do anything about them despite understanding them perfectly. Golden Idol forces a feeling of complicity onto the player – particularly profound as it echoes in a fictional sense the very real crimes of artifact theft, colonization, political assassination, and Puritanical subjugations that occurred from the 18th-20th centuries – more than any police murder in a GTA could, and as a result, encourages a reflection back onto that player’s lived world. In this way, we can see how the videogame medium can absolutely eliminate historicity entirely, leading to a consenting subject uninterested in critically assessing the conditions of the world around them, but that also the interactive quality of the game encourages a feeling of complicity and immersion in the right instances. These games pushing back against the spaces of exception and encouraging an historicizing impulse – even when they do not themselves historicize in reality – are spaces of potential political value and deserve more attention moving forward as we try to determine the ways games can help us understand and reevaluate the material conditions of ours and others’ histories.
“Now I don’t want to suggest that the CIA is producing our film or games” they are tho